Rodrigo Lazo
On January 9, 1878, Ramón de Contador y Muñiz brought in the new year in San Francisco with the thirty-third issue of his newspaper El Eco de la Raza Latina. Proposing shared interests among populations in the United States, Latin America, and Spain, Contador described his paper as “el organo de los intereses materiales y morales de España y los españoles en particular, y de toda la raza latina en general” or in his own English description “the organ of the moral, political and commercial interests of all the latine race.” (Fluent in French, Contador inserted the Francophone feminine latine.) Like many other Spanish-language newspapers in the nineteenth-century United States, El Eco de la Raza Latina included news from Europe and the Americas, advertisements for local Spanish-speaking businesses, and literary offerings: a selection from the novelist Benito Pérez Galdós’s Episodios nacionales and Contador’s own translation of Victor Hugo’s Histoire d’un crime. And also like so many other Spanish-language newspapers in U.S. history, El Eco de la Raza Latina remains today as a fragment. Only the solitary issue of 1878 is at the UC Berkeley libraries.
The texts of the Latino nineteenth century come to us in pieces. And yet despite fragmented remains, archival holdings register the views and aspirations of people who share (or at least engage with) concerns related to bilingualism, social formation, and political organization. In the case of Contador’s paper, a commonality is presented under the banner of a “Latin” people who can read his Spanish-language paper. Among the topics covered are some that are still relevant in the Spanish-language media almost 140 years later: a census of “Spanish” populations, methods for learning the English language, and the latest news from Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia.
Contador’s use of the term la raza Latina provides a lexical antecedent to the present-day Latino/Latina, and thus it introduces continuity and difference—continuity in the sense that some nineteenth-century populations first adopted the term Latino/Latina in reference to themselves but difference because this usage was clearly influenced by a genealogical claim to European connections associated with a broad geographic and historical sense of “Latin.” In the nineteenth century, the words Latino and Latina appeared throughout the Americas not only to name América Latina but also to posit a people, “la raza Latina,” with the latter claiming a European antecedent that was Catholic and went back to Rome. Contador adopts a hemispheric and transatlantic usage as he seeks to circulate his newspaper in the “United States, Cuba, Spain, Mexico, Central and South America,” searching for readers in various countries. Arturo Ardao, Mónica Quijada, and Walter Mignolo are among scholars who have studied the idea of Latin America, which emerged as a pan-Latin formation with a Eurocentric bent that connected criollos in the Americas to France.1 Most important, the notion of Latin America was used in contradistinction to an Anglo-Saxon America, the latter represented by the United States. In his América Latina y la latinidad, Ardao traced the term not only to various intellectuals from Latin America (most prominently José María Torres Caicedo and his poem “Las dos Américas”) but also to the French intellectual Michel Chevalier, who sought to build an alliance between Mexico and France as part of “Latin” people.2 The Spanish raza, closer in its historical usage to lineage than to the twentieth-century English race, was marshaled to argue for the achievements of a people going back to Roman greatness. Chevalier, for one, positioned Mexico as a site where the greatness of a Latin (French-inflected) Catholicism could respond to the Protestant North.3
The prominence of France in the notion of “la raza Latina” explains a curious excursus in a letter by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, whose novels are an important dimension of the Latino nineteenth century. In 1869, Ruiz de Burton invokes “la raza Latina” in a passage excoriating the United States and Manifest Destiny: “La historia no miente y la historia nos dice cuan gloriosa ha sido la carrera de la raza Latina” (History does not lie and history tells us how glorious has been the development of la raza Latina). But Ruiz de Burton clarified, only la raza Latina under a government in conjunction with its people. As if influenced by Chevalier himself, she positions France as a superior example: “De las naciones Latinas, ¿cuál es la única que progresa? La Francia. . . . ¿Por qué? porque es la única que adoptando todos los adelantes del siglo. . . . en ideas y materialmente—ha conservado un gobierno que es el único capaz de manejar a los franceses” (Of all the Latin nations which is the only one that progresses? France. . . . Why? Because it is the only one that by adopting all of the advances of the century . . . in ideas and materially—has maintained a government that is the only one capable of leading the French).4 (Given this type of French turn, it is not surprising that the Chilean migrant to California Vincente Pérez Rosales sometimes identified as French, as Juan Poblete tells us in his contribution to this collection.) Ruiz de Burton’s class-inflected Francophilia differs from Contador y Muñiz’s commercially viable grouping in El Eco de la Raza Latina. And yet both make necessary a historical interpretation of the term.
