Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing

This polished literary history argues forcefully that Latinos are not newcomers in the United States by documenting a vast network of Spanish-language cultural activity in the nineteenth century. Juxtaposing poems and essays by both powerful and peripheral writers, Kirsten Silva Gruesz proposes a major revision of the nineteenth-century U.S. canon and its historical contexts.


Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials and building on an innovative interpretation of poetry's cultur...