Kirsten Silva Gruesz
To what purpose came we into the Wilderness? . . . [to] dwell in a place of our own, that we might move no more.
—Samuel Danforth, “A Brief Recognition of New-Englands Errand into the Wilderness,” 1670 (emphasis in original)
Vida errante y de gitano, de expatriado de la gran patria americana. [The errant, gypsy life of an expatriate from the great American patria.]
—Self-description by Antonio José de Irisarri, 1863
Fui migrante y me hospedaron. [I was a migrant, and you took me in.]
—Idiosyncratic translation of Matthew 25:35 by human rights activist Father Alejandro Solalinde, featured on the website of his mission for migrants in Ixtepec, Oaxaca
Recalling a long-ago journey through the Guatemalan highlands, the narrator of Antonio José de Irisarri’s El cristiano errante (The Errant Christian, 1847) describes his compulsion to linger at the seven Maya-K’iche’ villages along the way. “He found those Indians hard-working, intelligent, agile, alert, well-formed, robust, dedicated to agriculture, commerce, and the arts” and praises their homes, their products, and their public works, including aqueducts and ingenious hydraulics that irrigated productive fields “whose yields were held in common.” He concluded that the indios of Los Altos “seemed to him more intelligent than the mestizos, zambos, and Spaniards of the other parts of America, for they were infinitely more skilled master builders.” Ignorant of indigenous lifeways prior to this journey, the young Creole “found in all of these villages a life, an activity, a surge of civilizing energy that he did not expect to find, nor would he find again among larger populations in Peru, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, or Colombia”—some of the places in which he would later live during his long, peripatetic life.1 Irisarri depicts the highlands Maya-K’iche’—apparently so isolated from the currents of Enlightenment thought that were animating revolutionary movements throughout the hemisphere—as having arrived, on their own, at the practical goals of those movements: functional self-governance, a fair justice system, free trade, peace. Reflecting on that visit from the vantage point of middle age, some forty years later, the narrator allows the point to sink in: America bloodied and nearly destroyed itself in order to achieve a harmonious social state that had already been attained by the very people those movements had most excluded.
The title of El cristiano errante echoes that of one of the most globally popular novels of the day, Eugène Sue’s Le juif errant, known in Spanish as El judío errante. Rather than follow the usual English translation of Sue’s title as “The Wandering Jew,” I want to revive the antiquated term errant as a way of linking a nineteenth-century text to contemporary U.S. discourses about migrancy. Errancy suggests wandering without a goal, without intention; the epiphany of Irisarri’s protagonist is the more powerful because he stumbled upon it while on his way to somewhere else. Yet even defenders of immigrant rights disavow such accidents, emphasizing intentionality of movement when they cast undocumented persons as determined, long-suffering pilgrims in search of a better life. Establishing sympathy for their cause depends on linking these groups to a longer national narrative of such pilgrimage. Stories about the accidental or reluctant migrant, the wanderer blown off course, the person at the end of his or her chances are less adaptable to the inevitably moralizing affect of sympathy.2 In this chapter, then, I want to use Irisarri—his “vida errante” and his errantly titled novel—to trouble the way such purposefulness can be used not only to embrace or demonize migrants but also to establish someone’s place within a narrative of national and ethnic belonging.
Irisarri appears as a founding father in cultural histories of Guatemala, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and even Curaçao. Yet no scholar has tried to position him similarly within U.S. (Latino) American literary history, despite the fact that he spent his final eighteen years in the United States—a longer period than José Martí—and published numerous books, pamphlets, and newspaper articles there. Irisarri demonstrated no desire to become a U.S. citizen, and he did not leave any obvious signs of a Latino or Central American–American identity.3 Instead, he makes a case for an ethics of identification that embraces nonpurposefulness and pushes against genealogy as a form of common sense.
Although El cristiano errante did not appear in book form in the United States (as did a later novel, a collection of poetry, and various nonfiction works), new archival evidence indicates that Irisarri published it serially in a New Orleans newspaper in 1851. This previously unremarked phase of Irisarri’s wanderings places him at the ground zero of fanatical schemes for the expansion of a Southern slaveholding empire: the financial and military launching-place for various filibustering expeditions and development and colonization companies aimed all across the Central American isthmus. As he joined forces with two seasoned local editors, Eusebio José Gómez and Victoriano Alemán, to publish La Unión in Spanish and English, Irisarri’s earlier admiration for the United States hardened into the critical anti-imperialist stance it would take for the remainder of his life. The discovery of this New Orleans edition of El cristiano errante, I argue, shifts this text outside its minor place in the developmental history of the Latin American novel and into the complex transnational history that yokes together the United States with Central America through the subjects who move between them, in ways that are often marked by state violence. Although the novel itself does not describe the lives of Spanish-speaking and Latino people then living in the United States, its serial incarnation in this periodical context links them as readers to the vision of a regional, community-based defense of Central America’s sovereignty—even though Irisarri continued his lifelong opposition to the federation of those small nations into a single state.
The Mayan territory through which Irisarri had traveled in 1806 now encompasses a second border between Latin America and the United States: a dark shadow and foreshadowing of the frontera that runs along and beyond the Río Grande. Along the railroad line that Irisarri correctly guessed would be built toward the end of the nineteenth century to link Guatemala with Chiapas, undocumented migrants undergo violent abjectification by the Mexican state (and by the organized crime cartels it tolerates), which has mimicked and exaggerated the tactics of those state agencies that patrol the U.S.–Mexico border. The emerging discipline of Latino studies, loosely assembled from the planks of Chicano/a, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American studies, has just begun to conceptualize the growing presence of Central American–Americans within the Latino bloc: sometimes successfully resisting the affect of sympathetic pity, sometimes not. U.S. American studies, too, needs to consider the implications of this GuateMexican border zone that lies well outside, but is still of, the United States. I want to ask how errancy and non-intentionality might provide not only a different ethos of migration and movement rights, but a different mythos as well. How might errancy talk back to that foundational trope of American studies, the Puritan errand into the wilderness and its self-justifying “escape to freedom”?
