Through a reading of works by the Cuban Catholic priest Father Félix Varela (1788–1853) that were published in New York during his almost thirty years in that city, in this chapter I recover the emergence of Latina/o-led political activism as an identifiable and organized minority in New York City in the 1820s to 1840s. Specifically, I argue that the Protestant/Catholic debates in which Varela participated converted him, and other Latinas/os in New York City at that time, into political agents who confronted anti-immigrant sentiments prevalent in the city. This recovery does not simply mark Varela as an influential figure in US Catholicism, but it prompts contemporary scholars to delve more deeply into the significance of Varela’s life and works beyond the “supposed” authorship of Jicoténcal (1826), as scholars of Latina/o literature know him, or as one of the first philosophers in Latin America or the first proponent of Cuban independence, as he is studied by scholars of Cuban and Latin American history. Instead, what unfolds from reading Varela’s US archive is a Latina/o intervention into US history, including a contribution to the rise of minority politics in the United States and the secularization of public-school curricula. Varela’s US archive and wider body of writings, and that of other Latina/os during this period, fundamentally challenge scholars to rethink the still existing divides between American, Latina/o and Latin American studies. More importantly, it locates Latinas/os, such as Varela, as actors at the very heart of US history and the US body politic.
Born in Havana, Cuba in 1788, Félix Varela was raised in St. Augustine, Florida, which was under Spanish rule until 1821. At the age of thirteen, he returned to Havana, choosing a religious career instead of a military one because “he wished not to kill men but to save their souls.”1 He taught at the Seminario de San Carlos and held the chair of philosophy there. He traveled to Spain in 1822 as a Cuban representative to the Spanish Cortes, but had to flee Spain that following year once Ferdinand VII reestablished monarchical rule, disbanded the Cortes, and exiled his opposition. Varela fled to the United States and lived first in Philadelphia (1824–1825), then New York (1825–1850), whereupon he retired permanently to St. Augustine, Florida due to his declining health, residing there until his death in 1853.
In Cuba, Varela wrote philosophical texts that defended the New Science emerging from Europe. While Varela did not reject scholasticism outright – he was an ardent reader of Thomas Aquinas – he advocated for induction in scientific inquiry and the use of the Cartesian method.2 The first to teach in Spanish instead of Latin at the university level in Cuba, Varela, after arriving in the United States, wrote in both Spanish and English, and translated, for example, Thomas Jefferson’s Manual on Parliamentary Procedures into Spanish in 1826. In these early years, he also published El Habanero (1824–1826), a political newspaper he founded in Philadelphia that espoused independence for Cuba and cautioned against US intervention in Latin American affairs. For this reason he has been considered one of the first advocates for Cuba’s political independence.3 He also published US editions of his early philosophical writings, Lecciones de filosofía (Philosophical Lessons) and Miscelánea filosófica (Philosophical Miscellanea) which were originally published in Havana in 1818 and 1819, respectively. Finally, he coedited with his student José Antonio Saco El Mensajero Semanal (1829–1831).4
To understand the significance of Varela for New York City and for Latina/o literary history, we must be aware that a large portion of his extant writings are preserved in English in US Catholic newspapers and magazines of the era, periodicals that in many instances he founded and edited himself, all in New York. For example, he edited and published many dozens of articles in the Catholic Expositor and Literary Magazine (1841–1844) and The Protestant Abridger and Annotator (1830), which he founded and edited in response to the publication of The Protestant, an anti-Catholic weekly in New York City, and its arguments against Catholicism. Similarly, he published articles in the Truth Teller (1825–1855), a Catholic newspaper in New York that responded to the accusations of popery published in The Protestant, cited above. He published and contributed to the first bilingual magazine in New York: El Amigo de la Juventud/The Youth’s Friend (1825). And he was the founder and editor of the New York Weekly Register and Catholic Diary (1834–1835) and the New York Catholic Register (1839–1840). The latter was absorbed by the New York Freeman’s Journal, which ran until 1918. This newspaper became the voice of Archbishop John Hughes in his successful fight against the New York Public School Society, which ultimately led to the removal of religious teaching from the public-school curriculum in New York City.5
Varela was a critical early figure in these debates. In fact, he had started the Catholic Register in order to keep Archbishop Hughes apprised of the status of the public-school debate while the latter traveled to Europe. During Hughes’s absence, Varela asked the Public School Society to bring all of their textbooks to him, so he could highlight the parts that misrepresented Catholics or Catholicism. Varela’s critical readings required the Society to then change the books in order to make education more inclusive. According to his US biographers, Joseph and Helen McCadden, Varela, like the editors of the Truth Teller, wished for religion to be taught in schools but opposed the demonization of Catholics. Varela’s early advocacy led to the end of the use of the King James Bible as a text in the public schools (106–107). Although Varela and the other editors sought to collaborate with the Public School Society, General Vicar John Powers and Archbishop John Hughes intervened to excise religion from public schools altogether while obtaining access to state funds for Catholic education. The latter – but not necessarily the former – was a position Varela also advocated. The cumulative effect of this debate contributed to the secularization of the US public-school system.6
So, if Varela was so prolific and so key to US Catholic history, why have so few US historians heard of or written about him? The answer lies in how scholars approach the archive. Recovering Varela requires the transnational, multilingual approach to archival research that has characterized Latina/o studies scholarship. In my work, the “archive” refers to the physical archives found throughout the United States, in Spain, and in Latin American countries and especially Cuba (in this case), which house texts that are usually thought to be field- and nation-specific, due to their being recorded in certain languages, and/or their authors or publishers being of that national origin. For example, while a Cuban author’s work might be housed in a US location – Yale University, the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami, or the New York Public Library – that author and his or her work regularly figure only in Latin American or Caribbean historical narratives.
