Hispanic modernism crusaded for a cosmopolitanism opposed to colonialism. The work of José MartÃ, Rubén DarÃo, Valle-Inclán, Unamuno and Julián del Casal rejects a hegemonic idea of progress and the imposition of alien political and cultural practices. Through a poetics of negation, they generated a revolutionary social and artistic awakening that resulted in the unprecedented cultural achievments of Hispanic modernism.