Caribbean Migrations: The Legacies of Colonialism 9781978814530

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Caribbean Migrations

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Critical Caribbean Studies Series Editors: Yolanda Martínez-­San Miguel, Carter Mathes, and Kathleen López Editorial Board: Carlos U. Decena, Rutgers University; Alex Dupuy, Wesleyan University; Aisha Khan, New York University; April J. Mayes, Pomona College; Patricia Mohammed, University of West Indies; Martin Munro, Florida State University; F. Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University; Michelle Stephens, Rutgers University; Deborah Thomas, University of Pennsylvania; Lanny Thompson, University of Puerto Rico Focused particularly in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, although attentive to the context of earlier eras, this series encourages interdisciplinary approaches and methods and is open to scholarship in a variety of areas, including anthropology, cultural studies, diaspora and transnational studies, environmental studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, and sociology. The series pays particular attention to the four main research clusters of Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, where the coeditors serve as members of the executive board: Caribbean Critical Studies Theory and the Disciplines; Archipelagic Studies and Creolization; Caribbean Aesthetics, Poetics, and Politics; and Caribbean Colonialities. Giselle Anatol, The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-­Caribbean and African Diaspora Alaí Reyes-­Santos, Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles Milagros Ricourt, The Dominican Racial Imaginary: Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola Katherine A. Zien, Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone Frances R. Botkin, Thieving Three-­Fingered Jack: Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780–­2015 Melissa A. Johnson, Becoming Creole: Nature and Race in Belize Carlos Garrido Castellano, Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art: Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere Njelle W. Hamilton, Phonographic Memories: Popular Music and the Contemporary Caribbean Novel Lia T. Bascomb, In Plenty and in Time of Need: Popular Culture and the Remapping of Barbadian Identity Aliyah Khan, Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean Rafael Ocasio, Race and Nation in Puerto Rican Folklore: Franz Boas and John Alden Mason in Porto Rico Ana-­Maurine Lara, Streetwalking: LGBTQ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic Anke Birkenmaier, ed., Caribbean Migrations: The Legacies of Colonialism

Caribbean Migrations

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The Legacies of Colonialism

Edited by Anke Birkenmaier

rutgers university press new brunswick, camden, and newark, new jersey, and london

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Birkenmaier, Anke, editor. Title: Caribbean migrations : the legacies of colonialism / edited by Anke Birkenmaier. Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2020. | Series: Critical caribbean studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020009850 | ISBN 9781978814493 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978814509 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781978814516 (epub) | ISBN 9781978814523 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978814530 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Caribbean Area—­Civilization. | Caribbean Area—­Intellectual life. | Caribbean Area—­ Emigration and immigration. | Postcolonialism—­ Caribbean Area. | West Indians—­Migrations. Classification: LCC F2169.C3677 2020 | DDC 972.9—­dc23LC record available at https://​lccn​.loc​.gov/​2020009850 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2021 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey For copyrights to individual pieces, please see first page of each essay. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. ♾ The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI  Z39.48-­1992. www​.rutgersuniversitypress​.org Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction: An Otherwise Modern Archive on Migration  1 Anke Birkenmaier

1 A Permanent Periphery: Caribbean Migration Flows and the World Economy  8 Alejandro Portes PA R T I

Unincorporated Subjects (Puerto Rico, Guam)

2 The Role of State Actors in Puerto Rico’s Long Century of Migration, 1899–­2015  17 Carlos Vargas-­Ramos



3 “May God Take Me to Orlando”: The Puerto Rican Exodus to Florida before and after Hurricane Maria  40 Jorge Duany



4 Caribbean Mediascapes: Ruins and Debt in Puerto Rico  59 Jossianna Arroyo



5 Circumscribed Citizenship: Caribbean American Visibility  78 Vivian Halloran



6 From Father to Humanitarian: Charting Intimacies and Discontinuities in Ricky Martin’s Social Media Presence and Writing  87 Edward Chamberlain

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7 Terripelagoes: Archipelagic Thinking in Culebra, Puerto Rico, and Guam  103 Yolanda Martínez-­San Miguel PA R T I I

Technologies of Representation (Cuba, Jamaica)