Latino/a is not an anachronism in the nineteenth century, either in usage or in its communal longings, even if la raza Latina can introduce celebrations of France and Rome that are at odds with contemporary implications of the term. Contador’s paper shows us how Spanish-speaking populations established linguistic and cultural connections, in this case mediated by print culture, while Ruiz de Burton reminds us of the sociopolitical complications of assuming the form of those connections. The unexpected historical contexts informing various types of Latino affiliation are a major concern of the articles in The Latino Nineteenth Century. This collection registers Latino aspirations at various points in the century while engaging with partial, sometimes fragmented, and regularly dispersed textual remains. We seek to open research into writing and textual production that may move us in unexpected directions and to new archival sites. In doing so, the chapters are in dialogue with the contemporary concerns of Latino studies and respond to the limitations of nationalist U.S. literature and regionalist Latin American studies.
The relationship of the nineteenth century (and other centuries) to Latino studies is vexed by the field’s own history—its emergence in response to civil rights movements of the late twentieth century. Because Latino studies is often focused on the past fifty years, historically minded scholars raise questions about the effects of deploying contemporary investments in other centuries. Some years ago, Quentin Skinner, writing about the history of ideas, described the challenges of historical vision driven by a preconceived paradigm: “The perpetual danger, in our attempts to enlarge our historical understanding, is thus that our expectations about what someone must be saying or doing will themselves determine that we understand the agent to be doing something which he would not—or even could not—himself have accepted as an account of what he was doing.”5 As Skinner describes it, the anachronistic assumptions of the present (a contemporary “understanding” of the past) would drive the interpretation of historical actions and texts.6 But that assumes a stable present-day epistemology. In the case of Latino studies, that would require a denotative sense of the term Latino that is deployed across time as an analytical starting point. But is there such an understanding? Latino is a word that is used to signify an identity, a concept, an ethnic label, a demographic category, and an opportunity for debate. Its use today sets off a tension between a pan-national umbrella and specific national designations, such as Puerto Rican and Chicano/a.7
This naming instability stretches into the nineteenth century, as “la raza Latina” shows, so that it is possible to consider Latino in a longer historical span of time, a longue durée signaling the difficulty of naming a population with common elements while conjuring a dispersal of experiences and meanings. In both English and Spanish publications of the nineteenth century, as scholars in this collection and elsewhere have also noted, the range of words used to describe people included Hispanoamericanos, Americanos, Spanish, Spanish American, and creoles, as well as a variety of nation-specific designations, sometimes in combination (e.g., Cuban Spaniard). In relation to these usages, Raúl Coronado has written, “The difficulty is in tracking the shift in discursive formations that allowed individuals to identify in various ways, from Spanish American to Latino, an issue linked with the question of whether nation, race, or both serve as the ontological basis of identity.”8 And yet it is possible to approach this challenge historically and in relation to the textual remains that are available. Spanish American was commonly used in the 1810s and 1820s in the U.S. Northeast, while Latino/a as an adjective begins circulating in the late 1830s in various parts of the Americas. As a result of migration from the southern Americas to the United States and the U.S. acquisition of territories, sometimes ethnic identification was linked to bilingual negotiations. Ruiz de Burton, whose work again proves instructive, deploys one of the most curious terms early in her novel The Squatter and the Don (1885). Speaking of laws enacted after the U.S.–Mexico War that would dispossess Mexican Californians of their land and effectively nullify provisions in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Clarence Darrell says, “I only wish I could wipe out those stains on our national honor by repealing at once laws so discreditable to us. Yes, the more so, as they bear directly upon the most defenseless, the most powerless of our citizens—the orphaned Spano-Americans.”9 Darrell’s Spano-Americans emphasizes that the population in California had become part of the U.S. nation, even as he seeks an adjectival form that would recognize a cultural difference from Anglo America. Although an awkward Anglicization of Hispano, Spano-Americans is no more a misnomer than any other term circulating at the time. Instead, it registers the difficulty of naming difference that changes over the century. Today some critics prefer the use of Latino to signal “how frail a word is / when faced with the thing it names,” to quote the poetry of Julia Álvarez, while others use Latina/o to specify a gendered reference more directly. Still others, especially in the blogosphere, opt for the gender-neutral Latin@.10
Chapters in The Latino Nineteenth Century complicate assumptions about fixed terminology, modifying terms and showing how texts and conditions can help us rethink the historical dimensions of Latino. What are the material conditions, spatial trajectories, hemispheric movements, and forms of colonization and war that influence texts of the Latino nineteenth century? And how are the textual remains connected to people who struggled to build communities, organize political movements, fight in wars, make their way through a new and sometimes hostile country, and publish their writing?
