Transnationalism

More than a century before it comprised a formal area of study in the US academy, Latino literature produced in the United States emerged from, engaged with, and circulated through transnational and transamerican contexts. The first decades of the nineteenth century witnessed successful struggles for independence by most of Spain’s New World colonies, significant expansions of US territory, and early attempts by continental leaders such as Simón Bolívar and James Monroe to articulate a new relationship between Europe and the Americas, and between the diverse young nations of the Americas. As the incipient Spanish-American republics strove to formulate coherent national identities, they often turned to the US as a possible model, even while watching with increasing wariness as their northern neighbor – dubbed the “Colossus of the North” as early as 1837 by the Mexican Secretary of War José María Tornel y Mendivil – spoke of “manifest destiny” and aggressively waged war against Mexico, annexing half of its territory in 1848. In the midst of such instability, writers and readers of Spanish-American origins, in communities large and small, permanent and ephemeral, across the United States, crafted, translated, published, and circulated texts in Spanish, English, or an admixture of both, that reflected their status and experience as (at least) bicultural subjects. As Kirsten Silva Gruesz observes, in her study of nineteenth-century Latino print

culture, “the possibility of a meaningful commonality of the idea of Latino expression” was, and continues to be, necessarily complicated by the “impossible diversity of the term ‘Latino,’” which encompasses individuals and communities from disparate and shifting national, class, ethnic, racial, and gender backgrounds (Gruesz 2001: x-xi). Nevertheless, she and other scholars have shown persuasively that, in the midst of meaningful differences, meaningful commonalities can be located. Such commonalities, like the communities and institutions that consciously or unconsciously forge them, do not always manifest themselves uniformly across space and time. Still, Latino/a writers’ connections (direct, inherited, or imagined) to an American homeland other than the hegemonic United States, coupled with their status (chosen, imposed, or both) as outsiders with intimate, often painful knowledge of the inner workings of the “Colossus of the North,” prepare fallow ground for a transnational literary imagination. Consider, for example, the lives and literary careers of María Amparo Ruiz de

Burton and José Martí, which in many substantive ways could hardly be more

different. They were born 20 years apart (she in 1832, he in 1853), into different gendered experiences, and on opposite ends of the Americas (she in Baja California, he in Havana, Cuba). Ruiz de Burton came from a Mexican military and landowning family, and became a US citizen as a teenager, in the wake of the Mexican-American war. She married an Anglo captain in the US Army, spent nearly a decade in the eastern United States while her husband fought for the North in the Civil War, and wrote in English as a means to make money after being widowed in her late thirties. The few literary works she published were little read in her own day and remained almost entirely forgotten until the end of the twentieth century. Martí, in contrast, was a Cuban-born child of Spanish parents who devoted his life to the cause of his island’s independence from Spain. Exiled from his homeland as a teenager for his political writings, he lived for years in the US but remained, in his own words, “an American without a country” (Lomas 2008: 35). A prolific writer, he became famous throughout the Americas, and remains a canonical figure in Latin American letters, for the hundreds of politically charged poems and essays he wrote in Spanish during his relatively brief life, which ended on a battlefield in Cuba. Still, a few common threads tie these two disparate figures together. Both lived much of their adult lives in the United States, whose culture and politics they knew intimately and about which they expressed deeply ambivalent opinions. Both – like most of their nineteenth-century Latino/a literary peers – hailed from a Spanish American elite that, as Silva Gruesz has argued, “shared a possessive investment in whiteness, in certain definitions of cultural literacy, and in a masculinist model of nationhood” (Gruesz 2001: 208). Both produced writings that seem to endorse some elements of this elite discourse, while rebelling against or disrupting others. Finally, both contributed to and drew from a distinctly Latino transnational literary imaginary. Such an imaginary permeates Ruiz de Burton’s 1872 novel, Who Would Have

Thought It?. Set primarily in New England during the Civil War, this unusual text centers on the culturally symbolic romance between an upright New England man and a racially ambiguous (but secretly wealthy) Mexican woman. As the novel tells it, the latter character, named Lola, had her skin dyed black while being held captive, along with her soon to be deceased mother, by a group of Apaches. After she is rescued by Dr. Norval (her future husband’s father) and brought to live with his family in New England, the dye slowly fades and her racial identity changes accordingly. She is, at various points, described as black, Indian, Mexican, Spanish, mongrel, and white. These transformations – whose precise meanings have been the target of lively critical debate (Aranda 1998; Bost 2003; Rivera 2004) – disrupt the black-white binary that even today dominates US concepts of race; in the process, they also expose the racial hypocrisy of abolitionist New England. At the same time, Lola’s avowed loyalty to her Spanish-Mexican heritage unsettles geographically limited notions of North and South by insisting that the specter of the MexicanAmerican War be revisited during the Civil War (Rivera 2004). By foregrounding Mexico and the fate of the Mexican peoples displaced by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Ruiz de Burton “casts her critique of the United States in terms that are not instantly recognizable” (Aranda 1998: 572). In doing so, she pushes her readers into unfamiliar territories and forces them to reevaluate entrenched ways of making

meaning by reposit(ion)ing central questions of US identity in transnational, rather than national, terms. Ruiz de Burton, as a US citizen who wrote in English, fits the contemporary

model of the Latino/a writer; Martí decidedly does not. Not only did he write in Spanish, but his best-known writings are characterized by their nationalist commitment to Cuba, as well as their passionate call for the southern nations of the Americas to join in opposition to the colonial legacy of Spain and the growing economic and political dominance of the United States. Martí’s pan-Latin Americanism is clearly on display in his canonical 1891 essay “Nuestra América” [“Our America”] in which he describes the US as “the giant with seven league boots” who does not know, and so disdains, its southern neighbors. He concludes by warning his fellow Spanish-Americans:

[I]t is imperative that our neighbor know us, and soon, so that it will not scorn us. Through ignorance it might even come to lay hands on us. Once it does know us, it will remove its hands out of respect.