Robert McKee Irwin
How to talk about “Latino” literature in a period that predates the general usage of the term as a category of cultural production or identity? If there is likely to be a general consensus on whether a given literary text might be categorized as Latino in the early twenty-first century, applying this category to another historical context is in itself an exercise that calls for definition. For example, one might argue that José Martí, who lived fourteen years in New York City and wrote many of his most acclaimed works from the United States, was a proto-Latino and that his Versos sencillos and various essays (e.g., “Nuestra América”) and crónicas (e.g., “Coney Island”) can therefore be categorized as Latino writing,1 or that John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta was a Latino novel because its protagonist, who was born in Mexico but lived out the last and most historically significant years of his life in the United States, was a proto-Latino. But either case might produce detractors, as Martí is best known as a Cuban writer and is indeed a symbol of Cuban nationalism, and Ridge, who was part Cherokee, is most often seen as a foundational figure of Native American literature as his Murieta novel was the first novel published in English by a Native American author.
Another case of interest might be that of what might be deemed the first Mexican novel set in the borderlands, La campana de la misión, first drafted by José María Esteva in 1858 and published in his native Xalapa, Veracruz, in 1894. It recounts the shipwreck of Mexican travelers on their way to San Francisco, leaving a young couple stranded in the desert terrain of the Baja California peninsula. They frantically ring the bell of the abandoned San Borja Mission in vain, and after they lose hope for rescue, the romantic hero, Eduardo, sets off alone in search of help. He perishes in a storm, and his fiancée, Laura, left alone in the abandoned mission, is never heard from again. The plot is not one of migration, but the story of Mexican travelers enduring perilous conditions and eventually dying while trying to get to California might be thought of as anticipating the life stories of the many undocumented migrants who in recent decades have died trying to reach the United States. The novel’s protagonists are neither impoverished nor uneducated, but rather of Mexico’s elite; Laura and Eduardo, a poet, hoped to reach San Francisco, where Laura’s father had launched a business. Yet they are almost Latinos: Had La campana’s author been a Californio, or had its plot led its romantic protagonists to settle in San Francisco, a case might be made for classifying this as an early Latino novel. La campana has never been categorized in this way, nor has anyone ever identified it as a precursor to the genre as neither its author nor its protagonists ever lived in the United States. Indeed, Esteva, who was from Veracruz, when exiled from Mexico for having collaborated with the government of Emperor Maximilian during the French Intervention, fled to Cuba and not the United States, as so many Latin American expatriates did in the nineteenth century.
The case of Chilean Vicente Pérez Rosales, whose Gold Rush memoir is treated by Juan Poblete elsewhere in this volume, likewise fails to fit neatly into the category of Latino author. Even if some of his writings are occasionally anthologized in Latino literature collections (for example, in Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California, edited by Rick Heide), he remains known to his readers, including those reading him in such anthologies, as a “Chilean” and not a “Latino” author. If studies on contemporary Latino cultural production take as a starting point the self-evident nature of the appropriateness (i.e., the Latinidad) of their objects of study, studies focused on the nineteenth century, which can consider Latino subjects only through anachronisms and extrapolations, are forced to think carefully about the notions on which such terms (Latino subject, Latinidad, Latino literature) are based. Whether or not Vicente Pérez Rosales ought to be thought of as a Latino is not really of great importance, however. Instead, what this volume seeks is to think beyond rigid categories in order to better understand the history of race and racialization, migration and citizenship, and national and transnational identity in the United States.
I will therefore take a moment to try and define what seems to be self-evident: how the notion of Latino might be distinguished from a separate category of Latin American. The notion of Latin American is reasonably clear for a discussion in a context of migration, especially when posited in opposition to U.S. American. There is an Anglophone America that is defined in contrast with what José Martí called “Nuestra América.” The opposition, of course, breaks down in the context of the notion of Latino America, which describes identities and cultural contexts that cross territorial divides. If the border between Mexico and the United States separates U.S. America from Latin America, the physical and cultural presence of Latin Americans in the United States establishes a separate category of identity and culture that operates both within and in opposition to each of the other two: the Latino.
