Concrete and Countryside

Scholars of Latin America interested in the ways that policies promoting modernization and urbanization have affected popular culture will find much to offer in Carmelo Esterrich's analysis of Puerto Rican cultural production during the 1950s. As a Caribbean island with deep social and cultural connections to Latin America despite its colonial status within the US political system, Puerto Rico was used during the mid-twentieth century as both a laboratory and a showcase for US-led development strategies centered on infrastructural modernization, public housing, health and sanitation programs, and industrialization. Historians interested in the export of these strategies to midcentury Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, and elsewhere in the region would be wise to examine how they were first implemented in Puerto Rico.Esterrich argues that the rapid industrialization of the 1950s exposed a tension between cultural conceptions of the rural and the urban in Puerto Rican arts and letters. Rejecting a simplistic binary interpretation of this tension, Esterrich borrows from French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to illustrate the complex ways in which the rural and the urban were “appropriated and capitalized through the transformative narrative of modernization on the island” (p. 16). Readers not up on poststructuralist semiotics, however, need not worry: what follows is a clearly written analysis of rare, remarkable, and underutilized primary sources created on the island both inside and outside the insular government—which after 1952 was known as the Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico or, in English, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.After a brief introduction that ably surveys recent scholarship and establishes the material and political context of the island's postwar modernization, Esterrich begins his examination of Puerto Rican art—widely conceived to include music, cinema, literature, and the visual arts. The book focuses on three specific sites of artistic production that addressed the tensions of the rural and the urban for popular audiences: the Afro–Puerto Rican dance music of Rafael Cortijo (particularly the band Cortijo y Su Combo), the literary work of René Marqués and José Luis González, and the educational films of the commonwealth's Division of Community Education (DIVEDCO). Interestingly, Esterrich does not explore these three sites of production separately but rather interweaves analysis of each throughout the book's thematically organized chapters.The sections on DIVEDCO's cinematic output are among the strongest in the book. The division, which also produced graphic arts, was originally organized by US-born veterans of the New Deal in Puerto Rico such as Fred Wale, Edwin Rosskam, and Jack and Irene Delano. But, as Esterrich shows, most of the division's work was created by a distinctly puertorriqueño cohort of writers and visual artists, including some of the island's most widely celebrated names: Pedro Juan Soto, René Marqués, José Luis Vivas Maldonado, Rafael Tufiño, and Lorenzo Homar. While these sections owe considerably to the work of Catherine Marsh Kennerley (as cited throughout the text), Esterrich updates and expands her previous analysis.Produced for rural audiences and screened in local community centers throughout the island's central mountains, DIVEDCO films were designed to educate jibaros and campesinos about the benefits of modernization. In tackling issues such as public health, medicine, sanitation, scientific agriculture, adult literacy, housing, political corruption, consumerism, urban life, and the inclusion of women as full citizens of the commonwealth, films such as Las manos del hombre (1952) and Modesta (1956) not only navigated the tension between the rural and the urban but also mapped the tension between the nationalist and pro-US political positions of Luis Muñoz Marín, the first elected governor of the island and leader of the ruling Partido Popular Democrático (PPD). This tension, Esterrich argues, can be most clearly seen in the lost film Un día cualquiera, which was shot in 1954 but not completed until 1993. Written by Pedro Juan Soto and directed by Ángel F. Rivera, Un día cualquiera focused on intra–Puerto Rican migration and was set in the notorious El Fanguito slum. By portraying the human struggle of its residents without pandering to dreams of modernization proffered by Muñoz Marín and the PPD, the film presented an “urban space that the commonwealth was very reluctant to admit existed in the new Puerto Rico” (p. 150).Concrete and Countryside will make a valuable contribution to scholarship of Puerto Rico and its diaspora. More explicit comparisons with similar state-led activities in the arts and humanities in other Latin American areas would have strengthened the book's appeal to broader audiences in Latin American studies. Doing so might have illuminated new directions to understanding Puerto Rico's fraught relationship with scholarship on Latin America. Similarly, greater attention to the intersection of gender and culture might have sharpened the book's theoretical contribution. That said, however, the book should be widely read by students and scholars of twentieth-century Puerto Rico and will provide fertile grounds for comparison with similar cultural products and modernization programs in Latin America

Archaeology · Colonialism · Economic growth · Ethnology · Geography · Government (linguistics) · Industrialisation · Latin Americans · Modernization theory · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · The arts · Urbanization · Cuban History and Society · Latin American and Latino Studies