In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

American Literary History 13.2 (2001) 242-264



[Access article in PDF]

Modernism and Boricua Literature:
A Reconsideration of Arturo Schomburg and William Carlos Williams

Lisa Sánchez González

And if the world will not have it--
if the world will not have her--
then I will turn the world to my way.

William Carlos Williams (of his mother)

1

Although many would like to claim otherwise, William Car los Williams (1888-1963) and Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874-1938) were Boricuas--members of Puerto Rico's stateside colonial diaspora--as the evidence surrounding both their families' histories makes clear. Williams's mother, Elena Hoheb Williams, was born in Mayagüez, a city on Puerto Rico's western coast, sometime during the mid-nineteenth century. Elena's brother Carlos introduced her to her future husband, William George Williams. After they married, the couple moved to the US, ultimately settling in a New Jersey suburb. Although Williams's father may have been born in England, he was culturally shaped by the Caribbean as well; raised from a very young age in the Dominican Republic, William George Williams was most comfortable speaking in Spanish, which was the primary language spoken in the Williams's New Jersey household. Without question, William Carlos Williams was born into the diasporan Puerto Rican, Dominican, and West Indian history he publicly claimed both in his Autobiography (1951) and, more emphatically, [End Page 242] in his biography of his mother, Yes, Mrs. Williams (1959). Williams's migratory family history in the Caribbean, as well as his bilingual, bicultural formation in the US, fit a common profile in the Boricua community during the first half of the twentieth century.

Arturo Schomburg also claimed his Puerto Rican heritage. Likewise, his apparently complicated family history was not at all anomalous within the Boricua community during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 1 Schomburg spent some time (apparently with his maternal great uncle) in St. Croix while he was still a teenager, then soon after migrated to New York City. When he arrived in the US his life also resembled common Boricua experiences; he became an expatriate activist for Puerto Rican independence, then married, established a career, started a family, and settled in Brooklyn.

Williams and Schomburg are conventionally read as foundational figures for US modernisms; Williams is typically categorized as a "white" American modernist and Schomburg as a key "black" Caribbean immigrant contributor to the Harlem Renaissance. This essay situates Schomburg and Williams as Boricua modernists whose legacies contradict prevailing North American assumptions about modernist poetics and early-twentieth-century racial politics. By examining how their critical contexts in the Puerto Rican colonial diaspora shaped their lives and work, I wish to illustrate how these two figures have been assimilated by a racial allegory that belies the socio-poetic complications of their writing. The juxtaposition of these two figures as Boricua modernists challenges the segregated critical milieus which have claimed them and posits a more precise reading of their transnational and anticolonial registers as American writers.

I aim to center Schomburg and Williams as representative figures of Boricua cultural intellectual history, focusing on both authors' critical appropriations of historical documentation in efforts to revise the master narratives of colonization in the Americas' history. Racism, genocide, and colonialism are core themes in both writers' transamerican inventions and interventions. And since their Anglo- and African-American contemporaries alternately accepted and contested both figures' legitimacy as racial and cultural intellectual peers, their narrative strategies for dealing with these ambivalent ideas about and means of racialization must be viewed in closer biographical and literary historical context. 2 The explicitly literary aspects of Williams's prose experimentation, and the explicitly polemical aspects of Schomburg's work as an essayist and archivist, further compound the [End Page 243] hermeneutical crisis I identify for early-twentieth-century Boricua narrative. Within this crisis--or the eternal scripting of Boricuas as culturally alien and racially illegitimate in US nationalist imaginaries--both Schomburg and Williams strive to overcome paperlessness, i.e., the deliberate erasure of not only Boricua but...

pdf

Share