Ralph Bauer
The chapters assembled here call our attention to a very rich and heterogeneous archive that has all too long been ignored by an Anglocentric tradition of literary history in the United States. As such, this volume makes an important contribution to the ongoing “recovery” project of the rich U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage in the United States launched by Arte Público Press in 1992. Equal in significance to its project of archival recovery, however, is this volume’s critical intervention in forcing us to think beyond some of the conceptual vocabulary that has conventionally informed Latino studies, a subdiscipline that emerged with a primary focus on an archive produced in the wake of the civil rights movement in the United States. As such, the chapters gathered here splendidly respond to Lazo’s challenge to “open research into writing and textual production that may move us in unexpected directions and new archival sites,” thereby illuminating the “material conditions, spatial trajectories, hemispheric movements, and forms of colonization and war that contribute what we can perceive in the texts that remain” of the nineteenth-century Latino archive.
One important difference, Lazo notes, between the archival encounter of Latino/a writing in the nineteenth century and that of more recent times is with regard to the issue of language. Whereas the Latino literature written since the 1960s has been published primarily in English, much of nineteenth-century Latino writing is preserved in Spanish. This may be one of the reasons, as Raúl Coronado points out, for the continued marginalization of this archive in American literary criticism, which has by and large followed an “English only” language policy, despite embracing multiculturalism and historicism in recent decades. Latino literature, in this critical tradition, belonged to U.S. literature only when it was written in English, but to Latin American literature when it was written in Spanish. Thus, as Carmen Lamas points out in her chapter, “it is only by way of accessing the Latin American archive . . . that we gain new insight into the Latina/o experience of the nineteenth century.” Indeed, only recently have some widely distributed literary anthologies, such as The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature, edited by Werner Sollors and Marc Shell, begun to reflect the impact of seminal critical works about the Spanish-language literature of the United States, including the works of many of the authors gathered in this volume. From this point of view, The Latino Nineteenth Century contributes to a new understanding not only of the longue durée of the Latino literary heritage but also of the nineteenth-century literary landscape of the United States.
But language aside, there are other reasons why The Latino Nineteenth Century challenges conventional paradigms guiding our archival encounters. While some of the texts and authors considered here manifest the beginnings of what we might call a “minority discourse” that speaks back to Anglo American hegemony and racism already alive and well in the nineteenth-century United States, the overall picture that emerges from this collection is that of a diverse set of Latino subject-positions, some of which point not forward to twentieth-century power relations in the United States but rather backward to those of late colonial and early national Latin America. As José Aranda observes in his contribution, “the ‘coloniality of power’” that resides in these texts is often “double-edged, fighting off an Anglo-American colonial presence, only to hide, make natural, or complicate older Spanish-Mexican colonial narratives.” Indeed, as Aranda goes on to argue, many nineteenth-century Latinos such as María Ruiz de Burton were no “subalterns.” Thus, Ruiz de Burton was the “daughter of the Enlightenment and a colonialist,” and, like many post-1848 writers of Mexican descent in the United States, she appears “as both colonizer and colonized, as beneficiary and victim of settler colonialism, as white and non-white, and as gendered, and therefore disciplined, in accordance to a European patriarchal system.” For this reason, Aranda concludes, the conceptual paradigms that grew out of the “counter-nationalist, Marxist leaning, activist archive of the Chicana/o Movement” of the twentieth-century United States have limited value for understanding the world of nineteenth-century Latinas/os such as Ruiz de Burton, who belonged to “other times and other politics.” This is what Aranda calls (borrowing from the Argentine Mexican theorist Enrique Dussel) the “transmodernity” of the Latino nineteenth century, a modernity that bridges and hybridizes Latin American and U.S. modernities that emerged from their respective histories of conquest and colonialism in the Americas.