El cristiano errante, though introduced in its Prologue as something other than a factual history, correlates broadly with events and landscapes in Irisarri’s own itinerary; thus, a logical place to begin is with a sketch of the author’s life. Unlike critics who have plumbed the resemblances between Irisarri and the protagonist (Romualdo de Villapedrosa from “Nueva Babilonia”), I am less interested in classifying its ratio of fiction to autobiography than in charting the spaces in which it was received. The author’s name and reputation do matter, as we retrace this novel’s movement along what Robert Darnton calls the communications circuit—but so do the other nodes of that circuit. Irisarri sometimes functions as his own editor and publicist and at other times is linked financially to political patrons; his reviewers and readers are mostly, though not always, caught up in those webs of partisan affiliation as well. The point along the circuit that matters most here is that of preservation and survival: how a stateless author and his digressive text were first neglected, then posthumously inserted into narratives of national tradition. The marginality of this novel, moreover, was compounded by the extreme degree to which its existence depended upon that most fragile of material formats, the newspaper.4
It is for his work in establishing newspapers wherever he went—the Johnny Appleseed of the nineteenth-century Latin American press—that Antonio José de Irisarri is mostly remembered. Born in 1786 to a wealthy family in Guatemala City, Irisarri traveled to Mexico City at age twenty to sort out the financial affairs of his deceased father, a merchant who had taken the daring step of trading in Philadelphia and Baltimore against the inconsistent decrees of the Spanish crown.5 After collecting family debts in Callao, Lima, and Valparaíso, Irisarri married and settled in Santiago de Chile, agitating on behalf of independence in the seminal monthly he founded in 1813 and attaching himself to Bernardo O’Higgins.6 Dispatched to London as ambassador to England and France, he brokered a controversial million-pound loan and befriended Andrés Bello, whose interest in philology—and whose defense of the Spanish spoken in the New World—he would later imitate. Returning to Guatemala in 1826, this nonmilitary man found himself named defense minister and thrust into a war against the Liberal Francisco Morazán, whose followers were trying to hold together the disintegrating Federal Republic of Central America. Morazán defeated him in—of all places—Los Altos and threw him into a Salvadoran prison for eleven months; Irisarri escaped in 1830.7 Finally returning to Chile to see the grown children he had known only as babies, Irisarri again embroiled himself in controversial government service: In 1837, he was accused of treason for having negotiated a treaty that would have ended the War of the Confederation with a concession of Chilean defeat. He never returned there, nor did he collect on the commissions and personal loan payments he claimed he was owed by four newly independent republics. The vast fortune he had inherited and received from his wife’s family would dwindle to $81 by the time of his death, in a rented room in Brooklyn, in 1868.8
In his early forties Irisarri began his life over, returning to the journalistic role he had adopted in Chile, starting newspapers in Ecuador, Guatemala, Nueva Granada, Venezuela, and Trinidad and leveraging his trademark style—by turns bitingly eloquent and hilariously satirical—to ridicule the ideas of the opposition party. Of course, when the party that was underwriting the paper’s publication fell out of power, there would be an urgent need to move on. El cristiano errante came into being during one of these new beginnings. Irisarri arrived in Bogotá in 1846 with a commendation to Tomás Cipriano Mosquera, then in his first term as president of Nueva Granada. A major anti-Mosquera newspaper was titled Libertad y Orden, so as a first counter-punch, Irisarri titled his new weekly Nosotros: Orden y Libertad. A rival journalist wrote that the editorial voice in Nosotros was so distinctive and quirky that “no-one from nowhere” could have written it: Surely the new writer in town must be El judío errante, the Wandering Jew. The intended insult was clear: Rather than speaking for “us,” for the Colombian public, Irisarri’s new paper spoke from the perspective of a suspect, stateless being. Turning the slur on its head, Irisarri immediately changed the name of his weekly to El cristiano errante.9
Because El cristiano errante, the “novel that resembles a history,” began serialization in the newspaper El cristiano errante shortly after this episode, Irisarri had probably written much of it before setting foot in Bogotá. The journalistic mudslinging, so typical of its period, seems to have lent the novel both a title and a key trope: that of the wanderer whose constant movement allows him to compare one place to another and thus to see beyond the narrow prejudices and petty loyalties of located identities (as the fictive name of his birthplace, “New Babylon,” suggests). Being errant does not make him noncommittal, though: The many digressions in the narrative muse about what the pan-American republics had wanted to be, how those ideals were corrupted, and what they still might become. The comparison of Irisarri’s Romualdo to Ahasuerus, the juif errant of popular European fantasy, was thus apt. The wild narrative that Sue had scaffolded around this figure had no time to waste on mere anti-Semitism; his Ahasuerus was held up as a prophet, an ageless time traveler who observed the corruption of the world around him (associated mostly with the Jesuit order that was Sue’s particular target). Sue’s sensational novel had been a global publishing phenomenon in 1844–45, keeping readers on edge awaiting the next installment, and imitators—including some in Spain, where popular fiction had barely taken hold—sprang up immediately. The ten-volume bound version of Le juif errant remained a bestseller even as the entregas of Irisarri’s Cristiano errante appeared, from August 1846 to March 1847.10
The story of Romualdo’s extraordinary journey through the continental revolutions was projected to cover seven volumes: If completed, it would have been nearly as prolix as Sue’s book. But as with that novel, the more significant material context has to do with El cristiano errante’s seriality, which establishes a particularly intense relationship among individuals within the readership who expectantly await the next installment together. Serial readers of El cristiano errante would be better equipped to associate the novel’s narrator with a contemporary editorial voice. Those readers might also recognize the “errant Christian” as a model for a particular kind of literary ambition, the ambition of the independent man of letters: When the novel ends, Romualdo is still only twenty-one and has discovered his vocation as a writer, though not as one whose words could change the political world. So only by association with the newspaper El cristiano errante could the novel El cristiano errante take the shape, in a reader’s judgment, of a Künstlerroman. In the Prologue, Irisarri calls out his “shiftless readers” as consumers of newspapers, “spending your time reading the day’s papers, and the harangues of our agitators”: These, he says, are even worse fodder than the chivalric romances that Cervantes had mocked. He goes on to say to this newspaper addict, “you may as well occupy yourself with something that might do you some good”—that is, to accompany the narrator back in time to the early Independence period by following Romualdo’s adventures.11
The book format usually has a distinct advantage when it comes to survival, the final phase in Darnton’s communications circuit. Although the printer of the weekly El cristiano errante, José Ayarza’s Imprenta de Espinosa, issued a codex version in late 1847, fewer than a hundred copies were printed. Nineteenth-century literary historians referenced the novel, but few seem to have read it until its recovery by a prominent Chilean historian, Guillermo Feliú Cruz, who published a new edition in 1929. Working with Irisarri’s descendants, who granted him access to private family papers, Feliú Cruz attempted to give Irisarri the triumphant return to Chile he had never had, by recognizing him as a national founding father.12 Not to be outdone, from the 1950s onward the Ministry of Public Education in Guatemala began reissuing Irisarri’s literary works, along with dozens of his political essays and diplomatic letters. Amilcar Echeverría’s Introduction to the 1960 Guatemalan edition of El cristiano errante acknowledged Feliú Cruz’s work while wresting the label of foundational national writer back from the Chileans, comparing Irisarri to his celebrated contemporary Juan José Millás (Salomé Jil), who created the iconic character of “Juan Chapín.” Now reconstructed as a book object, El cristiano errante was dutifully acknowledged in micro- and macro-histories of Spanish American literature, with critics poking away at problems of classification (was it more of a novel, or an autobiography? what to make of Irisarri’s theory of the interrelationship between historia and novela, roughly truth and fiction, in the Prologue?). Lost in these recoveries was the mobile, successive quality of the original serial publication and the spaces in which it had first circulated: maps of reception centered not in Chile or Guatemala but in New Granada and in the southern United States.
Bogotá, Humboldt’s “Athens of South America,” was a print-culture capital despite its relative isolation and the necessity of moving printed objects by slow nineteenth-century transportation. It was also one of the places where Bolívar’s legacy and the right to claim it was hotly contested in the 1840s. El cristiano errante does not mention O’Higgins or the revolutionary leaders Irisarri had actually known in Chile, but it does meditate on the dream of the continental unity of América, on the failure of putting Enlightenment political theory into practice there.13 Following up the “novela que parece historia” with an unrepentant “historia,” Irisarri then let it be known in Colombia that he had completed his magnum opus: a meticulously researched exposé of the plot to assassinate Antonio José de Sucre, Bolívar’s political heir, in 1830. Titled La defensa de la historia: Crítica del asesinato cometido contra la persona del Mariscal de Ayacucho (The Defense of History: An Exposé of the Assassination Committed against the Marshall of Ayacucho), it named as conspirators in Sucre’s murder various former revolutionaries who were still in power. Irisarri’s life was threatened. Again he left the country, completing his passage through the three nations into which the Bolivarian republic of Gran Colombia had shattered: first Ecuador, then New Granada, and then Venezuela, where he also failed to convince terrified printers to release his Sucre book. It was finally published in Curaçao in 1849, and the new paper Irisarri started there, El Revisor: Periódico político y literario, tried to make it notorious, reprinting evidence about the assassination to bolster Irisarri’s claims. The threats continued, and so did the long march northward.
