The Rise of Latino Intellectuals

It is hard to resist the temptation Raúl Coronado’s book title poses to the reader and therefore think about the world that came on after the ideas and texts he analyzes in his recounting of the history of Latino textuality in the US, particularly in a time when Spanish-language newspapers count by hundreds, not to mention literature and other types of print culture.¹ As Suzanne Bost and Frances R. Aparicio have persuasively shown in The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature (2013), identity terms such as “Hispanic” and “Latino” are usually contested, but there is consensus about them being racial labels “to describe Latin American descent peoples in the United States” (1). For Coronado, the term Latino exceeds spatial boundaries, referring “less to a subject-position than it does to a literary and intellectual culture that emerges in the interstices between the United States and Spanish America” (30). His aim is to analyze what discursive formations gave rise to Latino culture by recounting the life of a handful of documents that circulated within the Eastern Interior Provinces of New Spain from 1810 to 1850, a territory that would later become Mexico and the US.

In a somewhat misleading review, Sergio M. Martínez emphasizes the value of Coronado’s book as a “study of the Southwest’s writings and print culture focused on Latinos in times of Spanish political, cultural, and economical restlessness”. A World Not to Come is much more than that: it traces the circulation of texts and ideas beyond a particular region, from London to Philadelphia, from Philadelphia to Texas, from Texas to Mexico, and from there to Central and South America. Moreover, it illustrates the generation of imagined communities in overlapping spaces in a time where the modern nation-states did not exist on this continent. Coronado’s book surpasses the attempt to explain the making of Latino intellectual life in the US in terms of region or nation. Quite the contrary, he deconstructs such concepts in order to show the complex processes behind the notions of pueblo (town), patria (homeland), and nación (nation), and how their meaning related to the development of identities such as Spanish-Americans, Mexicans, and Texans.

Although there is a well-established tradition of scholarship on the book markets between Spain and the colonies, most of the research focuses on the capital cities of the viceroyalties. This tendency is easy to understand since those places were the original recipients of the first and second printing presses on the continent, as early as 1539 for Mexico City and 1584 for Lima, Peru. Yet little has been researched about literacy, education, and the history of the book beyond the cultural and political capitals. In this sense, Coronado’s study will probably become a classic on the print culture along the frontier and will share a place along the groundbreaking Books of the Brave (1949), in which historian Irving Leonard researched the impact of conquistadors’ reading habits and the distribution of fiction on the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Even though the printing press did not arrive in the Eastern Interior Provinces of New Spain until 1877, Coronado’s study demonstrates the circulation of textuality and, more importantly, that writing worked as palliative for the difficult and slow process through which sovereignty became detached from the Spanish monarch.

“Writing and publishing,” writes Coronado, “becomes an increasingly important means for communities to search for new sources of metaphysical certainty. They produce a self-sustaining knowledge that becomes ontologically foundational” (28). Here publics and politics are linked in the way that Michael Warner explains the circulation of texts as the basis for public representations: “public discourse circulates, but it does so in struggle with its own conditions” (107). The texts Coronado analyzes become fundamental in representing the struggles of people during three key moments in the history of the Mexican-American frontier: the Texan war of independence between 1811 and 1814, the Texas Revolution of 1835-1836, and the US-Mexican War between 1846 and 1848.

Although print...