Politics, Romance, and a Lost Manuscript

Institute for Ethnic Studies Author

11/06/2024 Added

9 Plays

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Politics, Romance, and a Lost Manuscript panel discussion.

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[00:00:00.000]Good evening, I'm Erin Hannes, Curator for Academic and Campus Engagement at Sheldon
[00:00:12.440]Museum of Art, and I'm delighted to welcome you all for this evening's program, Politics,
[00:00:18.520]Romance, and a Lost Manuscript: Recovering the Secret History of Key West.
[00:00:25.000]I'd like to begin by acknowledging that Sheldon Museum of Art is part of the University of
[00:00:30.480]Nebraska, a public land-grant institution with campuses and programs that reside on
[00:00:36.120]the past, present, and future homelands of the Pawnee, Ponca, Ottawa, Missouri, Omaha,
[00:00:43.000]Dakota, Lakota, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Kaw peoples, as well as the relocated Ho-Chunk,
[00:00:51.240]Iowa, and Sac, and Fox peoples.
[00:00:55.000]While we cannot change the past, we can change our understanding of history in order to change
[00:01:00.620]how we move forward.
[00:01:02.880]Such knowledge and the centering of indigenous peoples allows us to better understand the
[00:01:07.280]consequences of centuries of displacement, violence, settlement, and survival, which
[00:01:13.460]continue to inform our present and future.
[00:01:18.540]Now I want to also thank the sponsors of tonight's event, and there are many, the Institute for
[00:01:24.520]Ethnic Studies, Latinx and Latin American Studies, Department of English, Department
[00:01:29.760]of History, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Mexican American Student
[00:01:34.640]Association, and Sheldon Museum of Art.
[00:01:37.760]Thank you for your support.
[00:01:40.140]You'll see beside me there are seven scholars gathered on stage, all of whom are eager to
[00:01:45.440]share their insights into the groundbreaking new volume, "Tears and Flowers: A Poet of
[00:01:50.600]Migration in Old Key West."
[00:01:52.940]So let me very briefly tell you how I feel.
[00:01:54.040]I'll briefly tell you how this evening's program will work.
[00:01:57.200]And essentially, I will introduce Joy Castro.
[00:02:01.220]She will then introduce the other panelists and kick off the conversation.
[00:02:06.080]So without further ado, Joy Castro, seated on the far end of the stage there, is the
[00:02:12.920]award-winning author of four novels, a collection of short fiction, an essay collection, and
[00:02:18.940]a memoir.
[00:02:20.120]The Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies.
[00:02:23.560]She edits the innovative nonfiction series Machete at the Ohio State University Press
[00:02:35.200]and directs the Institute for Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
[00:02:39.900]Is this on?
[00:02:48.740]Is it on?
[00:02:49.740]It is on.
[00:02:50.740]Okay.
[00:02:51.740]Wonderful.
[00:02:52.740]Thank you so much, Erin.
[00:02:53.080]Thank you for being such an excellent planning partner throughout this process.
[00:02:57.600]We really appreciate that.
[00:02:58.700]We really appreciate the land acknowledgment.
[00:03:01.200]Land acknowledgments are incredibly important, and so are tangible actions.
[00:03:06.000]So we also want to thank the dozens of people who have contributed to the Institute's initiative
[00:03:10.740]to found an indigenous garden here on city campus, which will support experiential learning
[00:03:16.880]in indigenous studies, beautify and educate our campus, and serve
[00:03:22.600]as a tangible form of recognition, honor, and welcome to Native students, staff, faculty,
[00:03:29.080]families, and visitors here.
[00:03:31.780]We want to thank again all of our co-sponsors for the event,
[00:03:35.080]some of whom are here in the audience, especially MASA.
[00:03:39.120]It is great to have student interest and support, and a special thanks to MASA
[00:03:44.720]for their sponsorship, three of the books
[00:03:47.900]that are upstairs are designated for you for free, so if there's a student
[00:03:52.120]who would like to get a book and like to get it signed by Rye and me,
[00:03:56.360]whether for yourself or as a holiday gift for a parent, et cetera,
[00:04:00.620]please just tell Stephanie Boudel, who's up there handling the book sales,
[00:04:05.440]and she knows about that, and we want to thank Steph, too,
[00:04:08.480]who's not in here with us.
[00:04:10.400]We also want to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities
[00:04:13.380]for the grant that made the publication of this book possible,
[00:04:17.280]and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences for providing research funds
[00:04:21.640]to chairs and directors, which also helped.
[00:04:24.680]We thank Dean Mark Button for his strong and vocal leadership
[00:04:28.280]on inclusive excellence throughout the college,
[00:04:30.680]and his support for the Institute for Ethnic Studies,
[00:04:34.320]an interdisciplinary academic unit comprising faculty
[00:04:39.560]from across seven different departments.
[00:04:41.900]And it was founded over 50 years ago,
[00:04:44.000]so it was one of the earliest in the nation
[00:04:46.160]to focus on issues of racial, ethnic, and indigenous diversity.
[00:04:51.160]We offer a major, seven minors, and graduate specializations
[00:04:56.160]at the MA and PhD levels, as well as co-curricular programming.
[00:05:00.900]And along with the land acknowledgement,
[00:05:02.800]we want to acknowledge, too, that we are here gathering
[00:05:06.280]at a very particular time, as well as in a particular place.
[00:05:10.380]And we know that this is an intense moment for so many
[00:05:13.280]of us, no matter what your concerns or commitments are,
[00:05:17.020]we know that this is an intense and heightened moment.
[00:05:20.680]So we thank you for taking time to be here with us tonight
[00:05:23.820]for this celebration and discussion.
[00:05:26.520]I'm very proud to direct an institute
[00:05:29.460]that proactively seeks to promote understanding,
[00:05:32.560]awareness, justice, and peace
[00:05:36.200]through outstanding classroom teaching, groundbreaking,
[00:05:38.860]scholarly research, and public dialogues like this one.
[00:05:43.200]Thank you for coming.
[00:05:44.700]It is also an incredible thrill and honor to assemble
[00:05:49.400]so much brilliance
[00:05:50.200]on one stage, it is a joy every day to work
[00:05:52.800]with these colleagues.
[00:05:54.100]And so I'll first introduce them
[00:05:56.380]and provide a very quick overview of the book project
[00:05:59.180]and then we'll talk together until about 6:45,
[00:06:02.880]at which time we'll move the conversation up into the atrium
[00:06:05.940]for informal discussion and more chat.
[00:06:09.860]Okay, all right.
[00:06:11.860]Our UNL colleague, Dr. Luis Otoniel-Rosa is a novelist,
[00:06:16.500]poet, and critical theorist, right here,
[00:06:19.720]working on Latin American experimental literature
[00:06:22.520]and revolutionary movements.
[00:06:24.620]A co-founder of the Loud Readers Trade School,
[00:06:27.500]available at loudreaders.com, he is the author of two novels,
[00:06:31.340]a scholarly monograph on Borges and Macedonia that was published
[00:06:35.640]in Argentina and Chile,
[00:06:37.700]the collaborative experimental bilingual flipbook Kalima,
[00:06:41.040]the forthcoming novel The Cat in the Downward Spiral,
[00:06:43.580]and a forthcoming volume of poetry as well.
[00:06:46.720]He is associate professor of Spanish and Latin American
[00:06:49.240]Studies here at UNL, as well as our associate director
[00:06:53.180]of the Institute for Ethnic Studies.
[00:06:56.280]Luis comes to us from Puerto Rico, a floating island
[00:07:02.260]of beauty, culture, history, political courage,
[00:07:09.400]and a rich intellectual and literary tradition
[00:07:13.100]that is even now being digitized and preserved by graduates
[00:07:16.600]of our English and Ethnic Studies
[00:07:18.760]doctoral programs, Dr. Linda Garcia Merchant
[00:07:21.860]and Dr. Claire Jimenez.
[00:07:23.540]Not here tonight, but we want to shout them out anyway.
[00:07:26.440]Claire was the winner of our inaugural Grajera Award,
[00:07:29.780]and their team won a $1.35 million Mellon grant
[00:07:33.780]for the Puerto Rican Literature Project, which focuses
[00:07:36.940]on a fragile Caribbean literary archive similar
[00:07:41.020]to the one we discussed tonight.
