Latino/a Literature in the Classroom

Twenty-first-century approaches to teaching

Frederick Luis Aldama

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415724210
• eBook ISBN: 9781317933977
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Didattica nell'arte e nelle discipline umanistiche

In one of the most rapidly growing areas of literary study, this volume provides the first comprehensive guide to teaching Latino/a literature in all variety of learning environments. Essays by internationally renowned scholars offer an array of approaches and methods to the teaching of the novel, short story, plays, poetry, autobiography, testimonial, comic book, children and young adult literature, film, performance art, and multi-media digital texts, among others. The essays provide conceptual vocabularies and tools to help teachers design courses that pay attention to:

• Issues of form across a range of storytelling media
• Issues of content such as theme and character
• Issues of historical periods, linguistic communities, and regions
• Issues of institutional classroom settings

The volume innovatively adds to and complicates the broader humanities curriculum by offering new possibilities for pedagogical practice.

Part I

Teaching foundational moments

1 Recovered and recovery texts of the nineteenth century

Jesse Alemán

Since it was founded in 1992, the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, headed by Nicolás Kanellos and Arte Público Press, has transformed U.S. literary history to the point that we can no longer approach modern and contemporary Latino/a writings in the United States as a recent phenomenon born out of twentieth-century political conflicts, population booms, or demographic changes. Rather, the recovery of earlier Latino/a literature offers a corpus of work that troubles the usual expectations of minority writing (i.e., that it tells the story of identity, class, or cultural conflicts) but also reveals the historical formation of the conditions that produce such conflicts for U.S. Latinos/as in the first place. This is what Ramón Saldívar means when he explains that:

history is the subtext that we must recover because history itself is the subject of [Chicano narrative’s] discourse. History cannot be conceived as the mere “background” or “context” for this literature; rather, history turns out to be the decisive determinant of the form and content of the literature.

(1990: 5; italics in original)

Saldívar’s statement rings true for all U.S. Latino/a literature—history is the “determinant of the form and content”—but history is also the greatest detriment when it comes to teaching recovered texts to contemporary students trained in English Departments, which usually plot American literary history along the rise, fall, and reconstruction of Anglo America.

Language is also a high hurdle when it comes to fully understanding early U.S. Latino/a writings, the majority of which were penned in Spanish. At the graduate level, we should encourage students to gain Spanish language fluency if recovered texts are central to that student’s future research and scholarship, but outside of Spanish Departments, undergraduate classes on U.S. Latino/a literature are conducted in English with no Spanish language fluency required or even expected. This holds true even at my own institution, the University of New Mexico, with an undergraduate population of native Spanish speakers, bilingual learners, and a number of students who gained Spanish as a second language through high school or undergraduate curricula. Our English Department remains “English only,” while literature in Spanish is more likely to be found in our Spanish and Portuguese Department, taught within a curricular framework of Iberian, Peninsular, and greater Latin American literatures. While language is lost in one department, the specific historical formation of Latinos/as in the United States might be occluded in the other. Fortunately, though, a number of nineteenth-century recovered texts are available in translation, and for undergraduate classrooms, I have no qualm teaching these texts in English, because I think what we lose in translation is offset by what we gain in literary knowledge.¹

Besides reprinted texts available through Arte Público, there are two main anthologies to use in survey courses on recovered nineteenth-century U.S. Latino/a writing. Herencia, edited by Kanellos, brings together a large collection of U.S. Hispanic writings from colonial times to the contemporary, and many of the texts are products of the Recovery Project’s efforts. The collection is not without its flaws: its structuring organization of “Native,” “Immigrant,” and “Exile” literature doesn’t hold up well as a method of organization, and its headnotes are unevenly penned, with some offering biographical and publication history and others offering not much instructive information at all. However, the collection also brings together editorials, letters, speeches, poems, short stories, histories, chronicles, and excerpts from novels that showcase the diversity of U.S. Latino/a print culture over the last 400 years. Ilan Stavans’s Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2011) also offers a swath of texts, and while its headnotes and footnotes are very helpful, the collection’s organization, as Kirsten Silva Gruesz notes, produces a text “fundamentally at odds with itself, contradictorily espousing a transnational and a United States nation-based perspective without allowing either one enough oxygen to sustain itself” (2012: 336). This dilemma dislocates U.S. Latino/a literature, and while this might be Stavans’s point—that U.S. Latino/a literature resides somewhere in between two nations—it deterritorializes Latino/a literature from specific historical moments within what I would suggest is its most strategic pedagogical category: the United States. After all, for undergraduate English students, early U.S. Latino/a literature gets its pedagogical power from the fact that much of the writing occurred within the United States when, presumably, such populations and print culture didn’t exist for students familiar only with canonical American letters or contemporary U.S. Latino/a writing.

