Dream Nation: Puerto Rican Culture and the Fictions of Independence

Introduction

Introduction In a world in which Chechen, Catalan, Scottish, and Sri Lankan nationalists , among others, command significant attention calling for national liberation, Puerto Ricans have perplexingly rejected political independence .1 Puerto Rican independence (through political action or by force of arms) is an anachronism, a relic buried under more than a half century of electoral rejection.2 Given that political reality, why are themes of independence still so powerful in Puerto Rican culture? Why do many Puerto Rican writers on the island and in the United States cling to this ideal? Who among them has opposed this established position? Why has cultural independence succeeded whereas political independence failed? How does the dream nation enhance what being a Puerto Rican means? This book explores these questions in relation to how independence has become a symbolic aspiration, a grand gesture of love, a refuge for national pride, and an intellectual fantasy that sustains how Puerto Rican culture imagines the nation (its heroes, its allegories, its significant stories). Puerto Rican culture has, until recently, hardly explored the two other status options, commonwealth and statehood. And yet it is these two that represent the political will of the people. Like Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans themselves, the issue of sovereignty is fraught with the push and pull of wishes, yearnings, dashed aspirations, and hopedfor dreams. The paradoxes that this book grapples with are mostly absent from discussions in Puerto Rican cultural studies because for the most part, 2 / introduction culture critics have favored independence, and as a result, the disconnect between culture and daily reality has largely remained on the sidelines. There are some specialists in Puerto Rican cultural studies who have critiqued the dream of independence, but they have done so in academic articles and scholarly books that are not widely read. The present book aims to remedy that by being clear, forthright, and jargon-free. The people who produce and criticize high-end cultural products have themselves had discussions and conflicts on the matter, as the spat between Rosario Ferré and the literary establishment in the 1990s proves (see chapter 2). And it must not be forgotten that the dream of independence also remains strong in popular culture, for instance in rap music, where its long-standing pose of defiance against The Man as well as expressions of powerful self-regard (or national self-esteem) are extremely appealing. At the outset, I want to state clearly that I do not view independence as a viable political alternative nor as the sole lodestar of Puerto Rican literature and culture. I am fully aware that nothing is a monolith; that is certainly the case for a broad political movement such as independentismo , which has many shades.3 Neither do I believe that any one book can be comprehensive about Puerto Rican culture. This book aims to sample a variety of cultural artifacts, history, and politics to scrutinize the paradoxical impulses of independence/dependence in Puerto Rico. Some of the central concepts explained in later chapters spring from the intricacies of Puerto Rico’s political status in relationship to the United States, especially the historical context of the island’s 1898 annexation by the United States. I explore how stories, symbols, and fictions of achieving sovereignty have often depended on nostalgia linked to a premodern lost Lush Land paradise. Another issue I consider important is how a sense of shame shapes the reactions of a dependent country. As the book progresses, I stress the rift between cultural/literary ideas of independence and the realities of daily dependence, as well as point out how more complex concepts of the nation arise in contemporary cultural production, and, finally, how the ambivalent love/hate relationship to Puerto Rico plays out in Latino writers. Embedded in Puerto Rican culture is a deep longing for the stories, themes, and symbols of independence which are woven into the DNA of the culture’s highbrow as well as popular modes. The independence introduction / 3 ideal exerts the fascination of a cultural meme that therapeutically processes the failed project of political independence as a national wrong that was never made right—and provides a shared tragedy (or at least melodrama).4 The people, however, have rejected the practical burdens of independent nationhood. Why? Among the reasons for the voting patterns are that, initially, the island consciously hitched its wagon to a rising star in the 1940s and 1950s, when the American...