[00:07:44.480]Poet and translator Dr. Katie Maria is the assistant director
[00:07:48.280]of composition in the English department here at UNL
[00:07:51.280]and was the second winner of the Institute
[00:07:53.860]for Ethnic Studies Grajera Award,
[00:07:56.060]which honors our co-founder, Dr. Ralph Grajera,
[00:07:59.460]who was a professor of Chicano literature
[00:08:02.460]in the English department here over 50 years ago.
[00:08:08.360]Katie's award-winning debut poetry collection and all
[00:08:11.700]of their books can be found up on the book table as well,
[00:08:14.680]display copies, so you can take a look at them, her award-winning
[00:08:17.800]debut poetry collection Sugar Work was recommended
[00:08:20.600]by the New York Times and her translations of Luis's creative
[00:08:24.340]work and the work of Puerto Rican poet Nicole Cecilia
[00:08:28.440]Delgado can be found in literary magazines such as
[00:08:31.520]Fence, Waxwing, and Guernica.
[00:08:34.780]Our UNL colleague Dr. Laura Munoz, Associate Professor of
[00:08:38.460]History and Ethnic Studies, specializes in 19th and 20th
[00:08:42.600]century Latinx history in the US borderlands and the Great Plains.
[00:08:47.320]She's the author of the scholarly monograph "Desert Dreams: Mexican Arizona and the Politics
[00:08:53.980]of Educational Equality" from the University of Pennsylvania Press, recently out, and she
[00:08:59.500]is currently working on a history of Latinx Nebraska.
[00:09:04.380]Literary scholar, poet, and translator Dr. Ingrid Robin, UNL Associate Professor in the
[00:09:08.820]Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and Ethnic Studies, specializes in the literatures
[00:09:14.020]and cultures of the Hispanic Caribbean with a focus on the
[00:09:16.840]early 20th century.
[00:09:18.560]A working poet and the author of a scholarly monograph about Cuban writer Jose La Samalima,
[00:09:25.080]she's also the translator to Portuguese of the first anthology of poems by Cuban writer
[00:09:30.540]Lorenzo Garcia Vega in a language other than Spanish.
[00:09:35.780]Historian Dr. James Garza, UNL Associate Professor of History and Ethnic Studies, specializes
[00:09:41.140]in the history of 19th and 20th century Mexico, the author of a monograph about Porfirian
[00:09:46.360]Mexico, which also appeared in a Spanish language edition, and the co-editor of two collections.
[00:09:56.280]He's currently working on a cultural and social history of the draining of the lakes in the
[00:10:02.140]valley of Mexico in the late 19th century.
[00:10:05.180]Last, but definitely not least, our special guest and my collaborator on this book is
[00:10:11.160]Dr. Rye Johnson, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana
[00:10:15.880]University, Bloomington. Dr. Johnson is the translator of "Because I Want to See
[00:10:22.240]the Sea," a collection by the Galician poet Rosalia de Castro, no relation so
[00:10:28.480]far as we know, and the author of the scholarly monograph "Women and Water:
[00:10:33.920]Fluxes of the Feminine in the Nineteenth Century," which is currently under final
[00:10:38.640]review at the University of Toronto Press. So congratulations and fingers
[00:10:42.560]crossed. So it really is fantastic to have
[00:10:45.400]this assemblage of expertise and brilliance on stage. We're here this
[00:10:53.120]evening, as you know, to discuss the new book. It's a bilingual facing page,
[00:10:57.280]annotated, peer-reviewed, I want to say addiction again, edition, "Tears and
[00:11:03.720]Flowers: A Poet of Migration in Old Key West." It was published yesterday by the
[00:11:08.080]University Press of Florida. Yay! And it restores
[00:11:14.920]to public view the poetry collection "Lagrimas y Flores," and I want to show
[00:11:19.600]you, this is the only extant copy that we know of in the world. It's a very fragile
[00:11:27.480]archive of literary production in Key West at that time, in 1918 when this came
[00:11:33.740]out. Tampa, Key West, and Havana formed three points on what was then called the
[00:11:38.800]Tobacco Triangle, produced a hundred million and more cigars every year.
[00:11:44.440]And we'll talk a little bit more about that, but it was by the Galician-Cuban
[00:11:50.220]American author Feliciano Castro, who was my grandfather, and it was nearly lost
[00:11:56.320]forever thanks to Rai's extraordinary work, grants from the National Endowment
[00:12:01.680]for the Humanities, and the vision of University of Tampa professors James
[00:12:05.920]Lopez and Dennis Ray, who founded the NEH Summer Institute, where Rai and I met
[00:12:11.020]and started working together, and the editor-in-chief at the
[00:12:13.960]University Press of Florida, Stephanie Hunter, who does not usually publish
[00:12:17.500]poetry, so we're really thrilled that she took a risk on this one. This beautiful
[00:12:22.660]and incredibly teachable collection is now in print again, and its restoration
[00:12:28.240]makes an important intervention in Latinx and US literary history. I also,
[00:12:34.700]since he's here, I want to thank my son Gray, who translated a related text that
[00:12:38.820]we quote at length on page 30. That's kind of special. Thank you. And because they'll be
[00:12:43.480]watching this online later, I'd like to give special thanks to my family members
[00:12:48.040]Lourdes Caridad Castro, my Aunt Lou, hey Aunt Lou, and Tony Castro, my brother, and to
[00:12:53.500]thank our late father, Libano Castro, named after Lebanon, the most beautiful
[00:12:59.860]place that my grandfather Feliciano said he had ever seen. Our father cared enough
[00:13:06.800]about Lagrimas y Flores to keep it among his things until his death by suicide in 2002
[00:13:13.000]when my brother and I found it. And so in recovering part of this literary
[00:13:19.840]archive we're also recovering part of our family history and I could not be
[00:13:24.560]more grateful or more happy that this is this is happening and I hope that there
[00:13:29.500]will be no more of what Ana Menendez calls the great Cuban national pastime
[00:13:35.180]of self-annihilation. I hope that people will know their history, value their
[00:13:39.560]history, and value themselves.
[00:13:42.520]And with that, then, I'd like to open up the conversation to my distinguished colleagues.
[00:13:49.200]Is this on? Yeah, okay. So, okay, I'll try to be very brief, right? I study early 20th
[00:14:06.700]century Caribbean literature and culture and I would
[00:14:12.040]like to highlight the historical importance of this volume. And I'll
[00:14:15.880]explain that in the most didactic way, right? When we think about the U.S.-Cuba
[00:14:20.080]relationships, we tend to move from 1898 to 1959 as if nothing had
[00:14:29.440]happened in between. When, actually, the Cuban community in the U.S., specifically
[00:14:35.800]in Florida, Key West, Tampa, grew exponentially during those first decades.
[00:14:41.560]of the 20th century, right? But we know almost nothing about the intellectual
[00:14:46.540]and literary community that existed there during that time. And when we read
[00:14:51.320]this book, just by the number of people that he quotes, one can tell there was a
[00:14:58.600]vibrant intellectual community there that he was absolutely trying to please
[00:15:04.300]by showing his mastery of form and language. And it's funny that Joy
[00:15:09.700]mentioned the triangle, right?
[00:15:11.080]Because it's not just US Cuba, it's US Cuba, Spain, back and forth, right?
[00:15:17.560]We had Spanish intellectuals coming to the Caribbean to teach, to give
[00:15:22.760]talks, and Caribbean scholars and writers going to Spain to study, like Feliciano
[00:15:28.600]Castro, and then all those people going to Florida, sometimes to teach, sometimes
[00:15:34.120]to work in tobacco factories. So there was a vibrant community whose cultural
[00:15:39.700]production got lost.
[00:15:40.600]So that was the first thing that caught my attention in this book. And the entire
[00:15:46.060]first part is what I would like to call civic poems. They're quite political,
[00:15:51.720]and it's funny when he says "my two nations," he's referring to Cuba and Spain,
[00:15:57.100]not Cuba and the U.S., which is interesting. He was a Republican in the
[00:16:01.960]Cuban sense of Republican at the time. And then the Maestro of Form. He
[00:16:10.120]showcases like full control of forms metric, I'm talking about metric, that
[00:16:20.080]were not even popular anymore, but he uses that strategically like say to pay
[00:16:26.140]homage to a figure like Jose Marti, or maybe this woman who worked in this
[00:16:30.880]theater, Rye Johnson here can talk a little more about that. So I think there
[00:16:36.360]are two dimensions, the historical one and the language,
[00:16:39.640]and how difficult it is to translate that kind of poetry.
