Don Bartolomé de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, a Mexican diocesan priest of Spanish and noble Nahua ancestry, translated three plays from the Spanish baroque in the early 1640s. Due to his multiple positionalities – priest, translator, author – Alva has been understood as “in-between” distinct polarities. This understanding of Alva makes him relevant for examining sources and influences in proto-Latinx writing, including his way of dealing with language. This chapter analyzes Alva’s Nahuatl translation of Antonio Mira de Amescua’s El animal profeta y dichoso patricida, to argue that Alva is not “in-between” polarities, but rather is a cultural mediator that created and managed new contexts. Hence, Alva is a co-creator, not mere translator, who managed to reach two distinct audiences, Jesuit priest and Nahua elite, in one coherent text. He makes use of his positionalities, particularly in his portrayal of free will, strategically and intentionally to exercise his position of power as a priest and noble Nahua. Finally, his role as mediator contributes to the Latinx archive, providing an alternative to Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of “nepantla.” Instead, the process of “malinalli” in Aztec metaphysics becomes another way of conceptualizing a mixing together. This is exemplified in his process of translation.

This chapter explores a very early manifestation of Latinx people. Just as Goths, Celtics, and Andalusíes mixed to form something called “Spanish,” in the New World, pre-Latinx people formed when Indigenous, African, and European peoples encountered each other. A philological route to recover those realities is to read the archive, taking care to filter out colonial bias. Since chronicles about the New World were composed in Spanish or Portuguese, a neocolonial reworking of the archive occurs as it is translated into English. An early instance of what could be described as Latinx culture in a place called Cofachiqui in present-day South Carolina appears in Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s polished notes from his conversations with the conquistador Gonzalo Silvestre, La Florida by the Inca (1993). Other authorities add nuance and color to Garcilaso’s narrative, including The Account of the Gentleman of Elvas (1993), Luys Hernández de Biedma’s Relation of the Island of Florida (1993), and Rodrigo Rangel’s Account of the Northern Conquest and Discovery of Hernando de Soto (1993). When read together and reading between the lines, a fuller picture emerges of an early Latinx experience that happened in South Carolina at a place described in the chronicles as Cofachiqui.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, frustration with party boss control of the nomination process continued to grow. At the beginning of the twentieth century, at the behest of Progressives, several states adopted the presidential primary election, allowing voters to directly participate in the nomination process for the first time. Both national parties accepted the validity of the primary election process, but the early primaries did little to empower ordinary voters. In most primary states, voters did not directly vote for the presidential candidate but rather for the individual delegates to the national convention, whose candidate preference was often unknown and not disclosed on the ballot. As a result, uncommitted and favorite-son delegations, both of which were typically stand-ins for the state and local party bosses, often won the primary elections. Moreover, even when a candidate won a state’s primary, the national convention often allowed delegates from that state to vote for a different candidate; the primary result was not viewed as binding. Thus, despite the initial promise of primary elections, ordinary voters remained on the periphery of the nomination choice.

Between the mid-1920s and mid-1940s, the two Senate parties strengthened the position of floor leadership, building on the foundations laid by Gorman in the 1890s and on the innovations of the 1910s. This era of consolidation—a period first of Republican dominance, then of extended Democratic dominance, interrupted by a short period of competitiveness—is the subject of Chapter 7. Charles Curtis (R, Kans.), who became Republican leader in 1923, elaborated leadership posts as he navigated factionalism within his party. The New Deal elections left the Republican conference depleted—down to 16 members in 1937—so they minimized their formal organization in the 1930s and waited until 1944 to reinvent it. Democrats in this era were led by Joe Robinson (D, Ark.) and Alben Barkley (D, Ky.), who centralized power in the floor leadership position and wielded it effectively, but otherwise made few organizational changes.