In October 1849, Irisarri arrived in the United States, whose people he had once described admiringly as “our brothers.”14 He was able, by January of the following year, to launch a New York incarnation of El Revisor, which added material more relevant to its new target audience: reporting on the conflicts between the thousands of gold-seekers streaming across Colombian territory and local Panamanians. According to a contemporary source, Irisarri tried to market the weekly to the Spanish-language teachers in the city as a fount of well-crafted material from which pupils could learn good style.15 But apparently the students enrolled in Spanish schools were more interested in getting along in California than in quoting Cervantes; El Revisor failed in May 1850. In a despairing letter to his wife that summer, Irisarri wrote,
Estoy muy mal por ahora, de resulta del mal éxito que he tenido con mi última empresa, por lo cual me he retirado de Nueva York al campo . . . todo llegue a faltar . . . hace doce años ando así, haciendo pruebas sobre pruebas; teniendo tiempo en tiempo algunas muy lisonjeras esperanzas, y luego viniéndolas convertidas en humo.
I’m doing very poorly now as a result of the lack of success I had with my last enterprise, so I’ve left New York for the country. . . . everything I do fails. . . . for the past twelve years it’s gone this way for me, trying one thing and another, having some very flattering hopes and then, time after time, seeing them go up in smoke.16
Somewhere around this time, in a move that has escaped notice until now, Irisarri went south to join forces with the two most successful editors of a Spanish-language newspaper in the nation: Louisiana-born Eusebio José Gómez and the Spanish-born Victoriano Alemán, who over the previous four years had built La Patria of New Orleans into an internationally known periodical that now appeared three times a week and printed and sold other materials in its own bookstore. Gómez and Alemán, as it happened, were also avid about serial fiction: Not only did they sell Sue’s Wandering Jew in Spanish at the store, they rushed to translate installments of his latest novel in La Patria. They had serialized an original “mysteries of the city” novel set in Havana and Gómez’s own Un matrimonio como hay muchos: Novela que parece historia (A Marriage Like Many Others: A Novel That Resembles History), arguably the first novel by a U.S. Latino.17 When Gómez, Alemán, and Irisarri banded together, after negotiations we can only speculate about, one of the first issues of their new triweekly carried the initial installment of El cristiano errante: Novela que tiene mucho de historia, Publicada en 1847 por Don Antonio José de Irisarri, y corregida después por él mismo.18
Why does this forgotten New Orleans context matter? As with the serialized Bogotá edition, readers in Louisiana, Cuba, Texas, Mexico, and elsewhere along La Unión’s considerable sales circuit were directly implicated as newspaper readers by the narrating voice, which they understood to be coming from a journalist as well as a novelist. The paper identified Irisarri as someone worth listening to not on the basis of his participation in world-shaping events—as someone who had personally known O’Higgins, Sucre, and Bello—but through his editorial experience in the United States. The masthead of the first issue credentials Gómez and Alemán as “Late of La Patria,” and Irisarri as “Late of El Revisor, New York.” The mission statement affirms that La Unión will “defend the Spanish race from the frequent and unjust attacks to which it is often exposed in this country”; a small English section was added “in view of how little justice has been done by the Anglo-American press” to Spanish and Spanish America.19 Readers of this New Orleans edition of El cristiano errante, wherever they may have lived, were bombarded with the problem of whether the United States supported or held back the freedoms of the rest of America. On the other pages of the newspaper, they were reminded of the way that the recent U.S. acquisition of half of Mexico’s territory had radically changed the rules of engagement in the hemisphere: Yucatán and Cuba seemed likely to become states, and with the hordes of gold-seekers heading to California, the isthmian crossing points of Panama, Nicaragua, and Tehuantepec were now seen as spaces that needed to be brought under U.S. control—and not only by southerners seeking to expand their slaveholding empire in Central America and the Caribbean.
Editorially, Gómez and Alemán preached Latin American sovereignty and decried the “piracy” of filibustering expeditions like that of Narciso López in Cuba. But they had to tread carefully, because New Orleanians were among the major investors in development schemes in the isthmus, as well as major traders with Havana and Veracruz. A “Prognostication about the Year 1851” that appeared in the first issue of La Unión (and recalls Irisarri’s style) reveals the contexts in which these readers were immersed. The editors can only guess about the year to come:
. . . si la república francesa continuará siendo república; si la unión americana se rompe en este año o en el otro; si el canal de Tehuantepec llega a ser canal y no se queda en proyecto; si el otro canal de Nicaragua se queda en especulación de agiotistas y en motivo de contestaciones entre Inglaterra y los EU, y si el otro canal de Panamá se queda, como nosotros creemos, reducido a un camino de hierro. Cosas más fáciles que estas se han emprendido y han sido abandonado. Lo que no se abandonará es el protectorado de los Mosquitos por Inglaterra, ni los proyectos de los anexionistas en los Estados Unidos.
. . . whether the French Republic will continue to be a republic; whether the American Union will rupture this year or the next; whether the Tehuantepec Canal will become a canal or remain on the drawing board; whether the other canal through Nicaragua will become anything more than the speculation of money-changers and the cause of disputes between England and the U.S.; and whether the other canal through Panama will—as we believe—be reduced to a railroad. Simpler things than this have been undertaken and abandoned. What will not be abandoned is the English protectorate of the Kingdom of Mosquitia, and the schemes of annexationists in the United States.
But the editors could not have foreseen what 1851 had in store for La Unión itself. That August a crowd of pro-expansionist southerners, incensed by the paper’s pleasure about the guilty verdict against Narciso López’s collaborators, stormed the printing office, wrecked the equipment and stock, and shot at Alemán, who jumped across the roofs of the Vieux-Carré and ran for his life with a broken leg, while the angry mob went on to destroy other “Spanish-owned” businesses. As Joanna Brooks has written, “books, like people, have life chances.”20 What were the chances that cartons of copies of Gómez’s 1848 novel, and some of Irisarri’s as well, were burned that night? If they had survived and been preserved closer to their birthplace, how might the literary history of the “Latin American” novel, or the “Southern” novel, have evolved differently? Irisarri escaped, but we hear no more of him for six years, when he resurfaces in New York. Here we confront the problem of fragility and politicized selectivity that, according to Rodrigo Lazo, characterizes the “migrant archive” of U.S. Latinos: None of the relevant Latin American state archives have gathered his traces from the early 1850s, perhaps because they are scarce, but more likely because, during that period especially, he belonged to no national tradition.21 Serially expelled, he was truly un errante, a stateless person from everywhere and nowhere in América.
Finally, in 1857, Irisarri was named plenipotentiary minister (chief ambassador) of Guatemala to the United States by Rafael Carrera, the Conservative mestizo president who had returned to power on the backs of the many rural Mayans to whom he allowed a limited autonomy. Shortly after, Irisarri took on the same position for El Salvador, even during a brief renewal of war between the neighboring nations, living in Brooklyn and traveling to Washington when necessary. It is this diplomatic position that cleared the way for the twentieth-century celebration of Irisarri as a Guatemalan founding father, despite the fact that he spent very little of his adult life there. In his diplomatic correspondence and his letters there is a presciently Martí-like voice, speaking out against filibusterism, land grabs, colonization schemes, and anything Irisarri saw as an outgrowth of the Monroe Doctrine. He became assimilable as a good Central American, in other words, by becoming properly anti-American. But the timing of his forgotten association with La Unión suggests that he acquired this deep and lasting suspicion of U.S. intentions in Central America under the tutelage of Gómez and Alemán, two younger colleagues who had intimate knowledge of the engine of southern expansionism’s financing, as well as the roots of popular sentiment in favor of it. New Orleans was the belly of that beast.