8 The Caribbean in the U.S. Imagination: Travel Writing, Annexation, and Slavery  127 Daylet Domínguez



9 Contemporary Afrocubana Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Havana  143 Devyn Spence Benson



10 Going Back to Cuba: How Enclaves of Memory Stimulate Returns and Repatriations  160 Iraida H. López



11 The Floating Generation: Cuban Art in the Post-­Soviet Period, 1991–­2017  175 Rafael Rojas



12 “It Would Make a Rat Puke”: Diasporic Thinking in Contemporary Jamaican Art Practices  188 Jane Bryce PA R T I I I

Languages of the Diaspora (Hispaniola, United States)

13 Kreyòl Sung, Kreyòl Understood: Haitian Songwriter BIC (Roosevelt Saillant) Reflects on Language and Poetics  205 Rebecca Dirksen and Kendy Vérilus



14 Migration and Its Discontents: The Dominican Films of Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas  214 Anke Birkenmaier



15 Transnational Hispaniola: The First Decade in Support of a New Paradigm for Haitian and Dominican Studies  224 Kiran C. Jayaram and April J. Mayes



16 New Points of the Rhizome: Rethinking Caribbean Relation in U.S. Latinx Poetry  239 Emily A. Maguire

c o n t e n t s vii

Acknowledgments  259 Bibliography 261 Notes on Contributors  289 Index 293

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z Introduction an otherwise modern archive on migration Anke Birkenmaier

Valeria Luiselli’s novel Lost Children Archive tells the story of a road trip from New York to the Southwest of the United States in 2014, when the massive arrival of unaccompanied minors from Central America was widely reported in the news. The protagonist goes in search of the children who had gone missing when crossing the border and notes relatively early on in her reflections, “No one thinks of those children as consequences of a historical war that goes back decades. Everyone keeps asking: Which war, where? Why are they here? Why did they come to the United States? What will we do with them? No one is asking: Why did they flee their homes?”1 These questions point to a history that lies beneath the reports replayed by the news media, which more often than not speak of “crises” or “waves” of migrants coming to the United States without regard for the history of local interventions and economic dependency that has shaped people’s movements in the Americas. Indeed, the trail of people migrating from the south to the north of the Americas leads back in time through a history of wars, from the Spanish and Portuguese (as well as French, English, and Dutch) conquests and colonizations of the Americas, to the Latin American wars of independence of the nineteenth century, to the onset of U.S. imperialism following the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. But there also are individual choices and family and small community decisions at play when it comes to understanding the full picture of people’s movement across the western hemisphere. South-­north migration in the Americas, scholars have argued for a long time, is a result of the continued dependency of Latin American economies on the north even after the end of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires in Latin America. In Aníbal Quijano’s words, the “coloniality of power” has shaped Latin American societies from their inception, with Creole elites creating new institutional bases to preserve colonial, racialized hierarchies.2 The centers of power, that is, may move from the former metropolis to the local elite and from there to twentieth-­and 1

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twenty-­first-­century international powerhouses and corporations. What has not changed is the class hierarchy built on the division between the manual labor of members of minorities or migrants and the skilled labor of those who have established themselves as the governing elite. The link between the coloniality of power and migration has been studied closely by scholars of the Caribbean. Yolanda Martínez-­San Miguel has argued that because the region has long been the “fragmented frontier of multiple imperial projects,” colonial legacies have manifested themselves in the Caribbean in the form of massive migration events from the sixteenth through the twenty-­first centuries. This is what she calls the “coloniality of diasporas.”3 An “always already colonial region” after the extinction of its indigenous populations, the Caribbean was dominated by plantation economies relying on the transatlantic slave trade and later on imported, indented labor from Asia, and it was bypassed by the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century.4 This lack of a local diversified infrastructure means that for a long time, it has been advantageous for many to leave their countries of origin for work, following legal arrangements with a former or current metropolis encouraging Caribbeans to come, and go back and forth as they are able to. The Caribbean thus paradoxically and from early on came to be an an “otherwise modern” region (Michel-Rolph Trouillot), a constellation of island nations dependent on foreign investment and international trade and where, because of the constant back-­and-­forth of their citizens, ideas of national or regional community were conceived differently.5 As Jorge Duany notes in his book Blurred Borders, the long-­standing exchanges between Caribbean countries and their neighbors have led Caribbean subjects to have “bi-­focal” lives, maintaining affiliation with two or more cultures throughout their lifetimes.6 If we take an even broader global view, migration—­whether “forced” by political or natural disasters or “unforced” and motivated more obviously by personal or economic circumstances—­has been a hallmark of a modern age that depended on the global connectedness of economies, from the early days of Portuguese and Spanish colonialism on. It is known to have accelerated and expanded since the nineteenth century, when new transportation means and expanding markets made it possible for workers to move from the country to the city and from one state to another in search of better opportunities and living conditions.7 The population movements caused by the two world wars; the decolonization waves that ripped through Africa, parts of Asia, and the Caribbean; and the collapse of communist Eastern Europe, led to more large population shifts from one world region to another, further helped by the explosion of the internet and digital social networks.8 For some, such as Marxist scholars Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, these population shifts have been unprecedented in their magnitude and can be seen as a sign of resistance against modern-­day capitalism, indicating a refusal of people worldwide to accept exploitative work conditions.9 For many labor historians, however, the continued rise in migration is simply part of the acceleration of globalization in the late twentieth century, and they attempt to shift the discussion away from a focus on personal or political crisis moments toward the analysis of transnational

