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Jesse Alemán
For most of the nineteenth century, the print culture Latina/os produced and circulated in the United States appeared in Spanish‐language texts, as early as the Philadelphia‐published 1812 El Amigo de los hombres (The Friend of Men), a pseudonymously penned declaration for Spanish‐American independence in the vein of American revolutionary rhetoric. It falls in between José Alvarez de Toledo’s 1811 Manifiesto ó satisfaccion pundorosa (Manifesto or Satisfaction in a Point of Honor) and his 1816 Justificación – the former recounting the Spanish‐American statesman’s arrival in the city and the latter being his apologia to try to get back into the Spanish crown’s graces. Both of them were also published in Philadelphia, as was Vicente Rocafuerte Bejarano’s 1821 Ideas necesarias á todo pueblo americano independiente (Necessary Ideas for All Independent People of the Americas) and the 1826 anonymously authored historical novel Jicoténcal. As Rodrigo Lazo (2008) explains, Philadelphia proved formative for early Latina/o voices because “it had come to be well known as a hotbed of opposition to the Spanish monarchy” (57); equally important, it was a city with an infrastructure that could readily produce, disseminate, and market Spanish‐language materials locally and globally (6).
We have grown so accustomed to the New England, Anglophone story of American literature that proof of any alternative seems fugitive, anomalous, or erudite in what we take to be our literary history proper. However, Hispanophone print circulated across national borders, especially during the republican years of the Americas, as Spanish‐speaking peoples and Spanish‐language books spread revolutionary rhetoric across the Americas. Spanish print culture traveled from Florida to Massachusetts, moving north and south along the Atlantic seaboard from Amelia Island, Florida, to Boston with Charleston, Richmond, Washington, DC, New York, and Philadelphia home to Spanish‐language presses. In the circum‐gulf direction from Pensacola, Florida, to Brownsville, Texas, with New Orleans as foundational to Latino print as Philadelphia, las voces Latinas moved up the Mississippi and down to Vera Cruz, Mexico, spreading poetry, literature, and hemispheric views about independence and republicanism. Finally, from Brownsville to San Francisco, a steady stream of Spanish and bilingual expressive culture carried news of Mexico’s independence, circulated political and religious tracts, and became the main voice against US encroachment by mid‐nineteenth century. As Nicolás Kanellos (2000) explains, the Spanish‐language press across the United States “protected the language, culture and rights of an ethnic minority within a larger culture that was in the best of times unconcerned with the Hispanic ethnic enclaves” (5).
However, as Raúl Coronado (2013) maintains, “textuality” is perhaps a better term to map the “undifferentiated field of writing […] that included handwritten documents such as manuscripts and epistolary forms of all kinds, as well as revolutionary pamphlets and broadsheets, political journalism, memoirs, poetry, and histories,” alongside “oral and visual culture” that constitute US Latina/o cultural production (29). As a term, textuality presents the daunting archive we must still excavate to comprehend fully the depth, scope, and diversity of las voces Latinas across the nineteenth century. Textuality reminds us that Latina/o literary history remains a field being written from the archive rather than the readily available record of neatly periodized works that tell one national narrative of republicanism and romanticism; civil war and racial strife; realism and reconstruction; industrialization, westward expansion, and naturalism; and modern reform under large‐scale urbanization. This is the story of Anglo‐American literary history. Latina/o voices tell a different narrative on parallel tracks that lead simultaneously toward and away from the greater literary history of the United States.
For instance, as Cuba’s elected representative to the Spanish crown, the young creole priest Félix Varela spent two years in Spain, where between 1821 and 1823 he delivered a report to the Spanish Cortes on abolishing slavery on the island. Varela notes slavery’s legacy of oppression in the Americas, argues that it diminishes white labor power, maintains that it erodes the island’s economic stability by keeping racial divisions of labor, suggests that the growing population of enslaved blacks invites slave rebellion, and concludes with an appeal that challenges the Crown to honor revolutionary notions of freedom and equality. Varela closes with a proposal for a three‐pronged approach:
give liberty to the slaves in such a way that their owners do not lose the capital they spent on their purchases, or the people of Havana do not suffer new burdens, or in a way that free black[s] in their first unexpected [independence] do not, want to extend themselves beyond what has been granted to them [sic], and finally by helping agriculture in whichever form possible so that it won’t suffer, or that it would suffer less backwardness for the lack of slaves.
(Kanellos 2002: 528)
The Cortes promptly declared Varela guilty of treason, punishable by death, making him a political exile from Spain and his native Cuba. So, as with so many other exiles that followed, he showed up in New York City in 1823 and continued to write as he moved between New York and Philadelphia.
