Gendered Nationalism in Xicotencatl

Abstract

In 1826, William Stavely Publishing House of Philadelphia first published what is now a little discussed anonymous historical novel in Spanish entitled Jicotencal. Long familiar to mainstream Americanist scholarship as a center of Anglo-American revolutionary history, Philadelphia, in early nineteenth century, was also a hotbed for liberal political ideologies, one of which promoted complete political separation between Spain and its territories in Americas. As such, novel emerged as one of many endorsing not only political independence, but also a cultural distance between Americas and Europe. The liberal political charge of text explains author's decision to publish piece anonymously since Fernando VII of Spain often proclaimed death sentences in absentia for political dissidents of Spanish territories. Fernando VII issued one such death sentence for Felix Varela, a Cuban priest, philosopher, and political liberal, who fled to United States, where, well-known literary critics Luis Leal and Rodolfo J. Cortina have persuasively argued, he wrote Jicotencal: first hispanophone historical novel written in United States, or in Americas. (1) Despite these claims for primacy, which leading nineteenth-century scholars have corroborated, text was only recently recovered in Spanish form by Recovering U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage series in 1995; and Jicotencal was not translated English until Guillermo I. Castillo-Feliu published his translation in 1999 as Xicotencatl. (2) Despite recent English access to text, English language scholars have given little academic attention to novel because Americanists continue to largely ignore non-English writings and Latino/a cultural forms; ethnic Americanists persist in focusing mainly on twentieth-century literary forms; and US Latin Americanists continue to ignore issue of hispanophone US literary production. (3) Moreover, handful of Latin Americanists who have critically examined text have focused on debating authorship of text to extent that they have largely ignored its issues of post-coloniality and gender. Most scholars, therefore, have only peripherally examined how text represses while dismissing female as a participant and constructor of that history. Moctezuma, as primary power in pre-colonial Mexico, resisted Spanish colonial enterprise while second most powerful nation in pre-colonial Mexico, Tlaxcala, became Spaniard's greatest ally. In 1821, three hundred years after Cortes conquered Aztecs, and eleven years after Mexico achieved independence from Spain, Agustin de Iturbide I became emperor of new nation and fashioned a royal court in Spanish tradition after disbanding Mexican national congress. As such, Xicotencatl revisits and aestheticizes moment of colonial conquest a series of and political lessons for novel's contemporary readership. The text oppositionally represents historical trajectory of fall of Aztec empire and dramatizes classical a partisan glorification of Amerindian past in order to summon social conscience of novel's contemporary period against reinstating a European monarchy in post-independence Mexico. Georg Lukacs argues that modern writers of historical novels such as Xicotencatl take from historiography and historical philosophy of their time not only facts, but theory that these facts may be freely and arbitrarily interpreted [...] and therefore that it is necessary to 'introject' one's own subjective problems 'amorphousness' of history (244). As such, he rightly identifies this manner of fictionalizing as the decline of bourgeois realism, in which historical novel develops social critical novel because author's moral subjectivism interprets historical past into a moralizing fable intended to dramatize superiority of virtue over vice (78-80). …