This is an important point that is reinforced by Robert McKee Irwin’s notion of the “almost Latino” of more recent days. Insofar as the authors and agents discussed in this volume can be seen as representative of the Latino nineteenth century, Irwin’s notion challenges us to ask who was not included among the migrants and settlers whose stories we learn about in these chapters and to raise “questions about the relationship between a US-based identity category and its Latin American beginnings.” What the chapters in this volume thus collectively underscore is the need for a hemispheric and transnational perspective on the Latino nineteenth century, one that would consider Latinos in the context not only of the United States but also of colonial and postcolonial Latin American history and literature. Indeed, while the term Latino has come to distinguish an ethnic minority from an ethnic “Anglo” majority (as well as other ethnic minorities) in the United States, in the (post-) colonial Latin American context the identity category referencing a subject’s Latinidad has had very different social implications. In Latin America, the word ladino is generally used to distinguish mestizos and Indians who use or have adopted the Spanish language and culture (including dress, diet, agriculture, and so on) from “indios” or “indígenas” on the one hand and, on the other, from Spanish-descended and American-born creoles (criollos) as well as Spanish-born Spaniards (peninsulares). Latinidad, in other words, evokes not social and cultural marginalization but rather the assimilation to the culture of the (post-) colonial elite in the social order that had emerged from the European conquest by those who could not themselves lay claim to belonging.
Keeping in mind the (post-) colonial Latin American social context of Latinidad brings into focus the fact that most of the authors and subjects under consideration in this collection—the exception being the Afro-Puertorriqueño activists Francisco Gonzálo “Pachín” Marín Shaw (discussed by Laura Lomas) and Sotero Figueroa and Arturo Schomburg (discussed by Nicolás Kanellos)—belonged to the social class of “creoles” (criollos), the American-born descendants of European conquerors or immigrants. Although in the sociopolitical order of the Spanish American viceroyalties creoles were frequently discriminated against in the allocation of imperial offices, the colonial casta system made no distinction between American-born and European-born españoles. Regardless of the place of birth, the social prestige, wealth, and power of the caste of españoles were largely based on the exploitation of the labor and land of socially abject indios who had been turned into neo-feudal peasants in the colonial encomienda system, which conferred on the Euro American subject the right to the tribute and labor of an allotted number of Indians. By the nineteenth century, this system had been replaced by the hacienda, the great plantation estates that were now privately held by the creoles and on which the Indians were obliged to work—now no longer by imperial law but rather by economic necessity, after having lost most of the fertile lands to the haciendas or fincas. In the Spanish Caribbean, where the Indian encomienda had collapsed as a result of the demographic catastrophe resulting from disease and conquest, the rise of a plantocracy had depended mainly on African slave labor as early as the sixteenth century.
The interconnections between African slavery, the politics of its abolition, and national independence therefore loomed largest in those regions of Latin America, such as Cuba and Brazil, which depended most heavily on African slave labor, rather than on that of Indian peasants. In those Latin American territories that had gained political independence by the third decade of the nineteenth century, slavery never had the same economic significance as it had had in the Caribbean, Brazil, or the South of the United States, as Indians in encomienda had not legally been slaves. Nevertheless, throughout colonial Latin America a sort of neo-feudal aristocracy had formed that disproportionally benefited from a (neo-) colonial economy and social hierarchy that circumscribed the evolution of the sort of “liberal” revolutionary ideologies facilitated by the Native American holocaust in the northern and western areas of the nineteenth-century United States. The aristocratic pretentions of the creole elite were frequently mocked by the Old World aristocracy, for their class included many family lineages of humble background in Europe who had been able to elevate their social status in the colonial order of the viceregal Americas.
