Travels with Albizu Campos's Voice

After the Cuban intellectual Juan Marinello met Afro-Puerto Rican Nationalist Pedro Albizu Campos in 1927, he wrote that Albizu's voice was “like a cry that emerged far from the body in which it was born” (“como un clamor que arrancara de más allá del cuerpo en que nacía”). Marinello may or may not have been thinking of the then-new technologies of radio broadcasting or gramophones. He may or may not have been thinking of scenes of spiritual possession, or ghostly haunting. His words lend themselves to either of these interpretations. What is clear is his intention to assert the political and affective power of Albizu's voice. It was a voice, he claimed, that forced listeners to act: “The voice, which in intimate spaces was peaceful and suggestive, took on, in public spaces, a vibrant and metallic tone that reached the ears of the most distant listeners like a clarion whose orders were impossible to resist.”1 That voice would become, in Cold War Puerto Rico, an index of both defiance and illegality. Its recorded version would also reappear and circulate, haunting both intimate and public spaces in the decades after his death. Albizu remains a contested figure in Puerto Rican history. He advocated violence, was a devout Catholic, and anticommunist, though he mobilized labor organizations and was committed to independence for Puerto Rico. What he said and how he said it are at the center of debates over his legacy. This article proposes a consideration of voice and its afterlife, not to settle debates but rather to trace decades of shifting modes of listening. In particular, following the inscription and posthumous circulation of Pedro Albizu Campos's voice calls up buried Cold War stories via fragmented archives, transmedial remediations, and continually reimagined decolonizing projects.As Ana Ochoa has argued in Aurality, voice has a history, one that cannot be separated from a history of listening. Aurality, or listening, is multiply inflected: “Listening appears located between the juridical, affective and everyday practices of the disjuncture between the theological and the cosmological, between the rise of the secular order and everyday secularisms, and between different understandings of the entities of ‘nature.’”2 Ochoa is concerned with the specificities of nineteenth-century Colombia and the exigencies of state formation. As she shows, power was manifest in aurality, as related to nineteenth-century efforts to define and contain personhood. Who was deemed human and therefore apt for citizenship, she argues, was in part determined by allocations along a number of binaries: human/nonhuman; nature/culture; Indigenous or Black/white. As the book is set in the nineteenth century, Ochoa listens for aurality in writing. Her textual analysis demonstrates that thinking, writing, sounding, and listening are all embedded in one another.While methodologically Aurality rests on nineteenth-century textuality, it can inform work that attends to later nineteenth-century sonic technologies of recording. Indeed, Ochoa's more recent work posits the centrality of military and capitalist violence in the production of musical cultures linked to U.S. imperialism.3 To bring aurality into the twentieth century means also to consider a boundary that the act of recording transgresses: the boundary between the living and the dead. As Jonathan Sterne has argued, heightened interest in and capacity for the preservation of bodies rendered the preservation of the voice desirable and potentially attainable. More specifically, he argues that it was the rise of embalming as a practice that extended the cultural function of bodies, directing the logic of recording, as a way to transform sound “so that it might continue to perform a cultural function.”4 It was not that recording changed the status of the voice but the other way around: “The cultural status of the voice transformed the sound recording.”5 Perhaps, then, the question this article raises and works to answer has to do with the cultural status of the voice. It centers the voice of Pedro Albizu Campos, but asks more broadly about the voice as part of a transnational aural political culture, in which technologically amplified speech and anti-imperialist messages resonated across the Caribbean.Albizu's voice materialized as an aural phantom in the decades after his death. Avery Gordon writes of haunting: “that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken for granted realities.” The ghost that does the haunting “is a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. . . . Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition.”6 When a voice has been forcefully silenced and returns, Gordon suggests, it becomes necessary to heed and attend to its demands and needs. The multiple actors who transmitted Albizu's voice posthumously had radically distinct intentions and relationships with sound and media, but they privileged aurality even when it implicated them in the very infrastructures of capital and empire they sought to overturn. Haunting links two understandings of possession, which run through this article. Ownership, property, access to the material manifestation of a voice after death, are all part of the story. But I also want to draw from Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions to think about possession in the ways spirits speak through bodies, about the ways ongoing relationships with the dead are negotiated, attended to, and reenacted.Pedro Albizu Campos was a committed activist for Puerto Rican independence. He began this career in the 1920s as a labor organizer. A tour of the Caribbean and Latin America in 1926–1928 cemented his anti-imperialist convictions. Passing through Haiti (still occupied by the United States), the Dominican Republic (recently unoccupied), and Cuba (with a nascent student movement engaged in fighting corruption and Cuba's then-cozy relationship with U.S. capital) coalesced his understanding of Puerto Rico as part of a broader regional struggle against the United States’ military and economic hegemony. As president of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, he continued to advocate for the rights of workers while framing them as part of a broader project of independence and decolonization. He was convicted of sedition in 1936 and incarcerated in a federal prison in Atlanta, Georgia, until 1943, after which he spent two