Chicano Nations

The Hemispheric Origins of Mexican American Literature

Marissa K. Lopez

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814752630
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series Chicano Nations argues that the transnationalism that is central to Chicano identity originated in the global, postcolonial moment at the turn of the nineteenth century rather than as an effect of contemporary economic conditions, which began in the mid nineteenth century and primarily affected the laboring classes. The Spanish empire then began to implode, and colonists in the “new world” debated the national contours of the viceroyalties. This is where Marissa K. López locates the origins of Chicano literature, which is now and always has been “postnational,” encompassing the wealthy, the poor, the white, and the mestizo. Tracing its long history and the diversity of subject positions it encompasses, Chicano Nations explores the shifting literary forms authors have used to write the nation from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. López argues that while national and global tensions lie at the historical heart of Chicana/o narratives of the nation, there should be alternative ways to imagine the significance of Chicano literature other than as a reflection of national identity. In a nuanced analysis, the book provides a way to think of early writers as a meaningful part of Chicano literary history, and, in looking at the nation, rather than the particularities of identity, as that which connects Chicano literature over time, it engages the emerging hemispheric scholarship on U.S. literature.

PART ONE
IMAGINING THE AMERICAS

1 / Latinidad Abroad: The Narrative Maps of Sarmiento, Zavala, and Pérez Rosales

Fearing for his own life after the assassination of many of his political allies, the Mexican politician Lorenzo de Zavala fled Mexico City for the United States late in 1829. Arriving in New Orleans, he traveled northeast through Mississippi, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and eventually Canada, recording his observations along the way. A decade later, the Argentine writer, soldier, and provocateur Domingo Sarmiento, also fleeing political unrest, traced a similar path across the United States and Canada. Just three years after Sarmiento, Vicente Pérez Rosales, a Chilean journalist, businessman, and admiring critic of Sarmiento’s, left along with thousands of other Chileans to seek his fortunes in the golden hills of California. Each published an account of his travels in which, while simultaneously producing a vision of the United States for Mexican and Latin American consumption, they negotiated their own countries’ burgeoning nationalisms against the increasing hemispheric dominance of the United States.

Sarmiento, Zavala, and Pérez Rosales document their adventures, but their narratives also reflect the appearance of racial thinking in the Americas. Race emerges in the nineteenth century, as Ralph Bauer has argued, “as a transnational discourse of identity and difference based on biological factors, such as skin color” (“Hemispheric Genealogies” 36). These modern ideas of race, however, do not necessarily correspond to colonial discourses of difference, Bauer continues, contending that to speak of race in the modern sense before the nineteenth century is anachronistic. In the writings of Sarmiento, Zavala, and Pérez Rosales we see the shift to modern racial thinking as the United States moves inexorably toward constructing Mexico and Latin America as political and ultimately racial others.

Against the threat of U.S. hegemony, Latin American countries, in the early nineteenth-century wake of independence, asserted their unique, national identities. As Zavala, Sarmiento, and Pérez Rosales parse the meanings of Mexico, Argentina, and Chile against an ideal of hemispheric cooperation, U.S. market dominance continues to grow, consequently determining the meaning of American space and its inhabitants. This moment, when the various countries of the Americas begin to understand the potential and the danger of inter-American cooperation, is the ideal place to begin a study of Chicana/o literature. The moment when Latin America emerges as a potential other in the U.S. imagination also marks the inception of a Chicana/o national imaginary.

The limitations and contradictions of cultural nationalism also become apparent in this historical moment. As the writers under consideration in this chapter struggle to distinguish themselves and their home countries, they slowly come to understand the ways in which the United States is, in fact, all too willing to consider them as others. Political hierarchies in the Americas are codified concomitant with racial hierarchies into whose vortex Sarmiento, Zavala, and Pérez Rosales are unceremoniously swept. They are aware of this process to varying degrees, as the emerging language of race is unevenly available to them, evident in the differing roles race plays in each traveler’s narrative. When they do speak in recognizably racial terms, their intended subjects are difficult to correlate to twenty-first-century understandings of race. Sarmiento, Zavala, and Pérez Rosales are, therefore, not direct, philosophical ancestors to contemporary Chicanas/os. Considering the shifting conceptions of the Americas in their travel narratives does, however, reveal how racial thinking evolves with national thinking and how both are imbricated in a nascent Chicana/o national imaginary.

The advent of a Chicana/o and Latina/o racial identity in the United States shuts down the transamerican possibility with which the century begins, and to which Sarmiento, at least, clings so hopefully in his narrative. The story of Sarmiento’s, Zavala’s, and Pérez Rosales’s travels is also, then, the story of how race becomes available as an organizing principle of Chicana/o identity. In telling this story I have two aims: one, to make the hemispherism of these early nineteenth-century writers available to contemporary Chicana/o cultural workers as the grounds for a progressive politics; and two, to illuminate the historicity of race. Chicanas/os have a complicated racial history—grounded in the interconnected histories of Mexico, the United States, Argentina, and Chile—that involves its own fair share of oppressive colonial moves.

