Language Moves: The Bilingual 19th-Century Latino Archive

Alberto Varon’s paper examines a constellation of bilingual texts both to recover the Latino nineteenth century and to address the persistent problem of language in literary recovery and the canonization national... [ view full abstract ]

Alberto Varon’s paper examines a constellation of bilingual texts both to recover the Latino nineteenth century and to address the persistent problem of language in literary recovery and the canonization national literatures. While much of the Latino archive remains fragmentary, there are abundant texts that escape critical attention in part due to their linguistic challenges. This paper begins with an 1855 speech by Pablo de la Guerra, member of the First California Constitutional Convention and for an 1870 court case that became a test case for race, citizenship, and the legal authority of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Some decades earlier, before the U.S. conquest of California, Juan de la Granja’s Rasgos Historicos (1835), a reader intended for the teaching of the Spanish (castellano) language, was published in New York but in Spanish. At the end of the century, James Ramirez published Carmencita: Pearl of Seville (1890) in English and R. D. de la Cortina’s El Indiano: Comedia en tres actos (1893) sought to address both English and Spanish speakers by publishing bilingually. The selective use of both English and Spanish mediates affective and cultural belonging, and these texts speak to new ways of understanding Latinx textuality and its archive.