Emily García
On the façade of St. Mary’s, the second Roman Catholic church in Philadelphia, a large plaque commemorates Manuel Torres and his burial in the church graveyard. The plaque offers the following explanation: “As Minister of the Republic of Colombia he was the first Latin American diplomatic representative in the United States of America. Tribute from the Government of Colombia and from Philadelphia descendants of his friends. July 20, 1926.” The plaque takes up a good portion of the right wall of the entrance to the church and is hard to miss even from the sidewalk. I first saw it when I was on my way to speak to a church archivist about Torres, who had been a parishioner of St. Mary’s in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As an early Americanist who studies individuals whom others often know little or nothing about, I was ecstatic to see Torres’s name so prominently displayed. It was all the more significant given the relatively little information on Torres I had gathered from librarians at several of the city’s research libraries: The plaque seemed to indicate that finally I might gain the deeper knowledge of my subject that I was seeking. I was soon to be disappointed: The graveyard map showed no exact location for Torres’s grave, and the groundskeeper I spoke to had not heard of him (even after being reminded that Torres was the subject of the plaque on the façade). The archivist, who it turned out kept her office at St. Joseph’s Cathedral, also hadn’t heard of Torres. I relay this anecdote not to fault the archivists. Instead, I begin with this story because it illustrates so well the paradox that shapes and inspires my work on Torres and other early Latinas/os.
On the one hand, Torres is mythologized with a plaque that honors his participation in St. Mary’s and more broadly in Philadelphia: It marks his contributions to early Latin American diplomacy, the broader hemispheric friendship across the Americas that such community and diplomacy fostered, and the continued significance of this friendship into the twentieth century (the plaque’s date coincides with the so-called Banana Wars period of U.S. intervention in Latin America and precedes by a few years the institution of the so-called Good Neighbor Policy). On the other hand, despite this pronouncement on the church façade, Torres’s grave, his buried body, and the activities in which he participated to develop these diplomatic relations remain unknown, even to historians of the church.
I suggest that this contradiction is not singular to Torres but illustrates how the presence of Latinos and their influence on the United States have been received by broader U.S. culture from Torres’s time to our own. Although Torres’s categorization as Latino is complicated and risky, the contradiction of mythology combined with relatively little substantial engagement with our history of Torres is one of the clearest indications that we might consider him Latino. Torres also shares with borderlands subjects this contradiction vis-à-vis U.S. history and culture: Integral to national history and to the national imaginary yet constantly either projected as fantasies (of romance, of threat to national unity, for example) or rendered invisible, borderlands subjects and Latinos inhabit a paradoxical position in the larger U.S. national imaginary. We might begin to reframe and revise this understanding of Latinos by examining early figures like Torres. In this chapter, I examine the Philadelphia community in which Torres developed this cultural diplomacy and then engage in a more sustained consideration of Torres and his work.
Manuel de Trujillo y Torres emigrated to Philadelphia in exile from New Granada in 1796, when he was fleeing the Spanish colonial government, which was looking to arrest or kill him for his part in a failed revolutionary plot. He was part of an early but influential wave of Spanish Americans who came to the United States as exiles or visitors and who used their position in the United States to support the fight for Spanish American independence. Torres worked as publicist, purchasing agent, economist, diplomat, and as one of the nation’s first Spanish-language translators and teachers. He advocated for Spanish American independence through his writing and through connections he forged with U.S. and Latin American thinkers of various political persuasions, in addition to his contributions to the congregation of St. Mary’s. His publications included An Exposition of the Commerce of Spanish America (1816).1 The United States recognized him as official representative of Gran Colombia in 1822, the year of his death.2 The Jeffersonian-Democrat writer and editor William Duane called Torres the “Franklin of the southern world” in an obituary published in Niles’ Register and other U.S. periodicals; the appellation positions him within a broader, hemispheric discourse of republicanism and pragmatism that could be readily symbolized by Franklin, 1776, and Philadelphia.3
Like many of the other figures working in Philadelphia, Torres is at once significant and difficult to place. An examination of Torres contributes to work such as that of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, supported by Arte Público Press, which locates early historical moments of U.S. Latina/o identity. Given the incidence of anti-Latina/o policy and rhetoric in the contemporary United States, such a history is necessary. At the same time, the sense of history Torres’s life and work allow is far from simple, and its complexity marks the many and various identities and political positions indicated with the single term U.S. Latino, which is far from monolithic. The power relations between Latinos and other U.S. Americans—and between U.S. Americans and Latin Americans—are also far from homogeneous. Torres at once elucidates and complicates our understanding of what might be called a Latino nineteenth century.
