What the Liberators Read

September piles up flags like no other month. Central America celebrates its independence in the middle of the month; Mexico, the following night; Chile, on the eighteenth. There are parades and speeches, with their anthems, as there should be. This notebook wishes to join the celebration by entering through a less traveled door: the library. Because before there were armies there were readers, and American independences, in addition to being the wars they were, with their pain and their long reckoning, were an intellectual event. The men who led them had formed themselves by reading. And they knew it so clearly that they left written record of it: in a letter, in a speech, and in a will.

The Letter from Arequipa

May 1825. Simón Bolívar is at the peak of his glory: the Battle of Ayacucho, a few months prior, has sealed the independence of half a continent. And yet, in Arequipa, amidst the thousand urgencies of one who governs newborn territories, he finds time to write to General Santander and defend something that visibly matters to him: his education. A European traveler, Mr. de Mollien, had published that his education was very neglected. Bolívar dismisses the judgment in three words, "vague, false, and unjust," and responds with the only thing that admits no reply: the list of what he has read.

Before reaching the authors, he lists his teachers, and in that list there is a surprise that the rest of this article will appreciate: Simón Rodríguez taught him his first letters and grammar; mathematics was provided by an academy set up just for him; and belles-lettres and geography were handled, in his own words, by "our famous Bello." Yes: the very same who in a moment will found a university in Chile. Then came Madrid, the Academy of San Fernando, and languages, all under the direction of the Marquis of Uztariz, in whose house he lived. The legend of the illiterate caudillo does not withstand his own record.

And then comes the list, which is worth reading slowly: "Locke, Condillac, Buffon, D'Alembert, Helvétius, Montesquieu, Mably, Filangieri, Lalande, Rousseau, Voltaire, Rollin, Berthot," and then "all the classics of antiquity," from philosophers to poets, plus the moderns of Spain, France, and Italy and a good part of the English. This is not the list of a military officer with spare time. It is the curriculum of the entire Enlightenment, crossed with two thousand years of classics. When they sought to measure him by the degrees he did not have, he responded with the books he indeed had read.

It is worth saying honestly, because this house does not sell holy cards: those readers were a tiny minority in societies where the majority did not know how to read, and no book won a battle by itself. Independences were also made by geography, economics, and chance. But the question that matters is not whether books made independence. It is whether those men would have known what to do with it without books. Governing the new requires judgment, and the judgment of that generation had a bibliography.

All Truths Touch

September seventeenth, 1843, Santiago de Chile, the eve of the national holidays. That master of belles-lettres of the young Bolívar, now a sixty-one-year-old Caracas native, steps up to the podium to install the University of Chile, and in the inaugural address leaves a phrase that still today titles entire editions: "all truths touch." He did not say it as an ornament. He extended it, in all its letters, "from those that formulate the course of worlds in the abyss of space" to morality and practical life, and concluded with an image that seems written for our time: "Advancements in all lines call to one another, they link, they push one another."

Anyone who has read the first piece of this notebook will recognize the argument: it is the thesis of the return of the polymaths, pronounced in 1843 by Andrés Bello. The man was, himself, the proof: born in Caracas, formed between two shores, he spent years in London among libraries and arrived in Chile to found a university and write a grammar intended, according to its own title, for the use of Americans: the common language understood as the heritage of all who speak it. Knowledges touch and shores do too. When today we defend that an engineering student read history and a law student understand science, we are not importing a trend: we are continuing the foundational discourse of the Hispano-American university.

The Teacher Who Sowed Teachers

The third library in this story did not defend its education nor found a university: it founded teachers. Eugenio María de Hostos was born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, in 1839, and died in Santo Domingo in 1903, with half a continent traversed between both dates. In 1880, he founded the first Normal School of Santo Domingo; in September 1884, the first normal school teachers in Dominican history graduated. In the same city, Salomé Ureña directed the Instituto de Señoritas, where in 1887 the first female teachers graduated. Hostos's wager was to form complete people: not repeaters of formulas, but people capable of reasoning on their own.

And here history does something that seems written by a novelist. The son of Salomé Ureña, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, became one of the great humanists of the continent, and in 1925, in La utopía de América, put forward, according to his commentators, an education that forms judgment and sensibility rather than mere executors: the idea we already related in this notebook. Libraries are inherited. Hostos promoted the training of teachers, Salomé Ureña directed the Instituto, and her son defended, a century in advance, the thesis of this house.

Two Books for a University

December 1830, Quinta de San Pedro Alejandrino, near Santa Marta. Bolívar dictates his will; he has days left to live. Among the patrimonial clauses (estates, mines, debts), the seventh appears, and deserves to be read just as it stands in the archive: he orders that the two books presented to him by his friend General Wilson, which previously belonged to Napoleon's library, Rousseau's "The Social Contract" and Montecuccoli's "The Art of War," "be delivered to the University of Caracas."

Stop for a moment on the scene. A man who is dying, who has seen much of what he built fall apart, dedicates one of his last wishes to ensuring that two books reach a university. Every September, dozens of phrases attributed to Bolívar that do not exist in any archive circulate on social networks; this piece has been written with the opposite rule, citing only what the papers preserve: the letter, the speech, the will. Devotion does not need to invent. It is enough for it to read.

The Library That Decides

In the journey of TheNomba, the fifth stage is called "Understand where you come from," and one of its professors is the political scientist Marcelo Gullo. The title of the stage condenses an idea that holds true for peoples and for individuals: no one understands who they are if they have forgotten where they come from; one can also live furnished by ideas one never examined. The antidote of that generation remains available, and it is the same: to read with method, to read everything, to read slowly. That is why each stage of the journey carries its reading plan, and in those lists live together Cervantes alongside García Márquez, Galdós alongside Gallegos: the canon of both shores, without customs barriers.

The question of the patriotic month, then, is not only what those men did, but what they had read to be able to do it. And the one that falls to you is simpler and more uncomfortable: what are you reading that is forming you for something you do not yet know you will do? The liberators did not know, at age twenty, that they would be so. They read first. They decided later.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.