A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture. Raúl Coronado. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. x+574.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewA World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture. Raúl Coronado. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. x+574.Judy M. BertonazziJudy M. BertonazziRowan University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLanguage is the unending soul of all of our desires and discontents. For Raúl Coronado, the printing press became the medium through which Tejanos in the early nineteenth century articulated their desire to claim a felt sense of shared Latino identity within the Spanish, and later US/Mexican, territories now known as the Texas/Mexico borderlands. A World Not to Come begins during the historical period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when Napoleon overthrew King Charles IV and his heir, Fernando VII, causing the creation of Spanish juntas in its empires and the vacillations between patriarchy and revolution, and between scholasticism and modernity, which were fueled by printing press technology.A World Not to Come narrates the creation of a Tejano identity as a series of communicative texts (visual, aural, and written) that had Enlightenment and Hispanic ideological origins: “As the eighteenth century lurched toward the nineteenth, books, pamphlets, broadsheets, and manuscripts launched a discursive war against Spanish imperial rule. These texts may have targeted Spain’s specific reign over America, but they were birthed throughout the Atlantic world: in London, Philadelphia, France, the Caribbean, and even Spain herself” (7). Thus, Coronado’s historical lens reveals the origins of Latino writing and print culture as a meeting of competing power structures in the modern world system: Anglo America, European empires (especially Spain), and Spanish America (New Spain, which would become Mexico and the US Southwest).Notably, the author trains his eye on the rise of the Tejano social imaginary through the influence of both print culture and New Spain’s inclination toward oratory of printed works recited in town centers and churches.1 A printed document was disseminated when it was read aloud, therefore, the “ideas conveyed were mediated by the discursive world of each listener: murmurs, gasps, whispers, and gossip could quickly transform the intent of the text” (273). It would seem, then, based on Coronado’s narrative point of view, that Latino oratory gave print culture its ideological purposes via a “live” performance, a civic drama performed by a pregonero or town crier and “announced” by “a drum, trumpet, or church bells” (270). These print culture documents, therefore, were an extension of the townspeople’s public personas. As Coronado notes, print culture in the Spanish colonies of North America was reliant on the oral culture that was a “universe of signs that were all meant to be interpreted, from religious rituals to ceremonial processions, theatrical displays, music, and dance” and would reflect the orality of Spain’s literary texts as works spoken, not read silently (217).Coronado narrates the role that the printing press played in the social acceptance of revolutionary ideas—both revolutionary via American (US) and French revolutionary ideals and those expressed by Spain’s Enlightenment thinkers such as Valentín de Foronda and diplomats such as Casa Irujo and Diego María de Gardoqui Arriquibar. However, the printing press, for Coronado, was not the cause of social imaginaries in New Spain, which the author emphasizes on more than one occasion. Instead, the printing press aided in an already developing social imaginary produced by political documents that were orally disseminated directly to the people in an organic relationship between print and oral cultures. The author emphasizes the importance of Tejano sovereignty as a basic right but is careful to note that sovereignty was sought for the pueblo over the rights of individuals. This emphasis on the pueblo marks the key difference in New Spain’s social identity compared to Enlightenment ideals of individual rights and the public sphere, which were expressed by the Western European episteme influenced by Rousseau, Descartes, and Locke.Those familiar with Raúl Coronado’s scholarship will find A World Not to Come a helpful foundation for reading his current scholarship on early Latino literature from the late eighteenth century to the 1940s. His work is vital to scholars of Latino/a studies for its breadth and depth of archival research. It is important for scholars of hemispheric, transnational/trans-American studies because of its extensive examination of conflicting New World histories through the lens of New Spain (Mexico, the US Southwest, and Central America) and its position between Anglo American/British colonialism and Spanish colonialism.The archival research alone is of value to the Latino/a scholar of pre-twentieth-century writing and its development from oral discourses. The cited material is written in the original Spanish alongside English translations. There are seventy-two illustrations dispersed throughout the book that coincide with in-depth discussions of the historical and social contexts surrounding the historical figures who have contributed to Tejano intellectual production. Four appendixes of archival materials include the author’s transcriptions and translations of key texts, such as those written by nineteenth-century Latino political leaders José Antonio Gutiérrez de Lara and José Álvarez de Toledo, and by the Governing Junta of Béxar, as well as an anonymous account of the violence enacted on Tejanos by the brutal General of Eastern Interior Provinces Joaquín de Arredondo.Coronado leaves readers with a brief discussion of the rhetoric of oral culture during this time period and how it may have influenced the print culture of the day, which is perhaps the book’s most notable limitation. A World Not to Come does, however, remind readers of the origin of much contemporary scholarship on the convergence of cultures, the formation of a Latino modernity, and the budding social imaginary that stood against the dominant influence of Anglo American Protestantism, as well as “growing racial violence, and the continuing displacement of Tejanos” (353), which ultimately thwarted the prominence of a Latino public sphere in the US Southwest.Notes1. Social imaginary is defined in Coronado’s book via Charles Taylor’s definition: “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (Charles Taylor, A Secular Age [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007], 171). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 114, Number 1August 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/685935 Views: 235Total views on this site HistoryPublished online May 27, 2016 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.