Torres’s work and U.S. Americans’ perceptions of him deepen our understanding of nineteenth-century Latino, Latin American, and U.S. identities. Positioned alongside the specter of Franklin and of 1776 more broadly, the independent Latin American republics for which Torres was working might seem mere continuations of U.S. independence. At the same time, U.S. investment in Spanish American independence invites us to question this notion of lineage and to consider looking at American independence from a broader hemispheric viewpoint that spans the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Torres’s conceptualization of Spanish America in his Exposition and other works seems to compromise anticolonial resistance to outside forces for hemispheric friendship, a compromise several scholars have read as influential to the Monroe Doctrine.4 His life and work reflect a duality of thought, language, and culture that informed national foundation and independence.
Hence, Torres’s life and work remind us that Latino and U.S. identities were mutually informed decades before 1898 or even 1848 and that their mutual imbrication was at the heart of national independence in the South as well as in the North. Torres’s Exposition appeared just a year after Madison secured ratification of the Treaty of Ghent to end the War of 1812. Published during the Era of Good Feelings and the development of the Monroe Doctrine, Torres’s Exposition illustrates national as well as hemispheric imaginaries, reminding us that Latina/o and U.S. identities were interdependent even at the time of early nationalism.
Scholars and activists alike have long noted the ways in which the rhetoric of American independence informed subsequent revolutionary politics, from the decades following the War of Independence to our own time. Here, I examine how the liberatory and reactionary gestures of this rhetoric are not mutually exclusive and argue that the mutual imbrication of Latino and U.S. revolutionary rhetoric urges us to map the transnational influence in independence movements as neither linear nor unidirectional. That is, reading Torres alongside borderlands theory corrects a significant and longstanding misperception: Rather than regard U.S. revolutionary rhetoric as originary and all that follows as secondary, rather than consider influence as always moving southward, my reading of Torres highlights how revolutionary rhetoric and its cultural influence crisscross South and North, Latino and Anglo cultures.5
We typically think of U.S. independence as beginning circa 1776 and ending with the founding of the nation. However, a hemispheric examination of independence literatures across the Americas reveals how the work of U.S. independence extends into the nineteenth century, as the United States paradoxically seeks to strengthen its economic and political self-determination through relations with emergent independent Spanish American republics. This became particularly crucial after the War of 1812. What I call “the long era of American independence” extends our chronology of independence, but it also expands it geographically to consider independence from a hemispheric perspective, spanning Philadelphia to Spanish America’s Filadelfia.
Here, I use the term Filadelphia to refer to the intersection of the physical city and the cultural imaginary of the city in Spanish American circles; the term highlights the interplay between Philadelphia and Filadelfia. Filadelphia is the site where two concurrent cultural movements occurred: what Nancy Vogeley in The Bookrunner refers to as a “Hispanic vogue” for Spanish-language and Spanish American novels, grammars, and political and philosophical treatises, and what Rodrigo Lazo, following the Cuban exile José María Heredia, calls la famosa Filadelfia, which refers not only to the city itself but also to its “symbolic power” as a site of resistance and Enlightenment.6 This Filadelfia also refers to the city’s “multilingual history of hemispheric relations” that “disrupt[s] the city by shifting it away from its nationalist associations.”7 Though it is far from geographic borderlands, Filadelphia operates as a kind of borderland where U.S. interest and fascination with Latin America mixes with Latin American fascination with and interest in the United States, particularly around the idea of hemispheric independence. Moreover, the Spanish Inquisition’s restrictions on the publication and circulation of texts considered anti-government and heretical encouraged Spanish American authors to look elsewhere for the publication of these materials. With the relative decline of Philadelphia’s prominence in the United States, including the move of the capital to Washington and the increasing significance of other cities such as New York and Baltimore, Philadelphia’s printers and journalists had excess resources with which to support Spanish-language publications and literature related to Spanish American independence. As a result, Philadelphia (and Filadelphia) became an offshore capital of sorts for the Spanish American independence movement, predicated not only on Spanish Americans’ need for access to publication and circulation but also, and of more interest to us here, on U.S. Americans’ need to continue to have cultural and revolutionary relevance.
