John Alba Cutler
Already the title of this chapter names a fugitive archive. As just one example, consider the weekly Spanish-language newspaper El Hispano-Americano, which was founded by Victor Ochoa in 1891 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and, according to available bibliographic information, stayed in print for almost thirty years, ceasing publication in 1920. Of this thirty-year run, only a handful of issues from 1891 and 1892 have been preserved, available on microfilm at just nine universities in the country and in digital format to university libraries subscribing to Readex’s Hispanic American Newspapers archive. El Hispano-Americano published original and reprinted short fiction in each of its issues, usually dedicating the third of its four broadsheet pages to the genre. It is impossible to tell if this practice continued for the newspaper’s entire print run, but even if it happened for only the first two years, that would mean the newspaper published more than one hundred short stories, many of them by local writers. And El Hispano-Americano is only one of numerous Spanish-language periodicals that printed short fiction in the nineteenth century.
To refer to this fragmentary archive as short fiction might even be misnaming it. Nineteenth-century Spanish-language newspapers published a variety of short narrative forms—including costumbrista sketches and crónicas—for which “short fiction” is an insufficient gloss. This formal diversity suggests the importance of generic analysis. Fredric Jameson describes genres as “literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact.”1 The short prose narratives that proliferated in nineteenth-century Spanish-language print culture illuminate how Latino/a reading publics were constituted at the crossroads of U.S. and hemispheric American literary history. To explore this idea, I provide analyses of two texts emerging from distinct regional print cultures. The first is a series of sketches by Carlos F. Galán called “Recuerdos de California” (Memories of California), printed in La Voz del Nuevo Mundo in San Francisco in 1881; it presents a startling portrait of a language-based, politically resistant Latino/a community in California in the wake of the U.S.–Mexico War. The second is a short story by Venezuelan expatriate Nicanor Bolet Peraza titled “Historia de un guante” (The Tale of a Glove), which appeared in Bolet Peraza’s literary magazine Las Tres Américas in New York in 1895 and which advances a stunning critique of industrial modernity.2
To the extent they represent broader trends in nineteenth-century Latino/a short fiction, these texts are significant for both their social content and their literary form. “Recuerdos de California” and “Historia de un guante” wrestle with the question of what it means to be modern, particularly under conditions of discrimination, marginalization, and dislocation. Significantly, both texts configure their sense of modernity in relation not only to the local conditions of U.S. Latino/a communities but also to print cultures plugged in to hemispheric and even world literary currents. Galán’s and Bolet Peraza’s works attempt to show that Latinos are not belated newcomers to modernity but rather full participants in what Pascale Casanova describes as unified literary time, “a common measure of absolute time that supersedes other temporalities, whether of nations, families, or personal experience.”3 The stories’ publication dates bracket the dawn of modernismo, the Latin American literary movement predicated on aesthetic innovation and a critique of U.S. imperialism and materialism.4 But the principal genres of modernismo were poetry and crónicas, not short fiction. Galán’s and Bolet Peraza’s texts illustrate how short fiction served as a crucial “‘small’ place of experimentation” for U.S. Latino/a writers during this period.5 In both cases, the literariness of the texts is paramount, because it is the modernista literary aesthetic that reveals the stories’ “deseo del mundo,” to use Mariano Siskind’s term, their desire to approach a horizon of world literature that might overshadow their marginal, parochial origins.6 At stake in nineteenth-century Latino/a short fiction is thus a form of social power routed through the symbolic capital of literature.
Accounts of the short story in U.S. literary history tend to follow a straightforward, linear evolutionary model: romantic (Irving) to gothic (Poe, Hawthorne, Melville) to regionalist (Twain, Jewett) to realist (James, Chopin) to naturalist (Dreiser, Crane) to the modern, literary short story (Fitzgerald, Hemingway). The very definition of the short story emerges from this generic history, in Edgar Allan Poe’s description of a unified, autonomous narrative that might be read in one sitting.7 It would be a mistake for two reasons to attempt to shoehorn the narrative forms of Spanish-language print culture into this generic account—first, because those forms were heterogeneous and evolved along different tracks in different locations; and second, because this kind of generic history presumes a teleology with the “literary” short story as its end point, but short prose forms in Latin American and U.S. Latino/a literature continue to be experimental and diverse throughout the twentieth century. A reading of nineteenth-century Latino/a short fiction must grapple with this heterogeneity as its central fact.
Carlos F. Galán’s narrative sketches “Recuerdos de California” are a case in point. Galán (1831–?) was born in Spain and moved to Mexico in 1845 to attend the military academy at Chapultepec in Mexico City, going on to fight with the Mexican Army during the U.S.–Mexico War (1846–48).8 He spent time working in the gold fields of California during the early 1850s but found working and living conditions for Mexicans shocking and unbearable. Well educated, Galán edited several newspapers in the Mexican states of Baja California and Sinaloa before serving briefly as interim governor of Baja California directly after the restoration of the Republic in 1867. He moved back to California in the 1870s and in 1881 became editor of La Voz del Nuevo Mundo, one of the most influential and longest-running Spanish-language newspapers in the region.9 Galán transformed the newspaper during his short tenure as editor from a four-page broadsheet to an eight-page magazine format with larger fonts and fewer advertisements. The paper continued to report on news from throughout the hemisphere, but under Galán it focused increasingly on events in Mexico and the embattled position of the Mexican community in the United States. As with many Spanish-language periodicals in the nineteenth century, La Voz del Nuevo Mundo complicates Nicolás Kanellos’s distinctions among the immigrant, exile, and native presses, largely because its readership comprised elements of each of these communities.10 In editorials, for example, Galán often addressed immigrant miners from Chile and Mexico, uniting their concerns over discrimination with a consciousness of the continued dispossession of the native californio population.
