360 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 29 illus., 10 tables, notes, bibl., index

$60.00 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-2704-8

The Spanish folk term for the back-and-forth movement of people between Puerto Rico and the United States is el vaivén (literally meaning "fluctuation"). This culturally dense word refers to the constant comings and goings in which large numbers of Puerto Ricans are involved (C. Rodríguez 1994b). It implies that some people do not stay put in one place for a long period of time but move incessantly, like the wind or the waves of the sea, in response to shifting tides. Furthermore, it suggests that those who are here today may be gone tomorrow, and vice versa. More ominously, vaivén also connotes unsteadiness, inconstancy, and oscillation. In any case, contemporary Puerto Rican migration is best visualized as a transient and pendulous flow, rather than as a permanent, irrevocable, one-way relocation of people. La nación en vaivén, "the nation on the move," might serve as an apt metaphor for the fluid and hybrid identities of Puerto Ricans on the Island and in the mainland. I have therefore chosen that image as the title of this book, to suggest that none of the traditional criteria for nationhood—a shared territory, language, economy, citizenship, or sovereignty—are fixed and immutable in Puerto Rico and its diaspora but are subject to constant fluctuation and intense debate, even though the sense of peoplehood has proven remarkably resilient throughout.

In the past few years, the metaphor of Puerto Rico as a nation on the move has taken new meanings. On May 4, 2000, the U.S. Navy carried out Operation Access to the East, in which it removed more than two hundred peaceful demonstrators from its training grounds in Vieques, a small island off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico. Those practicing civil disobedience included a wide spectrum of political and religious leaders, university students, and community activists. The protests had been sparked by the accidental death of security guard David Sanes Rodríguez during a military exercise in Vieques on April 19, 1999. Soon thereafter, Puerto Ricans of all ideological persuasions called for an end to live bombings, the navy's exit, and the return of military lands to the civilian residents of Vieques. As a result of this prolonged struggle, the Puerto Rican nation was symbolically extended beyond the main island to Vieques—la isla nena, or "the baby island," as it is affectionately known—as well as to Culebra and other smaller territories of the Puerto Rican archipelago. It is now more appropriate than ever to speak about the islands of Puerto Rico.

A noteworthy development has been the active participation of leaders of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the grassroots movement to end the U.S. Navy presence in Vieques. Two of the three Puerto Rican delegates to the U.S. House of Representatives, Luis Gutiérrez and Nydia Velázquez, were detained in Vieques during Operation Access to the East. The third, José Serrano, was arrested inside the White House grounds demanding peace for Vieques. Many other Puerto Rican leaders from New York have publicly expressed their support for the peace movement on the Island. Thus, Puerto Rican national identity has moved abroad in two main directions—both across a short distance to Vieques and across the "big pond" of the Atlantic Ocean to the U.S. mainland. For the moment, the public discourse on the Puerto Rican nation has broadened beyond territorial boundaries and across political differences.

Despite the strong ties of solidarity displayed by Puerto Ricans on and off the Island, the U.S. government has insisted on continuing military exercises in Vieques until May 1, 2003. Although motivated by a host of political and strategic factors, this insistence reveals the colonial nature of U.S.-Puerto Rican relations. Without effective representation in Congress, islanders have been forced to accept a presidential directive (timidly negotiated by former governor Pedro Rosselló), which does not please most opponents of the navy's continued presence in Vieques. This directive called for the resumption of military training activities, although with inert bombs, as well as for a plebiscite to tap the views of the people of Vieques. (On July 29, 2001, 68.2 percent of those polled in a Vieques referendum supported the navy's immediate exit.) Throughout the controversy, high-ranking members of Congress have raised the question of Puerto Rican loyalty to U.S. citizenship and commitment to American security needs. On April 29, 2000, President Clinton's key adviser on Puerto Rican affairs, Jeffrey Farrow, reiterated the official position that Puerto Rico is not a nation but a territory of the United States (see García Passalacqua 2000). As such, the Island is supposed to follow the defensive strategies established by the White House for the entire American nation.

