Letters from Filadelfia: Early Latino Literature and the Trans-American Elite

In Letters from Filadelfia, Rodrigo Lazo delivers a series of provocative challenges to the epistemological underpinnings of a number of academic fields as well as an invitation to those poised to carry out scholarship under circumstances in which the boundaries and fixities of disciplines and area specializations are being called into question. The site of a lively Spanish-language print culture between the 1790s and the 1830s, born of the independence struggles in Spanish America and the arrival from there, under various circumstances and for varying amounts of time, of exiles, travelers, and those just passing through, Filadelfia was also a symbolic cityspace where republicanism and possible futures for the Americas might be imagined and articulated by means of translation and the publication in Spanish of everything from political tracts to histories to poetry to newspapers to travel accounts. Situating such writing as part of a hemispheric project is not only to insist on the long-standing presence of Spanish and Spanish-language cultures of print in the face of Anglocentrist myths about the United States as a monolingual nation state but also to reframe within a supranational context a number of literatures and histories that, up to recently, have been conceptualized within the framework of the nation or have excluded such materials from the very definition of what counts as part of their field. If readers have a sense that all terms and concepts in this book are open to questioning by the author in their attempt to find a means of expressing the sense of movement, translation, and transference characterizing the production and circulation of this print culture, such a reimagining of language only seems appropriate when one is reconceptualizing the scholarly task at hand.Perhaps no medium was better suited to crossing such boundaries or bringing into being extensive networks than the letter. For Lazo the letter serves as a “communicative address” (10) as much as a form or genre of writing (although it is that as well) and the print culture material—translations, anonymous publications, economic treatises, histories, many with the term “cartas” or letters in the title (75, 84, 175) —considered in each of the book’s chapters, adapt and borrow from the epistolary communicative mode. Doing so allows their authors to build on the understandings and assumptions of intimacy that characterized personal correspondence and to deploy them in their publications in order to move people, to affect them, in order to convince them to do such things as abandon colonial rule and embrace republican brotherhood. Enabling the cementing of homosocial bonds among the male trans-American elite, the letter was one of a number of “institutions of intimacy,” in Lauren Berlant’s terms (11–12), that helped bring about the formation of an intimate public sphere, one in which elite male writers recognized themselves while writing into being the abstract, idealized, autonomous male subject who was both the addressee and reader of their work. Much of the book is taken up with documenting the emergence of such a subject, as well as with the silences that accompanied “his” rise. As the author fully shows, with a few notable exceptions, most of those calling for an end to colonialism failed to question the social, gendered, and racialized hierarchies structuring either their home countries or their new place of residence: “Filadelfia,” Lazo insists, “evokes both potential and pitfall” (6).In the final chapter of the book, Lazo turns his attention to three sets of personal correspondence in order to reflect on the demands that letters make as well as on the archival dislocations they provoke. The first of these, a letter from Charlotte Stephenson, writing from London, to Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, living in Philadelphia, makes apparent the materiality of epistolary exchange. In addition to evoking emotions, this letter conjured the absent correspondent by means of handwriting that extended her touch. Stephenson’s correspondence also reminds us that letters are important as tokens of a relationship. Love letters written in the nineteenth century, for example, were valued as “prendas,” material mementos or signs of a courting relationship, as much as for the message they delivered.The letters in the second set, concerning the passionate love for his sister-in-law that Manuel Lorenzo de Vidaurre published in his book Cartas americanas, políticas y morales (1823), are astounding in their publicness, given that most correspondents in an amatory relationship demanded the return of their letters to preclude any notoriety. In this instance Lazo stresses the ways that the intimacy of the epistolary forms identified with republican brotherhood can be deployed in an “explicit affective and sexual relationship with a woman” (215). Yet, surely, the opposite must also be the case. The forms and intimacy of amatory correspondence must also have helped underwrite calls for republican brotherhood in letter form, including in the books that borrow the epistolary mode of communication.The letters from a dying man, Domingo García de Sena, in Philadelphia, to his family in Venezuela, comprise the third set. Here, the letters mark distance, the problems accompanying their circulation, and index, through handwriting, the state of the body of their composer. For Lazo such letters, composed by “forgotten people” (225), foreground the precarious nature of the recuperation of the history of early Latino textuality. Perhaps hinting at disciplinary conventions and differences, the letters of “forgotten people” are precisely the stuff of many working in social and cultural history.Out of place in the archives in which they are located, the three sets of personal correspondence enable Lazo to reflect on the archive as a means of organizing and enforcing the limits of knowledge and to extend an invitation to scholars to embrace a more interdisciplinary, open-ended scholarship, one in which the object of research does not become another archive bounded by its own limits (196). In foregrounding textual analysis and questioning most received terms and concepts, Letters from Filadelfia offers a model for such scholarship.

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