Filadelphia as borderland challenges national divisions of space and time; it reveals a multidirectional temporality of independence across the Americas rather than focus on discrete nation-states. In Filadelphia, the independence movement indexed by 1776 has yet to be completed; it is carried on by printers, writers, and politicians who have transferred their ideals for U.S. independence in the eighteenth century to Spanish America in the nineteenth. The critical concept of the borderlands also questions the relationship between center and periphery that informs colonial and early national histories. Though we typically consider nineteenth-century Philadelphia a center and not a periphery, reading Filadelphia as one of several sites of Latin American independence highlights how, in relation to the United States, its centrality shifts in two significant ways at the same time: The city is losing its relative centrality in U.S. politics, culture, and printing, giving way to other central cities such as Washington, Boston, and New York; Filadelphia serves as a “peripheral center” for the newly emergent and as yet to emerge Latin American republics Colombia, Mexico, and Cuba, among others.
I read Filadelphia as “on the border of independence” in order to recognize the mutual dependencies and the unraveling histories that inform the national foundations across the Americas in the nineteenth century. I want to hold in place the Spanish “al borde de la independencia” to describe this tension. In Spanish, the sense of “on the border” merges with being “on the verge.” In a colloquial use, most famously Pedro Almódovar’s Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), “al borde” in Spanish signifies being on the verge of something undesirable. The sense of anxiety that “al borde” signifies, along with its conflation of border and verge, is useful here: the anxiety about Latin America being “al borde de la independencia,” of whether Spanish Americans were capable of self-government, was a strong motivator for action, for both those in favor of and those against independence. Places like Philadelphia allowed for the examination, articulation, and mitigation of those fears, as did the work of transcultural interlocutors such as Torres. Moreover, the conflation of space and time that the phrase “al borde” offers is particularly apposite for our reading of Torres and of Filadelphia: Filadelphia serves as a spatial and cultural “borderland” for Latin and U.S. American republicans; it also serves as a temporal borderland between trans-American coloniality and monarchy and between republicanism and postcoloniality (in addition to U.S. imperialism). Filadelphia is also on the border of independence because it points to the limits of independence, to the spaces where American national identities are developed through cross-cultural networks, translation, and exchange.
Torres’s arrival in Philadelphia in the 1790s coincided with an increase in inter-American trade between the United States and the Spanish colonies. Merchants like the Stoughton brothers of New York and Boston, who were also Spanish consuls, coordinated U.S. commerce with Havana, Buenos Aires, Cartagena, and other Spanish American ports. Even then, U.S. commercial interests acknowledged the usefulness of inter-American trade. For example, Spain’s diminishing ability to provide supplies for her colonies encouraged the United States to export goods to Spanish colonies. At the same time, loopholes in anti-slavery trade laws, combined with a blatant disregard for them, furthered the import of Africans to the United States on Spanish American ships. This last example, of course, should warn us against viewing inter-American trade as simply a manifestation of revolutionary ideals.