years in a hospital in New York City. He returned to Puerto Rico in late 1947.U.S. carceral power ultimately silenced Albizu's voice. Incarcerated again in 1950, Albizu's health deteriorated, in part because, according to many sources, he was irradiated while in prison, as part of a series of experiments conducted on incarcerated people in the early Cold War years. Radiation attacks throat tissue, making it difficult to speak. Albizu suffered a brain hemorrhage in 1956, which left him completely mute.7 He died in 1965.Soon after Albizu's death in 1965, reporting on his funeral commemorated his voice. The Puerto Rican newspaper El Imparcial wrote that “his extraordinary capacities as orator and agitator exercised a magnetic influence on the masses . . . his words were round, sharp, and resonant, communicated by a clear voice that transmitted his ideas through intonation and sound. He was a tireless speaker, speaking for three or four hours at a time . . . always maintaining a clear line of thought. In his heyday thousands of Puerto Ricans would gather to listen devotedly through the night and into the dawn.”8Memories of Albizu's voice haunted subsequent invocations. The author and illustrator Teofilo Olivieri created an image for his 1992 comic book that featured a large mouth, wide open, with graphics suggestive of the Puerto Rican flag etched on to the tongue. An uncanny echo of Marinello's 1927 assertion that the voice came from elsewhere—as if the flag, or the nation itself, was doing the enunciating—this image reinscribed the centrality of the voice sixty-five years later.9LPs of a recording of one of Albizu's speeches were produced in Cuba in 1981, in Brooklyn, New York, in 1975, and in Puerto Rico in 1970. The remainder of this article is an effort to trace these appearances and consider how or why they mattered in specific settings. I work backward chronologically as a way to acknowledge shifting cultural politics as well as the uncertainty at the center of this story.10In 1981, the Cuban cultural institution Casa de las Américas produced an LP series titled “Palabra de esta América.” This series includes Latin American writers and poets, among them the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, the Colombian magical realist Gabriel García Márquez, the Peruvian novelist and poet José María Arguedas, and the Uruguayan journalist and novelist Mario Benedetti. It also includes a recording of a speech delivered by Albizu Campos on September 23, 1950. The occasion was the anniversary of Puerto Rico's Grito de Lares in 1868, which launched an anticolonial uprising against Spain. Eighty-two years later this speech was also intended to launch a revolution—and indeed was spoken just weeks before the uprising of October 1950. Nationalist forces in cities across the island attacked centers of power, which the U.S. National Guard and United States-backed Puerto Rican police repressed with overwhelming force.Albizu's speech issued a searing critique of U.S. imperialism. But it was a critique framed within legal, constitutional terms, not surprising given his training as a lawyer. It targeted the 1917 Jones Law, which bestowed U.S. citizenship on Puerto Ricans, only, according to Albizu, so that it could conscript them for military purposes. Albizu spoke of institutional constraints on self-determination both politically and economically. On the recording, he begins slowly and deliberately, creating spaces of silence between words, perhaps for emphasis and gravity. As the speech progresses, however, the words come more quickly, and more loudly, as if he is being swept away as much by the emotional weight of contemplating young Puerto Ricans dying in the Korean War, as “cannon fodder” in the service of U.S. interests, as by the calculated logic of the juridical argument for the illegality of the United States’ possession of Puerto Rico over the past fifty-two years.11Albizu's is the only speech among thirty-eight recordings of fiction, poetry, and short stories in “Palabra de esta América.” It is not clear how this recording came to the attention of the producers of the series, or how or when a master tape might have arrived in Cuba. But the series raises questions both of what it was intended to convey as an expression of Cuba's cultural establishment, and the imagined role of Albizu's speech in relation to the other authors and works included in the series. As Par Kumaraswami has argued, an interpretation of the Cuban 1970s that rests on a monolithic drive towards Sovietization does not do justice to the complexity of the cultural moment. Instead, he argues that cultural policy during the 1970s considered “different discourses of modernity and development” and “attempted to fuse these discourses over the decade of the 1970s in order to reach a more inclusive model that incorporated the language of particular ideological factions, as well as establish vital connections between Cuba and its international allies.”12 Coming at the end of this decade, perhaps this series was a sonic demonstration of Cuba's place among Latin American lettered cities—both as contributor to a tradition of literature and as curator and inspiration for some of the work on display. This series constructs a canon of Latin American left-leaning letrados who might be understood as a manifestation of far-reaching support for the revolution.13 In this sense, Albizu's speech occupies a singular slot. As the only political speech, and as a speech that led to the immediate repression and demise of the Nationalist Party, his presence lends tragic irony and reverberations of violence to this literary collection. It haunts this effort to canonize Latin American letters with the memory of failure.The same speech, delivered on September 23, 1950, had been made into a Paredon Records LP in 1975. Paredon Records was created by the musician Barbara Dane and the editor and producer Irwin Silber. Both were deeply engaged in political activism through music and cultural production. Dane was the first American to perform in Cuba since the 1959 revolution. In 1967, Dane and Silber returned for a major encuentro focused on the topic of protest music and sponsored by Casa de las Américas. About thirty singers and performers gathered from Argentina, Australia, Chile, the Congo, Cuba, Germany, Haiti, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, Uruguay, the United States, and Vietnam. From late July to