Northern Sights: Gender and Race in Latin American Nineteenth-Century Travel Narratives of the United States

During the nineteenth century, when Latin American nations were seeking ways to define home territory as distinct from their colonial legacies, some leading intellectuals sought inspiration in a modernizing hemispheric neighbor, the United States. “Northern Sights: Gender and Race in Latin American Nineteenth-Century Travel Narratives of the United States” analyzes how nine letrados interrogated gender and race as they related to imaginary geographies. By examining multiple and even contradictory socially-constructed representations of the “United States Man” (Chapter 1), the “United States Woman” (Chapter 2), and “The United States as a Multiethnic Nation” (Chapter 3), this project challenges the predominant North to South trajectory in travel writing studies that implicitly considers Latin America to be a passive recipient of cultural modernity developed elsewhere. Drawing from Benedict Anderson, I argue that travelogues contributed to the consolidation of the nation-building project and to letrado dominance within this project. This study, comprised of three chapters with an introduction and a conclusion, illuminates how these authors established their positions in nascent national canons as well as challenged notions of United States exceptionalism through the genre of travel literature