The Latino Nineteenth Century

Archival Encounters in American Literary History

Rodrigo Lazo, Jesse Alemán

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479871926
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria latinoamericana y caribeña

A retelling of U.S., Latin American, and Latino/a literary history through writing by Latinos/as who lived in the United States during the long nineteenth century Written by both established and emerging scholars, the essays in The Latino Nineteenth Century engage materials in Spanish and English and genres ranging from the newspaper to the novel, delving into new texts and areas of research as they shed light on well-known writers. This volume situates nineteenth-century Latino intellectuals and writers within crucial national, hemispheric, and regional debates. The Latino Nineteenth Century offers a long-overdue corrective to the Anglophone and nation-based emphasis of American literary history. Contributors track Latino/a lives and writing through routes that span Philadelphia to San Francisco and roots that extend deeply into Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South Americas, and Spain. Readers will find in the rich heterogeneity of texts and authors discussed fertile ground for discussion and will discover the depth, diversity, and long-standing presence of Latinos/as and their literature in the United States.

1

The Errant Latino

Irisarri, Central Americanness, and Migration’s Intention

Kirsten Silva Gruesz

To what purpose came we into the Wilderness? . . . [to] dwell in a place of our own, that we might move no more.

—Samuel Danforth, “A Brief Recognition of New-Englands Errand into the Wilderness,” 1670 (emphasis in original)

Vida errante y de gitano, de expatriado de la gran patria americana. [The errant, gypsy life of an expatriate from the great American patria.]

—Self-description by Antonio José de Irisarri, 1863

Fui migrante y me hospedaron. [I was a migrant, and you took me in.]

—Idiosyncratic translation of Matthew 25:35 by human rights activist Father Alejandro Solalinde, featured on the website of his mission for migrants in Ixtepec, Oaxaca

Recalling a long-ago journey through the Guatemalan highlands, the narrator of Antonio José de Irisarri’s El cristiano errante (The Errant Christian, 1847) describes his compulsion to linger at the seven Maya-K’iche’ villages along the way. “He found those Indians hard-working, intelligent, agile, alert, well-formed, robust, dedicated to agriculture, commerce, and the arts” and praises their homes, their products, and their public works, including aqueducts and ingenious hydraulics that irrigated productive fields “whose yields were held in common.” He concluded that the indios of Los Altos “seemed to him more intelligent than the mestizos, zambos, and Spaniards of the other parts of America, for they were infinitely more skilled master builders.” Ignorant of indigenous lifeways prior to this journey, the young Creole “found in all of these villages a life, an activity, a surge of civilizing energy that he did not expect to find, nor would he find again among larger populations in Peru, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, or Colombia”—some of the places in which he would later live during his long, peripatetic life.1 Irisarri depicts the highlands Maya-K’iche’—apparently so isolated from the currents of Enlightenment thought that were animating revolutionary movements throughout the hemisphere—as having arrived, on their own, at the practical goals of those movements: functional self-governance, a fair justice system, free trade, peace. Reflecting on that visit from the vantage point of middle age, some forty years later, the narrator allows the point to sink in: America bloodied and nearly destroyed itself in order to achieve a harmonious social state that had already been attained by the very people those movements had most excluded.

The title of El cristiano errante echoes that of one of the most globally popular novels of the day, Eugène Sue’s Le juif errant, known in Spanish as El judío errante. Rather than follow the usual English translation of Sue’s title as “The Wandering Jew,” I want to revive the antiquated term errant as a way of linking a nineteenth-century text to contemporary U.S. discourses about migrancy. Errancy suggests wandering without a goal, without intention; the epiphany of Irisarri’s protagonist is the more powerful because he stumbled upon it while on his way to somewhere else. Yet even defenders of immigrant rights disavow such accidents, emphasizing intentionality of movement when they cast undocumented persons as determined, long-suffering pilgrims in search of a better life. Establishing sympathy for their cause depends on linking these groups to a longer national narrative of such pilgrimage. Stories about the accidental or reluctant migrant, the wanderer blown off course, the person at the end of his or her chances are less adaptable to the inevitably moralizing affect of sympathy.2 In this chapter, then, I want to use Irisarri—his “vida errante” and his errantly titled novel—to trouble the way such purposefulness can be used not only to embrace or demonize migrants but also to establish someone’s place within a narrative of national and ethnic belonging.