Trans-American contexts at times demand that the term Latino be used with modifiers and in light of specific historical conditions. Kirsten Silva Gruesz opens the collection by introducing the notion of an “errant Latino,” which she develops through a reading of José Irisarri’s novel El cristiano errante (The Errant Christian, 1847). Gruesz’s approach is to read the nineteenth century against a set of present-day expectations regarding immigrants and their assumed trajectories. She argues that today the redemptive belief in immigration as an historical dimension of the United States and the exclusionary conception of undocumented people as lawbreakers and intruders both rely on an assumption of intention on the part of the immigrant. But what if we conceive of an errant subject as one who is not tied to a particular nation-state but rather moves in and with contingency, seeking a new and alternative way to grapple with the legacy of colonial domination and neoimperialism in the Americas? Such contingent readings are important for all of this collection’s chapters, whose range of study turns to texts by a diplomat from Spain, a Chilean Forty-Niner, Argentine travelers, and a pair of brothers who fought in the U.S. Civil War and Cuba’s Ten Years War.
Robert McKee Irwin also responds with a geographic challenge to the use of Latino as a U.S.-based identity category. Introducing the term Almost Latino, Irwin raises questions about those migrating people whose movement to the United States is truncated or made impossible. What happens to those who go back or are deported before they can claim or negate a U.S.-based ethnic label? What about those who undertake migrations but never make it and thus end up somewhere between Latin America and the United States? Irwin’s Almost Latino raises important questions about the relationship of U.S. Latinidades to Latin American beginnings, while also reminding us of the importance of epistemological limitations. In another approach to these types of questions, Jesse Alemán returns to trans-American as a term for the two Cuban-born U.S. citizens in his chapter, describing them as “hemispheric citizens whose sense of belonging traversed the Americas rather than being bound by its national borders.”
Modifiers such as errant and almost, as well as a notion of “la raza Latina” and hemispheric subjectivity, present spatial conceptions of Latinidades that cross the Americas. Because of its geographic reach, work on Latino writing must consider historical conditions across various countries and be done in at least two languages. But Spanish-language materials are at odds with Anglophone conceptions of nineteenth-century U.S. literature. Many practitioners of American (U.S.) literature have not taken seriously the historical concerns of Latino studies, in part because such a move would involve the reorganization of what Donald Pease called a field-Imaginary, in other words the field’s “fundamental syntax—its tacit assumptions, convictions, primal words, and the charged relations binding them together.”11 While Latino literature written in the United States after the 1960s is predominantly in English, the archival remains of texts written prior to 1900 are mostly in Spanish (with notable exceptions to both). As Raúl Coronado argues in his contribution to this collection, U.S. literary history has proven resistant to the revisionary strains of Latino studies in part because of the demands of working across languages, literary traditions, and historical contexts. The tendency in academic study to split the Americas into North/South or Spanish/English or U.S. American/Latin American is a hindrance to considering texts that cross those divisions in their contents or print culture histories.
The nineteenth century marks the establishment of nation-states in the Americas and the invigoration of nationalistic thinking, but it also presents for Latino America numerous cases in which intellectuals and writers are on the move. As such, the analytical framework should expand to encompass multiple traditions and nations, even multiple colonial legacies. Just as an Anglophone world has to contend with England, so does the explication of Hispanophone texts of the United States necessarily need to engage Spain and its colonial legacy. In Coronado’s chapter, these methodological considerations lead to a reading of a pamphlet published by Valentín de Foronda, a wealthy nobleman from Spain who served as that country’s general counsel in Philadelphia from 1801 to 1807. Foronda’s presence emphasizes the weight of colonial legacy on early Latino writing.
Because texts written in Spanish do not necessarily fit into Anglophone literary categories, the Latino nineteenth century is at odds with forms of U.S. literary history driven by the canonical desires of U.S. American literature and the fetishization of major writers. The ongoing consideration of the “great American novel,” even when approached with some skepticism, continues to be an Anglophone undertaking.12 Over the past four decades, scholars trying to build a more comprehensive version of U.S. literature have sought to expand its texts and articulate minority dimensions within it, seeking writings by people from various ethnic groups and making overtures toward new geographies of interpretation, including the conceptions of hemispheric American studies. Multilingual America has been an important consideration for scholars such as Susan Gillman, Werner Sollors, Marc Shell, Anna Brickhouse, and Ralph Bauer. At the same time, a nationalist wing of U.S. literature continues to foster extraordinary interest in the usual suspects, writers associated with the so-called American Renaissance and its Anglophone heirs. The construction of U.S. literature has always been influenced by a sense that its major authors were following an Anglophone tradition of writing. In other words, F. O. Matthiessen’s Renaissance was American as a westward continuation of the English Renaissance. This is not to say that everyone accepted the New England–centric focus of the American Renaissance. Nevertheless, Walden Pond and the Old Manse continue to exert an influential pull. In contrast to the centripedal force of national U.S. literature, a Latino nineteenth century calls for engagement with hemispheric geographies, a variety of textual production, and multiple archival sites.
