The first major history of Latin American literature in the 20th century, The Literary History of Spanish America (1916), was written by a Connecticut-born scholar named Alfred Coester. Coester entered the field of Iberian and Latin American literary studies during his time in Spain and ultimately received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1906, with a dissertation on the Poema del Cid. In 1920, after years teaching at a high school in New York and serving in Latin America for the State Department, he joined the faculty of Stanford University, beginning a foundational career in my field, Latin American literary studies.
Coester’s Literary History serves as a testament to how much and how little things have changed in the century or so since its publication. In the wake of construction of the Panama Canal, Coester was inspired by William Howard Taft’s admiration of the “Spanish American” — “I know the attractiveness of the Spanish American; I know his highborn courtesy; I know his love of art, his poetic nature, his response to generous treatment,” the president said in 1913. Coester’s work, a product full of the prejudices of his time no doubt, was nonetheless strongly committed to the importance of Spanish American literature, and to countering the belief that such literature was inferior to that of Spain and of the United States. “But shall we call Spanish-American writings literature?” Coester asks in his preface. The question made sense, considering that Bartolomé Mitre, a former president of Argentina and a major poet himself, did not believe that there was such a thing, or that the Iberian critic Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, in the book of record at the time, Historia de la Poesía Hispano-Americana, generally found these writings to be, as Coester himself paraphrased, “not only detestable but bad literature.” (For more on Coester, I recommend Fernando Degiovanni’s Vernacular Latin Americanisms, which discusses Coester extensively and provides an important history of the field.)
Coester’s question (“are Latin American writings literature?”) comes to my mind every time the press laments the demise of literary studies and the humanities. In The Chronicle and elsewhere, articles addressing our shared crises are generally written by professors in English departments confronting the reality of their field’s transformation from a backbone discipline to a peripheral one. I see my English colleagues as comrades and as partners in our common fight, but it becomes hard to elicit solidarity from people in fields like Spanish when the problems of English monopolize fundamental conversations critical to many other fields, particularly in venues like this one, read carefully by administrators with the power to decide our extinction.
The academy has failed to address an open war on Hispanophone culture.
Some of the arguments in The Chronicle Review’s “Endgame,” a collection of texts about the “academic study of literature,” sound puzzling or frivolous to me. I am an avid reader of Simon During’s work, and his “Losing Faith in the Humanities” intelligently describes the decline of the humanities as part of a secularization process. However, I do not recognize my field at all in his argument. The study of Spanish in the United States has never been a matter of canonicity or faith, but rather a continuous battle against the grain of prejudice and provincialism — often exercised by English scholars themselves. During’s piece exemplifies the kind of argument that only makes sense if you think that English and maybe history constitute the humanities at large. In a different and more relevant essay, the tragic and beautiful “My University is Dying,” Sheila Liming tells a truly compelling story about the economic crash in public universities and the refusal to rebuild after the purported recovery. But I couldn’t help wondering what was happening to the Spanish program at her university. How was it faring, as an even more peripheral humanities program than English?
The erasure of Latin American and Iberian literary studies from accounts of the “academic study of literature” and the “crisis of the humanities” is pervasive and, if Coester’s story illustrates anything, foundational. Every January, when I read media reports from the Modern Language Association’s convention, I am not surprised to see journalists flocking to English (and, to a lesser degree, comparative literature) panels but failing to notice the existence of anyone in “foreign languages” — an oversight not helped by the MLA’s usual practice of scheduling English and foreign-language panels in separate hotels altogether. Our invisibility in the reporting reflects something we all experience institutionally: We barely exist to our administrators, and we spend enormous amounts of time and energy defending — often fruitlessly — our importance as a research field and not just a place for pre-meds and pre-laws to cover their language requirements.
Those who ignore us often forget that Spanish is the fourth-most spoken language in the world — and the language of 50 million people in the United States. There are more Spanish speakers in this country than in Spain. Programs in Iberian and Latin American literatures are the only place in the vast majority of universities where the literatures and cultures of the U.S.’s second language actually exist as an academic pursuit. In institutions like my own, which does not have a single tenure-line devoted to U.S. Latinx literature or culture, Spanish programs are also the only place in which the growing population of U.S.-born and immigrant Latinx students can at least approach the language and culture of their heritage as a central pursuit rather than a minor subfield heroically defended by one or two faculty members.
My institution, like many others, has scholars doing great research in fields like social work and sociology on the challenges faced by Latinxs. However, as my Latinx and Latin American students often tell me, the fact that their culture is taught as a social problem but seldom as the source of some of humanity’s most important cultural works replicates the stereotypes affecting Latinxs and Latin Americans in U.S. society at large. When literary studies are conflated with English, the value of what we do, and they don’t, is threatened — not only by the crisis afflicting the humanities in general, but by academe’s failure to address the open war on Hispanophone culture waged by legislators, the continued imperial policies against Latin America, the constant demeaning of immigrants from Latin America, and bans on Mexican American studies (like that the one that stood in Arizona for many years). Spanish departments are one of the few places in the university, along with programs in Latinx and Latin American studies, where this marginalization can be fought.
