Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belong in the Early Americas

UC Santa Cruz literature professor Gruesz (Ambassadors of Culture) demonstrates in this immersive and eye-opening study that lines between languages and empires in 17th-century America were more fluid than previous historians and literary critics have imagined. In the 1690s, Gruesz explains, New England clergyman Cotton Mather learned Spanish in order to write a religious pamphlet aimed at converting the inhabitants of Spain’s colonies to Protestantism. In 1699, La Fe del Christiano (The Faith of the Christian) became the first Spanish-language text published in New England. Gruesz places the pamphlet’s composition within the context of “New Puritan Studies,” an emerging field that seeks to decenter New England from its long-held position as “the primal scene of national origins,” locating it in a far wider Atlantic world encompassing many African, Native American, and European actors and cultures. To that end, Gruesz also mines the historical record for details about a Mather family bondservant known as “Spaniard,” who was likely of African, Hispanic, and Indigenous heritage and had lived in Spanish-speaking America. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, this is an essential reconsideration of the historical and contemporary place of the Spanish language and “Brown identity” in the U.S. (July)