I use Herencia in my undergraduate survey classes because I want to support the Recovery Project; at the graduate level, I use individual texts because I want advanced students to focus on specific forms of early U.S. Latino/a writing rather than consume short, excerpted pieces. I also teach to different ends when it comes to undergraduate and graduate pedagogy. At the graduate level, I teach in seminar style, so I select narratives across the nineteenth century and allow discussion to carry the direction of our analysis. I maintain several key investments. First: that all early U.S. Latino/a narratives are historical in their form, content, and aesthetics. Second: I chart an alternative literary history to the canonical nineteenth-century American focus on romanticism, realism, and naturalism to demonstrate that these categories are neither natural nor representative of all the nineteenth-century literature produced in the United States. Finally, I cultivate analysis that views narrative as both art and artifact; something created but also something constituted by and simultaneously constituting its cultural moment.

In this vein, there’s little difference between how I teach early Latino/a literature and other graduate classes, such as the nineteenth-century American novel, so it’s more informative for me to chart my undergraduate pedagogy, which is thematically organized. At the undergraduate level, I focus on coverage, content, and the place of Latino/a literature within and against American history to demonstrate how Latino/a print culture engages with U.S. historical matter already somewhat familiar to students (i.e., governance, slavery, expansion, colonialism, and capitalism to name a few) but does so through political and literary discourses not so familiar to them (i.e., Cuba’s insurgent movements; Mexico’s reforma; or the poetic longings for the homeland by writers exiled in the United States). In other words, I select texts that take up historical themes or ideas with which our students are most familiar to examine how U.S. Latinos/as engage with, depart from, or reproduce with a difference those ideas.

For instance, the 1812 pseudonymous book, El amigo de los hombres, appeared in Philadelphia as an appeal to the people of the Americas to throw off Spanish monarchical rule and establish their independence. “On Behalf of Mankind,” as Herencia has it, is a prime example of the political rhetoric that circulated and fomented revolutionary discourses throughout the Americas, and its place of publication necessarily invites students to understand the American Revolution as one of a series of independence movements sweeping across the Americas. As the narrator declares, “the welfare of the people is the supreme law and the only sacred one; all pacts or contracts that offend it are null by nature. No one can renounce the rights that are afforded him by the social contract” (2002: 515). Echoing Paine’s Common Sense, mouthing Lockean theory of social contract, and sounding like the Declaration of Independence, “On Behalf of Mankind” introduces students to the rhetoric, context, and history of Spanish American revolutionary discourses, and because it’s written as a polemic, the pamphlet also affords the opportunity to teach the historical debates surrounding Spanish American independence.

One point vexing independence was the question of slavery. As with the U.S. Declaration, slavery troubled the distinction between political independence and freedom from slavery, shoring up the fact that independence, liberty, and freedom were not always understood synonymously and were not extended universally, despite proclamations otherwise. In the history of the Americas, the Spanish crown often kept independence movements in check by way of slavery; after all, the Spanish colonial system and military presence in the Americas provided whites with a sense of security following the violence of the Haitian revolution.² However, “On Behalf of Mankind” directly addresses this issue, offering a response to the problem of slavery by noting that (1) the population disparity between blacks, whites, and people of color is not as exaggerated as the Spanish crown presents it and that (2) republican independence would “try to make men of all classes and conditions happy” (2012: 514). Indeed, the pamphlet offers a pedagogically informative narration of race in the early nineteenth-century Americas, with its distinctions between blacks, mulattos, and whites and a theory of racial interaction at odds with the history of race relations in the United States: “The blacks aspire to the esteem of the whites, they want to be mistaken for them and in the second or third generation they are already tied together by blood and interests in such a way that they form one caste with the whites” (514). In short, the pamphlet’s answer to the threat of black rebellion against whites is simple—racial mixing, because black and white “blood and interests” would then be commingled in a way that tied their collective interests against the Spanish crown.