The archive for me also includes the historiographical sources that have been written by area studies scholars who have a more nationalist bent. These sources are built around academic fields and disciplines such as American studies or Latin American and Latina/o studies. Such secondary works create their own historical record – that is, they may be read themselves as primary sources that illustrate the views of their authors and record the trends and biases in their respective historiographies.
The contribution of Latina/o literary history and the argument at hand is that scholars in American, Latin American, and Latina/o studies must enter all of these archives and conduct a rereading of texts, both primary and secondary, a rereading that is transnational, trans-American, and transatlantic in scope. This approach, located at the intersection of these archives, invites scholars to ask different questions about the material emerging therefrom; and it allows the reader, in this case, scholars and students of Latina/o history and literature, to bring forth a new and more complex narrative of the Latina/o experience and of the parent disciplines of American and Latin American studies. Entering Father Félix Varela’s Americas archive from this perspective forces an epistemological shift in how we study Latina/o literature, not merely as a bridge traversing the American and Latin American studies divide, but as an integral part of both histories, the exclusion of which has led to the formation of dangerous lacunae in those histories.7
Most Latina/o studies scholars know of Father Félix Varela from Luis Leal’s 1960 article “Jicoténcal, primera novela histórica en castellano.”8 This article claimed that it was Varela himself who wrote this work, what is often regarded as the first historical novel in Latin America, and that was, provocatively enough, published in “la Famosa Filadelfia” in 1826, a site we know through Rodrigo Lazo and others’ work as key to nineteenth-century Latina/o literary history. As such, while Father Varela had previously been regarded as a key figure in Latin American philosophy by Latin American intellectuals, Leal’s article placed Varela at the very center of both American and Latin American literary history, at a key juncture for Latina/o studies: the first historical novel in Latin America – a novel that condemned the conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés – now could also be claimed as part of Latina/o literary history.
Although it took nearly forty years following the publication of Leal’s article for Jicoténcal to be published in the United States, first in Spanish in 1995, and then in English, in 1999,9 the novel today is a staple work in anthologies of Latina/o literature and in introductory Latina/o literature courses, its authorship invariably attributed to Félix Varela. And yet, while this attribution guarantees Varela’s name is at least known in Latina/o studies, it is the novel’s narrative/contents – its critique of the conquest of Mexico and the abuse of the indigenous at the hands of the conquerors – that take center stage. Its anonymous production continues to relegate its supposed author, and the balance of his writings, to a certain obscurity.
Take, for example, the manner in which Varela is treated in the 2014 edition of the Heath Anthology of American Literature. While the importance of including Jicoténcal in the anthology must not be dismissed, Varela, as in other anthologies that include him, is literally an aside: no effort is made there to consider the biography of the author in relation to his significance in Latina/o or US history. That is, the Heath finds importance in the book only in its arguments regarding the conquest of Mexico and its depiction of La Malinche as the mother of the mestizo nation in particular, as this is the section of the novel they choose to anthologize. What this means, in other words, is that the Heath highlights the presence in the narrative of a key symbol for the Chicana/o movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, and does little to explore the significance of the Cuban identity of the text’s supposed author, within his US context. Yet, regardless of the manner in which Varela is approached, one must laud the Heath editors for including Jicoténcal in their anthology,10 and Raúl Coronado, the author of the entry, for selecting such a representative excerpt from the novel. However, the lack of contextualization of Varela’s life and works creates a need for wider reading and theorizing to address the lacunae surrounding Varela, which I undertake here.
