Americo Castro in the United States (1937-1969)

n 1937, Americo Castro came to the United States, to take up residence, to teach, and eventually to become a citizen. This year and this definitive decision mark an all-important watershed, a wrenching, heart-rending break with Spain and with the life he had known there, and, at the same time, they mark a dramatic, very positive step toward a new and dynamic intellectual life, as vibrant and as passionately creative-if not even more so-as were the rich and varied cultural projects through which Don Americo had made such crucial contributions in Europe. Castro left behind him a beloved homeland, on the brink of chaos, riven by destructive hatreds and fratricidal conflict. The new Americo Castro, who was to emerge in his adopted American milieu, was built upon rigorous philological, literary, and historical approaches developed over years of previous research, but now he was driven by a deeply felt, vital need to re-explore, to reappraise, to throw unremittingly into question all previous conventional approaches to Spanish history, in an urgent, anguished quest for answers as to how and why Spain could possibly have reached such a catastrophic juncture in its national life.' We are, then, faced with two very different Americo Castros, preand post-1937: Don Americo, the philologist, the ethnographer and dialectologist, the brilliant literary critic, the passionate would-be reformer of Spanish education, the essayist, whose incisive contributions to Sol, as well as to journals and newspapers in Argentina, France, Italy, and Mexico, explored a host of burning cultural issues; Don Americo, author of El concepto del honor (1916), pensamiento de Cervantes (1925; 1972), and Santa Teresa (1929; 1972), co-author of the Vida de Lope de Vega (1919; 1969), editor of Aranceles de aduanas del siglo XIII (1921-1923) and Glosarios latino-espaioles (1936), co-editor of Fueros leoneses (1916) and the Biblia medieval romanceada (1927), translator and editor of Meyer-Ltibke's Einfiihrung (1914; 1926), as well as editor and critic of numerous Golden Age literary texts; Don Americo, the educational crusader in La enseiianza del espailol (1922) and Lengua, enseiianza y literatura (1924); Don Americo in Giner de los Rios' Instituci6n Libre de Ensefianza and Menendez Pidal's Centro de Estudios Hist6ricos; Don Americo helping to found the Instituto de Filologia Hispainica, in Buenos Aires; Don Americo, honored in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Havana, New York, Paris, San Juan, Santiago de Chile; Don Americo, citizen of Europe and citizen of the World. Over against this pre-1937 Don Americo, but continuing his passionate intellectual commitment, we have another, very different Americo Castro, who made no secret of his apparent rejection-more apparent and partial than absolute and total-of earlier philological concerns. From the moment of his arrival at Princeton (in The Meaning of Spanish Civilization, 1940), Castro made it perfectly clear that he was embarking upon a radically innovative, revolutionary reinterpretation of Spanish history, in terms of a host of significant features. He especially stressed the crucial importance, to the formation of Spanish civilization, of the fruitful symbiotic interaction of Spaniards belonging to three religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Castro saw Spain as having been forged during its medieval centuries by that dynamic process. The peoples who had come before, in the Hispania of Iberians, Romans, and Goths, represented something very different, a culture (or cultures) which could not be explained in terms of what came afterward. Don Americo's intense commitment to

Art · Humanities · Political science · Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism · Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America · Spanish Philosophy and Literature

• Americo Castro

  Manuel Da Costa Fontes, Ronald E Surtz et al.•Hispanic Review•1990

  Add to list