[00:16:43.780]Yeah, let me fill in a biographical detail in that way. Feliciano was born in 1892 in
[00:16:49.720]Galicia in Spain and moved to Cuba, to Havana, when he was nine years old by
[00:16:56.320]himself with his godfather. And so he was raised there and then educated in Rome,
[00:17:02.600]interestingly, and then moved back to Cuba. So he was in Cuba as a young man and went
[00:17:09.160]then to Tampa in 1916 and then by 1917 was living in Key West. And he spent the
[00:17:16.360]rest of his life until 1982 when he died in Key West, Florida. I want to add
[00:17:28.060]something to that and I mean I was fascinated by his story and I
[00:17:34.780]immediately spotted some of the comparisons
[00:17:38.680]and his identification also as an "Indiano" which is a person who was an immigrant
[00:17:46.600]from Spain, specifically from Galicia. Most of these immigrants were
[00:17:53.120]from Galicia who came to the Americas in the late 19th century.
[00:18:00.400]A lot of them went to Mexico but also to Cuba and to Colombia to seek their fortune.
[00:18:08.200]But his story was very different because he came, obviously, for different reasons.
[00:18:14.320]And he ended up in what I saw and what was, to me, stood out, was the factory, right?
[00:18:26.340]The tobacco factory. And immediately I thought of, when I was reading it, I thought of Angel
[00:18:32.040]Rama's book, The Lettered City. And I thought about the factory itself, the lettered factory,
[00:18:37.720]and the production of these poems and the fact that he was a lector, he was reading
[00:18:44.900]the stories, he was reading material to these workers.
[00:18:50.280]And I connected that to this universe of newspapers, this universe of ideas, this universe of literature
[00:19:02.620]that existed in Latin America at this time. That was not
[00:19:07.240]just read by the upper class, but was distributed and was read to everybody.
[00:19:19.160]So the ideas filtered down to people who could not read, but who understood the ideas of,
[00:19:28.120]let's say, independence, the ideas of that they were being oppressed, and they fought for these ideals.
[00:19:36.760]So, in terms of his poems that dealt with civic issues and identification with the country, right?
[00:19:46.200]Of course, there's also the poems about love letters, which we can love, which we could talk about later.
[00:19:55.320]But those ideas really stood out to me, and so the idea of the lettered factory really identified with that,
[00:20:06.280]and I thought, "Where else were there tobacco factories?"
[00:20:10.880]And that was very unique there, because the tobacco factories, for instance, in Mexico,
[00:20:16.680]they could not—the tobacco factories there, workers were not permitted,
[00:20:24.200]what I understand, were not permitted to hear any of these stories. There were restrictions on that.
[00:20:32.520]I was going to quickly fill in for the audience what the tradition of the lectores was,
[00:20:35.800]is that what you were going to do, Rai? Okay, so just super quickly, a lector was a person usually quite
[00:20:42.040]well educated who would be up on a wooden platform above the hundreds of cigar rollers working all
[00:20:50.040]day manually, and the lector, almost always a man but not always, would loudly read with all his
[00:20:58.200]might the news of the day, sometimes from several newspapers and in different languages, and then
[00:21:05.320]political theory, as James was saying, radical stuff at that time, like Marx and even like the
[00:21:12.360]anarchist Bakunin, yeah, and they would read this, and then after lunch they would read wonderful
[00:21:18.360]novels like Dickens, Count of Monte Cristo, Les Miserables, Don Quixote, right, so to keep every,
[00:21:26.360]it was kind of like a radio but a real person, and the difference was that the workers paid the lector
[00:21:34.840]the owner of the factory did not, so the workers took up like a dime every week and that went to the lector, right,
[00:21:44.280]so they auditioned the lector, they hired the lector, and they fired the lector if they didn't like what the lector was reading,
[00:21:50.520]and they would also bang on their work tables with their little knives, chavetas, to applaud so that the lector knew immediately what was landing with them, right,
[00:22:04.360]and then the lector could sometimes work that into his or her own writing that would then circulate among the transnational network of readers and thinkers.
[00:22:15.360]There is one other piece of the lector tradition and of this fabrica letrada that Meritz mentioned.
[00:22:24.960]While Feliciano was highly educated, the intellectual and literary communities in Tampa and Key West
[00:22:33.880]were hugely democratic in their production and they produced a lot of literary and cultural material.
[00:22:41.400]In the period when Castor was writing in Key West, there were about 20 different Spanish language periodicals
[00:22:49.400]being produced by the community and about 25 in Tampa.
[00:22:53.880]And while we maybe don't think about it today, the first point of publication for most literary production in the period,
[00:23:01.400]poetry, stories, even novels,
[00:23:03.400]novels broken up into pieces, was publication in newspapers.
[00:23:08.120]And then later you would go and you would gather up all of the poems that you had already published
[00:23:12.200]and you would put them into a book, which is what Castor did here.
[00:23:14.920]And so while he does have this really profound knowledge of meter,
[00:23:23.320]he's also existing within a community where literary production is not something that's like held up or elevated above the things that the people were doing.
[00:23:32.920]Not only the factory workers would listen to the lectores, but people would sometimes come and gather outside the windows of the factory to listen to the news, to maintain their political awareness.
[00:23:44.120]And in both Tampa and Key West, the mutual aid societies, which were generally sort of divided by national origin, which becomes a little bit complicated,
[00:23:55.240]but provided not only things like health insurance and life insurance, but also education.
[00:24:02.440]At a very high level, generally.
[00:24:05.000]And so these communities were very productive, both politically and in their literature.
[00:24:11.400]And a lot of that has been lost because it wasn't valued at the time by U.S. culture.
[00:24:18.120]And it also wasn't seen as important within the communities themselves because it was just part of what the community does is produce a prodigious amount of material.
[00:24:30.040]That literary
[00:24:31.960]and intellectual richness, I think, is one of the things that this book makes this book the most special, you know, most special.
[00:24:44.280]In particular, I want to piggyback on the lectores thing.
[00:24:47.320]I have four points.
[00:24:48.200]They're all about common poetry.
[00:24:50.280]That's my concept for the day.
[00:24:51.720]But I'm just going to make one.
[00:24:53.320]When I first got into UNL, my job talk was actually about readers in tobacco factories, right?
[00:25:00.280]I was
[00:25:01.480]giving a job talk about Luisa Capetillo, a Puerto Rican anarcho-feminist contemporary
[00:25:06.840]to Feliciano Castro because she was in Key West, of course.
[00:25:12.200]That was like the superstar lectora, right?
[00:25:17.000]You know?
[00:25:17.480]And I was amazed.
[00:25:18.600]I was like Joy says in the book.
[00:25:21.960]I, too, was a student of the avant-garde.
[00:25:24.120]I work on avant-garde modernist experimental literature, right?
[00:25:28.200]High literature, seeing for so.
[00:25:29.960]Very experimental.
[00:25:30.840]Very great.
[00:25:31.000]Very rare, right?
[00:25:32.680]But what amazed me about Delectores was that there was a completely different relationship
[00:25:38.280]with literature there.
[00:25:39.800]And in this book, what makes this book special is that completely different relationship
[00:25:45.240]with daily poetry, right?
[00:25:47.160]And Delectores, in particular, what is inspiring, you know, for historians, they say the workers
[00:25:54.200]in tobacco factories, for example, in Puerto Rico, the workers in tobacco factory knew
[00:25:59.640]Marx and Nietzsche.
[00:26:00.520]Before Marx and Nietzsche was being taught in the University of Puerto Rico.
[00:26:07.560]Isn't that absolutely amazing, right?
[00:26:10.120]And then we in the humanities are always complaining with all these neoliberal administrations
[00:26:15.240]of our universities that are depleting the humanities.
[00:26:18.040]And oh, my God, there's not going to be any history.
[00:26:21.160]Well, in tobacco factories, in the most exploitative capitalist factories ever, even their syndicates
[00:26:27.640]were able to organize intellectually.
[00:26:30.040]Right?
[00:26:31.040]And to have a cultural richness.
[00:26:33.040]Right?
