Calle Carlos Pereyra
Honours Carlos Pereyra (1871–1942), a Mexican historian and diplomat who spent his exile in Madrid and became one of the most fervent defenders of the Spanish legacy in America.
Carlos Pereyra was born in Saltillo, in northern Mexico, in 1871, and died in Madrid in 1942. Before settling in Spain he was a lawyer, deputy, undersecretary of Foreign Affairs and minister plenipotentiary in Belgium and the Netherlands. The fall of Victoriano Huerta’s regime removed him from Mexican public life, and around 1916 he put down roots in Madrid alongside his wife, the Veracruz writer María Enriqueta Camarillo. The city took him in for almost three decades.
From Madrid he built an extensive body of work on Hispanic America: the Historia de la América española in eight volumes, books on Hernán Cortés and anti-imperialist essays such as El mito de Monroe. He defended Spain’s role in the New World with such ardour that he earned a reputation as a Hispanist more Hispanist than the Spaniards themselves. In his last years he worked at the Fernández de Oviedo Institute.
The calle Carlos Pereyra runs through Prosperidad, a Chamartín neighbourhood born in the nineteenth century whose layout gathered the names of residents and of literary figures.