Notes on Shame and Failure: Portrait/s of Queer Puerto Ricans

As constitutive of Puerto Rican national identity, shame and failure have structured cultural narratives of the insular geography. Ingrained in a history of colonialism and subjugation, Puerto Rico has traditionally been narrated as a vulnerable and emasculated nation due precisely to the island’s inability for independence, autonomy and self-sufficiency. This national conceptualization can be traced throughout the works of 19^th- and 20^th-century intellectuals such as Salvador Brau, Antonio Pedreira or René Marqués, among others, who articulate the contours of the island as geographically inefficient and morally deprived. Insularismo: ensayos de interpretación puertorriqueña (Pedreira) and El puertorriqueño dócil y otros ensayos (Marqués) are but two examples of how depictions of the history of the island have emphasized insufficiencies, justifying therefore the current cultural and economic inferiority and reflecting a dysfunctional reality. In addition to regionally determined conditions that isolate the insular space and that reinforce an absence of work ethics, race has played a putative role in contributing to negative and defective representations of Puerto Rican culture. Once conceived as the root of shame, the figure of the jíbaro gradually transcended racial impurity, and backwardness. While these primordial elements derived from centuries of slavery, and while colonial imaginations under the Spanish regime still existed, the stigma of the jíbaro was displaced as the Afro-Puertorrican collective became the embodiment of shame and failure. Along with groups embodying racial marginality, sexual minorities and migrants also became targets of social, cultural and economic exclusion. In overcoming traditional narratives invested in negativity, my purpose in this essay is to explore how subaltern bodies reappropriate conventional discourses of shame and failure effectively challenging homogeneous narratives of nation formation. Consequently, these bodies convey a wide range of queer/racial constellations that are part and parcel of puertorriqueñidad in a transnational and diasporic scenario. In so doing, I will examine how potential articulations of shame and failure are successfully deployed throughout the film Brincando el charco produced by Frances Negrón-Muntaner in 1994 and how reap-propriating shame and failure facilitates alternative experiences of national identity.

In her 1999 article on the film “When I was a Puerto Rican Lesbian,” Negrón-Muntaner emphasizes her desire to portray more issues than the materialization of a possible lesbian romance in the diaspora as an effect of family and national rejection. Her project, in addition to being political, encompasses a myriad of marginal bodies through which Claudia—the main protagonist—identifies herself:

To constitute a specifically lesbian Puerto Rican location, the film goes through the bodies of others: heterosexual black Puerto Rican women, African Americans, gay Puerto Rican men. More important, the processes of traveling toward or reaching the other sets a group of lesbian identifications in motion and makes a specifically Puerto Rican queer location possible.

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By incorporating historical losses and cultural representations at the limits of hegemonic paradigms, she carries on the task of filming, photographing and interviewing Puerto Rican diasporic subjects that have liminaly and painfully constituted puertorriqueñidad as subalterns. In this way, Claudia creates a postmodern archive that highlights disruptions, shame, failure and re/foundations of identity at the core of transnational reconfigurations that inevitably underscore the impossibility of representing a whole and unique vision of history. Her engagement in a romance that moves beyond the exclusivity of the couple by emphasizing its relation to other individuals, re/signifies family, community and most importantly the intricacies of history making. In this sense, shame and failure as tropes of identity can be used “to re-evaluate how we are positioned in relation to the past and to rethink how we wish to live in proximity to others” and to revisit national projects undoing hegemonic discourses (Probyn xiv). In order to better comprehend the interventions and contributions of these concepts, I will carefully delve into theoretical studies done by scholars such as Silvan Tomkins, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Elspeth Probyn and Judith Halberstam on shame and failure to later examine how intellectuals from Puerto Rico have resignified them within a local...