We begin by thanking the contributors to the volume. Their intellectual energy, insight, and enthusiasm made it possible for this project to develop from a conversation into a collection of chapters. The idea of a book emerged from a panel at the first conference sponsored by C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists at Penn State in 2010. While the session was lively and well attended, the presenters walked away thinking that U.S. nineteenth-century studies had little interest in the concerns of Latino studies. Nevertheless, C19 continued to be an important venue for conversation and hosted “Latino Nineteenth Century” panels at its next two conferences, in 2012 and 2014. Kirsten Silva Gruesz and José Aranda were there from the start and helped us conceptualize the collection. The new Latina/o Studies Association conference also hosted sessions related to this project at its first gathering in Chicago in 2014, and some of our contributors joined us after that important meeting.
We thank the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, and particularly former Dean Vicki Ruiz for hosting a workshop that allowed some of the contributors to bring first drafts of papers and share them in a seminar discussion. Cristina Rodriguez helped to organize the workshop. The UC Irvine Humanities Commons provided a publication support grant. At the University of New Mexico, we’re grateful for the unfettered access to the Leon Howard Memorial Library, where we holed up for a long weekend to work among Howard’s books, and we appreciate the colleagues in the English Department’s American Literary Studies group for their sustained commitment to redefine the field.
Our editor at New York University Press, Eric Zinner, offered encouragement from the project’s earliest moment. He has been a consistent supporter of this book and Latino studies as a field. We also thank Karen Roybal and Alicia Nadkarni for assistance with the preparation and submission of the manuscript. Sections of Chapter 12 appeared in different form in Exile and Revolution: José D. Poyo, Key West, and Cuban Independence by Gerald E. Poyo (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014): 168–84, and are reprinted with the permission of the University Press of Florida.
We thank our friends, colleagues, and families for their ongoing support. In New Mexico, thanks to Daniel Worden, Marissa Greenberg, and Randall Gann for fortifying friendships, and Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán for her tenacious, fierce love. In Irvine, thanks to the Department of English for its ongoing support and to Arlene Keizer, Lilith Mahmud, and Erika Hayasaki for being “Suspicious Minds”; much love to Amy DePaul, Gabriel Lazo, and Francisco Lazo.