This session challenges the notion that, with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, California lost all its cultural, linguistic, and historical ties with its former sovereign nation, Mexico, and, more broadly, with the rest of Latin America. On the contrary, California entered a transformation that David E. Hayes-Bautista calls “the Latino big bang.” Latin Americans from Mexico to the Southern Cone promptly flocked to California to partake in the Gold Rush and take a piece of the gilded treasure. From this moment on, Latin Americans continued to pass through or settle in California. Along the way, they penned their impressions, reflections, and critiques of this land, which was immortalized as desirable and prosperous, yet foreign and hostile, due to their separation from their homeland and encounters with ill-informed and bigoted groups.
Reconsidering California as a pivotal center for Latin American cultures and identities responds to heated debates that question how to categorize and historicize the literary production of Latin American writers in this US state, where English has become the de facto language. The most common question is whether they belong to US American or Latin American literatures. Scholars like Jesse Alemán, Rodrigo Lazo, John Alba Cutler, and Marissa López, all working within Latino studies, posit categories such as “Latino/a/e/x” to signal an intermediate status between the Anglo and Latin worlds. In the meantime, others, such as Harris Feinsod, prefer to consider these works transhemispheric because they cross, involve, and connect different regions simultaneously. As a result, this session adopts, as its theoretical framework, what Carmen E. Lamas calls “the Latino continuum,” a phenomenon that recognizes the importance of space and time but also goes beyond it, meaning that these writers and their texts cannot be entirely identified as Latin American, US American, or transamerican; instead, they simultaneously occupy multiple spatialities while inhabiting and crossing diverse temporal moments.
This session comprises three presenters, each allocated 17 minutes. Having this amount of time allows each presenter to introduce, present, support, and conclude their subject matter with enough detail and precision, leaving 24 minutes available for a brief introduction at the beginning and a 15-minute Q&A at the end. The session will be organized chronologically from 1848 to 1920.
Christine Fernández commences with the life-writing genre, such as diaries and memoirs, by the Chilean politician Vicente Pérez Rosales and the Argentinian political exile Ramón Gil Navarro, who participated in the Gold Rush. Through their life writings, Fernández demonstrates how racial complexities present in transpacific commerce and mining during the Gold Rush simultaneously informed the political contestation of Latin American communities in Northern California, as the territory navigated its integration into US statehood.
Jair Jáuregui Torres continues with the Mexican educator and writer Laura Méndez de Cuenca, whose journalistic reports on San Francisco’s 1894 Midwinter Fair were published in a Mexican newspaper. Jáuregui Torres proposes that these reports serve as a form of nation-building beyond Mexico’s own state boundaries, which Méndez de Cuenca uses to rectify simplified and misconstrued portrayals of her homeland perpetuated by Californian investors and enterprises.
José María Rodríguez García concludes the panel with the early years of the Mexican writer Octavio Paz, who lived in Los Angeles’ “Mexican” Main Street in 1920 with his father, Octavio Paz Solórzano. Through a “geobiographical” approach that incorporates US immigration records and population census, Rodríguez García contests how Paz’s biographers had minimized his formative years in Southern California and instead reclaims the transformative impact that this region had on the lives of the “two Octavio Paz.”
Together, these panelists, two associate professors and one graduate student, working at public and private universities, contribute to the development of a stronger corpus of scholarship that recognizes the nuances and intricacies of Latin Americans’ perceptions of California. From their respective area of expertise, that being life writing, print culture, or geo-biography, panelists unite to essentially expand the geopolitical boundaries of this US state and reconsider its true geographical and cultural proximity to Latin America.