SOURCE: "Unity and Diversity," in Latin America in Its Literature, edited by César Fernández Moreno, Julio Ortega, and Ivan A. Schulman, translated by Mary G. Berg, Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc., 1980, pp. 63-83.

In the following essay, Martínez provides a historical overview of movements and major figures in Latin American literature.

We are a small human species; we possess a world apart, surrounded by vast seas, new in nearly all the arts and sciences although, in a certain sense, old in the experience of civil society.

Simón Bolívar

The most unique aspect of Latin America is that it exists as such, that is, as a group of twenty-one countries, with such profound historical, social, and cultural ties that they constitute a single unit in many senses. Other groups of countries may be related by their history and by their race, by their language...