Irisarri appears as a founding father in cultural histories of Guatemala, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and even Curaçao. Yet no scholar has tried to position him similarly within U.S. (Latino) American literary history, despite the fact that he spent his final eighteen years in the United States—a longer period than José Martí—and published numerous books, pamphlets, and newspaper articles there. Irisarri demonstrated no desire to become a U.S. citizen, and he did not leave any obvious signs of a Latino or Central American–American identity.3 Instead, he makes a case for an ethics of identification that embraces nonpurposefulness and pushes against genealogy as a form of common sense.

Although El cristiano errante did not appear in book form in the United States (as did a later novel, a collection of poetry, and various nonfiction works), new archival evidence indicates that Irisarri published it serially in a New Orleans newspaper in 1851. This previously unremarked phase of Irisarri’s wanderings places him at the ground zero of fanatical schemes for the expansion of a Southern slaveholding empire: the financial and military launching-place for various filibustering expeditions and development and colonization companies aimed all across the Central American isthmus. As he joined forces with two seasoned local editors, Eusebio José Gómez and Victoriano Alemán, to publish La Unión in Spanish and English, Irisarri’s earlier admiration for the United States hardened into the critical anti-imperialist stance it would take for the remainder of his life. The discovery of this New Orleans edition of El cristiano errante, I argue, shifts this text outside its minor place in the developmental history of the Latin American novel and into the complex transnational history that yokes together the United States with Central America through the subjects who move between them, in ways that are often marked by state violence. Although the novel itself does not describe the lives of Spanish-speaking and Latino people then living in the United States, its serial incarnation in this periodical context links them as readers to the vision of a regional, community-based defense of Central America’s sovereignty—even though Irisarri continued his lifelong opposition to the federation of those small nations into a single state.

The Mayan territory through which Irisarri had traveled in 1806 now encompasses a second border between Latin America and the United States: a dark shadow and foreshadowing of the frontera that runs along and beyond the Río Grande. Along the railroad line that Irisarri correctly guessed would be built toward the end of the nineteenth century to link Guatemala with Chiapas, undocumented migrants undergo violent abjectification by the Mexican state (and by the organized crime cartels it tolerates), which has mimicked and exaggerated the tactics of those state agencies that patrol the U.S.–Mexico border. The emerging discipline of Latino studies, loosely assembled from the planks of Chicano/a, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American studies, has just begun to conceptualize the growing presence of Central American–Americans within the Latino bloc: sometimes successfully resisting the affect of sympathetic pity, sometimes not. U.S. American studies, too, needs to consider the implications of this GuateMexican border zone that lies well outside, but is still of, the United States. I want to ask how errancy and non-intentionality might provide not only a different ethos of migration and movement rights, but a different mythos as well. How might errancy talk back to that foundational trope of American studies, the Puritan errand into the wilderness and its self-justifying “escape to freedom”?

A Peripatetic Textual History

El cristiano errante, though introduced in its Prologue as something other than a factual history, correlates broadly with events and landscapes in Irisarri’s own itinerary; thus, a logical place to begin is with a sketch of the author’s life. Unlike critics who have plumbed the resemblances between Irisarri and the protagonist (Romualdo de Villapedrosa from “Nueva Babilonia”), I am less interested in classifying its ratio of fiction to autobiography than in charting the spaces in which it was received. The author’s name and reputation do matter, as we retrace this novel’s movement along what Robert Darnton calls the communications circuit—but so do the other nodes of that circuit. Irisarri sometimes functions as his own editor and publicist and at other times is linked financially to political patrons; his reviewers and readers are mostly, though not always, caught up in those webs of partisan affiliation as well. The point along the circuit that matters most here is that of preservation and survival: how a stateless author and his digressive text were first neglected, then posthumously inserted into narratives of national tradition. The marginality of this novel, moreover, was compounded by the extreme degree to which its existence depended upon that most fragile of material formats, the newspaper.4