Contrary to such opinions, I argue that Puerto Rico is indeed a nation, but a nation on the move. In so doing, I redefine the nation not as a well-bounded sovereign state but as a translocal community based on a collective consciousness of a shared history, language, and culture. Furthermore, Puerto Rico may well be considered a "postcolonial colony" in the sense of a people with a strong national identity but little desire for a nation-state, living in a territory that legally "belongs to but is not part of the United States." The prevailing juridical definition of the Island as neither a state of the Union nor a sovereign republic has created an ambiguous, problematic, and contested political status for more than a hundred years. Paradoxically, it has also strengthened the sense of peoplehood among Puerto Ricans.

One does not have to espouse an essentialist or primordialist viewpoint to acknowledge that the vast majority of Puerto Ricans—on and off the Island—imagine themselves as part of a broader community that meets all the standard criteria of nationality, such as territory, language, or culture, except sovereignty. The public outcry over Vieques suggests that the "baby island" has been popularly redefined as part of the Puerto Rican, not the American, nation. At the same time, the massive displacements of people between the Island and the mainland over the last half century complicate any simple equations among territory, language, and culture. In particular, the mobile livelihood of many Puerto Ricans challenges static approaches to national identity. Nonetheless, recent essays on the construction and representation of Puerto Ricanness concur on its sheer strength, intensity, and wide appeal (Dávila 1997; Guerra 1998; Morris 1997; Rivera 1996). Unfortunately, most of this work has centered on the Island and neglected how identities are transformed and reconstructed in the diaspora.

The Recurrent Themes of This Book

Two key questions guide my analysis. First, how can most Puerto Ricans imagine themselves as a nation, even though few of them support the constitution of a separate nation-state? I address this issue by making a careful distinction between political nationalism—based on the doctrine that every people should have its own sovereign government—and cultural nationalism—based on the assertion of the moral and spiritual autonomy of each people. While the former is a minority position in contemporary Puerto Rico, the latter is the dominant ideology of the Commonwealth government, the intellectual elite, and numerous cultural institutions on the Island as well as in the diaspora. Most Puerto Ricans now insist that they are a distinct nation—as validated in their participation in such international displays of nationhood as Olympic sports and beauty pageants—but at the same time they want to retain their U.S. citizenship, thus pulling apart the coupling that the very term "nation-state" implies.

Second, what has been the cultural impact of the massive migration of Puerto Ricans to the mainland over the past five decades? I argue that diasporic communities are an integral part of the Puerto Rican nation because they continue to be linked to the Island by an intense circular movement of people, identities, and practices, as well as capital, technology, and commodities. Hence, the Puerto Rican nation is no longer restricted to the Island but instead is constituted by two distinct yet closely intertwined fragments: that of Puerto Rico itself and that of the diasporic communities settled in the continental United States. The multiple implications of this profound territorial dispersion are explored throughout the book.

In what follows, I approach the construction and representation of Puerto Rican identity as a hybrid, translocal, and postcolonial sense of peoplehood. Here I appropriate the suggestive notion of "hybrid cultures" developed by Néstor García Canclini (1990) to analyze the interpenetration of local, regional, national, and transnational forms of culture, as well as folk, rural, urban, popular, and mass culture. Furthermore, the interpretation of Puerto Rican culture on the Island and in the mainland calls for a transnational approach (Basch, Schiller, and Blanc 1994; Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992) that moves beyond territorial boundaries to characterize the continuing sociocultural links between the diaspora and its communities of origin. The book also draws insights from contemporary writing on the public representation of collective identities, especially the idea that all identities are constituted through particular discursive practices (see Hall 1997). By insisting on the performative aspects of people's sense of who they are, I do not claim that discourses take precedence over material experiences but that the former always mediate the latter through culturally patterned forms of imagination. Finally, I engage critically with a central strand of postcolonial criticism that takes the analysis of colonial discourses as its point of departure. Above all, the material presented in this book challenges homogeneous portrayals of racial and ethnic others, which cannot account for the specific historical and cultural junctures in which such portrayals emerge.

The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move deals with several interrelated topics, such as the politics of representation, the construction of colonial and anticolonial discourses, and the myriad intersections between race, ethnicity, class, and nationalism. In examining these issues, I dwell on certain historical moments and cultural practices shared by the Puerto Rican people, both on the Island and in the United States. First I assess the impact of the American occupation of the Island after the Spanish-Cuban-American War on the construction and representation of Puerto Rican identity. Then I emphasize recent social changes on the Island, such as industrialization, urbanization, and migration. I am particularly interested in the cultural effects of the massive displacement of Puerto Ricans to the United States since the 1940s. The 1950s can be considered a bridging decade between the colonial and nationalist discourses that dominated the first and second halves of the twentieth century, respectively. I also focus on emergent trends in the first years of the twenty-first century, such as an ever increasing ethnic diversity on the Island owing to foreign immigration and the persistence of migration between the Island and the mainland.

The present work draws on neglected primary sources for the ethnographic and historical analysis of Puerto Rican culture, such as its public display through material objects and photographs. Methodologically, the book weaves together findings from ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, surveys, censuses, personal documents, interviews, newspaper articles, and literary texts. Because of the shifting nature of my object of study, I myself had to move back and forth between Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York, and San Juan. I scrutinized the texts, images, and other cultural artifacts produced by several social actors, including American anthropologists and photographers, Puerto Rican writers and artists, as well as various institutional sites, such as the Smithsonian Institution, the New York Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, the Commonwealth's Migration Division, and Puerto Rican community organizations in the United States. I analyzed various genres of representation, ranging from ethnographic essays and census statistics to museum exhibits and world's fairs.

Throughout this book, I trace the development of certain emblematic figures of the Puerto Rican people (such as the jíbaro, or "independent subsistence farmer") during the twentieth century, to interpret the historical process of nation formation and consolidation on the Island and in the diaspora. As a consequence of massive and sustained migration to the United States, popular images of Puerto Rican identity have been thoroughly deterritorialized and transnationalized over the past few decades. For instance, the jíbaro's pava, or "straw hat," is constantly displayed as a visual icon of Puerto Ricanness in the United States. The pava reappears in the most unlikely places, such as folk festivals in Central Park, public schools in Brooklyn, and Smithsonian Institution exhibits. Another example is the construction of casitas, small wooden houses reminiscent of the Island's rural dwellings, in the abandoned lots of the South Bronx and the Lower East Side of Manhattan (Aponte-Parés 1996). The diaspora has mobilized standard concepts of the nation, culture, language, and territory on the Island and elsewhere. Population displacements across and within the boundaries of the imagined community have resulted in the weakening of political nationalism and the broadening of cultural identities in Puerto Rico, as well as in other countries of the world (Basch, Schiller, and Blanc 1994). While Puerto Ricans lack a separate citizenship, they have a clear sense of national identity. Any definition of the Island's political status must take into account the growing strength of cultural nationalism, as much as the increasing dispersal of people through the diaspora.

Imagining the Puerto Rican Nation

Nations are not natural and eternal essences but contingent, slippery, and fuzzy constructs, always in a process of redefinition (Chatterjee 1993, 1995; García Canclini 1990; Hall 1994). At the same time, national boundaries have practical implications for people's daily lives as well as long-term political repercussions, especially in colonial settings. National identities are not completely artificial or abstracted from everyday experience; on the contrary, they are historically grounded in social relations, cultural practices, and shared conceptions of what constitutes a people, a country, and a community. While some aspects of national identity can be fruitfully considered "invented traditions" (Hobsbawm 1983) or "imagined communities" (Anderson 1991), the process of inventing or imagining the boundaries of the nation has much symbolic and material significance. Even though nations are collective imaginaries, they have concrete consequences for one's sense of self and relations with others. The debate between constructionist and essentialist views of the nation remains sterile unless it is recognized that all forms of identity are imagined, invented, and represented—but not necessarily arbitrary, immaterial, and irrelevant.

Anderson's suggestively titled Imagined Communities has been the point of departure for much of the rethinking about nations.[3] Anderson (1991: 5-7) defines nations as political communities imagined by their members as limited and sovereign territories sharing a horizontal comradeship. Modern nations emerged as cultural artifacts toward the end of the eighteenth century in western Europe, particularly through new forms of literary representation, such as the novel, the newspaper article, biography, and autobiography. Nationalism is also expressed in state institutions of power via censuses, maps, and museums, all of which help to define and classify the nation as a separate entity. For Anderson, nations are not necessarily fabrications but rather cultural creations rooted in social and historical processes—that is, ideological constructs with personal and collective significance.

Unfortunately, some analysts (such as Elie Kedourie, Ernest Gellner, and Eric Hobsbawm) confound the meaning of the word "imagined" with "imaginary" in the sense of "fictitious" or "false," thereby suggesting that nations do not exist apart from the ideological machinations of nationalist elites or popular movements engaged in struggles for self-determination. However, the practical impact of national identities on people's everyday lives should not be neglected. As Etienne Balibar argues, nothing is more real than what someone imagines. All human communities are imaginary insofar as they are "based on the projection of individual existence into the weft of a collective narrative, on the recognition of a common name and on traditions lived as the trace of an immemorial past" (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 93). For Balibar, a nation constitutes a "fictive ethnicity" because it is "represented in the past or in the future as if [it] formed a natural community, possessing of itself an identity of origins, culture and interests which transcends individuals and social conditions" (96). The key question then becomes how representations of national identity are constructed, institutionalized, and communicated.

In their most extreme versions, such as those advanced by Kedourie or Gellner, critical views of the nation are as off the mark as essentialist approaches. Kedourie (1993) has correctly faulted the political doctrine of nationalism for assuming that nations are natural divisions of humankind and that the nation-state is the only legitimate form of government in the contemporary world. But he dismisses all too quickly the potency and endurance of national identities and their roots in earlier forms of human association, such as kinship, religion, and ethnicity. For Gellner (1983), nationalism arose in social formations undergoing modernization, as in much of western Europe during the nineteenth century. In his view, the loss of cultural homogeneity produced by industrialization leads to nationalism as a way of creating new bonds of solidarity and exclusion. Gellner's often-quoted dictum that "it is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way around" (55) resonates strongly with Hobsbawm's equally counterintuitive notion (1990: 10) that "nations do not make states and nationalism but the other way around." The major problem with this thesis is that it cannot account for nations without states, such as Scotland, Catalonia, Quebec, or Puerto Rico.

A more reasonable, if less controversial, attempt to define nations has been made by Anthony D. Smith in The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986) and in more recent works (Smith 1991, 1995, 1998). Smith argues that ethnicity has historically provided the main model for the construction of national identities, particularly with regard to myths, memories, symbols, and values. His study documents the continuity between ethnic communities and modern nations as bases for popular mobilization throughout the world. Nationalist ideologies incorporate elements of enduring ethnic identities to legitimize the creation of a nation-state. In this sense, nations are not entirely invented traditions or imagined communities but historically grounded in earlier modes of association, such as kinship and religion. As Smith (1986: 211) points out, "Nations are not fixed and immutable entities 'out there'. . . ; but neither are they completely malleable and fluid processes and attitudes, at the mercy of every outside force."

In his 1991 volume, Smith (vii) has argued that "we cannot understand nations and nationalism simply as an ideology or form of politics but must treat them as cultural phenomena as well." National identities are cultural practices involving specific kinds of icons, myths, and rituals. The symbolic repertoire of the nation is based on a limited set of images that must be interpreted according to local canons of knowledge. The foundational myth of an ancestral homeland, along with the preservation of an original language and the embodiment of these ideas in public ceremonies, is amenable to ethnographic description and analysis. Furthermore, nationalism often develops the ritual idioms of kinship, religion, and ethnicity as metaphors for the bounded solidarity among the citizens of a country. Thus, it becomes possible to reject essentialist and primordialist approaches to the nation without neglecting the lived experiences of ordinary people, whose subjectivities and material relations are shaped by that particular form of collective identity. Smith's call for the careful study of "the various 'myths' and 'memories,' 'symbols,' and 'values,' which so often define and differentiate nations" (1986: xix) outlines a useful research agenda.

This book contributes to the growing literature on the construction and representation of national identities in four basic ways. To begin, it locates precisely the multiple social actors who define and articulate the nation. In the case of Puerto Rico, several groups can be readily identified, such as colonial administrators, American scholars, nationalist intellectuals, Commonwealth officials, and leaders of migrant organizations, each with their own special interests, social positions, and ideological perspectives. Second, the book poses the question of when these discourses arise and how they gain broad institutional support. For instance, the historical context for the emergence of colonial, national, and transnational representations of Puerto Rico can be dated to the early part, the middle decades, and the last half of the twentieth century, respectively. Third is the issue of from where the nation is imagined: on the Island, from the United States, or from a diasporic standpoint? Among other factors, one's place of residence makes a huge difference in the construction and representation of the nation. Last, I analyze how identities are portrayed and communicated—through literary texts, visual images, government reports, ethnographic collections, museum exhibits, and so on.