But despite these important historical variations, the distinction that the title of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel The Squatter and the Don (1885) initially appears to draw between legitimate Spanish American “dons” and illegitimate Anglo American “squatters” obscures an uncanny historical resemblance between the descendants of two groups of Euro American conquerors whose economic privilege had similarly been founded on stolen Native American land and whose social privilege in the colonial order had been rationalized by a new conception of “race”—not in its traditional (Old World) sense of noble family lineage or pedigree but rather in the modern (New World) sense of belonging to a certain phenotype, namely that of being “white.” Although this modern idea of race did not fully form in Latin America until the nineteenth century, the fiction of a Euro American aristocracy (Latin American “dons” and U.S. southern aristocrats) pretending to hold legitimate title to American land has a long tradition in colonial American writing. There, it reaches back perhaps as far as the letters of Hernando Cortés to Charles V in the 1520s, in which the Spanish conqueror attempted to argue that the Spaniards, not the Mexica elite, were the legitimate and “natural” lords of Mexico, the fulfillers of ancient American prophecies and national destinies. If, as Marissa López shows, Ruiz de Burton’s novel ultimately resolves the conflict between Latino aristocrats and gringo squatters with which it begins by imagining a “western” or “local” solidarity in opposition to the railroad tycoons and tyrannical Federal policies, Ruiz de Burton builds on (and synthesizes) long colonial literary and political traditions of local creole patriotism in both colonial Latin and British American writing, in which the “first” conquerors register their indignation about and resistance against the alleged injustices of the “second” conquest by the advancing imperial state.
Keeping in mind this sociopolitical background of many of the authors and actors who appear in this volume helps shed light on the ambiguity of their subject-positions, as they transform from (neo-) colonial Latin American criollos to become U.S. American Latinos. Thus, Juan Poblete argues (following Ericka Beckman) that the Chilean Forty-Niner Vicente Pérez Rosales, in his Diario de un viaje a California and Recuerdos del Pasado, engages in the “creolization of imperial reason” by actively participating in the “implementation of an immigration policy that was generous and proactive towards European white immigrants at the same time that it was racist and ethnocentric against natives and mestizos.” Indeed, his strategy of countering the Anglo racism he faced in California is in part predicated on a particular kind of historical vision that would still inspire hemispheric American historiography in the early twentieth century, most prominently represented by that of Herbert Eugene Bolton—the idea that the history of the Americas can be understood in terms of a parallel or analogous scheme of progress resulting from the European conquest and (post-) colonial presence. Thus, Poblete argues, Pérez Rosales’s narrative combines “strong support for the beneficial aspects of immigration on the development of the nation, a clear view of the need to eliminate or subjugate Native Americans, as well as critiques of the blatant and, in Pérez Rosales[’s] view, mistaken racialization of and violence against those immigrants.” While his perspective is in part inflected by his immigrant and minority experience, Poblete argues, “it is also a nineteenth-century white national immigrant view” that celebrates the “salutary effects of white European foreign immigration in the Americas.”
Indeed, the antipodal and exceptionalist New World logic of Pérez Rosales’s hemispheric vision—Chile is South America’s “California” and vice-versa—has a long history of entanglement with proto-racist explanations of the origins of Americas’ indigenous populations rationalizing enslavement, exploitation, and genocide, reaching back to Amerigo Vespucci’s pronouncement, in the early sixteenth century, that America was a “New World,” unknown by the Ancients and never mentioned in the Book of Genesis. If the logical conclusion—hinted at here and there already in the sixteenth century—was that of polygenesis, its heretical implications had prevented it from finding overt scientific support throughout the early modern period. However, once religion lost its grip on science during the nineteenth century, polygenesis prominently reared its ugly head in nineteenth-century anthropology, providing the ideology of white settler colonialism and creole nationalism with a scientific underwriting throughout the Americas. Thus, creoles throughout the Americas argued that “progress” had been encumbered not by the natural environment—as eighteenth-century French and German philosophers had argued—but rather by the sloth and inferiority of its indigenous races.
But despite Pérez Rosales’s attempt to place European settler colonialism in a hemispheric perspective, his Latino subjectivity formed partially, Poblete also shows, in response to Anglo prejudice, injustice, and even racism against non-Anglo immigrants and especially again immigrants from Latin America. Thus, Poblete underscores the solidarity that formed during the California Gold Rush between Latino native-born Californios and Latin American, especially Mexican, immigrants in the face of Anglo racism. Similarly, John Alba Cutler suggests that while Latin American identities are largely constructed along lines of national divisions that would militate against any sort of common identity (drawing distinctions, for example, between what it means to be Mexican, Chilean, or Argentine), a Latino identity as it emerged in the nineteenth-century United States is predicated on “communities, unrestricted by particular nationalities,” communities united by the common idiom of the Spanish language and by being the common target of Anglo American racism, which made no distinctions of national origin.
