TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World

(English) This article considers late 19th-century U.S.-Mexican integration through the travel chronicles of two writers of Mexico’s political elite, Viaje a los Estados Unidos (1877) by Guillermo Prieto and En Tierra Yankee (1898) by Justo Sierra, with attention to their analysis of the infrastructures and built environment that sustained US imperial expansion. Critics have conventionally analyzed Latin American travel literature in relation to discourses of national identity, nation-building, the European colonial gaze, or the autobiographical “I” (el “yo autobiográfico”). By contrast, this study follows the “infrastructural turn” in cultural studies and Raymond William’s concept of “structures of feeling” to focus on the writers’ attention to ports, ships, railroads, telegraphs, newspapers, and cityscapes as instruments of colonial and racial administration of the conquered Native and Mexican populations. These writers examined the material roots of the continental transition from the Hispanic Empire’s northern frontier to the American West, in part to offer an alternative to racialized narratives of Anglo-Saxon superiority. While Prieto grounds his critique of U.S. imperial expansion in his fading vision of republican nationalism, Sierra fervently denounces U.S.-style capitalism and imperial expansion in the Caribbean through an emerging discourse of pan-Hispanism.