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Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials and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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