By 1824, he launched from the Quaker City El Habanero, a periodical that covered news and business impacting the island. Varela advocated for Cuba’s independence in a voice that echoed the American revolutionary rhetoric still in circulation and that was already evident in his scandalous essay against slavery. A similar tone appeared in Jicoténcal, an anonymously authored Spanish‐language historical novel that was published in Philadelphia in 1826 by the same press that, two years prior, had printed Varela’s El Habanero. The debate about Jicoténcal’s authorship is itself telling, for, as Brickhouse (2004) notes, scholarship has produced so many viable possibilities – Varela, the exiled Cuban poet José María Heredia, or Ecuadorian statesman Vincente Rocafuerte, to name the most cited – that give testament to “a dizzying array of writers from not only Mexico and Cuba but Ecuador, Argentina, and various other parts of Latin America who resided in or near Philadelphia” at the time (48). Luis Leal and Ricardo Cortina (1995) make the most convincing case for Varela, citing similar syntax, style, and content found in Varela’s other writings, but the possibility that it could be attributed to other Latino exiles bolsters the notion that the text is a representative early Latina/o voice.
A short, six‐chapter historical narrative, Jicoténcal (Anonymous 1995) recounts the collapse of the Tlaxcalan republic after it allies with Hernán Cortes in his war against the Aztecs. However, unlike its more widely read successor, William Prescott’s 1843 three‐volume History of the Conquest of Mexico, Jicoténcal focuses on the internal divisions within the Indigenous republic that Cortes exploits to leverage corrupt and proud Tlaxcalan senators to betray the republic’s ideals. It is a thinly veiled allegory for Mexico, Cuba, and other struggling Spanish colonial outposts pressing for republican independence at the time. Mexico is the narrative’s most direct allegorical referent, for after it gained its independence from Spain in 1821, Mexico struggled to establish its republican system of governance. However, the narrative proves equally prescient for Cuba’s struggle for republican independence of the sort that Varela had espoused in his essay against slavery and in the pages of El Habanero, making the narrative a cautionary allegory for the future possibility of Cuba’s republican nation rather than Mexico’s post‐independence struggle. As a historical romance, it draws on the past to comment on the narrative’s present but also to caution about the future of latinidad in the shadow of the United States’ growing influence over the Americas. This is what makes Jicoténcal a polyvocal Latino text. It uses the history of the conquest of Mexico as a historical palimpsest for the struggle between empire and independence in the New World. The narrative then layers another meaning that cautions about the vulnerability of Mexico’s unstable, newly established independence; it then laces a third significance that presents a warning for Cuba and the rest of the restless Americas, whose revolutionary sentiments are not united against the United States on the eve of the Monroe Doctrine, issued in 1823.
Jicoténcal captures the prevailing concerns that characterize las voces Latinas during the early nineteenth century: republicanism and empire; slavery and independence; self‐governance, in both senses of the term; indigeneity, race, and racialization; religion and secularism; and the lessons the past offers the present and the imagined future. These issues take different form for US Latina/os, radical in some cases and reactionary in others, vexed by the United States’ growing influence as an empire greater than Spain’s New World presence, and increasingly complicated by shifting terrain when it came to the abolition of slavery, alliance with the United States, and ambivalent commitments to inclusive racial equality. They are also concerns that parallel the pressing issues of the day for the United States. However, as the model republic extended its Manifest Destiny, it departed from a shared hemispheric vision of American republicanism and became a colonial threat territorially, economically, and politically to the rest of the Americas. So, by the mid‐nineteenth century, Latina/o voices in the belly of the beast – as Martí would later characterize life in the United States (Martí 2002b: 347) – turned away from the country as a republican ideal and increasingly critiqued its growing influence as an empire that impinged upon Latina/o self‐determination.
In 1811, for example, the Cuban‐born José Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois puffed revolutionary sentiment from Philadelphia to incite Mexico and Mexicans toward independence in the same vein as the American Revolution: “Mexicans: signaled by Providence, the time has arrived for you to throw off the barbaric and shameful yoke with which the most insolent despotism has ignominiously oppressed you for 300 years” (Kanellos 2002: 518). A call to arms against Spanish tyranny, the proclamation also foreshadowed the colonial conditions of Mexicans in the United States after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the US–Mexico War (1846–1848). The treaty largely dispossessed landholding Mexicans living in the ceded territory and disenfranchised Mexican Americans, who became second‐class citizens in their new country. By 1855, an 18‐year‐old Los Angeleno, Francisco P. Ramírez, proclaimed in an editorial in the pages of El Clamor Público, the newspaper he founded and edited:
But here in this fabulous country, he who robs and assassinates the most is he who enjoys freedom. Certain people have no kind of freedom – this freedom, we say, is that which the courts deny to all individuals of color. To buy a man for money, to hang or burn him alive arbitrarily, is another great liberty which any individual has here, according to his likes. This happens in the United States, where slavery is tolerated, where the most vile despotism reigns unchecked – in the middle of a nation that they call the “Model Republic.”
