Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (review)

Laura Briggs has produced a book which challenges its readers to rethink assumed wisdoms. Briggs speaks primarily to students of United States' history and politics. She argues vigorously against their all too frequent belief in U.S. exceptionalism in its practices as a world power. She demonstrates that the U.S. has long been and continues to be an imperial power, openly borrowing from its European predecessors in developing its strategies for colonial rule. Concerns about supposedly deviant working-class female sexuality and family forms and the use of modern science to "reform" them served as cornerstones of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico since 1898. Concomitantly, the use of apparently benevolent forms of imperial intervention such as medicine and social science research in the name of improving women's lot, has allowed the United States to effectively deny its imperial role on the island.

Working women's sexuality did not only worry colonial officials. It also became the object of campaigns by a wide variety of groups on the island. Local political elites, Puerto Rican feminists and nationalists, as well as North American missionaries, physicians, and social scientists continuously invoked the problematic sexuality of working women as a powerful rhetorical and political organizing tool. Briggs shows how these campaigns produced a plethora of meanings over the course of the last century, almost always, however, ending in the demonization of plebeian women as the root of Puerto Rican disease, poverty, or failed nationhood.

Briggs offers us numerous historical insights. In addition to interpretively stretching my own work on the varied Puerto Rican responses to the U.S.'s campaign against prostitution during World War I and that of Annette Ramírez and Conrad Seipp on the history of birth control on the island, Briggs shows that eugenics could be appropriated by Puerto Rican feminists and socialists. In the Puerto Rican context it did not only serve the interest of imperial racism. Her chapter on the debates over sterilization in the 1960s and 1970s is particularly illuminating. Here Briggs traces how anti-colonial feminists in the U.S. unwittingly undercut Puerto Rican feminists in their critique of alleged sterilization practices in Puerto Rico.

At times, Briggs exhibits an unfortunate tendency to overstate her points, placing her broader arguments on unnecessarily shaky ground. (See, for example, pp. 55 and 89.) My greatest disappointment, however, was the absence of plebeian women in the book. Briggs justifies this by noting that the project of recovering subaltern voices has often ended in intellectuals' appropriation of subaltern actions and interests for their own ends. I remain troubled by the implications of her decision to leave unexplored possible working-class female interpretations of and impacts upon the struggles she discusses.

Briggs has not avoided drawing a portrait of working women. Rather, their silence in this book, when contrasted to the plethora of other Puerto Rican voices included, implicitly erases working-class women's agency as much as the oppositional Puerto Ricans whom she criticizes. Fragments of working women's discourses are traceable in a wide variety of archival and published sources. Certainly these sources cannot be read as transparent windows onto working women's consciousness and experience. But the stories laboring women told in these venues were in significant ways authored by them—they deserve careful, critical analysis as much as the writings and speeches of those Puerto Ricans with more access to formal political arenas.

Ironically, Briggs cannot consistently maintain her position of respectfully allowing laboring women to remain in silence. A cornerstone of her refutation of Puerto Rican nationalist and U.S. feminist claims that the state carried out a massive campaign of forced sterilization on the island is testimony by working-class women recorded in social science studies and the documentary film La Operación (1982). Subaltern women...