The following is a reproduction of Kahlil Chaar-Pérez's three part blog post "Between Two Americas?: José Martí as a Latin American/Latino Intellectual." The work was initially published online under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 License.
For more than a century, Cuban revolutionary and writer José Martí (1853-1895) has been viewed as a foundational, almost sacred figure in the pantheon of Latin American intellectual history. To this day, Cubans living both in the island and in exile continue to take pointed positions over where Cuba’s “apostle,” as he is popularly called, would stand in relation to Fidel Castro’s Third Worldist brand of communism: one side highlights Martí’s repudiation of authoritarianism and his defense of individual liberties, while the other underscores his condemnation of US imperialism and his support for social equality.
Meanwhile, Martí holds a significant place in the Latin American canon of literature and sociopolitical thought. The continuing fascination with Martí among Latin American scholars is rooted, on one hand, in his status as a post-romantic polymath who navigated the fluid, conflicted borders between literature and politics, popular journalism and high culture, and the US and Latin America, and, on the other, to his self-fashioning as a man of patriotic self-abnegation in his pursuit of Cuban independence and Latin American sovereignty (the fact that he died, in martyr-like fashion, facing the Spanish army, of course adds to this mystique).
Aside from Spanish colonialism, what worried Martí the most was, as he put it in his most famous essay “Our America” (1892), the northern “tiger.” Martí thought that US expansionism represented the Spanish American republics’ “greatest danger,” which in his view were torn by “the arrogance of the capital cities, the blind triumph of the scorned peasants, the excessive importation of foreign ideas and formulas, the wicked and impolitic disdain for the native race.” In Martí’s utopian vision, the solution to this dilemma lied in Latin American autocthony, in engaging with the local world of Latin America’s “natural men,” teaching “the history of America from the Incas to the present tradition” and cultivating what he called “our own Greece,” all from an anti-racist creed that preached that “there are no races.” The origins of Martí’s creed of “continental unity” can be traced back to the Spanish American Wars of Independence, when Venezuelan general Simón Bolívar proposed the creation of a Spanish American republic that unified the former colonies (in contemporary Latin America, Hugo Chávez sought to resurrect this ideal alongside other left-wing populist presidents, from Evo Morales in Bolivia to Rafael Correa in Ecuador).
Martí’s utopia of a truly independent, socially harmonious Latin America was articulated through a dichotomy that represented negatively not only the US government, but also Anglo-American culture. In journalistic sketches published widely in Latin American newspapers, such as “Coney Island,” Martí relentlessly excoriated the greed and moral corruption he perceived in the United States and particularly in New York City, where he lived in political exile for most of the 1880s and early 1890s. His tone grew more acerbic as his plans for revolution intensified; one key reason for this was his suspicion that US would intervene in Cuban affairs if it sought political independence (Martí’s correct hunch was based not only in that US capitalists possessed key investments in Cuba, but also in that many plantation owners and merchants in the island supported annexation). In one of the many pamphlets he wrote in Patria, the Cuban Revolutionary Party official organ printed in New York City, Martí attacked US society for having “no bond other than that of interests,” as a place of “sordidness and bestiality” (“A la raíz”).
The irony of this narrative is that, even as Martí argued for an autochtonous Latin American identity separate from the tiger of the North, his work cannot be separated from the very culture he eviscerated in his most intense moments of political fervor. Martí held a sustained dialogue with a varied US literary and sociopolitical tradition, writing extensively and often admiringly on figures ranging from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to Walt Whitman and Ralph Emerson. In addition, he wrote and translated articles for Anglophone newspapers such as The New York Sun (interestingly, he also translated Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona into Spanish). As Laura Lomas points out in her fascinating book on Martí as a Latino intellectual, Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities, in the last two decades American Studies and Latina/o Studies scholars have incorporated Martí as an “interlocutor and as a reader of North American cultural and political texts” (65).
But Lomas also emphasizes the importance of understanding Martí’s difference as a Cuban living in political exile, as “a translator inside the empire’s belly” (13). Indeed, Martí’s ruminations on wide-ranging issues such as the myth of Billy the Kid, the Haymarket riot, the Knights of Labor, and the Pan-American Conference, show us a critical glimpse into US affairs and how the growing communities of Latin American origin in the US viewed such affairs and related to them, from a transnational, intercultural lens. In mapping these relations (and tensions), across spaces, cultures and time, and in delineating how they travel (if in fact they do) inside and outside the US, the work of scholars like Lomas and Kirsten Silva Gruesz, who wrote the groundbreaking Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing, can help us reflect not only on the meanings of Latina/o cultures and their history, but US intellectual history itself as an hemispheric enterprise, the utopian vision of a “continental” relationality.