The distinction between Latino and Latin American has to do with territoriality but also with subjectivity.2 A Latin American who visits the United States does not become a Latino by her mere fleeting presence in U.S. territory, whereas an individual who was born in Latin America but comes to the United States as an infant and lives the rest of his life in the United States may not identify as Latin American at all, but only as Latino. While some Latinos living in the United States may simultaneously retain their Latino American identity to some degree, for those born in Latin America who later relocate to the United States, there must be some dividing line to determine when a Latin American may become a Latino. Does it happen after a period of time? Does it have more to do with acts of assimilation, or with a desire to break to some degree with one’s Latin American roots and establish oneself in the United States? Is it a class-based identification open to only certain immigrants? Why is it that Mexican immigrant Alurista is so profoundly Latino, while Isabel Allende, who has lived in the United States for more than twenty years, still identifies as Chilean, despite having lived fewer years of her life in Chile? Paul Allatson’s Key Terms in Latino/a Cultural and Literary Studies defines a Latino/a as “the broad panethnic identity that includes [ . . . ] any citizen or resident [of the United States] with Latin American heritage.”3 Thus it would seem that identity is key: Once a Latin American–born immigrant to the United States is ready to assume a U.S.-based identity, letting go (of course not completely) of a feeling of belonging to a birth country enough to set down roots as a racialized minority in the United States, she then becomes Latino. But for the immigrant, does this conversion happen at a particular moment, or is it better understood as a process? To help think about this last question, we’ll begin with another one: What happens to a Latin American who desires to immigrate to, and establish himself as a resident in, the United States and begins to do so but ultimately cannot? Is this category of person, one whose process of becoming Latino is thwarted, of interest to Latino studies? It would seem that these truncated, disrupted, obstructed Latinidades call attention to the precariousness of the category for many, and the deeply embedded bigotry that continues to marginalize Latinos in the United States, even today as they enter ever more prominently and in greater numbers into the mainstream of national culture.
I turn to the liminal category of “almost immigrant” or failed immigrant in order to point to the stories of migration we do not know so well—and the gap here lies not only in Latino studies, but in American and Latin American studies as well—stories of disrupted immigration, stories that have become increasingly relevant in our current moment of xenophobia and border violence. I am thinking, for example, of the stories we will never hear told of the seventy-two “illegal immigrants” (as they were identified by Mexican authorities), fifty-eight men and fourteen women from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, and Ecuador, who were massacred, apparently by the Zetas drug cartel, in Tamaulipas in August 2010. This story made international headlines, although it had not been the first such mass killing of migrants in Mexico: previous, less-publicized cases include those of the discovery of fifty-five bodies in an abandoned mine in Taxco, and of fifty-one bodies recovered from near a trash dump in the outskirts of Monterrey.4 Theirs are lost stories of those who perhaps dreamed of becoming Latinos but never had the chance to claim this identity.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has been deporting immigrants in record numbers. The annual number of deportations has been rising steadily over the past thirty years, from only about 18,000 in 1980, to about 30,000 in 1990, to more than 188,000 in 2000, to 387,242 in 2010.5 The year 2011 saw a record number of 396,906 deportations, a figure that rose to 409,849 in 2012, as the Obama administration continues to strive to meet a quota of 400,000 deportations per year.6 Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of immigrants—476,000 in 2010—left the United States “voluntarily”—that is, at the request of the Department of Homeland Security, but without an official removal order. ICE Director John Morton brags in a report that in 2010, ICE arrested a record number of employers for hiring undocumented immigrants, and that workplace inspections (more commonly known as “raids”) were running at record levels in 2011, part of his “record-breaking immigration enforcement strategies” designed to “help strengthen and secure our homeland.”7 Meanwhile, in 2012, an election year in which campaign rhetoric included a proposal to construct an electrified fence along the border in order to execute instantly anyone trying to sneak across, deaths among undocumented immigrants attempting to cross the border (usually due to hypothermia, but also attributed to snake bites, heart attacks, traffic accidents, or violent crime) continue to be a major problem. Reports based on data from 2010 note that “although the number of people attempting to cross the United States–Mexico border illegally has declined in recent years, the number of unauthorized migrants found dead continues to increase” as immigrants avoid better-known (and -patrolled) crossing points, instead following more remote and dangerous routes through the desert.8
These migrants’ struggles of, to use ICE terminology, “removal” (formal deportation) or “return” (voluntary departure)—or Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign buzzword self-deportation—or even death are stories about which we hear little. We know that hundreds of thousands of immigrants, most of them Mexican (73 percent of removals and 75 percent of returns in 2010), are being hunted down, incarcerated in ICE’s outsourced and mostly for-profit private prisons, and tossed back across the border, but we learn little about their stories through Latino (or American or Latin American) literature. These temporary migrants, these almost-Latinos, are liminal figures who exist only in the interstices of the cultural categories that structure academic knowledge. Migrants such as those captured by ICE do get across the border, as Pérez Rosales did, but get spit back where they came from. In Mexico, for example, such returnees may be branded back in Mexico as pochos, losing as it were some essential piece of their Mexican identity, but they are almost never made part of a Latinidad that grants them a prominent place in Latino literature.
While the California Gold Rush was a unique historical circumstance, in a way it set the tone for later waves of migrations. The feelings of hope, trepidation, and excitement expressed by Pérez Rosales upon arriving in San Francisco in February 1849 are commonplace in Latino literature that recounts experiences of immigration to the United States. Similarly, the various tribulations experienced by Pérez Rosales, such as the sacking of Little Chile by Yankee marauders, might offer some parallelisms to those lived by contemporary Latin American immigrants to the United States, as esthetically reconstructed through Latino narrative. However, Pérez Rosales’s violent displacement from California after less than a year, and his subsequent reinsertion into Chilean society a few months later, is ultimately what defines his story as one of travel and not of migration.
He writes of his re-accommodation back in Chile: “On my downward path I had reached the lowest rungs on the fragile ladder of fortune; in California I had reached what seemed to me the lowest rung of all, that of personal service as a waiter, and it never occurred to me that an even lower one remained for me to tread, that of a minor civil servant!”9 While his tone is ironic, there is a story of involuntary displacement that he mostly elides. His tragic and somewhat shameful return trip to Chile is told in fewer than two pages—in deep contrast with his upbeat recounting of his voluntary voyage to and arrival in San Francisco, material enough for two entire chapters, or 28 pages. And this latter tale of removal is not a common trope of Latino literature, the details of which remain mostly outside of the way we think of the experience of migration in the Americas. We know, for example, that 72 migrants were executed in Tamaulipas and that 400,000 immigrants were deported each year from 2012 to 2014, but we don’t know their stories.
Vicente Pérez Rosales’s memoirs provide an early portrait of what California represented to those arriving in the United States from Latin America. The setting, of course, is the Gold Rush, the first moment of the history of California as a U.S. territory, a history propelled by massive immigration, from the Anglophone east, the Asian Pacific west, and, especially, the Spanish-speaking South. Pérez Rosales’s memoirs, parts of which were written as early as 1849, were published for the first time as a part of Recuerdos del pasado in Chile in 1882 and later in an unabridged form as Diario de un viaje a California 1848–1849 in a limited edition (one hundred copies) in Chile in 1949 and in more widely available edition only in 2007. The former text was translated into English as Times Gone By in 2003.
Let me begin with a passage from Times Gone By that expresses the hopes and fears of those coming to Gold Rush–era California:
California was an unknown country, almost a desert, full of dangers, and prey to epidemic diseases . . . personal security could be found only in the barrel of a gun or at the point of a knife, yet robbery, violence, sickness, death itself were secondary considerations when compared to the seductive gleam. . . . At the moment of departure no one gave a thought to the dangers and travails awaiting us. Unanimously we cheered the fresh breeze that was moving us along, and we lost sight of our native land without revealing with a sigh or tinge of remorse that we understood the magnitude of our collective rashness. (217–18)
The Chileans, who were among the first to set out for California when rumors of the discovery of gold began to circulate in late 1848, had little idea what California would be like, as the former isolated and sparsely populated Mexican territory had only just started to become a destination for travelers of any kind. However, the promise of riches was irresistible for many Chileans, who began reading in local newspaper headlines such as that of a front-page editorial printed in El Comercio of Valparaíso on November 16, “Emigración a California,” that drew attention to the opportunities for enrichment in California and signaled the threat of an impending mass exodus of Chilean adventurers.10
Regardless of the intentions of individual Chilean “argonauts,” those who remained did not assume that Chile might become wealthy when their prodigal sons returned with pockets full of gold but instead worried that their soon-to-be-prosperous compatriots would never return. Even as an anti-emigration drama was staged in Valparaíso titled “Yo no voy a California” (I am not going to California) in late December 1848, newspapers continued to deplore the wave of emigration and the resultant loss of population (estimated already at 2,000), cash (emigrants had left with more than a million pesos), and potential income (estimated at more than $6 million).11 The very same day as the publication of an editorial in El Mercurio announcing the statistics cited above and the premier of the play, December 28, 1848, Vicente Pérez Rosales embarked for California, arriving in San Francisco on February 18 of the following year as one of the first “49ers.” Pérez Rosales writes: “Once we had passed through the thick low lying fog that like a curtain almost always hangs over that place, . . . our eyes fell on the most beautiful view that could be offered them at so difficult a moment . . . the straits of the Golden Gate, which, glorious and imposing, seemed to be opening wide to receive us. We had reached California!” (222–23). His optimism was shared by his fellow-travelers: “For me good fortune has always been a delusion, but this did not keep me from sharing in the general happiness as I stood contentedly contemplating the scene. If an impartial spectator . . . had dropped at that moment from the moon, he could easily have read . . . in each of those agitated hearts: ‘My dream’s come true!’” (226). This enthusiasm, expressed thusly, was an early incarnation of what would later come to be known to so many Latin American emigrants as “the American dream.”
The context appears quite clear. Chileans were not going to California to exploit the land and return home; with a somewhat fantastic aspiration for self-enrichment, they were emigrating. While Pérez Rosales upon embarking on his adventure never makes clear whether he intends to return to Chile (and there is no telling whether or how he edited his diaries upon returning to Chile, where they were later published), these entries express a possibility, a dream, that he would make himself a fortune and a new marvelous life in California.
However, his dreams were not to come true. He soon comes to realize that gold is not readily available for everyone who shows up, and that Chileans, despite their experience and skill as miners, have no advantage whatsoever. As foreigners they find themselves at a distinct disadvantage in a territory newly occupied by a nation that has only just come into its possession and is determined to assert its authority and ownership. Nativism, according to the California historian Leonard Pitt, was “born in the months of 1849 and early 1850 when mining was most individualistic, government most ineffectual, and immigration most rapid.”12 And the immigration of Spanish-speakers (and later Asians) provoked great feelings of xenophobia among Anglo Americans, who marked them as more significantly foreign than, say, European or Australian immigrants. By April 1849, a group of Yankees carried out a local purge “of all Chileans, Mexicans, and Peruvians” on the grounds that they were “trespassers” in the mines.13
While U.S. Americans, fresh from war with Mexico, felt a special need to establish that Mexicans, to whom California had belonged until only a few months earlier, were no longer in charge, and many still saw them as adversaries, the extension of this animosity toward Chileans and other Spanish-speakers seemed to be justified by a cultural similarity: It was too difficult for Anglo Americans to try to differentiate among different groups of Spanish-speakers, who, it was thought, were culturally united through not only language but also religious excess (Catholicism) and a common heritage of Spanish-style colonialism. Not only had the Spaniards notoriously mixed with the indigenous peoples they had conquered, but their homeland had its own history of Moorish invasion that inculcated Arab and African elements into the ethnic bloodline. Writes Pérez Rosales: “The hostility of the common run of Yankees toward the sons of other nations, and most especially toward Chileans, had intensified. Their argument was simple and conclusive: the Chilean descended from the Spaniard, the Spaniard had Moorish blood, therefore the Chilean had to be at the least a Hottentot or at best something very much like the timid and abased Californio” (272).
Eventually driven from the mines by nativist thugs, the Chileans, who had formed their own makeshift settlement in San Francisco known as Chilecito (Little Chile), continued to be harassed and threatened wherever they went. After an unprovoked and violent attack on Little Chile that resulted in bloodshed on both sides, the local English-language newspaper produced headlines proclaiming: “American blood shed by vile Chileans . . . Citizens beware!” (273). Threatened, pursued, assaulted, the Chileans and their desire to make it in the “Golden State” persevered; in Pérez Rosales’s words: “to be sure, they were robbed of all they possessed; but in California that was a matter of no consequence . . . [And] no one favored returning to Chile; instead we unanimously resolved to struggle anew” (273).
Unfortunately, the dream of Vicente Pérez Rosales and other Chileans could ultimately not be sustained. After less than a year in California, Pérez Rosales is finally forced to return when his Little Chile is assaulted by arsonists: “The fire spread in all directions with the same sickening speed with which we sometimes see it spread in Chile in some of our wheat fields at harvest time. In the midst of that immense roaring bonfire, stoked by the explosion of barrels of gunpowder that filled the air with sparks and flaming timbers, everything was soon invaded by burning boards carried by the wind. The fire surrounded us on all sides, and like everyone else we saved ourselves only by the speed of our flight” (294).
