Félix Varela’s Hemispheric Interventions

This chapter recovers the transnational and hemispheric interests and influences of the Catholic priest Félix Varela (1788–1853), who lived for almost thirty years in the US and was nicknamed the “Father of the Irish” during his lifetime. It challenges the fractured reading of Varela’s archive in the scholarly literature, where he is normally studied only as an influential Cuban philosopher, his impact on US history having passed almost without note, and fills this lacuna by illustrating the manner in which Varela played a key role in the Protestant-Catholic debates of the 1830s–1840s and in the secularization of the public school system of New York City. Varela’s religious-ethical works Cartas a Elpidio (1835, 1838) demonstrate how these debates facilitated the emergence of minority politics in the US and the important role of Latina/os to that emergence. Nowhere is this more evident than in Varela’s annotated translation of Thomas Jefferson’s Manual of Parliamentary Practice, which exhibits a hemispheric reach and significance. It was intended for Spanish-speaking residents of the US, for readers in the nascent republics of Latin America and in colonial Cuba. An examination of Varela’s US archive, beyond his supposed authorship of Jicoténcatl (1826), locates Varela, on a Latino Continuum that reveals these early Latina/o writers as cultural actors shaping the very foundation of US history while also engaging broader ideas in Latin American political and cultural life. It thereby fundamentally challenges contemporary scholars to rethink the still existing divides between American, Latin American, Cuban, and Latinx studies.