(Kanellos 2002: 110)
In between Toledo y Dubois’ optimism for American republicanism and Ramírez’s stinging critique of it is the emergence of Manifest Destiny, which cultivated a culture of US imperialism that balanced republican discourse with colonial designs that left all of Mexican America disoriented in a way that Juan N. Seguín (1991) best expresses in his 1858 memoir as “a foreigner in my native land” (107).
The mid‐nineteenth century thus proved to be a period of contentious Latina/o voices that waged cultural, political, racial, and verbal skirmishes on different literary fronts. Cuban exiles took to periodicals en masse and called for the independence of what was known as Spain’s “ever‐faithful isle” by way of rebellion, annexation into the Union, anarchist revolution, abolitionist anti‐colonialism, or sovereign, self‐determined national independence. They also used the press to support filibustering expeditions to invade the island from print‐hub port cities, such as New York and New Orleans. Organs such as El Filibustero, La Verdad, and El Mulato contended with the conflicting impulses US coloniality presented. As Lazo (2005) explains, “writers were inspired by America’s promise of equality and freedom even as the United States instituted expansionistic military and economic practices” (7). Meanwhile, in New Orleans, Victoriano Alemán and Eusebio Juan Gómez’s La Patria – “the most ambitious and ultimately significant Spanish‐language publication in the United States during the period,” according to Kirsten Silva Gruesz (2002) – took a firm anti‐colonial stance against the United States’ invasion of Mexico and the subsequent military, economic, and political gestures toward the annexation of Cuba: “La Patria encouraged its readers to see events in the hemisphere not as national issues but as part of the global distribution of postcolonial power, pointing out similarities between what had happened in Mexico […] and what might occur in Cuba” (117).
Many Cuban politicos were also accomplished men of letters who collected their poetry in the 1858 El laúd del desterrado (The Lute of the Exile). The title echoes a poem of the same name by José María Heredia, a Cuban exile in the earlier part of the nineteenth century whose “Hymn of the Exile” epitomizes the “exile telos,” as Gruesz calls it, of the Laúd poets: “return, alienation, or death” (149). In homage to Heredia, who died in 1839, Miguel Teurbe Tolón, Pedro Santicilia, and José Agustín Quintero, among others, penned paeans to their beloved island, turning the political content of pamphlets, manifestos, and essays into the stuff of lyrical language that gives voice to the vexed condition of exiles who find themselves for different political reasons advocating from without for the independence of their native island. Miguel Teurbe Tolón’s “Siempre” (“Always”), for instance, expresses the interior conflict the poet feels so far away from home: “All that, night and day, / And moment after moment, / Makes me think that a harpy / Has settled in my thoughts / And devours my soul” (Kanellos 2002: 550). Similarly, Pedro Santicilia’s “A España” (“To Spain”) ironically works through Spanish history as a form of disillusionment for the speaker, who ends by affirming: “And instead of admiration, I felt in my / soul / A sentiment, Spain, of contempt” (Kanellos 2002: 556). “The Laúd poet,” Gruesz notes, “invented a politico‐literary genealogy of resistance that would prove more durable than the poems themselves” (2002, 146). Indeed, published three years after Walt Whitman’s first edition of Leaves of Grass, Laúd collects an alternative American poetics that does not herald democratic ideals in English free verse but offers nostalgic rhymed meter in Spanish that expresses Latino alienation in the United States.
At the same time, Mexican America was cultivating its own voice of resistance that, as with the Laúd poets, would reverberate for generations to follow. Juan Nepomuceno Cortina’s 1859 “Proclamation” called Mexicans to arms against Anglos in Texas. After heading several guerrilla skirmishes and raids in the border region, Cortina explains his actions to the Spanish‐speaking folks of Texas: “You do not have to fear because orderly people and upright citizens and their interests are inviolable to us. Our objective, as you are aware, and whose record you cannot deny, has been to punish our enemies’ shameless behavior, which thus far has gone unpunished” (Kanellos 2002: 113). Rhetorically, Cortina justifies his actions by appealing to moral values, proclaiming himself the protector of Mexican American people and their interests, and threatening more violence to come: “Our personal enemies will not possess our land, except by paying for it with their own blood.” His is a revolutionary rhetoric that sounds starkly different from the Cuban exile writing: it does not appeal to republican independence through nostalgia for the homeland but instead vows to take back “our land” through violence that characterizes the history of cultural conflict between Mexican and Anglo America that will follow (Kanellos 2002: 115).
