independent-minded businessmen who did not necessarily agree with each other or with the Secretary of State on all matters. And so the Latin delegates were frequently confused when the ten U.S. delegates expressed highly divergent opinions and voting patterns. There were several occasions, recorded by Martí, in which one U.S. delegate would make a motion and another of his countrymen would oppose it. There were also frequent moments when a proposal agreed to by a U.S. delegate in a committee session would be rejected by the U.S. delegation as a whole in plenary session. The Conference and U.S.-Latin American Relations Concern over U.S. Hegemony Although Martí frequently expressed his admiration for the vitality and energy of his adopted home in exile, he was also concerned that those characteristics of the United States would lead it to dominate its southern neighbors who, he felt, were ill-equipped to resist the U.S. economic, cultural, diplomatic and even military onslaught. Martí reported to his Hispanic audience, with some alarm, the frankly expansionist headlines carried by many U.S. newspapers regarding the Conference which stated that the purpose of the conference was to ratify the inevitable U.S. domination of the Hemisphere. He did see value in the Conference, however, as a mechanism by which the Latin Americans could show their Anglo-Saxon neighbor that they were capable of defending themselves with honor and dignity, and that the key to successful inter-American relations was that they be based on realism, knowledge of each other, and mutual respect. Pan-Americanism and "Americanism" Although Martí did not oppose the U.S. concept of Panamericanism as such, he was concerned that it carried with it the implicit assumption that this current of inter-American cooperation had been launched by the United States, that its first conference was being held in Washington, that its permanent secretariat would be established a short walking distance from the White House and the State Department, and that it would serve as the vehicle for U.S. commercial and diplomatic influence in the Hemisphere. To this concept Martí counterposed his broader notion of Americanism in terms of "nuestra América". Different from the U.S. concept of Pan-Americanism (and the Argentine one of an America still closely tied to Europe), Martí's "nuestra América" stressed the things that made the New World different and independent from Europe. The most famous expression of this "nuestra América" was a speech Martí gave at the New York