Archival Formations and the Universal Sentiment

This chapter examines the life and writings of Eusebio Guiteras (1823–93), who lived for twenty-five years in Philadelphia. Guiteras captured American life and culture in his travel diaries of the 1840s–1880s, and he translated Rudo Ensayo, a work by the eighteenth-century priest Juan Nentvig (1713–68) that details the evangelization mission of the Jesuits in what is now the American Southwest, but was then northern New Spain. Contextualizing the production and circulation of the multiple editions of Nentvig’s text in the nineteenth century, specifically one by the well-known antiquarian Thomas Buckingham Smith (1810–71), this Latina/o translation advocates for a constructive place for the Catholic Church in the US and Cuba. This advocacy must be understood in light of the translation’s underlying racial politics. Following his source text and the political designs of the editors of the Records of the American Catholic Historical Society (1894), in which the translation appeared, Guiteras simplistically and erroneously depicts the pacification of Native Americans in New Spain as a compassionate enterprise. In his travel diary, Un invierno en Nueva York (n.d.), Guiteras transposes this spiritual enterprise to the Cuban context, in which the place of Afro Cubans was being debated in the 1880s and 1890s on the island and in the US. In doing so, he envisions Catholic priests and Catholicism as agents for the pacification and assimilation of Afro Cubans in Cuba’s future republic while also arguing for a parallel and positive role for the Catholic Church in fashioning a culturally integrated United States.