[00:26:34.040]That's super inspiring and that lets us know that poetry, that history, doesn't depend
[00:26:39.540]on us in academia.
[00:26:41.360]You know?
[00:26:42.360]Doesn't depend.
[00:26:43.360]It won't die with us.
[00:26:45.000]Right?
[00:26:46.000]It's something that we need.
[00:26:47.240]It's part of the construction of societies.
[00:26:49.720]And I think that I want to make some particular points about Feliciano here, but I just wanted
[00:26:55.140]to add to that context there.
[00:26:58.560]Oh, sorry.
[00:26:59.560]Sorry.
[00:27:00.560]And after I gave that job talk, Joy was in the committee interviewing me.
[00:27:05.740]And at that point, I didn't know, but Joy was researching, too, the tobacco factories.
[00:27:10.360]It must have been by then that you already...
[00:27:13.400]Not yet.
[00:27:14.400]No.
[00:27:15.400]No.
[00:27:16.400]No.
[00:27:17.400]Tell the story.
[00:27:18.400]Because then the novel came out.
[00:27:19.400]Yeah.
[00:27:20.400]Yeah.
[00:27:21.400]No.
[00:27:22.400]I didn't know any of this stuff until 2019.
[00:27:24.400]Yeah.
[00:27:25.400]I had always been just curious.
[00:27:28.560]We found that book.
[00:27:29.080]I found that book in my father's things when he died, and I just didn't understand the
[00:27:34.080]history of Key West.
[00:27:35.460]The reason that we called this presentation The Secret History of Key West is because
[00:27:40.080]I think lots of people have been to Key West, right?
[00:27:43.160]Has anybody been to Key West?
[00:27:44.460]Okay.
[00:27:45.460]And you think of it as a nice little resort town, depending on what part you're in.
[00:27:49.120]It's either tacky with the t-shirts or really high-end and beautiful.
[00:27:53.920]But not too many people know that there was a rich Cuban history there for decades, over
[00:27:58.600]50 years.
[00:28:00.800]An anti-colonialist, anti-racist, pro-labor community in Key West, Florida.
[00:28:08.640]And I didn't know it, and it was my family's heritage.
[00:28:11.980]I had no idea, and I'd always been a little bit curious.
[00:28:15.400]Where did they come from?
[00:28:16.400]What was that?
[00:28:17.400]I thought they were economic migrants from Cuba.
[00:28:20.560]I had no idea that Key West was a rebel base for the anti-colonial, anti-imperialist movement
[00:28:28.120]in Cuba.
[00:28:29.560]No idea.
[00:28:30.560]They used Key West as a rebel base to gather munitions and funds.
[00:28:34.760]No idea whatsoever.
[00:28:35.760]So I did not know that when you applied with your very nice job talk at all.
[00:28:40.840]No.
[00:28:41.840]I was curious.
[00:28:42.840]And so when the NEH funded this thing in Tampa in 2019, I went just to find out.
[00:28:47.620]I had no plan to do anything academic or even creative, I'm mostly a creative writer now,
[00:28:54.620]no plan whatsoever.
[00:28:56.160]And it just, my brain caught fire.
[00:28:57.640]And I was like, everything falls into place now, now I understand.
[00:29:02.780]And not only is that deep for me, but I do want to share that.
[00:29:06.740]We do not know our own history.
[00:29:08.880]It has been largely erased and I wanted to help restore it.
[00:29:13.580]I'm just going to add very quickly, I'm surprised about that because Joy's last novel, One Brilliant
[00:29:18.240]Flame, I wrote a review online, Google it right now.
[00:29:24.320]The research of that novel is Key West, right?
[00:29:27.160]Tobacco Factors, a few decades before Feliciano.
[00:29:29.920]Tobacco Factors and Key West in the 1880s was filled of revolutionary potential, free
[00:29:36.780]love, anarchist, communist, the end of an empire and the beginning of another one.
[00:29:42.740]So it's a novel about revolutionary possibilities, right?
[00:29:46.580]It's a beautiful moment, so I thought that you were already simultaneously researching
[00:29:52.480]that as I was.
[00:29:54.180]When your novel came out, it was perfect for me because it was very multiple.
[00:29:56.680]It was very much invested in that historical period of the proletariat class, the most
[00:30:02.100]educated proletariat class in the world, were tobacco factory workers, you know?
[00:30:08.300]And anarchists, and feminists, and revolutionaries, and experimenting with many things, right?
[00:30:14.120]Love being one of them, okay, stop.
[00:30:19.180]All my points are sort of related to this and the highly productive moment in which
[00:30:24.280]Castro's writing.
[00:30:26.200]The literary moment and the idea that these things didn't get remembered because of erasure,
[00:30:33.360]but also because the social practice was that it was so commonplace, these things were commonplace.
[00:30:39.560]And to your point, Garza, Dr. Garza, that's Garza, I don't know why I'm calling you by
[00:30:44.280]your last name.
[00:30:45.280]We're a team up here.
[00:30:49.600]I want to focus in on something in the actual text a little bit and come to this idea of
[00:30:55.720]is translation today, or is this book a artifact that asks us what does translation participate
[00:31:04.120]in that common place social reading that perhaps takes the academic, highly elevated scholar
[00:31:14.120]into consideration and pushes back on them and says, what is it that we're doing and
[00:31:19.240]why are we doing it?
[00:31:20.240]So I'm going to read a little bit, but in the translator's note, Rai, you brilliantly
[00:31:24.480]tell us why you translate.
[00:31:25.240]You translated the poem Las Obreritas to the factory girls.
[00:31:30.080]So the word factory is not in the word obreros.
[00:31:34.880]It means workers.
[00:31:36.660]And so you make this point, obreritas is feminine in Spanish and it's diminutive, but to translate
[00:31:45.340]it perhaps as the little women workers, we're thinking of Alcott and domesticity, so that
[00:31:51.400]wouldn't be right.
[00:31:52.120]I laughed at that moment in the translator's note.
[00:31:54.760]And you also don't want to say the working girls because it takes on a different kind
[00:32:00.780]of labor.
[00:32:01.220]So you come to this place, the factory girls, which I love so much, and you say that this
[00:32:08.560]connects the labor of the cigar factories in Key West to the mills of the Northeast.
[00:32:13.220]And I think this is really interesting because it answers the question about translation's
[00:32:19.440]role in literature's political projects, because our conception of
[00:32:24.280]the working class now is not necessarily one of intellectual rigor, and that is probably
[00:32:32.500]completely false. So I just wanted to hear more about that moment or other moments where
[00:32:38.120]you were thinking as a translator, and what translation, broadly speaking, is doing right
[00:32:44.600]now in our cultural moment.
[00:32:46.140]That's a very big question.
[00:32:53.800]The factory girl, who also one of the most economically privileged working class groups
[00:33:03.900]within sort of US cultural history in a broad scale idea of this period, was often the subject
[00:33:13.940]of poems and songs, praising her beauty and also praising her industry. And the
[00:33:23.320]factory girls, particularly, maybe not particularly, within my knowledge, particularly in Lowell
[00:33:31.780]in Massachusetts, similarly shared in intellectual and pedagogic practices amongst their number.
[00:33:44.500]They would read and share books. They didn't have a lecture tradition, a loud reader tradition, but because they had access
[00:33:52.840]to money, they had access to books in a way that they wouldn't have in the agricultural settings from which many of them came.
[00:34:01.880]And so it seemed like the right way to get the obreritas out of, I don't know, out of the Spanish, at least.
[00:34:14.560]I think that the question of what translation is doing today
[00:34:22.360]is too big, but there is a question there that I think this book hopes to help to answer,
[00:34:29.640]which is about the interest that there is, and that is growing, and the care and the attention
[00:34:38.540]that we are, within and without the academy, beginning to pay to the early multilingual literatures of the U.S. particularly.