In this regard, corridos offer the most resilient expressive critical Latino voice. A form of Mexican American folk balladry, corridos are organically an oral form of musical, poetic performance shared between a corridista (a singer) and a community of listeners, who hold a common ethnolinguistic background. Corridos sing of news, events, and scandals of the Spanish‐speaking world, and border conflict dominated the late nineteenth‐century news cycle. While only fragments of it exist, the Corrido de Juan Cortina, for instance, blames colonial displacement after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as the reason for cultural conflict, border violence, and the need to assert Mexican American equality in the face of disenfranchisement. “The corridos about Cortina’s War,” Ramón Saldívar (1990) notes, “helped establish a tradition of socially symbolic artforms in the Mexican American communities of the Southwest” (28). The Corrido de Gregorio Cortez is the most enduring voice for Mexican American cultural production. A masculine, heroic ballad about Cortez’s stance against Anglo authority and abuse, the Corrido circulated from the late nineteenth to the mid‐twentieth century, when recording technology transformed the community‐oriented practice of corrido performances. However, with Americo Paredes’ 1958 With His Pistol in His Hand, the Cortez corrido took on new significance as an enduring expressive art form and a foundational expression of Chicano resistance to Anglo oppression and to forced cultural transformation under the aegis of the Americanization process that began in the mid‐nineteenth century.
If corridos occupy one voice of Latina/o orality, California’s testimonios embody the other. Testimonios recount the dispossession of California’s native Mexican population by mediating between personal and collective memory, giving them the unique rhetorical quality of expressing an individual voice that registers collectively. Mariano Vallejo’s sense of displacement, for instance, comes from a place of privilege – he is a landed Californio, who welcomed Anglo‐Americans with the hope of profiting from the new economic order. His voice of dispossession, then, rings almost with a level of betrayal, a feeling of loss for his land, his status, and his trust of Anglo America. Maria de las Angustias de la Guerra, however, offers a more harrowing account of the United States’ violation of Mexican domestic space:
The lieutenant [Baldwin] and his people finally came into my bedroom without uttering a single word. Baldwin had a pistol in one hand and a candle in the other. […] Then he came close to where I was and put the candle and the pistol to my face. […] That search and military occupation of my home lasted from ten o’clock at night until about two or three o’clock in the morning.
(de la Guerra 2006: 270)
While the testimonio articulates an individual voice, the collective expression of displacement reverberates loudly across the archive. Personal, autobiographical, historical, cultural, linguistic, racial, gendered, and spatial, testimonios also bridge a divide between orality and narrative (be it textual or literary) that signals a transition in nineteenth‐century Latina/o voices from orality and textual production to extended narrative forms, such as autobiography and the novel, that herald the modern emergence of Latina/o literary culture proper.
Californio testimonios, Seguín’s memoir, and the Cuban poems, proclamations, periodicals, and prose pieces at mid‐nineteenth century represent a critical departure from American literary history. Much of this expressive culture emerged during the so‐called antebellum period, the time before the US Civil War. Yet for Mexican America, the decade before that war marks the grim postbellum aftermath of the US–Mexico War. For Cubans in the United States, the same era is one long bellicose period between the 1830s movements for independence, the heady days of mid‐nineteenth‐century filibustering, the Ten Years War that raged in Cuba for a decade after Appomattox, and, finally, the 1898 Spanish–Cuban–American War, the civil war for independence on the island that Martí made famous. These various wars, which involved competing forms of colonialism, anti‐imperialism, discourses for independence, and arguments for and against slavery, challenge the way general forms of periodization, such as antebellum and postbellum markers, inscribe Anglo‐American history as the standard for literary production in the United States. For Latino/a literary voices, the US Civil War was not in itself as formative in imaginative cultural production as it was for Anglo and African America. Rather, the war was transformative in the way it launched trans‐American identity crises akin to internecine conflict.
While many Cubans participated on both sides of the US Civil War, for instance, one of the most literary on the Union side is Frederic Fernandez Cavada, who was born in Cuba, raised in Philadelphia, enlisted in Company C of the 23rd Regiment of Volunteers of Pennsylvania and later served in the Zouave 114th Pennsylvania Regiment. As a Union officer, he was cashiered for cowardice for retreating to the rear at the Battle of Fredericksburg and then again for the same act at the Battle of Gettysburg, where he was captured and afterward held as a prisoner of war in the infamous Libby prison in Richmond, Virginia. Cavada was a precocious child with early ideas of being a writer. His 1847 notebook, which he most likely received as a high school graduation gift, lists the number of books he read over the year, contains several love poems to different young women, and includes his attempt to write a rhymed epic piece, “Alpheus.” At 15, he penned and published in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin “The Cuban’s Adieu to his Native Land,” an exile poem in the same vein as other hymns to the island of the day. So, it is no surprise that he passes his time in Libby prison sketching scenes on contraband scraps of paper and, upon his release, publishes Libby Life in Philadelphia, initially by King and Baird in 1864 and then republished by J.B. Lippincott in 1865. Libby Life (see Cavada 1985) is probably the Civil War prisoner‐of‐war narrative by a US Latina/o, but Cavada did not stick around the states to receive literary laurels. In 1866, he returned to his native Cuba as US consul to Trinidad de Cuba. However, soon after the October 1868 outbreak of the Ten Years War, Cavada resigned his post and joined the rebellion, becoming known as General Candela, the “fire king,” for his guerrilla war tactic of burning sugar cane fields to curtail Spanish profits from property on the island.