This collection’s challenge to late-twentieth-century field-epistemology is also important for Latin American studies, which has had a vexed relationship with Latino studies. A version of Latin American studies that refuses to engage with the United States as an important site of migration overlooks the historical role of figures who moved in and out of cities such as Philadelphia, New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. The Latino Nineteenth Century presents the U.S. trajectories of diplomats, travelers, migrants, and residents of colonized spaces who might otherwise be situated in Latin American studies and even written as national figures. In her contribution, Carmen Lamas questions the effect on scholarship of the presumed separation of U.S. Latino and Latin American studies. What if we were to consider subjects along a “Latino continuum,” she asks? In a suggestive interpretation of writing and translation work by the Cuban revolutionary, lawyer, and writer Raimundo Cabrera (1852–1923), Lamas challenges scholars to delve into the Latin American studies archive to locate figures whose residency, even temporary, in the United States help us uncover unknown sites of the Latino nineteenth century. Carrie Tirado Bramen also reads from the South, drawing on the writing of Argentines who held diplomatic posts and traveled in the late-nineteenth-century United States. This writing, Bramen argues, “reverses the dominant gaze by showing the United States as the cultural ‘other’” and thus allows for a critical response both to U.S. and Argentine forms of exceptionalism. Both Bramen and Lamas discuss people who were in the United States for only a brief period and yet produced writing and translations that engage with important dimensions of the Latino nineteenth century. Although the diplomats in Bramen’s chapter are Argentine, their writing unsettles the organization of knowledge along a U.S./Latin American opposition and suggests the need for ongoing consideration of movement in American spatial conceptions.
The sense of a Latino continuum reminds us of the ongoing need to excavate archival sites in search of a multiplicity of texts: diaries, newspaper clippings, and letters. It is no surprise that many of our contributors have been involved with the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, which since its inception in 1992 has been an archival undertaking. Nicolás Kanellos’s monumental work establishing the Project deployed recovery as a term that included the locating of texts that had not been seen for decades or even centuries and also collecting, indexing, and republishing them.13 Kanellos’s contribution to this collection, a return to the work of the Afro–Puerto Rican printer and biographer Sotero Figueroa, whose trajectories brought him into contact with José Martí and Arturo Schomburg in New York, exemplifies the work done by the project over the past twenty-five years. Recovery scholars have turned to archival sites, including at times personal collections, in order to paint a panorama of Hispanic literary heritage. The Recovery Project and Arte Público Press have made available to contemporary readers the anonymous novel Jicoténcal (Philadelphia, 1826), the poetry collection El laúd del desterrado (New York, 1858), and the immigrant novel Lucas Guevara (New York, 1914), among other books, and have also published several volumes of articles by scholars whose criticism engaged with the newly recovered publications and introduced still other texts that were not always available to a wide readership.14 In turn, the Project has sought to build an archive. At first institutionalized in its home at the University of Houston, parts of that archive are now available through the sale to libraries of a database run by the company EBSCO.15 An archive introduces a series of problems related to occlusion, partial recuperation, and a fiction of knowledge, as Agnes Lugo-Ortiz has pointed out in her discussion of Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States.16 But archives in various forms are also sites of potential for the ongoing emergence of the Latino nineteenth century.
Scholars working in the historical dimensions of Latino studies are faced with an archive that is dispersed, multilingual, and incomplete. This material raises questions about the notion of an archive (singular) versus archives that are not always and not easily accessible. National archives established to represent a nation-state either forget certain people or frame mobile subjects in relation to a national lens, sometimes cutting out experiences in various countries. An archive is a problem more than a place. As I have argued elsewhere, turns in archive theory have shown the ontological impossibility of the archive, affected by the slippage of a defining category and the contradictions it attempts to contain. Instead, certain forms of scholarship call for a turn to “migrant archives” that are not widely available and break away from a standard language and official stories.17
Archival encounters—their imperatives, possibilities, and limitations—are an important dimension of the Latino nineteenth century, a periodization that calls for a reconsideration of what counts as an archive. The traditional repository of information may not be the only place to find texts and contexts, and that calls for venturing beyond the building as a repository of documents. For Emily García, one such archival site is St. Mary’s Church in Philadelphia, which displays a plaque celebrating the contributions of Manuel Torres, an early exile to what was then the newly founded United States. Settling in Philadelphia and becoming a parishioner of that church in the first decades of the century, Torres engaged with republican government as it was emerging in his new country and fostered a conversation with independence movements in Latin America, prompting the newspaper editor William Duane to call Torres “the Franklin of the southern world.” The plaque shows how the search in new sites alters what can function as an archive and why it is important to bring it forward. While the plaque celebrates Torres, he is largely forgotten, even in St. Mary’s Church today. At the time of his death in 1822, he was widely known in the United States, and newspapers across the country celebrated his appointment as the first ambassador from a new South American country, received by a U.S. president, James Monroe. A month after that meeting, Torres died, and his funeral procession included an armed infantry corps and four separate bands of instruments and was estimated to have drawn 20,000 people in Philadelphia.18 The recovery of Torres challenges a tendency in U.S. society to exclude or forget certain cultural and political resonances, particularly those that emerge from immigrant communities whose populations are not easily integrated into an Anglo or a black/white conception of the nation.