[00:34:51.880]When I talk to colleagues who work in Latinx or Latine literature, or who study Chicano literature,
[00:35:02.480]there's a barrier that is set up for a lot of their students around language production,
[00:35:08.320]where the interest is there in learning about these traditions, but the access might not be,
[00:35:15.440]because the students who are interested in these things might not
[00:35:21.400]have access to Spanish, or might not have a Spanish that allows them to appreciate the literary merit,
[00:35:27.840]and the musicality, and the play of language in poetry, and they might just be off-putting
[00:35:34.880]to try to engage with love sonnets in Spanish, and so what I, and what Joy and I wanted
[00:35:44.080]this book to do, was to open this little corner of the Key West tradition,
[00:35:50.920]and of the early Latinx literary tradition, to students of U.S. literature who are interested
[00:35:58.060]in these more diverse voices, and are interested in the ways that there isn't a single canon
[00:36:04.300]within early 20th century literary production in the U.S., and as we question and think
[00:36:11.220]about canonicity, and who we want to be paying attention to in the past, I think that voices
[00:36:16.920]like Feliciano's should be.
[00:36:20.440]In people's minds, and should be accessible to them.
[00:36:28.240]So I'd like to continue this conversation by filling in some holes, gaps that I see
[00:36:36.200]as a historian in our conversation so far.
[00:36:38.680]And I want to start with this idea of Latinidad, because we think in the United States that
[00:36:44.960]we're separate from what's happening in Latin America, or in the Caribbean, when in
[00:36:49.960]fact our ancestors, our antepasados, have been connected to those regions of the world
[00:36:56.700]for centuries.
[00:36:58.800]So 1519 is when St. Augustine, Florida was a town that was colonized by the Spaniards.
[00:37:07.480]And so from 1519, in the Gulf Coast, people have been reading and writing Spanish and
[00:37:16.040]practicing this language and its production.
[00:37:19.480]So, I think that's an important moment, because when we jump to 1900, we're leaping into this
[00:37:28.460]sort of Doctor Who time period.
[00:37:31.240]But 30 years before that, 40 years before that, 50 years before that, really, all the
[00:37:37.140]way back to 1800s, there are groups of people throughout Latin America who are fighting
[00:37:42.780]for their liberation from Spain, and many of those rebel troops, if you want to call
[00:37:48.240]them that now.
[00:37:49.000]Centered their lives in the United States, so they would leave their home countries and
[00:37:55.200]come to places like New York City or New Orleans, and especially if they were connected to the
[00:38:04.560]Texas, Louisiana, was intimately connected to Florida and the Caribbean. So the ideas
[00:38:11.870]and the newspapers, particularly, are moving across that Gulf of Mexico and into these
[00:38:19.270]communities. So what's happening in St. Augustine and Tampa and Key West and Havana is also
[00:38:25.090]being read about in San Antonio, in Los Angeles, in Monterrey, in Mexico City. There is an
[00:38:33.730]intellectual exchange taking place amongst all of these people for centuries before we
[00:38:40.870]get to Libano Castro's generation, your father's generation, in the 20th century. So as a historian,
[00:38:50.310]I'm always like, "Reach back, reach back. Think about how we're connected to this."
[00:38:55.070]And why do we not know that often? It's because in the United States, we developed a critical
[00:39:01.930]mass of Latino historians.
[00:39:02.910]Latina, Latino, and Latinx historians only in the late 20th century. So the very first
[00:39:11.870]scholars who trained people like James Garza and myself, some of them were white allies
[00:39:18.870]who were interested and passionate about this kind of history. Some of them were the students
[00:39:23.590]of those allies who then started training generations of scholars. In terms of myself,
[00:39:29.930]I'm in the first 100.
[00:39:32.090]She got a PhD in history in the United States, and I'm like in the 20s. The 30, the 100s,
[00:39:41.510]those women are coming in the 2000s, in the 2010s, in the 2020s. What we're all doing
[00:39:48.550]is attempting to recover the kind of history that is present in this book. I just want
[00:39:55.110]to make one last point about that. I met Joy in 2014.
[00:40:01.270]In that year, she actually showed me this collection of poems. This one and I think
[00:40:08.170]the other one, Mis Recuerdos. When I saw that as a historian, I wanted to cry. We have been,
[00:40:17.810]and there's a massive national, international project called Recovering the Hispanic Literary
[00:40:22.390]Heritage. We've been searching for this kind of work for decades. When she showed it to
[00:40:30.450]me, I was like, wow, hide this. Don't talk to anyone about it until you're ready. This
[00:40:37.150]is gold. And it really is. It's as if he's walking into the 21st century. It's amazing.
[00:40:48.830]Thank you so much, Laura. I wanted to also add something that you've worked on that
[00:40:53.850]speaks to what Rai was talking about a minute ago in terms of the way that the bilingual
[00:40:59.630]facing page structure of this book with the original Spanish poems on the left page and
[00:41:07.810]then Rai's translations into English on the right-hand side. It opens access to multiple
[00:41:13.070]audiences. And you've done work on the way that more recent Latinx people in the United
[00:41:20.730]States often don't have fluent Spanish. You've published about that. You've done interviews
[00:41:26.370]about that. And I think that's so interesting.
[00:41:28.810]I would add to that in the Gulf sort of the gap, not the Gulf of Mexico. Feliciano only
[00:41:40.210]spoke Spanish. And in my generation, fifth generation Floridians, we only spoke English.
[00:41:46.990]Our parents had been subjected to prejudice, linguistic prejudice, even police brutality
[00:41:56.150]based on their identity. And they didn't want to speak anything.
[00:41:57.990]They didn't want us to know anything but English. So I think the tide is turning in the other
[00:42:04.210]direction very strongly now. But that was like a moment of rupture and loss and cultural
[00:42:10.850]trauma for so many families.
[00:42:14.450]And I was thinking about your book, too, which is kind of this historical period, too,
[00:42:23.830]and teachers. Yes. And monolingualism has always been the
[00:42:27.170]tool of empire, right? So whenever, for example, colleges in UNL, for example, that are taking
[00:42:39.790]away the requirement for a second language, can you believe this, right? Ensuring that
[00:42:45.250]our students are going to be monolingual forever. Monolingualism erases these cultures. So when
[00:42:50.030]we read Feliciano here, it's not just that he's writing in Spanish. It's that the
[00:42:56.350]sophistication, and this is something that he writes about, right? The sophistication of the
[00:43:02.770]craft of the Spanish language is such that it's a powerful evidence, right, that you cannot
[00:43:10.370]understand the history of the U.S. without Spanish. You cannot understand its richness. So if I make,
[00:43:16.750]can I read a poem now? I want to read a poem in Spanish. Because, so you can, okay, I'm going to
[00:43:26.110]read it.
[00:43:26.330]I'm going to read it in English first, in the awesome translation of Rye. And it's very beautiful in English. Of course, metric is a sonnet. Metric and rhyme, you can never, you have to sacrifice. But I'll read it in English very quickly so you know what it says. And then I'll read it in Spanish so you can appreciate the musicality.
[00:43:44.310]To my sisters. Sisters, in my hours of bitterness, while I drink the bile of absence, my existence splits into pieces. And I send it to you.
[00:43:56.310]You, instances of fondness. I have no other offering. And I give you pure of my verses of love, the bliss in essence, your path of love and of innocence. I water with notes of sweetness.
[00:44:11.090]Mad, you call me because roaming, I followed a track wracked by drought, shielded by my sobbing lyre. Sisters, I have no wish to reproach you if I am mad.
[00:44:26.070]Then of a madman, still bleeding, break the heart that I sent you whole.
[00:44:31.550]I love this poem because one of the ancestral functions of poetry is precisely so we don't see the mad person, the craziness as a bad thing, right?
[00:44:40.750]This is one of the first things that poetry does. Madness, there's something beautiful in madness.
[00:44:45.710]Now in Spanish. Check out, if you don't know any Spanish, even better.
[00:44:49.530]Just listen to the musicality of it, you know? It's a song, right? I mean, Hermanas.
[00:44:55.330]Hermanas, en mis horas de amargura, mientras bebo las hieles de la ausencia,
[00:45:01.510]en pedazos divide mi existencia, y os la mando en estrofas de ternura.
[00:45:06.690]Otra ofrenda no tengo, y os doy pura, de mis versos de amor la grata esencia,
[00:45:13.390]vuestra senda de amor y de inocencia, yo la riego con notas de dulzura.
[00:45:18.530]Loco me llamaste, porque errante de arideces seguí por el sendero,
[00:45:24.870]escudado en mi lira sollozante, hermanas, reprocharos yo no quiero,
[00:45:30.470]si soy loco, de un loco así sangrante, partí del corazón que os mando entero.
[00:45:36.270]Gracias Luis.
[00:45:44.530]Is this a good time to talk about the meter and the challenges for you as a translator of preserving so much?