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economic frameworks and labor conditions. As Vic Satzewich writes, “A renewed emphasis on immigrants as workers instead of simply carriers of certain transnational identities and practices can establish a more complete picture of the lives of those who cross national boundaries in search of work, business opportunities, and better lives.”10 Yet the reasons, regulations, and circumstances affecting people’s choices to leave a country are complex and generally driven by both historical or political frameworks and small-­scale collective decision processes. To cite sociologist and migration scholar Alejandro Portes in his classic Immigrant America, people migrate for several reasons—­“not merely to increase their earnings by a certain amount but to solve problems rooted in their own national situations. For immigrants these problems appear as internal ones, but in reality they have been induced by the expansion of a global capitalist system.”11 While we might then understand modern-­day migration to be an expression of the challenges that increasingly interdependent societies experience, we must also consider that in each individual case, migration responds to a series of factors that are motivated not just by macroeconomics but by historically grown regional power dynamics, such as laws allowing citizens of one country to work in another country, media environments representing opportunities elsewhere and facilitating continued ties with one’s home, linguistic policy, and a general culture of acceptance (or not) toward migrants. As we strive toward a more nuanced understanding of how migration has shaped and continues to shape the modern world, it remains difficult to negotiate among data-­driven comparative approaches, approaches coming from history and political philosophy, and analyses of local stories and cultures. As a region that for better or worse has experienced waves of colonization and decolonization since the sixteenth century—­a region that therefore has always depended on travelers and migrants—­we believe that the Caribbean holds lessons for those seeking to understand the political, social, and cultural consequences of migration. The authors united here combine micro-­and macrolevel analyses and studies of both sending and receiving countries from the Caribbean and the United States. The intention is to give a comprehensive picture of the cultural and political role played by migration in the Caribbean and the United States, allowing for large-­ scale theoretical analysis just as well as for the interpretation of individual stories represented in literature, music, and the arts. We are all rooted in the interdisciplinary collaboration that characterizes Latin American and Caribbean studies and integrates disciplines such as history, anthropology, sociology, political science, literature, visual studies, media studies, and ethnomusicology. We respect each scholar’s own disciplinary background and goals and therefore do not strictly identify with the postdisciplinary ambition of cultural studies. Rather, scholars contribute to the discussion on Caribbean migrations from their own purview, in a language that is understandable to all of us and to the generally informed reader. Another interdisciplinary dimension of this joint effort is that the scholars included in this volume have deep expertise in different regions: the Hispanophone, Anglophone, or Kreyòl-­speaking Caribbean and its diaspora communities. In assembling their

