UC Santa Cruz

To date, there is a dearth of scholarship on the intellectual and mercantile networks that unified the ocean the west coast of the hemisphere; this is especially striking in context of the hemispheric and oceanic “turn” in American studies. Here, I begin to redress this absence by assembling an archive of work by Independence-era politicians and writers from throughout North and South America who envisioned a geographically and ideologically “western” ocean, which I call the Latin Pacific. From the end of the 16th century to the middle of the 19th century, the Latin Pacific was portrayed as a cohesive region, a space of abundant resources and the domain of interconnected traders and travelers. This geographic imaginary inspired the literature of writers such as Vicente Perez Rosales, Herman Melville, and Henry Dana Jr, who willed this space into being through language, oftentimes in the futurist rhetoric of the frontier.