Letters from Filadelfia

Early Latino Literature and the Trans-American Elite

Rodrigo Lazo

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813943565
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

For many Spanish Americans in the early nineteenth century, Philadelphia was Filadelfia, a symbol of republican government for the Americas and the most important Spanish-language print center in the early United States. In Letters from Filadelfia, Rodrigo Lazo opens a window into Spanish-language writing produced by Spanish American exiles, travelers, and immigrants who settled and passed through Philadelphia during this vibrant era, when the city's printing presses offered a vehicle for the voices advocating independence in the shadow of Spanish colonialism.

The first book-length study of Philadelphia publications by intellectuals such as Vicente Rocafuerte, José María Heredia, Manuel Torres, Juan Germán Roscio, and Servando Teresa de Mier, Letters from Filadelfia offers an approach to discussing their work as part of early Latino literature and the way in which it connects to the United States and other parts of the Americas. Lazo's book is an important contribution to the complex history of the United States' first capital. More than the foundation for the U.S. nation-state, Philadelphia reached far beyond its city limits and, as considered here, suggests new ways to conceptualize what it means to be American.

1

La Famosa Filadelfia

By the 1820s, Philadelphia was known among revolutionary intellectuals from Spanish America as “la famosa Filadelfia,” a symbol of American liberation from European colonialism and a city full of printers that could help produce pro-independence publications. When José María Heredia—poet, conspirator, and trans-American intellectual—sent a letter to his uncle describing a walk through “la famosa Filadelfia” in 1824, Heredia was self-conscious of repeating certain conventions: “Mil veces habrás oído decir que es una de las ciudades más regulares del mundo, y es verdad” (A thousand times you might have heard it said that it is one of the most orderly cities in the world, and it is true).1 Other Spanish Americans had indeed come before him, including the Venezuelan Manuel García de Sena, who had translated and published Thomas Paine’s writing in 1811; the Mexican priest Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, who had published several titles in 1821; and the political theologian Juan Germán Roscio, who had escaped from prison and published the impressive El triunfo de la libertad sobre el despotismo (The triumph of liberty over despotism) in 1817. Vicente Rocafuerte had also used the phrase la famosa Filadelfia in his Ideas necesarias á todo pueblo americano independiente (1821). Famosa, lexically close to famous but perhaps closer in translation to celebrated, shows that Philadelphia had become an important political location in the ongoing Spanish American wars for independence; the books and pamphlets coming out of the city showed that it was a Spanish-language print-culture hub.

Spanish Americans viewed Filadelfia as a trans-American city because they saw it not primarily as a national (US) site but rather as a model that could inspire other republican urban centers across the hemisphere. While printers facilitated the publication of texts that could circulate in a public sphere, the city itself offered cultural and social institutions, commercial and financial activity, and approaches to governance that could be adopted in new countries. Because of Philadelphia’s association with the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, revolutionary writing and urban topography became intertwined in the imagination of Spanish American intellectuals, who saw the city as an inspiration for the world. The attention to la famosa Filadelfia shifted the discourse of independence toward the Spanish language and offered a new translocal horizon of anticolonial work.

The dissemination of Filadelfia as a representative city for all of the Americas was an attempt to invert the colonizal gaze of European empires that had seen American territories as colonial outposts since the sixteenth century. Spanish American travelers, exiles, and immigrants promoted Filadelfia as a rival to Europe and a model whose revolutionary history could be emulated. “This great city founded by William Penn, inhabited at first by a few Quaker families, today has the appearance of an illustrious European city, with greater beauty and much greater hope for prosperity,” wrote the Mexican politician and journalist Lorenzo de Zavala in his Viaje a los Estados Unidos del Norte de América (Journey to the United States of North America, 1834).2 As we will see, Zavala was not the only one to compare Philadelphia favorably with European capitals.