[00:45:51.370]And like the hyperbaton, like that is an interesting thing that you worked to preserve in your translations.
[00:45:58.190]Yeah, so Castro uses a substantial number of different,
[00:46:06.250]different meters including like five different types of sonnets, eight different types of sonnets.
[00:46:11.190]And if you're not someone who wants to count out all the syllables for yourself,
[00:46:15.630]I've done it for you, and they're all in the appendix of the book.
[00:46:18.210]But that was me counting the the the syllable before reaching the appendix.
[00:46:24.890]But he also does things that
[00:46:30.970]aren't done in Spanish poetry.
[00:46:35.450]So Spanish poetry has two different kinds of rhyme, which in English
[00:46:39.910]we only have consonant rhyme, which is where you know all of the end of the word matches.
[00:46:44.950]Not getting into like slant rhyme and the kinds of rhyme you can use in like rap and stuff.
[00:46:49.450]But Spanish has two, so it has that one, and then it also has one where only the vowels are gonna match.
[00:46:55.450]So like canta, he sings, and palma, the palm tree,
[00:47:00.550]rhyme, even though nt and m are not the same.
[00:47:05.170]So
[00:47:05.450]it's the ah, ah, ah, ah, they go together.
[00:47:09.230]And Castro does a thing in one of these poems that I have not seen anywhere else,
[00:47:18.650]and that I have not been able to find anywhere else, and that I have not been able to find anyone who has seen
[00:47:24.530]anywhere else. Could be wrong.
[00:47:26.790]But in one of his poems, he mixes these two kinds of rhyme together.
[00:47:33.950]The
[00:47:35.390]assonant rhyme almost always falls on the even verses of
[00:47:39.710]a poem, and generally that means that the odd verses, so like verses 1, 3, 5, etc., are
[00:47:45.630]open, they're free, and then the assonant rhyme is used to help hold
[00:47:52.150]poems together, and it comes out of traditions of orality.
[00:47:55.910]And so what he does is he has this assonant rhyme in
[00:48:00.170]the even verses, like you'd expect it to be, where it ought to be, and
[00:48:05.330]then he is daring enough to use consonant rhyme on the odd-numbered verses.
[00:48:11.350]And then he breaks it into stanzas, which also you generally don't do with assonant
[00:48:16.170]rhyme. And he does this because he can, because he's writing during a period
[00:48:21.110]where exploration and experimentation in poetry also means exploration and
[00:48:26.890]experimentation in meter, because so much of Spanish poetry is based around these
[00:48:32.810]sorts of play with
[00:48:35.270]with patterning, with rhythms, with musicality, with the prosody, which
[00:48:39.350]comes through in the meter and also comes out in the the the hyperboton,
[00:48:43.250]which is where you mix a sentence all around itself to make some sort of
[00:48:47.810]effect rather than having your subject followed by your verb followed by your
[00:48:52.310]object. My students tend to find it very frustrating when I hand them poems that
[00:48:57.390]are full of hyperboton, because you have to unpick and untangle these puzzles. And
[00:49:02.570]it's something that I worked to
[00:49:05.210]maintain in the English, without making it too frustrating to read, I hope, because
[00:49:13.250]it's something that he uses to really beautiful effect throughout the volume.
[00:49:17.450]One of my favorite instances is where he's comparing one of the women that he
[00:49:21.950]writes to, and the whole second half of the book is largely sonnets to different
[00:49:26.070]women in Key West, because he was trying to make friends and so he wrote them
[00:49:29.430]poems, because that was what he could do. And he's comparing this woman to Venus.
[00:49:35.150]And he starts by talking about how beautiful Venus is. And he starts by
[00:49:43.550]making this comparison: more beautiful, right? And it's only at the end of the
[00:49:49.250]stanza that he puts his verb, that he compares this woman that he's talking to
[00:49:56.330]as being more beautiful than Venus. And so when you start, you're seeing, ah yes,
[00:50:00.890]Venus, queen of beauty, excellent, she's the most beautiful. No, she's the second
[00:50:05.090]most beautiful. This lady is the most beautiful. And if you put the sentence in order, you
[00:50:11.610]wouldn't get that turn at the end of the stanza. There's also places where he uses
[00:50:16.850]it to emphasize his own subjectivity in his relationship to the subject of his poetry,
[00:50:22.770]where he'll turn verses in on themselves in order to put himself either next to the
[00:50:29.410]object of his affection or to put himself and his verses together and then put the
[00:50:35.030]comparison that he's making with the object of that comparison.
[00:50:38.530]I think it's worth reading that section of the poem, where the hooker bat happens.
[00:50:46.550]Oh, sure.
[00:50:47.550]It's really obvious.
[00:50:48.550]We can make Luis do it.
[00:50:49.550]If you want.
[00:50:50.550]Go ahead.
[00:50:51.550]Go ahead.
[00:50:52.550]Can you find it?
[00:50:53.550]Yeah.
[00:50:54.550]While Reza's quickly finding it, I'll say that there are 96 verses in it.
[00:51:04.970]There are 96 poems in the collection.
[00:51:06.610]They're all formally structured rhyme and meter.
[00:51:09.690]The first rough half is all political poems, very engaged with Cuban politics, some Spanish
[00:51:18.910]history as well.
[00:51:21.670]To Laura's point earlier, the dedicatees of the poems are around Latin America at the
[00:51:31.910]time.
[00:51:32.910]And then the second half of the book...
[00:51:34.910]Are sonnets to 43 different women.
[00:51:39.810]Real interesting.
[00:51:41.470]And one of them ended up being his wife.
[00:51:44.910]So, yeah.
[00:51:46.390]46?
[00:51:47.390]Can I just speak to that issue of 46 women or...
[00:51:53.650]It's amazing...
[00:51:54.650]43?
[00:51:55.650]Yeah.
[00:51:56.650]43?
[00:51:57.650]Yeah.
[00:51:58.650]It's amazing how many people he evokes and brings into his poetry.
[00:52:02.370]And one of the things that...
[00:52:04.850]That you both have done beautifully is to document every single one of those individuals.
[00:52:11.610]So there's an appendix in the back that lays this out.
[00:52:15.750]Wow.
[00:52:16.750]That's like a historian's dream, just to look at these individuals.
[00:52:22.730]And then the call that these two writers put out is, "Help us find these people.
[00:52:28.450]Help us understand these social networks."
[00:52:31.310]Imagine yourself or somebody in the year 3000.
[00:52:34.790]Looking at your social media pages and trying to connect you to your universe on Insta or
[00:52:42.330]on TikTok.
[00:52:44.290]And that is what they're doing for us.
[00:52:46.690]They're showing us what it looked like in the early 1900s.
[00:52:52.350]It's amazing.
[00:52:53.790]He was definitely a Discord mod for this community.
[00:52:59.330]So I'm going to give you a little snippet.
[00:53:04.730]I'll give you that stanza about Venus.
[00:53:06.870]Thank you, Katie.
[00:53:08.670]And so he says, "I should like, in melodious stanzas and to spite arrogant Venus, the queen
[00:53:15.130]on a throne of diamonds, to proclaim you among all beauties."
[00:53:19.670]And so we see there, "to spite arrogant Venus, the queen on a throne of diamonds."
[00:53:25.650]Who is the queen on a throne of diamonds?
[00:53:27.290]Venus.
[00:53:28.290]No.
[00:53:29.290]"I should like to proclaim you amongst all beauties, the queen on a throne of diamonds."
[00:53:34.670]Thank you.
[00:53:35.670]I'd like to say something else about your translation, your decision not to translate
[00:54:01.050]the word "patria."
[00:54:04.610]"Patria," which means a lot of things in Spanish, but generally your country, your
[00:54:13.130]homeland, because I think it's really connected to the idea of Latinidad.
[00:54:19.550]If you come from a family of immigrants or migrants, even if your generation's removed,
[00:54:26.290]there's still this notion of the home country, of the "patria," and it's preserved in the
[00:54:32.150]home language.
[00:54:34.550]So, you grow up in the United States, and you have another language here and another
[00:54:38.730]reality here, but then you have this duality of these two homes, and that really comes
[00:54:46.790]across in his poetry, and I think it's very much connected to a contemporary Latino/Latinx
[00:54:54.490]experience.
[00:54:55.490]Yeah.
