Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History since 1898

TEN: Politics and Culture in the Epoch of PPD Hegemony

RETHINKING THE PAST, BETTING ON THE FUTURE: CULTURAL DEBATES FROM THE SIXTIES TO THE EIGHTIES The rise of new student, labor, antiwar, environmental, and independence currents in the late 19603 and the economic sea change of the early 19703 had their counterpart within the long-running debate on Puerto Rico's history and identity . In a manner reminiscent of the rise of the generation deltreinta in thecontext of the Great Depression, a new cohort of historians, social scientists, and artists now sought to remake the inherited visions of the past, offer new analyses of the present, and renew literary and artistic expressions and discourse.A salient aspect of the new literary wave was the participation of women in leading and prominent roles and in unprecedented numbers. Furthermore, this was the moment of the "Nuyorican explosion" as the children of the postwar mass migration came of age in the midst of persistent poverty and discrimination and in a period of mobilization and unrest in North American inner cities.Mixing English and Spanish, asserting their identity and denouncing racism, Nuyorican poets and historians now challenged not only white American but also Puerto Rican island-centered representations of migrants as demoralized cultural hybrids. Varied as these efforts were, most of them shared a newfound passion for history from below; an enthusiasm for popular struggles, culture, and language; and a desire to pose class, racial, and gender issues largely overlooked by both official culture and its fundamentally nationa \ist-independentista critics of the past. Opposition to U.S.intervention in Vietnam soon became a unifying focus of diverse challenges to the structures often described by this insurgent sensibility as the "establishment," a word that soon made its way into Puerto Rican Spanish. The influence of the Cuban Revolution was equally significant, and it wasnot only political. The refreshingly undogmatic revolution (perhaps best represented by the admired figure of Argentinean revolutionary Ernesto \B Guevara) also created new cultural reference points through such institutions as the literary center Casa de las Americas, the work of its graphic artists and filmmakers, and the rise of the new song movement, as well as through the formulations of new literaryvisions of Latin American unity. This coincided with the international success of a new generation of Latin American authors, known in Latin America as elboom. Aspiring young Puerto Rican writers thus felt the urge to join what was perceived as a continental upsurge of cultural renewal and political resistance. Authors of the international new Left also had an impact: HerbertMarcuse as a critic of the "American way of life" and consumer society and Frantz Fanon as a theorist of colonial mentality and of decolonization, to mention two prominent examples. The journal La escalera (1966-73) was an early vehicle of new criticalviews. It was sustained by veteran Marxist Cesar Andreu Iglesias and younger leftists such as Gervasio Garcia, GeorgFromm, Samuel Aponte,Annie Fernandez, and resident North American biologist Richard Levins, among others. The journal's name emblematically referred to the ladder used by its founders to address the participants at a teach-in that had been forbidden by the University of Puerto Rico administration. It was within this radicalized milieu that new representations of Puerto Rico's history and identity and a new literary and artistic sensibility emerged in the late 19603 and the 19703. These newer voices differentiated themselves from their immediate predecessors, who in some cases had also represented an attempt to elaborate nonofficial perspectives or alternative literary orientations beginning in the early 19603. Political scientists Manuel Maldonado Denis and Gordon K. Lewis and the poets grouped around the journal Guajana were the most influential of these transitionalfigures . Before the Explosion: Voicesfrom the Early 19605 Through the late 19603, the uneven but influential work of Maldonado Denis stood out as a counterpoint to official versions of Puerto Rican history. At a time when many described the latter as a hugely successfulprocessof modernization , he provided a critical reading of U.S.rule, a reminder of the repression used to sideline its opponents and of the shortcomings of Operation Bootstrap . He thus rejected the description of Puerto Rico's transformation as a peaceful "revolution" as well as the theory put forth by Luis Muftoz Marin of an American "dumb imperialism" (imperialismo bobo), which had stumbled into an expansionist adventure in 1898. Imperialism, he argued, is an inherent as248 * RETHINKING THE PAST pect of advanced capitalism, as the historical...