Considering Filadelfia’s trans-American print culture and symbolism, this chapter depicts how the work of publication—which included composition, printing, and circulation—cut across multiple countries. Philadelphia, which was home to dozens of printers in the early nineteenth century, offered an alternative to the censorship and strict licensing controls on printing in Spanish colonial sites. The participation of Philadelphia printers in Spanish-language publishing was an offshoot of Philadelphia’s evolution as a print center. The city’s printers and booksellers increasingly approached their business not solely in relation to local readers but as a commercial process that cut across the economies of North and South America and other areas. We begin with a panorama of Spanish-language publishing in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia. In the second part of the chapter, we turn to Philadelphia’s symbolic implications outside the United States. Letters about Filadelfia show how Spanish American intellectuals framed the city as representing political and commercial principles that could influence new countries, even as they papered over social problems and racial politics, including slavery, in the United States. For an example of the types of materials emerging from Filadelfia, we turn to Manuel García de Sena’s La independencia de la Costa Firme justificada por Thomas Paine treinta años há (The independence of the Spanish Main justified by Thomas Paine thirty years ago, 1811), which offered translations of Thomas Paine and other US revolutionary-era documents in an attempt to influence political movements in Venezuela and elsewhere. García de Sena’s book calls attention to the important politics of translation across the Americas in early Latino literature. But first let us begin with a print job that registers the growing investment of Philadelphia printers in Spanish-language publishing.

Spanish-Language Books and “Men of Capital”

On July 24, 1821, about the time Rocafuerte was making his way to the United States to publish Ideas necesarias, the Philadelphia printer Thomas H. Palmer printed pages of a Spanish translation of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791) for Mathew Carey’s publishing house. According to the house’s account books, Carey paid Palmer $95.76 for printing “forms,” the body of type that had been set, and went on to make up pages of the book, which was published by “Matias Carey é Hijos” (Mathew Carey and sons) as El derecho del hombre (1821).3 This small detail of the workings of the Carey publishing house is important because it depicts the commercialization of Spanish-language materials in the early United States and displays the publisher’s imperative to capitalize on Spanish-language books. The Carey house contracted a job to Palmer in order to see the book into print—with a view to markets outside the country. It was neither the first nor the only time that Carey produced Spanish-language books. While Rocafuerte and intellectuals in Mexico envisioned the printing and sending of Ideas necesarias as an epistolary intervention in the political changes taking place in the Americas, Carey saw an opportunity for international profit in such publications. As an example of this thrust into other markets in the Americas, El derecho del hombre was among materials in a cache of Spanish-language books sent by the Carey house to Mexico in 1822 via an agent whom Nancy Vogeley has called a “bookrunner.”4

The production of Spanish US writing was not isolated from changes in the US book market in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Carey’s translation of The Rights of Man provides us an opportunity to consider changes in the market that are connected to the commercial potential of Spanish-language materials. To trace these changes, we need to consider not only the increase in the number of Spanish-language titles that appeared in the 1820s United States but also the change from subscription publishing toward market investment; we can do so by comparing Carey’s 1821 Paine translation with an earlier publication by its translator, Santiago Felipe Puglia, an immigrant from Italy who had ushered in Spanish-language publishing in Philadelphia decades before with a self-authored book. In 1794, Puglia had published his El desengaño del hombre (Man undeceived), a 257-page energetic argument along philosophical, political, and religious lines against divine sanction for monarchs that was clearly aimed at readers in Spanish America. As Emily García has noted, “To desengañar is to undeceive, and this is Puglia’s main goal in the work: to try to render Spanish and Spanish American populations ‘undeceived’ of their allegiance to the monarchy, to bring his readers to the light of reason.”5 Probably the first Spanish-language book out of Filadelfia against Spanish colonial rule, it was banned by the Spanish Inquisition, a point to which we will return.

El desengaño del hombre was a result of sponsored publication rather than an investment in a product that could sell on the market. Unlike Carey’s 1821 Paine book, El desengaño del hombre followed a subscription-based publication approach. A year before its printing, Puglia had circulated a call for subscribers by publishing a pamphlet with the following appeal:

The Author conceives that the greater part of the Friends of Liberty in this country having no knowledge of the Spanish, will become Subscribers merely to encourage the publication, without wishing to have all the copies they may subscribe for. . . . The generous light of Democracy which eminently shines forth in the American Stars, will in the publication of this work find a favourable opportunity of shewing how inclined it is to the propagation and support of the Rights of Man.6

By asking people who themselves probably could not read Spanish to subscribe to this book, Puglia was in effect requesting a donation for a publication that would be distributed in places with Spanish readers. This attempt to circulate outside the United States was a manifestation of a process that I have characterized as epistolary.