Under Galán’s editorship, La Voz del Nuevo Mundo emphasized Latino/a modernity and cosmopolitanism. The paper supported free trade and the protection of workers’ rights, particularly those of immigrant laborers in California; and in editorials, Galán characterized these ideas as constituting the very essence of modernity. In his editorial of August 13, 1881, for example, Galán criticized nativist currents in the United States calling for an end to naturalization for various undesirable nationalities, but he did so in terms that emphasized how immigration was inextricable from the most ambitious projects of transnational modernization, stating,
Las vias férreas en Méjico y Guatemala y la apertura de canales en Nicaragua y Panamá—todos debidos á capitales estrangeros—van necesariamente á atraer á esos países grande inmigracion, de la misma clase que los Estados Unidos ya repugnan. Si esta gran nacion, grande en todo—en terrenos, en vias de comunicacion y en toda clase de productos naturales, industriales y civiles, y en poblacion—teme y quiere abolir la constante inmigracion que ha contribuido á hacerla lo que és, ¿se hallan las pequeñas repúblicas de América en mejores condiciones para resistirla?11
The railroads in Mexico and Guatemala, and the opening of canals in Nicaragua and Panama—all indebted to foreign capital—will necessarily attract a great deal of immigration to those countries of the same type that the United States is now rejecting. If this great nation, great in everything—in land, in communication technologies, and in all kinds of natural, industrial, and civic resources—fears and desires to abolish the constant immigration that has helped make it what it is, will the small republics of America be found in better conditions to resist it?
In retrospect, Galán’s optimism about the potential for immigration to Latin American republics to upset the balance of power in the Americas appears to naïvely underestimate U.S. willingness to exert economic and military power abroad, as in the building of the Panama Canal. Yet Galán cannily ties technological modernity—the railroad, the canal, communications technology—to the complex routes of capital and labor throughout the hemisphere. Modernity does not flow from the metropolitan center of the United States southward but rather emerges transnationally, if unevenly, in multiple sites and through multiple modalities.
La Voz del Nuevo Mundo’s hemispheric ethos anticipates the Latin Americanism of José Martí, José Enrique Rodó, and other modernistas and is apparent in the paper’s reprinting of Latin American news obtained through exchanges with newspapers all along the Pacific coast. Each issue of the paper devoted three full pages of text to updates from individual nations. This hemispheric consciousness finds a literary manifestation in the newspaper’s dedication to the costumbrista sketch, which, as Enrique Pupo-Walker notes, was “the most appealing of all short narrative forms” for nineteenth-century Latin American readers.12 The cuadro de costumbres is a difficult genre to define, a mishmash of ethnographic description, reportage, and first-person narrative. Spanish scholar Evaristo Correa Calderón’s classic definition describes the costumbrista sketch as “literatura de breve extensión, que prescinde del desarrollo de la acción, o ésta es muy rudimentaria, limitándose a pintar un pequeño cuadro colorista, en que refleja con donaire y soltura el modo de vida de una época, una costumbre popular o un tipo genérico representativo” (literature of brief length, which dispenses with plot development, or in which the plot is rudimentary, dedicating itself to painting a small, colorful sketch, reflecting with wit and ease the way of life of an epoch, a popular custom, or a representative generic type).13 The costumbrista sketch’s historical consciousness is crucial to this definition. Salvador Bueno argues that “[t]odos los intentos destinados a definir la literatura de costumbres están abocados al fracaso si no tienen en cuenta como observara Menéndez y Pelayo, su modernidad” (all attempts to define costumbrista literature are destined to fail if they do not take into account, as Menéndez and Pelayo might observe, its modernity).14 That modernity often stems from the temporal distance between the narrative voice of the costumbrista sketch and the epoch or customs it describes, which allows readers to identify with the narrator’s contemporaneity.
Galán showed a predilection for costumbrismo as both an editor and a writer. He regularly reprinted costumbrista sketches, including works by Ramón Mesonero Romanos and Ricardo Palma, perhaps the premier Spanish and Latin American costumbrista writers, respectively. Galán experimented with this costumbrista historical consciousness himself in “Recuerdos de California,” three sketches which together represent some of the most explicitly political imaginative literature of the Latino/a nineteenth century. The sketches appeared in La Voz del Nuevo Mundo on May 21, May 28, and June 11, 1881, and all are narrated from the perspective of a former resident of the Sonora mining camp, presumably Galán. In the May 21 Recuerdos, the narrator recalls nostalgically, “El invierno de 1849 a dejado hondos recuerdos en los que lo pasaron al pié de las heladas montañas de la Sierra Nevada” (The winter of 1849 to 1850 has left a deep impression on those that passed it at the feet of the snowy mountains of the Sierra Nevada).15 In the May 28 Recuerdos, the narrator characterizes himself as “uno de tantos gambucinos en busca de la volátil diosa Fortuna” (one of so many miners in search of that fickle goddess, Fortune).16 These details situate Galán in a specific community and historical moment; this is not the privileged world of the californios by now well known from the works of Mariano Vallejo and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton but rather a multinational working class community that feels the sting of U.S. dominance differently from the loss of land and status.
