In 1914, in Cuba, he defined what according to him a good critic must be: a flexible scholar who knows how to adopt any point of view.

Between 1915 and 1916 Henríquez Ureña worked as a journalist in the United States, living in Washington and New York.

His humanism and Americanism – that is, his firm defense of Hispanic-American cultural values – made him write a final lecture for the Club of International Relations of the University of Minnesota about the "intervencionist policy of the United States in all the Caribbean", since his own nation had been invaded in 1916.

For that reason the differences of the American Spanish, not only took us to the knowledge to a phonetic study of the region but of the geographic area that each dialectal zone describes.

For Henríquez Ureña, linguistics was a form to analyze in a scientific way the power of the American word, its wealth and its evolution through time.

He sustained that language was one of the main instruments that would give rise to a social transformation in the America of the future.

He died in 1946, after suffering a heart attack during his daily commute from Buenos Aires to La Plata.