Defendiendo la (Agri)Cultura: Reterritorializing Culture in the Puerto Rican Décima

Introduction

Hispanic balladry is one of the most prevalent oral traditions in the Americas; one of the strongest examples of this is the Puerto Rican décima. People who sing these ballads today identify with a well-known type in Puerto Rican history call the jíbaro. The word jíbaro first appeared in print in 1814 according to Laguerre and Melón (1968) and referred to a peasant eking a living off the land in the high country, or center of the island. This paper explores the projection of Puerto Rican cultural identity in décima singing. In particular I show how particular themes evoke an idyllic bucolic past at the same time that formal constraints of the genre are rigidified. I discuss how both these trends relate back to the notion of defending a cultural identity in the wake of colonization and deterritorialization and how through singing décimas about country living, Puerto Rican culture is symbolically reterritorialized.¹

For this research project 14 people were interviewed and recordings were made at nine different décima-singing events. This article focuses on 58 décima verses that were improvised for a contest outside of Comerío. The salient semantic clusters that emerged revolved around country life and singing décimas. All verses were transcribed and words related to these two themes were counted.

The Rise of the Puerto Rican Décima

The décima is a ten-line verse of eight syllable lines and a limited number of rhyme schemes which became popular in the literate culture of sixteenth century Spain, though several authors have suggested connections with the Andalusian zejel, mushawashah and kharja.² Bernal del Castillo informs us that Spanish colonizers arrived in America singing octosyllabic coplas, another predecessor of the décima (cited in Canino 1986:26). The first Puerto Rican décima that we have evidence of today was written during the seventeenth century in honor of the governor, unjustly imprisoned by the colonial government (Jiménez de Baez 1964:69). Evidence for the popularity of the décima form in Puerto Rico grew throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries (Jiménez de Baez 1964:65–95).

The décima became the dominant oral tradition in Puerto Rico, enjoying long-standing popularity similar to the corrido in Mexico. In 1918 J. Alden Mason stated that while “the popular octosyllabic copla . . . holds undisputed sway” in the rest of Latin America, in Puerto Rico it is successfully challenged by the décima (Mason 1918:290). The same sentiment is expressed in more recent works. In the conclusion of Canino’s El Cantar Folklorico de Puerto Rico, published in 1986, he talks about the décima as if, with a voracious appetite, it is gobbling up all the other traditional song forms on the island. He laments, “Today’s trovadores almost never compose coplas or brief song forms, they prefer to improvise décimas and when they do create a copla, they do it to serve as a glosa for a décima.” Further on he states, “Although romances are totally disappearing they left the themes and topics they used to deal with to the narrative décimas.”³ This statement is followed in the last paragraph of the book with the analysis that the popular traditions of today do not create new poetry, they only repeat the ancient oral traditions of the Spaniards: “Very seldom are we able to find” writes Canino “clearly Puerto Rican creations—except for décimas.”

Décimas are found in numerous contexts. They are written to be read and published by both elite and folk poets, written to be sung by oneself or another, or orally composed while singing. Practically nobody makes a living from singing, so weekends are the time when most décima events take place. Contexts for singing décimas include radio and T.V. programs, restaurant-bars, certain market places, patron saint festivals, religious events, folklore festivals, life cycle celebrations, political meetings, events to advertise businesses, homages, and improvisation competitions.

While the formal structure of décima lyrics harks back to...