Dream Nation: Puerto Rican Culture and the Fictions of Independence

3. From the Lush Land to the Traffic Jam

3 / From the Lush Land to the Traffic Jam Puerto Rican culture from every era shows a deep and abiding love for the island itself, for the geographic territory (in its olden incarnation), which is more often than not referred to as La Isla; the capitalization is the mark of an exceptionalist conception of the nation. This affection for the scenic beauties of the land is in many ways tied to nationalist emotions , to patriotism, to the hoped-for independence, and it contributes greatly to the dream nation. The patriotic love of land took hold of the national imagination during the Romantic movement, when it was tied to nineteenth-century Latin American independence movements and their nation-building literature . For instance, Andrés Bello, the quintessential Venezuelan poet of independence, connects Nature, rusticity, patriotism, and independence in his Silvas (written between 1823 and 1826), an unfinished ode to all of the newly independent Latin American nations: Oh, jóvenes naciones, que ceñida alzáis sobre el atónito Occidente de tempranos laureles la cabeza: honrad al campo, honrad la simple vida del labrador y su frugal llaneza (Rodríguez Alcalá 39) Oh, young nations, who lift your heads with tightly fitted new laurels toward the astonished West: from the lush land to the traffic jam / 111 honor the simple life of the farmer and his frugal simplicity Love of land and its simple country folk later finds its evil twin: the denigration of Western modernity. In Puerto Rican culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the ravages of modernity became more ubiquitous as the result of ecologically and aesthetically disastrous overdevelopment by greedy developers aided by lack of government planning. In this chapter, we look at how the Puerto Rican national imagination transitioned from an admiring mode into a lamenting mode, that is to say how during much of the nineteenth century, paisajismo, or the pictorial beauty of the island’s lush landscape, became synonymous with the dream nation and was entrenched in the national highbrow as well as popular culture . When the landscape itself changed, Nature’s beauty morphed into imagery and allegories of its despoiling, what Ana Lydia Vega terms “ecocide” in a column called “Marejada de los muertos” (Tide surge of the dead) in which she laments the pollution of air, sea, and land and the “extermination of the flora and fauna.” What was in the nineteenth century pure extolled landscape turns into an urban scene choking in roads, traffic jams, Burger Kings, and smog. Both modes of gazing at the land/nation coexist because, despite that sad reality of overdevelopment, who wouldn’t dwell on the splendorous greens and sparkling blues of the Painted Nation in, say, the paintings of Francisco Oller? That beautiful countryside remains at the heart of the belief in the uniqueness of Puerto Rico so that the pull of patriotism, nationalism, and nostalgia still leads many works to revere the patria as a Lush Land. Writers from every era have written of the Land with deep and abiding love. From María Babiana Benítez, Puerto Rico’s first woman poet (1783[?]–1873), to Esmeralda Santiago (the best-selling Latina/Puerto Rican writer), there is an earnest certitude in regarding the island in Edenic terms. Benítez’s 1832 poem “La ninfa de Puerto Rico a la Justicia” (The nymph of Puerto Rico to Justice) antecedes the book from 1844 that is regarded as the first Puerto Rican work of literature, the Aguinaldo puertorriqueño (Puerto Rican carol). Benítez’s poem has three of the traits that tie together Puerto Rican literature and, I would add, much of die-hard independentista culture: “the Edenic vision of Puerto Rico, cultural Hispanophilia and political commitment” (Torres Caballero). One can find all three elements in just one stanza: “Yo, desde Luquillo en 112 / from the lush land to the traffic jam la alta cima, / contemplo mis riberas, / que Ceres misma anima, / cubiertas de frondosas sementeras, / yo bendigo al monarca que me estima” (Rivera de Álvarez 67; I, from Luquillo’s high summit / contemplate my riverbanks, / which Ceres herself animates, covered with lush fields, / I bless the monarch who esteems me). Almost the entire output of nineteenth-century Puerto Rican literature uses the land as a reference point. For instance, Alejandro Tapia y Rivera reveals the sentimental, intimate connection between self and land that many writers have felt: Existe un motivo...