Pérez Rosales’s was in the end a travel diary, not a tale of immigration, although it might have been the latter had his luck here been different. Had Pérez Rosales stayed and lived out the rest of his years in the United States, or at least lasted more than a year in California, this text might be read by literary historians as an early precursor of Latino literature. In fact, Marissa López has identified Pérez Rosales precisely in those terms; she does so not by locating him within an imagined community of Spanish-speakers and their progeny who live in the United States with a clearly established minority status but as a part of a “transnational latinidad” that challenges such nationally construed configurations.14 However, in more conventional terms, this text is no more Latino than Humboldt’s travel narratives are Latin American. Instead, Pérez Rosales and many other Chileans of Gold Rush–era California did not “emigrate” as the Chilean press had feared but only visited California. They therefore remained Chilean without ever becoming Chilean American—that is, they are not proto-Latinos, but only almost-Latinos. And as such, their experience models that of many others who have set out for California with optimistic dreams that are shattered as they end up deported, driven back home, or killed. Pérez Rosales was an almost-Latino; indeed, he is a foundational figure of almost-Latino literature.
Latino is an imaginary category that may be understood as a political identity, a market segment, a distinct culture, an ethnicity, or a demographic grouping, but it does not apply to tourists or other short-term visitors to the United States. Objectively, those who manage to stay and find some stability in a new life may be categorized or may identify as Latinos; those who don’t have no choice but to remain Latin Americans. Those who live in the interstices of these two categories without ever managing to fully cross over from the latter into the former represent often painful stories of migration that are rarely considered yet are an important aspect of everyday life in the Americas. Migrants such as the many who get caught by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and are deported, or those who make it to “El Norte” only to find it a hostile environment in which they choose not to stay, or those who die in transit, whether because of harsh conditions of crossing the desert or because of the risks they face in dealing with those on whom they must depend for help along the way are all current-day examples of this pattern.
Pérez Rosales’s “travel diary,” a first-person account about the Chilean minority living in the California Territory in 1849, is normally read both in Chile and in the United States through the category assigned to it by its publishers. For example, the 2007 Chilean edition of Diario de un viaje a California argues that we must “incorporarlo al canon nacional [chileno], lugar que le corresponde” (incorporate it in the Chilean national literary canon, where it belongs),15 while the 2003 English translation of Pérez Rosales’s memoirs is published in Oxford University Press’s “Latin American Library” series, along with works by major figures of Latin American history and literature such as Simón Bolívar, Andrés Bello, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Clorinda Matto de Turner, Cirilo Villaverde, Jose de Alencar, and Ricardo Palma. An earlier 1976 text, We Were 49ers! Chilean Accounts of the California Gold Rush, which includes an English-language translation of an excerpt of Diario de un viaje a California, refers to Pérez Rosales and the other Chileans whose accounts of Gold Rush experiences it features as “some of the most famous names in Chilean literature.”16 Pérez Rosales is presented uniformly not as an immigrant but as a Chilean visitor to California. Whether or not this was how Pérez Rosales thought of himself in early 1849, it was clearly what Anglo American xenophobes intended for him.
In the end, it makes little difference what we call Pérez Rosales or others like him. What is important is that we take into account these stories of truncated or impeded processes of Latinidad. Kirsten Silva Gruesz, in setting out to explore how to define Latino literary history, critiques the commonly employed categories of “immigrant” and “exile” for their lack of precision in historicizing the texts that end up anthologized under one rubric or the other; as she puts it: “An exile may well imagine the future differently from a voluntary immigrant—but how many writers have access to knowledge of their place in this taxonomy at the time they are writing?”17 While some seasonal workers may think of themselves as living in exile, they may later end up deciding to stay, with or without documents to legitimize their presence, in the United States. Meanwhile, others may come to the United States with every intention—or at least hope—of staying but may not find a way to do so. There is no way to know whether Pérez Rosales’s diary was written in hopes of earning its author a place in the Chilean or Latin American literary canon, of documenting a story of exile and repatriation, or of narrating an immigrant’s “American dream” come true.
