Imperial Educación

Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas

Thomas Genova

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813946252
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria latinoamericana y caribeña

In the long nineteenth century, Argentine and Cuban reformers invited white women from the United States to train teachers as replacements for their countries' supposedly unfit mothers. Imperial Educación examines representations of mixed-race Afro-descended mothers in literary and educational texts from the Americas during an era in which governing elites were invested in reproducing European cultural values in their countries' citizens.

Thomas Genova analyzes the racialized figure of the republican mother in nineteenth-century literary texts in North and South America and the Caribbean, highlighting the ways in which these works question the capacity of Afro-descended women to raise good republican citizens for the newly formed New World nation-states. Considering the work of canonical and noncanonical authors alike, Genova asks how the allegory of the national family—omnipresent in the nationalist discourses of the Americas—reconciles itself to the race hierarchies upon which New World slave and postslavery societies are built. This innovative study is the first book to consider the hemispheric relations between race, republican motherhood, and public education by triangulating the nation-building processes of Cuba and Argentina through U.S. empire.

New World Studies

1. Republican Motherhood and Citizen Educación

This chapter traces the history of the allegory of the national family in nineteenth-century New World literary and educational texts and probes the ways in which that discourse is complicated by the racial heterogeneity of the Americas. I will focus on the construction of the “republican mother” who raises virtuous future citizens for the nation in several nineteenth-century texts from the United States, Argentina, Cuba, and—by way of comparison—Haiti. Looking at the historical, journalistic, and novelistic records, I will consider how women of color often were scripted by nineteenth-century thinkers as beyond the limits of republican motherhood. The chapter concludes with an explanation of the ways in which creole elites deployed public educación against what they saw as the depravation of mothers of color in an effort to preserve their republics from the depredations of the supposedly unvirtuous popular classes.

Family Allegory and Foundational Romance

Family allegory has had a long history in Western political discourse. Paternalist metaphor, in which the monarch is figured as a father to his people, served to justify and maintain feudal-dynastic political systems in Europe and its New World territories throughout the ancien régime (Rey 50). Francisco Suárez, for example, would argue in a 1612 treatise that “one could say that, in the beginning of creation, Adam, by nature, had primacy and thus imperium over all men, which derived from him, either originating naturally in first-born sons or through the will of Adam himself. Thus . . . all men have been formed and procreated from Adam to be subordinate to a prince” (22).1 By postulating royal sovereignty as a “natural” extension of the biblical Adam’s patria potestas over his descendants, Hispanic Enlightenment thinkers considered that, “in accordance with natural law, . . . authority passed from God to the paterfamilias, who would reproduce ‘the ties of nature itself’ and give origin to peoples and kingdoms. . . . Royal power [was] transferred by God to the first man, from the first man to the paterfamilias and from the paterfamilias to peoples” (Rojas 81–82).2 Eighteenth-century Bourbon monarchs would expand on this notion and conceive of the far-flung Spanish empire as “a large family with the king as father and multiple children, different but sharing a common duty to aid and defend him,” a metaphor that united Mexico and Montevideo under the paternalistic care of the monarch in Madrid (F. Guerra 21).3

Later, enlightened advocates of republican government in the Americas would mobilize this “family formula” against the peninsular dynast during the creole independence movements of the early nineteenth century (Felstiner 167). In the Spanish colonies, “family imagery succeeded in impressing feelings of depravation upon fairly comfortable Spanish Americans, stirred the desire to liberate family patrimony from imperial control while binding citizens into a kindred nation, confirmed hierarchies inherent in the Creole family model, and legitimized the ways families gained a controlling interest in the state” (180).4 In British North America, meanwhile, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, the French-born author of the foundational Letters from an American Farmer (1782), would critique George III of Britain for failing to protect his “children” on the American frontier:

I am informed that the king has the most numerous, as well as the fairest, progeny of children, of any potentate now in the world: he may be a great king, but he must feel as we common mortals do, in the good wishes he forms for their lives and prosperity. His mind, no doubt, often springs forward on the wings of anticipation, and contemplates us as happily settled in the world. If a poor frontier-inhabitant may be allowed to suppose this great personage, the first in our system, to be exposed, but for one hour, to the exquisite pangs we so often feel, would not the preservation of so numerous a family engross all his thoughts; would not the ideas of dominion, and other felicities attendant on royalty, all vanish in the hour of danger? The regal character, however sacred, would be superseded by the stronger, because more natural, one of man and father. (194)

In this passage, Crèvecoeur attacks the kingship-as-paternity metaphor from within itself, accepting that George III is a benevolent father with “good wishes” for the “lives and prosperity” of his colonial children but unfortunately is unable to know the “exquisite pangs” that afflict them due to the great distance at which they have “settled” from their monarch.5 With their father so far away, the American children might as well be independent, Crèvecoeur seems to say.

