Review of Felipe Fernandez-armesto the Americas a Hemispheric History

The The states is even so often thought of as an offshoot of England, with its history unfolding e to west starting time with the start English settlers in Jamestown. But what about the significance of America'southward Hispanic past?Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States is Felipe Fernández-Armesto's  book on the Hispanic past and futurity of the U.S., taking inthe explorers and conquistadores who planted Spain's kickoff colonies in Puerto Rico, through to the Hispanic heartlands in major cities such as Chicago, Miami, New York, and Boston. A wonderful and indispensable read for students of American history and civilization, writes Zalfa Feghali .

Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States. Felipe Fernández-Armesto. W.W. Norton & Visitor. February 2014.

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My lasting impression of Felipe Fernández-Armesto's Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States is its unflinching optimism. Alongside its optimism, this book is realistic, interesting, and scholarly, while still existence utterly readable. Fernández-Armesto's Hispanic narrative of the US is more than a revisionist project; it is not "just" a recalibration of The states history premised on the foregrounding of a "minority" group. Instead, this project zooms out, every bit it were, to view the history and time to come of the United States using a wider, hemispheric frame, based on the premise that "even well-educated, amiable, open-minded people in the United States do not realize that their country has a Hispanic past also as a Hispanic future" (xvii).

If the author's aim in Our America – a championship evocative of, among the many other works that inform the volume, José Martí'south famous essay "Nuestra America" (1891) – is to remind us that "Hispanics belong in the entire story of the country – as part of its origins and part of every important episode in its unfolding", then he certainly succeeds. While his shouldn't exist a radical assertion – considering Fernández-Armesto is correct – it is. Since, as he puts it, "citizens of the Us have e'er learned the history of their land as if it unfolded exclusively from eastward to west", the history of the US is all too ofttimes understood as "essentially – even necessarily – Anglophone, with a culture heavily indebted to the heritage of radical Protestantism and English language laws and values" (xx). This trend is not exclusive to the Us; the same history is near often taught similarly in the UK and elsewhere.

That said, Fernández-Armesto does not merits to offering an exhaustive history of the Us from a Hispanic perspective, only "an essay on the history of the United States…with the aim of stimulating thought rather than accumulating knowledge" (xxix). The volume is divided into 3 parts, with nine chapters covering the colonial era, the nineteenth century, and what Fernández-Armesto calls "Hispanic countercolonization" since the 19^th century.

The first chapter sets the tone of the study by request a simple question: "Where is Us history commonly supposed to have begun?" The reply, which Fernández-Armesto provides earlier the question, is of course, Puerto Rico (though a Google search provides hilariously vague and misleading results to this question). The fact that this question is so "difficult" to reply makes its own point; that even when faced with "facts", history has opted to overlook the fact that the first Europeans that settled in what is now the United States settled in Puerto Rico. In that location are various "justifications" for this, notes the writer, but none account for the fact that Americans "ignore or deliberately exclude Puerto Rico because of prejudice: prejudice that the Usa is a country fabricated by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, constructed by Anglophone colonists" (and so on), and where in gild to authorize equally an American citizen you must subscribe "to a approved version of the history of the land that begins among English colonists on the e declension of the continent" (p.5).

Mi Orgullo or My Pride: images captured during the 2010 and 2013 Puerto Rican/Hispanic Twenty-four hour period Parade in Bayshore, New York. Credit: SonnyVisions Photography CC By-SA 2.0

Of class all of these are now commonly held positions in the report of US history (though perhaps it is not worth going so far as to say they are universally accepted). This gentle but incredibly effective beginning sets upwards the rest of Fernández-Armesto's book, equally he considers histories that run in parallel to and silently (from the perspective of mainstream historical perspectives) only significantly inform the Anglo-American narrative of the United States: the ascension and fall of Castilian Florida, the Spanish colonization of what we now know as the South- and Mid-west, and Spain's role in the Revolutionary War. Each of these narratives, he argues, are informed by myths, including those of the Fountain of Youth, Queen Calafia, King Arthur, and after, Aztlàn, the mythical homeland of the Chicanos. As the author notes: "myths inspired people to explore and settle what has go the United states" (p.355).

The terminal chapter considers "the most pervasive myth of all – the American Dream of prosperity and independence in a country of opportunity unrestricted by barriers of class and creed (albeit not entirely by those of race)" (p.355). It is this concluding comment that may well be just a touch on as well optimistic – surely the The states has not overcome issues of class and creed? And certainly the event of race in the US deserves far more a sidelined parenthetical comment. But despite this, the author's points still stand: if the people of the The states recognize the Us equally "a country with a Hispanic past also as a Hispanic future" (p.352), there is little to lose. As Fernández-Armesto puts it: "The U.s.a. does not need to be an Anglo redoubt in gild to remain itself" (p.353).

This book'due south slap-up strength is its optimism grounded in robust, rigorous scholarly inquiry and lyrical, poetic, and engaging prose. It volition be (and has already been) well received by the broad range of audiences it effectively caters to. In terminal few years there has been burgeoning interest in North American Latinidad in the UK, and more recently, the emergence of groups such every bit The Salsa Collective and the Radical Americas inquiry network, among many others, attests to this. Given my own interests in hemispheric American studies, I find this volume to exist indispensable.

This review originally appeared at the LSE Review of Books.

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Annotation: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of USApp– American Politics and Policy, nor of the London Schoolhouse of Economic science.

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Zalfa Feghali – Canterbury Christ Church University
Zalfa Feghali is Lecturer in Modern American Literature at Canterbury Christ Church building University. Her previous research focused on the relationship betwixt contemporary American and Canadian poetry, citizenship, and civic acts of reading and her current project traces a literary history of Northward American citizenship. She is an avid ukulele player and tin exist followed on twitter @zalface. Read more than reviews past Zalfa.

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V minutes with Felipe Fernandez-Armesto: "Hispanic America is resuming its history afterwards what has been an interval of white, Anglo-Saxon supremacy"

Many have credited President Obama'due south ballot 2012 ballot victory with his capturing of the vast majority of the Hispanic vote. But do America'southward changing demographics marker an entirely new tendency, or simply the return of its own Spanish history? Chris Gilson, USAPP editor , talks to Felipe Fernandez-Armestoabout his new volume,Our America: A Hispanic history of the Us, which argues that afterward two centuries of relative Anglo-Saxon dominance, the U.Due south. is beginning a return towards existence a more than typical Hispanic-American country. He says by acknowledging its Hispanic parts and history, Americans will exist better able to adjust to having a more than equal relationship with their Latin American neighbors. Read the total interview.

saladinowithful.blogspot.com

Source: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2014/05/04/book-review-our-america-a-hispanic-history-of-the-united-states-by-felipe-fernandez-armesto/

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