Political Imagination, Cultural Community: The Story of Puerto Rican Nationalism

8/9/2019 Political Imagination, Cultural Community: The Story of Puerto Rican Nationalism

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Jose A. Laguarta

Nationalism and Ethnicity in Historical Context

Prof. Adamantia Pollis

Political Imagination, Cultural Community:

The Story of Puerto Rican Nationalism

148 USC 731e, 734

2 Including the smaller populated islands ofVieques and Culebra

3 Downes v. Bidwell, 182 US 244 (1901)


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Act" of 1917. The Jones Act did not, however, include the right to proportional

-'- representation in the U.S. Congress or the right to elect the President for Puerto Ricans

~-

"Commonwealth"; the New Progressive Party (PNP), integration as a U.S. state; and the~, _ ,,:S:

Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), independence. JWithin this framework, there are

two points of generalized consent among all parties/ The first is that Puerto Rico is a

historically and culturally distinct nation ~ a fully consecrated right to self-. : . , ~ , e ~ -

determination. The second point, logically derived from the first in the context described


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5 All percentages and approximations are taken from the Puerto Rico State Elections Comision,

www.ceepur.org
http://www.ceepur.org/http://www.ceepur.org/


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historically. Loosely following Nairn's conceptualization of uneven development, I hope

6 " tto demonstrate how the interaction diverse interests led different actors, at different times,

1 \

and under different conditions, to imagine the Puerto Rican community in ways that can

Royal Dictionary of the Spanish Language until its 1884 edition ([1990] 1997: 14-15).'?

One possible explanation is that despite the premature birth of the Spanish "state" in

"-the Spanish crown, heldy1 successively (and to this day) by "foreign" dynasties since the


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6 In the case of Spain, however, six years of resistance against the invading French army (1808-1813) may

have also been a contributing factor to the development of nationalism.


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7 For an analysis of race relations in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, see Jay Kinsbumer, Not of Pure

Blood: the Free People of Color and Racial Prejudice in Nineteenth Century Puerto Rico, Durham: Duke

University Press, 1995.


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8 They also denoted an intense apprehension towards the popular classes (Lewis 1983: 266), which suggests

that a specifically national identification was absent as of yet, at least among the urban elite of 1810.


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9 It is worth noting that Alonso's physical description of his subject is evidently that of a man of European

descent "bronzed by the tropical sun... [even though at the time] one out of every two Puerto Ricans was not

white," (Gonzalez [1978] 1989: 55-56; my translation).


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Manuel Alonso, entitled El Puertorriquefio, is revealing in this respect, describing its

subject as, among other things, yearning, free, arrogant, restless, laborious, and "in love

for his patria unequalled," ([1849] 1968: 131; my translation). These are clearly the

values of an emergent hegemony-seeking "nationalizing elite" rather than those of an

immiserated class of rural producers increasingly being drawn out of subsistence

agriculture into servitude at the hacienda. The guiding metaphor of the hacendado

paradigm exemplified by Alonso's poem is that of the "great Puerto Rican family", a

patriarchal metaphor which is inclusive of the "honest children of labor" as subalterns,

and which would endure well into the twentieth century (Rodriguez 1997: 244).

For the most, part, however, the national discourse of the emerging hacendado

class was not explicitly tied to the demand for independence. That demand was best

articulated by a marginal sector of the elite, that ofthe foreign-educated professionals and

intellectuals, who were generally more exposed to the radical political and intellectual

currents of mid-nineteenth century Europe. This sector pursued independence as a

vehicle for integration with the Caribbean and Latin America at large, as exemplified by

the literature and life-work of the sociologist Eugenio Maria de Rostos (Lewis 1983: 271-

273). As Anderson notes, this identification as "American", typical of Latin American

criollo revolutionaries, was a direct result of "the shared fatality of extra-Spanish birth,"

([1983] 199: 63). The abolition of slavery was an integral demand of the separatist

movement. A number of its leaders, such as Ramon Emeterio Betances, as well as the

most radical among the autonomists, came from an urban petit-bourgoisie of "mixed"

racial/ethnic descent.


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10 My use of "nationalists" as opposed to "separatists" here is entirely intentional. It is of crucial

significance that September 23, the date of the Grito de Lares, became an official "national" holiday under

the administration of Luis A. Ferre, Puerto Rico's first pro-statehood governor, elected in 1968, the year its

centennial.


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Cuba, granted Puerto Rico an Autonomic Charter with somewhat broader local powers.~,,~,- . . _ . .