As the providers of care work, women experienced the painful losses of male bodies during the Civil War acutely. This chapter explores the way Elizabeth Stuart Phelps used her works—particularly her successful sentimental novel, The Gates Ajar (1868)—to imagine faith as a way to manage this pain. Yet, Phelps’s popularity stemmed from the way her notion of faith also complicated the orthodox Calvinist belief in a disembodied spirit: an ontology premised on the soul’s difference from, and superiority to, the body. By developing what Phelps calls “spiritual materialism,” she puts the lived experience of embodiment at the very center of belief, not drifting or working between mind-centered and body-centered paradigms, as we have seen, but operating beyond them both at the level of faith. Precisely the way this re-embodied faith moves beyond mind-centered and body-centered ontologies allows Phelps’s sentimental novel itself to move beyond the restrictive gender politics of sentimentalism, “minding the body” to tell a less repressive story of domesticity and reveal a more capacious understanding of female desire.

The great postwar buildout comprises the most dramatic chapter in the longer history of suburbanization in the US. No other moment compares in terms of scale, speed, or social significance: the period saw a broader white middle-class identity coalesce around suburban homeownership. The literature that attends to these physical and social transformations – narrative material that continues to shape perceptions of suburban life today, and that provides this chapter with its principal focus – is characterized by hyperbolic tensions about money. Concerns about not having quite enough of it repeatedly become matters of life and death in these stories; the very real advantages of suburban living are thus typically obscured or disavowed. This chapter argues, however, that some of the period’s literature possesses a further, instructional role: texts such as Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit offer guidance, in a manner not unlike contemporary self-help literature, about how to make money matter to just the right degree to maximize the advantages of suburban settlement. This fine balancing, which is always executed in the absence of any consideration of the precarity of others, is a precise measure of the privilege of these fictional white middle-class subjects.

Organizational innovation in Senate parties is not continuous. Innovation is time-consuming and causes rifts among senators and so has been most likely to occur when the short-term payoff, in terms of the goals of majority party control and winning legislative battles, is substantial. The payoff is likely to be greatest when party strength is close to parity. Our central theme has been that modern party leaders advance their parties’ legislative and electoral goals by managing their party organization, coordinating party activities on the floor, serving as intermediaries with the president, building coalitions, and serving as party spokespersons. We have emphasized throughout this book that legislative and electoral goals are usually pursued in tandem. The process of organizational invention is sporadic. But it is also one of the nearly monotonic increases in the organizational capability of the two parties since the creation of party caucuses in 1841.

Henry Box Brown not only mailed himself in a box from Richmond in Philadelphia in 1849, but he also remediated this experience of embodiment later in competing slave narratives, on stage, in a panorama, and through his role as a magician and mesmerist. In these four “acts,” Brown uses the representation of his experiences of Black embodiment across various media both to support and—simultaneously—to undercut the mind-centered ontology that structured the system of chattel slavery’s reduction of Blackness to mindless matter. Rather than imagine ontological drift, as Bird does, or ontological betweenness, like Forrest, Brown uses different representations of Black embodiment to imagine existence as always already ontologically doubled, as something governed by the mind-centered paradigm that demeans the body, and by the body-centered paradigm that makes the material body’s expressive agency crucial for the fullest articulation of humanity. Brown suggests that consciousness emerges simultaneously from the mind and the body, and that by carefully curating these overlapping, and doubled, forms of consciousness, Black subjects can “mind the body” in order to imagine alternatives to white culture’s dehumanizing of Blackness.

The failure of the vice president—even more, the failure of the president pro tempore, who unlike the vice president is elected by the Senate—to become a party leader is a puzzle. Indeed, in the late 1830s and early 1840s, a full half-century after the first Congress, the president pro tempore, like the speaker, was routinely exercising the power to name the chairs and members of all standing committees; elections for president pro tempore were contested and closely watched; and no seniority rule existed. But, as we show in Chapter 2, the influence of the president pro tempore over the Senate’s affairs reached its zenith in the early 1840s. Although senators continued to refine the office’s responsibilities for maintaining order and enforcing rules, the position of the Senate’s presiding officer never fulfilled its early promise.