The unique geopolitical situation of the Americas, then, would exhaust the metaphorical paternity of the Bourbon and Hanoverian monarchs. The paternalist trope would be rendered completely unviable by independence and the rise of the republican order, yielding to other forms of family thinking. In Democracy in America (1835), Alexis de Tocqueville observed that while “amongst aristocratic nations, social institutions recognize, in truth, no one in the family but the father . . . [,] in democracies, where the government picks out every individual singly from the masses, . . . a father is there, in the eye of the law, only as a member of the community, older and richer than his sons” (727–28). In this context, the vertical metaphor of monarchical rule as paternity necessarily came to be replaced by the horizontal metaphor of republican society as fraternity, another variation on the larger gestalt of the nation-as-family tropological construct.6

“Race” would mediate the tensions between paternal hierarchy and fraternal egalitarianism inherent in this change. For French neo-Marxist Étienne Balibar, the metaphor of national genealogy represents “the symbolic kernel of the idea of race” through “the idea that the filiation of individuals transmits from generation to generation a substance both biological and spiritual,” which “inscribes” members of the national family “in a temporal community known as ‘kinship.’” Mobilizing blood as a metaphor to mark the limits of republican fraternity, “race” emerges as a technology to temper the egalitarian excesses unleashed by the political upheavals of the long nineteenth century.

This idea [of the national family] is correlative with the tendency for “private” genealogies, as (still) codified by traditional systems of preferential marriages and lineage, to disappear. The idea of a racial community makes its appearance when the frontiers of kinship dissolve at the level of the clan, the neighbourhood community, and, theoretically at least, the social class, to be imaginarily transferred to the threshold of nationality: that is to say, when nothing prevents marriage with any of one’s “fellow citizens” whatever, and when, on the contrary, such a marriage seems the only one that is “normal” or “natural.” The racial community has a tendency to represent itself as one big family or as the common envelope of family relations (the community of “French,” “American” or “Algerian” families). (Balibar 100)

Paradoxically, this metaphorical notion of national kinship, or “race,” surfaces at the same moment in which the rise of republican government—which, in the Americas, would set abolition in motion—invalidates the feudal-dynastic emphasis on the legitimacy of sovereign bloodlines. Crèvecoeur exemplifies this sort of republican interracial prohibition. Upon fleeing with his family to native territory in order to escape the violence of the War for Independence, Crèvecoeur notes that, “however I respect the simple, the inoffensive, society of these people in their villages, the strongest prejudices would make me abhor any alliance with them in blood: disagreeable, no doubt, to nature’s intentions, which have strongly divided us by so many indelible characters” (211). Here, the birth of the new political order is accompanied by the prohibition of interracial marriage as racial exclusion is deployed to contain republican inclusivity. Thus, by using “the structure of the family . . . as the conceptual model for the nation’s reproduction as an intact political entity over time, and sexual reproduction [as] the physical mechanism of national history,” the metaphor of the national family “naturalizes linear history and the cohesion of white Americans of the past, present, and future” by using the analogy of family belonging to justify racial exclusion from the theoretically inclusive republican body politic (H. Jackson 50).

Both US and Latin American intellectuals drew their nations’ boundaries of the blood on the pages of nineteenth-century national novels. Literary theorist Doris Sommer has argued that foundational narratives served to establish social hierarchies in the newly formed New World republics by allegorically modeling the relationships among the heterogeneous elements comprising the nation.7 This is achieved not through tropes of paternity or brotherhood but through “an erotics of politics” that shows “how a variety of novel national ideals are all ostensibly grounded in ‘natural’ heterosexual love and in the marriages that provided a figure for apparently nonviolent consolidation during internecine conflicts” that plagued the various nations of the Americas during the mid-1800s (Sommer, Foundational Fictions 6). “Once they project that ideal as an image that looks like a wedding portrait, their union . . . becomes the mediating principle that urges the narrative forward” toward its logical conclusion—marriage and the “promise” of future citizens in the form of the foundational couple’s progeny (18). Often set in the past, foundational literature thus attempts to conceive proleptically what Argentine critic Noé Jitrik calls “la línea de generación” of the past from the vantage point of the present in order to “orient” the nation toward a future “reasonable state.”8 In the nineteenth-century Americas—simultaneously postcolonial, neocolonial, and imperial—this entailed carefully pruning the nation’s family tree to include some members while excluding racialized others, as novels such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (1826), Eduarda Mansilla de García’s Lucía Miranda (1860), and Cuban Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1882) attest.

