Students, professors and community members gathered in the DeGolyer Library Thursday evening for a reception, lecture and book signing of Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s new work, “The Gulf of Mexico System and the ‘Latinness’ of New Orleans.”
Gruesz, who holds a bachelor’s from Swarthmore and a Ph.D. from Yale, is currently an associate professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her book was originally titled “New Orleans, the Gulf of Mexico System and the Abjection of Latin America,” but after fellow scholars criticized that she leaned too much on historicism in her pursuit of textual analysis, she reworked her footnotes and title.
Gruesz began work on her text long before the Katrina and Rita disasters of 2005. However, in light of the events, the work and its coverage of seldom discussed notions of U.S. culture and history is all the more pressing.
Gruesz cited America’s interpretation of New Orleans throughout the country’s history as being “dynamic, complicated and little understood.”
Spanish writer Sarmiento, on a trip from the northern interior of the United States to South America in 1847, described New Orleans as “a new animal created for political necessity. A dangerous backwards space, America’s orifice.”
Despite Sarmiento’s scathing criticism of the city, he did write down in his personal diary that he spent several dollars on “books – wicked ones” while he was in New Orleans. There seems to be a historical, ambivalent attraction to New Orleans with liminal delineation between Anglo and Latin culture. The Gulf System is a border zone, not a borderland – certain Spanish writers even referred to it as “the island of New Orleans.”
New Orleans, which has received so much attention in the past six months and will continue to do so as it recovers from devastation, has historically received attention for its dualistic position as the locus of power over South American trade with the United States while also being excluded from the more “acceptable” culture of the interior United States.
The overlap and continuity of Spanish, English and French cultures within the Gulf system spurned some of the best known Southern romance novels of the post-Civil War era, such as Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening.” While the innate spirituality of the Gulf is best expressed, according to Gruesz, in Spanish writing, New Orleans expresses an American enthusiasm for filibuster, fiery energy and humbug.
Now, in the post-Katrina world, Gruesz says it will be interesting to see the new immigration that comes to New Orleans as a result of the recovery efforts from devastation.
Now more than ever, Gruesz stresses, we need to better understand the relationship of the one South represented in the Gulf system that encapsulated both North and South America, and says in doing so, we will better understand one another.