By the mid-twentieth century, for those on the political Left, America had spawned a purely competitive, morally and spiritually debased, money-oriented culture. Inspiring a diverse range of responses, this American culture of money was a central ideological target of 1960s-era activism, alongside interrelated concerns with industrialization, the nuclear threat, the Vietnam War and American interventionism abroad, racism, and environmental degradation. Some counterculture groups adopted explicitly anti-money doctrines and actively sought to build functioning communities outside of the money economy; for others, poverty was associated with spiritual plenitude, or was a secondary symptom of a desire to be free of all responsibilities and entanglements; still others critiqued capitalism’s role in structural oppression. This chapter explores the diversity of such responses, as illustrated in political and literary works of the period, and registers the extent to which countercultural criticism of the culture of money was not without its compromises, inconsistencies, and (apparent) hypocrisies.

The 1968 Democratic National Convention illuminated all of the flaws in the presidential nomination process to that time: The ineffectiveness of presidential primary elections; the failure of party bosses to follow democratic norms in state conventions that selected national convention delegates; and the continued exclusion of African-Americans from the southern parties’ nomination process. Hubert Humphrey won the party’s nomination, but the manner in which he did so left many Democrats convinced that their nomination process was fundamentally flawed. Before it closed, the 1968 convention demanded that the party’s national committee create a commission to examine the party’s nomination process, with an eye to opening it up to ordinary voters in the future. In so doing, the 1968 Democratic National Convention set the stage for a reform movement that would fundamentally transform the presidential nomination process in both parties.

In his intensely physical acting, the nineteenth-century actor, Edwin Forrest, crafted a working-class theatrical aesthetic that imagined our existence not as drifting, but as ontologically between, an ontological third term distinct from both the mind-centered and the body-centered ontological paradigms. By recovering the way Forrest staged his own muscular—and white—body in his interpretation of Shakespeare’s Othello (1826) and in Bird’s The Gladiator (1831), this chapter argues that Forrest used the experience of his labored at, and laboring, body to perform this ontological betweenness as an alternative to the antebellum market’s alienation and regulation of working-class bodies. In staging the agency of white, working-class bodies against Black inagentic bodies on stage, Forrest’s performance of ontological betweenness “minded the body” by offering his adoring working-class audiences less alienated—but racially complicated—ways to perform their own material embodiment in the early nineteenth century.

The Great Depression is uniquely poised for literary-critical reevaluation, following the reorienting new lenses of Economic Criticism and the New History of Capitalism. Thinking (more) materially has permitted literary scholars in particular to better apprehend the textured record of modern lives: one where production and consumption infuse interior landscapes and unsettle divisive ontologies; where objects and goods occupy central space in the cultural imaginary and affective ecologies; where the human, natural, and built worlds overlay in unruly, disruptive ways; and where the tyranny of the human subject collapses into a broader network of interconnection that imperils the hoary axioms of civilization itself. This chapter offers a reading of Richard Wright’s posthumously published novel The Man Who Lived Underground (written just after the Depression) in the context of US Southern, African American, and Native American perspectives on the destabilizing and dehumanizing consequences of economic collapse. These contrapuntal readings unveil an American modernity marked by profound, multivalent loss: where money fails to orient, so too does race, and the uncanny (and always, finally, imaginary) freedom from both measures is by turns exhilarating and insupportable.

The closely divided Senates between the late 1870s and early 1890s was a period of remarkable innovation in the Senate. In 1881, each party controlled the same number of seats, something that had never before occurred in Senate history. It was in that Senate, in 1882–83, that Republicans invented a wholly new institution, which they gave the name “steering committee.” Then, in 1892–93, the Republican steering committee was strengthened and redefined, making it the dominant institution of the dominant Senate party for the next two decades. Facing the prospect of losing their majority following the 1892 elections, Republican senators mobilized, first to try to influence the state legislatures picking new senators then to manage their place in the legislative process. Created by a competitive party suddenly in the minority, the committee came to eclipse the caucus itself once Republicans regained majority status in 1895. During these years, Republican leadership in the Senate was centered on a handful of men: Nelson Aldrich (R, R.I.), William Allison (R, Iowa), Orville Platt (R, Conn.), Eugene Hale (R, Maine), and John Spooner (R, Wisc.).

