Identity, Nation, and Revolution in Latin America

Women's relationships to the state, to their societies, and to the construction of national discourses continue to provide topics for at-times-heated debates. On the one hand, generalizing about women in such a way as to claim that all women have a particular type of connection to political or social phenomena runs the risk of subsuming certain categories of difference—racial, ethnic, class, sexual—at the same time that it attempts to highlight gender difference. On the other hand, refusing to make any kind of statement about the issues faced by groups of women as they negotiate their relationships with the political movements, countries, and social structures surrounding them also leads to a critical dead end. Four recent books walk this tightrope in varying ways as they address the topic of gender and national construction and discourse.

Roy-Féquière's Women, Creole Identity, and Intellectual Life in Early Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico analyzes questions of race, class, and gender in the intellectual nationalist projects of the Generación del Treinta (Generation of 1930), a group of writers whose works form the basis for much of the debate about Puerto Rican identity in the twentieth century. In chapter 1, Roy-Féquière uses Antonio S. Pedreira's highly influential 1934 essay Insularismo (Insularism), which argued that Puerto Rican national identity depended upon racial purity and the dominance of the white descendents of the original Spanish colonists, as a jumping-off point to investigate the assumptions about race, class, and gender that underlay the vision of Puerto Rican national identity constructed by the Generación de Treinta. One striking aspect of Puerto Rican nationalist thought after the U.S. invasion in 1898 and subsequent U.S. possession of the island is that, unlike the vast majority of other Spanish American intellectuals, Puerto Ricans appealed to the vanished colonial, Spanish past as the basis for identity construction in the face of North American cultural domination. Roy-Féquière shows that these elements were part of the Generación de Treinta's efforts to construct a viable vision of Puerto Rican identity, as "the particular cultural memory of the descendants of the hacendado class is represented as a common historical and cultural patrimony" (42) not only for white elites but for rural peasants and the urban proletariat and bourgeoisie.

Beginning with the suffrage movement that started in 1917, chapter 2, "Compromising Positions: Reconstituting the Creole Gender Hierarchy," analyzes the strategies that white Puerto Rican women used to gain voice and agency. Suffrage for women met with immense opposition even though the suffragists asserted that their goal was to complement, not replace, men's activities. Middle-class women also tried to divorce their project of obtaining the vote for women from that of instituting radical changes in social structures or conventional morality. The suffragist movement of the 1920s, affirms Roy-Féquière, "provided a model of empowerment for women that made possible the strong presence of a number of women critics in the intellectual field" (77) in the Generación de Treinta. These women, however, were still constrained by—and themselves perpetuated—stereotypical notions of gender roles in which women had to strive to sublimate their sex in their intellectual work.

In the third chapter, Roy-F...