The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2010), in turn, moves closer to giving Varela his rightful place in Latina/o literary history, since the editors anthologize excerpts from Cartas a Elpidio, a work by Varela that speaks directly to his US experience and ministry. However, they also frame Varela as an exile who happened to be “an insightful observer of American life” (173) and thereby not as an integral part of it. Perhaps it was because Varela chose not to return to Cuba when a general amnesty was offered in 1832 for those who had been exiled in 1823, and also because he refused to take US citizenship, even while remaining in the United States, that scholars labeled Varela an exile. This ascription, which only partially captures his lived and political experience, has also augmented the aforementioned lacunae.
My point is this: nowhere in the showcasing of Jicoténcal or of Cartas a Elpidio is any measured consideration given to Varela’s entire body of written work, nor to the significance of his biography. In the final part of this chapter I will remedy this omission.
Turning now to the reception of Jicoténcal in Latin American studies, we find Latin American studies scholars unanimously unsupportive of the ascription of authorship to Varela. Shortly after the publication of the first Spanish-language edition of Jicoténcal in the United States in 1995, González Acosta dedicated an entire book to what he called El enigma de Jicoténcal (1997), attributing the authorship of the text to the Cuban romantic poet José María Heredia and debunking the classification of the work as the first historical novel in Latin America. In turn, Anderson Imbert, the well-known Argentinian anthologist of Latin American literature, went so far as to ask, “¿Es legítimo incluir Jicoténcal en una historia de la literatura hispanoamericana?” (Is it legitimate to include Jicoténcal in a history of Hispano-American literature?) (221). Anderson Imbert agrees to do so, because it is in his anthology of Latin American literature, but justifies its inclusion by listing the reasons that the novel resembles European literary productions of the time, thereby suggesting a Spaniard may have authored the piece.11
In the field of Cuban studies, Jicoténcal is simply nonexistent. Instead, both before and after the 1959 revolution, scholars of Varela on the island have concentrated almost exclusively on his early philosophical works.12 And his US archive is generally excluded from Cuban historiography, which is a shame given that the socially progressive ideology of the Cuban Revolution would have found resonances with the ideas Varela develops in his US publications13 (although, Varela, as a Catholic priest, would have denounced how the revolution has approached religion, Catholicism in particular, and the state).
Finally, American studies, generally speaking, does not consider Jicoténcal to be a part of the US literary heritage, except insofar as it figures in the Latina/o studies curriculum.14 It is not a work counted in the canon as integral to our understanding of American history, as is the case when we read Washington Irving or William Prescott and their respective histories of the discovery and conquest of the New World, for example. This exclusion is problematic, since, after all, Varela (assuming he is the author of Jicoténcal) also wrote about the conquest of the New World in this historical novel, and he lived in the United States for more than thirty years. Couldn’t his historical novel also count as a relevant colonial narrative for American history, but from a Latina/o perspective?
In sum, the above discussion offers one example that illustrates how the segmentation we see – in Cuba, in Latin America, and in the United States – in the reading and study of the writings of a Latina/o intellectual and historical figures obscures the greater links that exist across these geographic and cultural regions. The methodological approach I propose illuminates the role of Latinas/os not only in US politics and history but in Cuban and Latin American cultural and political histories, as well.