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chapters here, we hope to offer a pan-­Caribbean approach to better understanding migration as both an outgrowth of the modern world system and an individual choice that can produce its own creative forms of collective intervention. To look at migration in such a way—­as both a symptom and an expression of free will—­can allow us to appreciate emerging notions of cultural identity and political agency while recognizing the multiple challenges and colonial underpinnings migration has always represented to individual nations. In the spirit of envisioning Latin American studies as a truly “decentering” enterprise, this project not only transcends borders between nationalities or disciplines; contributors also have taken a special interest in the question of who gets to represent who and have worked with “alternative”—­that is, nonacademic—­knowledge producers from the Caribbean such as musicians, artists, filmmakers, and writers.12 Rebecca Dirksen and Kendy Vérilus’s interview with Haitian songwriter BIC (Roosevelt Saillant), for example, establishes a mindful dialogue with this musician whose song lyrics have impacted Haitian cultural and political life in profound ways. The importance of paying attention to interventions of Caribbean intellectuals and artists who speak from a nonscholarly perspective lies here not so much in strategically listening to “locals” or “insiders.” Rather, the authors of this book are concerned with alternative publics that have been reached through such intellectual activists in the Caribbean and beyond. Raphael Dalleo has usefully adapted Michael Warner’s concept of the “counter public” in this context, studying how Caribbean intellectuals maintain a unique relationship with the state and constitute a “counter public” that has often complemented and contested officially sanctioned channels of public dialogue in the twentieth century.13 Our contributors come to differing conclusions about the effectiveness of scholarly or artistic interventions in the social and political lives of individual countries, yet they agree on the importance of studying such interactions. Many of the contributors are scholars based in the United States with close ties to the Caribbean. Their essays help constitute that larger-­than-­national space of the Caribbean, where exile or diaspora communities actively negotiate how they want to be perceived at home and in their host countries, bringing with them economic and “cultural remittances.”14 In doing so, they build on a strong tradition of both theoretical and poetic reflection on Édouard Glissant’s concept of “Caribbean Relation,” as discussed by Emily A. Maguire in chapter 16, to ultimately suggest that as much as colonialism has historically been at the heart of the ongoing social and economic marginalization of Caribbean societies, the back-­and-­forth of their citizens has also produced transnational “intellectual social formations,” using Jayaram and Mayes’s phrase in chapter 15, that speak in their own voices and have insights to offer. It is important to note the moment that brought us together as a group. We all met at a conference organized on September 29–­­30, 2017, by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Indiana University Bloomington commemorating the one-­hundredth anniversary of the Jones–­Shafroth Act of 1917 that declared Puerto Ricans citizens of the United States (albeit without voting rights in

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the United States when residing in Puerto Rico), making possible the great migration waves of the 1940s and 1950s. The idea of the conference was to take Puerto Rico as a case in point for the long-­term study of the causes and effects of migration in the Caribbean and North America. Yet the occasion turned out to be more momentous than we could ever have expected or feared, with Hurricane Maria striking on September 20, having been preceded by Hurricane Irma two weeks earlier, and wreaking havoc on Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands. This was a crisis of daunting dimensions, causing a mass exodus of Puerto Ricans, who left behind destroyed houses and a destroyed electrical grid, to the United States. Some conference participants responded to the disaster by presenting talks—­which formed the basis of their contributions to this book—­that included an analysis of news coverage of the hurricanes and a close look at available numbers on the short-­ and long-­term consequences (Arroyo, Duany). For many of us, the conference was the first meeting where we were able to collectively grieve and reflect on the underlying causes and problems that had compounded the effects of these natural disasters: the long-­standing debt crisis of Puerto Rico and the precariousness of infrastructure before the hurricane hit; the fact that as a commonwealth of the United States, Puerto Rican citizens were treated differently than mainland citizens; and the disappointing local government representation and acrimonious discussions about how many really had died as a consequence of the hurricane.15 Our comparative focus on Puerto Rico as a case study acquired unsuspected urgency. Puerto Rico, as a “cultural nation” that politically is part of the United States yet in every other respect belongs to the Caribbean, is an example of the complicated relations between Caribbean island countries and their neighbors to the north.16 The case of Puerto Rico is, in our view, emblematic of the ambiguous status of Caribbean migrant cultures—­richer for their multilingual and multicultural heritage but legally and politically underattended. From the Spanish-­American War of 1898, to the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904, to the Monroe Doctrine, the United States has intervened in the Caribbean on a number of occasions (notably, occupying Haiti from 1915 to 1934, Cuba from 1898 to 1902 and from 1906 to 1909, and the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924 and from 1965 to 1966 and intervening in Cuba from 1917 to 1922).17 Yet it also worked with island governments to create migration policies that would channel the arrival of migrants from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica to the United States. The Jones–­Shafroth Act was one landmark decision. (Later, U.S. legislation encouraging migration from Puerto Rico to the United States is traced carefully by Carlos Vargas-­Ramos in chapter 2.) The Immigration Acts of 1924 and 1965, the British West Indies Program (1943), the McCarran–Walter Act (1952), and the Cuban Adjustment Act (1966) encouraged Caribbean citizens to come to the United States, with many immigrants not suffering from quotas or work visa limitations and maintaining a lawful residence, unlike their Mexican and Central American neighbors. The Caribbean presence in the United States has even been recognized since 2006 with a designated Caribbean American Heritage Month, as studied by Vivian Halloran in chapter 5. Still, many Caribbean citizens have had difficulties

