A Transnational Analysis of Representations of the US Filibusters in Nicaragua, 1855-1857

Andreas Beer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783319283517
• eBook ISBN: 9783319283524
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

This book investigates how the encounter between the U.S. filibuster expedition in 1855-1857 and Nicaraguans was imagined in both countries. The author examines transnational media and gives special emphasis to hitherto neglected publications like the bilingual newspaper El Nicaraguense. The study analyzes filibusters' direct influence on their representations and how these form the basis for popular collective memories and academic discourses.

© The Author(s) 2016

Andreas BeerA Transnational Analysis of Representations of the US Filibusters in Nicaragua, 1855-185710.1007/978-3-319-28352-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. A Transnational Perspective on the Nicaraguan Filibuster Episode

Andreas Beer¹

(1)

University of Constance, Konstanz, Germany

End Abstract

Every tourist who visits the Honduran town of Trujillo on the Caribbean coast will notice (and probably visit) the impressive Fort Santa Bárbara which dominates the bay. Right outside of its main entrance, the visitor comes across a curious commemorative stone, inserted into the pasture surrounding the fort, which simply reads “William Walker, 1860.” ¹ While some visitors might associate Trujillo with the US-American author O. Henry (who had lived there in the 1890s and drew on this experience in several of his “banana republic” short stories), most will be at a loss to situate the Anglophone name of “William Walker”—as will be most Hondurans, by the way. Meandering off to the old cemetery, though, the visitor will again be struck by the name, this time as the inscription to the best-attended grave in the graveyard and the only fenced-off gravestone which reads: “William Walker, fusilado, 12 Septiembre 1860.” The man who was executed by a firing squad in Trujillo on that date was what today we would call a mercenary, intimately connected to a series of attacks on the Central American isthmus that originated in the United States and had transnational repercussions: Great Britain, France and—to a lesser extent—Spain were eying the actions of the filibusters (as their nineteenth-century denomination went). The US administration was swaying between tacit support for their imperial schemes and outright condemnation for their disavowal of US laws (and their endangerment of US relations with European imperial powers) and the Central American nations of Honduras, Costa Rica and especially Nicaragua (which bore the brunt of the filibusters’ attacks) were attempting to devise defensive plans, first nationally and then cooperating internationally. William Walker, the leader and most notorious name of the pack, managed to occupy the position of Nicaraguan President for some months in 1856–1857 and, while only a footnote in the US history, still looms large in Nicaraguan and Costa Rican history. Outside of these two countries, barely a trace remains in terms of lieux de memoire or mentionings in history books, although the “King of the Filibusters” (as Walker was called in his heyday) and his motley crew of international volunteers—recruited, among others, from post-1848 Europe, Cuban independence fighters, South American liberals and young men both from the US North and slaveholding South—in their day were highly visible, almost iconic representatives of US aggrandizement. The filibusters thus contributed significantly to what Amy Greenberg and others have called the antebellum American Empire. While in the United States, their escapades have fallen into oblivion, on the isthmus, which the filibusters roamed from the mid-1850s until the beginning of the US Civil War, they were for a long time stuck within national(ist) paradigms of research, excluding connecting views to other countries and underpinning notions of national aggrandizement in their respective versions of the successful fight against the filibusters.

Although the filibusters were never completely absent from the US collective memory or its national historiography, they have suffered from a focus on a limited, exclusively US-American set of actors, with the aforementioned William Walker as the main protagonist and transportation tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt as the antagonist responsible for his eventual downfall and death. The same goes for Nicaragua and Costa Rica, where Walker was stylized as the monstrous foreigner, plotted against the anti-filibuster commanders Máximo Jérez and Juan Rafael Mora, respectively. Such a personalization has also hindered transnational investigations, which could complicate such dualistic narratives. In addition, as I will argue, after the US Civil War, narratives of the filibusters in the United States very quickly turned into sensationalist adventure tales, which often hindered serious academic research, leaving investigation to amateur historiographers with limited resources and methodological background. Thus, although most US historians today might be able to connect the term “filibuster” with some vague historical reference apart from the current usage linked to tactics of parliamentary blockade, a lot of research still needs to be done to better understand a period in US history which proved to be essential for the nation’s transnational connections with Latin America.

