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ABSTRACT
This article explores how Mexican politician, Lorenzo de Zavala, engaged with issues of masculinity and nation in his 1834 travelogue, Viaje a los Estados Unidos del Norte de América (Journey to the United States of North America). The first published Mexican travelogue of the United States, this understudied text illuminates the post-independence period in which Latin American intellectuals imagined a hemispheric republican future originating in the Americas. This travelogue engaged with debates about nation-building and the role of male citizens. By conceptualising androcentrism as a symbolic marker, Zavala’s interpretation of the U.S. man informed his notion of an idealised citizenry. This notion was racialized and excluded subaltern populations. Additionally, this text can be interpreted as a precursor to twentieth-century valorisations of multi-ethnic identity discourses. Zavala imagined the emergence of a borderlands population that combined the characteristics of both countries’ citizenries. This travelogue provides greater meaning by contributing to the ongoing, ambivalent textual relationship between Mexico and the United States.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Zavala gave a copy of his travelogue to each of the co-authors of the Texas Constitution (Rivera Citation2005, Citation2006, 429).
2 Georges van den Abbeele (Citation1992) offers the term oikos (home) as a tool for interrogating travel literature. He formulates that the oikos “organizes and domesticates a given area by defining all other points in relation to itself” (xviii). Also, although travel often connotates freedom, van den Abbeele contends that the oikos, as a touchstone of reference for the traveller, paradoxically constrains this experience.
3 Historian Daniel T. Rodgers maintains that “if complicity in world historical forces marks all nations, it especially marks outpost nations, like the United States, which begin as other nations’ imperial projects” (1). Rodgers asserts that there exists a transnational circulation of “people, goods, ideas and aspirations” across the North Atlantic world, a focus on interconnectedness that belies country-specific grand historical narratives that emphasise national singularity (1).
4 During the transition from independent artisanship to wage labour, race played a role in the construction of gender identity for the white male worker. According to David R. Roediger, “Whiteness was a way in which white workers responded to a fear of dependency on wage labor and to the necessities of capitalistic work discipline” (13). Interestingly, Irish immigrants were considered to be labour competition and, for a time, conflated racially with African Americans.
5 Henry Clay (Citation1842) has been attributed with coining the term “self-made man” in an 1832 Congressional speech when he declared that “in Kentucky, almost every manufactory know to me, is in the hands of enterprising and self-made men, who have acquired whatever wealth they possess by patient and diligent labor” (39).
6 Horacio Algier's stories offer an example of popular U.S. novels about the Self-Made Man, though scholar James V. Catano (Citation2001) posits that these stories are more nuanced than commonly received (10–11).
7 Wolfgang Iser (Citation1974) interrogated the concept of “implied reader.” In this construct, a literary text implies an ideal reader, and the meaning of a text is the result of collaboration between author and reader (274).
8 Silvia Molloy (Citation1991) has theorised autobiography as a revealing act of self-construction in which the self-image is “a social artifact, as revealing of a psyche as it is of a culture” (8). Similarly, John Sturrock argues that autobiography “is the story of singularization, or of how the autobiographer came to acquire the conviction of uniqueness that has impelled him to write” (Citation1993, 14).
9 Autobiography can be conceived as “the story of a distinctive culture written in individual characters and from within – [it] offers a privileged access to an experience … that no other variety of writing can offer” (Olney Citation1980, 13). Perhaps this definition can be extended to travel writing as well since, like autobiography, the narrative voice is nearly always the first person singular.
10 Positivism as a philosophy “claimed to explain the enormous changes that industry, powered by capital, and directed by science, had affected on the social character, economic power, and political bases of nineteenth-century Europe. In Latin America, many intellectuals were convinced that positivism offered not only an explanation for the many pressing social, economic, and political problems of the region, but pointed to new and more effective solutions” (Martí Citation2011, 154).
11 Mariusz Kałczewiak and Magdalena Kozłowska (Citation2022), in their analysis of Eastern Europe, similarly confront “the essentialist labelling that has defined that region as passive concerning global developments” (2).
12 The first iteration of this dualistic mentality of Latinity emerged in France in the 1830s and “because of the international prestige of French culture … had ramifications for … Latin American countries” (Thier Citation2012, 162). “Latin America” originally related less to geography than to politics. The term is a holdover from post-colonial identity construction according to Walter Mignolo who contended that Latin America “came to refer to a Spanish and Portuguese government and an educated civil society in America that turned its face to France” (59). Mignolo (Citation2005) has clarified that this concept did not include non-white populations.
13 In 1823, President James Monroe famously avowed that any further European colonisation would be considered a threat to the region, “a statement perceived by many Latin American leaders as a promise to defend republicanism in the New World” (Thier 166). Thier lists the British seizure of the Malvinas Islands from Argentina in 1833 as one such example of U.S. omission.
14 In Yucatán in 1808, at the age of twenty, Zavala married the daughter of his godparents, Teresa Josefa Correa y Correa. After Teresa died in 1831, Zavala remarried a few months later to an Anglo-American widow he met in New York, Mrs. Miranda [Emily] West Cresswell, who was pregnant with his son, Agustín (Henson Citation1996, 10–11, 53–55).