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

This book is a welcome addition to the emerging literature on the intersections of gender, race, and class in modern Latin America and the Caribbean. It effectively straddles the boundaries between history and literary criticism, and it consistently demonstrates how literature is a product of social relations, historical change, and conflict. Roy-Féquière shows how elite cultural and intellectual production in Puerto Rico throughout the 1920s and ’30s informed the island’s populist colonial political reforms of the mid – twentieth century in a variety of sites — informal social networks, the university, intellectual journals, the popular press, and fiction writing. She also carefully traces the impact of twentieth-century popular culture and political mobilizations on Puerto Rican elites’ anti-imperialism, nation building, and gender politics. This social class, Roy-Féquière reminds us, can only be understood in relation to those who challenged them in politics and cultural production. Thus, Julia de Burgos, Luisa Capetillo, Rafael Cortijo, and Pedro Albizu Campos haunt these pages as well. The result is a sweeping intellectual and cultural history of twentieth-century Puerto Rico.Roy-Féquière’s broad argument, that the famous Generación del Treinta — a group of men and women who created a nationalist literature as well as the scholarship which exalted that prose and poetry to canonical status in Puerto Rico — was both patriarchal and racist, is not particularly surprising in the context of the new critical historiography of the past decade on the exclusionary role of race and gender in Latin American nation building. Her innovation on this count — and it is considerable — lies in her careful tracing of the subtleties and, in her words, “ambiguities” of how women and people of African descent continued to be excluded from the twentieth-century criollo concepts of nation and legitimate culture, even as they were acknowledged more than ever before. Roy-Féquière builds on the work of renowned historically minded cultural critics such as Juan Flores, Arcadio Quiñones, Julio Ramos, José Luis González, and Mary Louise Pratt to construct a simultaneously sensitive and critical portrait of an embattled bourgeoisie struggling with a host of “demons,” both external and internal.Roy-Féquière also places women intellectuals and activists at the center of her retelling of the history of national Puerto Rican cultural production. University educators such as Margot Arce, Nilita Vientós Gastón, Concha Meléndez, and María Cadilla de Martínez emerge here as important arbiters of elite anti-imperialist politics, gains for women intellectuals, and creators of new national cultural parameters. They founded journals, women’s organizations, political parties, and intervened strategically in debates over culture, nation, and politics. Heirs to the new social, political, and intellectual spaces opened by the generations of Puerto Rican feminists — both conservative and radical — who preceded them, these women cement their place as intellectual authorities by “deliberately effacing a gender presence. Nonetheless, they strategically stress gender when it helps their case” (p. 8). Roy-Féquière shows how the very daughters of feminism buried the movement’s traces as they struggled to make their way in an extremely hostile male-dominated intellectual world of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.The negation of blackness in legitimate Puerto Rican culture and society was also key to these women’s acceptance by their male counterparts. Roy-Féquière insightfully discusses Arce’s mystical writings on conservative Spanish culture and its “spiritual” connection to the Puerto Rican national character. (Spanish radicals have no place in this elite Puerto Rican version of Spain.) She artfully illuminates the racist complexities of Arce’s defense of Luis Palés Matos’s “poesía negra”; even while defending the artistic value of this radical new poetry, Arce asserted the “essential Spanishness” of Puerto Rico. A chapter on the work of María Cadilla de Martínez, a famous Puerto Rican folklorist, exposes how Cadilla’s writings insisted on the necessity of forgetting the pain of slavery and conquest. Male critics and writers, from Emilio Belaval to Tomás Blanco to Antonio Pedreira and Palés Matos himself, are also subjected to critical scrutiny. Roy-Féquière discovers among them a wide range of strategies for dealing with racial and gender questions. Some are much more inclusive than others. All are tragically flawed. Their limits continue to haunt Puerto Rican conceptions of “legitimate” national culture today

Art · Colonialism · Context (archaeology) · Creole language · Criticism · Elite · Historiography · Identity politics · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Popular culture · Scholarship · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy