Raúl Coronado
Why has the Latina/o nineteenth century proven so recalcitrant to assimilation into the national U.S. canon and, indeed, to historicization? One could easily ask the same of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and other Latin American literary traditions, though certainly few have actually made this case. Given that most of those working in the field of nineteenth-century Latina/o literary history—the vast majority of the contributors to this volume, for example—work in English as opposed to Spanish departments, one could assume that the goal is to integrate Latina/o literature into the U.S. canon. However, I submit that it is the conceptual framework of the nation which raises serious problems: To which national literary tradition would nineteenth-century Latina/o writers belong?1 Literary canons and modern historiography, as we will see, emerged as ways to buttress the spirit of the newly born American nations, hoping to offer them ontological certainty.
In many ways, nation-formation has been the sine qua non of modern academic disciplines. The rise of modern history during the late eighteenth century went hand in hand with the rise of modern nations; they sought each other out, as it were, and history provided the nation with its much-desired antiquity.2 The institutionalization of the study of U.S. literature took place much more recently, during the early twentieth century, and parallels the literary arrival of the United States on the world’s stage. Some fifty years prior, in 1879, Henry James may have lamented the dismal literary state of affairs in the United States, but the American scene was quite another by the late 1930s.3 By then Pound, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and others had become world-renowned writers providing the United States with that much-yearned-for cultural supremacy which nineteenth-century authors had so desperately desired.
While U.S. literature had finally received European adulation, the story within the U.S. academy was a different one, and the academic study of U.S. literature struggled to establish itself as a distinct field of study until the mid–twentieth century. It was along the lines of Cold War cultural nationalism that it established itself, rising as it did concomitantly with the institutionalization of American studies.4 U.S. literary historiography came to parallel the grand narrative of Manifest Destiny, establishing itself on the eastern seaboard with the British colonies and, with time, expanding and moving west across the United States.
It is no surprise then that the multicultural movement of the 1980s and ’90s received such a strong conservative backlash, re-inscribing as it did those who had long been marginalized or excluded from these grand narratives of history and belonging, for even then one could see that re-inscription could not and would not merely entail some logic of accretion. If these marginalized subjects had been written out of national (literary) histories, the task of writing them back into history would by necessity require a logic other than that of national formation. One can identify this tension in Ramón Saldívar’s now classic Chicano Narrative (1990). Saldívar is at pains at locating Chicana/o narrative as a component of a national U.S. literature even as he describes it as the “literary productions of a culture at the margin of both the Anglo-American and Latin American cultural worlds.”5 Indeed, one may say that national histories could be written on the basis of the very elision of marginalized peoples as subjects from history.6 The relationship between these subaltern subjects and national narratives is at best an antagonistic one.
Given that the discipline of literary studies arose on the bedrock of the nation itself, how does one write a literary history that falls outside the logic of the nation? How does one work within a discipline that constructed its object of knowledge (“American literature”) and its methods along the perimeters of the nation? How does one write a literary history of Latinas/os that transcends and predates national borders? I use Latina/o to refer not to identities—few if anyone, in fact, identified as Latina/o in the nineteenth century—but to the manner in which nineteenth-century Spanish American communities in the United States drew from both Hispanic-Catholic and Anglo-Protestant epistemologies to understand the world they inhabited. The question is not restricted to Latina/o literary history alone. The persistent model of nation-formation may account for the still emergent field of nineteenth-century Latina/o historiography writ broadly. Innumerable literary critics and historians have taken nation-time as its periodization, starting with the juridical birth of Mexican Americans giving us the date of 1848 (the conquest and annexation of half of Mexico’s territory) or with the 1898 Spanish–American War, which led to the colonization of Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam. But how does one think across these periods, given that, after all, the Latinas/os living across these periods surely did not cast off their subjectivities for new ones, nor did their social formations shift as quickly as the nation was called into being?
The task here is to think against the grain, against the nation as teleology. If the birth of Latinas/os has been aligned with the foundational dates of 1848 or 1898, I propose that Latina/o history refuse this periodization and think creatively through and with the archive. One strategy of refusing the nation is to look askew at these foundational moments by turning to alternative—minoritized, as it were—documents that yield different narratives of belonging.7 Rather than center on the fetishized U.S.–Mexico War, literary historians could focus instead on the circulation of ideas before the arrival of the printing press in what is today the Southwest. The first presses begin to enter as early as 1813, but they entered a complex yet completely understudied world dominated by a centuries-old manuscript culture and tradition of declamation. How did these communities engage with ideas, the imagination, and writing, and how did the printing press transform (or not) the uses to which writing had long been put? Historians could also focus on how Latinas/os developed the centuries-long Catholic counter-Reformation concept of the secular. Indeed, it was the Protestant Reformation itself that produced the concept of the secular, cleaving forever the Divine from the temporal world.8 Rather than write literary histories that enshrine Latina/o resistance to Anglo American conquest and colonization, historians could focus instead on the accidents and reverse formations that led socially complex Latina/o communities to see themselves devolve from elite, Spanish American, Catholic communities of colonizers to increasingly racialized communities that were seen as homogeneous and devoid of sociocultural complexity. Instead of narratives of triumph, historians could focus on moments of failure, of dreams that failed to cohere, and offer contemplative histories of these moments. What would it mean to write literary histories of Latinas/os that did not lead to the presumed and critically undertheorized goal of assimilating into the canon of U.S. literary studies or, even, that of any Spanish American nation?