When we understand that Varela’s life and ministry took place over the course of some thirty years in the infamous and mainly Irish Five Points neighborhood of New York City, referred to as such because Cross, Orange, and Anthony Streets came together to form a five-point intersection in what is now between SoHo and Chinatown in Manhattan, it is hard to discount his importance, and by extension that of other Latinas/os, to US and New York history.15 For example, Varela is credited with founding a Catholic school for children in 1828 at Christ Church as well as a vocational school for women, mostly for Irish immigrants who populated the Five Points area, in order to help them enter the workforce and support their families; he was the founder of the Half Orphan Asylum (1835–1852), a refuge for children who had only one parent or relative; and he established the New York Catholic Temperance Society (1840), the first of its kind in the city. As vicar-general of New York, he pastored and/or founded St. Peter’s, St. Patrick’s (the first cathedral), Christ Church, St. Mary’s, and the Church of the Transfiguration, which is serving parishioners to the present, though at a different location than where Varela first founded the church. His dedication to his mainly Irish parishioners has led him to be called the “Father of the Irish,” and he is today considered to be the founder of New York Catholicism.16
Varela was also an apologist for the place of the Catholic Church in American life. In his day, various Protestant groups held public meetings that called on Catholics to defend the church, demanding they prove that the church was not the “whore of Babylon,” was not religiously intolerant, and was not calling for a new Inquisition in the US (in a move parallel to that of the Carlists, who at that time were advocating for the Inquisition’s return to Spain). Varela addressed moral and religious themes in his little-studied Cartas a Elpidio, a series of letters written to a friend, “Elpidio.” Written in Spanish in New York and published there in two separate volumes in 1835 and 1838 respectively, the Cartas record his prominent role in these debates. The volumes, respectively entitled Irreligiosity and Superstition, speak to events in Spain, as well as the growing despotism of Cuba’s governor and the concurrent repression on the Island. Yet, its main theme is religious intolerance in the United States.17
Specifically, in the second volume, he describes in detail his confrontation with the Presbyterian Nativist W. C. Brownlee in a public debate in which Brownlee’s monologue forestalled Varela’s participation in the debate by interrupting him repeatedly, when Varela attempted to respond to Brownlee’s monologue. Remembering the farcical nature of the encounter, in which he was hardly permitted even to speak, Varela says:
Not accepting the theological existence of any religion, they [the Protestants] cannot admit to true tolerance that necessarily presupposes the existence of things tolerated. We would not have argued on this matter if there would have been a true belief in religious tolerance. I mean, if there would have been [by Protestants] more charity and less arrogance.
We must stop here and ponder the word “arrogance.” Varela expresses a theological concern. Varela understood that, in his day, the Catholic Church saw itself as the one and only church, the only path to salvation. He also knew that the Catholic Church admitted that exceptions would be made for non-Catholics who, in their ignorance or incapacities, could not see or properly know the church. They, although not Catholic, could also attain salvation. Furthermore, Varela also understood his Protestant opponents to maintain the same theological view, just as he knew that they also were aware of the theological parallels between Protestant and Catholic views of salvation.
Yet, as Varela notes in Cartas, his Protestant (primarily Presbyterian) opponents hypocritically attacked Catholicism for its intolerance, while ignoring the exceptions Catholics allowed for non-Catholics to attain salvation. More than this, Varela lamented that his Protestant opponents ignored the existence of their own theological exceptions, because they could not recognize the existence of his differing beliefs. Instead, as he objected in Cartas, they repeatedly sought to convert him to Protestantism. Simply, he felt they could not tolerate a Catholic remaining Catholic in their midst, even though their theology could tolerate just that. And, he lamented that, despite the known parallels in their theologies, his Protestant interlocutors could not tolerate his Catholicism precisely because they wrongly demonized the Catholic Church as exclusivist. He concludes ironically by saying, “Believe me, the strongest argument against tolerance is the mere act of having to argue so much about it” (Superstition 151).
Varela’s indictment in Cartas and in his newspaper articles followed from his experience with religion in the United States, since he wished to warn his readers against erroneously praising the pluralism of Protestant denominations, as if they reflected a concomitant tolerance for diverse political or even religious views. Though noting that religious pluralism was enshrined as a legal right in the US Constitution, in Cartas he argued that, in practice, no concomitant social or theological tolerance accompanied this legal right.
And Varela warns his readers in the United States and Latin America not to see the North American model as a foundation for their democratic projects. He says:
You may have heard a lot about the religious liberty in this country accompanied by social harmony and an admirable peace… I fear that men may not have acquired correct ideas on this point, and that you may have allowed yourself to be taken up by the exaggerations of some and the injustice of others.
In order to impress upon his readers the serious nature of his warning in Cartas, Varela concludes:
I have known the impious for a long time, but here I have come to know Protestants. One and the other accuse the [Catholic] Church of being intolerant, and one and the other exceed themselves in their intolerance.
Directly linking his discussion of religion to political and social concerns, including discrimination, Varela also explicitly cautioned that it was not his identity as a Catholic priest that led him to write about Protestantism; rather, it was the eminently political nature of religion in the United States that led him to write about politics by way of discussing religion. He decries the veracity of judgments formed in haste by short-term visitors who perceived the United States as a model for Latin American republics:
The experience I have of the human heart warns me that my examples [of religious intolerance] will be passed over as the delirious rantings of religious interest, simply because the language I am using for my argument is different than what is found in books of mere political calculations. That language used to praise the democratic project [of the US] is used by many who believe they know this country, simply because they have strolled through some of its cities and attended one or another social gathering.