[00:54:56.490]Thank you.
[00:54:57.490]I love the fact that you preserved "patria" throughout the English translations.
[00:55:04.490]Yeah, Castro talks about both Cuba and Spain as "patria," and really talks deeply
[00:55:16.890]about his experience of multiple allegiances within this text, and the Cuba that he's talking
[00:55:25.050]about is both the nation that exists in 1918, but it's also the ideal republic
[00:55:34.430]of Marti, which was an ideal that was upheld by these communities in Florida, that was
[00:55:42.510]funded by these communities in Florida, that was fought for by these communities in Florida,
[00:55:47.290]and that was stymied to a large degree by the way that the war ended in 1898.
[00:55:55.050]And he also talks about the sea as his "patria," because of the trans-oceanic, the
[00:56:04.370]transatlantic focus of his identity. He also has a poem where he talks about
[00:56:10.910]Tampa as another one of his mothers that welcomed him with open arms in the same
[00:56:15.590]way that Cuba welcomed him as a mother with open arms. And so, yeah, I think that
[00:56:22.310]he gives us a lot of the many things that "patria" means.
[00:56:27.070]I believe it's almost the first page
[00:56:34.310]of the book. There's a moment in your note, Joy, there that you mentioned how
[00:56:41.070]your formation in modernism, in modernism, in avant-garde literature, sort of
[00:56:49.130]made you kind of disdain the poems of your grandfather because they were not
[00:56:53.570]as experimental. Do you want to say more about that?
[00:56:59.210]Yeah, sure. Is your question finished, though? Do you have more? Was it going to be a question?
[00:57:04.250]No, no, no. I want you to talk more about that.
[00:57:08.250]Yeah, it's super interesting the way that my well-intentioned attempt to learn
[00:57:15.170]literature as an aspiring writer, as an aspiring literary scholar, drove me to
[00:57:20.930]avant-garde experimental literature of the early 20th century in English. And
[00:57:26.030]that canon, which is all that I was exposed to when I was in undergraduate
[00:57:32.250]and graduate school,
[00:57:34.190]in poetry, this was like William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound and T.S.
[00:57:43.050]Eliot. So if you know those poets, it was like fragmented and very terse and no rhyme,
[00:57:49.190]no meter. They had thrown that away. That was the stuff of the old. And we
[00:57:54.650]didn't really like, you know, it's fine if you're in the 19th century to rhyme and
[00:57:58.870]be Longfellow, but not in the 20th century. That was old-fashioned.
[00:58:04.130]And so when I first encountered this book of poems, I did translate some of them
[00:58:09.370]myself, with my very weak Spanish, and thought, "Oh no, these are
[00:58:14.690]old-fashioned and they're sentimental." And the political ones, I had no frame of
[00:58:20.570]reference. I didn't know who Carlos Manuel de Céspedes was. Wow, like
[00:58:25.490]anybody who knows the history of Cuba is like, "Oh, this is a very important figure."
[00:58:29.750]But I had no, that was never covered in any of my education at
[00:58:34.070]any stage. So I was coming to this with not, what I didn't realize was ignorance.
[00:58:43.070]I thought I was really educated about that time period and literature of that
[00:58:47.870]time period, but I had been educated partially, right? So it caused me to
[00:58:54.630]dismiss or to disdain, as you say. And so at the beginning there's a
[00:58:59.090]note about that, a personal note about that, and then there's a wonderful
[00:59:04.010]brilliant translator's note, and then we have a 30-page historical and
[00:59:10.550]biographical introduction that tells the whole story, well not the whole story, but
[00:59:15.230]the small story of Key West at that time and the biographical story of Feliciano.
[00:59:21.230]So that sort of gives, and then the two appendices, one with the network of
[00:59:25.550]people and one for the literary scholarly nerds who love to count
[00:59:30.350]syllables. It's fantastic.
[00:59:33.950]Oh no, so, and I was thinking about what Laura just said about the 40-something
[00:59:42.590]woman and the social network that is created through that. That made me
[00:59:47.990]think a lot, something very Caribbean, something very Puerto Rican. It is said
[00:59:52.130]that the Caribbean is a land of poets, right? Like that every, I have a huge
[00:59:56.610]family, like a lot of Puerto Ricans, and of course I have a lot of uncles and
[01:00:01.410]cousins that are poets.
[01:00:03.890]And they will introduce themselves as poets, you know? They have never published a book or
[01:00:09.170]anything, but they will introduce themselves as, "I'm a poet." No, you're an electrician.
[01:00:13.930]No, no, no, I'm a poet, right? This is, there's a dignity, and everybody in the
[01:00:18.570]community will recognize them as a poet, right? Because on special occasions, they're
[01:00:22.970]there, writing the poem for the quinceañera, writing the poem for the eulogy
[01:00:27.950]for when somebody dies, right? And Feliciano is writing a lot of poetry that is
[01:00:33.830]functional, right? Interesting parts of the books are a lot of these poems were
[01:00:38.990]women, were other people in love with that woman, those women asking him to
[01:00:43.170]write those poems, right? Or for occasions, right? Or for patriotic
[01:00:49.790]events, right? The poem about El Grito de Yara is super important, right? So they
[01:00:53.810]all have a function, whereas in our view, this is, I share this with Joy, too.
[01:01:00.330]I, too, was formed in the avant-garde. I write mostly about the avant-garde
[01:01:03.770]because I'm always looking at literature for the rarest, right? The great literature
[01:01:08.710]for me is the most strange, right? And I still believe that, but what that makes us this
[01:01:15.710]day, the functional social aspects that literature does, poetry in particular, in everything,
[01:01:24.710]in the construction of a community, and that is something that Caribbean cultures in particular,
[01:01:33.710]it's impossible to be a great Caribbean writer according to the literary markets, monolingual,
[01:01:39.710]dominated by white people and all that. Literature becomes, it's a way of constructing dignity
[01:01:45.710]without the market, right? So Feliciano was super proud. Can any of you talk about the
[01:01:53.710]plagiarism plot there?
[01:02:03.650]I just wanted to, the idea of the poems reminds me of how also the idea of love letters, right?
[01:02:17.590]That there's love letters themselves were also, there was format. When people wrote love letters in private,
[01:02:26.590]that there was the idea that people got those ideas from somewhere else. And I was wondering
[01:02:33.590]about how that, when Feliciano wrote these poems and they appeared somewhere, they appeared in the,
[01:02:45.590]they would appear in the news, also maybe appeared in newspapers, right? How were they replicated
[01:02:54.530]in other newspapers, right, in the Caribbean? What was the network that these,
[01:03:03.530]these ideas, especially the idea of, of the comparison, right, the anatomy, right, the sentimentality of the anatomy,
[01:03:14.530]and how that spread, right, and how that, where that came from, and I was wondering about that, right, and,
[01:03:23.530]because that's very gender there, but it goes all the way back, right, because it's a tie to nationalism, right, the comparison of
[01:03:33.470]nations to the figure of maybe what the French Revolution and all that idea of, and where he got, he has these ideas from somewhere,
[01:03:45.470]but do they appear in other places, do the newspapers, and so they replicate it somewhere, right, because I've seen,
[01:03:54.470]I've seen comparisons in Mexico City newspapers, they appear in the Sunday editions, these poetries appear in Sunday editions,
[01:04:03.410]these poems, but I've never paid them attention, because I'm looking for something else, right, and I say, oh, I'm going to skip that,
[01:04:09.410]I don't care about that, I want, well, crime stories, right, who killed what, who killed whom, and so forth, but they're there, right,
[01:04:19.410]and these newspaper editors replicated all this, they copied everything, because there was a constellation, and I was just wondering about that,
[01:04:33.350]because the copying is there, right, I don't know if that was...
[01:04:39.390]Yeah, so the poems of Felicianos that I have been able thus far to find in the wild, to be able to find where he published them before he brought them together in this book,
[01:04:57.950]I have not found any that were republished in Mexico.
[01:05:03.290]But I do know that the newspaper that he worked for in Tampa, which was Bohemia, not the Cuban Bohemia, the Tampa Bohemia,
[01:05:12.550]did have an amount of international circulation.
[01:05:17.730]Not as much as some of the newspapers that were published in Tampa a couple of decades earlier that were published by the revolutionary political clubs where you would see in those papers lists of
[01:05:33.230]places where they were published or you'd see in their like fee schedules, you'd see what it was for international circulation versus national circulation.
