Cecilia Valdés in New Orleans
This paper considers some New Orleans sources, parallels and intertexts of Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés o la loma del Ángel: novela de costumbres cubanas (Havana, 1839-New York, 1882) and the fact that Cuba’s national novel was written over thirty years’ residence in the United States. Like José Martí, Benito Juárez, and other prominent Spanish Americans, Villaverde spent time in New Orleans where he published a weekly newspaper (El Independiente) in the 1850s. Rodrigo Lazo (2002) maps the transnational dimensions of Cecilia Valdés but does not discuss his New Orleans connections. The paper emphasizes this material in an effort to highlight the continuity of Spanish roots in the city (for example, the first Spanish language newspaper in the United States, El Misisipi, was published from 1808-1810 for Spanish exiles from the Napoleonic invasion of the Peninsula) and the importance of New Orleans as a part of the Latin American map.
Two novels on New Orleans history and customs related to Cecilia Valdés are George Washington Cable’s Les Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (New York, 1880) and Charles Gayarré’s Fernando de Lemos (New York, 1872). All three address questions of race, class, and Creole identity in the changing cities of Havana and New Orleans. All discuss the tradition of plaçage or formalized extramarital relationships between well-to-do white men and well-raised women of color, which enhanced the population of free persons of color in the city but, as the plot of Cecilia Valdés famously indicates, also threatened the stability of white families and whiteness itself.
New Orleans was part of the Captaincy-General of Cuba from 1762-1802, administered from Havana, and was thus literally part of Spanish America; between 1791 and 1809 it swelled with refugees from Haiti, many of whom had come through Cuba. Cable’s novel has an interpolated tale of the slave Bras-Coupé, whose story echoes that of the one-armed Haitian slave François Mackandal familiar to many from Alejo Carpentier’s novel El reino de este mundo (1949). Gayarré, a New Orleanian of Spanish descent, emphasizes Spanish characters including carlista nobility in his memoir of the city, and participates in the plaçage trope that is the kernel of Villaverde’s novel.
As we continue to examine documents of the period, the image of a Spanish or Spanish-inflected New Orleans begins to take shape. It becomes clear as well that Cecilia Valdés, the transnational Cuban novel, has a strong New Orleans dimension. The paper includes discussion of Villaverde’s journalism, Spanish language journalism in New Orleans, and the controversy around the reality of the custom of plaçage following new research by Kenneth Aslakson (2012).
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I did read The Grandissimes in a U.S. lit class at Reed College. The prof did not have anything to say about it that I remember. Was it a foundation myth? Not sure.
I urgently need to decide how I want to define foundation myths.
Grandissimes is boring, not my kind of novel, unless you are doing research on the issues in it, in which case it becomes interesting.
On the Haitian migration: http://www.inmotionaame.org/migrations/landing.cfm?migration=5&bhcp=1
Emily Clark at Tulane is coming out with a book that confirms Aslakson, which should be mentioned in this abstract.