Let us now return to the episode in Los Altos, which occurs in the seventh and eighth chapters of El cristiano errante. As is the case throughout the novel, Romualdo tests what he has read against what he actually observes. Earlier, his first effort to reach Mexico City from Guatemala City by sea had been interrupted by an English pirate who proved—against expectations—to be generous and good company; when he attempts the journey again, overland this time, he is rather comically masquerading as a postal carrier.22 This guise is figuratively apt, for the naïve hero is weighed down from too much reading. His source for information about the Highlands had been the seventeenth-century English Catholic convert Thomas Gage’s famous New Survey of the West Indies. What he sees, of course, contradicts Gage’s account at most every turn: The neat fields of maize and productive textile industries he finds among the Maya-K’iche’ identify them, in his view, as a forward-moving society rather than one that exists in a primitive, backward state. (Contrast this with John Lloyd Stephens’s widely read dismissal of Los Altos: “here the people had no character and nothing in which we took any interest, except their backs.”)23 The alcalde system fascinated Irisarri as an example of functional local democracy, but the alcalde’s authority unfortunately did not extend beyond the contact zone between the Mayan world and that of the Spanish and ladinos. Irisarri also admired their traditional justice system: “those villages had somehow hit upon the principle in English jurisprudence, that a man could only be tried by his peers, which gives the person on trial the best guarantee against pettiness and rivalry.” But the Mayans suffered under a colonial system, and then a national one, which made no such provision. Spanish justice “never failed to be fatal to Indians when Spaniards were the defendants” in complaints they brought.24
The voyage Irisarri draws on for this episode took place in 1806, but this retrospective telling is also informed by his ignominious 1828 military defeat in the same region. Returning to Guatemala after two decades away, he had missed the first episodes of significant Mayan resistance to the new political order of nationhood. Irisarri digresses temporally from the story of Romualdo here into a discussion of the 1820 Mayan uprising in San Miguel Totonicapán led by Lucas Aguilar and Atanasio Tzul.25 Although he had not witnessed that uprising, he judges that it was not only legitimate but also logically consistent with the Enlightenment principles of the independence movements. He anticipates a reader’s protest with a barrage of rhetorical questions, asking:
¿Si los indios eran o no eran ciudadanos como los otros? ¿Si la igualdad era cosa tratándose de indios y otra cosa de las demás castas? ¿Si los indios por ser más antiguos en el país deben tener menos derechos que los que lo poblaron más recientemente, y si era justo que porque una cuarta parte de ciudadanos querían una cosa, las otras tres cuartas partes debiesen querer lo mismo? (176–77)
Whether the Indians are not citizens like everyone else? Whether equality was one thing with Indians, and another with other castes? Whether the Indians, by virtue of having been in this country longer, should have fewer rights than those who populated it more recently, and whether it was just that if one-quarter of the citizens [meaning criollos and ladinos] wanted one thing, the other three-quarters should want the same?
In the same passage, Irisarri refutes the rhetoric of progress that drove so many forms of exclusion in the nineteenth-century Americas on the grounds that nonwhites were not yet ready for democracy in action. Tzul had been chosen by a vote, but the government refused to recognize the choice as legitimate self-determination. “The only kind of progress I recognize is that of natural reason, which is sufficient to convince me that what we are calling ‘politics’ is no more than acting against one’s principles, committing the most obvious contradictions.” Guatemala’s government had done no better than the United States with “their” Indians, with their shamefully enslaved Africans. “No one in the world can have any reason, no pretext of Enlightenment nor of civilization and progress, to oppose the will of the majority of a people,” he concludes, noting that Totonicapán had not yet lost “the hope of recovering their nationality.”26
Rather than represent the Highlands Maya as the least assimilable to a modern, secular political order, Irisarri casts them as typical of the fracaso of independence. They had tested Enlightenment principles of sovereignty and self-rule, only to be thwarted by the naked, unchecked self-interest of others:
En el comercio, en la política, en todas las transacciones humanas, hasta en las domésticas, hallamos esta especie de guerra que nos hacemos los mortales mientras vivimos; guerra, como en todas las guerras, en que cada cual hace a otro el mal que puede, buscando su propia ventaja; en que todas las celadas, todos ardides, todos engaños, todo egoísmo, toda hostilidad para el pobre prójimo. Examinemos bien nuestro modo de proceder en esta sociedad que llamamos humana, y que no debíamos llamar sino leonina, porque cada uno de nosotros queremos ser el león en ella, y sacar por nuestro individuo toda la ventaja, sin dejar ninguno al socio. (88–89)
In commerce, in politics, in all human relations even in the domestic realm, we find this sort of warfare that we mortals wage while we are alive; a war, like all wars, in which each one does the evil that he can to another, seeking his own advantage; in which we find all jealousies, all passions, all deceptions, all egoism, all hostility toward the next person. Let us carefully examine our way of carrying on in this society that we call human, and which we might better call leonine, for each one of us seeks to be a lion in it, and to take everything for our individual gain without leaving anything for our fellow.
Irisarri refers consistently, if sometimes hopelessly, to this Lockean principle of civil society as a group of fellows or socios—a term that might also be translated as “business associate”—setting aside their individual brute interests in the name of securing greater advantage for all.27 When he emphasizes the economic industriousness of the highlanders (national independence, he reports sadly, ruined the great textile trade of Quetzaltenango), it is to show them as better, or at least less hypocritical, socios than those who waged near-perpetual warfare in the name of peace and freedom.
It is worth speculating on how this passage of the novel—and the many others that make glancing comparisons with the United States—might have played differently to the 1851 readers of El cristiano errante in La Unión. Among them would have been Cuban slaveholders, investors in Central American and Mexican development schemes that required the displacement of indigenous villages, and readers who, whatever their position on slavery, were accustomed to figuring all “Indians,” whether in the Yucatán or in Texas, as dangerously uncivilized. What would have struck an affirmative chord with New Orleans readers is Irisarri’s language of animal rapaciousness and self-interest applied to political affairs. La Patria/La Unión had decried the U.S. war with Mexico, as well as the filibusters that war helped to spawn, as a bloodthirsty seizure of the sovereign rights of others, a betrayal of the rules of fellowship among nations. In his diplomatic and personal writing after the New Orleans period, Irisarri identified a host of threats to Central American sovereignty—whether from the U.S. nation-state or from its citizens, like William Walker—as versions of the same animal greed that betrayed the rational desire among socios to maintain the social compact. Even his official letters rarely pull punches. An 1856 protest to the U.S. secretary of state about the puppet ambassador of the Walker government in Nicaragua complains about the jingoistic press that has promoted the idea that Manifest Destiny extends to Central America, Mexico, and Cuba, believing “anything that is, or might be, beneficial to the United States is just and fair, even if it did damage and harm to the rest of the world.” Although some right-thinking yanquis don’t support filibustering, he writes, “these just men have not been able to triumph over the party that wants to annex Spanish America to the U.S. by force and re-establish slavery in it.”28
The violations arising from the Monroe Doctrine are a constant theme in Irisarri’s writing in the later 1850s and 1860s, even in private letters: That pronouncement “is and has been the basis of North American filibustering,” and even those who might have once supported its noble-sounding fraternal ideal now recognize it as a “disgrace.”29 Irisarri became a kind of pan–Central American figure during this period, instrumental in the negotiations over the site of a future trans-isthmian canal; in Latin American protests over the British presence in Belize and Mosquitia; in the rejection of the Lincoln administration’s rumored plan to send emancipated blacks to Central America; and most powerfully in the defeat of Walker, which came about through what Irisarri biographer Carlos Garcia-Bauer memorializes as a singular moment of “solidarity among the nations of the isthmus, and Central American brotherhood.”30 But ideals invite ironies. Having gone to prison for opposing a united Central American state, Irisarri gained a place in posterity for advancing the greatest practical success of the Central American idea.
