Rodrigo Lazo - The Latino Nineteenth Century: Archival Encounters in American Literary History

AMERICA AND THE LONG 19th CENTURY

General Editors: David Kazanjian, Elizabeth McHenry, and Priscilla Wald

Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor

Elizabeth Young

Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel

Edlie L. Wong

Shadowing the White Mans Burden: U.S. Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line

Gretchen Murphy

Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded-Age America

James B. Salazar

Empires Proxy: American Literature and U.S. Imperialism in the Philippines

Meg Wesling

Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature

William A. Gleason

Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights

Robin Bernstein

American Arabesque: Arabs and Islam in the 19th Century Imaginary

Jacob Rama Berman

Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century

Kyla Wazana Tompkins

Idle Threats: Men and the Limits of Productivity in Nineteenth-Century America

Andrew Lyndon Knighton

Tomorrows Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America

Peter M. Coviello

Bonds of Citizenship: Law and the Labors of Emancipation

Hoang Gia Phan

The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr

Michael J. Drexler and Ed White

Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies

Edited by Dana Luciano and Ivy G. Wilson

Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twains Asia and Comparative Racialization

Hsuan L. Hsu

Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century

Jasmine Nichole Cobb

Stella

meric Bergeaud

Translated by Lesley Curtis and Christen Mucher

Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship

Edlie L. Wong

Ethnology and Empire: Languages, Literature, and the Making of the North American Borderlands

Robert Lawrence Gunn

The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution

Jeremy Matthew Glick

Undisciplined: Science, Ethnography, and Personhood in the Americas, 18301940

Nihad M. Farooq

The Latino Nineteenth Century

Edited by Rodrigo Lazo and Jesse Alemn

Edited by Rodrigo Lazo and Jesse Alemn

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

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NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

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2016 by New York University

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ISBN : 978-1-4798-9683-7 (hardback)

ISBN : 978-1-4798-5587-2 (paperback)

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Jesse Alemn

Rodrigo Lazo

Kirsten Silva Gruesz

Ral Coronado

Emily Garca

Jesse Alemn

Robert McKee Irwin

John Alba Cutler

Jos Aranda

Marissa K. Lpez

Alberto Varon

Carmen E. Lamas

Carrie Tirado Bramen

Gerald E. Poyo

Juan Poblete

Laura Lomas

Nicols Kanellos

Ralph Bauer

Jesse Alemn

Although the chapters in this collection present a lot of new material, the book isnt so much a revision of literary history per se as its a return to the circuits of texts, print cultures, artists, and intellectuals that constitute in real and imaginary ways the Latino nineteenth century. Initially, the volume emerged as a direct response to nineteenth-century American literary studies, which, as early as Stanley Williamss The Spanish Background of American Literature, gestures toward but never quite grasps what were calling the Latino nineteenth century. The gesture implies an understanding that theres always been a greater context for American literaturethe contiguous Americas, shared revolutionary histories, the Spanish language, and, more recently, rapidly changing population demographics. But American literary studies rarely reaches the Latino nineteenth century because American literature tends to uphold an English-only mentality, extending the laws of the land to the layout of literary history.

The following collection of chapters, however, situates U.S. Latino/a as a central literary, historical, and analytical category to foreground the significance and significant presence of Latino/a writers, texts, and readers in nineteenth-century American culture. Until now, many of the Latino/a texts and the lives of those who wrote and read them have suffered the same fate as Manuel Torres, who, as Emily Garcia poignantly explains in her chapter, remains buried in obscurity in the graveyard of Philadelphias St. Marys Catholic Church. In this grim light, the book inherits from Latin American studies and the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project an understanding of the rich, complicated, and complementary histories that connect, divide, and redraw the Americas across literary, linguistic, national, and racial borders, where the term Latino is not, as some might assume, an anachronism but a marker of nineteenth-century transnationality that the following chapters excavate.

The Latino Nineteenth Century begins with an insistence on the legibility of Spanish-language texts that were written overburied, if you willby the logic and practice of an English-only approach to American literary history. Silly, nave, and racist as he might be, Herman Melvilles Amasa Delano has one up on most scholars of nineteenth-century American literature: He knows Spanish. So no matter how culturally critical nineteenth-century American literary studies can be, and theres been some canon-busting work out there, American literature, as a curriculum and field of study, often reproduces the national imaginarys impulse to subsume difference into a homogenizing narrative about Anglophone Americaits young romanticism, free-floating racial guilt, horrifying civil war, and refortification just in time for the reality of modernity, all in English. Yet the writers, writings, and people who populate the Latino/a nineteenth century inhabited a Hispanophone world. Theirs is a world of Spanish-language print culture, circuits, readerships, and routes that, while not at all surprising for nineteenth-century America, prove more difficult to decipher and narrate in the largely Anglophone literary history of the United States. For us, this is the first intervention of the Latino/a nineteenth century: Our work insists on reading Spanish-language texts. No progressive, revisionist project for nineteenth-century American literary studies can get around this issue of language. We need as much fluency as silly Amasa to converse with nineteenth-century America, and even then, we still might misread its cues.