by Payton Phillips Quintanilla, Latin American & Iberian Studies Librarian and Curator
Students are typically surprised to learn that there is a long history of Spanish-language publishing in the United States. This history even includes cities, like New York and Philadelphia, that were never part of the vast geographies of the Spanish Empire or the Mexican Republic (which now constitute more than one third of the territory of the U.S.’s 48 contiguous states). Rather than being simply presented with this information, they are often prompted to make this “discovery” on their own through their examination of printed books: an opportunity, during a class visit or an appointment in the Reading Room, to thoughtfully explore not just the intellectual content but also the individual histories of books, as objects.
Special Collections has recently acquired, through both purchase and donation, a number of publications that serve this exercise well; texts that, like the Caribbean Sea, cross geopolitical boundaries, complicate national narratives, and question literary canons, all while connecting cultures, histories, and geographies in the process. One of those publications is highlighted here.
Cuba sits at the crossroads of the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Caribbean Sea; and the story of this book, like the story of the island, is shaped by those waters, and by the peoples and polities that those waters have touched. The title of the book provides its first lesson in the Americas’ interconnected geographies of empire and independence, slavery and freedom, exile and return: Lectures on the History of Cuba, Pronounced in the Cuban Democratic Society of New York, by Pedro Santacilia. At the time of its publication in 1859, Santacilia (1834, Santiago de Cuba – 1910, Mexico City) had twice lived in Spain in forced exile, once as a child, due to his father’s political activities, and once as an adult, due to his own; escaped Spain via Gibraltar and moved to New York, where these lectures were given, and where he wrote and published alongside other Cuban exiles; moved to New Orleans, which was another refuge for Latin American exiles, and where this book was published; and, finally, settled in Mexico.
Santacilia was always a fierce proponent of Cuban independence, but his ideas about how independence should look, including how it should be achieved, evolved over time. He presented and published his Lectures during a period in which many Cubans, himself included, viewed U.S. military intervention, and even U.S. annexation of Cuba, as the most expeditious route to liberation from the Spanish empire. In fact, he dedicated this book to Domingo de Goucuría, and published it through the press of Luis Eduardo del Cristo, both of whom were prominent filibusteros: they supported and fought alongside Venezuelan-born Narciso López and Tennessee-born William Walker in their attempts to invade, colonize, and establish slave states in parts of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.
However, it was also in New Orleans where Santacilia met Mexican President Benito Juárez, a staunch abolitionist who himself spent two stints in the city as an exile, first during the dictatorship of Antonio López de Santa Anna, and then during the War of Reform. Santacilia ended up following Juárez back to México, married one of his daughters, witnessed the Mexican Republic’s resistance to the Second French Empire, fostered Mexican support for Cuban independence, and ultimately rejected U.S. interventionism in favor of a fully sovereign Cuban state.
RBSC’s copy of Santacilia’s Lectures followed a trajectory befitting its history. Published in New Orleans, it eventually made its way to Cuba, the subject of its pages. While we don’t know how or when it arrived on the island, a stamp, and accompanying handwritten note, tell us that it was sold by the famous Habana bookshop, Librería Martí — which itself was named after the great Cuban politician, author, and anti-imperialist, José Martí, who Santacilia befriended in Mexico. The purchase had to have taken place at some point between the mid-1920s, when the shop opened, and 1960, when it closed in the wake of the Revolution. RBSC’s copy, however, was not acquired from any agent in Cuba, but rather from a second-hand bookseller in Mexico City, where Santacilia built his life and legacy, and where he died and was buried.
Scholar Rodolfo J. Cortina once asked, “Cuban literature, Cuban exile literature, Cuban-American literature: where does one end and the other begin?”1 In answering this question, he posited that Santacilia’s Lectures, like other 19th-century texts — poems, plays, newspapers, novels, etc. — published in the United States, by Cuban authors living and writing in the U.S., should absolutely be included in the Cuban-American literary canon, just as they should be included in the island’s own history of letters. The context and content of the Lectures, and the movement of RBSC’s particular copy through Caribbean and North American geographies, certainly supports this view.
Learn more about National Caribbean American Heritage Month and its history, as well as the many contributions of Notre Dame’s Caribbean American community members.
Footnotes
1 See the Introduction to Cortina’s chapter, “Cuban Literature of the United States: 1824–1959,” in the openly accessible, digital volume, Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, edited by Ramón Gutiérrez and Genaro Padilla, first published by Arte Público Press in 1993. https://artepublicopress.manifoldapp.org/projects/recovery-vol-1