Given his views of the limits of US tolerance, it is no surprise that Varela supported Cuban independence over annexation, and by doing so as early as 1823, is regarded, as mentioned earlier, as one of the first Cubans to do so.19
But perhaps most notable in the last quotation is Varela’s distinction between the casual visitor to the United States, specifically to New York (here he may be referring to the likes of Domingo del Monte, etc.), and the experience of others, such as himself, who had come to know the country intimately as a resident over the course of decades. Indeed, he was more than merely a Cuban exile in New York, as most anthologists and biographers have called him, but rather an actor integral to US history.
Varela also recorded a similar absence of religious tolerance not in debate but in everyday social practice. Most poignantly, I wish to highlight his role in events surrounding the burning of the Ursuline Catholic Convent outside of Boston in 1834, which in turn triggered rioting in New York. While both Protestants and Catholics criticized the violence perpetrated against the young women who studied in this convent school, mostly populated by daughters of Congregationalists, the perpetrators were never convicted. In Cartas, Varela notes the significance of the event:
Experience has shown that the beliefs of the city of Boston are opposed to the Catholic religion and very foreign to that supposed tolerance of which so much is spoken but so little is practiced. A fire always incites compassion … but the Bostonians were happy with their expressions of grief and condolences (lamentaciones de gazeta) and did not believe they should do anything else for a place of education reduced to ashes due to religious hatred … which was proven by the newspapers themselves, as a universal fact.
Varela here criticizes the fact that, while Bostonian newspapers spoke against the anti-Catholic sentiments that fueled the fire, Bostonians publicly celebrated when those accused of the arson were exonerated for the crime (Superstition 157–58).20
Moreover, Varela objected to the fact that the state of Massachusetts denied the convent reparation funds to rebuild it, which were set aside specifically for such purposes (Superstition 155). Franchot contextualizes the significance of this denial when she highlights that the convent was situated close to Bunker Hill, and that writings of the time stressed that it was inappropriate for a Catholic institution ever to have been built so close to such an essential American historical site. In the end, the convent was never rebuilt (Franchot 135–54).21
In another event that led to Varela’s indictment of the so-called religious freedom in the United States, Varela mobilized the Catholic community to resist a planned attack in 1835 against New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In Cartas he describes the manner in which he helped to thwart the attack. The attackers claimed that the Pope was sending Catholics to the United States in order to take over the country and that the Inquisition was being secretly administered in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Varela tells the reader how one of his parishioners overheard the would-be arsonists. A group of Protestant butchers at the local market allegedly had described their plan to destroy the cathedral. Varela warned the church trustees, who reached out to the governor for protection in response. According to Cartas, he then joined 500 Catholics in surrounding St. Patrick’s to greet the arrival of the 200 to 300 rioters, who were turned back by the sheer numbers of parishioners present who were willing to defend the building. This mobilized minority group along with the governor’s threat to interfere, stopped the planned arson (Superstition 159–61).
Kyle Volk (2014) traces the beginnings of minority politics not to twentieth-century history, but defines it as a reaction to the rise of majority rule in the United States in the 1820s by immigrants, blacks, and Catholics. Varela was key to the rise of minority politics in the United States since he established the first Catholic temperance society in New York. Following Lyman Beecher’s role in the Second Great Awakening, as demonstrated by the positive reception acquired by A Plea for the West (1835), the reformers of the period linked moral rectitude with the survival of the American republic. As such, reformers lobbied to convert their beliefs about observing the Sabbath and also to legislate temperance. Specifically, Volk notes that in the shift from minority to majority rule in American politics, reformers used that majority rule to impose their mandates on the US populace. They did so through grassroots campaigns that mobilized the masses: “By involving millions of predominantly middle-class men, women and children, reform associations emerged alongside political parties as a major force of democratization” (27). Volk, in the end, claims that this widespread mobilization allowed these reformers to single out immigrants, blacks, and Catholics as the driving force behind the moral depravity of the nation that would in turn lead to the collapse and end of the American republican project (25). He concludes:
Their exertions would continue to transform public life in the nineteenth century, not least by giving rise to popular debates about American democracy’s central postulate—that the majority should rule—and by rousing a range of new grass-roots political action on behalf of minority rights.
These mass mobilizations in turn led to minorities organizing themselves against this type of morality-based legislation.