Pullman Strike, was a devout representative of the young imperial power, its dominant

interests, and its "civilizing" project. His "Proclamation" of July 28/lays out the

classical ideological contours of this project, "the cause of Freedom and Justice and


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Humanity," (cited in Frambes-Buxeda 1993: 189; my translation).

As the personal history of Miles himself attests, however, the U.S. civilizing

project of the turn of the century was fraught with stark internal contradictions. The

civic-territorial ideology of liberal democracy, wherever the imperialist endeavor carried

it, was accompanied eugenic theories of ethno-racial superiority. The coexistence of the

two apparently contradictory ideologies reveals the dialectical tension and ambivalence

that according to Nairn lies at the heart of all nationalisms~ (1975: 347-348). As a matter

of u.s. colonial policy, the debates surrounding early twentieth-century jurisprudence

(including Downes v. Bidwell), in which the "anti-imperialist" position was often

buttressed by the most vehemently racist tirades, exemplifies this dialectical tension. The

encounter with metropolitan nationalism would in turn have lasting consequences for an

incipient Puerto Rican nationalism (Carrion 1999).

Within Puerto Rican society, the double-sided colonial practice of liberal-

democratic inclusion and ethno-racial exclusion amounted to a hegemonic strategy that

constructed colonial subjects as subalterns, all the while undermining the potential of

local nationalism to provide a basis for resistance (Carrion 1993: 12-14). The central

narrative of this new colonial paradigm was the Rousseauvian myth of the "noble

savage", who could be redeemed by assimilating into the culture of "civilization". Thus,

one of the first clearly-defined policies of the new metropole was the attempt to

"Americanize" the population, pursued primarily through the English-language

instruction in the school system (Barreto 2001: 7-9)-even the spelling of the colony's

name was officially Anglicized as "Porto Rico" until the 1930s.


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The new colonial hegemonic strategy was deployed in the context of a radical

transformation of productive relations. The world of the proto-capitalist hacienda was

shattered by the rapid growth of massive agro-industrial complexes and sugar

monoculture at the hand of fmancially and technologically advantaged U.S. corporations.

As a result, the production of coffee, which had been Puerto Rico's major export in 1898,

nearly disappeared in the first few years of the U.S. occupation (Quintero Rivera [1977]

1986: 32-33). These changes in the class structure profoundly affected the development

of Puerto Rican nationalism in the twentieth century and the ways in which it was

articulated by different classes in the process of political struggle.

Perhaps the most immediate and pervasive change wrought by the change in

colonial administration was among the laboring classes. Small farmers and sharecroppers

rapidly became a rural proletariat in the new wage-based plantation economy. The urban

working class began to grow as well, as artisans were absorbed into its ranks and women

entered the labor force for the first time. Under these changing conditions and the advent

of limited democratic representation in the local legislature, workers began to organize as

a class and entered the formal political arena through a number of political parties that

crystallized into the Socialist Party in 1915. Most Puerto Rican workers scorned the

nationalism of the time as bourgeois ideology, instead articulating a vision of class

struggle, highly influenced by Bakunin, as an internationalist "labor crusade" (Rodriguez

1997: 247). U.S. liberal democracy was generally seen as a political tool separate from

the exploitative structures of capitalism (Gonzalez [1980] 1989: 30). Thus, despite the

early existence of a vocal pro-independence sector among the party's leadership (Mari


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traditional political leadership of these sectors, organized in the Federal Party and later/),

the Union Party, had supported the autonomic arrangement offered by Spain in 1897, but< -, ~ ~~ ,.. --

11 Many were forced into the new colonial bureaucracy or public service, as was the case of Alejandro

Albizu Rivera, the estranged father of Nationalist Party leader Pedro Albizu Campos, who was Deputy

Collector for the U.S. Customs Service in the 1910s (Ferrao 1990: 122).


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12 As early as 1922, Unionist leaders lobbied U.S. congressmen for the creation ofa "Free Associated State"

in Puerto Rico (Ferrao 1990: 39). In 1936, Miguel Garcia Mendez, leader of the "Pure" Republican

faction, suggested an alternative he called Estado-Independiente along the lines of autonomous Canada

(Melendez 1988: 68).


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13 It has been argued, however, that this duality between civilizations was first and foremost a geopolitical

argument (Carrion 1993).

14 Although the extent of his actual participation in leading the strike has been called into question (Negron-

Portillo 1997: 50).


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nationality was profound.