In effect, Latina/o history could develop what the historian Gyan Prakash has described as “post-foundational” histories. Such histories seek “to make cultural forms and even historical events contingent . . . [in order to] write those histories that history and historiography have excluded.”9 It is precisely the narrative of nation-formation that has occluded and makes opaque the discursive world of nineteenth-century Latinas/os, a world filled with texts and individuals that held competing, often contradictory, beliefs. If the goal is to think outside the logic of the nation, then the challenge for Latina/o literary historians is to write a nonteleological history that does not set out to arrange the literary archive only to reaffirm the long history of Latina/o resistance and triumph of nationally imagined communities.
Latina/o literary history will have to deconstruct the category of the literary even as it narrates a new history. We now know that the contemporary definition of literature as an autonomous, imaginative, aesthetic sphere of writing largely independent of other genres of writing only began to emerge in the nineteenth century. A mutation occurred in the history of writing in the West (Catholic and Protestant), one originating with the Reformation and becoming distinct in the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. It is during the nineteenth century that the category of the literary, as we know it, emerged as a recognizable genre distinct from other forms of writing.10 But embedded in this notion of the literary was writing as a search for immanence and belonging, for what Jacques Derrida described as a yearning for a metaphysics of presence. Writing increasingly becomes a means of approximating a sense of the divine: “God is the name and the element of that which makes possible an absolutely pure and absolutely self-present self-knowledge . . . [I]t can be produced as auto-affection, only through the voice: an order of the signifier by which the subject takes from itself into itself, does not borrow outside of itself the signifier that it emits and that affects it at the same time.”11 Rather than merely reflect God’s fixed meaning, language comes to be seen as a self-reflexive, flexible tool of understanding.
Prior to the late eighteenth century, literature had been embedded in an expansive, signifying language related to other knowledge-forms. In writing about the history of the Latin American novel, for example, Roberto González Echevarría argues that the novel “brings us back to the beginnings of writing, looking for an empty present wherein to make a first inscription”; it is a search for the “origin of being.”12 Similar claims have been made of Anglo American literature. Larzer Ziff theorizes this historical transformation as being one of a movement from immanence to representation, “from a common belief that reality resided in a region beneath appearance and beyond manipulation to the belief that it could be constructed and so made identical with appearance.”13 Ziff, too, claims that a shift occurred at the end of the eighteenth century, one in which representation became the dominant mode of understanding the relationship one had with writing in which one used language to construct one’s reality. This shift from immanence to representation, from the idea that one spoke or wrote from an immutable, fixed sense of self to one where “there is no assumed real self that is being represented” provided some of the ideological infrastructure that would allow novels and fiction to flourish.14
What characterizes the modern definition of literature is its search for what Derrida describes as a metaphysics of presence or what Ziff describes as a search for immanence but with an abiding sense that that search itself is a representation, a self-reflexive attempt to arrive at foundational truth while simultaneously being aware that that truth is but a product of language that could be infinitely peeled back layer after layer. The history of Latina/o literary culture must be situated between these competing histories of American literatures. It becomes clear that this enterprise must be interdisciplinary, weaving between literary and intellectual history, pursuing this yearning for a sense of ontological certainty, for presence across any form of representation.15
In tracing the discursive dispersal of writing prior to the consolidation of the literary, literary historians are often at pains to demonstrate that what they are studying eventually did yield to the novel or, more broadly, to the literary. But what if it had not or did not? What if writing continued to manifest itself in its undifferentiated form as it had before qua literature? Instead of tracing the discursive origins of the literary, what if literary historians turned instead to what Derrida described as a history of grammatology, a discursive history of textuality that did not necessarily yield to the teleological category of the literary, one in which textuality was not reduced to script but inhabited a more capacious world that also included the work of orality and visuality in the making of knowledge?16
Rather than a history of Latina/o literary culture, we should describe this enterprise as a history of textuality, a grammatology of sorts, one that does not seek to reduce the plurality of textuality to the fetishized aesthetic polished forms of literature (e.g., the novel, the short story, the poem, the play) but seeks instead to trace the discursive (trans)formations of writing as a mode of searching for immanence. Nineteenth-century Latina/o textuality, then, operated in an undifferentiated field of writing, one that was dominated by oral and visual culture, manuscripts, epistolary forms, revolutionary pamphlets and broadsides, political journalism, memoirs, poetry, histories, and novels that sought to sustain and establish its own sense of presence of being, a desire to achieve transcendence and belonging in the world. What we find in the nineteenth-century Latina/o archive is not a wholesale contestation of U.S. imperialism (though that too does emerge). Rather, we find a yearning for the creation of a new modern world, one that begins in the nineteenth century by imagining an improved transatlantic Hispanic world, continues by seeking to replace that world with Spanish American nations, and concludes the century beaten, baffled, and discombobulated by recalcitrant racial violence and U.S. colonialism.