When Irisarri died in 1868, his body was buried in Brooklyn’s Calvary Cemetery. After the filiopietistic revival of interest in creating a Guatemalan national tradition in the mid–twentieth century, his remains were exhumed and reburied with pomp in Guatemala City in 1971. A set of second-tier state honors, the “Orden de Antonio José de Irisarri,” was created—the medals of ribbons and gilt that he wore for his old-age portrait but mocked in his writings.31 Thus repatriated to their “proper” national ground, Irisarri’s bones raise the question of identity he had evaded when he described his own life as “errant,” as that of “an expatriate from the great American patria.”32 While he vigorously defended the sovereignty of peoples, he never had anything good to say about national borders. He lamented that independence had brought with it a new order of absurd exclusions: Where once there was liberty of movement, now there was “damned nationality”; “back when there were no American nations, all men of this America were brothers.”33 The figure of Irisarri still slips the noose of national memory, despite the best efforts of Chilean historiographers who have reviled or defended him, despite the lavish decorations of a Guatemala he declined to return to in his old age. Architect of the boldest Pan-American solidarity plan to be drafted between the days of Bolívar and of Martí, he may belong—like them—everywhere and nowhere, a (Central-) American (-American) Ahasuerus.34
What is the antecedent, though, to the repatriation of bones? What does it mean for a body to be “patriated,” to belong to a place? The suggestion that Irisarri and his U.S.-published works might be understood within the framework of Latino—as part of a narrative we could tell about the Central American–American past in the United States—will surely raise objections that he never sought citizenship (so far as we know); that his views about los yanquis during his final eighteen years were largely negative; or that his diplomatic status placed him in a special limbo, neither exile nor immigrant. Yet Irisarri arrived in New York as he had in Quito, in Bogotá, in Caracas, in Curaçao: in flight from certain danger and in search of new opportunities. For the first six years in New York and New Orleans, prior to those diplomatic appointments, his status was no different from that of any other migrant, trying to make what living he could from the skills he had. By reading backward from the end of his story—the repatriation of his bones and his figural reincarnation as a medal of honor—Irisarri could be inserted into a Guatemalan genealogy of culture. But what might happen if we let go of this preoccupation with the telos and consider persons, works, and circuits of communication in their moment?
Nicolás Kanellos classifies U.S. Latinos and their texts as belonging to one of three categories: the “native” (whose community predates U.S. borders), the “immigrant,” and the “exile.”35 Yet the last two of these categories can be difficult to disentangle, for they require a judgment about intentionality and carry an implicit telos: Exiles intend to return to their homeland, and if they do, they are not Latinos but something else. Immigrants may or may not intend to assimilate, but if they remain here at their deaths, they have become Latino by default. These retrospective categorizations about individuals become the foundation for histories that trace the “roots” of specific communities—the Puerto Rican colonia in New York, for instance—and in so doing celebrate the success of those who initially, intentionally, planted themselves there. As Robert McKee Irwin points out elsewhere in this volume, these narratives must leave out the stories of failure—of getting turned back at the border, shipwrecked en route, or, as in the case of the Hispanophone community of New Orleans in 1851, burned, beaten, and run out of town. It’s worth questioning the celebration of communal root-setting and successful genealogical reproduction by recalling these “failed Latinos,” but it is also important to challenge the way discourses of migration and assimilation rely heavily on moral judgments about what the subject intended to do. In closing, I want to offer Irisarri’s term errant as a way of focusing on the undecidability of movement’s present tense: a way of resisting the narrative structures that impose categories of belonging retrospectively, based upon their endings.
Intentionality scaffolds positions on both sides of contemporary debates about (im)migration. A stated intention to cross the border no matter what, or to overstay a visa illegally, will be taken by some as a sign of criminality, by others as a sign of a healthy, vigorous desire to remake oneself that has ample precedent in U.S. immigration history. Both views may be traced to a particular national myth of purposefulness that has also lent a key trope to U.S. American studies. In the 1670 Election Sermon of John Danforth that I cite among my epigraphs, the sermon that famously provided Perry Miller with the foundational trope of the Puritan (then-American) Errand into the Wilderness, the preacher searches for clues about the meaning of the colony’s trials. He asks, “To what purpose came we into this place, and what expectation drew us hither?” The answer: God “planted us” and “made us dwell in a place of our own, that we may move no more” after their exile from England and Holland. However disillusioned the colonists may have become when they saw that no one across the Atlantic cared much about their experiment (“left alone with America,” as Perry Miller memorably put it), Danforth finds redemption in affirming their purposeful decision to stay where they had been planted, to “move no more.” The virtue attached to purposefulness here highlights an important philological distinction between the seventeenth-century English errand and the nineteenth-century English errant, on the one hand, and the Spanish errante on the other—a distinction that may be able to illuminate some of the unfulfilled claims that remain for Latino studies to make upon U.S. American studies.36
While in English usage the noun errand, derived from Saxon-Germanic roots, is consistently linked to a sense of mission and purpose (as in Danforth’s sermon), the verb to err and its relations are Latinate, from a plethora of spoken Romance forms that evolved from errare, to stray, and iterare, to travel. The English knight-errant, in contrast, is a back-formation from the French errant that entered the language during the vogue of chivalric romance (and its burlesque, in the form of Don Quixote, although in Spanish the knight-errant is a caballero andante, not errante). The knight-errant—like the Wandering Jew, another late-medieval literary figure—represents the opposite of the purposeful mission, wandering from place to place with a clear set of values but without a specific goal (cf. erratic). Like an installment of a serial novel whose end is not yet known to a reader, each episode along the errant wanderer’s itinerary may be appreciated in its present-ness; it need not be judged by the telos of how the journey or the life will ultimately end. The philosophical tradition that runs from Levinas and Blanchot through Derrida finds a particular resonance in the term errancy and its association with such nonpurposefulness. The poetic or prophetic word that hopes to make itself heard through the dead shell of language’s conventions must get to the truth waywardly, from the margins: For Blanchot, “this is an essentially errant word, for it is always cast out of itself.”37
An errant wandering, then, is different from a pilgrimage or a mission. It must be apprehended in the temporality of its moment. Irisarri’s own presence in the United States was not a long-planned act of asylum-seeking, but the best among imperfect choices to be made at the time. Could this alternate telos help explain the lack of ready ways, in our culture, to think about immigrants who are anything less than fully committed to a happy-ending vision of their acceptance into the Promised Land? For many individuals who have been, now are, and will in the future be understood as U.S. Latinos, the act of migration has been less than wholly purposeful, less than fully chosen. Nor do we know what the ultimate status of many persons of Latin American origin now residing in the United States will turn out to be, given the many potential versions of “paths to citizenship” being proposed at the time of this writing—that “path” being yet another secularization of a Puritan type, the narrow path to righteousness. For the transmigrant, for the deportee, it may lead backward. Perhaps errancy—not as a synonym for a mistake, but as a name for a movement that has no idea where it is ultimately headed—captures more of the experience of undocumented people and their relationship to this inscrutable future than the more neutral “migrancy.”38
If Danforth’s Errand into the Wilderness intervenes in a moment of present crisis to project a clear path from past to future that the colony could follow, then Miller’s reanimation of the figure in the mid–twentieth century also tried to intimate what the destiny of a nation—newly become the dominant global power—might be. Amy Kaplan influentially argued in 1993 that Miller’s reading of Puritan exceptionalism sought to isolate the United States as an object of study from the complicating entanglements of empire and urged scholars to trace the webs of U.S. political and economic power, especially outside its borders. Toward the end of the essay, she points to transnational Chicano and transnational border studies as one intellectual space where these entanglements could be made visible.39 Some two decades later, the place of Latino studies within post-imperial “American” scholarship is still far from central. The field may have shed much of its former Anglocentrism, but has it left behind its attachment to Puritan purposefulness, to the privileged “errand” of becoming-American? Is it possible to adopt an ethical stance toward the migrant that does not judge according to intentions, to the imputed purity or criminality of her ultimate purpose?
