This essay represents a careful approach to a series of nineteenth-century biographies that outline the essential features of emblematic figures of Latin American thought and culture such as Andrés Bello, Simón Rodríguez or Francisco Bilbao. Rafael Mondragón's fluid prose leads us along a critical itinerary that manages to open the meaning of biographical writing to its ethical dimension, through the scrutiny of the philosophical and political substratum of a historiography that encodes in truthful fiction and in the deployment of a poetics of thinking the possibility of accessing a truth anchored in the body of history. It is in this sense that this book provides us with fundamental reading keys to approach these books of gestures.