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.

This volume approaches Latinx literatures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the prismatic lens of modernity. Foregrounding from the outset that there is no single Latinx experience, we understand Latinx modernities as multiple and multiplying. Latinx literary modernities constellate the coloniality of US domination, the rapid and often traumatic social changes wrought by new technologies, the displacements associated with domestic revolutions and international warfare, and the innovation of literary forms commensurate with the spiritual yearnings of people on the margins of society. Our volume assumes an organization based on conceptual categories of US and Latin American modernities with the intent of highlighting emergent approaches to Latinx literatures. These conceptual categories – space, being, time, form, and labor – allow scholars working on different national groups across different time periods to be in more direct conversation with one another without assuming that they are telling the same story. Our categories make visible surprising connections, illuminate new methods, and push back against the coloniality of aesthetic models that limit the conditions of possibility for Latinx literature.