[01:05:40.730]But he does sometimes have poems that he would publish previously, maybe slightly edited, maybe not, where they would be dedicated to someone else when he put them into Lagrimas y Flores,
[01:05:52.870]or where they didn't have a dedication when they were published in Bohemia in 1916 and then did have a dedication when they were published in Lagrimas.
[01:06:03.170]in 1918. And in terms of the social function of them being written for other people, one of the greatest examples of this is a poem that he writes to a girl named America Cermeno.
[01:06:19.570]And he says, I'm just going to read you the first two stanzas of it because the reason will become clear momentarily, he says, "Of my sonorous voice, the torrents their aromas offer to you sweetly,
[01:06:33.110]just as it songs the fountain offers in the garden to the roses, I should like with infinite essences unweaving these verses to perfume them because I know you will hear them recited by your lover, full of love each time you meet."
[01:06:50.550]So this is a poem that he clearly and openly wrote for someone else and about three pages later in Las Almas y Flores,
[01:07:03.050]six pages later? There we go, six pages later in Las Almas y Flores, there's another poem that is entitled
[01:07:11.150]"A Cermeño, Ar Miqueli" on the occasion of their marriage and so that poem at least that he wrote to America Cermeño, it worked.
[01:07:21.770]Thank you. To the question about plagiarism that you raised at the beginning, there's a prologue in Las Almas y Flores where it's very
[01:07:32.990]defensive to those who would claim that some of these poems are not mine, I blah blah blah and my name is the only treasure I have and so and there are like I think three poems, two, where he defends his good name and so apparently somebody in Tampa or Key West was claiming that some of his poems were not his and I think that you were suggesting that in some cases like the tropes are so very similar
[01:08:02.930]of like the woman is a beautiful flower etc and these tropes were circulating
[01:08:07.690]frequently and he's a young man of 24 and obviously quite insulted that
[01:08:12.710]anybody could think that he would need to borrow from anyone else you know and
[01:08:17.170]so do you want to say more about that? Oh just he's not one who would who would
[01:08:23.170]like anyone to take any of the honor of writing these poems away from him for
[01:08:28.970]sure and they are a lot of them do lean on very
[01:08:32.870]common tropes the use of flowers in reference to women is something that
[01:08:36.890]explodes in the 19th century and just carries on because it's a really great
[01:08:41.190]comparison if you're trying to think about beauty and good smells and stuff
[01:08:46.690]and also some more problematic elements referencing people's eyes and lips is
[01:08:52.250]not unique to Feliciano when we're talking about beauty right these are
[01:08:57.430]things that we talk about even in our poetry now when we're full of love and
[01:09:02.810]and there are other texts that were of a sort of similar level of press that were
[01:09:11.610]made by other small presses throughout the Spanish-speaking world and that have
[01:09:18.750]similar poems that have other love sonnets to other girls in other
[01:09:22.210]communities he's not the only one doing this kind of work there's one book that
[01:09:26.110]I found that's called Flores y Lagrimas that doesn't have as much of a political
[01:09:31.570]structure but does have a lot of
[01:09:32.750]sonnets to pretty girls but calling something tears and flowers when it's a
[01:09:37.970]book of sentimental poetry makes a lot of sense and so and I haven't found any
[01:09:45.850]instances where poems of that he is holding on to as his own that appear in
[01:09:51.650]this book appear anywhere else that doesn't mean that it's impossible that
[01:09:56.270]he borrowed things but in looking through what exists in the
[01:10:02.690]digital archives that do exist from the the work of recovery both in the US
[01:10:08.870]tradition and in the Spanish tradition as well I haven't found any of his poems
[01:10:14.630]being attributed to anyone else yeah thank you there are a lot of intertexts
[01:10:20.510]where he cites and quotes other poets but very deliberately so that's kind of
[01:10:26.310]interesting you know what we are sort of at almost the end of our time that we
[01:10:32.630]promised the audience so is there anyone else who wants to say or ask one last
[01:10:37.370]juicy thing Laura you know this this allegation of plagiarism is serious but
[01:10:45.950]and he takes it completely seriously and he does something about it he takes
[01:10:49.970]action he has it printed could you talk about how he had the skills and
[01:10:54.170]wherewithal to get this printed yeah so so when he was in Tampa writing for Bohemia
[01:11:02.570]he was making $15 a month which is the equivalent today of about $300 a month
[01:11:08.450]he realized he couldn't really make a living on that and that's when he
[01:11:11.130]decided to head back to Havana he got off the boat in Key West to have a meal
[01:11:16.650]and heard about the lector thing when he was reading as a lector he made so much
[01:11:21.950]more money that he had the wherewithal to invest in a small press it was co-owned
[01:11:32.510]by two men in Key West and he was just very interested and so he invested the
[01:11:40.070]excess of his earnings in that press and became a half owner of it and so the
[01:11:48.230]other coat that the owner that he bought out set the type for Lagrimas y Flores
[01:11:56.210]for him and so that and then and then left the press and then Castro became a
[01:12:02.450]co-owner with Juan Perez Rolo another writer of the period whose work has not
[01:12:08.270]yet been fully translated into English and and they became partners and so
[01:12:15.230]that's how that was able and and the site of the press is no longer standing
[01:12:20.930]the building that it was in and then after Juan Perez Rolo stopped being a
[01:12:29.190]newspaper producer editor then Castro
[01:12:32.390]it's weird to call him Castro puppy began running that newspaper Florida and
[01:12:42.350]from the Florida press which was in the backyard of their house and there were
[01:12:49.370]pictures of it on screen before we started
[01:12:52.310]so yeah I grew up running around in that yard around the Florida press and my
[01:12:58.610]father and uncle grew up working in that press as well
[01:13:02.330]yeah setting type for the Spanish language printing on the island yeah
[01:13:06.650]that's how that happened so a very material connection to that work yeah
[01:13:12.050]yeah I mean and if that hadn't happened it would be highly unlikely that we
[01:13:16.330]would have any of these poems at all because there's not very much of an
[01:13:21.350]archive of some of like the Bohemia there is but not Florida like until
[01:13:27.230]until now which yeah it's kind of exciting when my brother found
[01:13:32.270]out that we were doing this he's like hey I've got a bunch of stuff in my
[01:13:35.330]garage and and he sent it and there are dozens of issues of this lost newspaper
[01:13:41.990]dry do you want it as as our final comment do you want to say something
[01:13:45.330]about Florida Florida and the archival work that you're planning to do yeah so
[01:13:50.530]we've talked about the fragility of these archives and the ways that they
[01:13:55.770]have been erased and one of the things
[01:14:02.210]that is ongoing labor now that is hugely important is that the way that these
[01:14:09.110]archives can be deepened is through people realizing the value and the
[01:14:15.650]importance of these boxes of papi sold newspapers that they have in the garage
[01:14:21.950]when they're cleaning it out and it is so easy to just be like why do I have
[01:14:28.070]these boxes of like newspapers from the nineteen teens nobody
[01:14:32.150]wants this yes we do yes we do and and Florida the the newspaper that Feliciano
[01:14:40.250]produced and there until this box was discovered and there were no
[01:14:46.430]excellent copies of it it doesn't exist in any archive and it is a new a new
[01:14:52.530]another another new treasure trove of information about this community not
[01:14:59.150]only did Feliciano write for it his
[01:15:02.090]mother-in-law also wrote a weekly column in this newspaper along with many other
[01:15:07.430]people in this community and so I'm going to be doing a digitizing project
[01:15:12.730]this spring with these issues that we have which we hope to also we will be
[01:15:20.330]putting into online and and physical archive to preserve them and hopefully
[01:15:27.770]doing some scholarly work with them as well
[01:15:32.030]to bring a little bit more light to to Feliciano's little world thank you right
[01:15:38.750]and thank you all so incredibly much for engaging with this text and for spending
[01:15:44.450]your time thinking about it and being here this evening with us and thank all
[01:15:49.310]of you so very much for sharing this incredibly special moment with us thank
[01:15:54.590]you
[01:15:56.750]you
[01:15:58.810]you
[01:16:00.870]you
[01:16:02.930]you
[01:16:04.990]Thank you.

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Politics, Romance, and a Lost Manuscript

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