Professor of Ethnic Studies Raúl Coronado specializes in Latino literary and intellectual history from the colonial period to the 1940s. His first book, A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture (Harvard, 2013), focuses on how Spanish Americans in Texas used writing as a means to establish new sources of authority, and how a Latino literary and intellectual life was born in the New World.

In 1808, Napoleon invaded Spain and deposed the king. Overnight the Hispanic world was forced to confront modernity and to look beyond monarchy and religion for new sources of authority. The geographic locale that became Texas changed sovereignty four times, from Spanish colony to Mexican republic to Texan republic to U.S. state. Following the trail of manifestos, correspondence, histories, petitions, and periodicals, Raúl Coronado explores how Texas Mexicans began the slow process of viewing the world no longer as a received order but a produced order and debated how best to remake the social fabric even as they were caught up in a whirlwind of wars, social upheaval, and political transformations. In the end, Coronado sees in this process of racialization the birth of an emergent Latino culture and literature.

After an introduction by Francine Masiello (Comparative Literature and Spanish and Portuguese), Coronado will speak briefly about his work and then open the floor for discussion.