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making their voices heard in the United States even when they are citizens or legal permanent residents. The chapters of this book are organized into three broader themes following a short programmatic history by Alejandro Portes, “A Permanent Periphery: Caribbean Migration Flows and the World Economy,” which explains why Caribbean peoples have suffered the consequences of colonialism perhaps more than any other world region, resulting in their migration to those same nations that colonized them. Portes concludes that rather than following earlier migration models, Caribbean diaspora communities have created and maintained a new and complex transnational dynamic that is here to stay. Contributors to part 1, titled “Unincorporated Subjects (Puerto Rico, Guam),” study the power inequality between island nations and their current or former colonizers and the implications of the ambiguous legal status of Puerto Rican and Guamanian citizens of the United States on notions of modern subjecthood. Part 2, titled “Technologies of Representation (Cuba, Jamaica),” looks at how artists, activists, and writers of the Caribbean have used changing media technologies to gain visibility, be it through travel accounts of the nineteenth century, art, film, photography, or social media. Looking in particular at island nations such as Cuba and Jamaica, contributors also discuss the precarious recognition of diaspora intellectuals in their homelands. Part 3, “Languages of the Diaspora (Hispaniola, United States),” foregrounds the most basic form of mediation necessary for migrant subjects: language. This third group of contributions discusses how social fragmentation can be overcome through collaborative efforts and musical or poetic challenges to monolingualism. We believe that a book like ours is needed given that Caribbean studies has historically suffered from being split into distinct national and imperial contexts and is often approached through the lens of single disciplines such as cultural geography, African and African diaspora studies, history, literature, or sociology.18 This book sheds light on migration as an expression of the complex and creative ways in which Caribbean people have responded to economic and political marginalization. By studying the experience of migration and nomadism in different local contexts but with attention to how it can mobilize new social dynamics and ways of asserting a collective voice, we hope to contribute to debates on how the legacies of colonialism can be challenged and confronted in small and large ways in the Caribbean and beyond.

Notes 1. Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive: A Novel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018), 51. 2. Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” in Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, ed. Mabel Moraña, Enrique D. Dussel, and Carlos Jáuregui (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 181–­225. Decolonialism continues the body of work done by postcolonial scholars of the British and French Empires such as Edward Said but with a focus on Latin America. Important representatives include Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, and Santiago Castro-­Gómez.

i n t r o d u c t i o n 7 3. While Martínez-­San Miguel focuses her argument on what she calls “intra-­colonial” migration—­that is, the legal migration of citizens to their current or former metropolis (e.g., in the case of Puerto Ricans migrating to the United States)—­this book expands her line of argument by moving to include the Caribbean subjects who use legally available channels to leave for neighboring countries such as Mexico, the United States, or Canada. Examples of such “extracolonial” migrants would be Cuban, Dominican, or Haitian migrants. Yolanda Martínez-­ San Miguel, Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-­colonial Migrations in a Pan-­Caribbean Context (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 4. Karla Slocum and Deborah A. Thomas, “Rethinking Global and Area Studies: Insights from Caribbeanist Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 105, no. 3 (2003): 553–­564. 5. Michel-­Rolph Trouillot, “The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from the Savage Slot,” in Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies, ed. Bruce M. Knauft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). 6. Jorge Duany, Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 7. According to historian Dirk Hoerder, migration has not changed in kind between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the political conditions and reasons for it having remained the same. Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 8. 8. The International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental body, was founded in 1951 to account for the large population shifts in Europe following World War II. It offers today one of the most reliable data portals for worldwide migration numbers. See https://​ migrationdataportal​.org/​?i​= ​stock​_ abs​_​& ​t​=​2019. 9. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 212–­213. 10. Vic Satzewich, “Transnational Migration: A New Historical Phenomenon?,” in Workers across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History, ed. Leon Fink (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 40. 11. Alejandro Portes, Immigrant America: A Portrait, 4th ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 106. 12. Sonia E. Alvarez, Arturo Arias, and Charles R. Hale, “Re-­visioning Latin American Studies,” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 2 (2011), 225–­46. 13. Cited in Raphael Dalleo, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Post-­colonial (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). 14. Juan Flores, The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning (London: Routledge, 2008). 15. For a comparison of official U.S. responses to the three hurricanes of the 2017 season—­two of them affecting the U.S. mainland and one, Hurricane Maria, affecting Puerto Rico only—­see Nicole Einbinder, “How the Response to Hurricane Maria Compared to Harvey and Irma,” PBS Frontline, May  1, 2018, https://w ​ ww.​ pbs​.org/​wgbh/​f rontline/​article/​how​-the​ -response​-to​-hurricane​-maria​-compared​-to​-harvey​-and​-irma/. 16. César J. Ayala and Rafael Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History since 1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 17. See Alan L. McPherson, A Short History of U.S. Interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean (Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2016). 18. Studies such as Regine O. Jackson’s Geographies of the Haitian Diaspora (2011), Carol Boyce Davies’s more essayistic Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones (2013), Dirk Hoerder and Nora Faires’s coedited Migrants and Migration in Modern North America (2011), and Margarita Cervantes-­Rodríguez, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Eric Mielants’s Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States (2009) have inspired our book but are informed by single disciplines.

