Sotero Figueroa: Creating a Communal Voice in La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York, Patria, and La Doctrina de Martí

It is difficult to choose just one professional label to ascribe to Sotero Figueroa, an Afro Puerto Rican leader of New York City's Spanish-language publishing community in the final decades of the nineteenth century, when many of that community's members were organizing for Cuban and Puerto Rican independence. Perhaps best known as a printer who founded Imprenta América, the print shop in Lower Manhattan that produced the Cuban Revolutionary Party's Patria (Fatherland) newspaper, Figueroa was also an accomplished political organizer, journalist, and editor.¹ His contributions to Patria and to two other New York−based Spanish-language periodicals—La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York (New York Illustrated Magazine) and La Doctrina de Martí (Martí's Doctrine)—show how exploring print and literary history through the lens of the collaborative (and sometimes contested) space of the editorial office can shed light on the process through which writers and editors make publications vehicles for configuring and mobilizing communities.

Figueroa's collaborations with La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York, an elite literary monthly that circulated throughout Latin America in the 1880s and 1890s, demonstrate how editorial teams become sites of negotiation. The contributions that he made as an editor of the magazine show Figueroa debating with his colleagues about how exactly to carry out the magazine's commitment to "servir á la causa del progreso de las naciones hispano-americanas," or to "serve the cause of the progress of Spanish American nations."² In this magazine, which featured the region's leading writers for "toda la grande América que fué hispana, que padeció bajo el poder colonial" ("all of the great America that was Spanish, which suffered under colonial power"), Figueroa critiqued and revised La Revista's liberal agenda through articles that exhibit the commitment to racial justice that fueled his leadership of the Cuban and Puerto Rican independence movements.³

Starting in the June 1890 issue, which introduced Figueroa as an editor and a writer "á quien le gusta el combate digno y honroso" ("who likes dignified and honorable combat"), Figueroa wrote a series of Reparos literarios, or "literary criticisms," in which he debated the state of letters in Latin America with another editor of the magazine, Nicaraguan Gustavo Guzmán.⁴ Addressing Guzmán's question in an earlier article of whether "la ciudad ó … el campo" ("the city or … the country") affords the best conditions for literary writing, Figueroa writes: "En la ciudad, lo mismo que en el campo, puede el pensamiento tender su vuelo á las esferas de las grandes concepciones" ("In the city, the same as in the countryside, thought can take flight into the realm of great ideas").⁵ Figueroa's answer bridges the socioeconomic divide between the city, where economic and political power centered, and the disenfranchised countryside, which was frequently discussed by politicians and writers of the period. By suggesting that literary writing could flourish equally in the margins as in the centers of economic and political power, Figueroa counters the elitist position that characterized Guzmán's literary criticism. For Figueroa, "eclecticismo en el arte" ("eclecticism in art") is essential to social progress.⁶ Here and throughout his writings for La Revista, Figueroa signals the need to reach beyond the magazine's privileged contributors and readership to achieve the magazine's vision of true democracy throughout Latin America.

In a poem titled "Guttenberg" that Figueroa published in La Revista's January 1891 issue, he associates the capacity to debate and revise ideas collaboratively with print's revolutionary potential: "Y con la imprenta surge ese Proteo múltiple, inquieto, diligente, vario" ("And with print arises that multiple, restless, diligent, varying Proteus").⁷ Making change itself an ideal, Figueroa suggests that the versatility and adaptability associated with the god Proteus can produce "la voz comunal que, hora por hora, corrige, ilustra, profetiza, crea" ("the communal voice which, hour by hour, corrects, illustrates, prophesies, creates").⁸ The communal voice takes shape here through a combination of attentive correction and inspired creation that evokes Figueroa's own varied roles throughout his...