Pedro Henríquez Ureña
| Pedro Henríquez Ureña | |
|---|---|
| Born | 29 June 1884 Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic |
| Died | 11 May 1946 Buenos Aires, Argentina |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Parent(s) |
Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal (father) |
| Relatives |
Francisco Henríquez Ureña (brother) |
Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal (father)
Francisco Henríquez Ureña (brother)
Max Henríquez Ureña (brother)
Camila Henríquez Ureña (sister)
Federico Henríquez y Carvajal (uncle)
Pedro Henríquez Ureña (born June 29, 1884 - May 11, 1946) was a Dominican essayist, philosopher, humanist, philologist and literary critic.
Pedro Henríquez Ureña was born in Santo Domingo, the third of four siblings. Henríquez's father was Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal, a doctor and politician who was also an intellectual who maintained permanent contact with the most important representatives of the Hispanic Modernism movements from the early 20th century. Henríquez Carvajal would become president of the Republic for a brief period in 1916, before the American occupation. His mother was the eminent poet and feminist Salomé Ureña. Both played a key role in Pedro's formation and education. His brother, Max, and sister, Camila, were also writers.
The young Pedro traveled to Mexico in 1906, where he lived until 1913. About these times he wrote in Horas de estudio. In these years he also wrote about philosophical criticism, specially the seriousness of the thought. Here he made his criticism of positivismo, being one of the first in the Hispanic America, in his articles "El positivismo de Comte" and "El positivismo independiente".
In 1914, in Cuba, he defined what according to him a good critic must be: a flexible scholar who knows how to adopt any point of view. But mainly he must know the spirit of the time and the country he is studying. The critic will always be tributary of the values of the society to which he belongs and thus must fight against them. He obtains his flexibility, sometimes without proposing to it.
Between 1915 and 1916 Henríquez Ureña worked as a journalist in the United States, living in Washington and New York. In this last year he joined the faculty at the University of Minnesota where he taught until 1921. No doubt his travels influenced his work and his thinking. His humanism and Americanism – that is, his firm defense of Hispanic-American cultural values – made him write a final lecture for the Club of International Relations of the University of Minnesota about the "intervencionist policy of the United States in all the Caribbean", since his own nation had been invaded in 1916. In 1921 he traveled to Mexico where his americanismo would acquire a new vigor. Influenced by this atmosphere of enthusiasm towards the culture, he wrote his famous article "The utopia of America".
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