Thus, in the context of the nineteenth-century United States, the category of the Latino emerged as a fifth racial category that had never appeared in any of the neoclassical eighteenth-century racial taxonomies and theories of Carl Linnaeus, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and others postulating the existence of four races (black, white, yellow, red). Late-nineteenth-century Latinos such as José Martí were acutely aware of this emergent racial formation, as Laura Lomas shows in her chapter. While some of the early Latin American creole revolutionaries had courted the support of the various racialized castas for their political and military cause, many—having themselves been slavemasters—also “explicitly or implicitly excluded or devalued the racialized working masses.” In the context of the nineteenth-century United States, however, even socially privileged “white” Latinos such as Martí, who found themselves to be the objects of Anglo racism against all Latinos (regardless of skin color), came to an acutely critical understanding of the racial logic that had undergirded socioeconomic relations throughout the Americas. In a process that Lomas calls (borrowing from Yolanda Martínez San Miguel) “metropolitan racialization,” some U.S. Latinos of various races “came to realize that their linguistic difference and national origin excluded them from white privilege” and therefore formed multiracial alliances (in Martí’s case with Afro-Puertorriqueño Francisco Gonzálo “Pachín” Marín Shaw and Afro-Tejana anarchist leader Lucy Eldine González Parsons). In the process, they utterly “transformed the politics of latinidad.”
The fact that racial prejudices against Latinos are often ventriloquized by non-Anglo subjects—as they are in Alba Cutler’s example of Carlos Galán’s costumbrista short fiction by “white” Irish immigrants (rather than Anglo Americans)—underscores that the notion of a Latino formed in the United States not in isolation from a broader transnational context that saw the rise of the ideas not only of “Latin America” but also of a Global South as geocultural entities. This formation of a fifth ethnic and racial category distinctive to the United States takes place in the context of a larger shift during the nineteenth century from a hemispheric discourse of European settler colonialism in the Americas predicated on a spatial “east–west” network of colonial exploitation in both Latin and Anglo America since the sixteenth century to a hemispheric discourse predicated on a global “north–south” network of neo-colonial power relationships.
The third salient aspect of Latin subjectivity emphasized by the chapters in this collection is its trans-American dimension, as subjects move and act across national borders and defy being classified as either Latin American or U.S. American (and hereby, of course, the presumption that U.S. American equals Anglo American). On the one hand, the vast majority of Latinos such as Ruiz de Burton “entered” the United States with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1849), which ended the U.S.–Mexico War and formalized the annexation by the United States of vast territories and populations formerly belonging to Mexico. On the other hand, the volume also highlights the importance of “hemispheric mobilities.” Thus, many Latinos entered the United States “errantly” (as Kirsten Silva Gruesz puts it)—as travelers, migrants, and exiles—in the context and aftermath of the Latin American independence movements, which would open up opportunities to citizens of the newly independent Latin American nation-states for travel across the old imperial lines or even obliged many Latin American revolutionaries from not yet independent Spanish imperial territories (such as Cuba) to take up refuge in the United States. Thus, U.S. cities and locations such as Philadelphia, Key West, and Tampa became “peripheral centers” (as Emily García writes) in the Latin American independence movements.
A fascinating case in point is that of the Cavada brothers, discussed by Jesse Alemán in his contribution. Living in Pennsylvania, the Cavadas joined the Union Army in the American Civil War before returning to their native Cuba to fight for independence in the Ten Years War. Significantly, the Cavada brothers saw Cuba’s struggle for independence as an analogue not to the Confederacy’s secession but rather to the American Revolution, especially with regard to the all-important issue of slavery. Unlike the Confederacy’s secession, the Cuban bid for independence was not fought to protect the Peculiar Institution. At the same time, like patriots of the American Revolution, the champions of the Ten Years War in Cuba could not afford to alienate the powerful interests invested in slavery—in the Cuban case, the powerful interests of the sugar planters on the western parts of the island. It was, like the American Revolution, a pragmatic compromise between the emancipatory ideals of the Enlightenment and its darker side of economic liberalism as it had emerged since the seventeenth century in the Atlantic world—the “liberty” to hold humans as property.