In his life and work, Torres served as an interlocutor between the United States and the Spanish colonies working to gain independence. He forged relationships with prominent and influential U.S. Americans to increase their support for Spanish American independence. These included statesmen such as Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, and James Monroe and merchants such as Jacob Idler and Stephen Girard of Philadelphia.8 Torres was also acquainted with journalists such as the influential Democratic-Republicans William Duane, Baptis Irvine, and Hezekiah Niles, all of whom encouraged the publication of his columns in Aurora and other newspapers. He was an early but influential Latin American member of the Freemasons.9 In addition to such formal relationships, Torres hosted gatherings at his home, where U.S. and Latin American writers, investors, and political activists met for strategy sessions and discussions of political and intellectual matters.10
These ties allowed Torres to better understand U.S. perspectives and to give U.S. Americans at least initial access to Spanish American ideas and culture. While developing these ties, Torres also continued to nurture his relationships with other Spanish Americans both in the United States and elsewhere. Historians have recently discovered evidence that Torres met Francisco de Miranda during his famous 1805 visit and that he helped Miranda organize the 1806 expedition to South America. We also know that he was acquainted with Simón Bolívar and organized a junta to overthrow Royalists in New Spain with Mariano Montilla and Pedro José Gaul in 1816.11 Torres was also acquainted with the influential Dominican friar José Servando Teresa de Mier Noriega y Guerra, who stayed with Torres during his extended visit to Philadelphia. Torres assisted Mier in publishing pamphlets and introduced him to Henry Marie Brackenridge, then alcalde of Pensacola.12 Torres served as a bridge between the United States and Latin America, influencing Latin Americans like Mier away from monarchism and toward republicanism and urging U.S. Americans like Madison and Monroe to consider Latin America as nascent republics with which the United States should form partnerships.13 In an instance both symbolic and material, Torres assisted the trade of Venezuelan tobacco for U.S. gunpowder.14 Torres’s exile in Philadelphia, rather than position him outside the site of Spanish American revolution, presented an alternate, complementary locus to the fight for independence. Evidence of this exists in the fact that, in 1814 (eighteen years after Torres had been living in exile in Philadelphia), Spanish authorities made an unsuccessful assassination attempt against his life.15
Torres’s connections and his publications indicate that his work was relatively successful and that there was U.S. support for Spanish American independence before official recognition. Torres was instrumental in bringing about this formal recognition in 1822, once Florida became an official territory of the United States. Interest and support for the independent Latin American republics was also predicated by U.S. interest in commercial and political negotiations with other nations, particularly in this case with Britain and Spain. The United States supported revolutionaries who displayed allegiance to the United States and to its plans for hemispheric negotiations, and Torres’s argument in favor of commerce with Spanish America (and its argument for Spanish American independence) echoes these interests, presaging U.S. interest in Latin America in centuries to come.
In addition to working as one of the first Spanish-language teachers in the United States, Torres published English- and Spanish-language articles and essays on independence and international relations in the United States, translated and published monographs in both languages, and co-edited one of the earliest Spanish grammars published in the United States: Dufief’s Nature Displayed in Her Mode of Teaching Language to Man . . . (1811).16 The grammar is a Spanish-language adaptation of a French-language grammar by the same title that was popular at the time. Torres’s work in publishing, writing, and language instruction illustrate his work as one of cultural translation, which shapes his understanding of Spanish American independence and informs his contributions to that project. That the first Latin American diplomat was also one of the earliest Spanish-language teachers in the United States is more than mere coincidence: It reflects a longstanding interest in and need for what we now call “cultural literacy,” a need that can be traced at least as far back as Thomas Jefferson’s 1779 arguments for the teaching of Spanish and for establishing the nation’s first modern languages program at the College of William and Mary.17 These translations and bilingual negotiations were not (of course) purely cultural: They also speak to the economic and political forces that informed calls for learning Spanish and developing relations with Spanish America.
The pedagogy behind Dufief’s Nature Displayed is of particular interest here: Not only does the grammar seek to be an early introduction to the Spanish language for U.S. Americans; it also claims to be “so very economical, that a liberal education can be afforded even to the poorest of mankind; by which it is obtained the great desideratum of enabled nations to arrive at the highest degree of mental perfection.”18 The claim’s assertions of economy, common sense, and universality, influenced by Enlightenment political and economic philosophy, also align with Torres’s own emphases in developing hemispheric relations through writing and publishing. The grammar’s examples, like those of the Exposition, are practical and seem to offer an objective and utilitarian argument for broadening U.S. understanding of the Spanish language and of Latin America. This utilitarianism reflects the transnational Enlightenment ideals of the time, again associated often with Benjamin Franklin. They also indicate how cross-cultural learning and exchange were not ends in themselves: They were necessary for national growth.
Torres’s cross-cultural negotiations highlight how Latin American interests were dependent on the United States and the ways in which the U.S. national imaginary was dependent on Latin American independence for its own development in the early nineteenth century. This second point is of greater interest here, because it reverses the relationship of dependency as typically regarded in the hemisphere: Mutual imbrication challenges the idea that Latin American states simply modeled themselves on the United States. As I note below regarding the appellation of Torres as the “Franklin of the southern world,” this comparison, when read closely and critically, tells us more about U.S. reliance on Latin America than the opposite.
