A Latina Byline in the Los Angeles Press

A poet going only by the name “Josefina” published twelve poems, culminating in a series of five sonnets on untimely love, loss, and sadness in the Los Angeles, Spanish-language newspaper, La Crónica, from 1875 through... [ view full abstract ]

A poet going only by the name “Josefina” published twelve poems, culminating in a series of five sonnets on untimely love, loss, and sadness in the Los Angeles, Spanish-language newspaper, La Crónica, from 1875 through 1877. Although she is one of the few writers to have a review published about her poetry in La Crónica, the identity of “Josefina” is still a mystery. One detractor went so far as to accuse her of being a “Josefino” along with the exclamation “horror de los horrores!” [horror of horrors!]. Whether or not this comment was meant as simply an insult or as a way of viciously “outing” an author with a trans literary identity is unknown, and the truth of “Josefina” with regard to determining sex and gender identification/expression is not my primary interest. Rather, I contend that the poetic bodies of “Josefina” with regard to her verses and her byline signature can be read in terms of a trans literary climate, whereby trans implies a rhizomatic “crossing”, “excess”, and “going across, over or beyond”. This project tests the limits of feminist critical regionalism in the American West by approaching a body of work whose authorship is contextually marked as being feminine, Spanish-speaking, and Latina—but is ultimately uncertain. I contend that a trans rethinking of authorship in terms of gender, race, and language politics is a necessary first step in engaging with the unique literary climate of the nineteenth-century Latino press in Los Angeles.