The study of Iberian and Latin American literature takes place in conditions so adverse that the complaints articulated by English and comparative-literature colleagues barely scratch the surface of our challenges. Spanish programs are primordially tasked with language teaching. This means that unless one belongs to the rare, extinction-bound species of literature faculty at an R1 doctoral institution (like I do), literary scholars in my field devote a considerable part, often the majority, of their teaching to language acquisition, and rarely have the chance to bring their research expertise to the classroom. In smaller institutions, a single tenure-line faculty member can be tasked with teaching the entirety of Latin America — if anyone is at all. In most universities, Spanish is lumped together with other “foreign” languages — even though it is definitely not a foreign language. And in many places, literary studies in Spanish programs has been ceding ground to applied linguistics and pedagogy, which contribute importantly to our language-teaching pursuit, but which ought to complement, rather than replace, the study of literature and culture. The very possibility of teaching literature in a Spanish program is in constant danger.
The vast majority of students who wish to study literature go to English and comparative-literature programs, while most consider Spanish to be their second major, and “only” a language major. Their goal is language and cultural proficiency to address the Latinx and the transnational dimensions of the professions they aspire to join. It is increasingly difficult to persuade them that the study of literature is essential to their goals. In my 14 years teaching at an elite R1 institution, only five of my students have gone on to pursue a graduate degree in my field. In other words, our everyday job in undergraduate education is to teach literature in their second language to students who do not necessarily want to learn literature, and who in many cases do not even read literature in English.
These days, one is often faced with students from both elite and marginalized high schools who have never really been taught how to read a literary work in English. Now imagine classrooms full of students whose first substantial encounter with a literary text is Sor Juana or Borges in Spanish! We do this job lovingly, and against the grain of these structural impediments. I am proud to say that majors and preprofessional students alike often leave our classrooms either in love with literature, or at least with a sense of the cultural richness of Latin America and Spain. But our frequent experiences with students who become influenced by our subject do not translate well to the bean-counting that pervades university assessment. Even our national evaluation standards as established by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages focus on language acquisition rather than on literary or cultural knowledge.
We are in the midst of a boom of Latinx students on campus — the college-going rate of “Hispanics” pursuing higher education grew from 22 to 37 percent between 2000 and 2015, according to the Department of Education — and yet, for all the talk of diversity and inclusion, it is impossible for many departments, including mine, to persuade our administrations of the need to hire faculty in U.S. Hispanophone culture, Hispano-Caribbean studies, Central American studies, or other fields that represent the heritage of these communities.
This is a longstanding problem. When I was on the job market in 2006, most R1 universities did not have a professor of Mexican literature, even though Mexicans are the largest immigrant group in the United States. At the moment of this writing, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, for instance, do not have a single tenure-line faculty member dedicated primarily to Mexican literature. The life of a literature professor in a Spanish program can be thankless, particularly in fields that actually address Latinx students. As the case of Lorgia García-Peña, a star scholar recently denied tenure at Harvard, shows dramatically, the service that Spanish programs do in meeting Latinx students’ educational and cultural needs often goes unrewarded and even punished. Institutions want to showcase enough diversity for ranking purposes, but refuse to invest in infrastructure to teach and research the heritage and culture of this growing demographic.
Institutions want to showcase enough diversity for ranking purposes, but refuse to invest in teaching and research in Latin American literature.
The employment crisis, the casualization of labor, administrative neglect, and undergraduate-enrollment declines are problems that we share with everyone else. But the bias against our work takes these crises in new directions. Spanish graduate programs are relatively few and have contracted significantly. In the latest data collected by the MLA, 48 percent of departments decreased graduate Spanish enrollments between 2013 and 2016, and I suspect that number is higher today. I do not think we are anywhere near the overproduction of Ph.D.s afflicting the field of English. But as the cuts hit us, Spanish departments, like other humanities programs, have stopped hiring tenure-track faculty members altogether. Departures and retirements go unreplaced. The tenure stream is often very top heavy (my department, in a wealthy university, has 15 Spanish tenure-track faculty members, of whom only one is an assistant professor), which means that we have been unable to incorporate new directions in the field.
Yet, rather than leaving the academy, as I see many young scholars in English do, scholars holding a Spanish Ph.D. often become non-tenure-track language instructors and language teachers in K-12 institutions. Others leave for Spanish-speaking countries with strong academies (Mexico, Argentina, Chile). One could argue that this results in a less dire situation than the one faced by scholars in English. But it is not an exaggeration to say that, for people with a Spanish literary-studies degree — including many on the tenure track — teaching literature is the exception, rather than the rule. And some job market issues are, if not unique, particularly difficult for us. We educate a very high proportion of foreign graduate students, many of them from Latin America and Spain, who are routinely forced to drop out of the U.S. job market because failure to find a job right after graduate school means losing their visas. This is particularly sinister at a moment when anti-Hispanic politics are strong. Since President Trump came to power, many members of my field have faced long, unjustifiable delays in their migration paperwork.