The communities Galán describes in his sketches anticipate modern Latino/a communities, unrestricted by particular nationalities. “El campo de Sonora,” the narrator notes in the opening paragraph of the May 21 Recuerdos, “era uno de los más concurridos por los mejicanos, especialmente y como su nombre lo indica por los Sonorenses” (The Sonora camp was one of the camps most crowded with Mexicans, especially, as its name suggests, by Sonorans).17 Martínez, the hapless protagonist of the story, is one of these. Martínez falls in love with the daughter of a Chilean miner who disapproves of their relationship. They elope, and when she becomes pregnant, Martínez returns to attempt a reconciliation with her father. When the Chilean sees Martínez ride into town, however, he goes into a frenzy, shouting that Martínez is a thief. A crowd gathers and mistakes the Chilean’s meaning, thinking Martínez has stolen the horse on which he rode in. In a shocking conclusion to what has been a mostly comic story, Martínez is summarily lynched, and his wife has a nervous breakdown and dies in an insane asylum, while the Chilean is never heard from again. Bracketing the violence for a moment, it is significant that the Sonorans and Chileans move within the same social world in the story, alongside Spanish-speakers of other nationalities. Language is a powerful unifying factor for this community, so much so that its boundaries are broader even than what would usually count as Latino/a today: “Las introducciones no eran de estilo entonces y bastaba hablar español para llamar a cualquiera paisano, viniese de Magallanes ó de Filipinas, y entablar conversación con él” (Formal introductions were not the style of the day, and it was enough to speak Spanish to hail whatever compatriot, whether he be from Magallenes or the Philippines, and strike up a conversation with him).18 This sense of a linguistic community powerful enough to bind together individuals from countries thousands of miles apart anticipates the Latin Americanism of modernismo, though here it is configured within a specifically Pacific paradigm.
This sense of community animates the narrator’s reflections on “la ley de Lynch,” or lynch law. In the middle of the story, the narrator pauses to observe, “En aquellos meses, los robos de caballos eran muy comunes; los americanos, a veces con razón y a menudo sin ella, culpaban de ellos á los de la raza española” (In those months, horse thefts were very common; the Americans, sometimes with reason but often without it, blamed the thefts on those of the Spanish race).19 The resonance of “la raza española” is particularized by the story’s sense of linguistic community. “La raza española,” in other words, is not those of Spanish racial descent but rather those bound together by the Spanish language.20 This reading is bolstered by a similar commentary in the June 11 Recuerdos, when the narrator claims that “el oro de California, que los mejicanos encontraban con la mayor facilidad, les suscitaba envidia y mala voluntad de los menos afortunados, que eran especialmente los irlandeses, y el término de greaser, aplicado indistintamente a todos los de raza española, era para estos un sangriento insulto” (The gold of California, which the Mexicans were most adept at finding, provoked envy and bad will against them from the less fortunate, especially the Irish, and the term greaser, used indiscriminately against all those of the Spanish race, became for them a cruel insult).21
The third Recuerdos narrative is particularly interesting as a fictionalization of the infamous lynching of Josefa Segovia in Downieville, California, in July 1851. In the story, Segovia becomes Josefa Juvera, an immigrant from Atotonilco el Alto in Jalisco, Mexico. She is described as a young woman known for her “hermosura, patriotismo, y finos modales” (beauty, patriotism, and fine manners), in contrast with historical accounts characterizing Segovia as a lower-class prostitute.22 In the narrative, Josefa marries a young man from Sinaloa, and the two make a home together. A year later, pregnant and happy, Josefa falls prey to a mob of drunk, raging Irishmen who resent the Mexicans for their good fortune in mining. The night of the Fourth of July, the mob breaks down Josefa’s door, and while some of the men hold her husband fast, one of them attempts to rape Josefa in her bed. Her husband pleads with her to defend herself, which she does by plunging a knife into the throat of her assailant. Enraged by the violent act, the mob convenes a kangaroo court, which quickly convicts Josefa of murder, and despite the protestations of several prominent men called to the scene, she—like Martínez in the former story—is quickly hanged.
Part of the story of modernity that Galán’s narratives implicitly tell centers on the transnational movement of people and capital. In the June 11 Recuerdos, that movement involves European alongside Latin American immigrant labor, as Irish immigrants are the narrative’s primary antagonists. The narrator states that the Irish in California “comprendían muy poco las obligaciones y deberes que su nueva condición [de ciudadanía] les imponía. Más papistas que el Papa, tomaban del americano todos sus ódios, muchas de sus preocupaciones y muy pocas de sus virtudes” (little comprehended the obligations and duties imposed upon them by their new status [as citizens]. More Catholic than the Pope, they took from the American all of his prejudices, many of his worries, and very few of his virtues).23 Galán’s sensitivity to the tenuous whiteness of the Irish here is as impressive as his nuanced portrait of the diversity of the Latino/a community in the other narratives. They allow the narrative to displace anxieties about assimilation onto another group, which becomes the tool of Anglo American bigotry. Note too that for the Irish, citizenship is a “new condition,” a description that characterizes their savagery in the story as barely repressed primitivism. The narrative thus establishes Latino/a modernity not only through its historical consciousness but also by implicitly comparing Latinos to a group that has not yet become fully modern.
The story dramatizes the visceral horror of the lynching, emphasizing the violence of the “coloniality of power,” to use Aníbal Quijano’s term, that predominated in 1850s California.24 Galán’s narrative makes some significant changes from the historical documentation of the Josefa Segovia case, most of which comes from an account given by J. J. McClosky, a Downieville resident.25 In Galán’s sketch Josefa’s “victim,” a man described as “un galgo más audaz o más ébrio que los demás” (one greyhound or dog, more bold or drunk than the others) attempts to sexually assault her, while historical records indicate that during an argument, Segovia challenged Fred Cannon to come into her house, where she stabbed him.26 In Galán’s sketch, as in McClosky’s account, a doctor attempts to save Josefa’s life by pointing out that she is pregnant and that hanging her would therefore mean killing the innocent child, but Galán’s story concludes with further detail: “Pero aún no estaba saciada la sed insana de los bárbaros. Notó uno de ellos, que el feto se movía en las entrañas de la madre sacrificada, y a patadas le quitaron la vida, que sin ellas hubiera perdido muy pronto” (But even then the bloodlust of the barbarians was not satiated. One of them noted that the fetus still moved within the dead mother’s womb, and they kicked it until it was dead, which would have happened soon anyway).27 The murder of the fetus not only compounds the viciousness of the crime, but the irony built into the final sentence suggests the crime’s senselessness within a regime of obvious racial oppression.