Cavada published in Cuba a field guide to guerrilla warfare, but he also took the time to send dispatches and political proclamations to US newspapers, defending his guerrilla tactics and seeking to muster support for the rebel cause. He also penned a travel puff‐piece published in the November 1870 issue of Harper’s magazine. “The Caves of Bellamar” is a layered work of literary journalism that uses the trope of travel to Cuba to map out Cavada’s own coming to revolutionary political consciousness in the depths of Cuba’s famous caves. Significantly, Cavada was not alone in his revolutionary exploits. His brother Adolfo, also a Union man who became a US Consul to Cienfuegos before throwing in with the rebels, kept his own unpublished military journal during his days in the Civil War, and the brothers Cavada carried on a copious correspondence with each other; with their older brother Emilio, who channeled contraband munitions, aid, and letters by way of his New York and Philadelphia businesses; and with their mother. Frederic also wrote letters to his wife, sending her one last missive from his cell after Spanish authorities captured him in June 1871. Dated 30 June 1871, Cavada’s letter explains that he is again held a prisoner of war, nearly eight years after his capture at Gettysburg and on the eve of his fortieth birthday. The next day, Cavada was executed without trial.
Cavada’s Confederate counterpart, the Cuban born and cross‐dressing Loreta Janeta Velazquez, wrote her own Civil War narrative recounting her action in battle as Lt. Harry T. Buford. Released by Dustin and Gilman in Hartford, Connecticut, and Richmond, Virginia, in 1876, The Woman in Battle is an autobiography that tells of Velazquez’s early life in Cuba and New Orleans, her decision to fight for the Confederacy in drag, and her exploits as a woman, including working as a double‐agent in the Union secret service and running contraband goods and supplies around the Union blockade of Cuba. There is much debate about Velazquez and her scandalous narrative, ranging from the veracity of her account to the authenticity of her identity. However, one thing is certain: The Woman in Battle is the most unique, brash, and challenging Latina voice in the nineteenth century, alongside her Mexican American contemporary, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton. The Woman in Battle is postmodern before postmodernity in the way that identity performance becomes the very subject of the autobiographical narrative, as if the text makes literal the act of self‐writing every time Velazquez, the first‐person narrator, decides to don a new identity as a man or a woman. “Clothing,” Velazquez says in a statement that is as true for autobiography as it is for apparel, has “a great deal to do towards making us all, men or women, appear what we would like the world to take us for” (Velazquez 2003: 185).
More than simply sensationalist drag, Velazquez’s transvestism is transnational as it enacts an historical confluence between Cuba and the Confederacy as two slaveholding regions seeking economic and political independence from what Velazquez imagines as similar forms of colonialism: the Spanish yoke and Yankee imperialism. Besides historical homology, though, The Woman in Battle offers an instructive paradigm for understanding the embattled context for later nineteenth‐century Latina/o literary voices. They emerged during the long nineteenth‐century era of internecine conflicts, and in this context Latina/o identities formed in the crucible of civil war. For instance, before she becomes Harry T. Buford, Velazquez undergoes a process of Americanization that, in part, explains how she can disrobe herself so quickly from her traditional gender roles. On arrival in the United States for her education, she spends two years in a boarding school perfecting her English, and her linguistic transition facilitates a cultural one that allows her to question Old World mandates dictating marriage and, by extension, sexual behavior. Once Velazquez can “read, speak, and write [English] with fluency” (41), she rebels wholesale from Cuban customs and Spanish tradition: she rejects the marriage arranged by her father and, at the age of 14, elopes with a Protestant, American army officer. With her arrival in the United States and her acquisition of English, Velazquez undergoes a social transformation before she ever cross‐dresses as Buford: she becomes Americanized, rejecting Cuban, Spanish, Old World practices, and Catholicism as part of her education in the United States. As she simply puts it, she became “a good American in thought and manner” (50).
