American Alternatives: Participatory Futures of Print from New York City's Nineteenth-Century Spanish-Language Press

Published in lower Manhattan in the 1880s and 1890s, the Spanish-language literary monthly La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York (New York Illustrated Magazine) has long been obscured by its better-known neighbors. With an office at the corner of Reade Street and West Broadway, La Revista resided just a short stroll from the period's leading exemplars of the English-language popular press, which centered on a stretch of Park Row that was then widely known as "Newspaper Row." Its residents included the New York Sun, the New York Tribune, the New York Times, and the New York World, which opened its iconic gold-domed skyscraper there in 1890. Moreover, this news hub prospered just a few blocks from Ann Street, where a line of print shops (including one owned by Ricardo de Requesens, who produced La Revista in 1886) served papers without their own in-house presses. In this bustling news center, owner Elıas de Losada established La Revista and eventually an accompanying print shop to carry out a carefully designed "programa" centered on uniting Latin Americans to support the growth of democracy in the newly independent nations of Latin America (and in those still under Spanish rule) while promoting Latin American culture throughout the hemisphere ("Nuevo tıtulo" 1).¹ In pursuit of that mission, Losada and his editorial team—which included Nicanor Bolet Peraza, the principal editor from 1885 to 1890—envisioned a new kind of collaborative print community similarly focused on increasing access to the production of print.²

A July 1887 editorial notice celebrating La Revista's second anniversary gives a first glimpse of this extraordinary publication and its editors' ambitions. Evoking the English-language popular press that the magazine's editorial team had observed at close range in New York, the editors set their own publication apart: "No hemos querido hacer de esta publicación una mera entretenida lectura" ("We have not wanted to make this publication mere entertaining reading"; "La Revista Ilustrada" 1).³ The claim makes "mere" entertainment a foil to what the editors suggest is a worthier class of content: "Escribimos para nuestra raza, para nuestra patria inmensa, que es toda la grande America que fue hispana, que padeció bajo el poder colonial y que sigue padeciendo bajo sistemas que proclamamos como redentores" ("We write for our people, for our immense homeland, which is all of the great America that was Spanish, which suffered under colonial power and that continues to suffer under systems that we proclaim as redeemers"; 1).⁴ With a candor that would have seemed luxurious to many readers and contributors, given the limits on press freedom in many parts of Latin America at the time, La Revista identifies a lack of democracy as the problem this periodical will solve.⁵ The editors commit here to writing for an entire region of former and existing Spanish colonies brought together under the banner of nuestra raza (our people, our community, our race) (1).⁶ In the years following this reflection, especially after Losada opened his own print shop in 1890, the publication more and more sought ways to involve its readers in its democratizing mission of making "nuestras prensas" ("our presses") more widely available ("Importante" 28).

This essay situates La Revista at the forefront of a wave of experimentation with new forms of news and timely literary prose surging in the 1880s and early 1890s—as earlier nineteenth-century innovations (including the telegraph and cheaper paper) converged with later nineteenth-century new media technologies (like high-volume presses and the linotype machine). I argue that the encounter between New York–based writers of Latin American descent and the period's new print and electric media technologies powered La Revista's efforts to "servir á la causa del progreso de las naciones hispano-americanas" ("serve the cause of the progress of Spanish American nations"; "Importante" 28). At the very moment when the popular English-language press in New York City was banking its future on mass circulation enabled by those technologies and on a clear dividing line...