Kirsten Silva Gruesz's Books

Ambassadors of Culture

The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing

By: Kirsten Silva Gruesz

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Ambassadors of Culture

The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing

By: Kirsten Silva Gruesz

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 Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials and building on an innovative interpretation of poetry's cultural role, Ambassadors of Culture brings together scattered writings from the borderlands of California and the Southwest as well as the cosmopolitan exile centers of New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. It reads these productions in light of broader patterns of relations between the U.S. and Latin America, moving from the fraternal rhetoric of the Monroe Doctrine through the expansionist crisis of 1848 to the proto-imperialist 1880s. It shows how ''ambassadors of culture'' such as Whitman, Longfellow, and Bryant propagated ideas about Latin America and Latinos through their translations, travel writings, and poems. In addition to these well-known figures and their counterparts in the work of nation-building in Cuba, Mexico, and Central and South America, this book also introduces unremembered women writers and local poets writing in both Spanish and English. In telling the almost forgotten early history of travels and translations between U.S. and Latin American writers, Gruesz shows that Anglo and Latino traditions in the New World were, from the beginning, deeply intertwined and mutually necessary.

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Page Count

322

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

069105097X

ISBN 13

9780691050973

Ambassadors of Culture

The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing

By: Kirsten Silva Gruesz

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Ambassadors of Culture

The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing

By: Kirsten Silva Gruesz

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319

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0691221308

ISBN 13

9780691221304

Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons

A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas

By: Kirsten Silva Gruesz

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Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons

A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas

By: Kirsten Silva Gruesz

A sweeping history of linguistic and colonial encounter in the early Americas, anchored by the unlikely story of how Boston’s most famous Puritan came to write the first Spanish-language publication in the English New World. The Boston minister Cotton Mather was the first English colonial to refer to himself as an American. He was also the first to author a Spanish-language publication: La Fe del Christiano (The Faith of the Christian), a Protestant tract intended to evangelize readers across the Spanish Americas. Kirsten Silva Gruesz explores the conditions that produced La Fe del Christiano, from the intimate story of the “Spanish Indian” servants in Mather’s household, to the fragile business of printing and bookselling, to the fraught overlaps of race, ethnicity, and language that remain foundational to ideas of Latina/o/x belonging in the United States today. Mather’s Spanish project exemplifies New England’s entanglement within a partially Spanish Catholic, largely Indigenous New World. British Americans viewed Spanish not only as a set of linguistic practices, but also as the hallmark of a rival empire and a nascent racial-ethnic category. Guided by Mather’s tract, Gruesz explores English settlers’ turbulent contacts with the people they called “Spanish Indians,” as well as with Black and local native peoples. Tracing colonial encounters from Boston to Mexico, Florida, and the Caribbean, she argues that language learning was intimately tied with the formation of new peoples. Even as Spanish has become the de facto second language of the United States, the story of La Fe del Christiano remains timely and illuminating, locating the roots of latinidad in the colonial system of the early Americas. Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons reinvents our understanding of a key colonial intellectual, revealing notions about language and the construction of race that endure to this day.

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Page Count

337

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674275691

ISBN 13

9780674275690

Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons

A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas

By: Kirsten Silva Gruesz

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Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons

A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas

By: Kirsten Silva Gruesz

In 1699, Cotton Mather authored the first Spanish-language text in the English New World: a religious tract aimed at evangelizing readers across the Spanish Americas. Kirsten Silva Gruesz uses Mather’s text to explore complex overlaps of race, ethnicity, and language in the early Americas, which continue to govern Latina/o/x belonging today.

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337

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Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674971752

ISBN 13

9780674971752

Book's by Kirsten Silva Gruesz

Ambassadors of Culture

Ambassadors of Culture

Ambassadors of Culture

Ambassadors of Culture

Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons

Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons

Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons

Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons

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