To pursue this project, let me suggest a three-part methodology. First, as several literary historians have argued, Latina/o literary history must be comparative: We must be familiar with the literary and intellectual histories of the United States, Spanish America, and Spain, because these histories shaped and impacted the lives and thought of nineteenth-century Latinas/os, many of whom traveled throughout the Pacific and Atlantic worlds.17 Second, in order to track the discursive shifts in textuality, literary historians must engage in interdisciplinary archival research. The Spanish empire was an empire of paper that produced a vast “documentary umbilical cord,” as Angel Rama described it.18 The Spanish and Mexican archives in Texas, New Mexico, and California, for example, produced an extraordinary amount of documentation of nineteenth-century Latina/o life and culture, and so too did the various Spanish diplomats living in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New Orleans, especially in regard to the various movements for independence in Spanish America.19 Studying these archives, however, will require extensive Spanish-reading skills and familiarity with nineteenth-century manuscripts.
Given that the vast majority of these archival collections remains largely untapped, Latina/o historians of writing should focus on regional histories. As Francisco A. Lomelí proposed: “Concentrating on a single geographical area allows for viewing a complex network of interfacing data that provide a three-dimensional representation of a regional society. The cross-sectional stratification offers a more complete picture of trends, happenings and ideas. It encompasses historical revisionism, cultural anthropology, theories on culture, consciousness of race and class, partisan politics and literary theory.”20 The regional case model should be placed in productive tension with other larger, discursive networks in which the region was embedded. Though nineteenth-century communities in Texas, New Mexico, and California had very little communication with one another, they were embedded in larger discursive worlds. Early-nineteenth-century Spanish Texas, for example, had long been enmeshed with Louisiana, and, from there, with other important routes of trade, with Philadelphia, St. Louis, Florida, Cuba, and Mexico. California, on the other hand, had extensive networks with other port cities on the Pacific coast. Beginning with the Gold Rush, San Francisco, in particular, cultivated a literary-journalistic network that connected communities in Los Angeles, Mexico, and Chile, as other contributors to this volume show.
Yet, in order for the archival research to be efficient, historians of textuality must develop expertise in the historiography of the region and period in which they are working. Doing so will not only allow the grammatologist to better understand the historical context, but these published histories more often than not also contain references to some of the most intriguing of texts in archives. But engaging in this kind of interdisciplinary work will also require a rethinking of the history of writing and its epistemological claims of causality, especially in relation to other branches of history, such as literary, intellectual, cultural, social, and political history. Rather than see these historical subfields in some kind of competition for “truth,” we should see them as complementing one another, each emphasizing methods and archives that flesh out our understanding of the past, and we should engage in rigorous, animated interdisciplinary conversations.
By working inductively through primary materials, historians of textuality can then begin to develop alternative histories of imagined communities that transcended, indeed preceded, the nation. Finally, as Lomelí suggested above, historians must develop different, interdisciplinary reading strategies to read both with and against the archive. The idea that the historian merely lines up facts in order to tell a story has long been revealed as a naïve fiction; the historian selects certain facts while ignoring others in order to emplot them into a particular kind of history, whether the historian is aware of this process or not.21 Theories of formal textual analysis or close reading offer the historian skills to interpret the archive in order to unpack the various discursive significances of a text (whether they be aesthetic, formal, generic, subjective, political, historical, etc.). At a more deductive level, theories or philosophies of history, language, and knowledge will allow the historian to theorize self-consciously the type of history they produce.22 Historians should engage in extensive discussions regarding the creation of archives, evidence, and disciplinary differences. It may be that historians of Latina/o writing will reveal imagined communities that do not align neatly with the nation and may thus offer new ways of imagining communities of belonging that redress the contemporary aporias of the nation.
If history has served as the nation’s right-hand man, how will history have to be rewritten in order to move beyond the nation? National histories have long been emplotted as Romance.23 What alternatives can take the place of Romantic histories of the coming-into-being of the nation? Because of the ubiquity of histories emplotted as Romances, the genres of tragedy or satire might offer a more capacious interpretive framework for understanding the nineteenth century, a century that began with the optimism and utopian spirit of early-nineteenth-century Spanish American revolutionaries and concluded with the pessimism of a dwindling, increasingly racialized community of Spanish Americans.
It is not that emplotting histories as tragedy will offer a more “accurate” account than emplotting them as Romances; however, given the proliferation of Romantic histories, it may be that we may learn more from the less-told tragic history. Tragic histories would de-emphasize nostalgia in favor of “taking seriously the forces which oppose the effort at human redemption.”24 These would be non-nostalgic, meditative histories seeking to understand in depth particular moments in time. Instead of grand narratives of the manifest destiny of U.S. expansion, empire, and colonialism—and, thus, the inevitable incorporation of Spanish American literary expression into U.S. literary studies—Latina/o literary history should, in the words of Kirsten Silva Gruesz, who cites Walter Benjamin, “‘blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history’ [263], and in doing so to open up a new kind of experience of the past.”25
The anthropologist David Scott has contemplated a similar impasse in Romantic postcolonial historiography, and has, too, advocated for the tragic mode: “What then is the sense of the tragic for our postcolonial time? Because tragedy has a more respectful attitude to the contingencies of the past in the present, to the uncanny ways in which its remains come back to usurp our hopes and subvert our ambitions, it demands from us more patience for paradox and more openness to chance than the narrative of anticolonial Romanticism does, confident in its striving and satisfied in its own sufficiency.”26 In a similar vein, then, rather than produce teleologies of Latina/o subject-formation (“we were always there”), the genre of the tragedy would refuse to rush to conclusion—that is, to end with the arrival of contemporary Latinas/os. Instead, the emphasis would be on pausing, reflecting, contemplating the discursive formations that weave in and out of Latina/o history, full of its own complexity and contradictions. If the goal is to think outside the logic of the nation, the historian of textuality may indeed become a Foucaultian genealogist producing, in the words of Giorgio Agamben, a “philosophical archaeology”: “a science of ruins, a ‘ruinology’ whose object [of study are the archai or origins of] . . . . what could or ought to have been given and perhaps one day might be; for the moment, though, they exist only in the condition of partial objects or ruins.”27 How can this dystopic history at the margins—figuratively and literally—of Spanish America and the United States reveal alternative though perhaps all-too-often closed-off paths to modernity? Rather than write Romantic histories of Latina/o resistance or histories that serve to celebrate the diversification of the U.S. literary canon, we should experiment by writing histories that are more in line with the archive: histories of a world that was not to come. Here I would like to turn to one of the earliest Spanish-language publications from Philadelphia as an example of how one text can open up a new window into our understanding of the past.
