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1 The Literary Canon and Puerto Rican National Culture There are many Puerto Ricos, united by a Möbius strip that enters and leaves our diverse national consciousness. The Puerto Rico of which literature produced on the Island bears testimony is very different from the one produced in the continent. Neither is more or less authentic; the combination of both is the most important thing, because it provides a comprehensive vision of our people.1 —Rosario Ferré “At its inception national culture is really literary in nature,” asserts the critic Gregory Jusdanis, reminding us of the power of literature to create the illusion of unity among the various and disparate groups that constitute any given nation (xi). Literature is often seen as a “mirror” of the nation, to the extent that it succeeds in generating “stories about [the nation’s] identity” (46). Yet how, we need to ask, do particular works become central to the construction of the nation while others are discarded and rendered nonessential? What are the criteria for the classification of texts as either dispensable or indispensable to the national project? Or, to put it more simply, how does a work become part of the national literary canon? Unfortunately, there are no straightforward answers to any of these questions since the criteria for canon formation vary across cultures and fluctuate through time. What is clear, however, is the pivotal role that such canons play in the “survival of societies and traditions,” which in turn “depends not only on memory to retain the past but above all on the formation of a hierarchy of prized texts transmitted through time” (Jusdanis 60). The canon, as “a publicly available body of writing, representative of certain national and social interests,” primarily seeks to promote the perception of unity among disparate societal elements (Jusdanis 66). In doing so, the power differentials inscribed in the selection process tend to be eclipsed by the canon’s success in imagining “unity.” Jusdanis foregrounds this problematic caveat when he observes, “The mechanisms of canonicity conceal the classificatory strategies at work to preserve texts by making survival appear natural, self-evident, and deserved. They disguise the struggle waged by social groups over the 16 The Literary Canon power to classify” (63). Seen in this light, canon formation constitutes a highly politicized process; while trying to mirror the nation, the canon reveals the internal fractures that undermine its own ideal of unification. For this reason, examining a particular canon, as well as the silences created by those texts omitted from it, can reveal much about a particular culture/nation at any given historical juncture. In the case of Puerto Rican literature, Rubén Ríos-Ávila argues, “the search for identity is without a doubt the organizing paradigm of the Puerto Rican literary canon” (201).2 Examining the silences and fluctuations of this highly political canon can help us unravel the racial, class, and gender hierarchies that were at play on the island throughout the twentieth century, and which were the result of its complex colonial history . In fact, Puerto Rico’s persistent colonial status and the fact that the mainland population presently outnumbers that of the island have contributed to the highly politicized nature of its canon.3 The connection between literature and politics underlying national culture is evident since the moment of consolidation of the Puerto Rican canon, which most critics agree took place in the 1930s (Barradas 2003; Gelpí 1993). While a sense of cultural distinctiveness had begun to emerge on this Spanish colony during the nineteenth century, the process was interrupted—and eventually refueled—by the transferring of the island to the United States as a result of Spain’s defeat in the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898. Through the 1920s, a new generation of intellectuals born under U.S. rule (Antonio S. Pedreira, Luis Muñoz Marín, Pedro Albizu Campos, Luis Palés Matos) came to envisage “Puerto Rico as a national project truncated by the invasion of 1898” (Ayala and Bernabé 90). In the absence of a literary establishment , “the formation of a canon through the identification of classical texts became part of the objectives of the young authors of the 1920s as they matured during the following decade into what came to be known as the generación del treinta” (Ayala and Bernabé 91). Three decades of U.S. colonialism took a toll and “ironically led to the crystallization of a desire for national affirmation among a significant sector...

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