The most pointed change in Galán’s sketch from the historical accounts of the Segovia lynching is the location of the hanging itself. Historians describe the hanging as happening from a bridge, with men lining the river on both sides to watch. But in Galán’s sketch both the kangaroo court and the lynching take place on a special platform set up for the Independence Day celebrations:
La plataforma en que horas antés se habían proclamado los sacros e inalienables derechos del hombre, el juicio por jurados, dos instancias para los juicios criminales, etc. etc., fue el lugar escogido para patíbulo. Allí en un momento, colgaron una cuerda de la rama de un árbol y se arreglaron de modo, que sujeto el dogal al cuello de la víctima empujasen a ésta de la plataforma y la caída bastara a desnucarla.28
The platform from which hours earlier the sacred and inalienable rights of man had been proclaimed—trial by jury, two appeals for criminal judgments, etc. etc.—was the place chosen for the gallows. There, after a moment, a rope hung from a tree limb, arranged in such a way that when the victim’s neck was put in the noose and her body pushed from the platform, the fall would suffice to snap her neck.
Josefa’s death dramatically symbolizes the failure of the promises of equal protection and inalienable rights. This is evident not only in the location of the death but also in its process. The fall from the seat of justice is meant to break her physically and to remind Latino/a readers of La Voz del Nuevo Mundo of their own repeated falls from American grace. The June 11 Recuerdos exhibits the generic syncretism that characterizes the costumbrista sketch, but it also shows an evolution from Galán’s earlier sketches. The sketch combines reportage and fiction, but where the first two installments in the series have the loose narrative structure typical of many costumbrista sketches, the June 11 Recuerdos is a more unified narrative, driving forward from Josefa’s initial engagement to her untimely death. The narrator is also a much more muted presence in the final sketch. Although he breaks forth in an impassioned critique of lynching in the story’s final sentence—“Tal es la justicia de los hombres!” (Such is the justice of men!)—he does not figure as a character in the action of the story as he does in the first two sketches.
This generic experimentation emerges as a response to the local conditions of the California Latino/a community. Bueno argues persuasively that in the Spanish colonial context of Cuba, “En la imposibilidad de enfrentar directamente el gobierno colonialista, ya que la censura imponía férrea mordaza imposible de quebrantar, los costumbristas encontraban en su práctica literaria un vehículo adecuado para la diatriba, la denuncia solapada” (In the impossibility of confronting the colonial government directly, since the censure imposed an unbreakable iron grip, the costumbristas found in their literary practice an adequate vehicle for diatribe, for disguised critique).29 Writing in Spanish in the United States, Galán would not have had the same fear of censorship, partly because of a stronger tradition of freedom of the press but, more important, because he could assume that his audience would be restricted to sympathetic Spanish-speakers. The costumbrista sketch is useful for Galán not because it is a mode of discreet political critique but because it is a mode of historical representation that reaffirms the modernity of narrator and readers alike. The sketches resonate powerfully into the present through their portrait of Latino/a modernity as forged in the crucible of U.S. expansion and the violent exclusion of Latinos from the U.S. body politic.
The 1880s saw a boom in U.S. Spanish-language periodicals. Beyond California, regional Spanish-language print cultures thrived in New Mexico and New York. In the latter, expatriate Latin American writers found a ready community of fellow-travelers and a publishing infrastructure stretching back to the 1830s. As the increase in short fiction publications coincided with the increasing dynamism of hemispheric print culture, one way of reading the turn toward short fiction is that it marks a new relationship between Latino/a writers in the United States and the technologies and textures of modernity and modernismo. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the pace of modernity seemed to accelerate, marked by massive changes in infrastructure in the West and Southwest (the railroad, wage-labor, new printing technologies) and by new literary forms, such as the Symbolist-inflected poetry of Rubén Darío that burst onto the scene in 1888 with the publication of Azul. The majority of the short fiction sponsored by U.S. Spanish-language periodicals comprised either translations of works by European writers or reprints of works by established Spanish and Latin American writers. A catalogue of these writers would be extensive, ranging from European (especially French) writers such as Victor Hugo, Anatole France, Émile Zola, and Carmen Sylva (Regina Elisabet of Romania) to Latin American writers like Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera and Roberto Payró. The Spanish-language press in the United States participated vigorously in what Meredith McGill has described as the “culture of reprinting” in the nineteenth-century United States.
McGill regards the culture of reprinting as a kind of laissez-faire arrangement that worked to the benefit of savvy writers. For example, writing against the grain of conventional scholarship, she asserts that Poe “is both subject to and seeks to benefit from the peculiar structure of this market.”30 Siskind provides another way to think about the culture of reprinting within modernismo, however, arguing that it represents an important facet of Latin American cosmopolitanism, an “attempt to undo the antagonistic structures of a world literary field organized around the notions of cultural difference that Latin American cosmopolitan writers perceive to be the source of their marginality, in order to stake a claim on Literature with a capital L.”31 For Siskind, modernismo is characterized by two contradictory impulses: the desire to assert a unified Latin Americanism and the desire to achieve the kind of literary autonomy and universality that Casanova identifies as the currency of world literature. Spanish-language periodicals demonstrate both of these tendencies, but with the added complication that U.S. Latino/a writers operated not only in the context of the dialectical relationship between Latin America and the world literary powers of Europe but also with the increasing technological, cultural, and military domination of the United States.
