A Latin Americanist Looks at Early American Literature

In her letter inviting me to participate in this anniversary commemoration, Early American Literature editor Sandra Gustafson wrote: “I see this anniversary as an opportunity to reflect on the maturation of the area of literary studies covered by EAL and to build ties to neighboring fields.” Coming from the neighboring field of colonial Latin American literary studies, I was delighted to accept her invitation because, nearly forty years ago, I had answered a call for papers for an MLA convention panel on Native American studies. As I recall, the panel’s sponsor was the the MLA-affiliated Association for Studies in American Indian Literatures. In any case, my proposal was rejected on the basis that I had my “own” division, that is, “Latin American Literature before 1900,” under whose rubric Native American studies that focused on areas south of the Rio Grande could be entertained. (I was working at the time on the account of an extraordinary native Andean writer from Spanish colonial Peru, whose manuscript work remains part of my scholarly signature to this day.)¹

Revealing the dilemma of inclusion versus exclusion that we debated in the 1970s, the Native Americanist panel’s topic was: “Is American Indian Literature a Separate and Distinct Literature of This Continent or Is It a Sub-Branch of American Literature, an Ethnic Sub-Branch, or Are There Two Bodies of Indian Literature, the Quick and the Dead?” (Program of the 1976 MLA 1023). Had my paper proposal been accepted, I would have answered that American Indian Literature was not a “separate and distinct literature of this [North American] continent” but that it could include not only Mexico, which sits on the North American continent, but also Central and South America, too. Yet a project in “my” field, the creation of the journal Latin American Indian Literatures, affirmed the tendency of that time, which was to keep separate the geographical and therefore cultural areas of study of Native American cultures. In short, the exclusionary tactic was practiced in the hemispheric South as well as the North.

Yet in the period that extends from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the objective was not to exclude from consideration but rather, for the first time, to identify, highlight, and make worthy of study areas of cultural production that had been ignored. These efforts to “create space” characterize scholarly initiatives for all Americanist literatures (Anglo-, African-, Asian-, Latin-, Latino-, and so forth) of the late 1960s and 1970s, when women’s and gender studies, ethnic studies, and gay and lesbian studies also emerged. Suzanne Bost has observed, with respect to her areas of scholarship in postmodern and feminist theories and Chicana/o studies: “After all, the intellectual formations and identities I study did not exist prior to 1848, maybe not even prior to 1968” (235).² Today’s ongoing efforts to be both precise and inclusive are exemplified by the evolution of my principal division’s name from “Latin American Literature before 1900” to “Latin American Colonial Literature” to the current “Latin American Colonial Literatures,” to the proposed “Colonial and Pre-Columbian Latin American Literature.”

The current mission statement of Early American Literature supports the same goals of precision and inclusiveness:

Early American Literature, published three times a year, is the journal of the Society of Early Americanists and of the MLA’s Division on American Literature to 1800. Its province is American literature through the early national period (about 1830). Founded in 1965, EAL invites work treating Native American traditional expressions, colonial Ibero-American literature from North America, colonial American Francophone writings, Dutch colonial, and German American colonial literature as well as writings in English from British America and the US.

While honoring the journal’s current inclusion of “colonial Ibero-American literature from North America,” I want to go back in time to highlight some of the studies in the nearly fifty years of EAL, from 1967 to the present, that track its engagement with the Ibero-American world. Several of those essays slip farther south than the North American continent (which, we must always remind ourselves, includes Mexico...