Setting the Historical Scene

Independence movements across the former Spanish empire were connected but uneven, and nation building in each of the four countries considered here involved the simultaneous, symbiotic development of national and transnational hierarchies of race and class. Though intimately related, independence movements took root more quickly in loosely populated regions like Argentina, located far from colonial centers in Mexico City and Lima. The structure of Spain’s colonial governance, however, ensured that independence unfolded along similar lines, developing similar factions, in each newly sovereign nation. Across the empire the chain of command was the same: the cabildo (town council) reported to the intendencia (middle management intended to limit cabildo power), which reported to the audencia (regional political center), which reported to the viceroy, who answered to the crown (Shumway 10). Criollos (Spaniards born in the colonies) were not allowed to hold positions of significant political power, but they were allowed a fair amount of leeway in their fealty to imperial decree. Tolerating occasional disobedience allowed Spain to keep criollo power in check and maintain a loyal class of civil servants. The criollo population in the colonies was largely content until Napoleon’s 1808 invasion of Spain created warring factions of loyalists and patriots who came to dominate politics in the post-independence era (Shumway 18–20).

Partisans of the crown in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and elsewhere evolved into Centralists favoring a strong central authority, while patriots, or supporters of independence, became Federalists, favoring cooperative leagues of states within each new nation. These intranational conflicts informed emerging international relations in Latin America, as Simón Bolívar explained in “The Jamaica Letter.”¹ There he expressed hopes for a Latin American federation, organized loosely along the lines of the old viceroyalties, which would work together for the liberty and progress of the continent, a plan that met with much resistance from ardent nationalists.

Despite resistance to federation, Latin American countries took an active interest in their neighbors’ political development, with, for example, Argentina’s famed general José de San Martín aiding in the independence of Peru and Chile. Cultural production was similarly interdependent. Most of Argentina’s “May Association” of politically progressive writers opposed to the Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas operated from exile in Chile and Uruguay (Katra 10). Sarmiento, who was not a member but an avid observer of the May Association, also fled to Chile. There he worked as a journalist and editor, eventually publishing his Facundo, or Civilization and Barbarism (1845), an anti-Rosas manifesto and classic theory of both caudillismo (strongman rule) and Latin American development.

Such international cultural connections as existed between Chile and Argentina fell prey to the same political tensions Bolívar faced, however, with Vicente Pérez Rosales calling Chile a “refugium peccatorum for Peruvians and Argentineans” (173)² and harboring antipathy for Sarmiento in particular whose “rude and shameless arrogance” prompts him to, “in a corrupt Spanish, [print] whatever bit of nonsense tickled [his] pen” (174).³ Sarmiento, for his part, editorialized that it “was folly to study Spanish, because Spanish was a language dead to civilization,” viewed Chileans as “dim-witted,” and claimed that “while the muses happily caressed [Argentine writers], in Chile they did nothing but sleep like a log” (Pérez Rosales 175).⁴ Even so, Pérez Rosales found Sarmiento impressive and interesting, as did the Chilean government, which tolerated his presence in their country and funded his trip to the United States ostensibly to evaluate foreign education systems but also to deflect extradition pressure from Rosas’s government.

Pérez Rosales’s and the Chilean government’s reluctant tolerance of Sarmiento is a lens through which to focus cultural and political hemispherism in nineteenth-century Latin America. Bolívar’s desire for a Latin American federation became the crux of debates about nationhood in post-independence Latin America, a debate fueled and exacerbated by U.S. observers in the region, among whom Joel Poinsett, whose diplomatic career emphasizes the deep connections between the four countries discussed in this chapter, truly distinguishes himself.

In 1810 Poinsett served as a special agent for the United States in Buenos Aires and Chile, quixotically supporting both the Spanish crown and nascent revolutionary forces. During 1822–23 Poinsett was special agent to Mexico, where he fomented civil strife by supporting competing Masonic factions. In 1825, not long after Monroe delivered his 1823 doctrine, Poinsett was appointed U.S. minister to Mexico, from which position he worked, until 1829, to secure trade and diplomatic concessions from Mexico. Poinsett’s behavior—so strikingly intrusive as to lead Mexicans to coin the term poinsettismo to refer to meddle-some actions—characterizes the emerging diplomatic persona of the United States in the early nineteenth century. His actions generated such mistrust that Bolívar famously did not want to include the United States in the 1826 Congress of Panama, which sought to establish a Latin American league of nations (Bushnell xxxv). Though unsuccessful, the congress attendees grappled with fundamental questions about the meaning of the Americas and what role the United States would play in the American imagination.

A genealogy of Chicana/o literature can be traced from this moment of the Congress of Panama’s failure, from this same nexus of race, nation, and global capital emerging in Latin America’s post-independence period. An exploration of this genealogy begins with the travel narrative as emblematic of hemispheric possibility, similarity, and contradiction. It was, after all, the travel narrative that created the idea of the Americas in the European and American imaginations. Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’s account of his wandering across Texas in the early sixteenth century, in La relación (1542), presented Europe with one of the first anthropologic accounts of the “new” world intended for a broad audience. In addition to imagining the native as a lesser form of humanity, European natural historians tended to imagine American space as degenerative and inconsequential as well. Thomas Jefferson did much to refute these notions in Notes on the State of Virginia (1784), but perhaps the greatest proselytizer of American grandeur was the Prussian natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt. His multivolume Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, which Mary Louise Pratt describes as a “print epic” (119), documents his early nineteenth-century trips across South America and the Spanish Caribbean. Humboldt’s breathlessly romantic drawings and descriptions of the Andes, the Cordilleras, the Amazon basin, and other natural wonders of the continent did much to create a sense of South America’s natural largesse.

