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This dissertation examines interactions and circuits of exchange between Anglophone and Hispanophone literary cultures in the wake of the Mexican-American War, particularly those involving African-American, Indigenous, Latin American, and proto Latina/o-American communities. My dissertation grapples with the breadth of multilingual Americas, examining the stakes of U.S. territorial expansion and empire through a range of translations, adaptations, and literary borrowings that enabled the transit and transmutation of texts in the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I focus on works by a range of writers, poets, activists, politicians, and translators, including Carlos Morla Vicuña, John Rollin Ridge, Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, José Martí, Helen Hunt Jackson, Martin Delany, and Willa Cather. I draw upon letters, periodicals, novels, and poems that circulated in the Americas, arguing that choices and practices of translation were in dialogue with shifting frameworks of race and ethnicity in these different contexts. My analysis of these textual forms depicts some of the distinct ways that authors employed translation as a mode of political activism. Ultimately, this dissertation examines the relation between translation and national belonging in these different contexts, unveiling the varied forms by which transgressive translation strategies were harnessed as forms of anti-imperialist work even as they often initiated or replicated neocolonial and imperialist practices.

Puerto Rican culture often includes music as a method of expressing cultural identity. For instance, music has been considered a symbol of resistance, identity, and performative culture for many Puerto Ricans. This thesis will heavily rely on the involvement of Afro-Latin music in literature to determine ways that Puertorriqueñidad can be defined. To do this, I will examine how Puerto Rican writers present their identity in their works to define what it means to be Puerto Rican. These writers include the poet Sandra María Esteves and author Judith Ortiz Cofer. Throughout their literary works, they express several connections to their Puerto Rican identity, and through close examination, I was able to compile these connections to music, feminist ideologies, and themes of resistance and oppression. Using the scholarship of Puerto Rican scholar Juan Flores' From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity and Chicana feminist theorist Chela Sandoval's Methodology of the Oppressed, this thesis will contribute to the examination of music in literature as defying systems of oppression in Puerto Rican culture and explore the relationship between music and Puerto Rican identity.

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