One example cited by Volk was the reaction by minorities after the election won by the nativist James Harper in 1844, as mayor of New York. Harper wanted to impose Sunday laws, proposed the exclusive use of the Protestant King James Bible in public schools, opposed the funding of Catholic Schools, and sought tougher naturalization legislation (43). These attempts to regulate morality via majority rule were seen by minority groups as opposing working-class and immigrant rights and culture as well as hindering the religious freedom established in the constitution:
Countering Sabbath reformers and other advocates of Sunday legislation, these critics advanced cultural pluralism and religious liberty as cornerstones of American democracy. In their view, governmental protection of religious worship would ruin the republican experiment. The implication of their position reflected not only the diversifying ethno-religious order but also the everyday changes accompanying the ascension of market capitalism. (43–44)
Varela was integral in these debates and events, as evidenced from his arguments against the supposed “Blue Laws of Connecticut” (Superstition 127–29). He protested against temperance societies that were totalitarian in nature (Travieso 421–23), and played an active role in the public-school debates. As such, he was at the very heart of and integral to the very rise of minority politics in the United States.22
Varela, moreover, is but one figure, an exemplar of the many Latinas/os who were actively integrated into American life in the nineteenth century, yet who continued simultaneously to be a part of the Cuban, Latin American, and Spanish imaginaries.23 He presents us with a series of intersections and flows, networks and relations, that are within yet also move beyond space and time and ultimately structure the Latina/o experience.24 But these intersections are in fact set out on a continuum that is obscured by the siloed reading of the evidence, housed as it is in what are restrictively imagined as national archives that are often separated by linguistic divides.
Félix Varela and his thirty years in the United States speak to his deep engagement in US life, as an agent in important events in the life of the American Catholic Church and in US history more generally. But, I would also suggest that the Protestant/Catholic debate in which he took part speak beyond the limits of a US context.
One must recall that the engagements of Varela with American social, political, and religious life summarized in this article were at times written in Spanish. And that he self-consciously targeted Cartas to a Cuban audience – Cubans settled in New York and those visiting the United States, as well as Cubans in Cuba. His narrative about American Protestantism, that is, also offered another narrative. It was a narrative meant to express concern for Cuban understanding of American political, religious, and social life.
Here, I find Varela writing one story in Cartas, about American intolerance, while also writing multiple stories simultaneously: American legal tolerance did not extend to a theological or social inclusivism in the United States, in Varela’s view, as we have seen. And, this erroneously imagined inclusivism also would not extend to Cubans in Cuba, who often read into the legality of religious pluralism in the United States a concomitant tolerance for social and political difference (Travieso, Biografía 412). In other words, Varela in his narrative about American intolerance wished to warn Cubans (and Latin Americans more broadly) in Cuba and in the United States that annexation would not bring the sort of inclusivism and social harmony they imagined.
Varela also saw other perils for the United States in annexing Cuba. Varela opposed slavery and did not wish to see the institution reinforced by the incorporation of the island into the United States, given that slavery was so deeply ensconced in Cuba.25 The theme of intolerance in Cartas speaks simultaneously to this concern.26
Third, Varela did not wish to see the Catholic church, despite his misgivings with the manner in which its business was sometimes conducted in Cuba, dismissed out of hand for the transgressions of the Cuban Church in particular. Although he chided the Church for siding too closely with Spain and its colonial control of the island, in the Church he believed society could find precisely the sort of charity that he felt the United States needed: service to the poor, including the multitude of immigrants who were deeply in need; the Church’s educational missions; and in his view at least, the Church’s capacity to imagine itself, not merely theologically superior, but more thoroughly self-conscious and accepting of the possibility of other ways of thinking and believing. The Church, that is, still had something to offer to Cuba and the United States; and Varela’s narrative tells this story, as well.
Finally, and, yes, most directly, Cartas speaks to a desire to find in the United States the values it was supposed to present, with a place there to be found for the poor, non-white religious minority: the Irish who were not yet “white,” at least prior to the Civil War, and other immigrant and minority groups that hailed from across the world and who should have been welcomed in keeping with the values of the US Constitution.27
I wish to suggest that a concerted entry into the intersection of Varela’s multiple archives furnishes new information concerning the Latina/o experience, and also impacts our understanding of Latina/os who lived and live their lives constantly crossing multiple borders, both physical and metaphorical. And, his life and biography give voice to those who, like him, refuse or cannot return to their place of origin but who, at the same time, cannot entirely unproblematically find their place in the United States. Varela, after all, both refused to return to Cuba and at the same time decided not to take US citizenship.
What emerges from his decision to live between worlds is an individual who lives and addresses multiple worlds simultaneously. We can recover this figure from the past, and, by way of his example and the company he keeps, consider him a representative of so many who similarly live today across multiple borders. Moving forth into the future, I propose that a recovered Latina/o literary history will help to forge a more inclusive and, to use Varela’s term, “hopeful” society.
