Madrid, meridiano intelectual ibérico (la polémica peninsular de La Gaceta Literaria)

Abstract

In 1927, the Spanish magazine La Gaceta Literaria published the well-known editorial entitled “Madrid, meridiano intelectual de Hispanoamérica,” which defended the need for Madrid to be the intellectual point of reference for Latin America. This same position, with a deep ideological charge, was also present at the base of another, lesser known but also very important, debate, the one promoted in the Iberian Peninsula with Portugal and Catalonia, territories which this publication directed by Ernesto Giménez Caballero approached with the interest of adding them to the cause of a centralist cultural policy with an inevitable seat in Madrid. Through the approach to Catalonia, by means of a supposed strategy of defense of the peninsular plurality, an orchestrated campaign was actually mounted based on the unbreakable unity of Spain, whose culture would be presented—although with equally negative results—to Portugal and Latin America, as a real possibility for opposing French international hegemony.