A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture by Raúl Coronado (review)

Officially, Mexico is not simply México. It is, more properly, los Estados Unidos Mexicanos: the United States of Mexico or the United Mexican States. For many today, the echo implied by this name suggests that Mexico—and Spanish America more broadly—attempted and failed to replicate the structure and government of the United States of America.

It is against this assumption and its long history that Raúl Coronado writes in A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture. The intellectual heritage and ideological transformations traced throughout A World Not to Come are vital to understanding the development of Spanish America as a site both independent of and yet in relation to the United States. For A World Not to Come uncovers a now-forgotten—or now-incomprehensible—conception of modernity, one that emerges in Spanish America from amid a collision of Catholic, Protestant, and secular theological-political Enlightenment discourses. The world of print culture named in Coronado’s subtitle is one not only of material culture and circulation but of oral, visual, and performative religious and political texts. Print, orality, and performance then intersect with extensive etymologies and discussions of translation as A World Not to Come explicates the religious and political histories that shaped both practices of print and the construction of language in Spanish America during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In tracing the contexts that shaped Spanish American discourses of independence and nationhood, Coronado emphasizes that such discourses are neither poor imitations nor simple derivations of Euro-Anglo Enlightenment articulations of rights, liberty, freedom, individualism, and so on.

Within Latina/o studies and literary scholarship, critics such as Kirsten Silva Gruesz and Marissa K. López have begun to delineate a history of Latina/o print culture; they and others, including scholars such as John-Michael Rivera and Jesse Alemán, engage in broader discussions regarding the transformations Latina/o writing and culture undergo as US-Mexico relations shift throughout the Texas Revolution and the US-Mexican War. Border historians Andrés Reséndez, Karl Jacoby, Louise Pubols, Rachel St. John, Omar Valerio-Jiménez, and others have contributed political, economic, military, multiethnic, governmental, and cartographic histories vital to reconstructing borderland culture and what Rivera terms “the emergence of Mexican America.” Coronado brings to these discussions not only an extended time line, one that stretches from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, but also an emphasis on religion. In order to understand Latina/o reactions to US imperialism, Coronado asserts, we must “understand the world of nineteenth-century Latinas/os on their own terms, prior to their being colonized” (391). Such an understanding, Coronado argues, requires excavating the Catholic Scholastic tradition that underlies Spanish America’s alternate path to modernity.

The care with which Coronado sets out the structure and evolution of Catholic Scholasticism, its intersections with, and its implications for Spanish American thought justifies the scale of A World Not to Come (its five hundred pages include an introduction, nine chapters, conclusion, several primary-source appendixes, and notes). Following the Protestant Reformation, Coronado writes, the Catholic Reformation “reaffirmed the importance of visuality, orality, and community as a means of accessing the divine” (47). Hispanic Enlightenment thought, moreover, developed within a world that “refused the split between the rational mind and the spiritual life” (61). Thus central “Enlightenment” concepts, including “the genealogy of individualism, of thinking of agency as embodied solely in human beings, follows a different path in the Catholic Hispanic world” (51–52). In part by tracing the intricacies and transformations of terms such as patria, nación, país, and pueblo, Coronado sets forth a discursive tradition in which not the individual but a sense of community (defined through concentric circles of belonging) grounds the language of reform and revolution.

This tradition, Coronado argues, leads to an essential difference in the ways that British...