The archives of the Latino nineteenth century sometimes point to pieces and partial information rather than a book with a glossy cover. In José Aranda’s chapter, the metaphor of a collision speaks to the contradictory effect created when scholars go into archives with particular expectations. What if newly located information challenges such an expectation? Because archives operate under an organizing term, most noticeably the national archives of a particular nation-state, they foster certain commitments and even ideologies. What are we to make of the textual remains that are at odds or even challenge the archival designation Hispanic or a more particular term such as Chicano/a? For Aranda, archival holdings point to the need to remake the nineteenth century in relation to not only whom we study but also what we read. He writes, “[T]he multi-regional presence of the Spanish language press in this period alone makes evident how far the field of nineteenth century studies still needs to expand and revise just to incorporate only one aspect of a Latino nineteenth century.” As we have seen with the newspaper El Eco de la Raza Latina, these periodicals are sometimes available in pieces.19 John Alba Cutler calls the remains of short fiction in the periodical press a “fugitive archive,” and the errancy Gruesz associates with migration might also be a way to consider newspapers.
The importance of the periodical press and the challenges of recovering it are an inspiration for ongoing research across the Americas. Newspapers, for example, added an important component to Gruesz’s Ambassadors of Culture (2002), an influential book-length study that shifted a focus from specific Chicano or Cuban dimensions and adopted “a nongenealogical view of Latino identity grounded in a larger web of transamerican perceptions and contacts.”20 If anything, the nineteenth-century U.S. Spanish-language press crosses national groups and nations so as to create proto-Latino alliances. Contributors to The Latino Nineteenth Century turn to newspapers for information but also read the papers themselves as exhibiting a material condition of Latinidad in a country that has not always preserved its Spanish-language materials. Cutler recovers two important stories and traces their appearances in the Spanish-language periodical press across different parts of the United States and the Americas. “[T]he short story’s literary genealogies are distinct in Spanish and English,” he writes, recognizing difference in both social content and literary form and bringing forward a hemispheric approach. Cutler’s article suggests that what Meredith McGill has called a “culture of reprinting” stretches into the Spanish-language periodical press and should be considered across the Americas.
Materials pulled out of archives create a variety of hermeneutic difficulties and possibilities. This prompts Coronado to propose that we consider Latino “textualities” rather than emphasize generic categories and literary forms that may not be relevant. Sometimes the documents come as unsigned pamphlets or articles and cannot be so easily placed in a container, even if that container takes the form of academic institutions: field formation, books, centers of research. The documents of a Latino past point as much to multiplicity and flight as they do to something that we might call heritage. In other words, they point away from a central holding and toward movement.
The Latino nineteenth century opens to textual multiplicity as opposed to prescriptive points that define text or identity in the historical period. Here “multiplicity” is not so much numerical, not solely a reference to a large number of discrete objects, but rather a reference to degrees of difference. A numerical multiplicity would imply division among a set of units. Instead, “textual multiplicity” points to many kinds and many qualities, not always quantifiable because they point to interior states and degrees of representation. Gilles Deleuze associates this type of multiplicity with succession, heterogeneity, and difference in kind, “a virtual and continuous multiplicity that cannot be reduced to numbers.”21 Textual multiplicity emerges in the range of conditions presented by the texts. And this multiplicity engages with lived experiences in various sites.
One of the goals of the collection is to consider the relationship of textual remains to the lived experiences of the people who make up the Latino nineteenth century. In some articles, the emphasis is not on textuality per se but on how sources such as the periodical press allow us to recuperate historical circumstances and the agency of the people involved. Gerald Poyo, for example, offers a meticulously researched reconstruction of Cuban exile politics in late-nineteenth-century Key West that depicts the importance of U.S. legislative and governmental positions to transnational community formations. Even as they organized to oppose Spanish colonialism on the home island, Cubans were very active in local politics, church groups, baseball leagues, and local businesses. “The ease with which Cubans became United States citizens to defend their local social and economic interests betrayed an adamant rejection of Spanish nationality,” Poyo writes. In other words, despite a vision that kept its eyes on Cuba (and thus could be seen as one example of a series of hemispheric concerns), the local site was tremendously important in this community. Poyo’s article is also a reminder of the ongoing need for narrative history in the recovery of the Latino nineteenth century.