chapter 1

z A Permanent Periphery caribbean migration flows and the world economy Alejandro Portes

The position of the Caribbean Basin in the centuries of development of the world capitalist economy has been of permanent relegation to the periphery of the system. Beginning with the discovery of the Americas by the Spanish in the late fifteenth century, the region was thoroughly remolded by the dynamics of the emerging capitalist economy and by the fierce interstate competition for hegemony. This struggle involved European powers but played itself out throughout the world. Because of the feebleness of its territorial and demographic base, the Caribbean was one of the regions least able to resist the predatory ventures of European powers and, hence, most vulnerable to the effects of such initiatives. The first important consequence of this situation was the full occupation of the entire territory—­large and small islands alike—­by the Europeans. As the initial discoverers and colonizers, the Spanish had pride of place occupying the largest islands. In due time, however, competitors for European hegemony—­the English, the French, and the Dutch—­made their appearance, occupying smaller islands and neglected swamplands on the north coast of South America or wrestling settled territories from Spanish control. This is how the remarkable cultural and linguistic diversity of the region in a relatively limited territory came to be. A second major consequence of the European occupation was the implosion of the autochthonous population. It played no role in the social and cultural reconstruction of the region following its discovery by the Europeans because the latter literally exterminated the defenseless natives through a combination of imported diseases and ruthless exploitation. Pleadings by Bartolomé de las Casas and other Catholic friars in defense of the natives were of no avail, and by the seventeenth century, the tainos, siboneyes, and caribs who had populated these lands were largely a memory of the past. It is at that moment when the two major migration flows that were to shape the demography and political economy of these islands asserted themselves. 8

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The Moments of Migration The Spaniards who first came to these islands arrived in the role of colonizers, not settlers. Unlike the English and Scottish migrants who came to North America a century later in search of religious freedom, the Spanish had no intention of tilling the land themselves or settling permanently. Aside from soldiers and priests, the early Spanish colonial population was largely made of adventurers in search of rapid wealth to take back to the Peninsula. That explains why the institution of encomienda, designed by the Spanish Crown to civilize the natives, turned into an instrument of relentless exploitation.1 No other European power followed a different path in their various endeavors in the Caribbean. There were no large colonies of religiously minded Protestants intent on creating a principled new social order under the palm trees. On the contrary, all subsequent European initiatives in the region were guided, like the Spanish, by the goals of competitive political and military hegemony and the exploitation of natural resources. The Spaniards conquered the region but had difficulty populating it. As an incentive to come to the new lands, the Crown granted land parcels and encomiendas to would-­be migrants. These were mostly segundones, the second and third children of well-­to-­do Spanish families deprived of access to family wealth by the law of primogeniture.2 Since only firstborn males could inherit, those who followed had to seek their fortunes elsewhere. The new colonies offered an opportunity, but since the islands had very little gold to mine, the colonists turned to agriculture, initially for subsistence and then for export to Europe. When cane sugar was discovered, the Caribbean colonies found the equivalent of gold.3 So far as the indigenous workforce survived and could be exploited, production for export could proceed, at least in the larger islands. Other lands in the region remained mostly empty. The natives did not survive for much longer than a century, and hence, a solution had to be urgently found for the lack of arms. Early in the sixteenth century, slave markets could already be found in Havana and Santo Domingo.4 The Portuguese pioneered the practice of buying captives from African chieftains for sale in the Americas, a practice vastly extended by the British Empire. Hence the second great migration to the Caribbean was not voluntary but coerced. Slaves populated the Caribbean, providing the workforce that made sugar and subsequently coffee highly profitable ventures. Slavery made possible the triangular trade among Europe, Africa, and the Americas and encouraged other European powers to wrestle islands from Spain to organize sugar plantations for export.5 In Saint-­Domingue, the western part of Hispaniola ceded to the French by the Spanish Bourbon kings, slaves and coffee were ground together to enrich the colonnes until a massive rebellion by the end of the eighteenth century put an end to the practice.6 Be that as it may, over three centuries, slavery and its sequels populated the Caribbean. Black and then mulato workers joined white colonizers to form the demographic core of the region. In Cuba and Puerto Rico, a Spanish policy aimed at “whitening” the island colonies during the mid-­nineteenth century by

