Americanized criollos : Latina/o Figures in Late-Nineteenth-Century Cuban Literature

Americanized criollos: Latina/o Figures in Late-NineteenthCentury Cuban Literature carmen e. lamas columbia university While in Latina/o and U.S. American Studies the projects of recovering the U.S. Hispanic tradition (Kanellos), expanding the U.S. Latina/o archive (Silva Gruesz), uncovering the Latina/o influence on United States literature (Brickhouse), and incorporating Spanish-written texts published in the United States into the U.S. American archive (Castillo) have added to our understanding of the transamerican nature of the Latina/o experience, thereby questioning the boundaries of national literatures (Saldı́var, Stavans), the existence of the Latina/o figure in Latin American literature remains unexamined. One may be tempted to think that this phenomenon is caused by recent trends of globalization and the concomitant movement of individuals across geographic and cultural borders, with its appearance, therefore, restricted to contemporary literary manifestations. Nonetheless, representations of Latina/os from a Latin American perspective—what I term the ‘‘Americanized criollo’’—date back to the 19th century. This is especially so in the case of Cuban letters. Whether occurring due to the increased flow of people and capital between the U.S. and Cuba in the 19th century (Pérez), or, more significantly, because many of the Cubans who had spent years in exile in the U.S. as a result of the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878)1 returned to the island with the signing of the Pacto del Zanjón in 1878 (Poyo), references to Americanized Cubans appear in Cuban literature in the 1890s. Moreover, these characters are not coincidental or tangential in nature; they are central to the politically-charged messages of these novels. In this article I discuss the appearance of the Americanized criollo in two turnof -the-century Cuban novels: En el cafetal (1890) by Domingo Malpica La Barca and Leonela (1893) by Nicolás Heredia. I illustrate how these authors create Americanized characters who do not understand the social, political, and racial relations in Cuba because of their extended absences, thereby insinuating that their stay in the U.S. negatively impacts Cuba’s future. Next, I analyze how the 1 The Ten Years’ War was the first of three armed attempts at independence. The final attempt, which started in 1895, ended in 1898 due to U.S. intervention after the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine off the coast of Cuba. This military intervention led to a ‘‘mediated Republic ,’’ lasting from 1902 to 1933. 70 Revista Hispánica Moderna 61.1 (2008) authors’ biographies as well as their politics influence the construction of these characters. Ultimately, the inclusion of a Latin American example, the Americanized criollo, and a study of the transamerican experiences of the individuals who created this literary archetype broaden our understanding of the Latina/o experience beyond a historically U.S.-centric approach which is limited to an examination of how Latina/os affect and are affected by their North American experience. Domingo Malpica and the Fear of a Black Republic Little is known about Domingo Malpica La Barca (1856–1898), who is best remembered for hosting the party in 1893 at which Julián del Casal, one of the most prominent figures of modernismo, experienced his first major physical breakdown (Figueroa, Glickman). A patron of Casal’s work and an avid art collector who published a book on modern art (Del arte moderno: breves reflexiones sobre el arte de la pintura [1874]), Malpica’s only novel, En el cafetal (1890), tells the tale of the wealthy widowed criolla Mercedes Picatoste, who returns to Cuba to settle her family’s and her late husband’s financial matters after over a decade in exile in Europe and the U.S. The story details her one-month stay at the coffee plantation ‘‘La Estrella’’ and her romantic encounter with the Conde Ernesto de Arnam, a descendant of Charles V. It is easy to agree with Juan Remos’s 1945 critique that this novel ‘‘se resiente de falsedad en la pintura de caracteres en el sabor de la época’’ (107), since the idyllic representations of the slaves’ devotion to their masters, as well as the compassion of the bandits who kidnap Mercedes and Ernesto...