The Hispanic world at the turn of the nineteenth century was in turmoil.28 The elite in Spain, Spanish America, and the Philippines were bitterly aware that the Hispanic monarchy, comprising the kingdoms of the Spanish peninsula and the vice-royalties in America and the Philippines, had long lost its grandeur and global political-economic power. Indeed, the eighteenth-century Spanish monarchy had sought to reform the Hispanic world and did so by implementing the Bourbon reforms. But the reforms, in the eyes of many, worked too slowly and, in the eyes of Spanish Americans, merely sought to colonize Spanish America further. Among the voices of reform, one of the most cherished goals was transforming the top-down logic of mercantile capitalism by embracing Adam Smith’s radically new ideas of free-trade capitalism, with its emphasis on allowing those at the local level to determine the flow of goods.
From Philadelphia would emerge some of the earliest Spanish-language imprints that radically advocated for these changes. The first Spanish diplomats to the United States—Carlos Martínez de Irujo, the Marquis de Casa Irujo; and his consul general Valentín de Foronda—embraced these new Enlightenment-inspired political economic theories. Both of these men stand as symbols of the particular stream of Enlightenment thought that entered Spain, a stream that emphasized more the modern discourse of political economy than that of natural rights.29 French philosophers, such as Condillac and Condorcet, had translated and, in the process, altered the work of English and Scottish philosophers such as John Locke and Adam Smith. And their translations were, in turn, likewise translated and altered by Casa Irujo and Foronda, among others, producing significantly transformed philosophies. In Philadelphia, both men became some of the earliest Hispanic members of the American Philosophical Society, where they both contributed to the early history of Hispanophone publishing in the United States.
In 1803, on the eve of the wars of Spanish American independence that would begin five years later, the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia published an anonymous Spanish-language document that advocated the separation of Spain from America. Carta sobre lo que debe hacer un principe que tenga colonias a gran distancia (Letter concerning what a prince should do with his colonies held at a great distance) did not seek so much the independence of America as it did its abandonment, and the letter did so in the name of ensuring the tranquility and well-being of the people. The author sought to improve the Hispanic monarchy and proposed the abandonment of mercantilism in favor of free trade as the best way to do so. As it turns out, this little-known document reveals the fascinating world of Hispanic transatlantic thought and print culture, one that does not necessarily point to a large Spanish-language community in Philadelphia but does reveal how integral Philadelphia was to the circulation of thought in the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Hispanic world.
The letter is signed only with the initial “F.,” yet internal evidence makes it clear that Valentín de Foronda is the author.30 At fourteen pages, it is a convoluted, curious document, brief as it is, and comprises an eight-page letter prefaced with a one-page note, a three-page postscript, and a two-page appendix. Foronda goes to great lengths to distance himself from the arguments presented, creating elaborate, confusing subterfuges, and well he should have. The Spanish Inquisition had a long history of condemning and imprisoning formerly endeared political ministers for veering from Spain’s official doctrine. Years later, Foronda would not be able to escape this fate even as he continued to seek ways to transform Spanish society. For now, however, in 1803, Foronda produced an enchanting document full of displaced authors, intricate dreams, and conversations between an unnamed narrator and other unnamed characters. Most telling, the paper may have been published in 1803, the year of the Louisiana Purchase, but the letter itself is dated March 1, 1800, the year in which Spain secretly signed the Treaty of San Ildefonso, ceding the Louisiana Territory to France.31
The essay begins with a prefatory “Advertencia del Editor” (Note from the Editor), wherein the anonymous editor claims that “As I like the Spanish language, I try to engage with Spaniards” (Como gusto de la lengua Española, procuro tratar con los Españoles) (2). Here, already, the anonymous editor distances himself from the claims made in the essay by implying that he is not a Spaniard but merely a Hispanophile. The editor continues by describing a conversation he had recently had with an unnamed Spanish friend regarding Spain’s colonies: “I praised his Nation’s great happiness for possessing the Kingdoms of Mexico and Peru” (le ponderé la gran felicidad de su Nacion que poseia los Reynos de Mexico y el Perú). His Spanish friend disagrees with him, but rather than offer his own criticism, the Spaniard offers a letter “written by [yet] another unnamed friend of mine regarding the problem of the Colonies, in order to add them to those he had written to an imaginary Prince” (que escribio un amigo mio sobre el problema de las Colonias, para añadirla á las que habia escrito á un Principe imaginario). In effect, the essay references the traditional genre of ministerial advice given to monarchs. The editor reads this letter and, finding that its arguments “deserve the attention of Political-Economic Spaniards” (merecen la atencíon de los Economico-Políticos Españoles) decides to “print it” (imprimirla) so that “Political Truths may be discovered, leaving Opinions to struggle amongst themselves” (las Verdades Politicas se descubren dexando á las Opíníones, que luchen entre sí).