The bicultural relations that developed in Filadelphia also challenge the presumed progression from the age of Enlightenment to the age of expansion as traditional Anglo historiography tells it, as one of originating in the thirteen colonies (but especially Massachusetts and Pennsylvania) and extending southward and westward to the rest of the hemisphere. As I discuss below, Torres’s Exposition positions Spanish America as unique in the world, arguing that in it one can find all of the best that the rest of the world can offer. It also promotes Spanish-American exports to the United States as a means of independence. The contradictions inherent in both of these tenets of Torres’s argument offer an early version of the contradictions and effacements that continue to inform Latin American–U.S. relations to this day, including NAFTA and post-NAFTA economics, im/migration and labor issues, and anti-Latino mythologies about the monocultural origins of the United States.
Torres’s An Exposition of the Commerce of Spanish America; with Some Observations Upon Its Importance to the United States (1816) was published by George Palmer, an active Philadelphia printer who published works on politics and history. Torres’s Exposition presumes to give its readers an overview of trade relations; 84 of its 119 pages list tables detailing various exchanges of currency and goods for Spain, France, and the United States. These are introduced with an essay advocating U.S. trade with Spanish America and, implicitly, Spanish American independence from Spain. Though Torres’s Exposition announces itself as an economic and commercial work, the first sentence emphasizes its broader applicability: “The different matters of this work, destined to guide merchants in their commercial operations, will also be very useful to any one who buys, sells, or exchanges in any way: to the farmer and to the insurer, to the banker and to the statesman.”19 The universal applicability as stated in Torres’s Introduction calls to mind the vision of Torres as “the friend of all America, of humanity, and virtue,” William Duane expresses in a letter dated July 15, 1822, to James Monroe upon announcement of Torres’s death.20 Consistently throughout the Exposition, Torres highlights how his economic information will benefit more than just merchants, that the manual has broader implications for independence.
The manual includes a number of “operations,” or examples of trade transactions, which offer not only mathematical equations but also written commentary to illustrate the potential outcome of exchange. The operations develop an overall theme of resulting gains in the United States, as seen in the operation detailing the trade of 1,000 Spanish ounces of silver for a gain of $8.47. These operations offer readers a sense of the possibilities of trade relations with Spanish America; they allow readers to imagine commercial exchanges and their outcomes before materially engaging in or even pursuing them. The idea of trading with Spanish America mitigates the anxieties that merchants (and farmers, statesmen, and others) might feel about opening new trade relations. That these operations are so numerous and diverse illustrates how Torres is attempting to walk readers through the many possibilities of trade with Spanish America and its presumed concomitant risk.
The mitigation of anxiety is introduced more explicitly in the preceding essay, where Torres associates the same kind of rhetorical assurance by noting the consistent value of Spanish American minerals. According to Torres, precious metals are “not only the representatives, but the regulators and the equivalents of every other thing; a quality very contrary to the nature of paper money, whose value is always regulated by the degree of confidence the public place in it.” He also reminds readers that precious metals “increase . . . the real capital of a nation, and in the same proportion its power.” In this claim, Torres invites and encourages other nations—particularly the United States—to acquire Spanish American specie for their own profits: It is the regulator of all other trade. Because he makes this claim in order to argue that the United States acquire Spanish American specie, Spanish American independence as Torres describes it here will result in foreign (U.S.) rather than domestic profit. According to Torres, precious metals serve a crucial purpose in global trade relations.
In highlighting that trade with Spanish America would benefit the United States, and in predicating Spanish American independence on that trade and on that benefit to the United States, Torres’s argument foreshadows the places where liberal (or neoliberal) and dependency economics might overlap, despite their presumed distinction. Spanish America will gain materially through export, and thus it will achieve economic independence from Spain, but according to Torres, Spanish America will do so by giving away to other nations (particularly the United States) precisely what is most valuable in a global market. Torres’s transnational view of independence and of interest, though, explicitly obscures this issue, focusing as it does on the significance of independence to other nations.
