1
The Errant Latino
Irisarri, Central Americanness, and Migrationâs 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.
âSamuel Danforth, âA Brief Recognition of New-Englands Errand into the Wilderness,â 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.]
âSelf-description by Antonio JosĂ© de Irisarri, 1863
Fui migrante y me hospedaron. [I was a migrant, and you took me in.]
âIdiosyncratic 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 JosĂ© de Irisarriâs El cristiano errante (The Errant Christian, 1847) describes his compulsion to linger at the seven Maya-Kâicheâ villages along the way. âHe found those Indians hard-working, intelligent, agile, alert, well-formed, robust, dedicated to agriculture, commerce, and the artsâ and praises their homes, their products, and their public works, including aqueducts and ingenious hydraulics that irrigated productive fields âwhose yields were held in common.â He concluded that the indios of Los Altos âseemed to him more intelligent than the mestizos, zambos, and Spaniards of the other parts of America, for they were infinitely more skilled master builders.â Ignorant of indigenous lifeways prior to this journey, the young Creole âfound 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 Colombiaââsome of the places in which he would later live during his long, peripatetic life.1 Irisarri depicts the highlands Maya-Kâicheââapparently so isolated from the currents of Enlightenment thought that were animating revolutionary movements throughout the hemisphereâas 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, EugĂšne Sueâs Le juif errant, known in Spanish as El judĂo errante. Rather than follow the usual English translation of Sueâs title as âThe Wandering Jew,â 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 Irisarriâs 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 Irisarriâhis âvida erranteâ and his errantly titled novelâto trouble the way such purposefulness can be used not only to embrace or demonize migrants but also to establish someoneâs 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 Statesâa longer period than JosĂ© MartĂâand 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 AmericanâAmerican 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 Irisarriâs 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 JosĂ© GĂłmez and Victoriano AlemĂĄn, to publish La UniĂłn in Spanish and English, Irisarriâs 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 Americaâs sovereigntyâeven 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 RĂo 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.âMexico 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 AmericanâAmericans 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 âescape to freedomâ?
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 Irisarriâs own itinerary; thus, a logical place to begin is with a sketch of the authorâs life. Unlike critics who have plumbed the resemblances between Irisarri and the protagonist (Romualdo de Villapedrosa from âNueva Babiloniaâ), I am less interested in classifying its ratio of fiction to autobiography than in charting the spaces in which it was received. The authorâs name and reputation do matter, as we retrace this novelâs movement along what Robert Darnton calls the communications circuitâbut 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 wentâthe Johnny Appleseed of the nineteenth-century Latin American pressâthat Antonio JosĂ© 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 ValparaĂso, 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 OâHiggins.6 Dispatched to London as ambassador to England and France, he brokered a controversial million-pound loan and befriended AndrĂ©s Bello, whose interest in philologyâand whose defense of the Spanish spoken in the New Worldâhe 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 MorazĂĄn, whose followers were trying to hold together the disintegrating Federal Republic of Central America. MorazĂĄn defeated him inâof all placesâLos 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 wifeâs 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 styleâby turns bitingly eloquent and hilariously satiricalâto ridicule the ideas of the opposition party. Of course, when the party that was underwriting the paperâs 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 BogotĂĄ in 1846 with a commendation to TomĂĄs 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 âno-one from nowhereâ could have written it: Surely the new writer in town must be El judĂo errante, the Wandering Jew. The intended insult was clear: Rather than speaking for âus,â for the Colombian public, Irisarriâs 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 ânovel that resembles a history,â began serialization in the newspaper El cristiano errante shortly after this episode, Irisarri had probably written much of it before setting foot in BogotĂĄ. 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, âNew Babylon,â 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 Irisarriâs 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 Sueâs particular target). Sueâs sensational novel had been a global publishing phenomenon in 1844â45, keeping readers on edge awaiting the next installment, and imitatorsâincluding some in Spain, where popular fiction had barely taken holdâsprang up immediately. The ten-volume bound version of Le juif errant remained a bestseller even as the entregas of Irisarriâs Cristiano errante appeared, from August 1846 to March 1847.10
The story of Romualdoâs extraordinary journey through the continental revolutions was projected to cover seven volumes: If comple...