Neither critical lens of the Kaplan and Pease moment—empire/colonialism—quite captures the present-day complexity of the regime of surveillance and control over the bodies of the 12 million undocumented persons now living in the United States, a regime that Alicia Schmidt Camacho identifies as the “assault on migrant personhood.” And beyond those 12 million are others who might join or resist that flow, who fall under heavy yet indirect U.S. influence through the state’s financial pressure upon partner governments: Mexico, for example, has adopted many of the most brutal tactics of ICE and its predecessors to police its southern border with Guatemala, the principal funnel for tens of thousands annually of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, and migrants from elsewhere around the globe.40 This route—crisscrossed by Irisarri several times—is now one of the most violent and dangerous international borders in the world; the railway he foresaw being built along the coast is now visually associated, in recent filmic and textual exposés, with the precarious lives of the mostly Central American migrants who ride northward on the tops of its trains. Yet, as Claudia Milian reminds us, we must exercise caution lest this space of crisis, too, be pressed into the service of another sentimentalized racial hierarchy that figures Central Americans as “guileless rustic beings who supply ‘us’ with unusual underdeveloped things.”41
Father Alejandro Solalinde, the Mexican activist whose longtime service to migrants in Oaxaca has earned him both multiple death threats and Mexico’s 2012 Human Rights Medal, powerfully deflects this tendency with his concept of el migromo humano. The desire for movement is, he says, an essential part of our species-being in the twenty-first century; and like the human genome, the “migrome” is a puzzle we are just learning how to read, to map, and to interpret. In a beautiful example of categorical inversion, the migrant is transformed from the most abject of souls—no one from nowhere—into the exemplary member of the species. Our identity comes not from where we land but from the way we move. On the website of his mission, Hermanos en el Camino (Brothers Along the Road), Solalinde recasts the language of Matthew 25:35—the injunction to feed the hungry and give shelter to the homeless—with an idiosyncratic translation: “Fui migrante, y me hospedaron.”42 From an errant Latino perspective, the “American” story would uncouple itself from the ends it has long been attached to. It would stop reading migrant narratives through a predetermined telos. It would stop caring whether the migrant has intention or not, whether he ultimately takes root or moves on to another place. It would take him in no matter what.
1 All citations are from Irisarri, El cristiano errante: Novela que parece historia, ed. R. Amilcar Echeverría B. (Guatemala City: Ministerio de Educación Pública, 1960). “Encontró aquellos indios laboriosos, inteligentes, ágiles, despiertos, bien formados, robustos, aplicados a la agricultura, al comercio, a las artes” 128; “cuyos beneficios eran comunes” 129; “le parecían más inteligentes que los mestizos, zambos y españoles de las otras partes, pues ellos eran infinitamente más hábiles alarifes que los maestros de la architectura que había visto en la América meridional” 132; “Halló en todos aquellos partes una vida, una actividad, un movimiento de civilización, que no esperaba hallar, ni encontró después en otras mayores poblaciones del Perú, de Chile, de las provincias argentinas, de Bolivia, del Ecuador y de la Nueva Granada” 127–28.
2 Intentionality is, of course, also at the root of criminalized discourse about “illegals”: the notion that one has intentionally broken the law. There is a considerable bibliography on the problem of sympathy as a false politics, with sentimental abolitionism at its root; see Lauren Berlant, ed., Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004). It would be important to discuss affect theory with regard to recent bursts of liberal sympathy toward Latino migrants.
3 Arturo Arias embraces the “stutter” of the term Central-American-American, arguing that its very awkwardness demonstrates the inability of mainstream Latin American and Latino scholarship to account for U.S. populations of Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Honduran, Nicaraguan, Costa Rican, and Panamanian descent. See his “Central-American-Americans: Invisibility, Power, and Representation in the U.S. Latino World,” Latino Studies 1:1, 168–87 (2003).
4 The amended model of the communications circuit endorsed by Darnton (and adaptable to different moments in the social history of books) runs from author and text to publisher/printer/paper-maker/binder; to distributor/smuggler; to agent/bookseller; to reviewer/critic/censor; to reading public(s) who buy, exchange, or pirate a text; and finally to the spaces of preservation and survival: libraries, archives, and other spaces that lead later readers to assign value to the text according to its connection to others collected in the same site. See Darnton, “‘What Is the History of Books?,’ Revisited,” Modern Intellectual History 4 (2007): 495–508.
5 John Browning, Vida e ideología de Antonio José de Irisarri (Guatemala City: Ed. Universitaria, 1986), 10.
6 His paper El Semanario Republicano, like those of his ally Camilo Henríquez, disseminated revolutionary ideas; later newspapers included La Aurora de Chile, El Monitor Araucano, and El Duende de Santiago (1818). While in London in 1820, he founded El censor americano, on which his friend Bello collaborated.
7 Morazán, a fierce defender of the Federal Republic of Central America, was not well received by the church-backed oligarchy in Guatemala, which had historically dominated the region. Historians of Central America remain strongly divided about Morazán’s “liberal” legacy.
8 The bibliography on Irisarri’s political life is extensive but largely partisan, especially in Chile. In contrast to Guillermo Feliú Cruz’s mostly positive assessments of Irisarri, Chilean historiography tends to depict him as a contradictory figure who planted Enlightenment political theory in Chile but ultimately betrayed his revolutionary commitments. Following the negative assessments of Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna and Ricardo Donoso, the conservative Chilean historian Claudio Véliz has decried the million-pound loan that Irisarri negotiated in London as unnecessary, attacked Irisarri’s intentions as venal, and argued that the resulting international debt crisis led to O’Higgins’s downfall and to the subsequent war between Chile and Peru. See Véliz, “The Irrisari Loan,” Boletín de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe 23 (December 1977), 3–15. The controversy over Irisarri’s actions with the English loan was compounded by the Treaty of Paucarpata: Irisarri’s defenders point out that the treaty attempted to save the remnants of an army that had been resoundingly crushed in Peru. But the Chilean public, previously uncommitted to the war, angrily repudiated the treaty’s terms. The state then reinforced the navy and army and eventually defeated the combined Peru–Bolivia forces, dissolving their confederation to Chile’s great strategic advantage. Browning’s research is the most neutral and the most thorough and includes documents either not consulted by, or ignored by, Donoso that contradict his characterization of Irisarri as a self-interested traitor.
9 On the novel’s birth and the later-excised pirate episode, see John D. Browning, “El Cristiano Errante de Antonio Jose de Irisarri: su genesis, su acogida y sus ‘Paginas Perdidas,’” Revista Iberoamericana 36, no. 73 (1970), 613–27. While his youthful writing was full of revolutionary citations of Rousseau, Locke, and Paine, his political ideology evolved: He was later willing to entertain constitutional monarchy, as were Bolívar and Bello. He was moderately anticlerical with liberal social views—a strong advocate of deregulated finances and free trade. He was mostly associated with Conservative politicians (with notable exceptions like Mosquera), although it would be a mistake to assume that either Liberal or Conservative represents a consistent political position during this period. (For instance, the four newspapers Irisarri founded during his seven years in Ecuador were underwritten by Juan José Flores and supported by his former enemy, the Liberal Vicente Rocafuerte—whose rebellion against Flores in 1845 sent Irisarri on to Nueva Granada, the very nation from which Ecuador had broken away.)
Nor should we overstate Irisarri’s attachment to the term Christian, which he uses as a careless synonym for person. He described himself as a “primitive Christian” who tried to follow the self-abnegation of Jesus (Browning, Vida 181), as well as a lowercase liberal, which he defines as “tolerance of differing opinions, and the strict observance of the principles that uphold social liberalism” rather than advance one’s personal agenda (Browning, Vida 152; translation mine).
10 See Lou Charnon-Deutsch, “Of Jews and Jesuits in the Nineteenth-Century French and Spanish Feuilleton,” Comparative Literature Studies 46: 4 (2009), 589–617. On serial publication and periodicity, see Patricia Okker’s Introduction to Transnationalism and American Serial Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2011).