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stimulating migration from the Peninsula led to the tripartite white/mulato/black composition of the Cuban and Puerto Rican population. Elsewhere, descendants from African slaves predominated along with a growing mixed-­blood population of mestizos and mulatoes.7 The economies built by European conquest and settlement in the Caribbean were entirely subordinate to the whims and wishes of the global powers. It is for that reason that no new major inflow of European immigrants and settlers came to the region. In the second half of the nineteenth century, new waves of Europeans, primarily from the eastern and southern regions of the continent, came to the Americas to man the factories created by the powerful industrial revolution in the United States and the deliberate efforts of the Argentinian and Brazilian governments to populate the empty lands of their respective countries.8 “To govern is to populate,” declared Argentinean president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento as his motto to entice European immigrants to settle the near-­empty Pampas.9 The Caribbean was entirely bypassed, however. No industrial revolution and no new major economic initiatives took place in it. For the most part, the economies of the region were governed by the familiar trilogy of sugar, coffee, and tobacco, accompanied by a nascent tourism industry. The end of slavery brought attempts to replace black slave labor with indentured Chinese “coolie” laborers in Cuba and indentured East Indians in the English Caribbean. Intraregional population movements had primarily the same purpose, with Haitians going to cut sugar cane in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and several of the British Islands. All these movements corresponded and reflected the economic peripherality of the entire region.10 In terms of migration, it mostly stayed put. Beginning in the twentieth century, and as visitors from the north were discovering the beauty of the region and its mild climate in winter, poor Caribbeans started to search for ways to escape their fate. The main avenue for this purpose was migration to the global centers. Taking advantage of their knowledge of English and their status as British subjects, Jamaicans started migrating in numbers to England and New York, a movement that accelerated in the next decades and eventually extended to New England and Florida.11 Following the takeover of Puerto Rico by the United States and its conversion into a near-­colony, recruiters from the north began enticing islanders to migrate. For the most part, islanders went to the Northeast to replace earlier European immigrants in manning factories in New York, New England, and as far west as Illinois. This deliberate recruitment was the historical source of the emergence of large Puerto Rican communities in the American Northeast and Midwest.12 There were Puerto Rican populations as far as Hawai’i, to which they had been brought to work in the sugar cane industry. The other major population movements out of the region in the twentieth century originated in Cuba and Hispaniola and had as their source the turbulence created by widespread poverty and lack of opportunities for the majority of the population. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 expelled the upper and middle classes of the country. They were followed, in time, by refugees of more modest origins

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as the revolutionary project failed to deliver better economic circumstances for most of the population and as the U.S. open-­arms policy enticed many Cubans to depart the island.13 The Mariel exodus of 1980, during which upward of 120,000 new Cuban refugees arrived in South Florida, marked the end of that benevolent policy. In part, the change of policy was due to the fact that Haitians, escaping harrowing conditions in their own country, claimed the same treatment by U.S. authorities as that granted to Cubans.14 Fearing accusations of racism, Washington relented and allowed both Cubans and Haitians into the country under the novel legal category of “entrants, status pending.”15 The Mariel exodus bifurcated the Cuban enclave, created by the earlier exiles in Miami, into two distinct communities separated by class, origin, and physical space. The Haitian flow created a new Little Haiti quarter in Miami, not half a mile from the Little Havana enclave.16 The third major Caribbean outflow during the twentieth century, that from the Dominican Republic, also had political origins. These were linked to the decisive intervention by the American government in the mid-­1960s to prevent the consolidation of another leftist government in the region following the assassination of dictator Rafael Trujillo. As part of the effort to stabilize the country, the U.S. administration under Lyndon B. Johnson facilitated the departure of thousands of Dominicans, many of whom ended up in New York and in cities along the New York–­Boston corridor.17 This early political outflow was the core for sustained Dominican out-­migration to the same region in the following years and to the consolidation of a Dominican enclave in the Washington Heights area of New York.18

