National Performances: The Politics of Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago / Edition 2

by Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas

Overview

In this book, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas explores how Puerto Ricans in Chicago construct and perform nationalism. Contrary to characterizations of nationalism as a primarily unifying force, Ramos-Zayas finds that it actually provides the vocabulary to highlight distinctions along class, gender, racial, and generational lines among Puerto Ricans, as well as between Puerto Ricans and other Latino, black, and white populations.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Ramos-Zayas shows how the performance of Puerto Rican nationalism in Chicago serves as a critique of social inequality, colonialism, and imperialism, allowing barrio residents and others to challenge the notion that upward social mobility is equally available to all Americans—or all Puerto Ricans. Paradoxically, however, these activists' efforts also promote upward social mobility, overturning previous notions that resentment and marginalization are the main results of nationalist strategies.

Ramos-Zayas's groundbreaking work allows her here to offer one of the most original and complex analyses of contemporary nationalism and Latino identity in the United States.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226703589
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	07/15/2003
Edition description:	1
Pages:	303
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas is an assistant professor of anthropology and Puerto Rican and Hispanic Caribbean studies at Rutgers University. She is the coauthor of a forthcoming book on the racialization and the politics of citizenship between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago. Her current research is on the politics of space and citizenship between Brazilians and Puerto Ricans in Newark.

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National Performances: the Politics of Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago

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By Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2003 Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226703592

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1 - Performing the Nation: Perspectives on Puerto Rican Nationalism

The process of nation formation, like many other processes of identity formation, emerges at the boundaries of group membership. Nation-building relies both on definitions of a collective self as opposite to an Other and a process of creating a national self (Danforth 1995). Nationalism is distinguished from other forms of identity construction by the modes through which simultaneous processes of rejecting a national Other and creating a national self are fostered, contested, and sustained.

POLITICAL AND CULTURAL NATIONALISMS

Critical to examinations of contemporary Puerto Rican nationalism is the distinction between political and cultural nationalism. Political nationalism sees the nation as a political unit, focuses on citizenship rights, and uses reason as the ethical basis for the community. While appealing to ethnic sentiments, political nationalism ultimately aims to secure a representative, sovereign state. The distinguishing mark of political, or official, n ationalism is this attempt to establish a separate state (Eriksen 1993; Gellner 1983). When it addresses the relationship between ethnicity andthe state, it focuses on definitions of the nation as a physical location where ethnic boundaries should be coterminous with state boundaries (Gellner 1983). As a modernist concept, the nation is perceived as a centralized political unit that binds its members by legal rights and citizenship. Political nationalist movements may transform themselves from urban-based-elite movements to mass movements by "generating grievances against the existing state among di¤erent, competing groups"(Hutchinson 1992, 105).

By contrast, cultural nationalism perceives the state as an accident and regards the state with suspicion because of its overrationality and tendency to impose uniformity on the nation's subcultures. The nation is perceived to have creative and dynamic "personalities," and cultural nationalists turn to history to discover lessons for the future. Education rather than machine politics drives cultural nationalism (Hutchinson 1992). The nation is a cultural unit virtually outside the purview of state control.1Rather than focusing on a centralized government, cultural views of nationalism perceive the world in polycentric terms (Hutchinson 1992). Cultural nationalism relies on histories that typically present a set of mythic narratives: tales of migration, original settlement, a golden age of cultural splendor, a fall into a dark age, and a period of regeneration. Some of these histories begin in the present (Smith 1984, 292-93; Hutchinson 1992, 104). Cultural nationalism manifests itself in small-scale grassroots self-help movements led by "encyclopedic myth-making intellectuals" who are "moral innovators" in times of crisis (Hutchinson 1992, 186). These intellectuals are "historians, poets, artists who operate as an educational force, inspiring in a nascent public opinion a sense of loyalty to the national model, which furnished a matrix for later political nationalist movements" (Kohn 1946, 429-30).

The enduring distinctions between the culturalist and political views of nationalism suggest how ideas of what the nation is or should be are grounded in several coexisting and often contradictory ideologies, which Fox (1990) depicts as sets of cultural meanings at the bases of a national culture. While both views often converge in movements of new secular groups subversive of traditional orders, the two are very distinctive conceptions of the nation and find expression in quite di¤erent organizations and political mobilization strategies (Hutchinson 1992). Nevertheless, both cultural and political nationalisms are grounded in revolutionary doctrines and organizational movements and can best be understood as inherently dialectical. They are complementary and competing responses, communitarian and state-oriented, often forming in alternation, each eliciting the other (Hutchinson 1992, 111).