early August of 1967, participants discussed the promise and limitations of the term “protest music.”14 Dane asserts that this encuentro was the inspiration for Paredon Records, founded in the immediate aftermath. The label issued fifty albums over the course of fifteen years and was intended to record the world in protest, through song and speeches: “Imagine millions of young people hearing of independence movements sweeping through those faraway The between and America were but the and political were being in with of Dane understood the power of sound with to activism in she spoke of people from the of and that had to be and in order to on series, which could be as an effort to the aurality of Cold War protest again raises the question of the place Albizu's speech was imagined to A that while Dane and Silber were committed to the politics of Puerto Rican they had a of the about Albizu are with and speaking perhaps to or understanding of the Albizu, Barbara Dane that he was a of and of he to be president or was it of but the most figure of the Puerto Rican independence and this is a very speech that he the speech, she an speech this Albizu Campos was in prison in the United two or three I and died in He was one of the people who who suffered most for the of independence for Puerto Rico, and of course the American is not about Dane and Silber produced of and it is not intention to them for some of Albizu's and The is rather that Dane framed and made Albizu to U.S. perhaps by him into United The with or and the that American to who he speak to a of and to In that sense, Albizu haunts of U.S. history, not as the in the Cuban but as a from if between and 1975, had been given in the of a protest In that sense, the label might be as of a protest and more as a sonic through and is to trace the for the Paredon version of the Dane that New Puerto Rican and activist had issued a recording but that he had and for support for he was over his to of continue so he made a with I think what it was we him the to to his version of Paredon changed the which they had deemed and issued the which a of the speech as well as a by The Paredon and transformed Albizu for speaking him into a of Albizu who the of in Puerto Rican and might have been of the power of song to political would perhaps have been had produced an LP of the speech in Puerto Rico. were issued by in and appears on the label as He was at this in a transnational for Puerto Rican independence. As part of a of both on the island and in New York he had what Mario has an effort to sound and through As this effort was with Puerto Rican politics and in particular the of and against with efforts independence and these were not the they in this moment. In a series of sonic in public and spaces, and issued albums of protest music and and and in the United and Puerto Rico that efforts rendered Puerto Rican in its and in the of music and as much as it had been about capitalist for or and Albizu was and though he had and was But he was into a Puerto Rican of In to the as or his and he an of the voice continued to be featured in the of On September which would have been Albizu's and years after his death, the Nationalist a The order of included a at a to the at and at a public in the de The a of his the we will the public of speeches by Pedro Albizu Campos, and listeners will the The does not which speech the public would But the emphasis on the that the Nationalist the voice would act as to and In this years after Albizu's death, a movement took up Albizu's memory and his voice to its as the that might order to how and why these recordings of a speech made on September 23, 1950, might have come to it is necessary to to the political Albizu's to Puerto Rico in late Puerto Rico was on the of its first Puerto Rican had and and was to a relationship that the United States’ economic power while Puerto Ricans to a of as the would be rather the same Puerto Rico was to the Law, in which speech was and The made it a to or a Puerto Rican flag, to a to speak or of or to with or in of Puerto Rican set the for heightened of and Albizu's of Nationalist and to U.S. an of In efforts to with which to the on what has to as its The engaged in the and to Its to both and the to do so the production of thousands of on Albizu but also on of Puerto Ricans deemed or the same this very would come to the intention to and that which it the Albizu are it is to trace some of the reach of its listening, and recording. The Albizu's voice into the material of recording and The voice its recorded in order to and silence in the record as a material and they imagined or contain what to be and of his speeches and in Puerto Rico after with a speech recorded on in the from The state that these were but this was a of The was a in the of War As in the of this that from to was in in police It had the capacity to record up to three hours of sound and could be to record from It may have and I one of the only ways to record speeches in It is but not that people were recording radio speeches at the for institutional in the early was and to be an everyday The recording on the was a speech the of September in 1950. The question of these were the only recordings of Albizu in circulation is very much Afro-Puerto Rican voice, in an act of repression and after it had been silenced as a of his and death, a in what Ana Ochoa calls The recordings among a series of spaces, the U.S. and a Puerto Rican as of the Party, to the of and independence both in the United and on the an American record label that to bring the protest music of the world to U.S. and the cultural of the Cuban was at in these the question of how and what the recordings will work and a of But it also to stories of the role of the voice in the and of anti-imperialist of the and in the and of silenced The possession of voice and the of which that voice spoke part of an in which the cultural status of the voice is It of Puerto Rican the of politics to a broader structure of feeling by and transnational not as much as and as a in the of activist I to Ochoa as recent work on the argues that place to the that created those very musical cultures and related is perhaps to understanding how of have media, and cultural effort to trace a has from this I would that the aural is a This to the ways that musical cultures and infrastructures state violence and its of sonic The among

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