Writing Off the Hyphen: New Critical Perspectives on the Literature of the Puerto Rican Diaspora

10. Tato Laviera’s Parody of La carreta: Reworking a Tradition of Docility

Reworking a Tradition of Docility JOHN WALDRON ---------------------------------------------------------------n 1979, Tato Laviera published his first book of poetry, titled La Carreta Made a U-Turn.1 The poems there weave together thematic threads that Laviera will wind and unwind in subsequent collections. Generally speaking, most of his poetry is concerned with representing and criticizing the situation of Puerto Ricans and other disadvantaged groups living in the urban center of New York City. Along with his critique and portrayal of life in the United States, he also focuses some attention on the often-problematic relationship he and others of the Puerto Rican diaspora have with mainland Puerto Rican culture. That is, he writes about forms of exclusion or marginalization in the United States and at the hands of the mainland Puerto Rican public.2 In fact, the term “Nuyorican,” which many diasporic Puerto Ricans use to identify themselves, is a term that has its origins in a process of cultural othering effected by mainland Puerto Ricans. This term, as well as a catalog of cultural differences it points toward, is used to signify the existence of perceived “defects,” with the ultimate result of excluding diasporic Puerto Ricans from the island’s cultural imaginary. In his first book of poems Laviera confronts this problem by parodying a major work in the Puerto Rican canon, René Marqués’s La carreta.3 By taking on Marqués’s work, and the tradition it represents, he also contends with the problems emanating from colonialism that affect all Puerto Ricans. 221 10 TATO LAVIERA’S PARODY OF LA CARRETA I JOHN WALDRON The focus of my study here is to show how Laviera destabilizes the foundational colonialist myth of docility. By employing the literary trope of parody, Laviera critiques a tradition of docility even as he forms part of diasporic Puerto Rican culture. Parody is quite often understood as having a solely negative or critical relationship to the original text and the tradition it represents. However, as Linda Hutcheon has shown in her book on the subject, the relationship between parodic text and original is far more complex than that.4 As the etymology of the word suggests, parodia is a countersong, but as much as it is a song against a previously existing text, it is also one sung beside or along with the original. This singing alongside or along with suggests an intimate knowledge and even at times an accord with the previous text (32). Parody, then, has a dual nature. As the parodic text sings against and with the original text, it inscribes itself into the cultural history and canon represented by the original text even as it criticizes both the text and the canon of which it forms a part. This points to a paradox inherent in much of parody; the parodic text subverts even as it conserves past texts and the tradition they represent. The complexities implied by this literary trope are similar to Laviera’s relationship to Puerto Rican and U.S. cultural practices. Even as Laviera critiques his own exclusion from island Puerto Rican culture, he writes himself into it by intertwining his own text with a recognized landmark of Puerto Rican culture, La carreta. Parody then is an effective way for Laviera to confront Puerto Rico’s problematic past and present. By choosing to parody La carreta and its theme of docility, Laviera allows himself the possibility of conserving its critique of U.S. colonialism even as he proposes an alternative response to it—one that is more inclusive of diasporic and African elements of Puerto Rican culture. To understand how, and to what effect, his parody functions, it is necessary to analyze Marqués’s critique of the Puerto Rican colonial situation and its attendant docility in his essay “El puertorrique ño dócil,” followed by the portrayal of the ideas he develops there in La carreta.5 Once this is done, it is possible to then show how and to what effect Laviera’s parody works with and against Marqués’s texts toward a new conceptualization of culture. In “El puertorriqueño dócil,” Marqués studies what he describes as a phenomenon caused by colonialism, the illness of docility. He criticizes psychologists and sociologists “[for] the recent determination to deny 222 John Waldron docility as a psychological phenomena in the Puerto Rican male” ([por] el reciente empeño de negar la docilidad...