Front cover image for Ambassadors of culture : the transamerican origins of Latino writing

Ambassadors of culture : the transamerican origins of Latino writing

Argues that Latinos are not newcomers in the United States by documenting a network of Spanish-language cultural activity in the nineteenth century. Juxtaposing poems and essays by both powerful and peripheral writers, this title proposes a major revision of the 19th-century US canon and its historical contexts.
Print Book, English, cop. 2002
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, cop. 2002
XXI, [3], 293 s. ; 24 cm.
9780691050966, 9780691050973, 0691050961, 069105097X
1005147828
PREFACE ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xix Chapter 1 "Alone with the Terrible Hurricane": The Occluded History of Transamerican Literature 1 Geografa Nueva: An Alternate History of the American World System 7 Citizen, Ambassador: Stations of Literary Representation 13 The Transamerican Archive: Poetry as Daily Practice 20 Vernacular Authorship, or the Imitator's Agency 25 Chapter 2 The Chain of American Circumstance: From Niagara to Cuba to Panama 30 Meditations on Niagara: Transnational Pilgrims and the American Sublime 30 The Cuban Star over New York: Heredia's Translated Nationhood 39 Republics in Chains: From Bryant's Prairies to the Mexican Meseta 48 Vistas del Infierno: The Racial Dilemma of Maria del Occidente 61 Chapter 3 Tasks of the Translator: Imitative Literature, the Catholic South, and the Invasion of Mexico 71 "A Mist of Lurid Light": Translation Practice in the Americas 71 Ecos de Mexico: Whittier, Longfellow, and the Case against Expansion 87 Converting Evangeline to Evangelina 94 In the Vernacular: Translation on the Border 100 Chapter 4 The Mouth of a New Empire: New Orleans in the Transamerican Print Trade 108 New Orleans, Capital of the (Other) Nineteenth Century 108 The Fertile Crescent: Whitman's Immersion in the "Spanish Element" 121 Reading La Patria: Hispanophone Print Culture and the Annexation Question 136 Songs of the Exile: The Laud Poets and Quintero's Pearls 145 Chapter 5 The Deep Roots of Our America: Two New Worlds, and Their Resistors 161 Diplomatic License: Pombo in New York 163 Staging Gender on the California Borderlands 176 Brave Mundo Nuevo: The Marketing of Transnational Spanish Culture 186 Most Faithful Fidel: Guillermo Prieto's Reconstruction Travelogue 196 CODA The Future's Past: Latino Ghosts in the U.S. Canon 205 NOTES 213 WORKS CITED 255 INDEX 279