Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage

Without a doubt, one of the most significant events in the development of US Hispanic literary history was the establishment of Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage. Now in its third decade of operation, the Recovery Project (as it’s affectionately known) originally began as a ten-year initiative in the fall of 1990 with a broad mandate to locate, preserve, evaluate, and disseminate by way of publication or digital media “primary literary sources written by Hispanics in the geographic area that is now the United States from the Colonial Period to 1960” (Kanellos 1993: 13). This project was designed and implemented to combat the institutional absence and historic neglect of Hispanic contributions to US history, literature, culture, and politics. Although the terms “Hispanic” and “literary” were adopted as umbrella terms to forward the mission of the project, great editorial pains were taken to unpack the diversity of Latino/a communities from 1492 to 1960 that might be represented or impacted by the research. Recovery of the “literary” went beyond the usual genres of novels, poems, and short stories. In short, the Recovery Project envisioned a Herculean mission that included “letters, diaries, oral lore and popular culture by Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Spanish and other Hispanic residents of what has become the United States,” as well as the print culture of these communities found in newspapers and periodicals (Kanellos 1993: 13). While the Recovery Project always intended to accompany the reintroduction of such

Hispanic texts with scholarship, the targeted audience and desired effect was always much broader than academia. Its overt goal was nothing less than creating a seismic shift in education from K to 12 and beyond and well into mainstream US culture. Since 1990, the Recovery Project has achieved many milestones along these lines, surpassing many expectations, not the least being the limits of its initial ten-year funding. To date, the Recovery Project has published more than seven volumes of scholarship stemming from its biennial conferences. It has published the first-ever comprehensive bibliography of Hispanic periodicals of the United States since the colonial period, as well as an extensive linguistic study of the evolution of the Spanish language. It has published more than 30 titles of primary materials, ranging

from poetry and novels to essays, letters, biographies, autobiographies, and even Works Progress Administration era transcriptions of New Mexican folklore and oral tales. Recently, the Recovery Project has partnered with digital publisher of databases and archives, EBSCO, to make available to libraries much that has been recovered up to now, expanding exponentially beyond print media what can be made available to students and scholars alike. To better understand the origins and mission of the Recovery Project and its

achievements, it would be useful to remember the intellectual and institutional context from which it emerged, especially as it emerged from the Civil Rights Movement of the preceding two decades. The feminist recovery of US women writers fueled a growing impatience with the canonicity of dead white male writers. Because of this impatience, Florence Howe and Paul Lauter launched The Feminist Press (1970). They republished the works of Rebecca Harding Davis, Agnes Smedley, and of course Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Elsewhere, civil rights novelist and activist Alice Walker advocated on behalf of Zora Neale Hurston and her novels, most notably Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937, 1975). Throughout the 1970s, other individuals and groups started very similar recovery efforts. From Asian-American scholars came Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (Chin et al 1974), which included authors Carlos Bulosan and John Okada. From Native American scholars, authors such as Samson Occom, John Rollin Ridge, Zitkala Sa, and D’Arcy McNickle, to name a few helped to deepen the heated debate on race and manifest destiny in the nineteenth century. Into this moment appears the republication of Harriet Jacob’s 1861 slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, edited by Jean Fagan Yellin (1987). Altogether, these recovery efforts deconstructed long-hallowed habits of exceptionalism that had underwritten “American literature” and its study for most of the twentieth century. These changes invariably met fierce reaction. Issues of recovery were very often at the center of other controversial topics such as the canon wars, the culture wars, the PC wars, and debates over multiculturalism. By the end of the 1980s, “recovery” as a theme, method, and argument was at the crux of what it meant to be a US literary critic. Like its predecessors, the Recovery Project also emerges out of a community of

diverse activists, writers, and scholars committed to social change. As each Latino/a group develops its own political response to the Civil Rights Movement, there are these profound eruptions of artistic production from “Flor y Canto” gatherings among Chicanos/as to the Nuyorican Poets Café in the East Village of New York City. There is of course the dramatic appearance of Civil Rights inspired books by Latino writers such as Piri Thomas (Down These Mean Streets, 1967) and Tomás Rivera ( … y no se lo tragó la tierra, 1971), followed by the Latina feminist response by a multitude of writers like Lorna Dee Cervantes, Nicholasa Mohr, Ana Castillo, and more, nowhere better captured than in the 1981 anthology by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color. To remember This Bridge Called My Back is to remember the importance of other presses such as Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press and Aunt Lute Books in the early 1980s to women authors of color, especially lesbian authors of color. It should go without saying that Arte Público Press (1979) is right in the thick of this moment of alternative and activist cultural production, developing and promoting writers who will gain national notice such as Gary Soto, Julia Alvarez, Tato Laviera, Sandra

Cisneros, and Judith Ortiz Cofer to name a few. In addition, credit should be given to the appearance of other Hispanic presses and journals that grew out of the various parts of the Civil Rights Movement, such as Quinto Sol, Bilingual Review Press, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Revista Chicano-Requeña; each contributed to the context that would help set the stage for the Recovery Project’s emergence. Having said this, there also needs to be some attention to the disciplinary origins

of the make-up of the Recovery Board. Right from the beginning, probably because of his experience as co-founding editor of Revista Chicano-Riqueña and founder of Arte Público Press, Nicolás Kanellos established a faculty governance of the project that was internationalist, interdisciplinary, and ideologically capacious. The early Recovery Board included archivists, linguists, historians, and literary critics. The ethnic identities of the board members included Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, Cuban-American, and Dominican-American. Regionally, the institutional homes of the board members were in Puerto Rico, New York, Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Colorado, and Mexico. The board included feminist critics and feminist historians, as well as labor historians, literary historians, and librarians of special collections. By contrast, the board’s diversity was balanced by its collective historicist character; its rich and complex regard for the Spanish language and colonial legacies, including literary and political influences (revolutionary as well as conservative) from Latin America; and finally its unified political commitment to bettering the educational opportunities for all Hispanic Americans. For all the above reasons, the initial wave of scholarship and publication mirrors a

diversity of interests and opinions debated by the board. The initial volumes of essays that stemmed from the biennial conferences provided broad historical overviews of Mexican-American literature, Puerto Rican literature and US Cuban literature. Such overviews were followed by more specific studies either in topic or genre or medium, such as race and gender, or corridos versus novels, or theater versus newspapers. The issue of language was (and is) a persistent category of discussion and analysis in the Recovery Board. While the vast majority of its archives are in Spanish, the Recovery Board had to navigate the social and cultural limits imposed by the monolingualism of the US. Part of the negotiation over language stemmed from the project’s symbolic need to demonstrate allegiance to a broadly construed US nationalism. These recovered texts needed to speak toward a multicultural American heritage. This was certainly the case made to the project’s early sponsors, which included the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, AT&T Foundation, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. At a practical level, the demands of the publishing marketplace and the dominance of English in academia and classrooms conditioned how the project might to be able to finance its intervention into mainstream curriculums. Translating texts into English would require more funding, but would also take more time to publish. By contrast, recovered texts such as María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and The Don (1885, 1992), a novel that depicts the effects of unbridled greed by railroad monopolists in California, found their way to publication quickly in part because they were written in English. All the same, it was the recognized scholarly value of the text that ultimately convinced the board The Squatter and the Don would find an audience in English and history departments.