Already thrice displaced, the letter’s author begins by reflecting on the bitter, frustrated plans developed by “politicos” to develop the imaginary Prince’s colonies and protect them from “ambitious Nations” (Nacíones ambiciosas) (3). These plans are full of contradictions and false principles, claims the author: “Some of these cold, amateur dissertators . . . completely forget the first principles of political Economy . . . assuming that the Colonies are nothing but sheep to be kept by their owner in order to cut their wool and drink their milk!” (algunos helados y superficiales dissertadores . . . olvi[dan] enteramente los primeros elementos de la Economía política . . . de suponer las Colonias como una oveja que debe conservar su ámo para cortarle la lána y chuparle la lèche). So many opinions exist, says the author, but “shall I put my mind to print so that my ideas may be distilled into wisdom?” (pondré en prensa mi cerebro para que destíle una porcion de juicio). No, says the author; rather, he resigns himself to recounting a dream he’d had the previous night, believing that this dream may aid in “resolving the problem of the Colonies” (resolv[iendo] el problema de las Colonias).
He dreams that a friend of his (yet another displacement) is a prince and “owner of a vast country that was located between the New World and Asia. All in all, quite similar to our Americas” (dueño de un país inmenso, que se habia encontrado entre el Nuevo mundo, y la Asia en todo, todo, parecido á nuestras Americas) (4). The narrator insists at the outset that this is merely a “philosophical” exercise, refusing to concretize his example, and explicitly states that this prince is not the Spanish king or the imagined land America: “Your Grace must not think that I speak of Spain” (No crea Vm. Que háblo de la España) (7n1). But the narrator abandons the chimera halfway through the essay, writing at last that “I’ll assume as well [that your Kingdom] is a Peninsula” (tambien supongo [que su principado] será una Península). He offers a strident critique of mercantilism and embraces Adam Smith’s free-trade principles. The narrator draws upon Smith’s arguments and makes the case that expansion and wealth should come about only as a result of “negotiation and never by force since even when I sleep [referring to his dream] I’m directed by the maxims of justice and humanity” (negociacion, y jamas por la fuerza; pues aun quando duermo me dirigen las maxîmas de justicia y humanidad) (4). Dreaming that Spain had rid itself of its colonies, the narrator becomes perplexed by all the positive outcomes:
[M]e confundi al ver, que con el dinero que le producía à Vm. la mitad de la nueva isla pagaba todas sus deudas, que llenaba todo su Principado de camínos, de canales de navegacion, y de regadio, que mandaba construir todos los puentes que necesitan los rios, y hacer las obras que se requieren para evitar las inundaciones; que convertia las tierras cenagofas que no sirven sino de enfermar el ayre, en campos fertiles, y que cubria su Principado de Hospitales, de casas de misericordia y de albergues piadosos para aliviar la miseria pública. (5–6)
I became overwhelmed in seeing that the money produced for Your Grace [the imaginary king] by selling the colonies would pay all of the Kingdom’s debts, fill the entirety of his Principality with roads, canals for navigation and irrigation, the construction of bridges, works required to prevent floods, the conversion of swamplands—that serve no purpose but to pollute the air—into fertile fields, and that it would blanket the Kingdom with Hospitals, houses of mercy and halfway homes in order to alleviate public misery.
Foronda’s voice emerges crystal-clear here, echoing the exact same goals he had stated for Humanidad, a newspaper he had sought to establish in 1799.32 Spain needed commerce, not colonies, those “vampires always sucking from the treasury” (Bampiro[s] chupador[es] de los bolsillos), and this required a shift in national priorities: from mercantilism and protected trade to free markets with little governmental interference, and the first step was to rid Spain of its colonies (6).
Mercantilism had focused the monarch’s vision on possessing wealth and had thus been the cause of endless wars. The author recalls a French author’s analysis (Condorcet’s compendium of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which Casa Irujo had translated into Spanish) in which Condorcet delineated how “the real merchant is [not the trader] but the laborer, the manufacturer” (el verdadero comerciante [no es el traficante], és el Labrador, el manufacturero) (9). His dream made him realize how wrong “various governments” (varios Gobiernos) are in understanding their role in promoting commerce, because to them the goal was to control national wealth. The author, instead, argues for a dispersion of economic power, from the hands of the monarch’s administrators to those of merchants and manufacturers.
