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  • Compared to What?William Walker and Radical Republicanism in the 19th-Century Americas
  • Christopher Heaney (bio)
Michel Gobat. Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 367 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95.
Hilda Sabato. Republics of the New World: The Revolutionary Political Experiment in 19th-Century Latin America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Xii + 220 pp. Maps, notes, bibliographies, and index. $29.95.
Walker. 2008. DVD. Directed by Alex Cox. 1987. USA: Criterion Collection, 2008. $29.99.

To spoil a thirty-two-year-old film—but not the 164-year-old war it riffs on—Alex Cox's Walker ends in punkish anachronism. As in history, U.S. filibuster William Walker's 1850s regime in Nicaragua devolves into a haze of violence after he re-legalizes slavery and his men burn the country's oldest city, Granada, to the ground. But while the historical Walker staggered his way back to New Orleans by boat, here Cox has the version played by Ed Harris saved by M-16-toting Marines in a helicopter, overdubbing the U.S. adventurism of the 1850s with the U.S.-funded Contra war of the 1980s and a nervy soundtrack by Joe Strummer of The Clash. In other words, it goes places. And though poorly received at the time, this film, shot and edited in Nicaragua with Sandinista support, does interesting work in teaching the history of U.S.-Latin American relations. Students who have never heard of Walker quickly see the politics in its faux-Rambo Reaganite violence, in the subtitled asides in Spanish that cut Walker off at the—ahem—knees, in Walker's sergeant (played by Bennet Guillory, who is African American) staring daggers as Walker re-legalizes slavery. Students love it or hate it, yielding fascinating debates about when history does not deserve respect. Post-Walker, Hamilton is a cakewalk.

But since reading Michel Gobat's Empire by Invitation and Hilda Sabato's Republics of the New World, I am rethinking how and even whether to show it again. I am probably not alone. In U.S. and Latin American history alike, [End Page 370] William Walker is rarely just William Walker. He is often a metaphor, a chance to debate the designs of the United States and its citizens upon the region. On the side of U.S. history, Walker lets us ask whether he was Manifest Destiny's rotting fruit or an algal bloom on a darker river of imperial dreams, settler colonialism, and chattel slavery; a largely white supremacist and masculinist expansionism that linked Thomas Jefferson's "empire of liberty" to the Confederacy, the American intervention in the Cuban War of Independence, and beyond.1 In Latin Americanist history, Walker is both the wolf revealing its hunger for more than Mexico, and marker of the moment when the region pushed back. "Walker is the invasion . . . the conquest . . . the United States," warned Chilean liberal Francisco Bilbao after U.S. President Franklin Pierce recognized Walker's government in 1856; as Gobat notes in Empire by Invitation, the act "triggered one of the first anti-U.S. moments in world history" (p. 76), even inspiring the very term "Latin America." That Walker remains largely unknown outside of our profession is also what makes him so useful to teach. William Walker is a shibboleth by which historians initiate discussions on varying flavors of resistance and empire.

Read together, these two profoundly revisionist books instead ask another set of questions. What if Walker was the least interesting person in 1850s Nicaragua? What if his re-legalization of slavery was a historical red herring, stinking out how the more fascinating Nicaraguan story preceding him (remember: he re-legalized slavery) shaped a wider history than that of white Americans? Together, these books suggest that we Americanists (U.S., Latin, and otherwise), despite our entangled and transnational turns, can still work harder to avoid approaching each other's historiographies expecting contrast, conquest, resistance, and failure. With all the fire that songwriter Eugene McDaniels mustered in the late 1960s for a different imperial moment: "Compared to what?"2

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The more subtly provocative answer comes first...

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