Abstract
This article focuses on how two Spanish American Creole writers perceived their port city as a symbol of national prestige, devoted patriotism, and utilitarian significance, at a time when the military and economic status of the port was undergoing transformational changes. It centers on the works of two eighteenth-century Cuban writers, José Martín Félix de Arrate’sLlave del Nuevo Mundo, antemural de las Indias Occidentales: La Habana descripta(1761) and Ignacio José de Urrutia y Montoya’sTeatro histórico, jurídico y político-militar de la Isla Fernandina de Cuba y principalmente de su capital La Habana(1791), to show the ways in which these authors articulated their love for their country while endowing the port and the port city with local political power and cultural prestige. This sense of “topophilia,” a concept described by geographer Yi-Fu Tuan as the “affective bond between people and place,” is what guided the aforementioned authors’ geographic view of the port.
Highlights
This article focuses on José Martín Félix de Arrate’s Llave del Nuevo Mundo, antemural de las Indias Occidentales: La Habana descripta (1761) and Ignacio José de Urrutia y Montoya’s Teatro histórico, jurídico y político-militar de la Isla Fernandina de Cuba y principalmente de su capital La Habana (1791)
It centers on the works of two eighteenth-century Cuban writers, José Martín Félix de Arrate’s Llave del Nuevo Mundo, antemural de las Indias Occidentales: La Habana descripta (1761) and Ignacio José de Urrutia y Montoya’s Teatro histórico, jurídico y político-militar de la Isla Fernandina de Cuba y principalmente de su capital La Habana (1791), to show the ways in which these authors articulated their love for their country while endowing the port and the port city with local political power and cultural prestige
He does not elaborate on the implications of this patriotism, I contend that subsequent writings about the port city in the late eighteenth century offer us a window to understand how a physical space such as the port and its geographic relevance served to articulate a love for the patria that turns out to be geographic in nature
Summary
This article focuses on how two Spanish American Creole writers perceived their port city as a symbol of national prestige, devoted patriotism, and utilitarian significance, at a time when the military and economic status of the port was undergoing transformational changes. Guerra y Sánchez (1962, 173) suggests that in particular the siege of the port city of Havana by British forces fostered the first manifestations of a “patriotismo habanero,” evidenced in the complaints by local citizens about the inefficiency of colonial authorities to defend the city He does not elaborate on the implications of this patriotism, I contend that subsequent writings about the port city in the late eighteenth century offer us a window to understand how a physical space such as the port and its geographic relevance served to articulate a love for the patria that turns out to be geographic in nature. They may be intimately related to other but more distant sites through practices of circulation and processes of negotiation designed to warrant the credibility of knowledge, the credibility of certain claims to knowledge.” Arrate and Urrutia y Montoya claimed a particular knowledge and produced a specific image of the port city anchored within a patriotic discourse that they aimed to share with Spanish authorities and the rest of the world
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