1 Rodríguez, José Ignacio. Vida del Presbítero Don Félix Varela. New York: Imprenta de “O Novo Mundo,” 1878. Rodríguez cites a eulogy published in the New York Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register 13.38 March 19, 1856.
2 Scholasticism argued that there were God-decreed universal truths that governed the cosmos, a cosmos in which everything was in perfect balance. Catholicism was at the core of their structuring and understanding of the universe. While scholasticism in Western Europe was debunked during the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, late scholasticism continued to structure philosophical and political arguments in Spain and its colonies into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The new science, meanwhile, privileged reason over faith in understanding the cosmos and promoted the scientific method in the “natural sciences,” by which they referred to experiments and empirical observation in scientific investigations and philosophical argumentation that served to explain reality.
To understand Varela’s position in relation to scholasticism and the new science emerging from Europe, see Travieso (1942), Vitier (1970) and Leal (1971), among others. See also Coronado (2013), who addresses the impact of the emergence of the new science on early nineteenth-century Hispanic America and Latina/o communities in the United States.
3 See Hernández’s introduction (“Félix Varela: el primer cubano”) to the compilation El Habanero: papel político, científico, y literario (1997).
4 José Saco was one of the anti-annexationist editors of the influential Revista Bimestre Cubana (1831–1834). Exiled to Spain as of 1834 because of his political beliefs – he was a reformist who rejected absolutist monarchical rule – Saco is the well-known author of Historia de la esclavitud desde los tiempos más remotos hasta nuestros días (1875–1877). Varela and Saco held different views on slavery. Saco advocated for the end of the slave trade and pushed for an increase in white immigration and white labor to the island in order to counter the large number of Africans who were brought to Cuba as slaves in the early nineteenth century. Varela wanted to end the slave trade but also called for a gradual abolition coupled with indemnification to slave holders, citing a fear of slave revolts due to the large number of slaves already on the island as the reason for abolition. Both Varela’s and Saco’s positions regarding the end of the slave trade and slavery are deplorable at best, but Varela, in particular, was an early advocate for abolition. A more detailed analysis of Varela’s views of slavery and abolition is yet to be completed. However, Luis (1990), Williams (1994), Reid-Vázquez (2011), and Aching (2015) provide introductory explanations and comparisons of these two authors’ respective positions.
5 Ravitch (1947), Shea (2004), and Gjerde (2012) offer useful summaries of the New York public-school debates of 1840–1842.
6 The McCaddens’ biography (1969) provides a positive picture of Archbishop Hughes and his role in the New York public school debates; however, they stress the tactical differences between Hughes and Varela, noting Hughes’s polarizing position and Varela’s more conciliatory approach (106–110). Meanwhile, Travieso in Biografía (1949) presents Hughes as an individual who marginalized Varela’s more conciliatory strategy altogether (409–433).
7 My current book project, The Latina/o Continuum: Rethinking American and Latin American Studies (in progress), addresses these concerns at length.
8 The preface to the Spanish edition of Jicoténcal published by Arte Público Press includes an extended introduction by Luis Leal and Rodolfo Cortina regarding the authorship of the novel. However, Leal first published his findings in the academic journal Revista Iberoamericana (vol 25. no 4. pages 9–31) in 1960.
9 It was not until 1995 that Arte Público Press – the press for the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project – published Jicoténcal in Spanish. Four years later, the University of Texas Press published an English translation for wider use in the university classroom. With these publications, the anonymously written Jicoténcal was canonized in Latina/o studies, appearing in the emerging market of anthologies of Latina/o literature of the 1990s.
10 The Norton Anthology of American Literature, for example, does not include Latina/o writing in its nineteenth-century compilation.
11 One of Imbert’s rationales (among several) for questioning the Mexican and/or Latin American origins of the writer is that the novel is discursive instead of descriptive and that the discourse itself translates the conquest of Mexico into “términos europeos” (222).