Attempting to fill these lacunae, this study looks beyond the national paradigm, and examines filibustering from a comparative, transnational vantage point. It concentrates on one specific filibustering pageant: the period of 1855–1857, when during one of many Nicaraguan internal wars a small group of filibusters (headed by the aforementioned William Walker) was invited as auxiliary force for one of the warring parties and managed to control the country for several months before being defeated and forced to leave. As a cultural studies scholar by trade, I am interested in the processes the notion of culture was used during this episode to describe a conflictual contact situation, and I concentrate on tracing these processes in one specific medium: newspapers. Many filibusters and the Central Americans involved in the subsequent anti-filibustering campaign made use of newspapers to distribute their agendas, write travel reports, engage the diverse national publics in discussions, and so on. Various groups of Nicaraguans as well as the filibusters published newspapers, and US papers also reported widely on the events. The filibuster presence in Nicaragua was represented using discourses inscribing the dynamic, contingent situation “on the ground” into fixed binary logics recurring on nationalities (US vs. Nicaraguan), gender (men vs. feminized others), religion (Protestants vs. Catholics), or the national trajectory (independence of Central America vs. subordination under US control). Investigating these newspapers critically and with the aim to “treat comparatively the internal social relations of whatever geopolitical units define themselves as nation, state, region, community or group” ² makes it possible to dissect pretensions of national unity both sides used—pretensions that have also nurtured the academic scholarship that investigated, analyzed and (re-)narrated the events of 1855–1857.

The newspapers’ impact on academic scholarship, and this scholarship’s interplay with popular discourses of remembrance and forgetting form the second research interest of this book. In particular, it explores in which ways newspapers interacted with academic works, especially historiography. While it is a truism that the nineteenth century holds an enduring sway over today’s academic landscape, the comparative analysis of national historiographies concerning the Nicaraguan filibuster of 1855–1857 makes especially pertinent the manifold dependencies on a limited amount of sources and archives (and the omission of others), linguistic barriers and political maneuvering that often subtly shape historiographical research.

Finally, I am aware that sometimes paeans on discourses or medial representations seem to neglect the physical side of transnationality: the actors, the objects, the trajectories and losses involved in crossing geographical regions. My aim is thus to show that agents and artifacts indeed traveled between the various countries at the isthmus, toward the United States and back, and even to Europe and beyond, influencing and interacting with various other agents and artifacts on the way. On these often zigzagging routes, the newspapers encountered different readers, who interacted with them in a variety of ways: Apart from reading them, they wrote articles in response or letters to the editors, translated (and often amended) the articles, and decided to preserve them or not. Such acts of mingling and (mis-)appropriation helped to undermine national perspectives, showing that even in the high period of nationalism (and most of the actors appearing in this study would have agreed that they act nationally), transnationalism was a constant feature.

This study thus has a threefold interest: First, it analyzes the media representations of the filibuster episode in Nicaragua under a transnational scope, moving beyond perspectives bound by national borders; second, it examines which of these historical representations proliferate in today’s academic and popular discourses; and third, it traces how the artifacts that transported these representations moved between Nicaragua and the United States to delineate flows of influence.

In Chap. 2, I contextualize the filibusters from a dual point of view, examining the historical background of their involvement in Central America from both the United States and Nicaragua. I fathom which preconditions allowed for the emergence of the filibusters in the United States and their invitation to Nicaragua. Chapter 3 zooms in on the newspapers that transported textual and visual representations of the filibuster deeds (and their Mesoamerican counterparts) between different regions and states in Central America, from the United States to the isthmus (and sometimes vice versa) and within the United States. The fourth chapter identifies different discourses that interacted with each other in the newspapers. Some of them were shared among several groups that used newspapers as their media of communication, while others were confined to one single group. This chapter argues that the filibusters were not only agents acting transnationally but also sutured into transnational discourses: the discourses of late Enlightenment, of masculinity, of modernity, progress and economic liberalism. I argue that this shared discursive background was one of the major components that made the filibusters’ initial success feasible: Both US-Americans and Nicaraguans could integrate the filibusters into a set of ready-made tropes, and thereby make sense of their presence. Chapter 5, finally, discusses the ways in which the newspapers were converted into source material for academic scholarship, and how this academic dimension interacted with popular forms of collective remembering, forgetting and national identity construction.

