Dream Nation: Puerto Rican Culture and the Fictions of Independence

2. Breaking Tradition

2 / Breaking Tradition Puerto Rican national culture has been built up by the great works of its literary canon, itself shaped by institutions like universities and cultural centers, by documents like classroom syllabi and anthologies, by the media that promote culture, by activities like literary festivals, by communities of culture that award prizes, etc. The communities that produced the early canon believed that culture would directly and unequivocally boost the island’s struggle for independence. Until recently, the loftiness of that ideal (as well as peer pressure) meant that few writers dared to break with the dream nation. The traditional literary world in Puerto Rico is a small, clannish enclave that awards its members (who are acquaintances, friends, or mentors) the literary prizes, book contracts, and speaking gigs that merit literary recognition. There are exceptions, such as Eduardo Lalo, whose Rómulo Gallegos award was an external deus ex machina that brought him international attention. Moreover, a majority of the best-known writers have been alums of and professors at the University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras campus (UPRRP ), the state-run institution with a long history of intellectual sympathy for independence. So most major writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were fervent independentistas. However, in the latter part of last century, some important intellectuals broke with convention. Many others, of course, chose to ignore the matter of status altogether and in doing so they paralleled what a large portion of the voters did in the 1993 status referendum , choosing “none of the above” as the preferred status option or, as breaking tradition / 81 the voters did in the 2012 elections, casting blank ballots. Few critics or writers own up to being on the right or to the center of the political spectrum, although the information on writers’ political preferences other than independence is mostly anecdotal and hard to come by. For instance, Pedro Juan Soto asserts that two luminaries in the generation prior to his, Enrique A. Laguerre and De Diego Padró, were secretly right-wingers, “derechista encubierto, tapado” (Hernández, A viva voz 30; undercover right-winger, hidden), and he claims that is why De Diego Padró was not more widely read—which, one notes, was not the case for Laguerre.1 Puerto Rican literature, like most of Latin American literature, has leaned left—and the Puerto Rican leftist cause par excellence has been independence. The fact that some major writers questioned the doctrinal stance on the matter should not be attributed to a fondness for the United States, which remains persona non grata to the Left. This dislike persists despite the centrality of U.S. culture to at least one activist cause dear to progressives in the twenty-first century: minority and gender rights. No, the authors who broke with convention beginning in the 1980s did not have newfound devotion for the United States; their reasons were more complex. They were propelled by disenchantment with the feasibility of political independence and by their queasiness with an old-guard independentismo whose ossified postures on many issues (racial and gender biases, for instance) had become passé. John Perivolaris sumps up the fatigue of militant independentismo; talking about “El cruce de la Bahía de Guánica” (The crossing of Guánica Bay), an essay by Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá (who is, to put it mildly, not a fan of traditional independence), Perivolaris notes that the essay underscores “the anachronism and obsolescence of traditional militancy [ . . . ] suggested by the few people who turn up for the Socialist rally in Guánica, the tired rhetoric of its activists, and the old-fashioned revolutionary chic à la Guevara and Castro of their dress” (“Heroes, Survivors , and History” 693). Also burned out is the cultural establishment’s steadfast insistence that culture is only, or primarily, supposed to be in a perpetual and homogeneous mode of protest. These writers’ break with tradition was counterintuitive to the political atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s, which saw a formative stage for many prominent writers. Solidarity with the Latin American Left demanded common cause with revolutionary Cuba—which blazed a trail in hemispheric split from the United States. As Daniel Balderston and Mike González write: “In Latin America itself, the overthrow of Batista 82 / breaking tradition privileged the Cuban experience in all subsequent political debate. Its methods became the model, and its project for national independence the road to follow” (introduction, Encyclopedia of Latin...