The Latino Nineteenth Century ed. by Rodrigo Lazo and Jesse Alemán (review)

The Latino Nineteenth Century builds on the past two decades of Latina/o scholarship that focuses on historicizing the place of Latina/os in the United States. The book thus excavates the history of Latina/os in seemingly unlikely regions such as New England and cities such as Philadelphia. Further, it illuminates the need to examine Spanish-language texts rather than relying on works in English. Expanding the corpus of materials in this way also sheds light on the longer literary histories of Latina/o literature rather than relying on periodizations that ground Latina/o literature in the social movements of the mid-twentieth century. As The Latino Nineteenth Century reminds us, Latina/os existed in the United States well before the Chicano Movement. Further, to fully grasp the range of Latina/o experiences in the United States, several essays in this collection point to the necessity of examining US-Latin American relations. An impressive anthology that demonstrates the diversity and vitality of this period, The Latino Nineteenth Century makes necessary interventions into nineteenth-century American Studies, Latina/o Studies, and Latin American Studies.

A striking pattern across the collection is the need for new paradigms and methodologies. As Jesse Alemán observes in his preface to the collection, the term “Latino” is not “an anachronism but a marker of nineteenth-century transnationality” (vii–viii). However, as essays by Robert McKee Irwin and Raúl Coronado demonstrate, who counts as Latina/o is a fraught topic. Irwin theorizes the figure of the “almost Latino” (110), one who wishes “to immigrate to, and establish himself as a resident in, the United States and begins to do so but ultimately cannot” (113). Like Irwin, Coronado asks us to consider such moments of failure to highlight the “literary histories of Latinas/os that did not lead to the presumed and critically undertheorized goal of assimilating into the canon of U.S. literary studies or, even, that of any Spanish American nation” (51–52).

While Irwin’s and Coronado’s essays focus on dreams deferred, Kirsten Silva Gruesz and Juan Poblete focus on theorizing migration. With Antonio José de Irisarri’s serialized novel El cristiano errante (1847) as her launching point, Gruesz puts forward the idea of errancy, which she describes as a way to rethink migrancy “without a goal, without intention” (21). Errancy, she argues, allows us to rethink migrant narratives outside of the predetermined narratives of our contemporary moment, to “stop caring about whether the migrant has intention or not, whether he ultimately takes root or moves to another place. It would take him in no matter what” (40). Meanwhile, Poblete focuses on the Chilean author Vicente Pérez Rosale’s Diario de un viaje a California (1949) and Recuerdos del Pasado (1882) alongside philosopher Josiah Royce’s California: From the Conquest of 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco (1886). Citing Mae Ngai’s discussion of “impossible subjects” (287), Poblete argues that “the case of racialized foreign others in the California Gold Rush was already a manifestation of this later logic of the production of exploitable subjects” (287).

Such notions of migrancy and Latinidad raise the issue of Latina/os’ relationship to Latin America. Along these lines, Carmen E. Lamas theorizes a Latina/o Continuum, which she describes as “constituted and comes about simultaneously in and beyond space and time” (211). As an example, she reads Raimundo Cabrera’s Episodios de la Guerra. Mi vida en la manigua (1897–98) alongside his 1889 Spanish translation of Andrew Carnegie’s Triumphant Democracy of Fifty Years’ March of the Republic (1886). For Lamas, Cabrera straddles identities that are “not entirely Latin American . . . and not entirely U.S. American” (212). In a similar vein, Emily Garcia investigates the forgotten diplomat Manuel de Trujillo y Torres whose diplomatic work crucially informed American independence and, as Garcia argues, demonstrates “how revolutionary rhetoric and its cultural influence crisscross South and...