Frederic Cavada’s “touristic” account of Cuba’s Bellamar Cave in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine invites a comparison with another nineteenth-century account of Cuba’s sublime subterranean world—in Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Arteaga’s description of the Caverns of Cubitas in her novel Sab (1841). But while Gómez de Avellaneda y Arteaga similarly extolls Cuba’s sublime nature as an emblem of impassioned (Latin American) creole patriotism, her female personification of the Cuban nation, Carlotta, is seduced by the villainous gringo Enrique Otway, while her true and heroic lover, the black slave Sab, is driven to his death. Gómez de Avellaneda’s novel foreshadows both José Martí’s vision of an oppositional relationship between “Our” (Latin) America and the “Other” (U.S.) America, a hemispheric opposition that would find numerous iterations in Latin America during the twentieth century, such as José Enrique Rodó’s seminal essay Ariel (1900), which distinguished the “aristocratic” (“Arielesque”) spirit of Latin America from Anglo America’s “Calibanesque” spirit of crass capitalism, liberalism, materialism, and pragmatism. But unlike Rodó, Martí, or Gómez de Avellandeda y Arteaga, whose articulation of a “Latin American” identity was shaped by an engagement with the emergent North American giant, Cavada’s “trans-American” Latino subjectivity bridges U.S. and Latin America: “both Americas are his,” and he has a “voice in both worlds.” Thus, Alemán concludes, the Cavada brothers must properly be considered as trans-American hemispheric subjects who complicate José Martí’s famous distinction between “Our [i.e., Latin] America” and that America (i.e., the United States) “which is not ours.” This trans-American hemispheric subjectivity is key to understanding Latino political activism in the nineteenth century, as Gerald Poyo shows in his discussion of how the Cuban exile community in Key West deftly imprinted its political weight through ethnic activism onto the Florida political landscape with a trans-American perspective that advanced Cuban independence. But it inflects not only political activism but also literary form, as John Alba Cutler shows in his discussion of Carlos F. Galán’s California costumbrismo short fiction. While the modernismo short story developed in Latin America, under the sway of intellectuals such as Martí and Rodó, with “an attitude of resistance toward the encroachments of U.S. imperialism and the crassness of U.S. materialism,” Galán’s sketches reject the bifurcation of our/other America and instead “anticipate modern Latino/a communities, unrestricted by particular nationalities.”
As a whole, The Latino Nineteenth Century thus challenges several conventional assumptions about “Latino” literature, nineteenth-century “American” literature, and Latin American studies. As such, perhaps the most prominent theme that emerges from this collection is the multiplicity of Latino writing in the nineteenth century—a “multiplicity of the uncommon,” as Lazo aptly writes in his Introduction. On the one hand, many of the writers discussed here find themselves in a subject-position distinct from that of many of their Anglo (American) counterparts with regard to the dominance of Protestant liberalism in the Anglo American literary tradition, the rise of U.S. imperialism in the nineteenth century, and transforming nineteenth-century ideas about race and attitudes toward racial mixture. On the other hand, many of the Latino writers we encounter here share with their Anglo American contemporaries the ambiguities of creole patriotism, its colonial past, and its postcolonial legacies. While one of the effects of U.S. imperialism in the nineteenth century seems overall to have been an “inward” turn toward the national—disavowing the cosmopolitanism of many of the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century writers such as Thomas Jefferson or Alexander von Humboldt—this collection shows that many nineteenth-century Latino writers remained thoroughly committed to a transnational (and especially “trans-American”) perspective. And while many prominent nineteenth-century Latin American intellectuals—from Andrés Bello to José Enrique Rodó—turned toward Europe in order to counter the increasingly dominant hegemony of the United States in the hemisphere, this collection powerfully demonstrates how Latino writers of the nineteenth century bridged the gulf between “Our” American and the “Other” America. Hemispheric subjects, their America was both.