Centering Animals in Latin American History: Writing Animals into Latin American History

6. Notes on Medicine, Culture, and the History of Imported Monkeys in Puerto Rico

6 Notes on Medicine, Culture, and the History of Imported Monkeys in Puerto Rico NEEL AHUJA In 2007, nearly seventy years after the first large-scale importations of ‘‘old world’’ monkeys to Puerto Rico, the Commonwealth’s Department of Agriculture proposed a regulation prohibiting the importation, trade, and possession of rhesus, patas, and squirrel monkeys—three species designated as ‘‘detrimental to agricultural interests and a threat or risk to the life and security of humans.’’∞ If, as Roberto Esposito has argued, modernity’s politics of life is established through a paradigm of immunization, safeguarding against the proliferating risks of public, communal life, then the public discourse on monkeys in Puerto Rico has undergone a reversal since the 1930s, when monkeys were established as technologies for the pharmaceutical engineering of U.S. American immunity.≤ At that time, the U.S. biosecurity apparatus figured nonhuman primate spinal material as vital to polio-vaccine development and other areas of biomedical research, and the Puerto Rican archipelago was seen as a necessary breeding ground for monkey bodies. In 1939 the comparative psychologist Clarence Ray Carpenter , with the backing of the Columbia University School of Tropical Medicine at San Juan, personally transported over four hundred rhesus macaques from northern India to the islet of Cayo Santiago in the Puerto Rican archipelago. Although primate species such as the African vervet had arrived via slave ships on the nearby Caribbean islands of St. Kitts, Nevis, and Barbados as early as the 1560s, neither ‘‘new world’’ nor ‘‘old world’’ monkeys are indigenous to the Caribbean.≥ The twentieth-century research IMPORTED MONKEYS IN PUERTO RICO • 181 station founded by Carpenter, which inspired similar efforts across the United States and one in Brazil, was the first free-ranging colony of Asianorigin primates in the Americas. In U.S. American print media, officials justified Cayo Santiago and called for expanded U.S. imports of Indian rhesus macaques based on their value as pharmaceutical raw materials that could protect the nation against an increasingly wide array of diseases. What are the terms on which monkeys, as ‘‘raw materials’’ for the production of scientific knowledges and pharmaceutical commodities, become rhetorically aligned with the imperial nation? And in a multiply colonized, globally interconnected space like twentieth-century Puerto Rico, how does the concomitant alignment of monkeys with biomedical progress collide with the ascendant nationalisms of imperially dominated populations? Or even with the life-practices and ecologies of the animals themselves? In this chapter, I sketch the history of imported rhesus and patas monkeys in Puerto Rico with a focus on their political significance and the divergent institutional sites, discourses, and landscapes in which they appear as imperial migrants. I document monkeys’ contradictory status as, on the one hand, figures of progress aligned with modern biomedical technology, and, on the other, as ‘‘invasive species’’ that symbolize the multiple violences of U.S. imperialism and neoliberal development policy. Drawing in part on scientists’ official histories of primate institutions, I trace the historical conjunctions of nonhuman primate bodies, medical research institutions, Puerto Rican nationalism, cultural fears of government secrecy, and the transnational and transcolonial politics of the global primate trade. Monkeys ’ fate in Puerto Rico—as well as their relationships with humans and Puerto Rican ecosystems—has been intimately linked to the dynamics of U.S. imperial power on the archipelago, especially as it has been expressed economically and militarily. The history I outline is marked by four key transitions in primate biopolitics in Puerto Rico: the establishment of U.S. biomedical institutions in the 1920s and 1930s; the rise of Puerto Rican nationalism and the subsequent takeover of Cayo Santiago by the Puerto Rican government in the 1940s; the establishment of federally funded spinoff colonies in the 1960s and 1970s; and finally, new research and trapping agendas run by Puerto Rican scientists and conservation authorities. I conclude by reflecting on how a history of imported monkeys in Puerto Rico might help scholars theorize knowledge production in the humanities, as well as in emerging interdisciplinary research sites including biopolitical theory, critical species studies, and science studies. I focus in particular on the politics of the archive, issues of representation and agency, and the 182 • NEEL AHUJA difficulties in writing history against imperial discourses that silence the histories of colonized subjects and yet produce extensive, if conceptually limited, archives of animal representation in the form of behavioral studies and...