This chapter attends to the formal and cultural function of Latinx racial passing in Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton. Critical conversations about the orphan protagonist of the novel, Lola Medina, interrogate her rescue from Indian captivity and the gradual “whitening” of her dyed skin as a form of aspirational assimilation into Anglo-American society. Scholars have also studied the ways in which Lola’s captivity story is informed by the historical precedent and publications surrounding the repatriation of Olive Oatman to white American society after her five-year captivity among the Mohave in the 1850s. This contribution reads Lola’s performance of Latinx racial passing alongside the captivity narrative, newspaper articles, and visual culture from the Oatman case to argue how the idea of “passing” operates in the novel as a form of political critique and a catalyst for modernist, formal innovation. Lola’s narrative of Latinx racial passing not only illuminates an early discourse of Latinx racialization, but also catalyzes a modernist satire of Anglo-American imperialism.

Lamore examines revisions found in the full-length and abridged editions of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative published in the United States, and contends that they serve as a type of textual signature; they record how the editor and/or book publisher revised the autobiography to appeal to different readers in the United States. The US publishing history of Equiano's Narrative demonstrates that whereas the publishing history of the authorized editions of the autobiography underscores Equiano’s successful attempts to control his life, text, and self, the publishing history of the US editions of the autobiography repeatedly reveals that his life, text, and self were edited by others. For Lamore, the editing of an autobiographical text by a non-authorial agent forms an essential part of its reception history and the history of the multiple actors present in published life narratives. The publishing history of A Narrative of the Lord’s Most Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a frequently read eighteenth-century autobiography related by a free person of African descent, provides another occasion to study unauthorized editions of transatlantic autobiography.