Torres’s tables represent exchange, which makes an explicit point that Spanish American goods are admissible into the market with U.S. dollars and goods. They illustrate the broader welcome into republicanism and global trade that Torres’s essay makes more explicit, countering assumptions that Spanish America is stuck in the past. At the same time, the exchange of goods in the tables, more often than not, results in a profit for the United States. Torres’s commercial interests primarily express themselves in the copious attention and elaborate detail given to monetary values, measurements, and weights. More than providing a handbook for commerce, the sense of assurance implied in Torres’s exposition—the presumption is that examples are provided for the most common operations one might encounter—attempts to inspire confidence in such transactions, particularly in regards to benefits to the United States.
In addition to arguing that Spanish America might offer material gains to other countries, Torres bases the significance of emerging Spanish American independence on universal values. Here, Torres conceptualizes Spanish America as a repository of the best that the rest of the world has to offer and as completely unique in that regard. The paradox of universalism and exceptionalism is not new in Torres; it informs the concept of America from the seventeenth century onward.21 In his introduction to Spanish America’s “Situation, Government, Soil, Climate, Productions, etc.,” Torres claims that Spanish America “affords all the different productions of other continents, including those of Asia . . . and yields, in the vegetable and mineral kingdoms, many productions which are peculiar to this continent.”22 According to Torres, Spanish America can claim these natural resources as well as a “diversity of climates . . . from the most intense heat to ice.”23 Appealing to U.S. statesmen and merchants, he posits Spanish America as a microcosm, one in which “all nations . . . partake directly of the rich commerce.”24 Torres’ rhetorical goals shape the idea of Spanish America his Exposition presumes to introduce. He then expands this universal appeal in a discussion of Spanish American geography and in particular of the Spanish Main.
In what might be called the apex of his introductory essay, Torres defines Spanish America as “the centre between Asia, Europe, and the United States, through which Asia is nearer to Europe and the United States several thousands of miles by the communication between the two great oceans.”25 Though the statement might be considered accurate as it refers to the Isthmus of Panama, Torres’s location of this as central is noteworthy: It presumes to bring Latin America out of the margins of the global marketplace and position it as its core, raising its global significance. However, as with the argument about the significance of Spanish American minerals, the statement is predicated on a contradiction: The centrality of the Spanish Main and by extension (according to Torres) of Spanish America is defined by its ability to connect other centers of economic and political wealth to each other.
Like Torres’s position as interlocutor in Filadelphia, this conflation of core and periphery in Torres’s mapping of Spanish America complicates the distinction between Anglo and Latin Americas, predicating Spanish American independence on U.S. investment while yoking U.S. strength to Spanish American independence and development, ultimately resulting in interdependence. It is this blurring and crisscrossing of national and cultural identities and power relations that invite a reading of Torres through the critical concept of the border, that space which disrupts binaries, including those of core and periphery. One of Torres’s main arguments for U.S. and other global investment in Spanish America is its central position, but this central position as Torres articulates it is primarily as a conduit that serves other nations. In Torres’s view, Spanish America is both center and margin at once. That this view is articulated in Filadelphia, through Filadelphia publishers and because of Filadelphia transnational networks, means that this centrality/peripherality of Spanish America is coterminous with that of the Pennsylvania city.
Torres’s synchrony with U.S. identity seems to have been championed by those whose own relationship to the United States was complicated, who had a singular investment in Spanish American independence as one that would continue their own perceived thwarted republicanism. William Duane, a staunch Jeffersonian Democrat of Irish birth who had been tried under both the Alien Act and the Act of Sedition, noted in a letter dated October 25, 1814, recommending Torres as a cultural liaison to Secretary of State James Monroe, that Torres’s “practical experience” and “principles and views” are “perfectly in the Spirit of our Government.”26 At the time of his death, obituaries in dozens of U.S. newspapers praised his life’s work as instrumental to the burgeoning friendship between the Americas North and South, or as William Duane described Torres in his obituary, the “Franklin of the southern world.”
The comparison to Franklin is something that might have occurred to Torres himself. His Exposition of the Commerce of Spanish America delivers the majority of its argument through numerical data: More than 80 of the publication’s 110 pages are filled with charts and transactions. This calls to mind Franklin, who in works such as Poor Richard’s Almanack displays what Paul Pasles in his mathematical biography calls Franklin’s “quantitative reasoning.”27 The tables in Torres’s Exposition show quantitative and not merely philosophical reasons for U.S. support of Spanish American independence, and it is this form of reasoning that most objectively aligns his insights with U.S. interests.