Part 2:
In my previous blog post, I wrote about José Martí as a figure whose life and works embody, on one hand, the desire for an autonomous Latin American intellectual and political culture (“Our America” vs. the “tiger” of the north), and on the other, an intercultural, transnational dialogue with US society. In invoking the spirit of Martí and the productive contradictions that surround his historical legacy, my aim was to emphasize the importance of thinking about US and Latin American intellectual history jointly, beyond the limits of nationhood and from a hemispheric perspective, through what I called in my last words a “utopian vision of hemispheric relationality.” I would like to elaborate today and in my future posts what I meant by this admittedly opaque utopia, continuing my dialogue with Martí while complicating my “utopian vision,” particularly in respect to Martí and the place of other nineteenth-century Latin American intellectuals in the field of Latina/o Studies.
First of all, I would like to emphasize that by using the words “dialogue” and “relationality” I was not proposing a celebratory framework that foregrounds harmonious, pan-American connections while concealing the role of power. Dialogue isn’t necessarily an egalitarian practice, even when it is presented as such (i.e. the role of Socrates in Plato’s Dialogues). And needless to say, relations are often hierarchical and may implicate different kinds of violence. Martí pointed explicitly to the historically uneven relations between the two Americas, foreseeing the violent effects of the US presence in Cuba and other parts of Latin America. But what is more interesting is how his texts perform this unevenness in their relationship to the pillars of the US canon he venerated. It is often noted that Martí celebrated US intellectuals whose politics did not fully coincide with his republican, democratic, and anti-imperial ideals, Emerson and Whitman in particular. From our vantage point, one would believe that this should have presented quite a conundrum for a writer like Martí. Yet, as Laura Lomas brilliantly explains in Translating Empire. José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities Martí’s admiration was expressed from a critical distance, writing with Cuba and Latin America in his mind, as a political exile anxiously fighting for the liberation of his patria. Even as he honors Whitman, Martí calls attention to the bard’s imperial poetics in his long essay “Walt Whitman”: “his lines go at a gallop as if they were swallowing up the Earth with every movement.” And later: “the patriarch of the north never says [liberty] in English, but as he learned to say it from Mexicans.” The Mexicans here are of course the peoples whose territories were invaded by the US army, an expansion romanticized by Whitman in texts such as “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”
Lomas suggests that in reading Martí as an “extranational migrant” caught between the America he both berated and celebrated and the autochtonous, sovereign Latin America he envisioned, we can transcend the ongoing struggles over Martí as a nationalist icon for Cuba, while counteracting “the erasure or marginalization of Latino migrant influence on the culture and theorizing of the United States and upon this country’s narratives of itself” (37). A utopian undertaking, to be sure, this is a vision with which my brief notes on a hemispheric “utopia” intersect. But to envision this hemispheric “utopia” involves in my view another question: the possibility of thinking about the genealogy of Latina/o intellectual culture—if such a genealogy can actually be traced. How can the cultural and social transformations experienced today by Latina/o diasporas be linked to the history of the Southwestern Spanish-speaking communities incorporated into the US through territorial expansion, and of the Cuban and Puerto Rican exiles who established themselves in cities such as New Orleans, Philadelphia and New York City throughout the nineteenth century, producing a thriving print culture while also contributing to local newspapers and journals? Can we speak of a nineteenth-century Latina/o intellectual and literary history, without erasing the historical and ethnic specificity of the actors and works we would study, their identification with their places of origin and their frequent lack of interest in identifying with the US? And what implications would such a history have for the study of US nineteenth-century history? These are obviously open-ended questions, but urgent ones that need to be addressed, in tandem with the political vision that Lomas and others have sketched out in appropriating figures like Martí for a Latina/o Studies canon.
Part 3:
As the title of these posts underscores, my intention has been to reflect on the figure of José Martí as both a Latin American and a Latino intellectual, particularly by calling attention to his critical reception of U.S. culture, a fraught relation that blended admiration and antagonism towards the rising Northern “tiger” and its cultural pantheon. In preserving both labels to describe him, I mean to signal the productive tensions—the conceptual promises as well as the epistemological challenges—that surface from thinking Martí and other analogous nineteenth-century Latin American figures within a genealogy of Latina/o culture(s) that travels into a time much earlier than the actual emergence of Latina/o practices of identification in the 1960s and 70s.