In this book I transcend dichotomizing definitions of political and cultural nationalism and examine the coalescence of the political and the cultural in the performance of nationalism in Chicago. In using the idea of a performative nationalism, I aim to remedy the inadequate characterizations of political nationalism as inherently oªcial and cultural nationalism as inherently popular (Radcli¤e and Westwood 1996). Performative nationalisms are not invariably cultural; nor are all cultural nationalisms necessarily popular, since they are also deployed by national elites, often at the expense of the popular classes. Similarly, political nationalism is not decidedly limited to the oªcial, since numerous popular anticolonial groups have made demands for an independent nation-state outside the purview of official, status quo, colonial state control. Puerto Rican nationalism in Chicago was both political, in that a significant group of residents and activists had engaged in various militant practices with the aim of turning Puerto Rico into an independent nation-state, and cultural, in that these practices were guided by the barrio's "encyclopedic myth-makers" through grassroots educational projects.

THE POLITICS OF NATIONALISM ON THE ISLAND AND IN CHICAGO

As a stateless nation Puerto Rico poses interesting theoretical challenges to conventional understandings of nationalism. The distinction between "nation" as the people and "state" as the government is critical in understanding nationalism in Puerto Rico. Grounded on this distinction, nationalism on the Island is premised on a conception of the nation as "a self-determined group of people who share a sense of solidarity based on a belief in a common heritage and who claim political rights that may (or may not) include self-determination" (Morris 1995, 12). Political self-determination is not essential to a sense of nationhood; rather, nationalism on the Island is an aªrmation of a separate cultural identity from the United States in spite of a dependent political status. In this sense, "questions of citizenship, migration, and identity in Puerto Rico acquire a sense of urgency seldom found in well-established nation-states that do not have to justify their existence or fight for their survival" (Duany 2000, 4).

Explicit discussions about the political status of Puerto Rico vis-a-vis the United States invariably address the politics of electoral parties on the Island. Displaying one of the highest levels of electoral participation of all countries and territories in which voting is not mandatory ( Jennings and Rivera 1984), Puerto Rican voters consider electoral politics to be the preferred national sport. Indeed, scholars have argued that Puerto Rico's electoral process can be examined as a ritual in the classical anthropological sense (Ramirez 1973). The electoral plane is one of the most evident public spaces in which political parties appropriate the question of Puerto-Ricanness to advance their position about the juridical status of Puerto Rico. Each of the three main electoral parties--the Popular Democratic Party, the New Progressive Party, and the Puerto Rican Independence Party--bases its platform on the status it advocates for Puerto Rico vis-a-vis the United States: commonwealth, statehood, or independence, respectively.

The pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party is the only one of the three main political parties that, for the most part, does not consider Puerto Rico to be a U.S. colony. It views the Island as an Estado Libre Asociado [Free Associated State, or commonwealth]. The main objective of the party has been to construct the Puerto Rican nation on symbolic and cultural, rather than political, planes, mostly through the defense of all things Spanish and Taino Indian, while confining the African contribution to Puerto-Ricanness to the realm of sporadic folkloric activities. The significant Dominican and Cuban populations on the Island are excluded from this project altogether. Under the commonwealth party institutions such as the Institute for Puerto Rican Culture have been created to define and safeguard autochthonous folklore and the arts (Davila 1997; Diaz-Quinones 1993; Guerra 1998). The party has constructed an artificial sense of agency in the face of U.S. control not by demanding a resolution to the political status of the Island, but by evoking cultural symbols of the Spanish colonial past and metaphors of rural Puerto Rico as evidence of Puerto Rico's autonomy.

Until a decade or so ago the pro-statehood New Progressive Party was less overtly concerned with the cultural and more interested in securing financial transfers from the United States in the form of welfare benefits. To maintain the increase in electoral support that it has enjoyed for the last thirty or so years, however, the pro-statehood party has also been forced to devise ways to make "Puerto Rican culture"--including the Spanish language--appear compatible with the party's ultimate goal of turning Puerto Rico into the fifty-first U.S. state. The concept of estadidad jibara [folk statehood] has been consistently evoked as evidence that one can be both a supporter of statehood and a defender of Puerto Rican culture and, particularly, of the Spanish language and the Puerto Rican flag and anthem. Nevertheless, the possibility of statehood in these terms has been explicitly rejected by the U.S. Congress, the one body that actually has the power to determine Puerto Rico's political fate (Barreto 2001). Members of the pro-statehood and pro-commonwealth parties constitute close to 95 percent of Puerto Rico's electorate, which in turn accounts for over 80 percent of Puerto Rico's population (Jennings and Rivera 1984).