Such a shift, the author declares, would amount to an “unexpected revolution” (inesperada revolucion) that would cause consternation at first, but then tremendous benefits for the common good. The revolution would be a political, economic revolution, a wholesale abandonment of mercantilism with its top-down control of the economy, an inversion in which manufacturers through their individual decisions would shape the economy and well-being of the nation. Like many of his contemporary Spanish ministers, Foronda appears to be cognizant not only of the radical shift in economic priorities but that these changes—from mercantilism to free-trade capitalism—would result in an epistemic revolution, one in which Spain’s long-valued virtues of military glory and territorial conquest would be replaced by more modern ones like the well-being of the entire social body, and not just its elite.
This economic line of thinking contains the germs of what will later lead to an actual revolution, the shifting of power from the sovereign to the subjects-cum-citizens. The author of the letter in no way gestures toward a political revolution and nowhere mentions natural rights or the bourgeois rationale for revolution. There is no mention, for example, of “life, liberty, and property,” as John Locke had it; nor is there any trace of Foronda’s good friend Thomas Jefferson, who sublimated the materiality of property into the ethereal dream of “pursuing happiness.” With that absence of an actual revolution, it is no surprise that political philosophy in its various guises (republican, democratic, constitutional monarchical) is not discussed or debated at length.33
Still, notwithstanding the absence of political philosophy, the author of the letter understood the politically radical gesture of using the word revolution. On the title page of this document, written in what appears to be contemporary script, someone noted that it had been presented to the American Philosophical Society on February 3, 1804. The pamphlet was printed, then, at the close of the Haitian Revolution (Jean Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti independent on January 1, 1804), and with the bitter memories of the French Revolution (1789–99) and beheading of the Spanish king’s cousin Louis XVI still fresh in their minds, elite Hispanic readers must have shuddered at seeing the word revolution in print. Still, the word appears rather innocently, politically neutral even. In this sense, Foronda, the diplomat-becoming-bourgeois (he was involved in various business ventures), uses the word capaciously, for all that it can and will signify. He yearns to give it a different Spanish signification that might be devoid, as one of the characters in his document says, of the “the carnage of human blood” (carnicerías de sangre humana) (10). In effect, and not unlike Adam Smith, Foronda yearns for a peaceful economic revolution that would increase public happiness (felicidad pública).
Yet this is all a dream, a man’s dream of an imagined prince and an imaginary land in an anonymous letter presented to an anonymous editor. As the author of the anonymous letter notes, “As soon as this unexpected revolution establishes itself, I thought in my dream, Your Grace would become the most envied of all Princes” (Desde el momento, decia en mi sueño, que se verifique ésta inesperada revolucion, sera Vm. el mas envidiado de todos los Principes). With this, the author awakens from his reverie:
[Y] acordandome de todo lo que habia pasado por mi imaginacion, me alegré de haber soñado en la felicidad de los hombres. Qué placer puede equivaler á pensar en disminuir la suma de los males que aflixen á nuestros semejantes? Yo creo que nínguno; así estoy contentisimo de haber pasado una buena noche. (10)
[A]nd remembering everything that had passed through my imagination I was happy to have dreamt of the happiness of mankind. What pleasure can equal the thought of diminishing the amount of evils afflicting our fellow man? I don’t think anything can; thus, I am thrilled at having had a good night.
The letter closes, and the author signs it with the initial “F.”
The “editor” added an appendix detailing the United States’ exports for 1801 as evidence that commerce not only leads to the cessation of wars but also indubitably increases the wealth of nations, an argument lifted from Smith’s Wealth of Nations. In this appended note—and, thus, formally outside the realm of dreams—and in the very last two sentences of Foronda’s document, the optimism of the dream leads to the pessimism of a melancholic reality: “Then Spain is not as happy, as I had thought, for possessing the Americas. Then this dream is applicable to the colonies belonging to this magnanimous and glorious Nation” (Luego la España no es tan felíz, como yo pensaba por poseer las Americas. Luego este sueño es aplicable á las Colonias de esta magnanima y gloriosa Nacíon) (15).
Foronda’s melancholy is far from unique.34 The trope was a dominant one in eighteenth-century Hispanic culture and may be understood as related to the epistemic shift in viewing the world as a fixed, received order—from God—to a world in which humans come to see themselves as actively producing their world. Pessimism, then, becomes the affective manifestation of the disenchantment of the world, with the withering away of God. Foronda says little as to how Spain would go about “ridding” itself of its colonies. He mentions, in passing, the king’s “selling” and later “exchanging” the colonies for other territory, but the majority of the essay preoccupies itself with explaining the benefits of free trade over mercantilism. His emphasis throughout, nonetheless, is the development of Spain and the happiness of mankind. It would not be long, however, before his compatriots, this time from Spanish America, would arrive in Philadelphia with plans of their own.
A mere two years later, in May 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte would invade Spain and depose the Spanish king. Overnight, the Hispanic world was transformed forever.35 Foronda was still in Philadelphia and from there did everything he could to aid his homeland, including consulting with his friend Thomas Jefferson as Foronda prepared his study of a new liberal constitution for Spain. Elsewhere, Spaniards, Filipinos, and Spanish Americans, including those living in what is today the United States, sought ways to bolster transcendental truth: If a Catholic God had created the cosmos and ordained monarchical rule, who or what could possibly replace the supreme political authority of the deposed sovereign? Indeed, what if a Catholic God did not exist?36 The immediate reaction around the Hispanic globe was one of undying patriotism for their deseado (desired) Spanish monarch King Fernando VII. But that reaction quickly though unevenly gave way to outright rebellion, resulting many years later in the independence of the vast part of Spanish America.