It is no minor point that Duane notes Torres’s importance by raising the specter of U.S. revolution.28 Duane knew firsthand how the era of Federalist national constitution fostered the curtailment of revolutionary impulses, and his interest in Spanish American independence continued his earlier revolutionary ideals. Duane’s view locates Torres within a trans-American republic of letters, one in which Spanish-speaking and English-speaking Americans participated through various literary, political, and cultural networks.29 This republicanism is evident in other of Torres’s publications, such as the 1812 Manual de un Republicano para el uso de un Pueblo libre, which supported U.S. political practices and purported to translate Rousseauean views of government for the burgeoning republics of the South. Torres’s transnational republicanism is also evident in his work for U.S. newspapers, in particular the Philadelphia Aurora, which he possibly edited. The Aurora, which Duane edited first with Benjamin Bache and then alone (if not with Torres) after Bache’s death, continued to publicize Anti-Federalist and Jeffersonian appeals against strong centralized governments through the Federalist period and onward.30 A sense of Torres’s legacy for Duane is apparent in the newspaper itself. For a “rabble rouser” like Duane, the freedom of the revolution had been contained to a certain extent with the ratification of the Constitution. Hence, the aspirations for and possibility of American revolution were transported or transposed southward onto Spanish America. The figure of Spanish America and its accompanying emblems such as Torres served as repositories for the revolutionary ideals of North American radicals such as Duane. This is part of a larger phenomenon, in which U.S. Americans depend on Latin American independence movements in part in order to address their own sense of unfinished revolution.31 The sense of unfinished revolution was not the only reason for U.S. investment in Latin American independence, and it was not true for all U.S. Americans. But it does inform much of the work and spirit of men like Duane, who were disillusioned with the political climate of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is significant for writers and thinkers in Philadelphia, the center of republican thought that had come to be supplanted by Federalism and by other centers such as Washington, D.C.
At the same time, the negotiation between difference and sameness is necessary for the economic relationships that Latin Americans and U.S. Americans are developing at the time. The “modern world-system” that continues to develop during and informs the long age of American independence, Immanuel Wallerstein reminds us, puts nations in the position of needing to trade with other nations for their own national growth and stability.32 Because of this, nations also cannot become too proximate: Cultural ideals of U.S. exceptionalism and prominence belie the interdependence on which U.S. expansion depends. Torres’s Exposition reflects and articulates these contradictions in very interesting ways. Torres postulates the significance of Spanish America as important to U.S. wealth, a framework that suggests Spanish America might ultimately and paradoxically give away what gives it value, while the value is predicated on the basis of potential exchange. At the same time, the indeterminacy exhibited through Torres and respondents to him such as Duane caution us to read this as an early version of what comes to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, as some scholars have suggested.33
Torres’s descriptions of Spanish America in An Exposition and his self-positioning in Filadelphia contributed to assumptions that Spanish American nations in their independence would and should reflect the ideals of other nations, particularly the United States. As such, Torres’s work seems to invite a “control through sameness” that the historian Eldon Kenworthy later calls the “America/Américas” myth, which is “a versatile strategy of control that emphasizes identity.”34 However, Torres’s expression of this cannot simply be named an instance of U.S. “control”; this reading is complicated first by the fact that this particular articulation of identity stems from a Latin American argument in favor of independence and second by the milieu in which Torres works and the U.S.–Latin American interdependency that informs it. Such interdependency troubles the distinction between same and different, between Spanish America and the United States. As I have argued above, the political and cultural diplomacy that emerges in Filadelphia through figures like Torres illustrates U.S. reliance on Latin America, reversing our understanding of hemispheric influence and allowing us to correct present misapprehensions as we return toward a Latino nineteenth century.
1 Manuel Torres, An Exposition of the Commerce of Spanish America, With Some Observations Upon Its Importance to the United States (Philadelphia: G. Palmer, 1816).
2 See Charles H. Bowman Jr., “The Activities of Manuel Torres as Purchasing Agent, 1820–1821.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 48:2 (May 1968) 234–46 and “Manuel Torres, A Spanish American Patriot in Philadelphia, 1796–1822.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 94 (1970) 26–53.
