Conclusion

In Sofía Martín Morúa Delgado would stress that clothes are markers: markers of taste, cultural inclinations, socioeconomic status. They are also markers of place and geographic identifications, as Morúa would observe about the inadequate clothing worn by Americanized Cubans upon their return to the island after extended stays in the US, noting that their use of “lanas y franelas sencillas…conservaban una graciosa reminiscencia del tipo extranjero impreso en ambos por su larga estancia fuera de su país natal” (Morúa Delgado 1891, 102) (simple wools and flannels…retained an amusing reminiscence of the foreign type stamped on both because of their long stay outside of their countries of birth). He was not the only Latina/o author who found himself moving between spaces, on a Latino Continuum, on which clothing, like texts and life events, served as markers of that experience. Take for example the martyred Cuban poet, Juan Clemente Zenea (1832–71), who, although on a diplomatic mission to the island, was executed by Spanish authorities as a traitor to the Spanish cause in Cuba. He would likewise comment on the experience of living in a new country, but this time through the lens of emotions and desire in the doomed love affair of a displaced couple who yearn for their homeland as they walk down ...

Morúa’s Continuum

Martín Morúa Delgado’s vision for Cuba’s future and his concern for Afro Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits extends beyond the island to the Americas and is found not simply in his literary production but in his translation practice. Completed in the early 1880s in New York City, just as Morúa’s disenchantment with the politics of Cubans in exile began, his translation of James Redpath’s rendition (1863) of John R. Beard’s The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture: The Negro Patriot of Hayti (1853), reflects Morúa’s belief that the written word had the power to wield a hemispheric influence and could serve to support political transformation in Cuba and by extension the Americas. Toussaint L’Ouverture and this translation were at the center of this vision, for Morúa would reference the Haitian liberator throughout his literary and journalistic career, thereby expounding his belief that a leader modeled on L’Ouverture would bring true political independence to Cuba, inaugurating social change across the hemisphere. It is through this figure and the translation that Morúa conceived an alternative vision for Cuba and for the Americas, one that did not involve the leadership of the US-compromised Americanized Cubans and Latin Americans he so feared. Countering such political thinkers as Wendell Phillips, Rafael Serra, and Juan Gualberto Gómez, his vision placed Afro Latina/os, Afro Latin Americans, and African Americans as the new foundation of a truly politically and socially free hemisphere, one redeemed of its racial prejudices and biases.

The Black Lector forging a radical revolution

This chapter explores the place of black Cubans in Cuba and the US during the 1880s and 1890s, as articulated through the life and works of Martín Morúa Delgado (1856–1910). The first black reader or lector in cigar factories in Havana, New York, and Key West, Morúa labored incessantly for worker’s rights on both sides of the Florida Straits. Reading Morúa’s life and works from the Latino Continuum allows the recovery of the political significance of this figure for literary and historical studies, especially since he interacted directly with José Martí—the founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in New York City. Juxtaposing Morúa’s and Martí’s literary works and translation choices allows us to understand more fully why Morúa was at odds with Martí regarding Cuba’s future and the role that Afro Latina/os had played and would continue to play in Cuba and in the Americas. While the translation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) by Martí and the publication of Martí’s novel, Amistad funesta/Lucía Jerez, speak to US expansionism and its effect on Native American populations, they did not engage Cuba’s most pertinent question at the time—the role of black Cubans in the upcoming wars of independence and in the future Cuban Republic. Morúa, aware of this absence, uses his two novels, Sofía (1891) and La familia Unzúazu (1901), to question the political intentions and social prejudices of Americanized Cubans like José Martí, Tomás Estrada Palma, and Cirilo Villaverde.

Introduction

In May of 1892, the Cuban exile Nestor Ponce de León (1837–99) delivered a lecture titled “Los primeros poetas de Cuba” (1892, 385) (The First Cuban Poets) at a meeting of the Sociedad de Literatura Hispano-Americana in New York City. Despite the name of the society and the ostensible focus of Ponce de León’s talk, this meeting was not simply a gathering of friends and visiting authors from Latin America who found themselves in the vicinity of New York and who happened to love Cuban literature and the wider culture of belle lettres in the Americas. Ponce de León was surrounded by fellow exiles planning revolution. In the audience sat one of the founders and a former president of the Sociedad, José Martí (1853–95), who had stepped down from leading the New York literary society in order to organize the Partido Revolucionario Cubano. As was so often the case among nineteenth-century Latina/o intellectuals (and their Latin American counterparts), literary and political practices were mutually informing and hard to separate into neat categories of their own....