On the Island the Puerto Rican Independence Party consists of radicalized sectors of the petite bourgeoisie, including independent artisans, university academics, and other liberal professionals who advocate making Puerto Rico an independent nation-state or republic. The Independence Party lacks significant electoral support. The extension of public welfare benefits received as transfer payments from the U.S. federal government has solidified popular support for annexation, and local entrepreneurs reject the pro-independence discourse because they identify their class interests with continued association with the United States (see Barreto 2001; Duany 2000, 4). As Puerto Ricans on the Island become aware of the inability of neighboring Caribbean nation-states to incorporate themselves successfully into global economic processes, political party support is being reconfigured (Grosfoguel 1999). The vast majority of Island Puerto Ricans favor statehood or the status of an "autonomous yet associated state" articulated in the pro-commonwealth party platform; they desire to maintain some kind of economic and political aªliation with the United States even though they do not for the most part want to forgo cultural autonomy and representation.

Discussions of political nationalism in Puerto Rico discursively evoke the arrested development of a nation-state, first under Spain and then under the United States. Under Spain's colonial control, prior to 1898, Puerto Rico's economic privation, immigration policies instituted by the Spanish government to strengthen its hold on the island, and political and military repression curtailed the growth of a broad-based separatist nationalism (Ferrao 1990). Poverty and repression overshadowed concerns over sovereignty as Puerto Rico's landowning hacendados sought to obtain from Spain more economic and political autonomy on behalf of their class rather than demanding the country's independence or the creation of a nation-state.

Subsequently U.S. colonization of the Island beginning in 1898 further hindered Puerto Rico's aspirations for political autonomy and sovereignty. The 1917 imposition of U.S. citizenship and of the English language, through the educational system and in all government transactions, became critical tools in the Americanization project of the colonial government during the first four or so decades of U.S. occupation (Barreto 2001; Caban 1999). Ideologically Americanization defined the United States as the model of civility and progress to which the decidedly inferior Puerto Rican subalterns should aspire. At the structural level Americanization required that Puerto Rico's economy be transformed from an hacienda-based agricultural system to a plantation-export system to service the metropolis. U.S. appointees, most of whom were American rather than Creole, dominated local government until 1947.

Increasing discontent with U.S. colonial domination was tempered by massive economic transfers and legal recognition of workers' right to strike. In this ironic predicament, colonial rulers enhanced the potential for a radicalization of the more marginalized sectors of the Puerto Rican population (cf. Guerra 1998). Some members of the working classes in Puerto Rico attributed improvement in civil rights, such as the creation of workers' unions and raised racial consciousness, to U.S. dominion over the Island.

The early decades of the twentieth century saw an upsurge in interest in national identity on the Island, catalyzed by this intensive Americanization agenda. A landowning Creole elite threatened both by the radicalized popular classes and U.S. colonial domination turned to the Island's Hispanic legacy--particularly, the Spanish language--in response to the Americanization project (Barreto 2001). This led to a noticeable resurgence of Spanish metaphors of nineteenth-century Puerto Rico: the classless "hacienda family," Catholic devotion, the Spanish language, and eventually the consolidation of the white jibaro, or mountain folk as the "authentic Puerto Ricans" (Gelpi 1993; Guerra 1998). Constructed around moral values, close-knit kinship, whiteness, hospitality, and generosity, Hispanicity was deployed in sharp contrast to the morally depraved and barbaric American invaders and in negation of the African and immigrant elements of national identity. More significantly, concerns with national identity became embroiled in struggles over who constituted el pueblo puertorriqueno.

The nationalist canon was consolidated by a notable group of intellectuals, writers, and artists known as the Generation of 1930. This group of Island intellectuals, and most notably Antonio S. Pedreira (1934), delineated contemporary discourse on the Puerto Rican nation by formulating ideological cornerstones to define the "real" Puerto Rican (Duany 2000; Flores 1993; Gelpi 1993). In his study of the intellectual tradition behind Puerto Rican nationalism, Duany (2000, 7) outlines the five basic principles of the Puerto-Ricanness defined by the Generation of 1930. First, the Spanish language became an indispensable aspect of Puerto-Ricanness typically viewed in opposition to the corrupting influences of the English language. Second, the Island's territory emerged as the geographic entity containing the nation, and manifestations of Puerto-Ricanness outside of Island borders, including those among Puerto Rican migrants to the Mainland, threatened to contaminate or dissolve the nation. Third, common origin was located on place of birth and residence, which became critical to the definition of who was a "real" Puerto Rican. Fourth, the racial triad was consolidated as a shared myth of origin by which all Puerto Ricans were considered to be a cultural and genetic mix of Spanish, Taino Indian, and African influences. This shared history also made possible strong resistance to assimilation into U.S. racial structures. Finally, a predetermined set of folkloric symbols-- mostly involving images of a pure rural past--were superimposed on images of U.S. urbanism, avoiding unwanted mixing of cultural elements.

