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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
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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
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Editorial Cultural.
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Anderson, Benedict. [1983] 1999. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Barreto, Amilcar. 2001. The Politics of Language in Puerto Rico. Gainesville:
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introduction to Blanco, Tomas, El prejuicio racial en Puerto Rico, pp. 15-83. Rio
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Juan: Editorial Cultural.
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la mano" in Del Nacionalismo al Populismo: Cultura y Po Utica en Puerto Rico.
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