Hispanizing the California Bohemians: San Francisco Print Culture in the 1860s and the Question of the First Mexican-American Novel

20 May Hispanizing the California Bohemians: San Francisco Print Culture in the 1860s and the Question of the First Mexican-American Novel

Kirsten Silva Gruesz, UCSC
Friday, May 20 / 1:30 PM
South Hall 2635

Aurelio Luis Gallardo, a liberal exile from Maximilian’s Mexico, serialized his now-forgotten novel Adah, o el amor de un ángel in 1868-69 in San Francisco, where he was an active participant in local politics and print culture. Part melancholy romance, part picaresque adventure tale, Adah encourages a reappraisal of the role that the multilingual press played in the development of US regionalism. It also begs the question of what it would mean to consider Adah as the first Mexican-American novel: what would such a retroactive claim for a Latino literary tradition reveal about the exigencies of the present moment?
Kirsten Silva Gruesz‘s work focuses on cultural and political relations between the U.S. and the rest of the Americas. Among many other publications, she is the author of the 2002 book Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing.
Sponsored by the History of Books and Material Texts RFG, the Chicano/a Studies Department, the History Department and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.