Culture and the City: Pedro Henriquez Urena's New York City

Pedro Henriquez Urena's memoir, written in 1909 while in Mexico (but published in its entirety in 1989) may well be claimed as one of the first written accounts by a Dominican intellectual in the United States. In this paper I analyze the cultural implications of what it meant to be Dominican at the beginning of the 20th century for a non-white elite intellectual such as Henriquez Urena in New York City. Although I view Henriquez Urena's memoir as a depiction of travel experiences of modernity, I am also interpreting his memoir as a historically prefiguring attempt at recapturing the Dominican nation he had gradually displaced himself from (for different reasons). I argue that Henriquez Urena's memoir is itself the literal site of exposure of a life that had been constantly marked by dislocations and relocations.