The Venezuelan expatriate writer Nicanor Bolet Peraza provides a good example of what Siskind describes as Latin American deseo del mundo, or “desire for the world,” where the “world” is both “a signifier of abstract universality [and] a concrete and finite set of global trajectories traveled by writers and books.”32 Bolet Peraza is best known for his work as editor and publisher of two important Spanish-language periodicals in New York during the 1890s—La Revista Ilustrada and Las Tres Américas—that participated in the culture of reprinting. Through these periodicals, Bolet Peraza proved instrumental in supporting the burgeoning hemispheric literary culture of modernismo, publishing works by such luminaries as José Martí and Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde. He also made a name for himself as a writer, and scholars have generally characterized his work as bridging the gaps between realism, costumbrismo, and modernismo. Domingo Miliani credits Bolet Peraza for helping the Latin American short story assume its modern form, noting, “En Bolet Peraza el cuento se presenta con precisa independencia de otras modalidades narrativas en prosa. Condensación de las acciones, efectividad del conflicto, poder de síntesis en las secuencias, ésos son los rasgos significativos resaltantes” (In Bolet Peraza the short story is manifest clearly independent of other prose narrative modes. Condensation of action, unity of conflict, synthetic power in sequence: these are the significant features foregrounded).33 Carlos Sandoval traces Bolet Peraza’s evolution from costumbrista to short story writer specifically to his New York years and the stories he published himself in Las Tres Américas, including “Las tres vidas de Antón,” “El monte azul,” “El espejo encantado,” and “Historia de un guante.”34 These critical appraisals are helpful for understanding a neglected writer, but they both work by reaffirming the familiar teleological narrative about the modern short story’s evolution.
“Historia de un guante” exemplifies not so much the purity of the modern, literary short story as it does the two senses of deseo del mundo that animated modernismo. First, deseo del mundo manifests in the story’s self-conscious literariness. The plot is simple. The narrator recalls attending a dance as a young man and picking up a glove dropped by a beautiful young woman. The glove has a sweet, overpowering redolence, and the young man falls instantly in love with the woman after pressing it to his nose. At this point, the glove takes on a life of its own and begins a dialogue with the narrator, recounting its life history since being violently cut away from its mother, a goat, until the dance, where the glove could sense by the heat of its mistress’s palm that she had fallen in love with one of her dance partners. The glove actually taunts the narrator for mistaking the smell of its mistress’s lover for the smell of the mistress herself, and for thinking that he might have a chance to woo her. The story concludes by returning to the retrospective frame; the narrator observes that he since that day long ago uses the glove only to polish his eyeglasses, a punishment for the glove’s cruelty.
The story’s modernista sensibility manifests in highly stylized descriptions and ambivalence about female sexuality. This is clear from the first paragraph of the story, which thrusts readers en medias res into a description of the dance:
Habia llegado ya la hora del cansancio, del fastidio y del sueño. Las bujías habian sido cambiadas tres veces, el buffet estaba agotado; los músicos exhaustos, los trajes femeninos en desorden, los peinados desmayados, los lindos rizos que la bandolina sostuvo hasta donde fue químicamente posible, caían sobre los ojos medio dormidos haciendo en ellos el estorboso efecto de las moscas; la concurrencia comenzaba a desfilar por delante de los dueños de la casa, ensayando cada cual una sonrisa de despedida, una mueca de trasnochado.35
The hour of fatigue, ennui, and sleepiness had already arrived. The candles had been changed three times, the “buffet” was empty, the musicians exhausted, the women’s dresses in disorder, their coiffures failed. The delicate curls that the bandolín had sustained as long as chemically possible fell over half-closed eyes, making them as annoying as flies. The crowd began to shuffle out before their hosts, everyone making a half-hearted smile of farewell, a sign of their exhaustion.
The opening description establishes a sense of exhaustion in the narrator, who looks back on his youth from old age with nostalgia but also embarrassment. That exhaustion pivots on the spent female bodies, the disordered dresses, and limp hairstyles as signs of a revelry both energetic and strangely passionless. The women’s “lindos rizos,” or beautiful curls, are sustained by the bandolín “hasta donde fue químicamente possible,” emphasizing the decaying artifice of their appearance, which demands chemical intervention.
When the narrator learns that the glove can talk, he demands that it recount its history, which it does in the following terms: “Un curtidor, después de mil atomías me zabulló en tanino, una cosa muy amarga; me dió a comer alumbre, una cosa que frunce y da carraspera; me ahogó en tinta gris perla, me prensó y aplanchó, y me entregó a un cortador que me despedazó, y de allí me tomó una costurera que me acribilló a puntadas” (A tanner, after a thousand indecencies, washed me clean. He gave me alum to eat, which made me retch and grow hoarse. He drowned me in pearl gray dye and ironed me, and then delivered me to a leatherworker who cut me in pieces, and from there took me to a seamstress who pierced me everywhere with stitches).36 As if the glove’s voice were not enough personification, this description characterizes its creation as a violent, bodily process. It is drowned, dismembered, poisoned, and perforated as if caught up in some perverse auto-da-fé. As Sandoval points out, the glove’s tortuous creation is also a damning critique of the inhuman working conditions of industrial capital, because not only is she subjected to the various poisons and dangers of the manufacturing process, but so are the curtidor, the cortador, and the costurera.37 The beauty of the resulting glove resembles nothing so much as the chemically altered curls of the dancers at the beginning of the story, another body standing in for the dehumanizing artifices of modernity.
A comment the narrator makes to the glove stakes this critique of modernity to theories of democratic citizenship. At first the glove demurs when the narrator asks it to recount its history, saying, “Mi madre fue una cabrita infeliz,” to which the narrator responds, “No te aflijas por lo humilde de la cuna. Vivimos en épocas democráticas en que el mérito es quien da la estirpe” (My mother was an unfortunate goat. . . . Do not be distressed by your humble origins. We live in democratic times in which merit determines the stock).38 The narrator’s comment plays on the absurdity of the talking glove. What possible virtues could the glove hope to demonstrate to overcome the fact of its origins, its non-agency? And at this point, the story’s difference from other modernista texts is crucial, for as Rachel Price persuasively argues, “[M]odernismo was object-oriented typically in its interest in precious luxury items or through its attempt to approximate advertising’s strategies, while disavowing everyday material culture through flights to a world of princesses and swans.”39 Running counter to this disavowal, “Historia de un guante” degrades a luxury item by revealing its emergence from the industrial processes of material culture. The narrator’s flippant aphorism depends on the glove’s status as object, catalyzing the narrator’s disillusionment. Not only do the glove’s bodily sacrifices count for nothing in the end, but after learning that his object of desire loves someone else, the narrator does not even attempt to pursue her. No matter his origins or his merits, his chances at fulfillment are foreclosed before he even makes an attempt to win her. The narrator’s comment calls attention to the spirit of the age as he emphasizes the “épocas democráticas” in which they live, times implicitly contrasted to bygone, nondemocratic epochs. The story doubles up and ironizes this temporal distancing in its subtitle, “Recuerdos de Mocedad,” which suggests that the narrator has arrived at a more mature, fuller modernity than even what he remembers from his youth or adolescence.
As significant as the story’s relation to modernista aesthetics is its surprising publication trajectory. Sandoval credits Las Tres Américas with the first publication of the story, followed closely by its appearance in the Venezuelan literary magazine El Cojo Ilustrado in July 1895.40 This account puts the story squarely within circuits of Latin American literary circulation. Yet “Historia de un guante” was published at least twice in the United States before it appeared in Las Tres Américas: once in El Hispano-Americano in Las Vegas, New Mexico (April 21, 1892), and once in Las Dos Repúblicas in Los Angeles, California (serialized on November 19 and 22, 1892). Given the dates of publication, it is probable that Antonio Flores, the editor of Las Dos Repúblicas, acquired the story from El Hispano-Americano, though no attribution is given to the other paper. It is also unlikely that Victor Ochoa, the editor of El Hispano-Americano, was the first to publish the story. Like other Nuevomexicano newspapermen, Ochoa reprinted news and literature from regional and Mexican periodicals. Ochoa likely reprinted “Historia de un guante” from a Mexican periodical, though up to this point I have not been able to find the source.
The occluded history of “Historia de un guante”—a minor story not usually even collected in anthologies of Bolet Peraza’s work—and its routing through Mexico and the Southwest and reappearance in New York suggest that the itineraries of modernista literary exchange were not always predictable. In relation to Latino/a literary history, fin-de-siglo New York is something of an overdetermined space, a site of cultural and political ferment felt the hemisphere over. By contrast, although much work has been done on the dynamism of New Mexican print culture in the same time period, that work tends to emphasize the localism of Nuevomexicano writers and editors and their strong regional identity.41 Neither of these narratives is wrong, but the migrations of “Historia de un guante” imply that they are incomplete—that New Mexico energetically tapped into hemispheric literary culture via Mexico City, another important hub for the triangulation of U.S., Caribbean, and Latin American cultural production. McGill’s characterization of the culture of reprinting as “a distinctive literary culture that cannot adequately be perceived through the optics of national literary study” applies as well to nineteenth-century U.S. Latino/a literature as to U.S. literature more broadly.42
Given Bolet Peraza’s participation in the New York Latino/a community, it is tempting to see “Historia de un guante” as exhibiting modernismo’s impulse to, as Gruesz puts it, “[define] Latin Americanness through its spiritual opposition to the economically dictated values of the United States.”43 By this reading, the story’s harsh representation of industrialism and its satire of the idea of meritocracy could be seen as directed against U.S. materialism and inequality. Such a reading would certainly have resonated with readers of Victor Ochoa’s newspaper El Hispano-Americano, which was openly critical of both the continued federal disenfranchisement of Nuevomexicanos and the modernization projects of the Porfirio Díaz regime in Mexico. Like many Nuevomexicano journalists, Ochoa was a Mexican exile and supported the Catarino Garza borderlands revolt in the 1890s, activism that led to Ochoa’s imprisonment for violating U.S. neutrality laws.44 Yet any significance we might read into Ochoa’s reprinting of “Historia de un guante” runs into problems when balanced against its subsequent reprinting in Las Dos Repúblicas. Founded in March 1892 by Antonio Cuya and Antonio J. Flores, the Los Angeles paper was avowedly pro-capitalist and pro-Díaz, often criticizing other newspapers, such as Los Angeles’s El Monitor, for opposing Díaz’s free trade, modernizing agenda. Where El Hispano-Americano is text-heavy with news, editorials, stories, and poetry, Las Dos Repúblicas is almost entirely dominated by advertising, including prominent advertisements for Spanish lessons for interested businessmen. The paper printed a fair amount of literature, serializing novels and printing short stories and poetry, but the pittance of news and commentary that the paper offered, along with the preponderance of advertising, lends the literature an air of mere entertainment, as opposed to the belletristic mission of Bolet Peraza’s Las Tres Américas or the politicized context of El Hispano-Americano. Literature is a disposable object in Las Dos Repúblicas, as evidenced by the poor editing job done on the two installments of “Historia de un guante,” which appear in the paper rife with spelling and orthographical mistakes, even misspelling Bolet Peraza’s name as “N. Boute Peraza.”45
Nevertheless, it is significant that all of these newspapers found space for “Historia de un guante” in their pages. What unites them is the conviction that short fiction such as Bolet Peraza’s has tapped into the realm of universal literariness, the true sign of Latin America’s emergence into modernity. “Historia de un guante” especially would play into this desire for literary cultural capital through its obvious Symbolist influences. For example, the narrator’s mania at the end of the story, when he announces that he still keeps the glove “para el prosaico oficio de limpiar mis gafas de cincuenton,” strongly echoes Poe’s many manic narrators.46 This is not to say that the story’s political critique is unimportant but rather that the cultural work it, and many other short stories, does within Latino/a print culture extends beyond its content to its formal and literary historical innovations and influences.
