This chapter offers an account of literature’s intervention in the money debates of the early twentieth-century United States. It explores the corrosive effects of banking crises and the fear of corrupt trusts through the realist anti-banking novels of writers such as Upton Sinclair; the persistent social shibboleths of gold versus paper money in the naturalism of Edith Wharton and Frank Norris; the teleological failures of speculation depicted in the caricatures of F. Scott Fitzgerald; and the possibilities and limitations of the crisis that precipitated the New Deal, as suggested by the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston. The chapter also explores, through the writing of Mina Loy, the alternative money debates that were receiving increased attention in this period.

In the late eighteenth century, the viceroyalty of New Spain extended its control over Alta California, introducing secular cultural practices like music, dance, and drama which gained popularity among traders, soldiers, and hybrid communities, blurring the traditional boundaries of race, gender, and class. These societal shifts foreshadowed the forthcoming wars of independence (1810–1821) and clashed with missionary liturgy, accentuating the growing divide between monastic orders and secular society. This chapter focuses on the censorship of Fermín de Reygadas’s play, Astucias por heredar, un sobrino a un tío ("Tricks to Inherit: a Nephew and His Uncle"). Initially censored in the viceroyalty, the play was later transported and performed in Alta California, only to be concealed by Hubert Bancroft, who omitted all references to it in his History of California. This play survived two forms of censorship: Spanish colonial moral censorship and Anglo-American disregard towards a text and a performance that did not fit his racialized historiographic narratives. The chapter also explores the play’s staging in Villa de Branciforte near the Santa Cruz mission and concludes by comparing two performances of the play, considering the role of language, location, and early Californio history in contemporary decolonial reenactments.

This chapter explores the complex monetary environment of the United States from the Revolutionary War to the earliest years of the nation. Analyzing a wide variety of political, economic, and imaginative texts that attempted to explain and solve the monetary challenges of the new country – especially the collapsing value of the paper money created to fund the war – the chapter calls attention to the important tension between the representation of money as abstract symbol and as familiar object. For example, arguments in support of and in opposition to the redemption of Continental currency engage both complex monetary theories and allegorical stories about talking coins. Reading popular literature about United States money in the 1770s and 1780s thus reveals a community that was comfortable navigating a diverse array of monetary forms even as the unification of monetary functions made the concept of money increasingly abstract.

This chapter moves beyond a captivity scholarship based almost entirely on the experiences of White or White-descent captives and their Indian captors to study an account of nineteenth-century borderland captivity in the US Southwest, where – contrary to what the plethora of Anglo captivity scholarship indicates – most captives were of Mexican and/or Indigenous descent. To do so, I read Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and the Goodness of God (1682) alongside María Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would’ve Thought It? (1872). This Mexican-American historical romance novel and, I would add, fictionalization of an Indian captivity narrative, retells the history of Mexican dispossession at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War through fictional Mohave captive and emerging Mexican American elite, Lola Medina. Within a broader rethinking of the captivity narrative genre, I argue that captivity narratives helped produced proto-Latinx subjects as racially discrete individuals, even while the factual condition of nineteenth-century captivity forced individuals of Latin-American descent into ambiguous relation with other racialized communities.

Although several scholars have expanded their selection criteria when editing anthologies of Latinx literature, they rarely include writings by colonial Creoles. Focusing on Francisco de Florencia (1620–1695), this chapter argues that his 1694 provincial chronicle of the Jesuits in New Spain deserves to be studied with other colonial texts that have been described as “symbolic precursors” to Latinx writings. Unlike other Spanish explorers and missionaries who traveled to the Spanish Borderlands, Florencia was born there; his hometown was Saint Augustine, he lived most of his life in Mexico City, and he spent almost a decade in southern Europe representing his religious province. Florencia’s frontier crossings offer early modern examples of border crossings, themes that emerge in the ways he deals with transnational experiences and influences, questions of belonging, and a sense of space. Even though sacred (or ecclesiastical) history is often overlooked in studies of Latinx literature, an analysis of the ways in which Florencia engages with earlier Spanish accounts of the Jesuit missions in La Florida is a unique window onto Creole identities in the early modern Spanish world.

The Cambridge University Press Latinx Literature in Transition series is conceived, in part, as a response to the challenges that arise when thinking historically about the field of Latinx literary studies. This first volume in the series undertakes the particularly important task of questioning what have often been presented as the uncomplicated origins of Latinx literature – starting points defined by US history and geography that belie the multiple eras, geographies, cultures, and cosmologies that gave rise to “Latinx” as a storied and complex identity spanning multiple centuries and places. By defining and discussing these complexities and accentuating the transits, transactions, and transcreations of/by multiple peoples over time, we hope to upset the familiar narrative and invoke a much more inclusive, more plural, and less functional origin story for Latinx literature and its creators. Through a focus on very early literary expression and surviving texts, we push the boundaries of what has most commonly been understood and studied as the “history” of Latinx literature.

Here we examine the rise of Senate party caucuses. As we show, senators met in caucus only infrequently in the first half-century of the chamber’s history. The most notable use of early caucuses was by Republicans in the two chambers, who gathered on a quadrennial basis to nominate their presidential candidate. But, in 1841–45, led by the Whigs, the modern Senate party caucuses were born. In that brief period of time, senators began utilizing caucuses on a regular basis, both to conduct legislative business and to organize the membership of the Senate’s standing committees. In later years, first in 1856–62, then in the 1870s, Republicans and Democrats gave new structure and permanence to their caucuses. They created formal positions in the caucus, such as a regular caucus chairman, and caucus committees, including committees on committees, campaign committees, and ad hoc committees on the order of business. The emergence of the Senate caucus in 1841–45 coincided with the rise of a competitive two-party system, both in the electorate and in the Senate.

With the establishment of the national party convention, the process used to select the delegates to the national convention became of paramount importance. State and local party conventions selected the national convention delegates, but those conventions were often conducted in deeply undemocratic ways, excluding many party voters or using parliamentary rules such as winner-take-all and/or the unit rule to marginalize political minorities in the state. Nevertheless, the Democratic Party expressly endorsed the use of winner-take-all and unit-rule voting in the nomination process, which allowed party bosses to control the composition (and therefore candidate preference) of their state delegation. The Republicans were initially more hostile to boss control, forbidding the unit rule, but they, too, ultimately endorsed winner-take-all delegate selections in 1916. Moreover, both parties routinely seated delegates from states in which the convention process had been run in an undemocratic fashion. Thus, for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the party convention process was run by a small coterie of party bosses, who ultimately chose the party’s nominee.

Set during the Muslim slave uprising of 1835 in Bahia, Brazil, this chapter tells part of the story of the Muslim Atlantic. It offers a close reading of two talismans that Bahian authorities confiscated from the bodies of the slain rebels and the homes of the arrested rebels. This chapter approaches these talismans, which were composed in Arabic by Muslim clerics in Bahia, as Arabic documents and posits that they signify the endurance of Muslim letters in the New World and the Muslim Atlantic. More than offering protection for the wearers, these talismans also provide insights into the spiritual, political, and even existential wonderings of those involved in the rebellion. More broadly, these talismans both elucidate the African Muslims’ faith and disrupt our understanding of what constitutes a text in general, and specifically as part of Luso-Brazilian literature. In doing so, this chapter disrupts the Catholic hegemony of the Latinx religious imaginary by expanding the religious and racial connotations of “Latinidad” to include Islam and African Muslims.