An 1848 for the Americas: The Black Atlantic, "El negro martir," and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism in New York City

Abstract

In the wake of the European revolutions of 1848 and the convulsions of independence and abolition sweeping across the Caribbean and Latin America, scores of political refugees arrived in New York City. Many of these exiles contributed to republican periodicals like the French Le Republicain, the Italian L’Eco d’Italia, and the Cuban El Eco de Cuba, El Filibustero, El Horizonte, El Mulato, El Pueblo, La Revolucion, and La Verdad (Catania 2:14–15; Ortiz). In the early 1850s, New York City was an incubator of republican nationalism for both Europe and the Americas, linking Young America to Giovane Italia and Joven Cuba, the anticolonial Cuban exile movement. New York reacted more to celebrity than to ethics when it gave a hero’s welcome to both the antislavery Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian nationalist, and the proslavery Jose Antonio Paez, the Venezuelan caudillo and president, when they arrived in July 1850. Two years later, Francisco Aguero y Estrada, an obscure white exile from Cuba, sailed into New York harbor without any fanfare. But Aguero, a veteran of an ill-fated anticolonial guerilla war in Cuba, would soon usher republicanism into an innovative reckoning with its contradictions of race and slavery, which defined the position of the Americas in the modern world system. As the intellectual architect of El Mulato’s intervention in republicanism, Aguero dismantled the Negrophobic logic of Cuban exile nationalism as pro-slavery annexationism when he boldly declared that if the