Hers is a civil war narrative embattled on several fronts: she no doubt wished “she had been born a man,” as she says; she also waged an internecine cultural war of transformation as she moves from Cuba to the United States, replaces Spanish with English, Catholicism with Protestantism, and Old World patriarchy with her New World sensibility of individualism and independence; with her cross‐dressing, she engages in gender warfare; and in drag she participates in several Civil War battles before her more covert warfare as a spy, double agent, and blockade runner. Velazquez is not the only Latina/o to participate in or write about the US Civil War. The aforementioned Cavada brothers, Ambrosio José Gonzales, José Agustín Quintero, Santos Benavides, Rafael Chacón, and James Santiago Tafolla all wrote about the war as combatants in various genres, including letters, orders, reports, and, for the latter two, postwar participant memoirs. But few of these writers, with the exception of Tafolla, also treat the war as an embattled event for Latina/o identity transformation, and none of them put on a petticoat (in public at least) in the same way that Velazquez donned pantaloons for the cause. She is in this sense the most unique Latina voice, though not quite the most politically powerful.
Such a distinction is reserved for Velazquez’s Mexican American contemporary, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, the first Mexican American woman to publish two novels in English. Her first, Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), is in part a Civil War narrative, while her second, The Squatter and the Don (1885), wages a critical war of words against railroad monopoly, the dispossession of landed Californios, and the corrupt collusion between capitalism and so‐called republican governance in the United States. Both narratives relentlessly critique Yankee hypocrisy and Anglo‐American racism, as they are practiced by lower‐class rabble and New England’s elite, bolstered in both cases by popular xenophobia, institutionally iniquitous legal structures, and a fundamentally Anglocentric system of governance that is not at all democratically inclusive but exclusively representative of Anglo‐American cultural, political, racial, and economic interests. In tone, style, genre, and structure, the two novels owe much to the British, European, and American literary traditions of the day: the historical romance, the sentimental and domestic tale, the muckraking tradition, and, at least for the first novel, the captivity narrative. Moreover, even though Ruiz de Burton penned most of her letters in Spanish, her two novels are entirely in English, with very few Spanish language words or phrases besides proper names, place names, and occasional loanwords. Both novels are, for the most part, monolingual, much like Velazquez’s The Woman in Battle.
The language transition is itself significant for the way it marks a greater shift in register for las voces Latinas. With Cavada, Velazquez, and Ruiz de Burton, Latina/o literary voices become increasingly prevalent in English in terms of literary production even though their private correspondences, at least for Cavada and Ruiz de Burton, remain in Spanish. To be sure, most mid‐nineteenth‐century Latina/o writers were Spanish and English bilingual to some degree, but the imaginative work of the early and mid‐nineteenth century – the poetry and fictional prose – largely appeared in Spanish, especially the material that circulated in Spanish‐language periodicals in Florida, New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and throughout Texas, New Mexico, and California. While the Spanish‐language press continued unabated throughout the nineteenth century, Cavada, Velazquez, and Ruiz de Burton herald a new class of Latina/o voices literate and literary in English. Cavada’s aforementioned reading list, for instance, includes John Milton, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Paine, and Washington Irving, while Ruiz de Burton spoofs classical rhetoric in her first novel and cites writers such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle throughout her second novel. Her sharpest characters are avid readers of newspapers or historical novels, and she expresses stinging disdain for readers of popular romances. As Velazquez demonstrated with her US education, English is a new battlefront, but rather than marking the end to Latina/o identity, the transition to English in imaginative writing signals an ethnolinguistic transition for Latina/os who use English to wage war against Anglophone America.
At the start of a tense meeting between Anglo squatters and Don Mariano Alamar, the eponymous Don of Ruiz de Burton’s second novel, language becomes the primary front on which the Don wages his opening salvo over issues of culture, law, land use, and coloniality: “Don Mariano excused himself for not speaking English more fluently,” the narrator explains; “‘If you don’t understand me I will repeat my words until I make my meaning clear,’” the Don says (Ruiz de Burton 1992: 90). All agree that the Don speaks English well, but the Don’s gesture is a feint. His English is impeccably fluent throughout the narrative – he is the novel’s voice, after all, of Californio dispossession, political disenfranchisement, cultural nostalgia, and sentimental moral disillusionment. Instead, the Don’s feigned linguistic insecurity invokes the racist equation between intelligence and English‐language fluency not only to dismantle it but also to use it as an occasion to “repeat” his point often that the squatters are wrongfully on his land and that the land is better used for cattle‐raising rather than for farming, as the squatters insist. The Don’s arguments fall on stubborn, deaf ears, but, as Ruiz de Burton has it, the Don wins his opening linguistic move when squatter Matthews later proclaims, “‘I don’t want any cattle. I ain’t no ‘vaquero’ to go ‘busquering’ around and lassooing cattle’” (94). Contra to the Don’s impeccable English is Matthews’ Anglophone corruption of Spanish loanwords, leaving the native English speaker to sound more unintelligent, as cultural standards go, than the Spanish‐speaking Don.
