The Sentimental Politics of Language: Ralph Waldo Emerson's and José María Sánchez's Texan Stories

In 1828, Mexican President Guadalupe Victoria assigned General Manuel de Mier y Terán to survey the Texan boundary between Mexico and the United States and to assess the situation of Anglo-American settlers in the territory. Traveling with Terán was Lieutenant José María Sánchez, whose diary of the expedition has long been recognized as an important source document for histories of the period and region. This article asserts the literary value of Sánchez’s diary for a hemispheric study of American Romanticism. In his description of landscape as spiritual experience and his emphasis on language as creative political force, Sánchez enacts the core tenets of an Emersonian Transcendental subject, an artistic sensibility at variance with the Byronic Romantic hero of Mexican and Latin American literature of the period. This article investigates the Mexican political tensions such a Romantic position evokes while exploring the inter-American potential of a hemispheric Romanticism.