American Alternatives: Participatory Futures of Print from New York City’s Nineteenth-Century Spanish-Language Press

Abstract

This essay situates the Spanish-language literary monthly La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York, which was published in New York City in the 1880s and 1890s, at the forefront of a wave of experimentation with news and timely literary prose that surged during the same period. I argue that the encounter between New York–based writers of Latin American descent and the period’s new print and electric media technologies powered La Revista’s efforts to promote democracy in Latin America and to advance the region’s cultural status on the world stage. As New York’s popular English-language press banked its future on mass circulation enabled by those technologies and on a clear dividing line between producers and consumers, La Revista emphasized quality over quantity, ideas over entertainment, and, most importantly and experimentally for the time, reader participation over passive consumption. My analysis contributes to recent investigation of the origins of Latinx writing and to related efforts to unsettle the boundaries of US and Latin American literary history. It also sheds new light on José Martí’s “Nuestra América” (“Our America”), which first appeared in La Revista in January 1891—at the height of the magazine’s efforts to extend its own print and publishing capacity.