Staging the Don as the novel’s moral, political, and rational center, the narrative makes a self‐conscious ethnolinguistic gesture to emphasize the fluency with which he speaks English, seemingly without any linguistic trace of accent. In her first novel, Who Would Have Thought It?, Ruiz de Burton employs a similar strategy. Upon arriving at the Norvals’ New England home, Lola Medina, whom Dr. Norval has rescued from Indian captivity in the Southwest, encounters a torrent of racist comments from Mrs. Norval and her daughters, who assume that Lola does not understand English. But when she politely thanks “in very good English” Mr. Hackwell for the bread he gives her, the company expresses their surprise: “‘Why, the little ’possum! She speaks English, and very likely has understood what has been said,”’ Mattie Norval proclaims, while her father sarcastically responds, “‘She has understood every word […] and doubtless is impressed with your kindness’” (Ruiz de Burton 1995: 20). When finally asked her name, Lola gives what is probably her most self‐assertive statement in her otherwise passive role in the narrative: “‘My name is María Dolores Medina, but I have been always called Lola or Lolita,’ she answered in the plainest English” (21).
Lola’s polite, plain English further amplifies the vulgar, rude, and racist voices of Mrs. Norval and her daughter Ruth, both of whom the narrative represents unsympathetically as irrational, unintelligent women – Mrs. Norval succumbs to brain fever, and Ruth finds satirical success as the wife of Major‐General Cackle, joining a class of “well‐dressed women who have a perfect right to be stupid,” Ruiz de Burton concludes (287). Meanwhile, the novel’s most sympathetic characters, Dr. Norval, Isaac Sprig (Mrs. Norval’s open‐minded younger brother), and Don Luis, Lola’s father, speak English and Spanish with varying degrees of fluency, with Don Luis more bilingual than the two Americans: “‘It is a long time since I spoke your language,’” Don Luis says to Isaac “in good English,” “‘but I shall endeavor to speak it now’” (199). And he does so with a genteel fluency that distinguishes him from his New England counterparts in the same way that Don Mariano’s English places the squatters in a negative rhetorical light. These minor episodes are more than just Ruiz de Burton emphasizing that her Mexican characters speak English better than their Anglo counterparts, though. Instead, they signal her awareness that English is a cultural battlefront, a form of social and rhetorical power that her characters wield even as Mexican Americans, including Ruiz de Burton, increasingly yield to their disempowerment under Anglophone America.
Fluent in English and Spanish, Ruiz de Burton conducted most of her personal correspondences in Spanish while she reserved English to address and critique her American readership. In this regard, she differs considerably from José Martí, the Cuban poet, intellectual, journalist, political agitator, and all‐round man of letters who lost his life on the battlefields of his native island during its final struggle for independence. Polyvocal in English, French, Italian, and Latin, Martí chose to write primarily in his native Spanish, in part because much of his writings appeared in Spanish‐language venues across the Americas, with Martí serving as a cultural translator of sorts, commenting on US customs, news, and events for his Spanish‐language readers. He wrote pieces in English as well, of course, most notably for the Anglophone US press, and he worked on and off as a translator of English writings to make ends meet. But as a poet, political journalist, cultural commentator, and leading Latino voice at the end of the nineteenth century, Martí wrote in Spanish, cultivating an ornate, politically powerful aesthetic in poetry and prose that makes him one of the most innovative and prolific writers in any language at the end of the nineteenth century in the United States.
There is hardly a topic Martí did not touch on during his 15 years in New York, exiled from his native Cuba and on the lam from Spain. In 1880, he penned sketches about the United States that appeared in English in The Hour, a New York literary weekly. The sketches recounted with humor and insight the bustle of the city; the dangers of the country’s rapid economic rise; American virtues and vices; women, subtle racism, and language pronunciation. The pieces are in the vein of the greenhorn marveling with a balance of wit, admiration, and skepticism the customs and culture of the United States and New York in particular. His costumbrismo, however, would develop over the years, especially as his literary journalism gained circulation outside of the United States – in Mexico, Argentina, Honduras, Uruguay, Venezuela, and throughout the Hispanophone Americas struggling to gain or stabilize republican independence without succumbing to the “colossus of the north.” For his Latin American readership, he offered a eulogy for Emerson, a paean to Whitman, a description of Coney Island, an account of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and coverage of events such as a memorial service for Karl Marx, a Chinese funeral, the Haymarket Riots in Chicago, a presidential election, the lynching of over a dozen Italians in New Orleans, the burning of a black man in Texarkana, and a great blizzard that covered the Empire City. He would simply be a prolific cultural correspondent if he had not also written about Cuban independence, pan‐American republicanism, US colonial culture, race, slavery, hemispherism, and revolutionary politics – all with the unflagging radical voice that caused his exile from Cuba when he was 16, that landed him hard labor in a prison quarry before his deportation to Spain, that got him arrested a decade later for conspiring against Spain from Havana, incognito, and that brought him as a wanted man to New York in 1880. His later correspondences with Generals Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo indicate he was on the ideological frontlines of Cuba’s independence movement in the years before the Spanish–Cuba–US War, and his death in battle at one of the first skirmishes of Cuba’s final bid for independence in May 1895 cement his memory as a cultural hero for all of Latin American independence.