By examining the filibuster incident in Nicaragua from a comparative, transnational perspective and incorporating material that has hitherto been neglected, this study aims at contributing to an interdisciplinary effort (stretching from cultural studies to history, and political science) that attempts to adumbrate “new ways of looking at old problems but also reveals new strata of actors, events and processes,” as Andrew Zimmerman has called it in his magisterial study Alabama in Africa, itself a prime example of transnational historiography. ³

Being Unsettled and Unsettling Others: The Transnational Perspective

Edward Said wrote in his Representations of the Intellectual that “Exile for the intellectual […] is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others.” ⁴ I appropriate this description for the engagement with what I call the transnational perspective; persepective because it is not necessarily a fully-fledged theory or acknowledged methodology. As an academic—which arguably always includes a certain portion of intellectual rigor—this perspective unsettles one’s own institutional grounding, one’s imbrication into distinct fields of study, of clear-cut methodologies and theoretical approaches. Yet, it also unsettles other scholars with its peripatetic ruminations and its insistence on interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. As the quote by Andrew Zimmerman has shown, a transnational perspective does not simply mean the confluence of two, three or more national perspectives into a wider analysis, but also the revelation of desiderata, of actors, events and processes hitherto unknown. In this study, I will attempt to live up to this challenge. Utilizing transnational perspectives, though, should not entail an insouciant forgetfulness about one’s own intellectual limitations: Usually being educated in one or two academic disciplines, a certain limit is set as to how much factual knowledge one can acquire in other fields. The consequence is that many studies stand on the shoulder of giants, and this one is no exception: A large amount of cogent works have already been published on the filibusters in the US, in Costa Rica, Canada, Nicaragua, Great Britain, France, or Germany, ⁵ but I argue that so far neither has ventured beyond the (always fuzzy) boundaries of their respective nation state.

Latin America, including the Caribbean and the isthmus, with its long history of US involvement (military, economic, or otherwise) is one of the geographical regions best qualified for a wider, more inclusive approach toward a transnational perspective in US-American history. Apart from the ubiquitous Chicano and Border Studies, which zoom in on the cultural and physical hybridizations of the US–Mexican border (lands), Latin American scholars have helped to unsettle the former exceptionalist pretensions of the discipline with programmatic works such as José Saldívar’s Trans-Americanity, case studies on the influence of the transisthmian transportation route in Panama by Aims McGuiness or Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop, which show how the Caribbean basin, Central America and especially Cuba served as an experimentation ground for US desires of imperial control from the eighteenth century onward, and how these experiments reflected back into US mainland cultures. In 2005, Michel Gobat sounded the interplay between transnational Nicaraguan elites and US invasions to this Central American country in his book Confronting the American Dream, while Gretchen Murphy looked at the hemispheric ramifications of the Monroe Doctrine in her book Hemispheric Imaginings. ⁶ Like the exiled in Said’s quote, scholars from or with connections to what is usually called “Latin America” have demanded a return into a discipline that often silenced their voices in the double continent that is variously called America/América/Amérique.

Like all historical research, transnational history is dependent on the sources it can use, and for the Caribbean and the isthmus, these often leave lacunae that make a reliable argumentation troublesome. This absence leaves two possibilities: Either, once can start an attempt to read “against the grain” those texts that are available today, or to transgress the disciplinary divides and incorporate findings from other disciplines such as ethnology or (cultural) anthropology. In many cases, the first method produces a clearer vision of the blank spaces within dominant texts, but can lead only to tentative results or “academic guesses.” The second method, too, often encounters its limits in a historical setting which did not allow either the production or the preservation of deviant knowledge. A transnational approach asks questions that have not been asked before, but this does not mean that definite answers are necessarily included in the package. It rather is a game of addition, adding small insights to the already existing body of research, and opening up new horizons.

Another unsettling factor is the very denomination of the perspective, its insistence on nations as important (if not prime) categories. In the present case, one might argue that this includes the risk of falling into easy binaries between the United States as the dominant, always-present nation state and an interchangeable other (being this Nicaragua, Canada or Togo, as in Zimmerman’s study), something Anna Brickhouse has aptly called a mix between “blindness and binocularity.” ⁷ This results, in my view, in the need for a special focus on those actors, events and processes that transgress the nation state, not only physically, but also structurally. It also means that we should engage with “the history, the conditions and the specifics of US exceptionalism and US imperialism in their differences from non-US histories and non-US manifestations of exceptionalism and imperialism.” ⁸ Via the powerful instruments of travel grants, research programs and university cooperations (which favor interchange between the highly industrialized countries), the possibility of incorporating non-Euro-Americacentrist scholars and sources remains precarious. Consequently, one of the blank spots on the map of transnational studies is its negligence of sources, practices an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. A Transnational Perspective on the Nicaraguan Filibuster Episode
• 2. Conceptualizing the Filibuster(o)s
• 3. The Nicaraguan Press and El Nicaraguense
• 4. Discursive Voyages Between the United States and Nicaragua
• 5. Between Omnipresence and Oblivion. The Filibusters in Transnational Collective Memories and Nationalist Historiographies
• 6. In Lieu of a Conclusion
• Backmatter