12 As early as 1862, Mestre writes of the importance of Varela’s philosophical texts for Cuban history in De la Filosofía en la Habana, but excludes Varela’s US works. Likewise Rexach (1950), Roig de Leuchsenring (1957), Vitier (1970), Serpa (1983), and Piqueras (2007) concentrate almost exclusively on Varela’s philosophical texts not addressing Cartas a Elpidio or Varela’s political activism found in US newspapers. While his Cuban biographer, Travieso (1949), who combed through US sources in DC, Philadelphia, and New York, speaks to Varela’s US activism and writings, he dedicates most of his biography to his Cuban writings. His previous book, Varela y la reforma filosófica en Cuba (1942), concentrates on the latter’s philosophical works. Meanwhile, El Habanero (1824–1826) has become a resource for scholars since a complete compilation of its articles was published in 1997 by Editorial Universal in Miami, Florida. This edition includes the once-lost seventh issue of the newspaper. The introduction to this important compilation does not include a review of the significance of Varela in a US context. Moreover, his US biographers, José Ignacio Rodríguez (1878) and Joseph and Helen McCradden (1969) speak to Varela’s importance in relation to US Catholicism but do not contextualize his life from a Latina/o perspective. The former dedicates most of his book to Varela’s work originally published and/or written in Cuba and Spain.
13 The University of Havana, under the direction and editorship of Torres-Cuevas et al., published Varela’s Obras in three volumes in 1997. Unfortunately, due to lack of access to US sources, the editors were not able to compile and include Varela’s articles from US Catholic newspapers, thereby providing an incomplete compilation and limited assessment of Varela’s importance.
14 Two scholars that have given attention to Jicoténcal but have not concentrated on Varela’s other works are Silva Gruesz (2001) and Brickhouse (2004). While they do not speak in detail as to Varela’s wider significance in Latina/o literature and history, their books are essential reading for those interested in Latina/o studies from a hemispheric perspective.
15 Tyler Anbinden’s book titled Five Points (2001) concentrates on this neighborhood and its importance for Irish-American and US history. Yet, Varela is absent from his book.
16 These biographical details and many others are compiled from Varela’s three book-length biographies (Rodríguez [1878], Travieso [1949] and McCadden [1969]) as well as the introduction of Letters to Elpidio by Estévez (1989). The latter is the first English translation of Cartas in its entirety.
17 Volume 1 of Cartas a Elpidio was also published in Madrid in 1836. In the twentieth century, it was published in Cuba in 1944. In 1997, it was included in volume 3 of Varela’s complete works, published by the University of Havana and edited by Torres Cuevas, et al.
18 All translations are mine.
19 His presentation to the Spanish Cortes (1822–1823), but primarily his articles in El Habanero, speak to his call for Latin American and Cuban independence.
20 Oxx (2013) dedicates an entire chapter to the Ursuline Convent burning and cites primary sources that signal the rise of Nativism in the US in its religious context in the early nineteenth century. Franchot (1994) provides a detailed account of the newspaper coverage of the arson case as well as the court proceedings surrounding the case. Her endnotes (398–401) are particularly useful for those wishing to read primary sources related to this event. Billington (1938) also offers a useful summary from a religious perspective.
21 Two important dimensions linked to this event and depicted in Cartas are the disenfranchisement of the working class in early America, for the arsonists were Scot-Presbyterian bricklayers who found themselves competing for jobs with the Irish and having to move west in order to subsist and find work (Franchot, 135–154) and the disestablishment of mainstream Protestantism and its impact on US religion and politics. In Superstición Varela amply lists and critiques the many Protestant groups (Methodists, Baptists, Quakers, Shakers, et al.) emerging from and populating the US religious landscape. Along with Franchot (1994), see Hatch (1989) and Fessenden (2010) for a full discussion of disestablishment and the secularization of religion in the nineteenth century.
22 When inaugurating the society in 1840, Varela wrote, “The object of the New York Catholic Temperance Society is to abolish intemperance without imposing unnecessary privations … each person is solely impelled to avoid intemperance, and not to deprive himself completely of liquor … We do this in this manner because we consider imprudent the establishment of a general rule when each case is, in its very nature, different. He that during his meals always drinks a glass of wine without feeling the effects of intemperance; we will not force him to break his custom, because others are drunkards” (Qtd. in Travieso, 421–22).
23 Other Latinas/os who lived extended periods in the US during the Varela’s lifetime include Cristobal Madán and Agustín José Morales, among others.
24 Silva Gruesz (2002) argues for the network of trans-American texts and lives that are part of the Latina/o experience. Brickhouse (2004) address the trans-American relations of which Latina/o and US writers were a part.
25 In a presentation he drafted for the Spanish Cortes (1822) but never delivered, Varela proposed the abolition of slavery in Cuba. He also drafted a plan for gradual abolition. (Obras, 2: 113–27).
26 See El ingenio, complejo socioeconomic cubano (1964) by Manuel Morena Fraginals, a classic for those interested in the topic.