Images and Identities

Puerto Rican in Two World Contexts

Asela Rodriguez de Laguna

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351513609
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Demography

This book represents the vitality, diversity, and distinctiveness of contemporary Puerto Rican letters and writers. It is concerned with the image and identity of the Puerto Rican as it is reflected in literature.

Part I

Images and Identities

1

A Puerto Rican Testament

José Luis González

When Dr. Asela Rodríguez de Laguna informed me of her generous wish that I should share with my dear friend, Luis Rafael Sánchez, the honor of being a keynote speaker at this meeting of Puerto Rican writers and distinguished scholars of our literature, my first reaction was to get hold of my best English-Spanish dictionary and look up the meaning of the word keynote. I was dumbfounded by the first definition: it refers to music theory and denotes “the tonic note of a key or scale.” For an instant I thought: a “key” is, as well, a small instrument used to open doors, including, (why not?) those to fame; and a “scale” is what Calixto used to climb up to Melibea’s bedroom. But, of course, the dictionary is not referring to these two meanings but to the first, the one having to do with music theory. Since—wisely enough—I was not being invited to sing or play the piano, I moved on to the second definition in the dictionary, and it was there that my problems began. Because what I stumbled across—and I use the verb in its most literal sense—was keynote defined as “fundamental principle, basic idea or keystone.” Stones, I said to myself, are what will surely rain all over me if I dare to take on the responsibility that Doña Asela is so keen to put on my poor shoulders. Only God and she know why.

With these reflections I closed the dictionary and wrote my kind prospective hostess a sincere letter, thanking her for doing me the honor of inviting me and regretting that I had to decline. I made in the letter, I confess, no allusion to my apprehension at addressing a demanding and learned audience. I did mention another problem, equally real yet much more imposing. I explained that traveling to the United States always places me in a humiliating and exasperating predicament. It so happens that I am not permitted—for legalistic reasons of which you all possibly are aware—to obtain a visa such as is issued to decent persons who want to visit this country. As is also the case with my old friend Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Benedetti, and many other individuals in a similar situation, I am forced to ask for a “waiver of illegibility” founded upon reasons valid according to the authorities of the United States Department of Justice. This means, evidently, that I am persona non grata unless a respectable institution in the United States is sufficiently courageous to suggest the contrary by inviting me to visit.

I knew, of course, that Rutgers University is a respectable institution. I had known this for a long time, since the time it dedicated one of its public buildings to the memory of a great North American with whose friendship I was honored in my youth. I refer dear friends, to the unforgettable Paul Robeson. And just as General Pershing—the frustrated victimizer of my adopted countryman Pancho Villa—said when he arrived in France, at the head of the expeditionary North American forces in the First World War, before the tomb of a hero of the independence of the thirteen colonies: “Here we are, Lafayette,” I feel I have the right to say now, in this illustrious Rutgers University: “Here I am, brother Paul.”

However, after receiving the invitiation, my apprehensions of being a bad speaker and my reluctance to ask favors of a foreign government weighed heavily on me and I asked Doña Asela to excuse me from attending in person, but so that I should not be wholly absent, to allow me to mail my “keynote address” and have it read to you by a friend gifted with the eloquence that I lack. Doña Asela, however, would not agree to my proposition. She insisted on my physical presence here, tactfully appealing to my duties as a Puerto Rican writer. In the face of such strong arguments, I decided to present myself at the United States Embassy in Mexico and ask for a “waiver of ineligibility,” thinking that if for a certain French king “París bien valía una misa” (Paris was worth a Mass), to me the possibility of meeting with you all is well worth a visa.

What I have attempted is entitled “A Puerto Rican Testament.” I could not think of anything further from the dictionary definition of keynote as a fundamental principle, basic idea, or keystone than the simple testimony of a man who never learned any other craft than that of telling stories—whether true or invented—and who, despite many attempts, has not been able to find the frontier between the true and the invented. This frontier might be very important to other crafts, but not to mine. Someone has said—I do not remember who—that the literature of imagination is nothing but a lie which is useful in order to reach the truth. This should also be the function of any testimony worthy of being believed.

In participating at a conference which happily brings together Puerto Rican writers of three generations, it has seemed justifiable and useful to me, as a member of the intermediate generation, to try—by way of personal testimony and without indulging in a collective representation which no one has either asked from or ascribed to me—to approach certain aspects of what can be considered, somewhat doubtfully or hesitantly, an authentic national literary tradition. I am concerned, because I am a writer and not a professional critic, that there may be some involuntary untruth in what I say. If this is so, please accept it with an indulgence founded upon what I said earlier: that it is a lie of the imagination in the service of truth.

I would like to begin by remembering the kind of country Puerto Rico was when the writers of my generation began to write. I have just said “remembering,” and the verb forces me to point out—to you and to myself—something which ordinarily, although it is very obvious, seems not to be recognized with the clarity it deserves: First, one can only remember the past; and second, the past can only be remembered from the present. This may seem a tautology, but from it we can gather an important conclusion: Every retrospective view carries with it the risk that the past will be distorted by the perceptions of the present. It is an inevitable risk and, in my case, a calculated one.

I remember (and I do not believe that in this particular memory there is any distortion) that the Puerto Rico of the early forties was a country where poverty and injustice reigned and, as a consequence, there was nonconformity. Someone may say that none of these three things is really lacking in the Puerto Rico of today. And that someone may be correct, but with one difference. Poverty, injustice, and nonconformity still persist in present-day Puerto Rico, but in disconcerting coexistence with the ideological buffers created by two generations of Puerto Rican and North American reformers in order to disguise and downplay them: poverty with food stamps; injustice with Associated Free State or, more euphemistically, “Commonwealth”; and nonconformity with alienating and institutionalized demagogy.

Forty years ago—this is a precise fact because, according to literary critics, forty years ago the book of short stories with which the work of my generation began was published¹—poverty and injustice paraded in shameless nakedness in Puerto Rico. Because of this, collective dissent crystallized in a historical movement that enjoyed the hopeful support of the majority of Puerto Ricans for many years. The failure and frustration of that movement in the long run does not invalidate—it seems right and neccessary to point out—what it meant as an expression of the popular will for change and the self-realization of the most conscientious and well-meaning sectors of the Puerto Rican people of those years.

Poverty, injustice, and noncomformity were the great literary themes of my generation. True, they had also been those of the previous generation of Puerto Rican writers: from Alejandro Tapia y Rivera, Salvador Brau, and Manuel Zeno Gandía to Enrique A. Laguerre, Tomás Blanco, and Emilio S. Belaval. But even if the themes were not essentially the same, the reality which generated them was. Within that poverty, injustice, and restlessness, Puerto Rican society had been undergoing transformations. From the archaic colonialism of the Spanish captain-generals it had passed to the then modem colonialism of North American politicos who received as a prize for political favors the government of the only outright colony of the Imperial Republic. What that change entailed, strictly speaking, was the implantation in Puerto Rico of a dependent capitalism which, among other things, displaced and pushed to one side an important sector of the old Creole ruling class. This is most important in the context of my present theme, because that class has produced most of the country’s literature. The restlessness with the status quo expressed in the literature of the thirties was not unexpectedly a class restlessness—but not exactly that of a progressive class. The Creole had been a progressive one, at least fundamentally, under the Spanish Colonial regime when it struggled to transform itself from a subordinate class into a ruling one. Within three decades of U.S. colonial rule (dependent yet modernizing capitalism in the Puerto Rican context) that class could not be anything but determined to preserve its lost preeminence. Its writers protested against a situation which objectively deserved such a protest; but their protest, in most cases, was conservative. Thus, for example, the remedy they proposed for the evils of the monopolistic and single-crop sugar economy was an impossible return to an idealized agrarian and patriarchal precapitalism incarnated in the vanishing traditional hacienda. This I have tried to explain in my book El país de cuatro pisos and in other texts, and Angel Quintero Rivera has explained it much better in his brilliant studies of Puerto Rican social history. But this is not the time to expand on the subject.

I should like to dwell, however, on the subject of what my generation represented and continues to represent as a reaction to the conservative attitude of the preceding generation. At this point I must warn you that limited space forces me to generalize; and, as we all know, every generalization leads to inexactitude. The ideology of the majority of the writers of the thirties was, indeed, conservative. But majority does not mean totality. The greatest exception—and certainly not the only one—was Tomas Blanco, a singular and admirable example of the Puerto Rican intellectual patrician who surpassed, in intelligence, sensitivity, and talent, the ideological horizons of his own class. The ideology of my generation of writers was—and still is—essentially anticonservative (for reasons I will try to explain later). But, once again, majority is not synonymous with totality. The greatest exception—and certainly not the only one—among us was René Marqués, a very important writer, a great formal innovator in his best works and, at the same time (in a most revealing contradiction—which Arcadio Díaz Quinones has studied with his customary insight) ideologically committed to an irrecoverable past.

In the works of Pedro Juan Soto, Emilio Díaz Valcárcel, and César Andreu Iglesias, a younger and insufficiently known member of our generation (not because of age, but because of the salient characteristics of his narrative work), as also in my own works, I see the expression of new forms and themes derived from the accelerated transformation of an agrarian society more or less closed within itself, into an urban society, more open to the rest of the world. Moreover, as a consequence of this transformation, the literary expression of a new group of cultural progenitors was also transformed. Just as the literature of preceding generations had been the cultural product of the Puerto Rican patriciate and their ideologically assimilated elements (a most heterogeneous product nonetheless: reactionary in José de Diego, liberal in Lloréns Torres, and fairly progressive in Nemesio Canales and Luis Palés Matos), the most characteristic literature of the generation of 1950 was the cultural product of a new social milieu whose exact definition is still to be determined but which undoubtedly included, in a preponderant way, elements derived from the old proletariat and incipient petite bourgeoisie who only recently had gained access to the cultural world hitherto reserved for the ruling class. Just one illustration will suffice: neither the father of Pedro Juan, nor Emilio’s, nor César’s, nor mine went to the university. But their children, with different degrees of financial strain, were university students.

We were college students, but not patricians—for a very simple reason: by the 1940s there was no longer a Puerto Rican patriciate capable of absorbing lower-class intellectuals. A university degree could turn the son of a worker or peasant into a petit bourgeois or even a bourgeois, but not into a patrician, because the Puerto Rican patriciate was already a historically closed social class. At first, the writers of my generation confronted the same general reality of poverty, injustice, and dissent which our immediate forerunners had known. But we did not see it in the same way, since various historical events made an identical vision impossible. Among these events were two international wars in which my generation participated directly and under compulsion; a massive exodus of Puerto Ricans to the United States of which at least one of us, Pedro Juan Soto, was a part; the transformation of our peasantry into an improvised and cheap industrial workforce, which, far from being able to continue and strengthen the cultural and political tradition of the Puerto Rican working class, witnessed and suffered the ideological castration and social alienation of that class; the matter, of course, positive in itself, of the betterment of the social status of wom...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Images and Identities
• Part II. Authors’ Voices
• Part III. Puerto Rican Literature Written in English
• Part IV. Translations
• Part V. Puerto Rican Literature in the Public School Curriculum
• Part VI. Interrelations between Puerto Rican Literature and Other Hispanic Literatures in the United States
• About the Contributors
• Name Index