The path to reform—both modest and radical—that many Hispanics (again, in Spain, the Americas, and the Philippines) had long sought would come to a screeching halt. The dreams that Foronda had been forced to sublimate, much like those of his global compatriots, would be quashed by conservative Hispanics who viewed any kind of change as a threat to their patria. These long-forgotten dreams, vexing as they may have been, are not unrelated from those that Simón Bolívar and José Martí would later dream of in the future. They each, in all their myriad, complicated ways, carry traces of alternative, minoritized Western concepts of sovereignty and rights, of the common good and the pueblo, concepts rooted in a Catholic-Hispanic modernity. But this divergent modernity also has its own internally and just as marginalized radically divergent voices, those of indigenous peoples, women, and the non-elite. These were subaltern voices that were not seen, in their own period as now, as comparable to those of the unmarked, ideal, universal subject of knowledge. This, then, is what I have characterized elsewhere as modernity not as a linear narrative but as historical trauma: the forced collapse of the Hispanic world brought about externally by a foreign invader and a search on the part of the Spanish monarch’s subjects for new sources of transcendental-political authority. This is why historians now see the initial wars of Spanish American independence during the early nineteenth century as a global Hispanic civil war, involving Spain, Spanish America, and the Philippines: It was a war of competing social imaginaries, with various social groups fighting to establish their points of view as authority in the wake of the deposed king and, by extension, religion.37
In the years that followed, more Hispanics—revolutionaries from Spain and the Americas—would descend upon Philadelphia, long seen as a liberal bastion for exiled revolutionaries from throughout the Atlantic world. They too would turn to the press and unleashed even more daring dreams.38 From Philadelphia, they would launch transatlantic literary volleys, aiming them at ports where their compatriot Hispanic revolutionaries were working to make these new social imaginaries a reality: in London, Spain, the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, and down along the Atlantic coast and around up the Pacific. From here, we can begin to trace—with no clear origin or conclusion—the blurry outlines of a Latina/o history of writing, one that is full of accidents and reversals, often completely unexpected and unwelcomed, that would transform these peoples and their worlds.
1 I use Spanish American to refer to people of the former Spanish colonies in the Americas. Latin American, on the other hand, refers to people of the former Spanish, Portuguese, and in some cases to the French colonies in the Americas. Leslie Bethell, “Brazil and ‘Latin America,’” Journal of Latin American Studies 42: 3 (2010): 457.
2 See, for example, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 192–99; Joyce Oldham Appleby et al., Telling the Truth about History (New York: Norton, 1994), 91–125; Enrique Florescano, Historia de las historias de la nación mexicana (Mexico City: Taurus, 2002).
3 One only need recall James’s memorable litany of cultural forms missing in the United States: “No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy . . . no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures.” Henry James, Hawthorne (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1879 [1997]), 34–35. In their absence, James wondered how anything called the “American” imagination could flourish.
4 David R. Shumway, Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 299–319; Claudia Stokes, Writers in Retrospect: The Rise of American Literary History, 1875–1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 103–37; Elizabeth Renker, The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 23–39.
5 Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 4, emphasis added. Luis Leal, however, writing in 1973, claimed that it was “too idealistic” to claim that Chicana/o literature was a part of American literature because “for the time being, Chicanos are considered a group apart.” Luis Leal, “Mexican American Literature: A Historical Perspective,” Revista Chicano Riqueña 1:1 (Spring 1973): 33.
6 For an analogous argument, see Gyan Prakash, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32: 2 (April 1990), 399.
7 For a similar methodological approach, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 46.
8 See part one, “Absolutism and the Lutheran Reformation,” Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The Age of the Reformation, vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
9 Prakash, “Post-Orientalist Histories,” 401.
10 Foucault, Order, 42–44, 81–92, 299–300; Michael T. Gilmore, “The Literature of the Revolutionary and Early National Periods,” in Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Cyrus R. K. Patell, vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 541; Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 1–42; Julio Ramos, Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, trans. John D. Blanco (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), xl–xli.
11 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 98.
12 González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 4, 13.
13 Larzer Ziff, Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), xi.
14 Ziff, Writing in the New Nation, 77.
15 For the present, I will describe it as literary, even while acknowledging the complex, theoretical question of discipline and subfield formation.
16 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 27–73.
17 These literary histories also offer heuristic models of how literary canons are produced. María Herrera-Sobek, “Canon Formation and Chicano Literature,” in Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, ed. Ramón Gutiérrez and Genaro Padilla, vol. 1 (Houston: Arte Público, 1993).
