The Spirit of Modernism/o: Spanish-Language Newspapers, Literature, and Latinidad

John Alba Cutler
English
UC Berkeley

My manuscript, The Spirit of Modernism/o: Spanish-Language Newspapers, Literature, and Latinidad, gives an account of the rich and extensive archive of literature published in US Spanish-language newspapers in the early twentieth century. Almost one thousand Spanish language newspapers were published in the United States during the first decades of the twentieth century, ranging from large daily newspapers like La Prensa of San Antonio of Los Angeles to weekly newspapers like Gráfico of New York. Virtually all of these newspapers regularly published literature—poetry, short stories, crónicas, lyric essays, and serialized novels. The Spirit of Modernism/o makes a series of interconnected claims about this archive: first, that newspapers were the most important literary institutions for Latino/a/x communities during the first half of the twentieth century; second, that Latin American modernismo was the most significant aesthetic influence on Hispanophone newspaper literature; and third, that the outpouring of creative expression in these newspapers reveals literature’s essential, if precarious, role as a spiritual bulwark against the fragmenting and alienating pressures of modernity. The Spirit of Modernism/o is thus an archival investigation and an interrogation of the relationship of literature to modernity.