Even as they organized politically and elected some of their own to office, Cubans in Key West also faced discrimination and even threats of lynching, thus facing manifestations of racism in a period that saw the emergence of legally sanctioned segregation. Latino experiences with race and racism throughout the century are affected not only by historical conditions and geographic location but also by a particular person’s skin tone and class position. In U.S. Latino history, some figures are considered white and/or elite in their home countries, which in his response Ralph Bauer points out is a colonial effect that placed criollos in Spanish America toward the top of a hierarchy that denigrated indigenous populations and slaves. But once criollos enter the United States, they must confront a different racial taxonomy inspired by an Anglo/Latin opposition that reads a racial distinction into culture and appearance. In the most pernicious cases, this distinction is marshaled in support of a presumed Anglo American nation-state that would exclude Latinos. In his contribution, Juan Poblete focuses on the writings of Vicente Pérez Rosales—a politician, merchant, and miner—to show how Chileans and other economic migrants in California in the wake of the war against Mexico were racialized into a single category in opposition to an Anglo American notion of citizenship. For Poblete, the racism and discriminatory structural effect of this treatment among Gold Rush miners is an early indication of “the category of the illegal alien that would have such a long, constitutive, and productive history in the state to this day.” Reading history into the present and vice versa, Poblete emphasizes the structural effects of a U.S.-based Latinizing process that draws in many countries and people in contradistinction to an imagined U.S. white citizenry. What becomes clear is that local racial formations such as those that emerged in California in 1849 are not isolated but rather intertwined with an economic network that sometimes flows back into other parts of the Americas. Poblete also turns the question of racial national formation on Pérez Rosales’s Chile, because Pérez returns to his country and promotes German immigration as a way to build what he conceives as an industrious national population. Like Bramen, Poblete also interprets the U.S.-based experience of writer/travelers in relation to their home countries.
Those who move from one part of the Americas to another grapple with racial formations in more than one place, even as they face the discursive and juridical demands of presumed connections between race (or color) and national belonging. Marissa K. López returns to Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don to argue that the novel complicates a notion of a white and healthy national U.S. subject that does not include populations of Mexican descent after the U.S.–Mexico War. Looking at the role of trains and railroads in the novel and their relationship to bodies, López proposes that a Latino dismodern negates a hierarchy of health that would separate Anglo Americans from a putatively unhealthy or disabled Mexican subjectivity. Instead of a binary opposition, Ruiz de Burton’s novel offers what López calls “a series of faulty bodies” that are at odds with a notion of an idealized and perfect white national subject. López is among contributors to the collection who navigate the contours of racial formation and remind us that the Latino nineteenth century complicates black/white readings of the history of U.S. racism. That is not to say that racism against blacks was not an important concern in the Latino nineteenth century.
How did Latino subjects respond to conditions for blacks in the United States, especially considering that many countries in the Americas had their own histories of slavery and black/white racism? Laura Lomas confronts that question directly by turning to late-nineteenth-century urban contexts that called for engagement with racism against blacks. Lomas reads Francisco Gonzalo “Pachín” Marín, of Puerto Rico, alongside José Martí and the labor organizer Lucy Eldine Gonzalez Parsons. In a suggestive contribution, Lomas argues that a class- and race-conscious Latinidad emerged in the late 1800s, particularly in relation to Afro-Latino labor politics with connections to the Caribbean. She writes that this Latinidad called for “an end to a quotidian experience of discrimination, disdain and exclusion on the basis of nonnative pronunciation in English, bias against a ‘swarthy’ or ‘half-breed’ appearance, or stereotypes about how Latin American countries and their peoples should relate to the country and people of the United States.” Lomas brings forward the anarchist and labor politics experienced by Martí and Pachín Marín in New York, so that the urban experience becomes an important dimension of how these figures considered racial discrimination and their notions of Latinidad. Moving beyond the oft-cited essay “Our America,” one of the neocanonical pieces of the Latino nineteenth century, Lomas argues that “anti-racism became conjoined to class critique through Martí’s attentive observation of Lucy Parsons’ oratory and through his close association with Afro-Latino/a collaborators.”
While this collection does not dwell on major figures, Martí and Ruiz de Burton continue to raise crucial questions for the Latino nineteenth century. Their importance is not only the result solely of literary production but of the types of questions they raise: What are the economic and class dimensions of hierarchies along racial lines? How does gender enter forms of discrimination, particularly as majority cultures in the United States encounter and engage with women from countries such as Mexico? How does movement throughout the Americas complicate national affiliations and historical conceptions?
