Acknowledgments

Like reading obituaries and wedding announcements, compact and charged, reading book acknowledgments can produce anything from admiration to incredulity, from twinges of envy to snorts of “I-knew-it.” Let’s admit it: who can truly claim never to have tossed aside a promisingly titled book after a scan of the acknowledgments? Here is my contribution to this unsettling genre, where I hope to express my honest gratitude to some folks, but also show off a lineage about which I am proud.

I invite potential readers to use this as a pre-vetting for what comes ahead.

The editor in chief at the University of Virginia Press, Eric Brandt, was supportive and bafflingly loyal to this project from the outset. This was despite major holdups, any of which would have made a reasonable book wrangler give up, and quite understandably. Thanks as well to managing editor Ellen Satrom, whose humor and caring make my previous experiences pale in comparison. Repetidas gracias, Eric and Ellen.

The first stirrings of Fellow Travelers came many nights ago in graduate school, inspired by two very different people and scholars, Roberto González Echevarría and Josefina Ludmer. It took twenty years to see the common ground in what they were then working on, respectively, the picaresque and the gauchesque. As often happens when one ventures out into unknown parts, this led down some arduous paths that led nowhere. I first believed this would be a long book about constitutionality, so following that belief, I consulted heavily with law scholars, especially David Flatto, Michael C. Mirow, and Lauren Benton, who shared their expertise and insight, but ultimately made me understand that this needed to go elsewhere.

For this being a book about men, it was guided most crucially by the advice and encouragement of four women, each fiercely intelligent and right. Lois Parkinson Zamora, a true inter-Americanist, has been a constant and rare guide for how to do and be both as a person and an intellectual. Giuli Dussias, friend and head of the department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at Penn State, besides personally holding herself to a standard that is nigh impossible to repeat, provided an overwhelming amount of assistance and leeway. My wife, Stacy Andersen, MD and PhD (in literature, no less), has always been an exacting perceiver of hidden patterns—a master diagnostician. My friend and PSU colleague Maria Rosa Truglio has been a constant fellow traveler, willing to walk wherever. Each of these women has received a hand-loomed Mexican rebozo as expression of my thanks, and with the hope that they will continue telling me what (not) to do.

An unflagging and constant research assistant, Emily Wiggins, has for years conscientiously wrangled unruly language, data, sources, and images, among many unreasonable requests. She almost deserves a coauthorship. Copyeditor Phyllis Elving fine-combed pretty much all the prose. An undergraduate student, Panini Pandya, helped out at the very end. Eric Hayot and Tom Beebee at Penn State read and commented on the overarching plan during key junctures of development, putting quite some effort into helping me hammer it all out.

I have always depended on running conversations with Ernesto Livón Grosman and Nina Gerassi, spread out over the years and with regrettably long pauses. Among many other things, Ernesto helped me approach Argentina, his once-and-future home. Nos debemos un viaje juntos. Aníbal González, Priscila Meléndez, Catalina Villar Ruiz, Linda Kleindorfer, and Jennifer Siegel have always looked out for me, and I’m glad to have found Dina Rivera again.

Light conversations or casual email exchanges, often apparently random or unrelated, resonated and held: with Catharine Wall, Vera Kutzinski, Anna Brickhouse, Priscilla Archibald, Krista Brune, Dan Purdy, Monika Kaup, Djelal Kadir, Matthew Marr, Judith Sierra-Rivera, Susan Antebi, Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Sophia McClennen, and Laura Dassow-Wells. (North) Americanists who did agree to listen to this prying Latin Americanist were, first at the University of California Riverside, the late Emory Elliott, Katherine Kinney, and David Axelrod; then at Penn State, Sean Goudie and Hester Blum. Other times I outright tracked down and bothered strangers whose work I had read and learned from but wanted to learn more: Alan Nadel, the cultural historian of the US Cold War, humored a cold-calling stranger; the casta painting expert Ilona Katzew helped me track down some fugitive images. Americanists Joseph Shapiro at Southern Illinois and Matthew Garrett at Wesleyan pointed to some useful sources. The outside evaluators at the University of Virginia Press were humbling in their generosity with time and ideas, especially on how to reframe the whole thing.

The institutional support required, and received, for this kind of project is quite astounding. At Penn State, the heads of the Department of Comparative Literature, Carey Eckhardt, Robert Edwards, and Charlotte Eubanks, were encouraging and generous, and the College of the Liberal Arts was quite accommodating.

I field-tested some of the early stages of these ideas at public presentations: guest lectures at CUNY at the invitation of Araceli Tinajero, and at Pittsburgh invited by Josh Lund. Very useful feedback arose at various annual conferences of the American Comparative Literature Association and the Modern Language Association. I also learned much at gatherings held by the Society of Early Americanists in St. Augustine, the Proyecto transatlántico at Brown University, and a memorable conference on the road genre at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. The “MexicanEast” research group has been putting up with my strange comparatist ideas at its yearly conferences for far too long. And, perhaps validating a usually thankless but necessary aspect of our profession, I learned quite a bit as the anonymous evaluator for tenure cases of young scholars whose names and institutions I can’t divulge.

The staff at the University of Virginia Press was thoughtful, efficient, and incredibly pleasant to work with even despite a worldwide pandemic, especially Helen Chandler, Anne Hegeman, Emily Shelton, and Charley Bailey.

Finally, about twenty years’ worth of graduate and undergraduate students at UC Riverside and at Penn State served as unwitting, non-IRB-approved test subjects: I hope I didn’t damage them too permanently. And truth be told I wish I could name the few outright assholes who blocked the road or refused help (they know who they are for the most part) since on some fundamental level they contributed positively as well, so I thank them too.