Un paseo por la modernidad: Reflexiones de Paz Mendoza en Notas de Viaje (1929)

Paz Mendoza Guazon’s Notas de viaje (1929) is a collection of commentaries written during her one-year trip in the US, Europe and the Middle East as part of an education program of the Filipino government. The travelling notes of Doctor Mendoza, one of the first female graduates in Medicine of the University of the Philippines, are not only an archive of cosmopolitan knowledge but constitute Mendoza’s imaginary of her national project. Mendoza’s national project is based on the cultural transformation of the Philippines in terms of its assimilation to cultural models observed during the trip in order to make the Philippines a modern nation. I have called this desire of transformation an active transculturation. My aim in this article is to highlight the characteristics of such process based on Mendoza’s text.