11 “Ocupándote tú en leer los periódicos del día, y las arengas de nuestros tribunos”; “ocúpate en algo que te traiga algún provecho” (Irisarri 2). “Tribuno” revives the Roman sense of the speaker/writer who defends the rights of the people—that is, the modern journalist.
12 The rare 1847 Bogotá edition, which scholars fruitlessly hunted for as late as the 1980s, can now be accessed electronically on the website of the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia; it contains charmingly mock-archaic chapter titles that are missing from the Guatemalan edition. Feliú Cruz’s restorative work took place during a fertile period in Chilean revolutionary historiography, when educational reformists aimed to instill cultural nationalism in a much broader swath of the country’s middle and working classes. The publication of El cristiano errante by the national university press may be seen as a kind of re-adoption into Chilean cultural genealogy: Irisarri’s son Hermógenes also became a politician and minor poet; his daughter married an important Chilean landscape painter; and a great-great-granddaughter served in the Bachelet cabinet. But see note 8 on the later backlash from Donoso and his followers who challenged his loyalty to Chile. Another twist to these national dramas of filiopietism is that Irisarri fathered at least one child outside marriage, a son who became rector of a university in Cartagena and founded a college in Panama named in Irisarri’s honor (García Bauer 32).
13 The hero of Irisarri’s other novel, Historia del perínclito Epaminondas de Cauca (History of the Incomparable Epaminondas of Cauca) (New York, 1863), was modeled on Bolívar’s tutor, Simón Rodríguez. Among Irisarri’s other extant fictional works are three short stories using the univocal constraint: “Amar hasta fracasar,” using a as the only vowel; “Pepe, el de Jerez,” using e, and “Los mozos gordos,” using o. This constraint had been a minor fad among some seventeenth-century writers in Spain, preceding the Oulipians of the twentieth (García Bauer 65–70). These interests in history and in language converge in his other major publication from this period, Cuestiones filológicas (New York, 1865).
14 See Browning, Vida 205–15 on the transformation of his youthful admiration for Paine and Franklin, and for the liberal immigration policy of the United States, which he believed to be responsible for its greater success with the democratic experiment despite slavery, which he condemned. As late as the 1830s, he wrote that he would be a populist democrat if he lived in the United States (205). Only after the U.S.–Mexico War, which he decried in his Bogotá paper, does his criticism of the expansionism and interventionism encouraged by the Monroe Doctrine begin.
15 The historian Ames McGuinness traced a single extant copy of the New York El Revisor, which is not catalogued anywhere in the United States, to an archive in Panama and transcribed three articles about Panama from it (personal communication). There is also one issue in the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia. J. M. Torres Caicedo interviewed Irisarri for his Ensayos biográficos y de crítica literaria sobre los principales poetas y literatos hispano-americanos (Paris, 1863) and provides the detail about Irisarri’s marketing strategy for Spanish-language learners (1: 217).
16 Family letter quoted in Browning, Vida 200.
17 None of Irisarri’s biographers mentions anything about New Orleans: Because he began and ended his time in the United States in New York, they seem to have simply assumed that he never left the city; this letter’s reference to going to “the country” already puts this into question. His name appears in the New Orleans City Directory for 1851 next to the address of the print shop/bookstore: “Irisarri, I. A. [sic], firm Aleman, Gomez & Irisarri.” On the importance of La Patria/La Unión in transnational print culture, and on Gómez’s own serial novel, see my article “Tracking the First Latino Novel” in Okker, op. cit., 36–63. Gómez’s subtitle, “Novela que parece historia,” is strikingly similar to Irisarri’s “Novela que tiene mucho de historia,” and although of course this play between novel and history runs rampant in the first century and a half of the novel as a form, it raises the possibility that Gómez had perhaps read one of the Bogotá versions of Cristiano, discovered Irisarri was in the United States, and subsequently invited him to collaborate on the newspaper. Gómez had himself started a paper in New York City in 1845, but it failed financially; an editorial in La Patria’s final issue before the name change (December 31, 1850) boasts of how Spanish print culture has thrived in New Orleans, in contrast.
18 La Unión, January 8, 1851, 1. I have not yet attempted a line-by-line comparison of the Bogotá serial or codex versions next to the New Orleans version to see what was “corrected.” The serialization was completed in May 1851.
19 “[D]efender la raza hispanoamericana de los frecuentes e injustos ataques a que suele verse expuesta en este país”; “en vis a la poca justicia que se ha hecho por la prensa anglo-americana.” La Unión, January 3, 1851, 2.
20 “The Unfortunates: What the Life Spans of Early Black Books Tell Us About Book History,” in Early African-American Print Culture, eds. Jordan Stein and Lara Cohen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 42.
21 Lazo, “Migrant Archives,” in Russ Castronovo and Susan Gillman, eds., States of Emergency (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 37–54. There may be much more evidence about Irisarri’s life between 1849 and 1857 in the family papers held by Irisarri’s descendants in Santiago de Chile: As Lazo points out, such private archives illustrate gaps about what the state does not deem worth collecting. I thank Alejandra Díaz Balart in Buenos Aires, who found out about my research on La Patria on the Internet, for copies of her ancestor Victoriano Alemán’s letters describing his dramatic flight from the New Orleans mob in August 1851; her family also holds the only complete copy of the 1850 run of La Patria, of which only a few numbers exist in the United States. The only consistent run, from 1846–47, 1849, and 1851, is preserved at the Historic New Orleans Collection: On the original leather bindings, the spines were stamped “V. Aleman.”
22 The most convincing literary reading of Cristiano is that of Jorge Shan Chem, who describes it as most strongly resembling the digressive, mixed travel-and-satirical-commentary character of eighteenth-century writing. See “El cristiano errante: entre la encrucijada discursiva y el desencanto utópico,” Filología y Lingüística 30: 1 (2004): 61–73; and in particular, on Irisarri’s refutation of Buffon and dePauw on the supposed inferiority of the New World, 66–67. Fernando Unzueta closes his La imaginación histórica y el romance nacional en Hispanoamérica (Lima: Latinoamericana Editores, 1996) with a chapter on Cristiano, which he reads as staunchly conservative in its rejection of progressive narratives. While the scientific and philosophical digressions take Irisarri’s novel too far from the hero’s journey at times to label it as “picaresque,” in other respects its homage to Cervantes is obvious: The Prologue (which contains the phrase “de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme” in the very first sentence) meditates on the distinction between truth and fiction; Don Quixote’s status as a “cristiano viejo” informs the type of the “errante Christian”; and Romualdo makes two sallies on his journey.
23 Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and the Yucatan (1841), qtd. in Stephen Benz, Guatemalan Journey (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 113–14. Benz’s volume surveys the range of misapprehensions of indigenous Guatemalans, from dismissive views like Stephens’s to the still-powerful tendency to romanticize and exoticize them.
24 “[S]e hallaban en aquellos pueblos, sin saber cómo, el principio de la jurisprudencia inglesa de no ser juzgado el hombre sino por sus iguales, lo que debía dar a los juzgados la mejor de las garantías contra el espíritu de rivalidad y de prevención,” “no dejaba las más veces de ser fatal a los indios cuando eran españoles los demandados,” 139–40.
25 This was one of several efforts by heavily indigenous regions to break away from the early Central American states. The anti-Tzul historiography of Irisarri’s time argued that the uprising had not been supported by most Mayans in Los Altos and was instead a despotic power grab by the briefly crowned “King Lucas.” Over the course of the nineteenth century, Mayan political organizations became increasingly stratified into elite and peasant classes in exchange for limited sovereignty. See Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 54–81. I am certainly not arguing that Irisarri does, or could, speak from a Mayan perspective here. However, his rejection of most of his contemporaries’ ideas about primitivism and progress sets him apart from those liberal thinkers, including Martí, who urged Indian assimilation.