Just as Galán’s recourse to costumbrismo presents a challenge for literary histories centered on a conventional narrative of regional realism, so do Bolet Peraza’s modernista fictions challenge traditional literary histories positing the development of “American” short fiction from realism to naturalism to modernism. Spanish-language newspapers circulated modernista writing beginning in the 1890s, and writers such as Bolet Peraza experimented with modernista ideas and forms. To acknowledge this fact is to insist that Latino/a modernity is not a belated, reactionary development but part and parcel of a world system of modernity in which center and margin have always been inextricably linked. In other words, a complete history of the American short story needs to account not only for the evolution of the short story in English but also its coexistence with a variety of other short narrative forms, including in Spanish the costumbrista sketch and the modernista short story. This more comprehensive history would need to acknowledge that in the United States modernismo precedes modernism, and that Latino/a writers were interested in many of the same thematic and formal innovations that now-canonical U.S. writers would take up a generation later.
Attending to nineteenth-century Latino/a short fiction is also important inasmuch as literary scholarship has been disproportionately devoted to the major genres of the novel and the lyric poem. This is not to say that the novel and lyric poem are not important but rather to reiterate that as a fugitive archive, short fiction has the potential to enrich and broaden our understanding of the Latino/a nineteenth century. At the same time, scholarship on modernismo has tended to focus on the genres of poetry and the crónica, with short fiction relegated to a minor role within that movement. But there is good reason, particularly within the U.S. context, to renew our focus on short fiction. In her examination of the “asymmetrical” relationship between the short story and the novel, Mary Louise Pratt observes that one reason the short story has historically been regarded as a minor genre is “the very concrete fact that a novel constitutes a complete book (or books), while a short story never does. A short story is always printed as part of a larger whole, either a collection of short stories or a magazine, which is a collection of various kinds of texts.”47 Andrew Levy makes a similar point when he argues that Poe’s creation of both the modern literary magazine and modern short story shows that the two are “symbiotic projects,” because the blossoming of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century made for an economic system perfectly tailored to the “disposable artifact” of the short story.48 Studying nineteenth-century Latino/a short fiction thus entails studying U.S. Spanish-language print culture and helpfully reminds us that modernismo unfolded through hemispheric print culture as much as through the publication of independent volumes.
Most important, Galán’s and Bolet Peraza’s stories illuminate a central tension in the unfolding of Latino/a modernity. While such writers as Galán trenchantly depicted the oppression of Latinos in the United States, those stories always participated in a larger literary culture of reprinting in which the vast majority of stories, including those of Bolet Peraza, were not centered on the oppositional relationship between Latinos and the dominant culture, or between Latin America and the United States. The world literary horizons of Latino/a short fiction are a good reminder that even while modernista writers first anticipated and then critiqued U.S. imperialism, the United States during this era remained a relatively marginal literary force. Dominant accounts of modernismo assert that, in Julio Ramos’s words, during this era literature “[became] the fundamental vehicle for an anti-imperialist ideology, defining the Latin American ‘being/identity’ through its opposition to the modernity of ‘them’: the United States or England.”49 In recent years, however, Siskind and other scholars have argued that modernismo extends beyond this dialectic, aspiring to belong to “a world posited in the vague language of a desire to transcend the limitations not only of the local but also of the neocolonial relations, whether with Spain or new powers like France or Britain.”50 Reading Galán and Bolet Peraza side by side, we see how nineteenth-century Latino/a writers grappled with modernity emerging at precisely this juncture of the particular and the universal—the local conditions of Latino/a dispossession in the United States facing off with the global aspirations of their narratives.
1 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press), 106.
2 For reprints and translations of these narratives, see John Alba Cutler, “Confronting Frontier and Industrial Violence: Latino Narratives” in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Seventh Ed., Volume C, Late Nineteenth Century: 1865–1910 (Boston: Wadsworth, 2014): 999–1014.
3 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 93.
4 Literary historians generally cite the publication of Rubén Darío’s Azul in 1888 as the beginning of modernismo.
5 Mary Louise Pratt, “The Short Story: The Long and the Short of it,” Poetics 10 (1981): 190.
6 Mariano Siskind, Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 3.
7 E. A. Poe, “Twice-Told Tales: A Review,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews (New York: Library of America, 1984), 569–77.
8 The most useful source for biographical information about Galán is a deposition he gave in a legal case in San Francisco in 1874, found in Compilation of Reports of Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 1789–1901, Vol. II (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1901): 493–99. Some information can also be found in Leonidas Hamilton, Border States of Mexico: Sonora, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, and Durango (San Francisco: Bacon & Co., 1881).
