Decolonial perspectives on José Martí's La Edad de Oro: education and Latin American identity

Abstract

This article proposes a decolonial approach to the journal La Edad de Oro (The Golden Age), which became a veritable educational project based on a media platform that served as a forum for disseminating the revolutionary thought of Cuban national hero José Martí. It articulated a journalistic discourse focused on education and, above all, on the identity values of new generations of Latin Americans at a crucial moment in 19th-century modernity. The essential purpose of this research was to systematize the particularities of Martí's communicative and pedagogical discourse in La Edad de Oro, highlighting its critical and decolonial nuance, oriented toward forging an inclusive, indigenous, and emancipatory Latin American identity. To achieve this, a qualitative and historical-descriptive approach was adopted, based on a bibliographic and documentary review and an analysis of Martí's journalistic discourse, supported by the theoretical framework of the Modernity/Coloniality-Decoloniality group. The study's findings revealed the multiple perspectives from which Martí envisioned patterns and instilled a sense of regional identity among young people, through an emancipatory symbiosis between communication and pedagogy, in constant dialogue and counterpoint with the dominant Eurocentric thought. It concludes that Martí's work in La Edad de Oro constitutes an essential reference point for liberating education and Latin American identity. Its enduring relevance lies in the projection of a critical and emancipatory thought that transcends its time and remains key to understanding the pedagogy of decoloniality.