La manifestación de la Ilustración a través de los “prospectos” de la prensa hispanoamericana

The objective of this article is to offer a study of the elements that discover the enlightened thought in the Hispanic American colonial press and in its literate actors. We will focus on analyzing the « prospectus » of several of the periodicals published in the century of the Enlightenment, in order to identify the role played by creole writers in the development of science, culture, literature, arts and economy. Based on these topics, the enligthened American took the press to show the European world the knowledge that was cultivated in various fields of enlightened culture in Latin America, while promoting American identity through geography, nature, climate and history. Based on the above, we approach the Enlightenment from the perspective of reason, progress and utility, proposing as hypothesis that the principles of this intellectual current determined the development of American Enlightenment culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries