Laura Lomas
I wear an iron ring, and I have to do iron deeds. . . . No suffering as the black men in my country.
—José Martí
Y los negros? ¿Quién que ha visto azotar a un negro no se considera para siempre su deudor? Yo lo vi, lo vi cuando era niño y todavía no se me ha apagado en las mejillas la vergüenza.
—José Martí1
Scribbling in the margins of his copy of the Scottish economist John Rae’s Contemporary Socialism, New York–resident Cuban poet and revolutionary José Martí introduces the issue of racism and racial equality as a factor flagrantly missing from Rae’s volume and from the work of the major figures of socialist thought whom Rae treats therein: Ferdinand Lasalle, Karl Marx, Henry George, and a range of Russian anarchists and Christian socialists.2 While it sounds pedantic today, Martí’s annotation that “el negro es tan capaz como el blanco” (the black man is just as capable as the white) in 1887 (the date of the edition in which Martí’s comments appear) suggests that Martí’s claim that all people belong to a single human race may best be read as a proactive critique of entrenched and growing white supremacist terror in the United States rather than as a misguided belief that the effects of racism no longer merited attention and redress. Both this subtle critique of European and North American socialism’s blindness to white racism and Martí’s subsequent critique of his own independence movement suggest that anti-racism became an ethos of organized, self-conscious Hispanic Caribbean migrant communities.3 The critique of class and race relations in the late nineteenth century influenced the definition of Latinidad and set the stage for ongoing struggles for racial and class justice.
In 1887, the year historians locate as the fulcrum of Martí’s radicalization, large audiences congealed around the Afro-Tejana anarchist leader Lucy Eldine González Parsons and Afro-Puertorriqueño poet and revolutionary Francisco Gonzálo “Pachín” Marín Shaw, who became active in the pursuit of racial, decolonial, and class justice. I suggest that the speeches, writings, and courageous examples of Marín and Parsons form part of the historical context that transformed Martí and the politics of Latinidad. While a full treatment of Afro–North American and Afro-Latin@ immigrant relations far exceeds the scope of this chapter, this argument puts pressure on the definition and borders of the term Latin@ by reading across national, racial, gender, and language borders to consider three key nineteenth-century Latin@s—Martí (Cuban), Marín (Puerto Rican), and Parsons (Texan)—as contributing to the definition of Latinidad.
Afro-Latin@s played a role in making nineteenth-century Latin@s aware of themselves as people of color committed to revolutionary change.4 While decolonizing nationalist movements and black self-emancipation from slavery have been intertwined in the Americas since the Haitian revolution ending in 1804, the U.S. War of Independence and the Spanish American revolutions of the early nineteenth century implemented notoriously unequal versions of independence, where freedom from colonialism did not spell freedom for the people bound by racial slavery or address the entrenched inequalities that slavery forged. As Martí commented, the resulting form of self-government in the United States “bambolea sobre los hombros de una raza esclava” (wobbles on the backs of an enslaved race).5 Leaders of creole revolutions—including some erstwhile slavemasters—signed idealistic proclamations that excluded or devalued the racialized working masses.6 White racism thus aimed to divide and has often prevented unity among a multiracial working class by granting access to citizenship only to those who conformed to the dominant racial operations. The longstanding Eurocentrism inherited from centuries of Spanish colonialism makes Latin@ immigrants’ interrogation of the dominant U.S. racial system an unlikely, difficult, yet urgent response. At the same time, Hispanic Caribbean migrants of African descent on the islands and inside the various territories of the new U.S. empire experienced racialized violence at the hands of the police, the Guardia Civil, and other state or vigilante forces. The critical response to a racist and classist application of state violence shapes the consciousness of Latin@ migrants from the islands to the mainland in the late nineteenth century. As racial terror and imperial expansion increased in the United States, light- and dark-skinned working class Spanish-speakers on the islands and in the diaspora experienced common, brutalizing processes of racialization.
In the late nineteenth century, revolutionary militancy in the overlapping struggle to end colonialism and slavery became a defining characteristic of the Hispanic Caribbean migrants of various shades who supported Cuban and Puerto Rican independence and became identified as a distinct social formation under the emergent appellation “gente latina” (Latina/o people), a term that appears in Martí’s correspondence in 1885: “De siete artículos que escribí para un peródico de esta ciudad, pero de gente latina, hallé que tres eran de cosas mexicanas” (Of seven essays that I wrote for a newspaper of this city, but for Latinas/os, I found but three were on Mexican topics).7 Thus Martí tells Manuel Mercado, his friend and editor in Mexico, of a print community of Latin American origin based in the city in which he was living—New York. The reference marks a space of educational (and implicitly light-skinned) privilege but also refers to a minority group in an Anglocentric America. Moreover, the group interpolated by the term Latina/o expands beyond limited circles of reading and writing with the practice of tobacco workers (many of whom were of African descent) paying a portion of their wages to a “lector” (reader) to perform readings of Spanish-language news and literature of their choosing while rolling cigars, the occupation of most of the Hispanic Caribbean immigrants, as Bernardo Vega suggests. Related terms appeared in English, as the “Latin portion of North America,” or in Spanish as “Hispanoamericano”—set often in opposition to “Saxon,” “Anglo,” “United States,” or “Norteamericano”—and circulated in English- and Spanish-language periodicals such as La América, The North American Review, La Nación, or Patria—to refer to differences of dress, style, values, cultural practices, and political allegiances in articles that circulated in the United States and internationally.8
The Spanish-speaking migrant communities in the New York metropolitan area and beyond formed cross-class and cross-race alliances in the nineteenth century’s last two decades despite pressures to fall into the patterns of color segregation. The Cuban and Puerto Rican anti-colonial, anti-racist social movement refused to abide by customary and eventually official legal public segregation laws, which raised eyebrows in New York as the color line was wending its way around the world to become “the problem of the twentieth-century” in W. E. B. Du Bois’s phrase from The Souls of Black Folk. Bernardo Vega’s recollections of his fictional Uncle Antonio’s experiences in late-nineteenth-century New York evoke a Puerto Rican immigrant family’s refusal to accommodate the pressure to engage in segregation. Uncle Antonio recounts how their German and Irish neighbors near 88th Street and Lexington Avenue came to complain that the Vegas “frequently have Negroes coming to [their] house” and ordered them to “be more careful” about whom they invited over.9
In the late-nineteenth-century United States, structures of exclusion and state or police abuse positioned recently emancipated U.S. and Caribbean migrants of African descent alongside formerly indentured Asian laborers, annexed native Americans and Mexicans, and immigrant workers.10 State-condoned disenfranchisement in the post-Reconstruction United States—from mob lynching to capital punishment administered through politicized juridical procedures such as the Chicago anarchists’ trial (to which I turn below)—shaped the emergence of an anti-racist Latina/o self-consciousness opposed to, rather than invested in, white supremacy, Anglo expansion, and the concomitant economic hierarchies among classes and nations. Lived experience in the United States led some of Latin American and Caribbean origin in New York who could and did pass as white to begin to conceive of themselves as different from a privileged white group, because they underwent “metropolitan racialization,” a term Yolanda Martínez San Miguel coins to describe Afro-Caribbean citizens Frantz Fanon and Piri Thomas’s mid-twentieth-century experiences of marginalization as minorities in Paris and New York, respectively. Both Fanon and Thomas find that their status as “legal citizens” does not enable them to escape the second-class status of colonial and ethnoracial subjects.11 I endow Martínez San Miguel’s phrase with a longer history extending back to the nineteenth century and stretch it to encompass the complex range of skin tones of Latinidad.
In the late nineteenth century, metropolitan racialization refers to the process by which multiracial Hispanic Caribbean migrants in New York realized that their linguistic difference and national origin excluded them from white privilege insofar as they refused to participate in negrophobia or did not disavow national origins, their home language, and anticolonial politics. Just as Frantz Fanon describes becoming black for the first time under the destructive weight of the white Parisian gaze upon his arrival in Paris from Martinique, late-nineteenth-century Latin@ self-consciousness emerges in response to experiences of racialization in North America.
The vindication of Latinidad calls for an end to a quotidian experience of discrimination, disdain, and exclusion on the basis of non-native pronunciation in English, bias against a “swarthy” or “half-breed” appearance, or stereotypes about how Latin American countries and their peoples should relate to the country and people of the United States.12 Martí’s English-language letter to the editor of The New York Evening Post, entitled “A Vindication of Cuba,” attacks stereotypes of Cubans, black and white, as “supine” or “pitifully ineffective” because of a supposed lack of manly force or self-respect. Martí’s indignant letter responds to an anonymous writer in The Manufacturer who speculated on the danger of incorporating Cuba’s 1 million blacks into the United States in the event of annexation, particularly insofar as all Cubans spoke an Africanized Spanish tongue that would create “dire confusion” for governmental bodies overseeing the annexed territory.13 Martí defends Cubans against the implication that Africanized Cuban Spanish would necessarily be problematic while simultaneously denouncing the proposal of annexation.14 In impeccable English, Martí’s letter argues against annexation in part because of the reigning racial views of the United States, in which “[the Cuban’s] ability is denied, his morality insulted, and his character despised.”15 To refute the stereotypes circulating in the U.S. press, Martí offers a catalogue of achievements of Cubans on the island and in exile, in Key West, Philadelphia, New York, Latin America, and in Europe and defends the Cuban war of independence as key to abolishing slavery, and successful in keeping at bay the crumbling empire of Spain “with a loss to him [Spain] of 200,000 men, at the hands of a small army of patriots, with no help but nature.”16
This public defense of Cubans in the diaspora and on the island alludes to an emergent transnational formation of Latinidad in his complaint about derogatory stereotypes of Cubans lumped “in a mass with other countries of Spanish America.”17 The letter to the editor denounces the dual vulnerability of Cuban migrants and islanders to invasion and annexation by the emerging U.S. empire, which proposed to render the blood of all those who died fighting for independence “but the fertilizers of the soil for the benefit of a foreign plant, or the occasion for a sneer from the Manufacturer of Philadelphia.”18 Late-nineteenth-century vindications of Hispanic Caribbean people or an emerging formation of Latin@s undermines discourses that attribute qualities of unruliness, indolence, empty talk, and an incapacity for self-governance to the “hybrid” racial and cultural mixtures of African and indigenous-descended peoples of Latin America, the Caribbean, and their diasporas.
Despite his professional status and light skin color as a child of Spanish immigrants to Cuba, Martí’s anger at the stereotypes circulating in the U.S. press was not unrelated to his individual encounters with racial disdain, or reactions to his status as a dark-haired, Spanish-dominant speaker of accented English. As Martí notes in his 1887 chronicle “Great Cattle Exposition,” the U.S. environment reduced him to the status of a domesticated herd animal, “acorralado de todas partes por la lengua inglesa” (corralled on all sides by the English language).19 Martí’s personal notebooks and fragmentary writings underscore the violence of an Anglocentric milieu. For example, Martí recalls the disdain with which he was received by a hotel employee in Murray Hill in New York City, upon inquiring after his Latin American colleagues, diplomats who were guests at the hotel:
—“Conoce V. a un caballero sudamericano, muy alto, que come aquí desde hace un mes?”
—“No sé. Entran y salen. El no se ha hecho conocer de mí.” (“He has not made himself known to me.”) ¡Y la mirada de desprecio, y el gesto de ¡deje en paz al Emperador! con que acompañaba la repuesta! Vive uno en los Estados Unidos como boxeado. Habla esta gente, y parece que le está metiendo a uno el puño debajo de los ojos.
[—“Do you know a South American gentleman, very tall, who has been eating here for the past month?”
—“I do not know. They come and they go. He has not become known to me.” (“He has not made himself known to me” [in English in the original].) And the gaze of disdain! And the gesture of “Leave the Emperor in peace!” that accompanied his response! One lives in the United States as if subject to blows. These people speak and it seems like they are waving a fist in front of one’s eyes.]20
In light of his being snubbed by this hotel employee in what he perceives to be an imperious linguistic environment, it is not surprising that Martí elsewhere identifies a hotel for Spanish-speakers, Hotel América, and recommends it to Spanish-speakers he recruited to the cause of Cuban independence. Galician Mambí Félix de los Ríos recalls meeting with Martí in the welcoming space of this hotel’s lobby, a part of which was “only for Latinos [my translation, lowercase L in Spanish original] although there was no difference in the service on each floor and one elevator served all floors.”21 The existence of such Hispanophone spaces, which Spanish-speakers embraced and promoted, suggests that the group welcomed the protection of an enclave where it was possible to enact a distinct subculture.
The failure of states to guarantee even a semblance of racial equality in post-slavery Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the United States convinced Afro-Cubans and Afro–Puerto Ricans to support the revolutionary movement that adopted an officially anti-racist position. If we consider factors that led Puerto Rican migrants to seek exile in New York in the late nineteenth century, it is possible to see continuities between the abuse of state power in Spain’s colonies and in the United States, a complaint which Martí paraphrased in 1887 in an emphatic standalone paragraph in his chronicle on the mostly German anarchist martyrs: “America, then, is the same as Europe!”22 In the United States and in Europe’s colonies, we learn, migrants have in their recent memory direct experiences of racialized and class-marked violence.
In the colonial Puerto Rican context in particular, violent reprisals against the founders and members of the Autonomist Party—which upheld liberal ideals of racial equality—led to the exile of key Afro–Puerto Ricans who played a foundational role in the struggle for Cuba’s and Puerto Rico’s independence and in disseminating radical politics among Latin@ immigrant communities in New York.23 A notable poet, chronicler, newspaper editor, and revolutionary of African descent through both of his grandmothers, a beloved member the class of “artesanos” (artisans) who worked as a typesetter, “Pachín” Marín was forced out of Puerto Rico because of his egalitarian political views. Marín published his second chapbook of poetry, Mi óbolo, in 1887 after participating in the assembly at which the Autonomist Party was founded, which was also the ignominous year of the compontes, a term that refers to the violent “ordering” of society carried out by the Guardía Civil under General Romualdo Palacios in 1887.24 The historian Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof notes that during the compontes, Puerto Ricans of African descent disproportionately suffered gross abuses and torture: “Guard members hung Victor Honoré, a mulato stonemason from Mayagüez, by his arms and legs for days and beat him with sticks across his torso. They broke the fingers of Gil Bones, a mulato [sic] tailor from Ponce. They hung a cobbler in Guayanilla by his feet from a telegraph post. Other men of low status, including some common laborers, were hung by their testicles or dunked head first into latrines. By one contemporary account, 197 pardo and moreno artisans were arrested, 130 of whom were tortured.”25 Hoffnung-Garskof notes that this personal experience had a “profound effect on the evolving politics of both [Sotero] Figueroa and [Pachín] Marín.”26 Already artisans had condemned the presence of racism in 1874. An anonymous letter to El Artesano of Mayagüez calls the attention of its readers to Puerto Rican society’s persistent complicity with racist views: “Still flourishing in our society is that system of privilege which recognizes one race’s supremacy over another.”27 Upon the arrival of Figueroa and Marín to the shores of New York, both became involved in meetings that led to the founding of the Cuban Revolutionary Party; they were active in labor movements and sociedades de color; and they helped found a political club to promote Puerto Rican independence.28 In other words, one effect of the repression in Puerto Rico was the radicalization of Latin@ communities in New York.
In the case of “Pachín” Marín, who was called “a Black Lord Byron,” the threat of torture or death during the compontes prompted him to abandon the island for a period of five years of nomadic political and creative activity.29 During this time he lived and continued to expand his revolutionary, poetic, and journalistic activities in the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Haiti, Martinique, and New York. In 1887, Marín first fled to the Dominican Republic. Although his literary prowess initially gained him favor from General Ulises Heureaux (“Lilí”), the Dominican dictator forced Marín to march through the city in chains and very nearly ordered his assassination after Marín published a critical editorial.30 Deported first to Curaçao for six days, and then to Venezuela in 1889, Marín worked in South America as a typesetter by day and performed his poetry by night. His fellow typesetter and fellow-traveler, the self-declared socialist Afro-Colombiano Juan Coronel, likened their low-budget lives to scenes from Henri Murger’s La Vie bohéme (1851).31 Marín, his daughter Quisqueya, Juan Coronel, Felix Matos Bernier, and Luis Caballer—the last two exiled Puertorriqueños who also contributed to La Sombra (The Shadow), a leftist newspaper in Venezuela—were all imprisoned and then deported in August 1890 to Martinique, because of their public critique of Venezuela’s Liberal Party president, Raimundo Andueza Palacio.32 Marín’s Caribbean migrations took him to St. Thomas and Jamaica before he returned to Ponce, where he rejoined protests and demonstrations led by his cousin Américo Marín. Forced into a second exile in a matter of months in 1891, Marín migrated to New York. In 1893, Marín returned to the Caribbean to establish in Haiti a hotel named El Internacional, where he corresponded with combatants and generals in the midst of the war in Cuba, but his last entrepreneurial initiative burned to the ground and within two years he returned again to New York, where he resided only a short time before departing for the battlefront in Cuba.
Inspired by the deaths of his brother, tabaquero and militant Wenceslao Marín; by Maceo’s assistant, the young Afro-Cuban Francisco Gómez; and by the greatest strategist of Cuba’s wars of independence, the Bronze Titan, Antonio Maceo, Marín joined the revolutionary forces in 1897. He perished in the Cuban Manigua, alone in his hammock, shaking with yellow fever. Before his departure, he became a beloved bard and shining star of New York’s late-nineteenth-century Latin@ community.33
According to Bernardo Vega, Marín—“a young mulatto with sparkling eyes”—was the first one to greet Martí as he stepped down from the podium after he returned from his first visit to the tabaqueros in Key West and Tampa, and an enthusiastic audience called for him to speak.34 Pachín often shared the podium with Martí, who described Marín’s oratory in Patria as “elegant and ardent eloquence” (eloquencia elegante y ardiente) or as “sizzling improvisation (calurosa improvisación).”35 An accomplished guitar player, Marín lent his often-improvised musical and oratorical talents to Rafael Serra’s La Liga, a night school created by and for Puerto Ricans and Cubans of African descent, and he worked as a correspondent for Serra’s La Doctrina de Martí. Marín formed part of the interracial Liga Antillana and Liga de Artesanos, both of which were “bulwarks of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano.”36 Together with Arturo Schomburg, Marín was a founding member of the Cuban Revolutionary Party and secretary of the Club Borinqueño. Marín is credited with designing the Puerto Rican flag.37
Marín’s poetry and prose affirm his dark skin, which disobeys the dominant pressure to “improve the race” or to silence race by disavowing, bleaching, or disappearing blackness through enblancamiento. Marín denounces the exclusion and disdain with which the United States and other American or Caribbean societies treat black people, and especially poets of African descent, like Marín himself. He alluded to himself as a “bardo oscuro” (dark bard) and famously attacked the Dominican dictator General Ulises Heureaux for disdaining Marín’s and his own blackness: “Tirano, entre tú y yo hay una gran diferencia: ambos llevamos sangre africana en las venas: pero tú te avergüenzas de ella y yo no” (Tyrant, between you and me there is a significant difference: African blood flows in both of our veins, but you are ashamed of it, whereas I am not).38 This refusal to deny or see his blackness with shame suggests that Marín resists the rhetoric of “pardoism,” which emphasizes mixture with whiteness or “mejorando la raza” (improving the race) by valuing brown over black.
While Marín’s poetry extols liberty as the greatest consolation available on Earth and associates freedom with taking up arms against Spain, he acknowledges that Enlightenment ideals did not often extend to the “raza perseguida” (persecuted race). In Emilia, a narrative poem about a love affair across color lines, the father of the light-skinned lover responds to the couple’s love affair with a “¡no!” (E 151) so strong that this “sílaba que mata” (syllable that kills) initiates the path of the girl to her grave and of her dark-skinned lover to madness. Opening with an epigraph from the Buddha affirming “Todos los hombres son iguales” (All men are equal), Marín’s controversial narrative poem suggests that skin color sadly may also determine whether a creative artist will enter the canon of cultural memory.
Marín writes furiously, right up until his death, against his oblivion or erasure as an Afro-Latin@ poet. In his poem “Un Puerto,” Marín’s poetic persona accuses his interlocutor (the beloved Filena) of drawing negative conclusions about him based on his skin color:
¡Acaso piensas que en mi tez de cobre
se anubla la expresión de la mirada
y ves que está mi cabellera pobre
por el sol de los trópicos quemada!
¡Acaso antes tus ojos mi alma es muda
e ignoras niña, en tu razón secreta
que bajo el bosque de mi crencha ruda
la inspiración se oculta del Poeta! (E 54)
(Have you considered before my copper skin
clouds the expression of the gaze
and you only see my poor hair
is burned by the tropical sun!
Before your eyes my soul is mute
and in your secret reason, girl, you haven’t noticed
that beneath the rude forest of my parted curls
lurks the hidden inspiration of a Poet!)
This poem, which alludes in a coded fashion to the poetic speaker’s island origins in the title “Un Puerto” and in the first stanza’s reference to “mi riqueño cielo” (my Rican sky) (E 52), also exposes Filena’s racist inability to perceive the poet’s soulful self-expression. The poem’s second stanza develops this meditation on the effects of centuries of pejorative coding of appearance: “sobre la frente/ llevo escrita la historia de mi pena” (on my forehead/ is written the history of my pain) (E 53). Because the very creole nationalism to which Marín had committed himself denied racial difference as a way of distinguishing and distributing value among a supposedly equal citizenry—when in fact Puerto Ricans of African descent did not enjoy equal access to rights—it is all the more remarkable that the poem returns to a coded discussion of blackness. The third stanza repeats the word negro as an adjective to modify the poet’s heavy burden of pain: “Como el negro pesar que me devora/ negra es también tu hermosa cabellera” (As the black burden that devours me/ black too is your beautiful hair) (E 53). This adjectival description of a burden as “black” invites the reader to deconstruct the association of blackness or Africanity with pain or stupidity. As the speaker notes, his beloved Filena too has black hair and black eyes, but ironically her vision remains cloudy and in her eyes his soul is “mute.” Marín’s blackness, like his vocation as a poet, renders him “agorero/ pájaro de la noche tenebrosa” (ominous bird of the gloomy night) within a world where reason has become delirious, where the poet who would know himself lives without a country, beckoned to sleep or to drunkenness.39
The emergence of a discourse of Latinidad in the writings of Martí and of his interlocutors, as a Hispanophone print community, but moreover, as an explicitly nondominant and politicized working class–identified formation, responds to a specific historical conjuncture. In 1887, Martí revised his initial position aligned with mainstream views critical of the Chicago Haymarket anarchists to sympathize with the “Eight-hour day movement” leaders as heroic victims of a biased judicial system. Some of Martí’s untranslated writings on the Chicago anarchists, and on Lucy Parsons in particular in Mexico’s El Partido Liberal, furthermore condemn the disproportionate abuse of politically radical, working class, non-native protesters and affirm the need to address the structural causes of the misery that the anarchists and working class leaders had mobilized hundreds of thousands to denounce. The mass marches during the eight-hour-day movement suggest a generalized understanding of the need for sweeping structural change to which Martí and his circle too became sympathetic, in part because they felt in the metropolis the violence of racialization and their exploitation as workers.
Both Pachín Marín and Lucy Parsons pushed Martí to interrogate his own presuppositions about structural privilege, because as African-descended Spanish-speakers they experienced firsthand the multiple discourses of domination that led to their “triple-consciousness” as American, black, and Latin@.40 A Spanish-speaking woman of color, Lucy González Parsons was born Lucy Ella Waller in Waco, Texas, in the same year as Martí (1853) to a black mother and a Mexican father. Founder of the Working Women’s Union in Chicago in 1879, she had become a nationally notorious public figure when she spoke at Clarendon Hall on October 16, 1887, in New York. Shelly Streeby re-centers Lucy Parsons as a bilingual, anti-racist, class-conscious, and globally beloved figure who makes it possible to see connections between Haymarket in 1887 and the Mexican Revolution, which is to say, between anarchists, socialists, Wobblies, and Magonistas.41 Victor Valle and Rodolfo D. Torres have noted Parson’s influence on Martí in encouraging him to imagine Latina leadership and engage fearlessly in revolutionary change.42 With the “atrevida claridad de mundo nuevo” (daring clarity of a new world), Parsons jolts Martí because she speaks from her condition of African and indigenous descent, in Spanish and English, in arguments that defend a working class majority and defend Spanish-speakers’ historic native connections to America.43 Martí’s encounter with Parsons brings about a crisis regarding his own masculine, white, and class privilege. Martí’s Parsons, every bit as “implacable e inteligente” (implacable and intelligent) as her husband, “habla con feroz energía en las juntas publicas” (speaks with ferocious energy in public meetings) and marches at the head of 40,000 to 80,000 workers, inspiring a revelatory and sympathetic portrait of a Latina anarchist’s persuasive power.44 Parsons, like other Afro-Latin@s directly radicalized by the non-universality of Enlightenment ideals and liberal rights, pushes Martí toward his role in founding a revolutionary mass movement in which a majority of workers of African descent expected to enjoy equal rights, and in which blacks and whites ideally would be considered equally capable.
Martí’s superlatives in his chronicle of November 7, 1886, in Mexico’s El Partido Liberal, reveal the effect of Lucy Parsons’ speaking tour in New York on the Cuban leader. She exemplified the dramatic and “curiosísima” (extremely curious) prominence of women in the public life of North America. As Parsons outlines in a letter to fellow labor leader Joseph Labadie, the purpose of this speaking tour, including Cincinnati, Louisville, Cleveland, New York, and Pittsburgh, was to counteract the misinformation about the eight anarchist labor leaders, including her husband, Albert Parsons, who were being tried for a bombing in Haymarket Square that took place at a protest against police brutality in Chicago in May 1886, and to raise funds for their legal defense. She singles out mainstream reporting of the case by a “lying monopolistic press” as the reason so many had initially presumed the anarchists guilty.45 Part of what makes her unusual is that Parsons uses the speaking engagement in Clarendon Hall not to beg for clemency for her husband, slated to be hanged, nor to portray herself as a victim, but rather to denounce the root causes of the desperation of a group of working people to which she herself belonged. In a “Letter to the Editor” in the Columbus Sunday Capital, Parsons recounted how in Columbus, Ohio, she was beaten and jailed in a filthy basement cell upon speaking out about the shutting down of the venue where she had been invited to speak. In an essay from this period, “What Anarchy Means,” she denounces the wage system that “creates famine in the midst of abundance, and makes slaves of nine-tenths of the human family.”46 In her New York speech, she teaches about the anarchists’ vision of a new order, without child labor, and criticizes the excessive consumption of elite women, whom she depicts as impinging on the children of the working class majority. In his review of Parsons’ oratory, Martí represents anarchy, unlike the mainstream U.S. press, not as anathema, but as a necessary call for justice. He legitimizes Lucy Parsons’ response to the unjust legal process, one that did eventually hang her husband:
He aquí como ella misma describe [la anarquía], con sus proprias palabras: “Pedimos la descentralización del poder en grupos o clases. . . . No se abochorna de confesar sus hábitos llanos: “Fischer,” dice, “estaba entonces tomando cerveza conmigo en un salón cercano.” ¿Quién ha dicho en el proceso que vio tirar la bomba, a ninguno de los condenados? ¿Acaso los que van a matar llevan a ver el crimen, como llevó mi marido, a su mujer y a sus hijos?” “¡Ah, la prensa, las clases ricas, el miedo a este levantamiento formidable de nuestra justicia ha falseado la verdad en ese proceso ridículo e inicuo!”47
Here is how she herself describes [anarchy] in her own words: “We seek the decentralization of power among groups or classes. . . . She is not embarrassed to confess her free habits: “Fischer,” she says “was at that time drinking a beer with me in a bar nearby.” “Who has said in this trial that they saw any of the condemned throw the bomb? Is it likely that those who go to kill would take their wife and children to see the crime, as my husband took us?” “Oh, the press, the wealthy classes, the fear of this formidable uprising for our justice have falsified the truth in this ridiculous and iniquitous trial!”
Economic elites had corrupted the press’s ability to offer an impartial representation of the trial. Martí’s reporting counteracts this process by citing Lucy Parsons’ testimony about where the accused were during the incident, and why it is unlikely that her husband would have engaged in throwing a bomb at that time.
Parsons’ commentary, as transcribed by Martí, also makes visible the failure of modernity, and industrialization in particular, to bring about the promised liberation of the masses of people, in particular women and children. Parsons gives convincing eyewitness reports of the ways the factories increased the misery of those who walked long distances to labor in them. The juxtaposition of these working class experiences with those of wealthy women suggests that Parsons’ understanding of class injustice inexorably informs her feminist critique:
Cuando habla de la miseria de los obreros halla frases como esta: “Oigo vibrar y palpitar las fábricas inmensas; pero sé que hay mujeres que tienen que andar quince millas al día para ganar una miserable pitanza.” “Decid que no es verdad, a los que os dicen que aquí se adelanta. Cuando a mis propios ojos andaban en Chicago descalzos diez mil hijos de obreros, en Washington se presentaba en un baile una señora con todo el vestido lleno de diamantes, que valían $850,000: y otra llevaba en el pelo $75,000, y el pelo después de todo no era suyo!¡No! no es bueno que los ojos de vuestros hijos pierdan su luz puliendo esos diamantes.”48
When she speaks of the misery of the workers she uses phrases such as this: “I hear vibrate and palpitate the immense factories; but I know that there are women who have to walk fifteen miles a day to earn a miserable pittance.” “Say that it is not true, to those who tell you that here there is progress. When before my own eyes ten thousand workers’ children walked barefoot, in Washington a lady attended a ball dressed in a gown full of diamonds that was worth $850,000: and another wore $75,000 in her hair, and the hair after all wasn’t even hers! No! It is not just that the eyes of your children lose their brilliance in order to polish those diamonds.”
Parsons speaks with special sympathy for working class women and laboring children, whose living conditions relate to the extreme concentration of wealth among the political and economic elite. Thousands of working class children had to labor in factories at a wage so low they could not afford shoes, yet their labor produces the excess wealth that the politician’s wife in Washington, D.C., conspicuously loaded upon her gown or her wig. Parsons predicts an imminent revolt in the face of these contradictions, so that factories propelled by children’s labor could become schools.
In Martí’s chronicle, Lucy Parsons shines as a compelling spokesperson, with the ability of the greatest orators to command the attention of her audience. With the crowd outside pushing to enter, everyone in the room jumped to their feet. Martí acknowledges Parsons’ power to move men, women, and children to tears and to action:
¿Por qué no ha de decirse? Esa mujer habló ayer con todo el brío de los grandes oradores. . . . Cuando acabó de hablar esta mestiza de mexicano e indio, todas las cabezas estaban inclinadas, como cuando se ora, sobre los bancos de la iglesia, y parecía la sala henchida; un campo de espigas encorvadas por el viento.49
Why not say it? This woman spoke yesterday with all the force of the great orators . . . When this Mexican and Indian mestiza finished speaking, all the heads were bent, as if in prayer over the benches of a church, and the room seemed full; a field of wheat bending in the wind.
By acknowledging Parsons’ oratorical skill, by depicting men whose tears covered their beards after hearing her speak, and by describing little girls shouting “hurra” while atop their fathers’ shoulders, Martí’s reportage sketches men in awe of this woman who was enacting new protagonistic roles for Latinas, roles that challenge the traditional ideal of women as receptacles designed to satiate men’s physical or emotional needs and/or as fulfilling their duty to the nation strictly through reproduction.50 The description of the room as people bowing to pray, or as a field of wheat bending before the power of the wind, attribute both divine and natural powers of this mestiza, Mexican and indigenous, and of African descent, as Martí and the mainstream press elsewhere underscore. The rhetorical question—“Why should it not be said?”—suggests Martí’s anticipation of the way his chronicle would ruffle the feathers of his readers, just as she had shaken him, but he does not for this reason deter his account of her inspired voice, which flowed from her “labios llenos” (full lips) like “globos de fuego” (globes of fire), as if her speech were the lava of a volcano.51
Between May 15, 1886, the date Martí affixed to his first essay on the trial of the seven anarchists of Chicago, and fall and winter of 1886, when Martí addresses a range of social questions ranging from class conflict, the concentration of wealth among a small elite, and the increasingly numerous and organized working class movement, Martí’s experiences in the city provoke a dramatic shift to acknowledge the anarchists’ claims that a radical transformation needed to occur.52 In numerous essays that originally appeared in the Partido Liberal, and many of which were not included in Martí’s Obras Completas until 2003, Martí wonders whether educational reform can bring about change, whether freedom of the press really exists in the United States, and whether immigrant, working class people of color can obtain fair representation in U.S.-style democracy. Martí notes, perhaps reluctantly, the need for a shift in women’s roles, and for an organized movement to respond to class injustice, racial terror, and state-sponsored violence. The shock and novelty of Lucy Parsons’ masterful oratory awakens Martí—like tens of thousands of others—to move beyond reflection and resentment toward radical action. For Martí, the encounter with Parsons suggests a shock of recognizing a peer, a fellow Spanish-speaker, and a teacher.
The official end of racial slavery and the emergence of working class, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist movements constitute enduring legacies of the nineteenth century. The multiracial formation of late-nineteenth-century Latinidad defines itself against monolingualism, imperialism, and U.S.-style racism. The Spanish-speaking feminist of color Lucy Parsons and the Afro-Puertorriqueño “Pachín” Marín did not hesitate to speak out against the violence they faced, as people of color, as workers, and as colonial subjects. The contributions of these dynamic wordsmiths, fearless orators, and indefatigable organizers push Martí to address his own blind spots, especially concerning race and gender, to inscribe a multiracial Latina/o social movement into the margins, as a critical supplement to the socialist and revolutionary projects that emerged in the late nineteenth century.
In Memoriam Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tameer Rice, Akai Gurley, Trayvon Martin, Andy López, Anthony Rosario, Anthony Baez, Israel Hernández Llach, Reefa Henández, Islan Nettles, Oscar Grant, Kenneth Chamberlaine Sr., Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, David Perez, and many thousands of other black and Latin@ victims of police or vigilante abuse and of an unjust legal system. I am grateful to José Aranda, who organized “Global Hispanisms” at Rice University in 2014; Carmen Lamas, who organized a panel at the Latina/o Studies Association in 2014; and Silvio Torres Saillant, who organized “Prensa, Latinidad y Legado: Spanish-Language Press and Print Culture” at Syracuse University in 2014, where I was able to present earlier versions and receive invaluable feedback on this chapter.
1 José Martí, Fragment 184, Obras Completas 22, 108 (in English in the original); Fragment 286, Obras 22, 189.
2 José Ballón’s indispensable archival research documents Martí’s marginal manuscripts on his personal copy of Scottish economist John Rae’s treatise Contemporary Socialism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1887; f.p. 1883), available in the Archivo de Asuntos Históricos del Consejo de Estado de Cuba. See Ballón’s detailed documentation of all legible annotations in Lecturas norteamericanas de José Martí: Emerson y el socialismo contemporaneo (1880–1887) (México: Centro Coordinador y Difusor de Estudios Latinoamericanos, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1995), 36–58.
3 Martí, “Mi Raza” (My Race), admonishes racism in the Independence movement, in an article that simultaneously addresses blacks and whites.
4 This argument responds to the review of my book Translating Empire by Manuel Tellechea, in which he identifies the notion of Martí’s learning from his colleagues of African descent as “the most offensive reference to Martí in Translating Empire.” “Part II, Review of Laura Lomas Translating Empire.” (http://www.josemartiblog.blogspot.com, accessed on September 11, 2014).
5 Martí delivered his speech, “Madre América,” in New York to Latin American leaders on December 19, 1889. See Obras 6: 135.
6 See, for example, Martí’s critique of the weakness and divisions that Spain has exacerbated by “taking advantage of our preoccupations of the former master [antiguo señor], to divorce us from those who, because they have suffered in slavery like us, should and could be always our natural allies” (“A Ricardo Rodríguez Otero” 16 May 1886); Obras 1:194. The referent for the collective pronoun us seems to be white creoles, but to claim that whites experienced enslavement just as Afro-Cubans is highly problematic.
7 This term appears in Martí’s correspondence to Manuel Mercado, his Mexican friend and editor, for whom he wrote his serialized novel Amistad funesta, which appeared in New York in El Latino Americano. See Martí, “A Manuel Mercado, April 12, 1885,” in Martí, Epistolario1: 299.
8 In “The Truth about the United States,” Martí discusses the supposed differences between “Latins” and “Saxons” but concludes they are nil. See Lomas, Translating Empire, xii, 92, 217, 232–35, 272–75, 285n6, 335n1.
9 Even when these “white” neighbors made their lives unbearable by throwing feces at their door and disrupting their employment, the Vegas continued their patterns of socializing until, eventually, they had to move. See Memoirs of Bernardo Vega, trans. Juan Flores (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), 85.
10 See crónicas that represent a critical reading of racial terror in the section on the “Asesinato de chinos” (La Nación, September 19, 1885) and “El problema industrial en los Estados Unidos” (La Nación, October 23, 1885); rpt. En los Estados Unidos: periodismo de 1881–1892, ed. Roberto Fernández Retamar and Pedro Pablo Rodríguez (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 2003), 540–44; “A Town Sets a Black Man on Fire,” in Martí, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Esther Allen (New York: Penguin, 2002).
11 Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Coloniality of Diasporas (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 101.
12 See Martí, Selected Writings, 296, 264.
13 This phrase, which acknowledges the ways in which African culture had always already marked Cuban culture (and Caribbean culture more generally), appears in an excerpt from The Manufacturer, reprinted in Martí, Selected Writings, 262.
14 The pro-annexationist Cuban travel writer Ricardo Rodríguez Otero falsely attributed his views of autonomy to Martí. For discussion, see Translating Empire, 210–12.
15 Martí, “A Vindication,” Selected Writings 263.
16 Ibid., 267.
17 Ibid., 264.
18 Ibid., 267.
19 Martí, “Gran exposición de ganado” (May 24, 1887, La Nación July 2, 1887) in En los Estados Unidos, 872–79. Cf. Lomas, “Imperialism, Modernization and Commodification of Identity,” 201.
20 Obras 21:399; Selected Writings, 287.
21 Ríos, “El tren de Martí,” 152–53.
22 Martí, “Class War in Chicago: A Terrible Drama,” Selected Writings, 200.
23 Bernardo Vega makes the case to recognize Puerto Rico’s fundamental contribution in his chapter entitled, “With the help of Puerto Ricans like Sotero Figueroa and Pachín Marín, the Partido Revolucionario Cubano is founded,” in his Memoirs, 63–71.
