Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature: Explorations of Place and Belonging

4. Memoirs of Resistance: Colonialism and Transnationalism in Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican, Almost a Woman, and The Turkish Lover

4 / Memoirs of Resistance: Colonialism and Transnationalism in Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican, Almost a Woman, and The Turkish Lover Esmeralda Santiago, like Judith Ortiz Cofer, writes from and about the liminal space between colonized Puerto Rican islanders and postcolonial mainlanders, uses her stories in order to return to and interrogate the space of the island, and shows how the production of narrative confounds and resists the colonial framework of the United States. Clearly, the island’s status as a Commonwealth and unincorporated territory of the United States determines, to a great degree, its anomalous political status, its legislative subordination to the United States, and its residents’ binational identity.1 As such, Santiago’s three memoirs raise questions about U.S. Puerto Rican belonging and displacement, and make us rethink national identity by imagining Puerto Rican identity and space as a part of the United States. In Santiago’s work, particularly the later memoirs, the dynamic of colonialism and racialized citizenship that we saw in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s novels is also further marked by the stigma of perceived Puerto Rican cultural and social deficiency, as the protagonist Negi’s subordinate class position contributes to her acute sense of illicit and cultural unbelonging on both the island and mainland. While Ortiz Cofer depicts the island ethnographically in both her novels, implicitly demonstrating the effects of U.S. imperialism, in Santiago’s memoirs, the island’s colonized identity (for both islanders and diasporic Puerto Ricans) is more explicitly written from within the subaltern’s psyche.2 It also becomes clear even early on that as a subaltern , Santiago’s presence and creative ambitions on the island and the mainland are marked by others as strongly illegitimate. Over the 128 / memoirs of resistance course of her memoirs, which explore how legacies of political and cultural colonization on the island haunt the mainland and connect to her experiences of personal dislocation, she thus attempts to take possession of her environment, her writerly voice, and her transnational identity. Although scholars have tended to criticize Santiago’s memoirs (particularly the first one) for their apparent assimilationist drive, I contend that Santiago’s process of belonging occurs not through assimilation, which assumes as its premise that she is a cultural outsider in the United States, but by troubling normative definitions of U.S. identity and ultimately imagining herself as a binational U.S. Puerto Rican citizen. Here I read all three of Santiago’s memoirs progressively to argue that in constructing this blended self, she engages in transnational decolonization, rather than figuring the cultural, topographical, and geographical erosion of Puerto Rico under the auspices of U.S. globalism, as Ortiz Cofer did. Through my interpretation of “place” in the memoirs as an intersection of physical location (land, geography) and cultural practices and experiences , I demonstrate how her personal dislocation is rooted in legacies of political colonialism and how resistance—even decolonization—can come out of her spatial, physical, and psychological experiences of unbelonging.3 And while her first memoir seeks to separate the two nation-spaces, at the end of the last memoir Santiago sees herself in an ambassadorial role, alluding to a shared heritage between mainland and island Puerto Rican artists and imagining herself as a citizen of both spaces. As in Ortiz Cofer’s work, one implication of this transnational citizenship is to shift both nations’ history and dynamic of colonialism, and enable a new understanding of nationhood.4 In offering this reading of Santiago’s memoirs, however, I want to first address both the negative critical responses to her work and some of the defenses of it.5 Santiago’s first memoir, When I Was Puerto Rican, has garnered the most attention; Maria Szadsuik points out (although she does not necessarily concur with the idea) that because Santiago shows the bright successful story of the American dream come true, she has been accused of complicity with the ideology of the majority culture. But even Szadsuik, who places Santiago on a spectrum with Chicana and Mexican American writers Cherrie Moraga and Sandra Cisneros, argues that while these writers respectively respond to the majority culture through active negation and withdrawal strategies, Santiago writes assimilation.6 Lisa Sánchez González, looking at When I Was Puerto Rican, contends that Santiago’s writing comes across as allegorical and representative of Puerto Rican experience, but denies the structural inequalities that most memoirs...