The recent publication of the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2011), edited by Ilan Stavans, exemplifies this trend of thought in the humanities: it constructs a history that goes through not only the works of Martí, other Latin American exiles, and Southwestern Hispanic writers from the nineteenth century, but also incorporates texts from the colonial era in Latin America, such as Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s account of his nightmarish travel to Florida (1542). In the preface, Stavans states that the texts and pasts he has chosen for the anthology intersect as a narrative of belonging; they narrate the “constant mutation” embodied by latinidad : “At its core, Latino literature is about the tension between double attachments to place, to language, and to identity” (liii). Yet, as Kirsten Silva-Gruezs establishes in a wonderful y trenchant intervention (“What Was Latino Literature?”), Stavans’ justification of the book’s sweeping, wide-ranging scope rests in an ahistorical conception of Latina/o identity. While it offers a wealth of indispensable documents for studying the history and prehistory of Latina/o cultures, especially from an intellectual lens, the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature avoids addressing the historical formation and periodization of such cultures.
In a future post, I will dig deeper into the problems presented by Stavans’ prologue and theNorton Anthology, in connection to Silva Gruezs’ critique. For now, I would like to stress what may be obvious but is worth reiterating: how the retroactive process of building a Latina/o canon runs the risk—as in all processes of canon formation—of distorting the historical coordinates from which such cultural production unfolded. Scholars interested in the possibility of framing nineteenth-century Latin American cultural forms in the U.S. through a Latina/o genealogy, such as myself, should proceed with caution when imposing these frameworks on the subjects of study. In resignifying figures like Martí through a U.S. centric narrative, we may end up overlooking the relations such individuals and their communities continued to have with Latin America, not to mention the practices of identification that tied them affectively, culturally, and politically to their places of origin (in the case of Martí, one can point to his revolutionary discourse of a race-less Cubannationality and his mestizo conception of a Latin American identity in “Our America”). My emphasis on maintaining the epistemological oscillation between the Latino and the Latin American in the nineteenth century represents a way to articulate this hemispheric relationality: the act of reading the North from the South and the South from the North, in dialectical fashion.
One can witness this dilemma unveil itself in Laura Lomas’ shrewd resignification of Martí as a “migrant Latino subject” in Translating Empire. On one hand, Lomas’ project of reading Martí “from and for the United States” (xiii) shines light on how the Cuban intellectual’s often ambivalent dialogue with U.S. hegemonic culture-produced from a self-consciously marginal position—encapsulates the condition of “Latino migrants,” a people who “straddle statelessness and an incipient nationality, empire and colony, and ‘early’ and ‘late’ temporalities assigned by timekeepers in the metropolitan center” (49). For Lomas, the possibility of a critique of “imperial modernity” emerges from this condition of constant negotiation and errantry, as exemplified by Martí’s essays on figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman (as I pointed out in my previous post, the Cuban revolutionary celebrates the latter’s mastery of the poetic form, which inspired his own post-Romantic verses, but he also represents Whitman’s poetry as a totalizing rhetoric of the self, utilizing images that echo his negative appraisal of U.S. expansionism). At the same time, Martí fully embraced more radical figures, such as Peter Cooper and Wendell Phillips, incorporating them into his republicanist vision of social freedom and equality (interestingly, in a note published in the journal La América, George William Curtis lauds Martí’s obituary on Phillips, a fact that suggests the existence of actual exchanges between Latino intellectuals in the U.S. and their Anglo-American peers in the time of Martí). Through her reading of his involvement in the New York print culture of the 1880s and 90s, of the wide circulation of his texts throughout Latin America, and his ongoing conversation with U.S. “imperial modernity,” Lomas repositions Martí within a counter-modern intellectual tradition that not only includes Latina/o thinkers like Gloria Anzaldúa, but goes beyond the marker oflatinidad, linking Martí to W.E.B. Dubois and his analysis of an African-American “double consciousness.”
Yet, in tracing these continuities and resignifying Martí as “a migrant Latino subject,” Lomas understates the extent to which his prolific writing spoke to the South, to the Cuban revolutionary cause and to Latin American elites. By choosing the category of “migrant” over “exile,” Lomas curiously minimizes how Martí formed part of a community of political exiles (from Puerto Rico as well as Cuba) that viewed and utilized the U.S. as a springboard to launch the revolution against Spain (it is also curious that she does not engage with his profuse writings in the New York-based official daily of the Cuban Revolutionary Party). Lomas argues that this label “permits of a long-standing and counterproductive mutual exclusion between the immigrant and the exile, between the admirer of Abraham Lincoln and critic of the annexationist leader Augustus K. Cutting…” (35), but as scholars such as Edward Said have established, the figure of the exile certainly oscillates between critique and admiration towards the new “home.” In my next post, I will continue to develop these questions in relation to the idea of latinidad and Martí’s self-construction as “un americano sin patria,” reflecting on what implications these issues have for the articulation of a nineteenth-century Latino/Latin American intellectual history.
Next Section: