Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building

National Sentiments, Transnational Realities, 1897-1940

Naida García-Crespo

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781684481194
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Nation Building focuses on the processes of Puerto Rican national identity formation as seen through the historical development of cinema on the island between 1897 and 1940. Anchoring her work in archival sources in film technology, economy, and education, Naida García-Crespo argues that Puerto Rico's position as a stateless nation allows for a fresh understanding of national cinema based on perceptions of productive cultural contributions rather than on citizenship or state structures. This book aims to contribute to recently expanding discussions of cultural networks by analyzing how Puerto Rican cinema navigates the problems arising from the connection and/or disjunction between nation and state. The author argues that Puerto Rico's position as a stateless nation puts pressure on traditional conceptions of national cinema, which tend to rely on assumptions of state support or a bounded nation-state. She also contends that the cultural and business practices associated with early cinema reveal that transnationalism is an integral part of national identities and their development. García-Crespo shows throughout this book that the development and circulation of cinema in Puerto Rico illustrate how the "national" is built from transnational connections. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide byRutgers University Press.

1

Contexts for a National Cinema

Cultural, Political, and Economic Movements in Puerto Rico (1860–1952)

The period that I study in this book represents a crucial moment in Puerto Rican political history: the transition from a Spanish to an American colonial government. This transition encompassed more than a geographic shift in the colonial metropolis; it signaled economic and cultural changes as well. The far-reaching cultural transformations were accompanied by discourses regarding the “nature” of the nation that to this day influence the way intellectuals approach Puerto Rican nationalism. As I will show in this chapter, intellectuals have constructed the Puerto Rican nation primarily around one key late nineteenth-century political event: the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War and its aftermath. In turn, this political approach has marked the way scholars and critics interpret and categorize cultural productions, making the definition of “Puerto Ricanness” tightly tied to the concept of nation building.

The year 1898 represents a collective trauma of the Puerto Rican nation that it refuses to overcome. For, as Rubén Ríos Ávila contends, “coloniality is our [Puerto Ricans’] perverse love story, the master, the empire, the Other of our erotic tale,” from whom we must symbolically divorce.1 Although I agree with Ríos Ávila’s analysis, I consider talking about the fraught political relationship as a fundamental way of healing the historical trauma. Nonetheless, such a healing process is complicated because it entails contextualizing and decoding the unresolved tension between the ever-present nation and the absent state. As Carlos Pabón has controversially indicated, intellectual elites have overexposed and commoditized so much the concept of nation in Puerto Rico that it has lost its meaning, and nationalism has become another product for sale.2 Even though I do not fully agree with Pabón’s assessment, I cannot deny that the Puerto Rican nation has gone through a process of commodification. However, I see these exaggerated outward expressions of nationalism as the day-to-day tools of Puerto Ricans for dealing with the ambiguity of having a nation without the presence (or even the possibility) of an autonomous state. So much academic discussion of the nation has relied on the term’s presumed relationship to that of “state”—even if we constantly proclaim their difference—that we have forgotten what it is like to experience them as truly separate. With the following cultural–historical analysis I position the trauma of 1898 not as a residual trauma of coloniality per se but instead as the trauma of trying to understand the “insufferable ambiguity” (to use Pabón’s term) of the nation that lacks a state. Furthermore, I argue that this national sociopolitical ambiguity has marked the way that Puerto Rican scholars define and defend the concept of an autonomous culture and of a national cinema more specifically.

Late Spanish Colonialism through 1898

Many Puerto Rican historians (e.g., Picó, Scarano, and Rosario) argue that we must understand 1898 in the international context of the widespread turmoil for political independence in the nineteenth-century Americas.3 Following the outburst of the Latin American wars of independence (1808–1833), Spain increasingly relied economically on its Caribbean and Pacific colonies. As a consequence of the loss of territories, Spain increased taxes and established greater restrictions on areas still under its control, for example, limiting imports to the island colonies from places other than Spain in order to protect the peninsular market.4 In the Caribbean, the dissatisfaction among both the Cuban and the Puerto Rican elites with the Spanish government grew to the point of revolutionary outburst in the fall of 1868. The Cuban “grito de Yara” (cry of Yara) in October of that year initiated what academics now refer to as the Ten Year War, the first of four wars that Cuba fought with Spain in the last half of the nineteenth century (which culminated with the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War and the final independence of Cuba). Earlier that same fall, and in conjunction with the Cuban revolution, a small elite sector in Puerto Rico revolted against the colonial government in what the insurgents called “el grito de Lares” (the cry of Lares).5 Although the Spanish government was not able to suppress the Cuban revolt completely, the 1868 revolt in Lares lasted only two days.

Even though the Lares revolt did not gain the support that its planners hoped for, the event became crucial in the discourse of Puerto Rican nationality formulated in later years. The failed attempt became in the Puerto Rican nationalist imaginary of later generations a mythical defining event, and its participants became heroes in the defense of a nascent Puerto Rican identity. For example, a leading figure in the Lares revolt, Eugenio María de Hostos, exerts ongoing influence over how twenty-first-century Puerto Rican intellectuals conceive the nation: as fundamentally Hispanic and geographically defined, despite decades of U.S. colonization and migration. Known as “el ciudadano de América” (the citizen of the Americas), Hostos believed that the Caribbean region (more specifically, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic) should form a political alliance—a Caribbean Confederation—to protect the interest of the “criollo” population against colonial powers like Spain. Hostos’s “dream” of a free and united Hispanic Caribbean can still be found in pro-independence discourses that highlight the disadvantages of purportedly losing Caribbean camaraderie by becoming part of the United States.6

Moreover, part of the fascination with the cry of Lares in political and historical discourses comes from the perception that dissatisfaction among local elites increased after the failed battle. Even though the discontent of most landed elites did not come from any personal investment they had in the Lares revolt, the historical records—particularly newspaper columns—show that many were indeed unhappy with the colonial government.7 In addition, historical records demonstrate that this dissatisfaction surfaced because instead of enacting social and economic reforms to guarantee the loyalty of its remaining colonies, Spain continued to ignore the complaints of the local landed sectors, which demanded more representation in their local governments and the peninsular one as well. When eventually, in 1894, Spain promised reform, the response came too late.

Prior to the 1868 revolutionary attempts in Puerto Rico and Cuba, the United States had in 1823 proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine, which threatened military retaliation if any European nation tried to interfere in North and South America. In 1895, Great Britain first tested the Doctrine’s consequences in what historians now denote as the “Venezuelan Crisis,” a conflict that set the stage for the United States to target Spain’s New World claims.8 Following the American Revolution, the U.S. expansionist drive had led to the Louisiana Purchase, the Annexation of Texas, the Oregon Treaty, the Mexican-American War, the Alaska Purchase, and, in 1893, the Hawaiian coup d’état that culminated in annexation in 1898. Given Cuba’s proximity to the Florida Keys, the United States had particular interest in its political development; hence the island’s political instability in the last half of the nineteenth century proved advantageous for its northern neighbor.

As is well known, the sinking of the USS Maine stationed in the Havana Harbor in 1897 served the United States as a historically contested justification to confront Spain, but violence in both Cuba and the Philippines had established the basis for the conflict long before that event. The Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War officially began in Cuba in the spring of 1898 and spread to Puerto Rico by the summer of that year. Although the acquisition of Puerto Rico does not seem to have been a main objective for the U.S. government, that outcome of the conflict was certainly well received, for Puerto Rico’s geographic position provided a much-needed locale for storing coal and monitoring the entrance of ships into the Americas. In addition, already by 1890 the United States was the primary market for both Cuban and Puerto Rican sugar, even surpassing Spain.9 With sugar cane as its main crop, Cuba soon became economically dependent on the U.S. market. If one also considers the mythical status that the United States held as a defender of “freedom” after its successful revolution, it should come as no surprise that the revolutionary elites in both Cuba and Puerto Rico sought U.S. support in resolving their problems with Spain. The local elites knew that they would find U.S. support for their revolutions because many American entrepreneurs had economic interests in the area; moreover, the newspaper coverage of the events suggests that the popular discourse propagated in the United States throughout the course of the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War favored the delivery of Pan-American support.

Despite the idealized vision of the brotherhood between Cuba and Puerto Rico, historical facts show that their economic and political circumstances were extremely different by the turn of the century.10 Although Puerto Rico also produced sugar, by the late nineteenth century, coffee was its most profitable crop.11 A more expensive product than that consumed by most Americans at the time, Puerto Rican–produced coffee found its primary markets in European nations, where the Puerto Rican type of bean was in high demand. For the most part, while the coffee plantations in the mountains thrived, the sugar plantations along the Puerto Rican coast were unprofitable.12 The two colonies also differed in that the powerful Cuban revolutionary movement met with skepticism in Puerto Rico regarding its effectiveness for politico-economic change. Furthermore, the strict press censorship Spain exercised in Puerto Rico kept most residents ignorant of the proceedings in Cuba.13 Instead of armed conflict as occurred in Cuba, Puerto Rican political elites promoted a more peaceful approach to change, demanding a gradual governmental move toward autonomy, a strategy that by the end of the nineteenth century appeared to have brought results. However, despite the delayed Spanish action toward granting Puerto Rico autonomy, dissatisfaction with the colonial government persisted by the end of the nineteenth century, resulting in a low level of Puerto Rican “loyalty” toward Spain during the war.

Circumstances and Consequences of the U.S. Invasion

The neglectful practices of the Spanish administration throughout their colonization of Puerto Rico were a key factor enabling the American invasion to proceed rather “easily” as a “splendid little war,” as U.S. ambassador John Hay described it. The campaign in Puerto Rico lasted only one month and resulted in few casualties, for as historian Fernando Picó argues, the natives met the American action for the most part with cunning indifference.14 Even so, despite the war’s short duration and few casualties, the events of 1898 have become in the Puerto Rican imaginary a wound that refuses to heal. At the same time, the imagination of later generations has transformed the loyalists who decided to fight for the Spanish colonial power into heroes of the nascent Puerto Rican nation. Nonetheless, this pro-Spain (as nationalist) position is filled with contradictions given that fighting in the war on the side of Spain would still have represented a procolonial stance. However, we must understand that the pro-Spain discourse of later generations actually relates to the larger trend in Puerto Rican nationalism toward hispanofilia. Hispanofilia evidently arose among Puerto Ricans subsequent to 1898 because the scars of that year are not really a product of the war itself but of the social changes that came as a result of the new colonial power’s desire to culturally assimilate the Puerto Rican population. Elite intellectuals responded to the almost immediate forceful cultural assimilation with a withdrawal into the immediate past and hence linked resistance and Puerto Ricanness to Spanishness.

Because intellectuals throughout the years have continued to define Puerto Rican identity as fundamentally Spanish, later generations construed the absence of a bloody war as some sort of fault in the Puerto Rican character. For writers like René Marqués, the dearth of bellicosity became a sign of weakness and a signifier of lack and incompleteness in the process of nation building. Academics Luce and Mercedes López Baralt point out that “we Puerto Ricans remain nostalgic for heroism, for an honorable foundational myth on which to rest our retrospective historic gaze.”15 For those scholars there is no clearer evidence of this violent lack than the events that unfolded after the publication of Luis López Nieves’s “Seva.”16 The story of the U.S. Army’s massacre of the revolting town of Seva first appeared in the leftist newspaper Claridad in December 1983 without any reference to its fictional nature and was taken by many ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Contexts for a National Cinema: Cultural, Political, and Economic Movements in Puerto Rico (1860–1952)
• 2. Cinema Comes to Puerto Rico: Historical Uncertainties and Ambiguous Identities (1897–1909)
• 3. Stateless Nationhood, Transnationalism, and the Difficulties of Assigning Nationality: Rafael Colorado in Puerto Rican Historiography (1912–1916)
• 4. In the Company of the Elites: The Discourses and Practices of the Tropical Film Company (1916–1917)
• 5. Perilous Paradise: American Assignment and Appropriation of “Puerto Ricanness” (1917–1925)
• 6. Making the Nation Profitable: Industry-Centered Transnational Approaches to Filmmaking (1923–1940)
• Conclusion: Early Puerto Rican Cinema and Stateless Nation Building
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author