One of the commonplace notions in Latin American Transatlantic Studies is Alfonso Reyes's “Hispanism,” exemplified by the lifetime engagement of the prominent Mexican writer with the culture of Spain. The persistence of the idea of Reyes as a “Hispanist” is understandable if one considers the long-standing relationship between Reyes and Iberia, from his early exile in the 1910s and his presence in Jose Ortega y Gasset's circle in the 1920s, to his role in assisting Spanish intellectual exiles in Mexico in the 1940s and his lifelong interest in bringing authors like Gongora and Cervantes to Mexican and Latin American readers. Nevertheless, as I will argue in this short piece, this version of Reyes overlooks his notion of the Atlantic as a space not reducible to the relationship between Spain and Latin America, and the emergence of a sense of worldliness that showed the limits both of Hispanism as a cultural praxis in his work and of what I will call here a “transatlantic reason.” By this term, I refer to two things: the reification of colonial Atlantic circuits as the fundamental experience of the Atlantic—in this case the idea of the relationship with Spain as the core of the Atlantic experience of Latin America—and the emergence of a critical construct called “Transatlantic Studies” that seeks the continuation of the artificial symmetry between Iberian and Latin American Studies in the English-language academy by reducing Latin America's Atlantic experience to an intellectual agenda largely defined by Peninsular Spanish Studies. For the sake of concision, my remarks here will be limited to addressing the first question, since other essays of this collection engage the second point in detail and debate. I believe that Reyes's intellectual evolution proves important to thinking the category of the “Atlantic” for Hispanic Studies without falling back on a reductionist view based on the politics of academic knowledge. His work understands both Spain and Latin America to be part of richer circuits and networks. I will proceed in three steps. First, I will focus on Reyes's early writings on Spain, during his time there in the 1910s, to understand the way in which, early on, he “provincializes” Iberian culture.