and racial rage. The will to repair the damage was certainly reasonable, and agents of modernity could appreciate that. But the energy required seemed beyond reasonable hope, in countries where elites were used to demanding submission rather than winning it through hegemonic arrangements. Love was that energy, irrational and benevolent, like the rest of God's Nature.

# Imagined Sexualities and Historical Communities

I have already hinted at why eroticism and nationalism become figures for each other in modernizing fictions. Now, I would like to suggest how this works rhetorically. It is through a literary sleight-of-the-invisible-hand that legitimates heterosexual passion in patriotism, and reciprocally legitimates hegemonic states in sexual desire. I want to consider these forces, and merely to suggest the matter of reciprocal allegory, which I argue elsewhere.14 Briefly, ErosCuban war of independence. Since the beginning of the 1880s, Martí had entered the struggle to build a discourse of continental identity that was meant to challenge all colonial implications. By working on the idea of "our" America, Martí rejected the image of the continent as a "daughter" of a foreign figure of knowledge and power, and projected a self-referential genealogy in which the region appeared as the mother of their people. In "Madre América" (Mother America), a speech for the delegates at the first Pan-American Conference, Martí imagined a homecoming scene through which he proposed a new perspective on the region: "Cuando cada uno de ellos (los delegados) vuelva a las playas que acaso nunca volvamos a ver, podrá decir, contento de nuestro decoro, a la que