Republican Motherhood

Given the nineteenth-century literary emphasis on racially restrictive marriage and the production of a particular citizen body, it was only natural that, in addition to the paternal and fraternal metaphors of state discussed above, the “‘natural’ and inalienable mother-child binomial” should rise to discursive prominence (Nari 70).9 In the “deeply gendered” political economy of the nineteenth-century Americas (Dore 15), a new tropological cornerstone—that of the “domestic woman”—was forged to hold together the ideological structuring of the republican national family (Nari 70).10 This new discourse mobilized the figure of the virtuous mother to “discipline the social practices of women and families, [bringing] the hope of regeneration of the ‘race,’ society, the nation” (70).11 “Bourgeois women” such as Mrs. March in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) “were to act as both nurturant moral models to their children and as nurturant supporters and moral guides for husbands on their return from an immoral, corruptive world of work” (Chodorow 5). Imbued with this ideology, Alcott’s matriarch regards it as her “duty” to encourage her husband to fight for the Union during the Civil War and raise her four daughters on her own until his return, an attitude that transfigures homemaking into an act of patriotism. “I gave my best to the country I love, and kept my tears till he was gone,” Alcott’s character explains (96).

Cultural studies scholars, especially in the United States, have used the term “republican motherhood” to refer to this deployment of moral mothers to rear “and continue to rear future generations of citizens” for the nation (Apple and Golden xv). “Focusing attention on their sons and encouraging industry, frugality, temperance, and self-control, republican mothers would nurture virtuous citizens who served their communities; by educating their daughters, mothers would ensure the virtue of future generations” (Blackwell 31). In her work on the United States during the 1700s and 1800s, Linda K. Kerber theorizes republican motherhood as a means of political influence for women, who had been denied suffrage by the early republican governments. “The new republic leaned on the law for structure. In turn, an educated citizenry was expected to maintain the spirit of the law; righteous mothers were asked to raise the virtuous male citizens on whom the health of the republic depended” (10).12

In the Spanish-speaking Americas, meanwhile, moral motherhood originally was tied more closely to the Catholic ideals of femininity found, for example, in works such as Fray Luis de León’s 1583 La perfecta casada than to bourgeois-republican notions of citizenship. In an 1860 article appearing in the Álbum cubano de lo bello y lo bueno (Cuban album of the beautiful and the good) entitled “Las mujeres y los niños” (Women and children), Antonio de Trueba appeals to the Catholic Marianist tradition of maternity, stating that “God has given children a mother in every woman” (216).13 In this way, he frames motherly love in terms of the Christian virtue of charity. A few lines later, he writes, “Let us ask the most vulgar of women why she loves children, and she will tell us, if she succeeds in translating her feelings, ‘I love children because I look for angels on the earth and I find them only in children’” (216–17), words that transfigure maternity into a divine calling.14

A more modern discourse relating motherhood to the rearing of a bourgeois-republican citizen body was emerging, however, from the pages of Latin America’s flourishing periodicals (Provencio Garrigós 43). The liberal press in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, in particular, “display[ed] a sustained interest in the dignification of women as mothers and companions to men” (Garrels, “Sarmiento ante la cuestión”).15 An anonymous 1830 article in La Aljaba: Dedicada al bello sêxo Argentino (The quiver: Dedicated to the Argentine fair sex), considered the first Argentine women’s magazine (Lojo, Introduction 20), describes Ancient Greek and Roman mothers heroically raising and sacrificing soldiers for the nation. Tellingly entitled “Amor a la patria,” the article presents the raising of future citizens as women’s civic—not moral or religious—duty.16 Another anonymous article, entitled “Educacion de las hijas” (Education of daughters), speaks of “the scepter” that women have “in their hands symbolizing morality and religion,” an image that evokes republican motherhood and the notion of women’s virtuous domestic rule (2).17 Through the trope of the scepter, a metonymy for government, the author reframes Christian values (“morality and religion”) in order to tie educación to national reproduction.

The need for mothers to raise virtuous republican citizens would lead to a renewed emphasis on women’s education in nineteenth-century liberal circles as motherhood ceased to be regarded as a natural condition equally available to all women and came to be understood as a function of bourgeois-republican society whose proper fulfillment required special preparation (Provencio Garrigós 62).18 The subject of women’s education has a long history in Hispanic letters, appearing as early as Padre Feijoo’s 1676 Defensa de las mujeres (Defense of women) on the peninsula and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s 1691 Respuesta de la poetisa a la muy ilustre sor Filotea de la Cruz (The Poet’s Answer to the Most Illustrious Sor Filotea de la Cruz) in colonial New Spain. In the nineteenth century, Mexican liberal Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s 1819 L...