José Juan Nicolás Ramón Arrom González

Professor, researcher and Cuban essayist of great prestige.

Although born in 1910 in Holguín, the capital city of the current province of the same name, José Juan Arrom spent his childhood and part of his youth in Mayarí, a small town in Holguín in the north of eastern Cuba. Very young, in 1929, with universities closed by the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, he left to study in the United States and there he resided for most of his life. At Yale University he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (1937), Master of Arts (1940) and Doctor in Philosophy (1941). For years he taught at that university as a professor of Spanish and director of Graduate Studies in Spanish. After his retirement as Professor Emeritus at that prestigious institution, he maintained intense intellectual activity until the end of his life.

He taught in the summer courses at the Universidad de La Habana (1946); at the Instituto Caro y Cuervo (1960), in Colombia; and at the University of Arizona (1961). He was a Member of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, Corresponding Member of the Academia Cubana de la Lengua, the Academia Nacional de Artes y Letras de Cuba, the Ateneo Americano de Washington, the Real Academia de Córdoba, among other academic and scientific corporations. He collaborated with numerous publications, including Anales de la Academia Nacional de Artes y Letras, Boletín de la Academia Cubana de la Lengua, Revista Bimestre Cubana, Revista Cubana, Universidad de La Habana, Islas (all from Cuba), Vida Hispánica (from England), Revista Iberoamericana (from Mexico), Thesaurus (from Colombia), Revista Nacional de Cultura (from Venezuela), and The Romanic Review (from the United States). He received various honors from American universities and institutions. In 1981, the Universidad de La Habana granted him the Doctorate Honoris Causa in Arts and Letters and the professor, poet and essayist Roberto Fernández Retamar delivered the commendatory speech.

Beyond his teaching practice, through which he trained several generations of American and Latin American Hispanists, he developed his research in the fields of ethnology, history, linguistics, literature and folklore.

Arrom was part of that group of Hispanists who managed to overcome the hostility of the American Academy of that time—which still tended to regard the analysis of Latin American culture as matters of minor importance—and the disdain of northern society, in order, from the late 1930s onward, to gradually open space for Hispanic studies. In addition to disseminating this knowledge among his students and thereby contributing to increased respect for our peoples, Arrom, together with other professors of Hispanic origin, such as Federico de Onís and Manuel Pedro González, managed to create a community of interested disciples, which undoubtedly served as a foundation for the growing boom of Hispanic studies and Latin American studies in the United States.

He specialized and distinguished himself through his pioneering work and original contribution to the letters and theater of the colonial period, lexicology and linguistics, and studies of Caribbean culture from its pre-Hispanic origins. His research and his work to recover Cuban cultural heritage served him to reinforce his own Cuban and Hispanic American identity. He never lost contact with Cuba and its people.

Arrom is the author, among other texts, of critical editions of El príncipe jardinero y fingido Cloridano, a comedy by the initiator of Cuban theater, Santiago Pita, and of the Historia de la invención de las Indias, by Hernán Pérez de Silva. If we consider the scarcity of critical editions in our field, we can fully appreciate the exemplary work of the researcher.

Studies on Cuban and Latin American theater occupied much of his life's work and offered relationships and certainties that had previously been overlooked. Texts such as Voltaire y la literatura dramática cubana (1943), Historia de la literatura dramática cubana (1944)—a true landmark in the literary historiography of the continent that would become an essential reference for those interested in a cultural manifestation that was very insufficiently studied at that time—, Documentos relativos al teatro colonial en Venezuela (1946), Teatro de José Antonio Ramos (1947), Una desconocida comedia mexicana del siglo XVII (1953), El teatro de Hispanoamérica en la época colonial (1956), Historia del teatro hispanoamericano, época colonial (1967) and Primeras manifestaciones dramáticas de Cuba, 1512-1776 (1968), are testament to this.

All this work in theatrical research made him deserving of the Premio Ollantay 1979, granted by the jury of the Centro de Creación e Investigación Teatral (CECIT), convened in Caracas. In the minutes prepared for the jury's decision, the reasons were clear: "Master of theatrical researchers of the continent, whose works constitute today obligatory reading for the knowledge and real evaluation of the scenic past on the continent. His extensive teaching work at Yale University, his research published throughout Latin America, his work of dissemination as a result of a life devoted to research, where theater occupies a preponderant role, point to professor Arrom as an example of work, modesty and extraordinary achievement."

In Esquema generacional de las letras hispanoamericanas: ensayo de un modelo, Arrom proposes the articulation of Latin American literary history based on generations that emerge in a thirty-year span, from the arrival of the Spanish in the New World (for him, the generation of 1474) to the generation of 1954. Thus he inserted himself not only in questions of systematization of our culture, but in the diverse discussions and positions known in the generational method: the contribution of the Spanish philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset is remembered and, among us, that of the professor and also essayist José Antonio Portuondo.

Essays by him were collected in Certidumbre de América. Estudios de letras, folklore y cultura (a volume that first appeared in Cuba in 1959, and later, expanded in Madrid in 1971), a vast sample of his diverse investigations, all centered on the definitions of identity of what Martí called Nuestra América. "Criollo: definición y matices de un concepto," which opens the volume, was first published as a separate edition from the magazine Hispania, and is undoubtedly extremely important in the process of elucidating the culture of the peoples south of the Rio Bravo. Arrom has traced, through philological means, the term "criollo" to its first manifestations to find a concept that identifies Latin Americans.

Particularly relevant are his essays collected in Mitología y artes prehispánicas de las Antillas (Mexico, 1975) and in Estudios de lexicología antillana (Havana, 1980), where he shows his interest in going back to the origins of our culture to find revelations that enrich our identity profile.

In the commendatory speech when José Juan Arrom was granted the title of Doctor Honoris Causa in Arts and Letters from the Universidad de La Habana, Fernández Retamar defined the intellectual and human dimension of the Cuban-American scholar in the following way: "José Juan Arrom has been, is and will continue to be a vigilant conscience, sensitive not only to the delights of a literary text, to the search and unraveling of a word or to the discovery of a historical fact, but also to the sufferings and aspirations of peoples, especially those of our Continent, which are part of the vast and suffering family of the poor of the Earth."

José Juan Arrom passed away in Massachusetts, United States, in the year 2007.