3 William Duane, “Death of Mr. Torres.” Philadelphia Aurora, reprinted in Niles’ Weekly Register July 16, 1822.
4 See Anna Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4. Brickhouse cites Nicolás García Samudio, La Independencia de Hispanoamérica (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1945), 171–78.
5 John Carlos Rowe, among others, has recalled the ways in which the rhetoric of the American revolution argues that “the United States in the nineteenth century employed the rhetoric of ‘emancipation’ derived from the American Revolution to promise, often falsely, various subaltern groups—African Americans, Native Americans, Chinese Americans, Latin Americans, European Americans, and women—the hope of eventual social justice tied inextricably to national progress and American individualism.” See Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5.
6 Nancy Vogeley, The Bookrunner: A History of Inter-American Relations—Print, Politics, and Commerce in the United States and Mexico, 1800–1830 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2011), 42; and Rodrigo Lazo, “La Famosa Filadelfia: The Hemispheric American City and Constitutional Debates.” Hemispheric American Studies, ed. Caroline Levander and Robert S. Levine. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 57.
7 Lazo 69 and 70.
8 Bowman 234 and 237.
9 Vogeley 84.
10 Bowman, “A Spanish American Patriot,” 34.
11 Ibid., 31 and 45.
12 Bowman, “Purchasing Agent,” 18–22. According to Vogeley, Torres’s influence on Mier was extensive and even unintentional, as some of the books that most influenced Mier’s later work were stolen from Torres’s library. Vogeley 84.
13 Vogeley 86n229.
14 Vogeley n229, referencing Bowman.
15 Bowman, “A Spanish American Patriot,” 39.
16 Manuel Torres and L. Hargous, Dufief’s Nature Displayed in Her Mode of Teaching Language to Man (Philadelphia: T. & G. Palmer, 1811).
17 R. Merritt Cox, “Spain and the Founding Fathers.” The Modern Language Journal. 60:3 (March 1976) 101–9.
18 Torres and Hargous, Dufief, title page.
19 Torres, Exposition, 1.
20 Qtd. in Bowman, “Purchasing Agent,” 246.
21 See Emily García, “‘The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind’: American Universalism and Exceptionalism in the Early Nation,” American Exceptionalisms, ed. Sylvia Söderlind and James Taylor Carson (Albany: SUNY Press, 2011), 51–70.
22 Torres, Exposition, 7.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 5.
25 Ibid., 17.
26 Qtd. in Bowman, “Spanish American Patriot,” 40.
27 Paul C. Pasles, Benjamin Franklin’s Numbers: An Unsung Mathematical Odyssey. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 1–19.
28 The comparison recalls Jesse Alemán’s discussion of the uncanny as it figures in the “shared revolutionary histories” between Mexico and the United States, as it “collapses the otherwise clear distinctions between native and foreigner, domestic and international, America and América, making Mexico in particular a strangely familiar place that troubles the trans-American imaginary of the United States.” The Torres/Franklin comparison raises the spectre of revolution in similar ways that mark Spanish America as “strangely familiar.” Jesse Alemán, “The Other Country: Mexico, the United States, and the Gothic History of Conquest.” American Literary History 18:3 (Fall 2006), 406–26, 77.
29 For a broader history of these trans-American literary networks, see Brickhouse and Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 7–19.
30 Coronado, following Bowman and García Samudio, mentions the possibility that Duane had helped “reorganize” the Aurora, 478n3.
31 Emily García, “Novel Diplomacies: Henry Marie Brackenridge’s Voyage to South America (1819) and Inter-American Revolutionary Literature.” Literature in the Early American Republic 3 (April 2011): 145–71.
32 Immananuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s–1840s (Burlington, Mass.: Academic Press, 1989). For Wallerstein’s treatment of the modern world-system in connection with the period examined here, see Volume III of Wallerstein’s work.
33 For example, Anna Brickhouse, following the popular historian and chancellor at the Colombian Consulate General Nicolás García Samudio, has suggested that Torres may have been a significant influence on James Monroe and John Quincy Adams in drafting the economic and ideological policy. See Brickhouse, 3.
34 Eldon Kenworthy, America/Américas: Myth in the Making of U.S. Policy toward Latin America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 37.