As Pratt argues, Humboldt marks a transition from travel writing as an instrument of empire to travel writing as a genre South American writers embrace as a means of asserting American particularity in the post-independence age. For nineteenth-century Latin American writers like Andrés Bello, Esteban Echevarría, Sarmiento, and even Bolívar, Humboldt emerges “as a point from which Americanist consciousness set out, and beyond which it sought to go” (181, emphasis in original). The intersection of natural history and travel writing embodied by Humboldt becomes the means by which americanismo literario (the movement to create an autochthonous literature of the Americas) could reclaim the Spanish empire and describe it as uniquely American.

In my readings of Sarmiento, Zavala, and Pérez Rosales, I explore how travel writing simultaneously articulates and deconstructs transamerican space and culture. I am particularly interested in how each discursively maps the Americas, arguing either for or against hemispheric unity. How, in the midst of establishing their own nations, do these writers grapple with the idea of the Americas, how do they write the United States into that vision, and how does race emerge as a way of organizing problems of nation and citizenship? Humboldt’s landscapes were instrumental in narrating American particularity, and Latin American writers deployed Humboldtian convention, as Pratt shows; here I wish to push travel and its accoutrements—writing, transportation, maps, and hospitality—to account not just for a post-independence pride grounded in natural history but also for the geopolitical realities and shifting power dynamics in the hemisphere.

Traveling Through Racial Histories with Sarmiento

Sarmiento certainly works from a Humboldtian ideal in Facundo. Locating the gaucho’s “barbarism” in the desolate geography of the pampas defined caudillismo as a uniquely American phenomenon rooted in the land’s specificity. Positing the “natural” gaucho against “civilized” Buenos Aires constructed the city as a denaturalized, European space toward which the country was progressing.⁵ But famously, Sarmiento had never seen the pampas he wrote about in Facundo. Though he had traveled quite a bit by 1845, he had never traveled through the Argentine spaces his narrative attempts to contain. I turn here, therefore, to Sarmiento’s Viajes por Europa, Africa, i América, 1845–1847⁶ to see what Sarmiento makes of the other spaces within which he actually moves, and I look specifically at his journey through the United States in order to lay the groundwork for the transamerican ideal emerging in these early Latin American, post-independence pilgrimages north.

Whereas Facundo posits the Argentine landscape as an irreducible difference, in Viajes por…América Sarmiento represents nature as absorbing differences of race and class, relegating them to the past. The United States is constituted as a nation, incorporating difference as the Yankee moves across and transforms natural space. But even as Sarmiento celebrates this spatial transfiguration, he balks at Yankee utilitarianism. He also expresses an uneasy sympathy with those relegated to the natural past (indigenous Americans) and domestic space (American women). Viajes por…América should be read, then, in terms of its praise for Yankee progress but also for its moments of discontent, the ways in which Sarmiento’s hemispheric vision collides with U.S. political realities.

Sarmiento begins on a resoundingly positive note, describing the United States to his friend Valentín Alsina, to whom Viajes por … América is structured as a long letter, as the perfect country (118, 336).⁷ Land is freely available and it is resource rich, but even these qualities do not fully explain the success and uniqueness of the United States, a project Sarmiento intends to take up in his narrative. He tells Alsina not to expect “an orderly description of the United States” for Sarmiento has “another purpose” (117):⁸ to explain its success and difference from other American countries. The differences between Argentina and the United States, Sarmiento explains to Alsina, are racial, economic, and geographic, but he sees these things as subsets of something larger, which emerges in the narrative as travel: the ability to move freely through and transform national space.

Travel is particularly noteworthy for Sarmiento because it was, for him, a relatively novel liberty. Before the Spanish constitution of 1812, movement within the Americas was severely restricted, requiring significant paperwork and passage through numerous checkpoints (Mexal 83). Indeed, this was the case throughout much of Europe. John Torpey, in The Invention of the Passport, draws a clear connection between freedom of movement and freedom of thought in European countries, a point with which Sarmiento would have wholeheartedly agreed. “The word ‘passport’ is unknown in the states,” he tells Alsina (158),⁹ asserting further that “if France had abolished the passport liberty would have been advanced more than it has been in half a century of revolutions and advanced social theories, and the proof is in the United States” (161).¹⁰ Travel, then, comes to serve three functions for Sarmiento: it furthers a public morality grounded in the romantic optimism of the United States; it produces the material traces of the nation with roads, maps, and a hospitality industry; and, in so doing, it drives expansion, increasing the space under national control.

Sarmiento comes to these observations about travel elliptically, however, and spends a good deal of his narrative working through seemingly tautologous relations between public institutions and public sentiments. He initially se...