Harry Hoetink's seminal Two Variants in Caribbean Race Relations enhanced my understanding of Caribbean societies - and of social science in general - by questioning the easy dichotomies that were applied to research on race at the time. This paper offers an opportunity to continue our dialogue. I have chosen to examine some Latin American identity essays three published in 1928, one in 1940, and a fifth one in 1980, appended here as a grace note. All but one deal with the Caribbean and Brazil and all are pertinent to the ‘ethnic’ concerns of this book. The geographic exception is Mariátegui's Siete ensayos which makes a useful comparative point. My second purpose is to examine the identity essay as a genre that, however influential in its day, was seen by the 1950s and 1960s as ‘impressionistic’ or ‘literary’ save for those texts having a strong political thrust. Today, however, the science-literature split is losing its reputation as an Occam's razor, and in closing I will suggest how Latin American ‘identity', however immersed it may seem in local culture, is not at the rim of Western culture but participates in its unfolding (Stabb, 1967; Earle and Mead, 1973; Leite, 1983).

My selection of five writers was arbitrary but has acquired a rationale of sorts. The founder of the modem identity essay who signalizes the shift from pensadores of the nineteenth-century intellectual establishment to iconoclastic essayists infected with modernism is often taken to be Jose Carlos Mariátegui The book that launched Mariátegui's international reputation in 1928 appeared, however, in the same year as two comparable collections of essays by a Haitian and a Brazilian, both of an earlier generation and both with different prescriptions for their countries of origin. These works offer a vigorous challenge to the comparativist.

Economics and ethnicity: Mariátegui and Price-Mars

We start, then, with Mariategui (Peru, 1894--1930), Jean Price-Mars (Haiti, 1876-1969), and Paulo Prado (Brazil, 1869-1943). The three men had comparable diagnostic intentions but were headed toward different conclusions. All three started with a view of countries whose beginnings had been exploitative and sanguinary and whose ‘emancipatory’ nineteenth century had been in large part a mirage. They envisioned nations that were not yet nations. They hankered not for blueprints or formulae but for grounds of understanding.