A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture

by Raúl Coronado

Overview

A shift of global proportions occurred in May 1808. Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain and deposed the Spanish king. Overnight, the Hispanic world was transformed forever. Hispanics were forced to confront modernity, and to look beyond monarchy and religion for new sources of authority. A World Not to Come focuses on how Spanish Americans in Texas used writing as a means to establish new sources of authority, and how a Latino literary and intellectual life was born in the New World.

The geographic locale that became Texas changed sovereignty four times, from Spanish colony to Mexican republic to Texan republic and finally to a U.S. state. Following the trail of manifestos, correspondence, histories, petitions, and periodicals, Raúl Coronado goes to the writings of Texas Mexicans to explore how they began the slow process of viewing the world as no longer being a received order but a produced order. Through reconfigured publics, they debated how best to remake the social fabric even as they were caught up in a whirlwind of wars, social upheaval, and political transformations.

Yet, while imagining a new world, Texas Mexicans were undergoing a transformation from an elite community of "civilizing" conquerors to an embattled, pauperized, racialized group whose voices were annihilated by war. In the end, theirs was a world not to come. Coronado sees in this process of racialization the birth of an emergent Latino culture and literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674970908
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	08/29/2016
Pages:	574
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Raúl Coronado is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi

Note on Translations xv

Introduction 1

Divergent Revolutionary Genealogies 1

The Traumatic Origins of the Modern World 11

A History of Latino Textuality 17

Disenchantment 22

Becoming Latino 28

A Spiral Historical Narrative 30

I Imagining New Futures

1 Anxiously Desiring the Nation: The Skepticism of Scholasticism 37

The Beginning of the End 37

Provincial Education 41

The Scholastic Episteme 46

Skepticism in the Eastern Interior Provinces of New Spain 56

Imagining the Nation 62

2 "Oh! How Much I Could Say!" Imagining What a Nation Could Do 75

Voyage to the United States 75

Seeing a New Country 81

Admiring the Well-Being of the Nation 85

Struggling to Articulate the Sublime 90

II Pursuing Reform and Revolution

3 Seeking the Pueblo's Happiness: Reform and the Discourse of Political Economy 101

The Need to Reform the Monarchy 101

The Discourse of Political Economy as the Vehicle fur Greater Happiness 104

The Shifting Ideologies of Mercantilism to Free-Trade Capitalism 110

The Commercial Interests of Philadelphia's Early Spanish Diplomats 117

Early U.S. Hispanic Publications, the Critique of Mercantilism, and the Common Good 120

Epistemic Shift 137

4 From Reform to Revolution: Print Culture and Expanding Social Imaginaries 139

Communication Networks 139

Initial Ruptures 143

The Demise of the Hispanic Monarchy and the Birth of the Modern World 154

Print Culture and the Eruption of the Public Sphere 159

Reconfiguring Time and Space 175

III Revolutionizing the Catholic Past

5 Seduced by Papers: Revolution (as Reformation) in Spanish Texas 181

Modern Tempests 181

On the Spanish Texas-Louisiana Border 184

Revolution as End of the World 192

Revolution as Seduction 200

From Patriarchal Respect to Reciprocal Love 204

Alone with the Hurricane 211

6 "We the Pueblo of the Province of Texas": The Philosophy and Brute Reality of Independence 213

Reading Revolutionary Broadsheets Aloud 213

The Broadsheet's Content 219

Francisco Suárez and the Catholic Corpus Mysticum 222

Revolutionary Catholic Visions of the Modern Political World 229

Indigenous Literacies 239

Catholic Republican Government 242

War and Terror 248

IV The Entrance of Life into History

7 "To the Advocates of Enlightenment and Reason": From Subjects to Citizens 263

From Spanish Defeat to Mexican Independence 263

Writing and the Word of the Sovereign 269

Printing and the Making of Citizens in Postindependence Texas 277

Caring for the Social Body 294

8 "Adhering to the New Order of Things": Newspapers, Publishing, and the Making of a New Social Imaginary 312

Forced Peace 312

Interfacing with Writing and Print Culture 318

The Founding of Spanish-Language Newspapers 324

Producing a New Social Imaginary 330

Reconfigured Publics 337

A New Temporality 342

9 "The Natural Sympathies That Unite All of Our People": Political Journalism and the Struggle against Racism 352

Putting Pen to Political Work 352

Xenophobia and Anti-Mexican Violence 355

Representing Tejano Interests in the 1856 Election 358

Texas and the Gulf of Mexico Network 365

Reconfigured Imagined Communities 369

Racialization and Colonization 377

Conclusion 381

Surrounding Oneself with the Beauty of Life 381

A History of Writing, a Search for Presence 388

Appendixes: Transcriptions and Translations

1 José Antonio Gutiérrez de Lara, "Americanos" (Proclamation, 1811; translation) 397

2 José Álvarez de Toledo, Jesús, María, y José (Philadelphia, 1811; translation) 401

3 Governing junta of Béxar, "We the Pueblo of the Province of Texas" (San Antonio, Texas, April 6, 1813; transcription and translation) 407

4 Anonymous, "Report of the Most Notable Things That Occured in Béxar in the Year [18]13, under the Command of the Tyrant Arredondo" (transcription and translation) 417

Notes 435

Acknowledgments 537

Index 541

Editorial Reviews

In this brilliantly conceived book, Raúl Coronado turns over the forgotten record of a Texas rebellion, and from it spins an absorbing counter-history of a distinctively Latino tradition of political thought. A World Not to Come will stand as a major contribution to the emergent multilingual portrait of print culture in the U.S., and to the comparative intellectual and literary history of the Americas in general.

Kirsten Silva Gruesz

Coronado’s book offers a fascinating alternative history of modernity, one rooted in the forgotten archives of Texas. Well-timed to intervene in contemporary debates on rights theory and sovereignty, Coronado tells the story of how Spanish-American intellectuals of the early nineteenth century took the work of now-forgotten Catholic Reformation thinkers to produce a model of rights based on collective well-being and ‘public happiness.’ The Anglo-American Protestant history of rights suppressed a rich and complex Spanish version, and Coronado finds in these conservative thinkers a revolutionary potential that I believe found fruition in liberation theology in the Americas.

Carrie Tirado Bramen

A World Not to Come constitutes an extraordinary contribution to distinct and interconnected lines of scholarly debates engaged with Latin American and trans-hemispheric history.

S-USIH: Society for U.S. Intellectual History - Beatriz González-Stephan

Reading British colonial writers as the sole founders of American culture lends our history a false sense of teleology, as though we were always going to end up here. One of the greatest strengths of Coronado’s book is its ability to remind us of other paths we might have taken; other worlds different ‘we’s’ might have made… A World Not to Come boldly challenges the dominance of the westward expansion narrative… At once a gripping history, a dizzying synthesis of Enlightenment philosophical currents, and a breathtaking feat of original archival research, his book merits reading by anyone interested in American literature, Latina/o studies, economic history, or Western philosophy. A World Not to Come demands that we recalibrate our sense of what ‘American’ literary history looks like.

Los Angeles Review of Books - John Alba Cutler

In a work of great originality and breathtaking erudition, Raúl Coronado writes a compelling history of an alternative West, a history spanning continents, oceans, centuries, and genres. The story told in A World Not to Come is the story of modernity itself, inflected through an immense and virtually unstudied archive of Latino writing that the author reads as a fragmented narrative of becoming. This is cultural history of the highest order.

Anna Brickhouse

Coronado’s A World Not to Come is already a standard, well on its way to becoming a classic. The comprehensiveness of the research is extraordinary: an extraordinary job, extraordinarily well done.

Rolena Adorno

A World Not to Come is a magnificent first book. Raúl Coronado makes the case that the meeting of Anglos and Mexicans in the Southwest occasioned not only political and military conflict but also epistemological struggle between two different systems of thought. Latinos in the U.S. attempted forge what in hindsight can be seen as a modern social imaginary. The differences between these conflicting visions of an American imaginary are still very much with us and help define the nature of the present interactions between Anglos and Latinos within the boundaries of the U.S. and outside of them. This is a compelling thesis about the need for a ‘transnational’ view of the Americas and the recognition that an undifferentiated history of ‘Latino’ writings cannot easily be extracted from the historical record. Coronado’s argument on both counts should advance significantly our understanding of the relationship between the Anglo and Latin Americas in the nineteenth century.

Ramón Saldívar

This is a book about Tejanos and the printing press in the Age of Revolutions. Between 1810 and 1848, Tejanos witnessed momentous sociopolitical, cultural changes and responded by articulating their own peculiar narratives of modernity through the printing press—narratives that both Mexican and U.S. historiographies have erased. Coronado brings these forgotten narratives, poised between utopia and disillusionment, deftly back to life. This is a moving meditation on the making of the first ‘Latino’ public sphere.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

A World Not to Come constitutes an extraordinary contribution to distinct and interconnected lines of scholarly debates engaged with Latin American and trans-hemispheric history.

Society for U.S. Intellectual History blog - Beatriz González-Stephan

This is a book about Tejanos and the printing press in the Age of Revolutions. Between 1810 and 1848, Tejanos witnessed momentous sociopolitical, cultural changes and responded by articulating their own peculiar narratives of modernity through the printing press—narratives that both Mexican and U.S. historiographies have erased. Coronado brings these forgotten narratives, poised between utopia and disillusionment, deftly back to life. This is a moving meditation on the making of the first ‘Latino’ public sphere.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

A World Not to Come is a magnificent first book. Raúl Coronado makes the case that the meeting of Anglos and Mexicans in the Southwest occasioned not only political and military conflict but also epistemological struggle between two different systems of thought. Latinos in the U.S. attempted forge what in hindsight can be seen as a modern social imaginary. The differences between these conflicting visions of an American imaginary are still very much with us and help define the nature of the present interactions between Anglos and Latinos within the boundaries of the U.S. and outside of them. This is a compelling thesis about the need for a ‘transnational’ view of the Americas and the recognition that an undifferentiated history of ‘Latino’ writings cannot easily be extracted from the historical record. Coronado’s argument on both counts should advance significantly our understanding of the relationship between the Anglo and Latin Americas in the nineteenth century.

Ramón Saldívar