Women, Creole Identity, and Intellectual Life in Early Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico (review)

The revisionist turn in Puerto Rican literary criticism that emerged around the 1980s coincided with two intellectual trends that signaled a major shift in conceptual frameworks: the production of numerous historical studies on the island, to mark the beginning of what has been called "la nueva historiografía" in Puerto Rico; and the establishment of Women's Studies programs, to indicate the constitution of gender as a legitimate object of study in academic disciplines in universities throughout the world. All three projects entailed bringing to light cultural practices that previous scholars had forgotten or overlooked.

Magali Roy-Féquière's Women, Creole Identity, and Intellectual Life in Early Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico follows suit in the sense of recovering the voices of women and blacks in her reassessment of texts from a significant moment in Puerto Rican cultural history: the Generation of 1930. Reportedly derived from a doctoral dissertation, the book takes up a recurring issue in Puerto Rican intellectual discourse ever since the island's insertion into the U.S. political space in 1898: the perceived need to construct a recognizably Puerto Rican identity in a modern colonial society.

The book's eight chapters are preceded by an introduction, where the author provides a historical overview of the period in question, and outlines the theoretical and critical framework for the analyses that follow. Here, she sets forth her general idea of Puerto Rican nationalist discourse as a locus of "creation and invention" (2), an idea derived from Eric Hobsbawm's concept of invented traditions. Roy-Féquière also locates her study within the fields of Women's Studies and Cultural Studies, as is evident from the following statement: "My argument is that discourses of national identification presuppose certain gender relations that have complicated ramifications for those they address as well as for those they marginalize. [ . . . ] Moreover, the women intellectuals of my study often do not—or cannot—escape the dominant practice of inscribing the subject as male and white" (7–8).

Chapter 1, "Nationalism Revisited: Deciphering the Creole Imaginary," begins by showing how the intellectuals perceived the socioeconomic upheavals of the 1930s—widespread poverty, hunger, labor strikes, protest marches—as evidence of "a crisis of representation, demanding discursive remedies" (13). The author takes Antonio S. Pedreira's Insularismo: ensayos de interpretación (1934) as an emblematic text that inaugurates the discourse of cultural nationalism in Puerto Rico. She goes on to analyze the work of the Generation of 1930 in the light of rereadings of the historical record by social historians and literary critics during the 1970sand after. In the younger intellectuals' judgment, Pedreira's and his colleagues' assertions of Puerto Rico's cultural continuity with Spain was a displacement onto the symbolic realm of the effective power held by their landholding forebears prior to the moment of rupture in 1898. Consequently, their rhetorical gestures are viewed as a simultaneous response to the island's political domination by the U.S. and to the writers' own socioeconomic subordination. Roy-Féquière also takes the notion of Puerto Rico's essential Spanishness as a marker of the desire to erase the black presence. She points out that the American presence disturbed conventional gender roles by providing greater educational and job opportunities for women. However, these produced differential effects on working-class women, and on middle- and upper-class women. The author notes the discomfort this turn of events provoked among intellectuals such as Pedreira, who viewed "these women's struggles for autonomy as a sign of antinationalism" (30). The chapter goes on to discuss the university's role in the elaboration of the nationalist discourse, especially the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Puerto Rico. The chapter ends with a close reading of Margot Arce's essay, "Las raíces" (1956) to illustrate Roy-Féquière's assessment of the contradictory stance of the Generation of 1930.

Chapter 2, "Compromising...