Archival Formations and the Universal Sentiment

This chapter examines the life and writings of Eusebio Guiteras (1823–93), who lived for twenty-five years in Philadelphia. Guiteras captured American life and culture in his travel diaries of the 1840s–1880s, and he translated Rudo Ensayo, a work by the eighteenth-century priest Juan Nentvig (1713–68) that details the evangelization mission of the Jesuits in what is now the American Southwest, but was then northern New Spain. Contextualizing the production and circulation of the multiple editions of Nentvig’s text in the nineteenth century, specifically one by the well-known antiquarian Thomas Buckingham Smith (1810–71), this Latina/o translation advocates for a constructive place for the Catholic Church in the US and Cuba. This advocacy must be understood in light of the translation’s underlying racial politics. Following his source text and the political designs of the editors of the Records of the American Catholic Historical Society (1894), in which the translation appeared, Guiteras simplistically and erroneously depicts the pacification of Native Americans in New Spain as a compassionate enterprise. In his travel diary, Un invierno en Nueva York (n.d.), Guiteras transposes this spiritual enterprise to the Cuban context, in which the place of Afro Cubans was being debated in the 1880s and 1890s on the island and in the US. In doing so, he envisions Catholic priests and Catholicism as agents for the pacification and assimilation of Afro Cubans in Cuba’s future republic while also arguing for a parallel and positive role for the Catholic Church in fashioning a culturally integrated United States.

Latina/o Translations as Historiography

Miguel Teurbe Tolón (1823–57) is a figure well-known in Cuban history because of his landmark contribution to the island’s cultural and political life: he is credited with designing the nation’s flag. Tolón, however, also captures contemporary attention, because, first, he rendered for the first time in Spanish one of the most influential histories of the US that was published in his day, Emma Willard’s Abridged History of the United States. Second, the specific circumstances of Tolón’s historical moment signal the cultural importance of translation as a site not only for identifying the movement of cultural ideas across supposed cultural boundaries, but also for the mutual imbrication of supposedly different cultural worlds. Third, taking into account Willard’s intended audience for this translation—it was to serve as a US history textbook for Spanish-speaking inhabitants of the newly acquired Southwest territories and as a book for learning Spanish for US readers—an analysis of Tolón’s rendering situates this translation on the Latino Continuum. By critically engaging Willard’s vision of the newly acquired Southwest and California territories, Tolón’s translation practice provides an early political critique of Manifest Destiny and US expansionism. Tolón’s rendering reveals precisely that his is a Latina/o translation that, moving between English and Spanish and through Cuba, the US, and Mexico, constructs a Latina/o historiography, one that recognizes the degree of mutual imbrication of their peoples and literatures of the period. It also serves as a point of departures for reconceptualizing the intersection between American, Latin American, Cuban, and Latinx studies.

Félix Varela’s Hemispheric Interventions

This chapter recovers the transnational and hemispheric interests and influences of the Catholic priest Félix Varela (1788–1853), who lived for almost thirty years in the US and was nicknamed the “Father of the Irish” during his lifetime. It challenges the fractured reading of Varela’s archive in the scholarly literature, where he is normally studied only as an influential Cuban philosopher, his impact on US history having passed almost without note, and fills this lacuna by illustrating the manner in which Varela played a key role in the Protestant-Catholic debates of the 1830s–1840s and in the secularization of the public school system of New York City. Varela’s religious-ethical works Cartas a Elpidio (1835, 1838) demonstrate how these debates facilitated the emergence of minority politics in the US and the important role of Latina/os to that emergence. Nowhere is this more evident than in Varela’s annotated translation of Thomas Jefferson’s Manual of Parliamentary Practice, which exhibits a hemispheric reach and significance. It was intended for Spanish-speaking residents of the US, for readers in the nascent republics of Latin America and in colonial Cuba. An examination of Varela’s US archive, beyond his supposed authorship of Jicoténcatl (1826), locates Varela, on a Latino Continuum that reveals these early Latina/o writers as cultural actors shaping the very foundation of US history while also engaging broader ideas in Latin American political and cultural life. It thereby fundamentally challenges contemporary scholars to rethink the still existing divides between American, Latin American, Cuban, and Latinx studies.