My point here is that categorizations based on identity categories that we all know are fluid, or geographical sites in an era of multidirectional flows, do not help us to understand some of what might be considered the greatest human rights abuses occurring today in our hemisphere. What I am proposing through my rescue of Pérez Rosales’s writings, which I teach not in a class on Latino literature or Latin American literature but in one titled “California and Latin America” whose context allows students to explore relationships of ethnic otherness, migrations and transculturations, cultural and military imperialism, and so on, is an engagement with interstitial spaces such as those implied in stories of Latin American migrants who do not quite become—or only barely become—Latinos in order to better understand some of the more disturbing social problems of times that see Jan Brewer, who championed and signed Arizona’s brutal anti-immigration law, elected by a comfortable margin, and presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s reviving the Ku Klux Klan’s slogan “Keep America American” as part of his anti-immigration rhetoric.
Juan Poblete has proposed the “concept of a globalized Latino/a America,” a transnational approach to Latino studies that, as Frances Aparicio argues, recognizes the importance of locating Latino studies in relation to the traditions of both American studies and Latin American studies.18 Poblete has in his previous work argued that “the US and Latin America are intertwined in inextricable ways by the new flows of people, capital, goods and communications” and that “the new global condition of Latinos” calls for new epistemologies and critical approaches, not unlike those suggested here.19 As the question of contemporary dynamics of cross-border movement, voluntary and involuntary, as discussed above in the context of both the nineteenth century and the present makes clear, Latinidad is perhaps most productively addressed not only as a fixed ethnic identity but also as an unstable, sometimes volatile, and often incomplete transnational process.
1 See Laura Lomas, Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009).
2 On the complexities of meaning evoked by the terms Latin American and Latino, see, for example, Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005); Claudia Milian, Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a Studies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013); Juan Poblete, “Latin/o Americanism/o” in Dictionary of Latin American Cultural Studies (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 197–204; as well as the essays collected in Juan Poblete, ed., Critical Latin American and Latino Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
3 Paul Allatson, Key Terms in Latino/a Cultural and Literary Studies (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), 140.
4 “Zetas Massacre 72 Illegal Immigrants in San Fernando, Tamaulipas,” Borderland Beat, August 26, 2010. http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2010/08/zetas-massacre-72-illegal-immigrants-in.html.
5 Bryan Caplan, “Deportation Statistics.” Library of Economics and Liberty, August 21, 2011. http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/08/deportations_st.html.
6 Dan Moffett, “Deportation of Illegal Immigrants Breaks Another Record in 2012,” About.com, December 24, 2012. http://immigration.about.com/b/2012/12/24/deportations-of-illegal-immigrants-break-another-record-in-2012.htm.
7 John Morton, “Statement of John Morton, Director, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Before the House Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement: ‘Oversight Hearing on US Immigration and Customs Enforcement: Priorities and the Rule of Law.’” Homeland Security, October 12, 2011. http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/testimony/20111012-morton-ice-oversight.shtm.
8 Genevieve Quinn, “Broken Borders, Broken Laws: Aligning Crime and Punishment Under Section 2L1.1(b)(7) of the US Sentencing Guidelines.” Fordham Law Review 80.2 (2011), 925.
9 Vicente Pérez Rosales, Times Gone By: Memoirs of a Man of Action. Trans. John H. R. Polt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 296; hereafter cited parenthetically.
10 Jay Monaghan, Chile, Peru, and the California Gold Rush of 1849 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 44.
11 Ibid., 174–75.
12 Leonard Pitt, “The Beginnings of Nativism in California.” Pacific Historical Review 30.1 (1961), 23.
13 Ibid., 25.
14 Marissa López, Chicano Nations: The Hemispheric Origins of Mexican American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 49–59.
15 Vicente Pérez Rosales, Diario de un viaje a California 1848–1849 (Santiago, Chile: Tajamar Editores, 2007), 10.
16 Edwin A. Beilharz and Carlos U. López, eds. We Were 49ers! Chilean Accounts of the California Gold Rush (Pasadena, Calif.: Ward Ritchie Press, 1976), front cover.
17 Kirsten Silva Gruesz, “The Once and Future Latino: Notes Toward a Literary History Todavía Para Llegar” in Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Pérez, eds., Contemporary US Latino/a Literary Criticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 129.
18 Juan Poblete, Introduction to Critical Latin American and Latino Studies, xxiii; Frances Aparicio, “Latino Cultural Studies” in Poblete, ed. Critical Latin American and Latino Studies, 19.
19 Juan Poblete, “US Latino Studies in a Global Context: Social Imagination and the Production of In/Visibility.” Work and Days 24.1–2 (2006), 243.