The University of Arizona Press
April 1, 2025
In Publishing Latinidad: Latinx Literary and Intellectual Production, 1880–1960, Jose O. Fernandez meticulously examines the works of notable figures like José Martí, Arturo Schomburg, Jesús Colón, José de la Luz Sáenz, Adela Sloss-Vento, and Américo Paredes, illuminating their innovative approaches to circumventing exclusionary practices in the publishing world. He demonstrates how these writers and intellectuals entered literary, cultural, and intellectual discourses through alternative modes of literary production: crónicas, translations, paratexts, bibliographies, archival practices, sketches, diaries, biographies, unpublished fiction, and scholarly monographs.
Today, Fernandez answers five questions.
What inspired you to write this book?
When I began writing about post-1960s Latinx writers, I became interested in early authors, intellectuals, and civil rights activists that could be considered their predecessors in relation to a shared interests in articulating their unequal treatment within American society. Publishing Latinidad is a continuation of my previous book in which I explored the historical background of certain Latinx literary genres and forms. When I was a graduate student, for example, I was unaware of the rich tradition of early Latinx writers and intellectuals who came before the writers of the Chicanx and Nuyorican movements. I still remember my surprise at finding José Martí in The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, but this should not have been the case. A larger part of Martí’s writings originated in New York City, and his literary and intellectual legacy directly influenced other Latinx writers after him. In this book, I wanted to study these connections in more detail, and specifically how early nontraditional Latinx texts and print forms fit within Latinx literary history.
How do you choose the intellectual analyzed in each chapter?
For the last couple of decades, if not longer, there has been an increased interest in the study of writers and intellectuals who can be considered precursors of Latinx writers who came of age after the 1960s. For this book project, I wanted to highlight writers from the turn of the twentieth century to the mid twentieth century since this is the literary period that I concentrated on in graduate school. There are a number of writers who could have merited a chapter in the book such as Sotero Figueroa, Bernardo Vega, Juan Antonio Corretjer, Eusebio Chacón, Jovita González, and especially Alonso Perales. The authors I selected are connected to each other when divided in two geographic areas, New York City and Texas. My book seeks to explore literary and intellectual ties; for example, Jesús Colón wrote about Arturo Schomburg, who in turned was directly influenced by the writings of Martí. The same happened in Texas as Adela Sloss-Vento met and corresponded with José de la Luz Sáenz and Alonso Perales, and Américo Paredes was aware of the writings and civil rights activism of Perales at the time when Paredes’s poetry was being published in Spanish-language newspapers during the 1930s.
When Texas Mexican soldiers serving in World War I returned to the United States, what was the state of race relations in Texas?
Racialization through legislation and the courts affected the lives of both Mexicans and Mexicans in Texas. Their social lives were dictated by “Juan Crow” segregation, which was similar to the segregation and racial violence experienced by African Americans at the time. Sáenz, who fought overseas during World War I, writes about segregated barber shops, restaurants, and public accommodations in Texas after the war. The racial discrimination Mexican communities experienced in Texas before and after the war influenced Sáenz’s writings and social activism. There is an increasing body of scholarship that has focused in detail on the extent of these systems of racial control and racial hierarchies affecting Mexicans and Mexican Americans not only in Texas but across the Southwest. The list of scholars who have written about this is extensive, but in relation to the various Mexican American civil rights activists who emerged after the war, it is important to note the scholarship of Benjamin Johnson, José A. Ramírez, Emilio Zamora, Martha Menchaca, and Cynthia Orozco. What I attempted in Publishing Latinidad was to connect this history with writers such as Sáenz, Perales, and Sloss-Vento, who wrote about this through nontraditional texts and print forms.
What are the connections between Mexican American civil rights and African American civil rights and Indigenous civil rights?
Unfortunately, the prevailing commonality among the experiences of these groups was their shared racialization and exclusion from mainstream social, political, and cultural participation in the United States. At the same time, Latinx, Black, and Indigenous groups during different periods in history also shared their fight for inclusion and for their rightful place in society and inclusion of their cultural and intellectual contributions. Another shared trait of these groups in their fight for civil rights was that while they gained their citizenship at different periods in American history, their social thinking and literary writings have been marked by their attempts to gain full citizenship rights. To bring back Sáenz as an example, some of his arguments when he articulates the need for full rights for Mexican Americans after World War I uncannily resemble some of the claims made by W.E.B. Du Bois when he makes a case during the war for the end of racial violence against African Americans. Sáenz also specifically makes the argument in his war diary that Indigenous groups in the U.S. should be granted citizenship based on their war sacrifices.
What are you working on now?
There is an increased interest in the current role of mainstream publishers in the publication and promotion of authors of color. When it comes to Latinx authors, this exclusion is not new; it is the result of their historical exclusion in cultural, publishing, and academic spaces. One of my current projects focuses on the role and significance of Arte Público Press, the most successful nonprofit Latinx publisher for the last fifty years. This project focuses on the history of Arte Público and its founder, Nicolás Kanellos, and how several of the authors and books published by the press have shaped the trajectory of Latinx literature.
Jose O. Fernandez is an assistant professor in the Latina/o/x Studies Program at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Against Marginalization: Convergences in Black and Latinx Literatures. His research focuses on the emergence and development of the Latinx literary tradition through a comparative ethnic studies lens and the influence of the publishing dynamics that have shaped Latinx literary and intellectual production in the United States.
