Latino Nineteenth Century

A retelling of U.S., Latin American, and Latino/a literary history through writing by Latinos/as who lived in the United States during the long nineteenth centuryWritten by both established and emerging scholars, the essays in The Latino Nineteenth Century engage materials in Spanish and English and genres ranging from the newspaper to the novel, delving into new texts and areas of research as they shed light on well-known writers. This volume situates nineteenth-century Latino intellectuals and writers within crucial national, hemispheric, and regional debates. The Latino Nineteenth Century offers a long-overdue corrective to the Anglophone and nation-based emphasis of American literary history. Contributors track Latino/a lives and writing through routes that span Philadelphia to San Francisco and roots that extend deeply into Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South Americas, and Spain. Readers will find in the rich heterogeneity of texts and authors discussed fertile ground for discussion and will discover the depth, diversity, and long-standing presence of Latinos/as and their literature in the United States.

The collections expansion of American literary history is also evident in the inclusion of Central American textualities, which have been overlooked in most fields of study. In sum, the 15 essays Lazo and Aleman bring together offer new frameworks to better understand and examine 19th-century Latina/o hemispheric movements., The Latino Nineteenth Century builds on the past two decades of Latina/o scholarship that focuses on historicizing the place of Latina/os in the United States. The book thus excavates the history of Latina/os in seemingly unlikely regions such as New England and cities such as Philadelphia. Further, it illuminates the need to examine Spanish language texts rather than relying on works in English. Expanding the corpus of materials in this way also sheds light on the longer literary histories of Latina/o literature rather than relying on periodizations that ground Latina/o literature in the social movements of the mid-twentieth century. As The Latino Nineteenth Century reminds us, Latina/os existed in the United States well before the Chicano Movement. Further, to fully grasp the range of Latina/o experiences in the United States, several essays in this collection point to the necessity of examining US-Latin American relations. An impressive anthology that demonstrates the diversity and vitality of this period, The Latino Nineteenth Century makes necessary interventions into nineteenth-century American Studies, Latina/o Studies, and Latin American Studies., The nineteenth-century in the context of the extraordinary triangle presented here of Latina and Latino writers and intellectuals in the United States, Latin America, and the transatlantic may come to us in fragments, but what a marvel it is to bring together this dazzling constellation of scholars who highlight the historical dimensions of 'the Latino/a' and speak to the concurrent traditions, canons, moments, and tensions that have long been neglected and overlooked. Excitement for The Latino Nineteenth Century will have no bounds: this is sure to become a treasured volume., The Latino Nineteenth Century is expressive of the new directions in Latinx studies, and demonstrates the capaciousness of this field in accommodating nineteenth-century literary studies, and not the other way around. Indeed, the collection as a whole demonstrates that the Latinx nineteenth century is not a smaller, narrow subfield of this period, but rather constitutive of and formative to the field of nineteenth-century US literary studies. The editors of this volume challenge us to rethink our own orientations in C19 so as to think and teach in this field more expansively.

Rodrigo Lazo is Associate Professor of English and an affiliate of the Chicano/Latino Studies Department at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (2005). Jesse Alemán is Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, where he teaches nineteenth-century American and Mexican American literary studies. He is the editor of The Woman in Battle (2003) and co-editor of Empire and the Literature of Sensation (2007).