Imperialism and the Wider Atlantic by Tania Gentic & Francisco LaRubia-Prado

Author:Tania Gentic & Francisco LaRubia-Prado
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Frances Inglis Calderón, originally from Scotland and a resident of Boston, traveled and lived in Mexico from 1839 to 1842, as the wife of the first Spanish diplomat received in Mexico after independence. As the above quote reveals, her status as a foreigner aroused suspicion in the U.S. but also in Spain and Mexico. More recently, she has been a controversial object of attention. On the one hand, critics like Jean Franco remarked upon her imperialist gaze, condescending and laden with racial stereotypes. My graduate students , without exception, react viscerally to this imperialist gaze every time we read Life in Mexico in our seminars, and mainly with good reason. On the other hand, there are critics who, trying to read the letters against the grain and from a more generous perspective, have placed the writer in the identity crossroads of a multicultural subject, as an Englishwoman married to a Spanish resident in the U.S. and Mexico (Eva Lynn Jagoe, Amy Kaplan, Nina Gerassi Navarro, Nigel Leask). Some of them point to the nature of the epistolary text, written in situ, which makes it more fluid and susceptible to traces of the traveler’s displacements.

For my part, I think that once the reader overcomes the first barrier of the text (plagued by racist stereotypes) and patiently reaches the last page, it is possible to identify an aesthetic and ideological fluctuation in the traveler. This shift occurs gradually from the first to the second stay in Mexico City. In between, there is a season in the countryside. I would like to stress that Fanny Calderón’s change occurs between the two revolutions (or pronunciamientos) that the Calderóns witness in Mexico City. The time in the countryside operates as a catalyst for the change.

It is pertinent, then, to study the letters of Fanny Calderón paying attention to the chronotopes that shape the narrative. The countryside (undeveloped, rural, or wilderness areas outside Mexico City) appears here as subsidiary to her experience in the capital to the extent that the countryside is the quintessential site of the return to the primitive, where travelers reach a higher truth or a more perfect wisdom. There are great examples of this in travel literature, from the classics to the Romantics, including canonical figures like Rimbaud, Conrad, Hudson, and Borges.

The first pronunciamiento of the Federalists against President Anastasio Bustamente took place in July 1840, during the Calderóns’ first stay in Mexico City. During these months Fanny Calderón demonstrates her inability to interpret the political events, seeing them as mere commotion and spectacle. Clearly ignorant of the city’s habits and codes, Fanny Calderón also reveals her fear of its actors: the revolutionaries, servants, and vagrants. Mexico City overwhelms her. Her idealized and bookish vision of Tenochtitlan conquered by Cortés crumbles in the face of the everyday life of its people, where a chasm separates the rich from the poor and the proliferation of immigrants and the unemployed threatened to make the streets erupt with crime. Nineteenth-century post-independence Mexico was characterized by

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.