A rich tradition of Spanish American essayistic writing preceded the modernistas, harking back to Colonial times in works of Baroque science and historiography such as the Mexican Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora's (1645–1700) Libra astronómica y filosófica (Astronomical and Philosophical Balance, 1670) and Alboroto y motín de México (Uprising and Mutiny in Mexico, 1692), as well as Enlightenment-influenced works of scientific travel and observation such as the Spaniard Alonso Carrió de la Vandera's (1715?–1783) El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes (A Guide for Inexperienced Travelers, c. 1776). However, if the essay is regarded as a genre in which ideas, rather than narratives or description, take center stage, then the first great flowering of the Spanish American essay truly takes place during Spanish America's struggle for independence and nation-building, roughly the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Key figures in this period are political leaders such as the Venezuelan Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), with his Manifiesto de Cartagena (Cartagena Manifesto, 1812) and Carta de Jamaica (Letter from Jamaica, 1815), and the Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–88), with his celebrated work Civilización y barbarie: vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga (Civilization and Barbarism: Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga, 1845), as well as humanists and scholars such as the Venezuelan Andrés Bello (1781–1865), whose wide-ranging essayistic work was published mainly in journals he founded and edited, such as Biblioteca Americana (1823) and Repertorio Americano (1826–27), and the Mexican Ignacio Manuel Altamirano (1834–93), whose essays appeared in his journal El Renacimiento (1869).

The modernistas’ contribution to this tradition, as with the short story, is again connected to their work in journalism, arguably the most programatically modern form of textual production. One of the principal differences between the modernista essays and those of their immediate Spanish American predecessors lies precisely in their attitude towards modernity. As I pointed out in Chapter 1, unlike the Spanish American writers of the Independence and nation-building eras (from Bolívar to Sarmiento), who debated about whether and how to modernize their societies, the modernistas felt that they were already modern, and they were more concerned with how to effectively express this feeling through literature. Modernista essays often promote, celebrate, and analyze literary and cultural modernity.