Carmen Maria Colon Pellot: On "Womanhood" and "Race" in Puerto Rico during the Interwar Period

To my friend Anjelamaría Dávila Malavé

THE INTERSECTION OF "WOMANHOOD" AND "RACE" WAS A FOUNDING ELEMENT of Puerto Rican cultures—especially for "native" women—between 1898 and 1940, particularly during the interwar period. This intersection, as an abstract conceptual process and as a lived experience, was more fundamental than is generally acknowledged by sociohistorical inquiry, and specifically by Puerto Rican history.

After some brief consideration of the state of Puerto Rican historiography in relation to "womanhood" and "race," and the importance of doing this kind of research and analysis, I want to explore a number of aspects of the poetic work of Carmen María Colón Pellot (1911-), a Puerto Rican "mulata" writer and author of Ambar Mulato, a book of poems published in 1938. I will draw on her literary production—among other writers of the interwar period—as a way of approaching an understanding of how Puerto Ricans imagined and deciphered being "woman" and being "raced": how Puerto Rican women themselves made sense of their gendered and racialized conditions during the interwar period.

Puerto Rican Historiography, "Womanhood," and "Race"

Women's history focusing on Puerto Ricans has made great strides during the past two decades. ¹ However, those of us within this tradition have failed to address (1) what "race" has meant to women in Puerto Rico (white and, primarily, nonwhite); (2) how "race" structured these women's lives and social conditions; and (3) what images have been socially constructed for them—both as Puerto Rican women and as racially located Puerto Ricans. ²

Likewise, virtually all considerations of the Puerto Rican "race question" (scholarly, journalistic, and/or governmental) in the first half of the twentieth century tend to share two other limitations. On the one hand, "race" among Puerto Ricans ultimately has been explained (away) as a non-issue, framed within the widespread Occidentalist/Hispano-American arguments of "racial democracy" (Zenón Cruz 1974, 1975; Seda Bonilla 1972, 103-89). The "authentic" Puerto Rican self that emerges within the social sciences and humanities has been fashioned as ultimately European in origins, devoid of any African markers and, indeed, of any racial markers at all.

On the other hand, and like their more mainstream counterparts, the still very small number of writers and scholars who address the Puerto Rican "race question" from alternative perspectives tend to reduce racialized experiences and cultural representations to a male context. The socially and racially varied (not to mention conflicting) experience of Puerto Rican "womanhood" at this time for the most part is overlooked; so is the entire spectrum of visual, metaphorical, and—more importantly—racialized images that define such "womanhood." This problem is especially true for studies of the pivotal interwar period, when Puerto Rican identities underwent substantial redefinition (Roy-Féquiere 1993).

As with most social science inquiry on Puerto Ricans, issues of "race" within women's history are usually relegated to "race relations theory," especially between Puerto Ricans and North Americans (Rodríguez 1989, 49-84; Jiménez-Muñoz 1993a; 1993b; 1997, 140-65). This is a marked contrast with the immense concern with "social class" in Puerto Rican sociohistorical inquiry in the past three decades (Santiago-Valles 1997, 95-115). Such emphases and oversights mirror the close attention paid to linking "race" and "social class"—while omitting "gender"—in the social science literature on Puerto Ricans corresponding to the period from the 1940s to the early 1960s. ³

Within the contexts of Puerto Rican women's history and the literature on the Puerto Rican "race question," "womanhood" and "race" are typically analyzed as separate, though prominent, forms of subjectivity and social domination commonly construed as "biologically determined," and as historico-culturally immutable "things." Instead, we need to examine such...