Rubén Gallo has become one of the most innovative cultural essayists of our time, because among several qualities combines an impressive erudition with a playful intuition that allows him to draw connections between cultural phenomena of great diversity. In Proust's Latin Americans, Gallo explores the presence of Latin America in the life and work of Marcel Proust: with a context of tense relations between France and Latin America as a background, due in part to the imperial adventure of Maximilian, promoted by Napoleon III , As well as by a financial scandal known as the Panama Scandal, Proust established a relationship with various Latin American characters that would be, Gallo argues from a minute study of his correspondence, crucial figures in the composition of his artistic imagination. As if they were fascinating characters of the work of Proust, Rubén Gallo portrays his relations with his Venezuelan lover, the composer Reynaldo Hahn, with an Argentine dandy called Gabriel de Yturri, with the Cuban poet Jose-Maria de Heredia, as well as with the painter Mexican Antonio de la Gándara, and with Ramón Fernández, the brilliant literary critic, also Mexican, who would end up with fervor to the Nazi ideology. Through Proust's correspondence, Gallo finds that Latin America played a fundamental role as the political unconscious of that monumental, imperishable novel called In Search of Lost Time.