Among Martí’s collaborators in New York was Sotero Figueroa, whose work took him from Puerto Rico to New York and on to Cuba after 1898. As a printer and newspaper editor, Figueroa participated in the late-century debates about war and race that stretched from the United States to the Caribbean. Kanellos reconsiders Figueroa’s biographical writing, which was itself an attempt to recover the contributions of blacks in the Caribbean and ranged from Toussaint L’Ouverture to a local educator in Puerto Rico. Figueroa’s biographical pieces were no less than a revisionary attempt to write back into history subjects who had been excluded by structures of domination in their racist societies. Kanellos situates Figueroa as a precursor to but also contemporary of Schomburg, whose archival work has become important to African American history and literature.
The different experiences of intellectuals in late-century New York and those in early Philadelphia remind us that the nineteenth century is a domain that is unwieldy and expansive. The collection offers the contours of textual changes over the century. Given the difficulty of cutting off historical conditions at a particular date, it is no surprise that scholars often speak of a long nineteenth century. Not so much a period—which is usually associated with a mode (romanticism or realism), an intellectual movement (transcendentalism or modernismo), or a major writer (the age of Whitman or of Martí)—the nineteenth century marks a duration that allows for a variety of voices that emerge in tandem with a series of historical events. The Latino Nineteenth Century offers the contours of changes in textual production over the decades. In the early “Spanish American” decades before 1830, texts are produced in conjunction with Latin America’s wars of independence and attendant hemispheric and transatlantic networks of migration and publication. (For scholars working in U.S.-based American studies, the various wars of independence in the Americas suggest the limitations of using the term “the early Republic.”) In the mid–nineteenth century, which brings on the U.S.–Mexico War and the threats of Manifest Destiny, newspapers and other periodicals become a dominant mode of publication and communication for Latino intellectuals. And in the latter part of the century, a growing body of literary texts and periodicals engage with the growing influence of the U.S. empire, which culminates in U.S. intervention in Cuba’s war for independence.
The Latino Nineteenth Century seeks new geographical and historical trajectories that can alter a nation-based approach to defining important historical moments. In Jesse Alemán’s article, the experiences of the brothers Adolfo and Frederic Cavada open a reconsideration of the relationship between the U.S. Civil War and Cuba’s Ten Years War. Having fought in both conflicts, the Cavadas lived through subjective experiences in two countries and two languages, leading Alemán to position them as trans-American subjects. How does the timeline of Ten Years War, 1868–78, add another dimension to what is widely considered in nineteenth-century American literature a milestone and dividing line: 1865? How does the ongoing U.S. intervention in the Caribbean after the Civil War complicate the nationalist racial frame of “Reconstruction”? For decades, scholars in U.S. literary studies have organized survey courses around the 1865 break. But many a Civil War general’s autobiography begins in Mexico.22 The Latino nineteenth century offers other important points: 1826 (the Congress of Panama organized by Simón Bolívar), 1848 (The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo), 1849 (the California Gold Rush), 1856 (the filibustering of Nicaragua), and 1868 (the outbreak of revolts in Puerto Rico and Cuba).
Rather than offer a hemispheric mapping of a field that combines the United States with the many territories of Latin America, our contributors approach hemispheric movements as discrete historical manifestations. That is to say, the hemisphere is too vast to function as an alternative map for Latino America, but hemispheric movements offer a tremendously important analytical potential for Latino/a studies. Movements here refer not only to geographic relocations but also to political alliances and changes in perspective. Like Pérez Rosales, many of the Latino/a writers and intellectuals who moved in and out of the United States in the nineteenth century often grappled with comparative national imaginaries that they conceived or adopted through experiences of economic migration and travel. In some cases, these figures retained a vexed relationship to the United States and did not identify themselves in relation to U.S.-based categories of identity or citizenship.
Latino studies as a field is nurtured by demographic changes in the United States in the past forty years, and thus it is inclined toward contemporary considerations, sometimes of an excessively sociological bent. But it also prompts a historical approach that emphasizes the contingency of textual remains and challenges the previously separate spheres of U.S. American studies and Latin American studies. The Latino Nineteenth Century complicates the study of America on both sides of the North–South divide by presenting textual multiplicity and how those texts register the experiences of people seeking new ways to make sense of the changes they have encountered and conceive of communal affiliation. The elements that come up in our chapters, including a varied and dispersed textual record, discrete historical conditions, and shifts in language, make the Latino nineteenth century a multiplicity of the uncommon.