The Puerto Rican nationalists of the early twentieth century, to a greater extent

than their nineteenth century counterparts, were driven by a profound sense of social

anomie, in the sense of dissatisfaction with earlier paradigms of identity (Greenfeld 1992:

15). This was true not only of the displaced sectors organized under the Unionist Party of

the 1920s and reactionary elements within the Nationalist Party, but also of the

progressive intellectuals who would set the tenor of the cultural paradigms dominant in

the second half of the twentieth century. Antonio S. Pedreira's famous metaphor of

Puerto Rican identity as a "ship lost at sea" ([1934] 1992) was the most eloquent example

of lack of direction felt by the intellectual elite and projected onto the social whole.

Profoundly influenced by Albizu's call to reawaken a national spirit founded on the

historical continuity of shared culture (Ferrao 1990: 54) the national identity envisioned

by Pedreira and others would in turn shape the cultural policies of the Popular

Democratic Party.

Puerto Rican electoral politics in the 1930s, dominated by the Republican-

Socialist Coalition and the Liberal Party (an offshoot of the now-defunct Union Party)

was a quagmire of corruption and complacency to which the militancy of the Nationalist

Party seemed the only alternative. In 1938, the Popular Democratic Party (PPD) was

founded, an eclectic mix of former Communists and Nationalists under the leadership of

left-leaning Liberal senator Luis Munoz Marin. The new party promoted a populist

alliance of the disenfranchised intellectual and political elite and the depressed rural

population, a clear example of what Nairn calls "inviting the masses into history" (1975:


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tenure laws. "Bloodsucking" absentee landowners were ~~~~i~ed as the enemy of the~, ..--~:.":"''"''-''-:--~

people, and democracy was enshrined as their weapon (Lopez Rojas 1998: 45-69).


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to the"PPD:~ call to exercise the vote as a weapon of collective salvation. On the other,\ __ ._J


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The nationalist founding myth disseminated through the official locates the~",;:;-,:,;,:,,:;::::=:~,.._"'-.

factors for the fIrst time. This idealized folk-image of the ruraljibaro, fIrst exalted by thef r u .

literary folk-romanticists of the nineteenth century, whose profile emblazons the PPD's


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The PPD's absolute reign over electoral politics in Puerto Rico came to an end in 1968,

";'~h~~bro-statehood candidate Luis A. Ferre. The 1950s and 1960s had seen the dramatic

as well the displacement of the rural population into the urban slums, facing dire2 " -

conditions that pro-statehood leaders promised to alleviate (Melendez 1988: 89). In


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ollis - paper1.doc. . .. , ~- ~,-

uncomfortable topic for members of the U.S. Congress considering the prospect of status

change. Support for this analysis is provided by opinion polls which consistently show

only 4% of all Puerto Ricans identify as "American first" (Carrion 1999: 89), even though

electorally the statehood option is supported by nearly half of the population. The caveat


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actively promoted by the U.S. and Puerto Rican governments as a way to "relieve"

population pressures, and a key to the economic "success" to Operation Bootstrap. The

migrant population, which is now almost as large as the "home" population, has remained

in constant flux to and from Puerto Rico. The diaspora has contributed greatly to the

cultural substance of Puerto Rican nationality, particularly in the development of new

musical forms, and is considered (although not unproblematically) part of the Puerto

Rican "nation". It could be argued that in the Puerto Rican case, musical production in

the latter half of the twentieth century has played the role attributed by Anderson to print

capitalism in the popular dissemination of nationalism ([1983] 1999: 33-36).

In this context, Puerto Rican nationality has become "deterritorialized", as it is no

longer dependent upon the geographic space of Puerto Rico. The experience of migration

has meant the experience of being a "national minority" for the first time, which has

reinforced the sense of belonging to a "unique" ethnic culture and identity. It has also

reinforced connections with other Latin American groups and a sense of belonging to a

broader Latin American community. Nevertheless, Puerto Rican nationalism remains

"territorial" in the "civic" sense, insofar as birth in Puerto Rico is usually a sufficient

factor of "Puerto Ricanness". In this view, it is the exposure to and acceptance of Puerto

Rican "culture", rather than "belonging" to it in the genetic sense, that becomes the

Alonso, Manuel A. [1849] 1968. "EI Puertorriqueno" in El jibaro. Rio Piedras:

Editorial Cultural.


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University Press of Florida.

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puertorriqueiia: Ensayos en torno a Pedro Albizu Campos, pp. 3-18. Juan

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Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico.

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Political Imagination, Cultural Community: The Story of Puerto Rican Nationalism

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