Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons

A sweeping history of linguistic and colonial encounter in the early Americas, anchored by the unlikely story of how Boston’s most famous Puritan came to write the first Spanish-language publication in the English New World.The Boston minister Cotton Mather was the first English colonial to refer to himself as an American. He was also the first to author a Spanish-language publication: La Fe del Christiano (The Faith of the Christian), a Protestant tract intended to evangelize readers across the Spanish Americas. Kirsten Silva Gruesz explores the conditions that produced La Fe del Christiano, from the intimate story of the “Spanish Indian” servants in Mather’s household, to the fragile business of printing and bookselling, to the fraught overlaps of race, ethnicity, and language that remain foundational to ideas of Latina/o/x belonging in the United States today.Mather’s Spanish project exemplifies New England’s entanglement within a partially Spanish Catholic, largely Indigenous New World. British Americans viewed Spanish not only as a set of linguistic practices, but also as the hallmark of a rival empire and a nascent racial-ethnic category. Guided by Mather’s tract, Gruesz explores English settlers’ turbulent contacts with the people they called “Spanish Indians,” as well as with Black and local native peoples. Tracing colonial encounters from Boston to Mexico, Florida, and the Caribbean, she argues that language learning was intimately tied with the formation of new peoples. Even as Spanish has become the de facto second language of the United States, the story of La Fe del Christiano remains timely and illuminating, locating the roots of latinidad in the colonial system of the early Americas.Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons reinvents our understanding of a key colonial intellectual, revealing notions about language and the construction of race that endure to this day.

In her revolutionary new book,…Gruesz sets aside Mather the witch hunter to center him instead in a fascinating new story about race…It is Gruesz’s thrillingly literary focus on a single text—spinning out as much significance as she has convincingly shown it deserves—that makes her new consideration of him so rewarding., Immersive and eye-opening…Meticulously researched and elegantly written, this is an essential reconsideration of the historical and contemporary place of the Spanish language and ‘Brown identity’ in the U.S., One of the most exciting and illuminating books I have read this century. Just when our nation’s institutions of historical memory are being called to account for their role in constructing entrenched systems of racialization, Gruesz reminds us that the political status of Latinx people in the United States remains profoundly unclear. Brilliantly combining historical, archival, and literary work, this book shows her to be a singular figure in American Studies today., A stunningly researched and original take on Cotton Mather. Kirsten Silva Gruesz replaces entrenched US origins stories with a transformative account of labor, race, and nation. In so doing, she locates English-speaking America in a series of richly hemispheric new contexts., Kirsten Silva Gruesz has produced a magisterial study that fundamentally reimagines the complex relationship between colonial British North America and colonial Spanish America. Coupling extensive archival research with sensitive readings of multilingual texts, she traces not only the dialogue among criollo elites throughout the Americas, but also the deep imprints of Indigenous and African peoples on linguistic, religious, and material practices that continue to bear on our own lives today.

Kirsten Silva Gruesz is a leading expert on Spanish-language print culture in the United States and the author of Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing. She is Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.