Many of our problems are the consequence of the outright discrimination. An administrator once told a friend of mine that the only reason he supported the Spanish department was because students needed to be able to communicate with the help. In the universities of some of my colleagues, deans respond to requests for faculty in fields of enormous cultural urgency — like Central American literature or Latinx literature in Spanish, needed to recognize the growing population of minority students — by asking if the department would consider hiring someone dedicated to business or medical Spanish instead. To be a faculty member in Iberian and Latin American studies frequently implies educating administrators, even well-meaning ones, about why we exist in the first place.
Basic ignorance afflicts faculty advancement, too. Colleagues face challenges in the tenure process because publication in Spanish is not considered to be good enough. When I was a junior professor, a senior faculty member told me that publishing in the press of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, one of the gold standards for a Mexicanist like me, would be worthless. That he was himself born in Latin America — albeit someone who often refused to speak Spanish in public — added to the irony. Many of us, including myself, moved from primarily writing in Spanish to primarily writing in English because the type of academic publication in Spanish visible for purposes of university evaluation is either unavailable, expensive (requiring thousands of dollars in subsidies), or, paradoxically, less visible in Spanish-speaking countries than some publications in English.
Spanish language programs could be self-sustaining. We are, after all, the largest second-language and the second-largest field of literary studies. Nonetheless, academic consolidation means that rather than growing to meet the formidable challenge posed by the increased presence of Latinx students and the importance of Spanish in everyday American life, we have to compete for resources with, and even subsidize, other foreign-language programs. This is not to say that we do not stand in defense of French or German programs, or against the near-extinction of fields like Italian and Russian, all of which constitute the bulk of the 651 language programs that disappeared between 2013 and 2016. But it is also true, according to that same report by the MLA, that Spanish had a net loss of 118 programs, second only to French, a number that only makes sense if one tacks prejudice to financial austerity.
I have benefited from a degree of mentorship, institutional support, and good fortune that is simply unavailable to most of my peers. As such, I decided a few years ago to devote myself to representing Latin American literary studies at conferences and in publications dominated by English and comparative literature. I have no complaints about the generous and welcoming reception that I have found. But the dynamics of our marginalization in the larger constellation of literary fields have become crystal clear since I started venturing out. There are countless books and journals on putatively transnational topics in which Latin American literature is either ignored or represented by a token scholar — a role I have played myself. While many literary scholars are multilingual, it is unusual for a scholar outside of my field to read Spanish. Moreover, most of our colleagues in other literary disciplines lack even basic knowledge of the books published in English about Latin American or Iberian literature, even when it relates to the periods and topics that they themselves study. And when one considers that three of the most influential writers worldwide are Latin American — Borges, García Márquez, and Bolaño — the inability or unwillingness to support the disciplines that account for the genealogy of those writers is a glaring omission.
Add to this the dismal state of translation of literary criticism from Spanish to English — we are more likely to have a critical edition of the most trivial writings by the French theoretician du jour than the seminal work of a Latin American or Iberian thinker — and it should surprise no one that even the most sophisticated comparatists can be astonishingly ignorant about Latin America. As someone with extensive editorial experience, I can attest that it is nearly impossible to convince a press to pay for a translation of theory from Spanish, although some heroic efforts and supportive editors have begun to emerge. This is in part a consequence of the siloed practices of reading fostered by the rat race of the job market and the tenure process in a time of extreme austerity. But it is also the consequence of the fact that, unless you are a direct participant in it, the literary culture of 60 million Latinxs in the United States and of over 450 million Spanish speakers worldwide lacks the symbolic capital afforded to “literary studies” as such.
The provincialism of many U.S.-based disciplines means that Spanish programs are also in charge of cultural manifestations other than literature. It is rare for a program in film and media studies, for instance, to have a Latin Americanist or an Iberianist, so Spanish programs house most of the experts on the subject. If there is any Latin American presence in the humanities and the social sciences, it is often because scholars in Iberian and Latin American literary studies invite scholars and translate texts. If we disappear, the only place in which these materials even register in the United States will go with us. Alongside the (too few) Latinx-studies programs in the country, Spanish programs are the only place in which the culture of the largest immigrant community in the U.S. is central to our mission. Moreover, it can be hard to convey that Spanish programs, Latinx-studies programs, and Latin American-studies programs are different disciplines. This often means that the existence of one ends up justifying the erasure or the absence of the others.
Defending Latin American and Iberian culture at large is of particular importance in this age of Hispanophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment. We have the capacity to fight these phenomena, and a growing responsibility to do so. At a time when administrations are less likely than ever to invest in our growth, we need to bring into our departments subfields like Central American studies, Latinx Hispanophone literature, Afro-Hispanic studies, and indigenous studies. These are urgent areas of study — and there is student demand for them. If we are to deliver cultural recognition, inclusion, and justice to the largest immigrant populations and the speakers of the second-largest national language in the U.S., Iberian and Latin American studies should be front and center in conversations about literary studies. I hope that other humanists will fight alongside us against the existential crisis that threatens us all.
