During the 20 century, and mainly in the contest of the Cold War, politics and social responsibility became ineludible factors for literary thought and practice. The Cuban Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall (1959-1989) comprise the symbolic frame for the literary philosophy and practice of those writers of Latin American known as politically committed writers. This study demonstrates that the problems of a philosophy of literature as well as a political literature are inseparable in what is called "Literature of Engagement". This way of understanding and practicing literature is shown to have traceable roots both European humanism and in Amerindian traditional culture. I begin by analyzing the question of engaged intellectuals and their historic sources, examining the thought and ways of perceiving the world which preexist the production of writing. The structural paradigm revealed and explicated in this study is a cyclical one leading to a utopia of humanistic liberation and the return to origins in a framework of Amerindian cosmology.