26 “Ni tengo cuenta con otros progresos, que las de la razón natural y esta me basta para hacerme conocer que lo que estamos llamando política no es sino obrar contra los principios, cometiendo las más evidentes contradicciones.” “Lo que los angloamericanos hicieron con ellos y con los descendientes de africanos, de no considerarlos sino como harina de otro costal, o como el salvado de la harina” (177). “Nadie en el mundo puede tener razón ninguna, ni alegar pretextos de luces del siglo, ni de progreso de civilización, para oponerse a la voluntad de la mayoría de un pueblo” (178). “Los indios [de Totonicapán] no pierdan la esperanza de recobrar su nacionalidad” (174).
27 See Chen Sham 4 and Browning 69 for further discussion of the socio as the ideal citizen, and society modeled as a commercial enterprise.
28 “. . . es justo y equitativo todo lo que es, o puede ser provechoso a los Estados-Unidos, aunque sea en daño y perjuicio del mundo entero.” “. . . estos hombres justos no han podido triunfar del partido que quiere hacer por fuerza la anexación de la América Española a los EU para que vuelva a establecerse en aquellos paises la esclavitud” (Carlos García Bauer, Antonio José de Irisarri, diplomático de América: Su actuación en los Estados Unidos; la colonización negra y la invasión filibustera [Guatemala City: Imprenta Universidad de San Carlos, 1970], 48). Irisarri was at the time awaiting recognition, which he eventually received, as the legitimate U.S. ambassador for the loyalist Nicaraguan government. His vigorous work against U.S. state support for Walker, and his facilitation of the cooperative military efforts among the often-warring states of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Costa Rica to oust Walker between 1856 and 1860, is detailed in this volume.
29 Letter dated May 15, 1865, in Enrique del Cid Fernández, ed., Epistolario inédito de Antonio José de Irisarri, 1857–1868, (Guatemala City: Ed. del Ejército, 1966), 155. The letter expresses a concern that because the Civil War has ended, the United States will take up its former expansionism again and make all of Latin America “una colonia de los Estados Unidos”: “si como yo creo, de esta vez viniese a tierra la fatal doctrina, yo tendría la gloria de haber sido el primero en combatirla” (if the fatal doctrine does come to this, as I believe, I would have the glory of being the first one to have fought against it). For other writing about the Monroe Doctrine as a rationale for unchecked expansion, see Cid Fernández 60, 64, 185, 200–1, 220–21.
30 Irisarri, he says, offers “una hermosa demostración de comprensión y de grandeza civica, de solidaridad entre los países del istmo y de hermandad centroamericana” (Diplomático, 125).
31 The recipients of the “Orden de Antonio José de Irisarri” span quite an ideological gamut: from a novelist who was denounced by the Left for not speaking out against the repressive government of the 1970s, to longtime diplomats, to human rights lawyers. The vision of returning the bones, of course, raises the spectre of the indigenous genocide and civil violence of the 1980s and contemporary debates about the spaces of its memorialization.
32 Qtd. in Echeverría, “Introducción” to El cristiano errante (Guatemala, 1960), 1.
33 “Maldita nacionalidad,” “Cuando no había naciones americanos, todos hombres de esta América éramos hermanos”: qtd. in Browning 130. He is recalling here the trauma of being detained at the border during his return to Central America in the 1820s, when he was briefly defense minister of Guatemala: While the Irisarri family home had been in Guatemala City, their hacienda was in Sonsonte, now located in El Salvador. Salvadoran independence had been a movement against centuries of dominance by Guatemalan governors, as well as against Spanish colonial rule.
34 U.S. historians have neglected Irisarri’s central role in designing the “Confederación de los Estados Hispanoamericanos” in 1856. It explicitly excluded the United States and was thus quite different from the Pan-American Union and the OAS that followed. Although signed by representatives of seven countries, this mutual defense accord was never ratified by all their congresses. See Garcia Bauer, Antonio José de Irisarri: Insigne escritor y polifacético prócer de la independencia americana (Guatemala City: Tipografía Nacional, 2002), 57–64.
35 Nicolás Kanellos, Introduction to Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5–29. The division, while perhaps necessary at some level, is problematic in that the category corresponds to the status of the author within one of those three categories, assuming that readers and texts will follow.
36 Samuel Danforth, “A Brief Recognition of New-Englands Errand into the Wilderness: An Online Electronic Text Edition,” ed. Paul Royster, 18, http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience/35/. My thanks to Jesse Alemán for pointing out the suggestive proximity of Irisarri’s title to the foundational errand in the wilderness. Intentionality isn’t only the intent to start a tradition through genealogy; it’s also crucial to the property laws governing land claims in many histories of settler colonialism: to “stake a claim” is to declare an intention to settle for a defined period of time, and the fulfilment of that intention (often by violently evicting others) conveys proper title.
37 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 51. For the figure of the poet/prophet crying in the wilderness, see Emmanuel Levinas, “The Poet’s Vision,” in Proper Names, trans. Michael Smith (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 127–39. Levinas, Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida embrace errancy as the means through which the imperfect, error-filled vehicle of language can commit itself to a truth that paradoxically lies outside the power of language to express. Usefully for my argument here, poststructuralism challenges the notion of an intentional subject: Language exceeds or subverts intention.
38 My concept of the “errant Latino” owes something to Laura Lomas’s notion of the “migrant Latino subject” exemplified by Martí, and for this reason I have drawn some comparisons between Irisarri and Martí throughout. Not every Latino is a migrant, and even the cases most likely to attract white sympathy for immigration reform—undocumented persons brought as children to the United States—may not be best understood through tropes of movement. The nonteleological sense of errancy, I believe, better suits the uncertainties of many individuals who must learn to live without a clear story of their future identities. See Lomas, Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009).
39 Amy Kaplan, “Left Alone with America: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” in Kaplan and Donald Pease, Cultures of US Imperialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994); see especially 16–17. For a summary of how Latina scholars Lora Romero and Josie Saldaña-Portillo have responded to Kaplan’s glancing reference to Chicano studies here, see Richard T. Rodriguez, “The Locations of Chicano/a and Latino/a Studies,” in John Carlos Rowe, ed. Concise Companion to American Studies (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2010), 201–5.
40 Alicia Schmidt Camacho, “Hailing the Twelve Million: U.S. Immigration Policy, Deportation, and the Imaginary of Lawful Violence,” Social Text 28:4 (Winter 2010), 1–24, 20. Schmidt Camacho considers the southern Mexican border within the “migratory circuit” linked to the United States: “It is time to create another category of legal subject, to honor the membership of migrants in U.S. society, and to recognize our bonds of community beyond the limited borders of the nation” (19). She argues that a human rights approach to migrancy would reimagine citizenship as the default category by which people are presumed to be deserving of rights.
41 Journalistic books about the journey by train across this “shadow border” widely circulated in the United States include Sonia Nazario’s Enrique’s Journey (2007) and Oscar Martínez’s The Beast (English translation 2013), complementing Cory Fukunaga’s feature film Sin Nombre (2009) and Pedro Ultreras’s documentary The Beast (2011). The revisionist “1848/1898” periodizations offered by post-imperial American studies, which have also been made to serve narratives of early (Mexican/Caribbean) Latino history, don’t resonate for Central Americans. Latino studies is scrambling to address the fact that Salvadorans now outnumber Cubans in the United States; see the Summer 2013 special issue of Latino Studies co-edited by Arturo Arias and Claudia Milian for a summary of the state of the field. On the “dark-brownness” associated with Central Americans and especially with Guatemalans, see Milian, Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a Studies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 123–50.
42 Lecture at Lozano Long Conference on Central Americans and the Latino Landscape, UT-Austin, February 24, 2012, https://www.utexas.edu/cola/insts/llilas/digital-resources/llilas_av/archive/archived_av.php. Spanish translations of this verse usually give forastero or extranjero (foreigner/stranger); Solalinde’s substitution of migrant is clearly directed toward the context.