Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870-1920 (review)

Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870-1920. By EILEEN J. SUAREZ FINDLAY. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xii, 316 pp. Cloth, $54.95. Paper, $18.95.

This book forms part of a growing trend in the historiography on Puerto Rico--away from the staid, exceptionalist discourse that even today dominates historical writings on the island and in the direction of constantly shifting conceptualizations among scholars who seek to give meaning to similar processes in the countries they study. It is pathbreaking in terms of subject matter, bold in its use of sources, and ambitious in its discussion of the relevant issues. Its publication is the cause of celebration not only for historians of Puerto Rico in search of empirical knowledge about time (1870-1920) and place (Ponce and by extension Puerto Rico) but for those who might be seeking useful comparative perspectives and innovative theoretical tools to apply to their own work.

This book is about contested attempts to define a national identity through the manipulation of sexual and racial discourses, first--and most coherently--by a male Liberal bourgeoisie in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and followed, challenged, modified, and disputed again by working-class men, elite women, women of color, and other subaltern groups in the early twentieth century. The author argues that early efforts to "de-Africanize" rural and urban plebeians, both male and female, to conform to a moral Puerto Rican paradigm of decency point to the island elite's problematic view of race and sex. Although working-class activists questioned the legitimacy of equating whiteness with respectability, male labor intelligentsia took the opportunity to affirm the role of men of all classes as champions of women's integrity, claiming a voice in the regeneration of society and reinforcing patriarchy. All the while, elite and working-class women refused to be marginalized through imposed concepts of honor and normative sexuality, and so entered the political arena and consequently the debate on inclusion as part of the gran familia. The introduction of sexuality as a political agent in the construction of citizenship, along with the more familiar colonialism, race, gender, class, and culture is an exciting historiographical breakthrough.

The author's use of sources is another daring incursion into unorthodox historiographical territory. Findlay uses fiction to contextualize the conclusions she reaches after a careful examination of traditional sources (criminal records, newspaper reports, pamphlets, government regulations). For example, a short story by Ana Roqué de Duprey, the founder of an early bourgeois feminist newspaper, serves to confirm that feminists rallied against the sexual double standard that privileged men and subjected women (p. 71). In addition, Findlay uses her casual conversations and more formal interviews with contemporary Ponceñas to bounce off her conclusions from late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century materials. Her informants, elderly women eager to talk about flirting, dancing, first love, or prostitution, corroborated for the author that "sex and power . . . were intimately linked; sex was the cornerstone of both the reproduction of dominance and its subversions" (p. 2).

The analysis of a complicated subject--the politics of sexuality and race--deserves a sophisticated execution. Findlay is a master at drawing the road map of the bumpy and irregular push for the incorporation of subaltern groups into the nation-state. Her revealing section on divorce, the first systematic treatment of the institution from the perspective of women that I am aware of, is a good example of her treatment of the complex forces at work in the negotiation of equality. Although U.S. officials institutionalized divorce in an effort to reform the populace, women "flocked to the courts" in the early twentieth century for their own purposes, and in so doing left for the historical record an instance of popular protest against irregular financial support on the part of...