The article deals with José Martí's intellectual and political trajectory. I aim at analyzing the breakthroughs that brought Martí to the Latin American cultural field by motivating him not only to redraw the civilization barbarism lines but also to redefine the connections between literature, history and politics. As I attempt to demonstrate, Martí deployed the newspaper chronic as a weapon to introduce a new discourse that sought to highlight the existence of an alternative modernity, whereby subaltern and forgotten groups could become social actors and protagonists of Latin American history.
History; intellectual; modernity; Latin America