The entirety of José María Vargas Vila’s textual production was published outside Colombia. This essay studies the ways in which his perspective of the country as an outsider yields argumentative cruxes that may offer a productive comparison with the reality of over 4.7 million Colombians living outside the country today. The article examines early writings (hope, possibility, opportunity) and late works (disenchantment, defeat, apathy, oblivion) about exile that have not been broached by critics, and that trace the elliptical and flighting movement of his more than fifty years of disallowed work and person abroad.