In the context of these Island-based intellectual debates aiming to define the Puerto Rican nation, the 1930s through the 1950s saw the height of separatist, anticolonial nationalism on U.S.-dominated Puerto Rico. The emerging Nationalist Party (now almost disappeared), under the leadership of Pedro Albizu Campos, denounced the U.S. colonization of the Island as illegal, called attention to Puerto Rico's colonial status in international forums, foregrounded the flag and anthem as national symbols, and engaged in several episodes of armed struggle against the colonial regime (Rodriguez Fraticelli 1992; Fernandez 1994; Tirado 1993). To do this the party and its largely landowning constituency turned to the Spanish colonial legacy as a cultural and ideological tool against U.S. influence. The Nationalist Party's Hispanophile conception of the nation and its petit bourgeois membership, along with its emphasis on national sovereignty that precluded all other local issues including deepening class schisms, limited its popular support, and therefore any potential threat to U.S. rule (Ferrao 1990).

Notwithstanding the Nationalist Party's lack of success in its pursuit of independence from the United States, in rare instances the party did engage issues of economic restructuring; for example, it was involved in the sugar cane workers' strikes of 1934. Such instances expanded the party's popular support and thus posed a significant threat to U.S. domination (Pantojas-Garcia 1990), but they also led to the imposition of the ley de la mordaza, the "gag law," on anyone who attempted to disseminate ideas against the Island's colonial government.

The gag law became one of many institutionalized strategies for repressing Puerto Rican nationalism in the late 1940s, foreshadowing the McCarthyism of the 1950s in the United States. This law was critical in containing civil unrest in the period leading up to the consolidation of Puerto Rico as a U.S. commonwealth in 1952 (Ferrao 1990). In particular, the gag law and other repressive strategies provided the basis for the arrest and lengthy imprisonment of nationalists during the revolts and the occupancy of Ponce, Jayuya, and other towns on the Island (Seijo-Bruno 1989). The tension between the Popular Democratic Party, under which commonwealth status was attained and which to this day remains the leading proponent of that political formula, and the nationalists, who sought complete separation from the United States, continued to increase throughout the 1950s. This political turmoil framed the rapid industrialization of Puerto Rico and the massive migration of Puerto Ricans to the United States.

Nationalist armed struggles, mostly masterminded by Pedro Albizu Campos, continued outside the Island's territory and political party lines as unofficial grassroots movements. In 1950 two Puerto Rican nationalists attacked President Truman, and in 1954 Oscar Collazo, Lolita Lebron, and Rafael Cancel Miranda engaged in a shoot-out at the U.S. Capitol. These radicals have since become icons of Puerto Rico's nationalist movement (Fernandez 1994). Various clandestine groups in the United States have discursively and symbolically built upon the legacy of armed struggle by the early Puerto Rican nationalists, and they have been further inspired by the U.S. civil rights protests of the 1960s and 1970s (Oboler 1995). One such group, the Fuerzas Armadas para la Liberacion Nacional (FALN), was founded in Chicago's Puerto Rican barrio, where most of its members were born and raised. Such separatist nationalism has lost virtually all followers on the Island, where support for independence rarely surpasses the 4 percent mark in elections.



Continues...

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Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
1- Performing the Nation: Perspectives on Puerto Rican Nationalism
2- Cold in the Windy City: Migration, Settlement, and Political Stories in Puerto Rican Chicago
3-Los nacionalistas: Popular Education, Community Activism, and Gender Ideologies
4-Los profesionales: Public Education, Class Identities, and the Mainstream Media
5-Cultural Authenticity: The Suburban Islanders, Historiography, and the Island-Nation
6-Creating Race: Pedro Albizu Campos, Representation, and Imagination
7-Creating Space: Barrio-Nation, Urban Landscapes, and Citizenship Identities
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index

Editorial Reviews

Ramos-Zayas has presented an up-close, richly detailed account of the processes that define a community. She has made contributions in two important areas of anthropology. First, her detailed ethnography provides information about an area of the Puerto Rican diaspora not previously documented. . . . Second, she emphasizes the construction of national identity as a discursive process, contingent, comparative and context sensitive.

Anthropological Quarterly - Bonnie Urciuoli

Ramos-Zayas has presented an up-close, richly detailed account of the processes that define a community. She has made contributions in two important areas of anthropology. First, her detailed ethnography provides information about an area of the Puerto Rican diaspora not previously documented. . . . Second, she emphasizes the construction of national identity as a discursive process, contingent, comparative and context sensitive.”

— Bonnie Urciuoli,

Anthropological Quarterly