Under the weight of such transnational significance, it is easy to forget that Martí was an accomplished poet. Certainly, his most famous prose piece, “Nuestra América,” an opus on the future of latinidad, as we now understand it, has eclipsed his work as a transformative, innovative poet whose unique style brought Latin American modernismo to the United States long before modernism became all the rage. Versos sencillos, for instance, his 1891 collection of poems, seems almost belletristic in the way it returns to the exile sentiment that, by the end of the nineteenth century, was a veritable poetic tradition for Cubans in the United States. There is nothing simplistic about Martí’s simple verses, though; they mediate through metaphor internal turmoil with external political struggle. His opening line, in fact, launches a conceit that directly invokes the exile theme of death: “A sincere man am I / From the land where palm trees grow, / And I want before I die / My soul’s verses to bestow” (Martí 1997: 17). Martí’s poetics inherit from Heredia and the subsequent exile poets the aesthetic sensibility that expresses a longing for home from an alien nation (the United States) that results in personal and cultural alienation. Yet, his highly stylized meter – a rhymed free verse that unpacks an extended metaphor – announces a new function to poetic form: sensuous, personal, romanticized spiritualization with a political purpose: “My verse is brief and sincere, / And to the brave will appeal; / With all the strength of the steel / With which the sword will appear” (32–33).
While Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío’s 1888 publication of Azul, a short story and poetry collection, is credited with introducing modernismo to Latin America, Martí is a kindred writer for the way his poetry and prose compose ornate extended metaphors and musings that are at once highly personal and deeply political. Referring to the International American Monetary Conference in Washington, DC, which Martí covered as a correspondent, he explains the underlying mood of his Versos sencillos: “My friends know how these verses came from my heart. It was in that winter of despair, when due to ignorance, or fanatical faith, or fear, or courtesy, the nations of Latin America met in Washington, under the fearful eagle” (Martí 1997: 13). The poems are not overtly political; instead, they are tender romantic conceits about love, poetry, sensuality, and sex. At the same time, they offer complex juxtapositions that, in their simplicity, shore up the poet’s division between personal memory and political commitment:
I am still taken aback
With a simple schoolboy’s glee
By the yellow canary,
Whose eye is so very black!
When I die without a country,
Nor to any man a slave,
I want a wreath on my grave
And a flag draped over me! (79)
It is not a stretch to say that Martí ushered US Latina/o voices into the modern era of literary experimentation, innovation, and output, and his body of published and unpublished works makes it all the more odd that he is mainly remembered for “Nuestra América,” his widely anthologized essay about pan‐Americanism. True, the essay is a synthesis and culmination of his thinking about pan‐Americanism, offering in the same flowery language of his poetry a vision for the Hispanophone world in the concept of America that was, by the end of the nineteenth century, increasingly becoming synonymous with the United States in a kind of nomenclature acquisition that embodied the United States’ growing empire over all the Americas. However, as Martí (2002c) put it in his tribute to Marx, “We are still at the first letter of the alphabet of life” (135), meaning that for las voces Latinas there is much more after Martí and much more to recover from the archive before him. His is a pivotal moment, for it looks ahead to the twentieth century, when US Latina/o voices take hold of modern genres, such as the novel and short story, to cultivate a canon of literary production proper, but as Martí’s exile sensibility indicates, his is also a tradition from the past, a legacy of Latina/o expressive culture that writes from within the United States but does not exactly share the same sense of Americanness claimed by Anglo Americans. “[I]t is an unshakable conviction among people of little sense,” Martí says in an essay critical of the United States’ interests in Mexico, “that because I write this from the United States, all that I write […] must be North American” (Martí 2002a: 149–150). His writing was not North American. It was instead un voz Latino that reverberates among the long tradition of individual and collective Latina/o voices in the United States proclaiming independence, self‐governance, and self‐determination as much in literature as in life.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 17 (LITERATURE AND THE CIVIL WAR).