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MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 65.2 (2004) 323-327



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Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing. By Kirsten Silva Gruesz. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. 293 pp.

Ambassadors of Culture is a panoramic study of the almost forgotten Spanish-language periodicals and literary public sphere that flourished in major U.S. cities and newly acquired U.S. territories during the mid- to late nineteenth century. Kirsten Silva Gruesz relies on lyric poetry, the most popular literary genre featured in those periodicals, to open a window onto Latino print communities. She highlights poetry in particular because the "rarified, costly form of cultural literacy" it demands (26) is compensated by its performative qualities, making it one of the most accessible genres to authors and audiences "possessing a broad range of literacies" (xii). At the intersection of poetry and the press, Ambassadors of Culture deftly interweaves multiple levels of analysis, including archival-based histories of a dozen or so periodicals; profiles of writers, both canonical and lesser known, whose careers brought them into contact with those publications; and numerous close readings of poems. All the while, it sustains a general discussion about crosscurrents in U.S. and Latin American poetry and translation.

The book's five chapters each present several case studies of poets linked to one another through their participation in a given publication, residence in the same area, or writings on a common theme. Gruesz dubs the protagonists of Spanish-language print culture "ambassadors" because playing such a role "involves reporting and representing, but not enforcing, the authority of that idealized realm of prestige knowledge in a place where it does not rule—whether in the hinterlands or in a cosmopolitan space where many value systems come together in chaotic plurality, as they did in American cities" (18). Most of the poetic-minded ambassadors are educated, white-identified Latin American diplomats and exiles, as well as californio and tejano elites; through case studies of two women poets, Gruesz offers counterpoints to the male ambassadors' perspectives.

Gruesz's broad historical objective is not merely to recover a neglected publishing tradition, however, but to narrate "an alternative version of the 'American Renaissance' of the late 1840s and 1850s" that comprehends "subsequent decades not through the lens of the Civil War and Reconstruction but in terms of the development of U.S. expansionism" (11). Thus Gruesz's primary historical markers are the legacy of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823: the Mexican War (1846-48), the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo (1848), the first Pan-American Congress (1889), and the U.S. interventions in Central America and the Caribbean that preceded and followed the [End Page 323] Spanish-American War (1898). Although the nationalist projects of U.S. manifest destiny, Cuban and Puerto Rican independence, and the Mexican reforma are persistent themes in this study, the reach of Spanish-language print culture that Gruesz outlines is hemispheric. It extends from New York to Cuba, Panama, Boston, San Francisco, Mexico City, San Antonio, even Brazil.

The fluid transnationalism of Gruesz's inter-American spatial imaginary is in some sense a Latino counterpart to the African-oriented circum-Atlantic outlined in Joseph Roach's Cities of the Dead.1 Both authors share an interest, for example, in the city of New Orleans, that crossroads of New World African, Francophone, Anglophone, and Latino cultures, dubbed "el París hispano" by its Latin American admirers (109). Chapter 4 of Gruesz's book focuses on New Orleans as a meeting ground for Latin American exiles, travelers, diplomats, and patriots during the Mexican War. It was there, at the height of the Spanish-language publishing industry, that the fledgling journalist Walt Whitman found himself for several months during 1848 working as "exchange editor" for the virulently racist and expansionist English-language periodical the Crescent, where his job was to cut and paste news items that arrived from the international press, including New Orleans's own La Patria. Gruesz argues that Whitman's day job provided "the experiential source" (131) for such sections of Leaves of Grass...

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