Latina/o Translations as Historiography

Miguel Teurbe Tolón (1823–57) is a figure well-known in Cuban history because of his landmark contribution to the island’s cultural and political life: he is credited with designing the nation’s flag. Tolón, however, also captures contemporary attention, because, first, he rendered for the first time in Spanish one of the most influential histories of the US that was published in his day, Emma Willard’s Abridged History of the United States. Second, the specific circumstances of Tolón’s historical moment signal the cultural importance of translation as a site not only for identifying the movement of cultural ideas across supposed cultural boundaries, but also for the mutual imbrication of supposedly different cultural worlds. Third, taking into account Willard’s intended audience for this translation—it was to serve as a US history textbook for Spanish-speaking inhabitants of the newly acquired Southwest territories and as a book for learning Spanish for US readers—an analysis of Tolón’s rendering situates this translation on the Latino Continuum. By critically engaging Willard’s vision of the newly acquired Southwest and California territories, Tolón’s translation practice provides an early political critique of Manifest Destiny and US expansionism. Tolón’s rendering reveals precisely that his is a Latina/o translation that, moving between English and Spanish and through Cuba, the US, and Mexico, constructs a Latina/o historiography, one that recognizes the degree of mutual imbrication of their peoples and literatures of the period. It also serves as a point of departures for reconceptualizing the intersection between American, Latin American, Cuban, and Latinx studies.