1 Arturo Ardao, Génesis de la idea y el nombre de América Latina (Caracas: Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos, 1980); Mónica Quijada, “Sobre el Origen y Difusión del Nombre ‘América Latina,’” Revista de Indias 43 #214 (1998): 595–616; Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005).
2 Arturo Ardao, América latina y la latinidad (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma, 1993).
3 Chevalier circulated his work decades before the French invasion of Mexico and installation of the Emperor Maximilian in 1864. See, for example, Michel Chevalier, Mexico: Before and After the Conquest (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1846), 90–91.
4 María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Conflicts of Interest: The Letters of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, ed. Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita (Houston: Arte Público, 2001), 301. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine. Ellipses are in the copies of the original letters at the Huntington Library.
5 Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8:1 (1969), 6.
6 This “danger” differs significantly from Walter Benjamin’s use of the same word in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in which the danger is a threat to the historian: “that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes,” a point he makes after dismissing the importance of articulating the past “the way it really was.” Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 255.
7 Frances Aparicio and Suzanne Bost remind us that “Identity terminology is particularly tricky in Latino/a studies,” in that the terms raise questions of location in the Americas, racial mixing, immigration status, and national affiliation. “The central lesson to draw from this terminological friction is that all of these identity terms are contested, sometimes fluid, and always relational.” Suzanne Bost and Frances Aparicio, The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature (New York: Routledge, 2012), 1–2.
8 Raúl Coronado, A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2013), 29.
9 María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don (Houston: Arte Público, 1997), 97. Later in the book, Darrell’s interlocutor, Don Mariano Alamar, adopts the same phrase: “we, the natives of California, the Spano-Americans” (162).
10 Julia Álvarez, “Bilingual Sestina,” in The Other Side/El Otro Lado (New York: Plume, 1995), 4. For a discussion of how the term Latino emerges as a “site of permanent political contestation” rather than a descriptor, see Cristina Beltrán, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 8–9.
11 Donald Pease, “National Identities, Postmodern Artifacts, and Postnational Narratives,” in National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives, ed. Donald Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 1.
12 Lawrence Buell, The Dream of the Great American Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).
13 Recovery also implies restoration and the regaining of a better condition. Ramón Gutiérrez and Genaro Padilla called for the sustained study of Hispanic literary heritage in order to “document its regional and national diversity, to view from various perspectives and angles the matrix of power in which it was created, and to celebrate its hybridity, its intertextuality and its polyvocality.” These goals of recovery work are still with us. See Gutiérrez and Padilla, Introduction to Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage (Houston: Arte Público, 1993), 21.
14 The first of the seven volumes was edited by Gutiérrez and Genaro Padilla in 1993, the seventh edited by Gerald E. Poyo and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto in 2009. The Project has also published Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Linguistic Heritage, ed. Alejandra Balestra, Glenn Martínez, and María Irene Moyna (Houston: Arte Público, 2008). Many of the contributors to The Latino Nineteenth Century have published articles in those volumes. Some of us met at Recovery Project conferences, and still others have been involved in the Project’s Board of Editorial Advisers.
15 The cost of the EBSCO database, which is sold only to libraries and not individual researchers, can run into the thousands of dollars. As such, it raises important questions about the economic effects of digitizing archives.
16 “A partir de esa evidencia, se plantea lo hispánico como un elemento constitutivo de esta nación, de sus procesos culturales y del orden de la escritura como esfera privilegiada para la valoración de lo cultural.” Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, “La antología y el archivo: Reflexiones en torno a Herencia, En otra voz y los límites de un saber,” in Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, vol. V, ed. Kenya Dworkin y Méndez and Agnes Lugo-Ortiz (Houston: Arte Público, 2006), 145. For a discussion of archival limitations, see 157–58.
17 See my articles “The Invention of America Again: On the Impossibility of an Archive,” American Literary History 25.4 (Winter 2013): 751–71, and “Migrant Archives,” in States of Emergency, ed. Russ Castronovo and Susan Gillman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 36–54.
18 “Funeral of the Colombian Ambassador,” Aurora General Advertiser, 18 July 1822; “The Franklin of South America (From the New York Evening Post),” Aurora General Advertiser, 24 July 1822.
19 For an overview of the periodical press, see Nicolás Kanellos with Helvetia Martell, eds., Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960 (Houston: Arte Público, 2000).
20 Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), xii.
21 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 38. For Latino studies, historical “textual multiplicity” points to the importance of moving beyond the dialectic of self and other. “We are told that the Self is one (thesis),” writes Deleuze, “and it is multiple (antithesis), then it is the unity of the multiple (synthesis)” (44). Rather than work with a binary opposition between Anglo and Latino or even along oppositions between groups from different countries, the multiplicity of the Latino nineteenth century shows slippages in categories.
22 I thank Ian Litwin for pointing this out.