In the main, critics have regarded Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés (also known as Plácido) as a tragic mulatto detached from enslaved black people yet unable to join the ranks of the white literary elite. This essay takes an innovative approach to Plácido by reading his poetry as transculturated colonial literature rather than a poor imitation of European aesthetics. Plácido produced poems situated at the crossroads between classical European deities and enigmatic African spiritual practices. I argue that Plácido transculturated Mars, the Roman god of war, with the Yoruba principles of the divine masculine most often attributed to the orisha Oggún. In Oggún philosophy, the divine masculine is the capacity to exploit the powers of devastation and dissension either to ensure the survival of a given polity or to remake it entirely. Plácido appropriated Aeolus, the Greek god of the wind, Jupiter, the supreme Roman god, and most prominently Mars, the Roman god of war to reimagine Cuban resistance as a just war between good and evil. Plácido’s portrayal of ancient deities divested of sacred authority enabled him to convey an alternative God concept without contravening censorship guidelines that forbade any criticism of Catholicism, the official religion of the empire.

This chapter reads Las edades de la rata (2019), a comic by Peruvian, Valencia-based Martín López Lam within a genealogy of the migrant subject. It proposes that Antonio Cornejo Polar’s ideas on migration as a phenomenon which goes back in time, both aesthetically and conceptually, are useful to think about how recent literature dealing with the contemporary migrant condition can be read as a continuation of long-lasting histories and traditions of displacement. The essay traces a connection between contemporary Latinx comics and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, which Cornejo Polar identifies as one of the first manifestations of this migrant aesthetic. The qilqas of Guaman Poma are thus read alongside a form of our times, the contemporary comic, a medium that is defined by its radical formal heterogeneity and multimodal construction. Ultimately, by reading López Lam’s comic within this framework, the chapter draws a relationship between the many dimensions of the migrant subject, including its Latinx iterations, and the larger processes of coloniality which have shaped the encounter of cultures in Latin America and its diasporas.

This chapter attends to contemporary Latinx adaptations of early modern English drama and theater to theorize how a hegemonic playwright such as Shakespeare can be adapted as Latinx theater Cuban-American playwright Carlos-Zenen Trujillo’s 2019 play, The Island in Winter or, La Isla en Invierno (an adaptation of The Winter’s Tale), serves as a case study of the multimodal process of transnational theatrical bilanguaging, or the experience of living between languages. I argue that the currency of adapting Shakespeare for Latinx today is in the possibility of moving from a historical memory that recolonizes Latinx to an active site of Latinx temporality as worldmaking. Trujillo’s The Island in Winter as a process of epistemic disobedience disenfranchises anti-Black racism from theatrical representations of Cuban culture by integrating African Indigenous rituals into one of Shakespeare’s stories. It is through this process that cultural narratives are redrawn and reenacted, while gaps in the Western canon are exposed.

Our main concern is to understand Senate party development. What are the problems that individual legislators encounter in the absence of leadership? How do they set out to solve problems of coordination and collective action? Our answer, and our central argument, focuses on three factors: party competition, factionalism, and entrepreneurs. In the Senate, where leadership and institutional organization rest in the two parties rather than in the presiding officer, members adopt innovative structures when parties are most closely balanced. With this book, we look at the rise of party organization and leadership in the Senate throughout its history—showing the origins of the Senate caucus in the 1840s, the Republican steering committee in the 1880s and early 1890s, and Senate floor leadership in 1890, and then analyzing the maturation and development of party leadership and organization in the twentiethth and twenty-first centuries. We focus on five main features of Senate leadership: party organization management, floor management, service as intermediary with the president, party spokespersonship, and coalition building.