An Aymara in Filadelfia: Vicente Pazos Kanki and Early Latino/a/x Literature

In 1818, the newspaper writer and editor Vicente Pazos Kanki published a pamphlet in Philadelphia defending Spanish-American revolutionaries against the aggression of the United States. This talk traces how Pazos Kanki, born into an Aymara family, entered the world of print culture in what was then known as "la famosa Filadelfia," the most important Spanish-language publishing center in the early United States. Filadelfia publication led to the rise of a nineteenth-century trans-American public sphere that was simultaneously revolutionary and elite. These texts help us develop a conception of early Latino literature with connections to both the United States and Spanish-American territories. What were the elements contributing to those connections and what types of questions do they raise for the writing of Latinx literary history?

Rodrigo Lazo is Professor of English; Director of the Humanities Core Program; and a faculty affiliate of the Department of Chicano/Latino Studies at The University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). His new book, Letters from Filadelfia: Early Latino Literature and the Trans-American Elite, is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press. He is co-editor of The Latino Nineteenth Century (New York University Press, 2016), which offers a corrective to the Anglophone and nation-based emphasis of American literary history.