José Julián Martí Pérez (1853-1895) seems to have known from a very young age that racial difference and discrimination in Cuba, and its use by Whites as a mechanism for social division, were the greatest obstacles to overcome in the island’s quest for independence from Spain – and especially for the creation of a modern, legally and socially egalitarian country. However, his writing has traditionally been classified as literature, even though that same corpus was meant to “do work in the world,” not just be archived, gather dust, or be dissected for its literary value. His writing was performative in that it was not just descriptive. He believed that language could change the world, not deterministically or relatively, but by resolving contradictions such as the dichotomies that separated people by origin, skin color, ethnicity, culture, nationality, religion, and language. Ultimately, it is the rhetorical Martí, the illocutionary and perlocutionary force of his written and spoken words, that needs to be further examined if we are to fully appreciate the transformative potential of many of his writing.

This chapter attends to contemporary Latinx adaptations of early modern English drama and theater to theorize how a hegemonic playwright such as Shakespeare can be adapted as Latinx theater Cuban-American playwright Carlos-Zenen Trujillo’s 2019 play, The Island in Winter or, La Isla en Invierno (an adaptation of The Winter’s Tale), serves as a case study of the multimodal process of transnational theatrical bilanguaging, or the experience of living between languages. I argue that the currency of adapting Shakespeare for Latinx today is in the possibility of moving from a historical memory that recolonizes Latinx to an active site of Latinx temporality as worldmaking. Trujillo’s The Island in Winter as a process of epistemic disobedience disenfranchises anti-Black racism from theatrical representations of Cuban culture by integrating African Indigenous rituals into one of Shakespeare’s stories. It is through this process that cultural narratives are redrawn and reenacted, while gaps in the Western canon are exposed.

This chapter locates an important constellation of Latinx literary modernities in the editorial offices and print shops of New York City’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish-language press. In contrast to familiar expressions of literary modernity in Spanish and English centered on literary autonomy, those of interest in this chapter pursued the possibilities of an expanding and increasingly interconnected world of print for achieving democracy and social justice. In New York City, that pursuit began in the context of Cuba’s and Puerto Rico’s anticolonial struggle against Spain – in the form it took in the 1880s and 1890s as José Martí built the coalition that organized Cuba’s final independence war with Spain. Some of his collaborators, including Rafael Serra and Sotero Figueroa, made Cuba’s revolutionary movement a source of ambitious thinking about the interrelationship of modern media, democracy, and social justice. Their ideas help to reveal continuities that run through early twentieth-century Spanish-language periodicals in New York City and their late nineteenth-century predecessors – including those associated with the literary movement of modernismo. Across those periods, Latinx editors and writers launched visionary and largely understudied innovations designed to make modern media a means of enabling participation in creating just democracies.

With a focus on Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, this chapter examines the sense of belatedness in abolitionist and postabolitionist literature published between the 1860s and the 1930s. Belatedness implied an affective relationship to the global temporality of abolition – a way of feeling time as shame that shaped literature in long-lasting ways. Writers like José Martí and Machado de Assis reflected on the apparently anomalous status of their nations, where slavery was not abolished until 1886 and 1888 respectively. By analyzing canonical literature in light of the Black public spheres that emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century, this chapter explores questions such as the rejection of African cultures, Whitening ideologies, the fantasy of the submissive slave, the myths and realities of racial democracy, Maroonage, and other forms of slave resistance. Other writers analyzed include Maria Firmina dos Reis, Antônio de Castro Alves, Alfonso Henriques de Lima Barreto, Martín Morúa Delgado, and Francisco Calcagno.

Latin Americanism was a topic of intense intellectual scrutiny and political and social activism at the turn of the twentieth century. The rise of the United States as a global power triggered a wide range of debates on the idea present and future of Latin America as an integrated historical and cultural entity. By exploring the work of José Martí and José E. Rodó, who imagined Latin Americanism within the limits of the pedagogical sphere, as well as contributions of Manuel Ugarte and the leaders of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), who attempted to transform it into a militant movement connected to politics on the streets, this chapter shows both the possibilities and limitations of a university-based reformist project in constant search of expanding its social bases and institutional support. Issues of gender bias, language dominance, and ethnic hierarchies are at the center of this discussion about the challenges that Latin Americanism has faced over time.

This chapter argues that while New York’s Cuban and Puerto Rican communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cultivated a Spanish-language press to address national crises, the periodicals they produced also fostered transnational networks, Latin American solidarity, a critical hemispheric consciousness, and an early US Latino discourse. Through an overview and analysis of the periodicals, the chapter outlines national concerns while underscoring the periodicals’ transnational dimensions. Illustrated magazines, for example, circulated throughout Latin America and conceptualized the region based on cultural affinities promoting a Hispanophone audience, while hemispheric collaboration resulted in the founding of Latin American periodicals in New York. Periodicals of the Ten Years War (1868–1878) anticipate the criticisms of US expansionism and the immigrant narrative associated with José Martí and contemporary US Latino literature respectively. Lastly, Jesús Colón’s sketches examine US and Puerto Rican racial paradigms, demonstrating the divergence between these cultural constructs.