9 The paper began, as Kirsten Silva Gruesz notes, as El Nuevo Mundo, a biweekly paper founded by Mexican poet José María Vigil in 1864 (Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002], 177). Sometime soon afterward, however, editorship was taken over by Francisco P. Ramírez, the political radical who edited the influential paper El Clamor Público in Los Angeles during the 1850s. El Nuevo Mundo merged late in the 1860s with another San Francisco paper called La Voz de Chile y de las Repúblicas Americanas, edited by a Chilean immigrant named Felipe Fierro, and briefly went by the name La Voz de Chile y del Nuevo Mundo until settling on the name La Voz del Nuevo Mundo. Galán became the editor of La Voz del Nuevo Mundo early in 1881, after Fierro found himself in debt and poor health. Fierro died in San Francisco soon thereafter. After editing the paper for a year, Galán left California and apparently returned to Mexico.
10 See Nicolás Kanellos, “A Brief History of Hispanic Periodicals in the United States,” in Kanellos and Helvetia Martell, Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público, 1993), 6.
11 Galán, untitled editorial, La Voz del Nuevo Mundo, August 13, 1881: 4. I have retained the original spelling and orthography for all of the nineteenth-century texts quoted in this chapter. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.
12 Enrique Pupo-Walker, “The Brief Narrative in Spanish America: 1835–1915,” in The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, ed. Roberto González Echevarría and Pupo-Walker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 504.
13 Evaristo Correa Calderón, Costumbristas españoles: Estudio preliminar y selección de textos (Madrid: Aguilar, 1950), xi.
14 Salvador Bueno, Literatura Costumbrista Cubana (Morelia: Ediciones Casa San Nicolás, 2000), 10. Italics added.
15 Galán, “Recuerdos de California,” La Voz del Nuevo Mundo, May 21, 1881: 7.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 This is similar to what Gruesz describes in relation to the New Orleans newspaper La Patria: “When the paper was retooled . . . in January 1846, it had a new subtitle: Organo de la población española de los Estados Unidos, and a more solemn editorial voice. This would seem to suggest that the paper was directed at Spaniards, yet a self-advertisement reprinted in every issue that spring implies that the adjective describes language, not nationality. The editors repeatedly stressed that “La población española de Nueva Orleans es indudablemente la más variada de cuántas existen no sólo en esta ciudad sino en toda la Unión” (the Spanish population of New Orleans is undoubtedly one of the most diverse not only in this city but in the whole of the Union) (Ambassadors of Culture, 113–14).
21 Galán, “Recuerdos de California,” La Voz del Nuevo Mundo, June 11, 1881: 7.
22 Ibid.
23 Galán, “Recuerdos,” June 11, 1881: 7. “Más papistas que el Papa”: literally, “more popish than the Pope,” but intending to convey that a person is overly zealous in his or her regard for a custom or law, or in this case, that the Irish have become more zealously American than natural-born citizens.
24 Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power: Eurocentrism and Latin America,” trans. Michael Ennis, Nepantla: Views from the South 1.3 (2000): 533. Quijano uses the term to refer to the persistence of modes of racial and economic domination formulated in colonial contexts.
25 For histories that depend on McClosky’s account, see William B. Secrest, Juanita (Fresno, Calif.: Sage-West, 1967), 25; and Rudolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, Fifth edition (New York: Pearson Longman, 2004), 137.
26 Galán, “Recuerdos,” June 11, 1881: 7.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Bueno, Literatura Costumbrista Cubana, 17.
30 Meredith McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 150.
31 Siskind, Cosmopolitan Desires, 6.
32 Ibid., 3.
33 Domingo Miliani, Tríptico venezolano (Caracas: Fundación de Promoción Cultural de Venezuela, 1985), 51.
34 Carlos Sandoval, “Ingenios, entes, y negocios,” Revista de Literatura Hispanoamericana 3 (1998): 66.
35 N. Bolet Peraza, “Historia de un guante,” Las Tres Américas 30 (1895): 780.
36 Ibid.
37 Sandoval, “Ingenios,” 66.
38 Bolet Peraza, “Historia de un guante,” 780.
39 Price, The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868–1968 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 13.
40 See Bolet Peraza, “Historia de un guante,” El Cojo Ilustrado 85 (1895): 400–1. Many thanks to my colleague Nathalie Bouzaglo for pointing me to this source. In her book Ficción adulterada: Pasiones ilícitas del entresiglo venezolano (forthcoming, Beatriz Viterbo), Bouzaglo reads “Historia de un guante” brilliantly in relation to El Cojo Ilustrado’s tendency toward commodity fetishism.
41 See, for example, Doris Meyer, Speaking for Themselves: Neomexicano Cultural Identity and the Spanish-Language Press, 1880–1920 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996) and A. Gabriel Meléndez, Spanish-Language Newspapers in New Mexico, 1834–1958 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005).
42 McGill, Culture of Reprinting, 1.
43 Gruesz, Ambassadors, 192.
44 On the complications of Ochoa’s biography, see Mélendez, Spanish-Language Newspapers, 87–88.
45 N. Boute Peraza [sic], “Historia de un guante,” Las Dos Repúblicas, November 22, 1892.
46 Bolet Peraza, “Historia de un guante,” 780 (“. . . for the prosaic office of cleaning my old-man spectacles . . .”).
47 Pratt, “Short Story,” 186.
48 Levy, The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 21–22.
49 Ramos, Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 46.
50 Siskind, Cosmopolitan Desires, 138.