It is for his work in establishing newspapers wherever he went—the Johnny Appleseed of the nineteenth-century Latin American press—that Antonio José de Irisarri is mostly remembered. Born in 1786 to a wealthy family in Guatemala City, Irisarri traveled to Mexico City at age twenty to sort out the financial affairs of his deceased father, a merchant who had taken the daring step of trading in Philadelphia and Baltimore against the inconsistent decrees of the Spanish crown.5 After collecting family debts in Callao, Lima, and Valparaíso, Irisarri married and settled in Santiago de Chile, agitating on behalf of independence in the seminal monthly he founded in 1813 and attaching himself to Bernardo O’Higgins.6 Dispatched to London as ambassador to England and France, he brokered a controversial million-pound loan and befriended Andrés Bello, whose interest in philology—and whose defense of the Spanish spoken in the New World—he would later imitate. Returning to Guatemala in 1826, this nonmilitary man found himself named defense minister and thrust into a war against the Liberal Francisco Morazán, whose followers were trying to hold together the disintegrating Federal Republic of Central America. Morazán defeated him in—of all places—Los Altos and threw him into a Salvadoran prison for eleven months; Irisarri escaped in 1830.7 Finally returning to Chile to see the grown children he had known only as babies, Irisarri again embroiled himself in controversial government service: In 1837, he was accused of treason for having negotiated a treaty that would have ended the War of the Confederation with a concession of Chilean defeat. He never returned there, nor did he collect on the commissions and personal loan payments he claimed he was owed by four newly independent republics. The vast fortune he had inherited and received from his wife’s family would dwindle to $81 by the time of his death, in a rented room in Brooklyn, in 1868.8

In his early forties Irisarri began his life over, returning to the journalistic role he had adopted in Chile, starting newspapers in Ecuador, Guatemala, Nueva Granada, Venezuela, and Trinidad and leveraging his trademark style—by turns bitingly eloquent and hilariously satirical—to ridicule the ideas of the opposition party. Of course, when the party that was underwriting the paper’s publication fell out of power, there would be an urgent need to move on. El cristiano errante came into being during one of these new beginnings. Irisarri arrived in Bogotá in 1846 with a commendation to Tomás Cipriano Mosquera, then in his first term as president of Nueva Granada. A major anti-Mosquera newspaper was titled Libertad y Orden, so as a first counter-punch, Irisarri titled his new weekly Nosotros: Orden y Libertad. A rival journalist wrote that the editorial voice in Nosotros was so distinctive and quirky that “no-one from nowhere” could have written it: Surely the new writer in town must be El judío errante, the Wandering Jew. The intended insult was clear: Rather than speaking for “us,” for the Colombian public, Irisarri’s new paper spoke from the perspective of a suspect, stateless being. Turning the slur on its head, Irisarri immediately changed the name of his weekly to El cristiano errante.9

Because El cristiano errante, the “novel that resembles a history,” began serialization in the newspaper El cristiano errante shortly after this episode, Irisarri had probably written much of it before setting foot in Bogotá. The journalistic mudslinging, so typical of its period, seems to have lent the novel both a title and a key trope: that of the wanderer whose constant movement allows him to compare one place to another and thus to see beyond the narrow prejudices and petty loyalties of located identities (as the fictive name of his birthplace, “New Babylon,” suggests). Being errant does not make him noncommittal, though: The many digressions in the narrative muse about what the pan-American republics had wanted to be, how those ideals were corrupted, and what they still might become. The comparison of Irisarri’s Romualdo to Ahasuerus, the juif errant of popular European fantasy, was thus apt. The wild narrative that Sue had scaffolded around this figure had no time to waste on mere anti-Semitism; his Ahasuerus was held up as a prophet, an ageless time traveler who observed the corruption of the world around him (associated mostly with the Jesuit order that was Sue’s particular target). Sue’s sensational novel had been a global publishing phenomenon in 1844–45, keeping readers on edge awaiting the next installment, and imitators—including some in Spain, where popular fiction had barely taken hold—sprang up immediately. The ten-volume bound version of Le juif errant remained a bestseller even as the entregas of Irisarri’s Cristiano errante appeared, from August 1846 to March 1847.10

The story of Romualdo’s extraordinary journey through the continental revolutions was projected to cover seven volumes: If comple...