I use this pamphlet to introduce students to U.S. Latino/a literature’s historicity—its political discourse; the nature of the debates about independence; and the way the pamphlet articulates a language about slavery and race relations that marks a paradigm different from the U.S. discourses about race and slavery. Félix Varela’s 1820s “Essay on Slavery” (2002) is especially instructive on this point. His essay offers a primer for students to understand slavery’s history in Cuba and the cautious way Varela advocates for its abolishment on political, economic, and social grounds. Slavery is antithetical to a free government, Varela maintains, and it also creates unstable social class relations, but most importantly, slavery inhibits free labor, economic development, and the diversification of the market. Varela concludes:

give liberty to the slaves in such a way that their own owners do not lose the capital they spent on their purchase, or the people of Havana do not suffer new burdens, or in a way that free blacks in their first unexpected [freedom] do not want to extend themselves beyond what has been granted to them, and finally by helping agriculture in whichever form possible so that it won’t suffer.

(2002: 528)

Implicit in Varela’s argument against slavery are also the historical reasons the island was reluctant to end it: owners would lose capital; whites might suffer from the influx of free blacks; the number of free blacks might threaten the social balance of power; and the island’s agrarian economy would collapse. However, I also use Varela’s essay to teach students about the social construction of race in terms of blacks, mulattos, “people of color,” and whites:

The introduction of Africans on the island of Cuba gave origin to the class of mulattos, many of whom have received their freedom from their own fathers, while others suffer in slavery. … The slaves are employed in agriculture and in domestic service, while the freemen are almost all dedicated to the arts, mechanical as well as liberal; it is estimated that for one white artist there are twenty of color.

(2002: 525)

The snapshot Varela provides of racial identity in relation to genealogy and the division of labor invites the class to examine how slavery in Cuba and across the Caribbean resonates with the problem of slavery in the United States but produces a different way of understanding its significance for independence movements, republican rhetoric, and revolutionary momentum that swept across the Americas (including the United States) throughout the nineteenth century.

While it sounds like I teach early U.S. Latino/a literature as history, I’m rather explaining a pedagogy that highlights the historicity of these early texts. It’s a fine distinction but one that maintains that history is not just the context for the literary text but also the content of it. Yet, even though many early U.S. Latino/a writers were politicians, I don’t presume history to be only political; we also see the development of different literary forms as part of Latino/a political history. “On Behalf of Mankind” is a polemical pamphlet like the scores of pamphlets that debated the American Revolution; Varela’s piece is a persuasive essay, with a main argument supported by examples that advance his position through proof and critique of the opposition. These literary forms also generate a political rhetoric that, because it’s fanning the flames of revolution, sounds much like the contemporary rhetoric of activism. Students tend to find José Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois’s manifesto, for example, strikingly relevant to modern and contemporary struggles against oppression. “Mexicans,” Toledo y Dubois asserts, “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” (2002: 518). In New Mexico, at least, Toledo y Dubois’s statement rings as true now for some as it did when he penned it to critique the tyranny of the Spanish crown.

The first part of the class, then, introduces students to early forms of U.S. Latino/a literature through a rubric of revolution, republicanism, and slavery, with attention to how republican revolutionary discourse uses the language of slavery to link chattel slavery to political slavery under the yoke of monarchy. The anonymously published 1826 historical novel, Jicoténcal, brings these ideas together within the context of the conquest of Mexico through a literary style we might call republican romanticism.³ As the first historical novel to be published in Spanish in the United States (Philadelphia), the narrative invites close attention to the way the novel, as a genre, handles the polemics of independence. Characters debate republican ideals through staged conversations in the backdrop of romance, seduction, and rape, and instead of direct attacks on the ruling Spanish government, the novel displaces its critique of empire to the days of Hernán Cortés, the Aztecs, and Doña Marina. Already familiar with the debates by way of pamphlets, essays, and manifestos, undergraduates tend to find the novel a little melodramatic for their contemporary tastes, so I focus their attention instead on its form, on the idea that, as a novel, it is crafting a historical allegory that turns the history of empire, conquest, and colonialism into a multival...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: what are we teaching when teaching Latino/a literature?
• Part I: Teaching foundational moments
• Part II: Teaching parts that make up the Latino/a whole
• Part III: Teaching poetry, theatre, and performance arts
• Part IV: Other Latino/a forms and spaces
• Part V: Snapshots: Case studies in action
• Glossary
• Suggested further reading
• Bibliography
• Index