18 Angel Rama, The Lettered City, trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 33.
19 For a brief survey of important archival collections, see Ramón Gutiérrez, “The UCLA Bibliographic Survey of Mexican-American Literary Culture, 1821–1945: An Overview,” in Gutiérrez and Padilla, Recovering. To this list, I would also add the voluminous Spanish–Mexican governmental archives in Texas, New Mexico, and California. Many states have extensive bibliographic studies on imprints in those states that provide a history of the press in said state along with a bibliography of the imprints, many of which are in Spanish. See, for example, Robert Ernest Cowan, A Bibliography of the Spanish Press of California, 1833–1845 (San Francisco: s.n., 1919); George L. Harding, “A Census of California Spanish Imprints, 1833–1845,” California Historical Society Quarterly 12, no. 2 (1933); Henry R. Wagner, “New Mexico Spanish Press,” New Mexico Historical Review 12 (January 1937); Vito Alessio Robles, La primera imprenta en las provincias internas de oriente: Texas, Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, y Coahuila (Mexico City: Antigua Librería Robredo, de José Porrúa e Hijos, 1939); Illinois Historical Records Survey, Check List of New Mexico Imprints and Publications, 1784–1876: Imprints, 1834–1876; Publications, 1784–1876 (Detroit: Historical Records Survey, 1942); Raymond MacCurdy, A History and Bibliography of Spanish Language Newspapers and Magazines in Louisiana, 1808–1949 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1951); Raymond R. MacCurdy, “A Tentative Bibliography of the Spanish-Language Press in Louisiana, 1808–1871,” The Americas 10:3 (1954); Thomas W. Streeter, Bibliography of Texas, 1795–1845 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955); Herbert Fahey, Early Printing in California, From its Beginning in the Mexican Territory to Statehood, September 9, 1850 (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1956); Edward Cleveland Kemble, A History of California Newspapers, 1846–1858 (Los Gatos, Calif.: Talisman Press, 1962); Doyce B. Nunis, Jr., Books in Their Chests: Reading Along the Early California Coast (San Francisco and Berkeley: California Library Association, 1964); Douglas A. McMurtie, “The History of Early Printing in New Mexico, with Bibliography of Known Issues, 1834–1860,” New Mexico Historical Review (October 1, 1929); John Melton Wallace, Gaceta to Gazette: A Check List of Texas Newspapers, 1813–1846 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966); Florence M. Jumonville, Bibliography of New Orleans imprints, 1764–1864 (New Orleans: Historic New Orleans Collection, 1989).
20 Francisco A. Lomelí, “Po(l)etics of Reconstructing and/or Appropriating a Literary Past: The Regional Case Model,” in Gutiérrez and Padilla, Recovering, 233.
21 Hayden V. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 1–42.
22 See, for example, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, “Utopía Latina: The Ordinary Seaman in Extraordinary Times,” Modern Fiction Studies 49:1 (Spring 2003); Kirsten Silva Gruesz, “The Once and Future Latino: Notes Toward a Literary History todavía para llegar,” in Contemporary US Latino/a Literary Criticism, ed. Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Pérez (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
23 In his study of European historiography, Hayden White defines the Romance as “fundamentally a drama of self-identification symbolized by the hero’s transcendence of the world of experience, his victory over it, and his final liberation from it. . . . It is a drama of the triumph of good over evil, of virtue over vice, of light over darkness, and of the ultimate transcendence of man over the world in which he was imprisoned by the Fall.” White, Metahistory, 8–9.
24 White, Metahistory, 9.
25 Gruesz, “Utopía Latina,” 61.
26 David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 220.
27 Giorgio Agamben, Signature of All Things: On Method (New York: Zone Books, 2009), 82.
28 I use Hispanic to refer to those people who belonged to and identified with the global Catholic-Spanish monarchy.
29 For an elaboration of this discursive transformation in the Hispanic world, of political economy and reform, including these diplomats, see Coronado, A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 101–78.
30 Valentín de Foronda, Carta sobre lo que debe hacer un principe que tenga colonias a gran distancia (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1803), 10, hereafter cited in text. I have not modernized the orthography. The only Spanish members of the Society living in Philadelphia at the time were Casa Irujo and Foronda, and the narrator in the essay admits to having written Cartas económicas-políticas, which Foronda had published in 1789 (8).
31 Spain would continue to rule the territory until 1803.
32 Robert Sidney Smith, “Valentín de Foronda: Diplómatico y Economista,” Revista de Economía Política 10 (1959): 427n8.
33 Foronda, however, would come to develop his own account of a social contract based on liberty, equality, and property. Valentín de Foronda, Carta sobre el modo que tal vez convendría a las Cortes seguir en el examen de los objetos que conducen a su fin, y dictamen sobre ellos (Cádiz, Spain: Imprenta de Manuel Ximenez, 1811).
34 Coronado, A World Not to Come, 104–6, 136–37, 170–74.
35 Gabriel H. Lovett, Napoleon and the Birth of Modern Spain, 2 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1965); Jaime E. Rodríguez O., The Independence of Spanish America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
36 According to Habermas, Hegel was the first to articulate this dilemma for (Protestant) modernity: how to constitute absolute or transcendental meaning in the wake of reason’s critique of religion. Jürgen Habermas, “Hegel’s Concept of Modernity,” trans. Frederick Lawrence, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987). The related question is how Catholics shifted from religion to reason as providing the primary basis of transcendental meaning.
37 Rodríguez O., Spanish America, 36–74. Coronado, A World Not to Come, 26. See also Vicente L. Rafael, “Welcoming What Comes: Sovereignty and Revolution in the Colonial Philippines,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, no. 1 (2010).
38 See Rodrigo J. Lazo, “‘La Famosa Filadelfia’: The Hemispheric American City and Constitutional Debates,” in Hemispheric American Studies, ed. Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Coronado, A World Not to Come, 139–78.