The publication conditions of Puglia’s El desengaño del hombre show not only that other intellectuals in the city shared a sense of “cause” in the Americas; more to the point here, the call for subscriptions demonstrates that the book’s publication was partly the result of sponsorship. Puglia’s call was handed out on Philadelphia street corners, and it took several months before Puglia could collect enough money to persuade someone to print the book.7 When five hundred copies of the book were published, the list of subscribers included “Alexandro Hamilton,” “Tomas Jefferson,” “P. Freneau,” and “one true friend of liberty and independence for all nations who paid for 130 copies.”8 That true friend, Puglia revealed later, was Edmond-Charles Genet, a.k.a. “Citizen Genet,” French ambassador to the United States during the French revolutionary period. It was the antimonarchical warrior Genet, according to Puglia, who made the publication possible.9 Through his subscription book, Puglia ushered Spanish into the languages of the revolutionary United States, to the consternation of Spanish colonial authorities.

The subscription-based model, not uncommon in the US colonies, was tied to the dominant local language, making a Spanish-language subscription book all the more eventful. Subscription allowed authors and printers to collect money to cover the costs of printing up front and helped gauge interest in a particular work. Some proposed books never made it into print owing to a lack of subscriptions. In Printers and Men of Capital, an impressive study of Philadelphia’s book market from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, Rosalind Remer argues that the new century ushered in a change from local printer-based publication of books, including subscription publishing, to a new, more diversified production process in which publishing houses invested in books but did not print those books, even as they sought markets in other parts of the United States.10 Publishers who committed to a project financed the books (paper and printing) through credit networks. And this approach became linked to expanding markets. “By selling books to the countryside, publishers hoped to relieve the financial pressure of overstocked shelves while acting to unify the growing nation through the distribution of the printed word,” Remer writes.11

For Spanish American intellectuals in the United States, the shift away from publication driven by subscription meant that certain books could move into world markets rather than having to be financed by those who wanted them printed. Or to put that another way, self-publication gave way to the marketplace of letters. Two examples that demonstrate the shift from self-publication to printing for profit are books by Valentín de Foronda and Manuel Torres, published thirteen years apart. Foronda’s Carta sobre lo que debe hacer un principe que tenga colonias á gran distancia (Letter regarding what a prince should do when he possesses colonies at a great distance, 1803) is a product of coterie publishing with connections to the American Philosophical Society. Foronda’s Carta does not include information about publisher or printer, and the title page says only “Philadelphia: ANO DE MDCCCIII.”12 It was published anonymously. I refer to coterie publishing because it appears that Foronda or someone else paid for the run, which was done by a lower-end print shop. Foronda’s “letter,” which looks like a pamphlet, is printed without type for the letter s. In its place, the printer used the letter ſ, known as a “descending s” or a “long s.” By 1803, the long s was only being used by printers who could not afford to modernize with new type. Generally speaking, this means that Foronda went to a lower-quality printer.

Foronda’s Carta, which delves into political economy, precedes by several years instances when a publication on economics and the Spanish American colonial setting would be attractive to a for-profit publisher. In 1816, Manuel Torres’s An Exposition of the Commerce of Spanish America, a book clearly appealing to commercial interests, was both printed and published by George Palmer, whose shop on Chestnut Street also printed other Spanish-language titles. We turn to that book and to Torres, an important editor and activist who helped build a pro-independence intellectual circle in Filadelfia, in the next chapter. The point here is that the exposition’s connection to the Palmer house showed that intellectuals had greater access to a budding publishing industry in 1816. The difference between Foronda’s letter and Torres’s exposition illustrates the shift from private printing to publishing for a market of readers interested in Spanish America. Potential readers of Torres’s book would have included merchants and ship captains trading in Spanish American ports.

By the 1820s there was a Spanish-language print culture in the US Northeast, supported in part by increasing economic trade with the southern Americas and growing interest in the history and culture of Spanish America. Scholars have studied different aspects of the growing interest in the Spanish language, Spanish-language publishing, and Spanish American history occurring on both sides of the Atlantic. Focusing on intellectual history, Iván Jaksić has shown that starting in the 1820s US academics such as the Harvard professor George Ticknor and the historian William H. Prescott turned to the “Hispanic world” and developed the antecedents of fields of study that would later focus on Spain and Latin America. This development, he argues, was intricately connected to efforts to shape US national identity in contradistinction to Spanish “national character.” Richard Kagan has argued that in the 1820s negative associations related to the Black Legend gave way to a romantic v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on the Spanish Language
• Introduction
• 1. La Famosa Filadelfia
• 2. The Trans-American Elite
• 3. Faith in Print
• 4. Anonymously Yours: Republican Man
• 5. Leaving Filadelfia, or Archival Dislocations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index