24 Francisco Gonzálo Marín, Mi óbolo, Mis dos cultos, A la asamblea, Al sol (Ponce: Tipografía El Vapor, 1887). As I have noted in “Migration and Decolonial Politics in Two Afro-Latino Poets: ‘Pachín’ Marín and ‘Tato’ Laviera” Review 47.2 (2014): 157, the word componte derives from the Spanish use of torture to componer (put in order) and refers specifically to repression of rebellious free black artisans in Cuba during La Escalera several decades earlier in 1844.
25 Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, “To Abolish the Law of Castes: Merit, Manhood and the Problem of Colour in the Puerto Rican Liberal Movement, 1887–1892,” Social History 36.3 (2011): 332–33.
26 Hoffnung-Garskof, “To Abolish the Law of Castes,” 333.
27 See “Letter from an Artisan to His Newspaper,” in Workers’ Struggle in Puerto Rico: A Documentary History, ed. Angel Quintero Rivera, trans. Cedric Belfrage (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), 186.
28 See Hoffnung-Garskof, “To Abolish the Law of Castes,” 314.
29 See Vega, Memoirs, 128.
30 After seeing a production of Marín’s play 27 de Febrero (1888), Lilí appointed Marín director of a school in Santiago de los Caballeros, but Marín was forced to flee shortly thereafter. Victor Coll y Cuchí describes the “macabre spectacle that this sublime sweaty, exhausted and enchained pilgrim presented” (qtd. Figueroa de Cifredo 44–46).
31 See Juan Coronel, Un peregrino. Pre-Biblión de Aníbal Esquivia Vasquez (Cartagena: Dirección de Educación Pública de Bolívar, Extensión Cultural, Imprenta Departamental, 1944), 302. In this remarkable document, Coronel reprints articles from El Obrero to which Marín contributed, and in the chapter on socialism in his memoir he notes “de hecho me declaré socialista” (in fact, I declared myself a socialist) (324). See Lawrence E. Prescott, “A Colombian Pilgrim in the Caribbean: Juan Coronel, alias Un Peregrino,” Crítica Hispánica 22.1 (2000), 135–47.
32 See Marín’s further denunciation in his poem entitled “Andueza Palacio,” En la arena: Poesías (Manzanillo, Cuba: Editorial el Arte, 1944), 102; hereafter cited parenthetically as E. Jorge Quintana has located archival evidence to show that the cause of Marín’s deportation from Venezuela was an article criticizing Andueza Palacio, not the critique of Lilí, in “La expulsión de Venezuela de Francisco Gonzálo Marín,” Revista 37 (October 10, 1967), 27–32.
33 According to his biographer, Patria Figueroa de Cifredo, a manuscript eulogizing two African-descended warriors fallen in the struggle—Antonio Maceo and Francisco Gómez—was found on Marín’s corpse. See Figueroa de Cifredo, Pachín Marín: Héroe y Poeta (San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña), 1967.
34 Vega, Memoirs, 67.
35 José Martí, “Los Clubs: Rifleros de la Habana,” Patria (28 de mayo 1892); rpt. Obras completas 1:471; and “El Club ‘Mercedes Varona,’” Patria (1 de noviembre 1892); rpt. Obras completas 2: 178. See also José Ramón Freyre, El Machete, 2 de mayo de 1909; qtd. Figueroa de Cifredo 70.
36 Vega, Memoirs, 66.
37 See Figueroa de Cifredo, Pachín Marín, 71–73, where she cites correspondence with personal testimony from Domingo Collazo and J. de H. Terreforte crediting a letter from Marín, then in Jamaica, for the design of the Puerto Rican flag.
38 Marín, “Victor Hugo,” En la Arena, 60; Marín, Preface to “Emilia,” qtd. in Carlos N. Carreras, “El heroismo de Gonzalo Marín en la época de los compontes,” Puerto Rico Ilustrado 27.1441 (23 oct 1937): 61; qtd. in Figuroa de Cifredo, Pachín Marín, 46.
39 Marín, “Las Botas,” En la Arena, 108.
40 See Juan Flores and Miriam Jiménez Román’s use of this term in their Introduction to their edited volume The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–15. Roberto Zurbano also uses the term triple consciousness, but in his case to refer to a concept elucidated by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin White Masks, to refer to the overlapping categories of blackness, nationality, and “a decolonizing consciousness.” See Roberto Zurbano, “Cuba: Doce dificultades para enfrentar al (neo) racism o doce razones para abrir el (otro) debate,” Universidad de la Habana 273 (Enero-Febrero 2012), 273.
41 Shelly Streeby, Radical Sensations: World Movements, Violence and Visual Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013).
42 Victor Valle and Rodolfo D. Torres, “After Latino Metropolis: Cultural Political Economy and Alternative Futures,” in Latino Urbanism: The Politics of Planning, Policy and Redevelopment, ed. David R. Dias and Rodolfo D. Torres (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 181–201.
43 Martí, “Grandes motines de obreros,” En los Estados Unidos, 627.
44 Martí, En los Estados Unidos, 726; “Grandes motines de obreros,” 632.
45 Parsons, “Challenging the Lying Monopolistic Press: A letter to Joseph Labadie,” in Freedom, Equality and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches 1878–1937 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2004), 56–67.
46 Parsons, “What Anarchy Means,” The Advance and Labor Leaf (March 12, 1887); rpt. Freedom, Equality and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches 1878–1937, 57–61.
47 Martí, “La mujer norteamericana,” El Partido Liberal (November 7, 1886); rpt. En los Estados Unidos, 738–40.
48 Ibid., 740.
49 Ibid., 739.
50 Ibid., 740.
51 Ibid., 739.
52 On the key role of anarchists in the Cuban Independence movement, after Martí persuaded them that the nationalists and anarchists had common interests, see Gerald Poyo, “With All, and for the Good of All” (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989) and Frank Fernández, Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement, Trans. Charles Bufe (Tucson: See Sharp Press, 2001).