Conclusion These population outflows, first from the British West Indies and then from the Spanish-­and Creole-­speaking islands, created the present large Caribbean communities in the United States and Canada. Unlike conventional theories of immigration that portray it as a one-­way escape from misery and want, the reality is that these expatriate communities maintain a constant traffic of information, remittances, investments, and travel back to their home countries.19 This two-­ way movement has been easier in the case of Puerto Ricans by dint of their being recognized as U.S. citizens, but it is also present in the case of other groups. One of the key signs of the bifurcation of the Cuban community of South Florida is that while pre-­1980 exiles refused to return, invest, or contribute in any way to the Castro regime, Mariel and post-­Mariel arrivals have made it a practice of sending remittances to their families and communities in Cuba and to travel there on a regular basis.20 The result has been the rise of transnational communities suspended, as it were, between two nation-­states: the small and impoverished sending countries and the large and hegemonic northern nations.21 Participants in these communities lead double lives, having homes and families at both ends, communicating daily across national borders, and traveling back and forth.22 Transnationalism has had positive

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consequences for sending nations and communities in the form of alleviation of local poverty by a growing inflow of remittances and transfers of information and technology. Transnational practices have also helped expatriates by facilitating the creation of small enterprises abroad and by lessening the shock of adaptation to a foreign language and culture.23 Transnational practices have also had negative consequences, such as the depopulation of sending communities and the undermining of local economic activities through the rise of a “culture of remittances.”24 Be that as it may, the confinement of the Caribbean to a perennial subordinate position in the global economy and the absence of new economic opportunities, save in tourism, practically guarantee the continuation of migrant outflows and, along with them, the expansion and consolidation of transnationalism. In essence, Caribbean peoples have responded to the harsh economic conditions imposed on them by the dominant nations to the north by migrating to them. In the process, they have created a new and complex dynamic across national borders that has become a mark of our time. While frequently resisted by the native populations of the receiving nations, transnationalism is here to stay and will affect decisively the future of the Caribbean as well as the cities and regions where these large expatriate populations settle.

Notes 1. Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onís (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947). See also Levi Marrero, Cuba: Economía y sociedad (Madrid: Editorial Playor, 1959). 2. Hugh Thomas, Cuba, or The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998). 3. Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint. 4. Haroldo Dilla, Cities of the Caribbean (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). 5. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origin of Our Time (London: Verso, 1994); see also Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint. 6. Sidney N. Mintz, “The Caribbean as a Socio-­cultural Area,” Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale 9, no. 4 (1966): 912–­937. See also Alex Stepick, Pride against Prejudice: Haitians in the United States (Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn & Bacon, 1998). 7. Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint. See also Wilfredo Lozano, “Dominican Republic: Informed Economy, the State, and the Urban Poor,” in The Urban Caribbean: Transition to the New Global Economy, ed. Alejandro Portes, Carlos Dore-­Cabral, and Patricia Landolt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 153–­189. 8. Fernando H. Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependencia y desarrollo en América Latina (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1969); Alejandro Portes and John Walton, Labor, Class and the International System (New York: Academic Press, 1981). 9. Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, X-ray of the Pampa, trans. Alan Swietlicki (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971). 10. Lozano, “Dominican Republic,” 153–­189. See also Sabine Manigat, “Haiti: The Popular Sectors and the Crisis in Port-­au-­Prince,” in Urban Caribbean, ed. Portes, Dore-­Cabral, and Landolt, 87–­123. 11. Suzanne Model, West Indian Immigrants: A Black Success Story? (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008); Derek Gordon, Patricia Anderson, and Don Robotham, “Jamaica: Urbanization in the Years of the Crisis,” in Urban Caribbean, ed. Portes, Dore-­Cabral, and Landolt, 190–­223. See also Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick, City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

a p e r m a n e n t p e r i p h e r y 13 12. Joseph Fitzpatrick, Puerto Rican Americans: The Meaning of Migration to the Mainland (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-­Hall, 1987); C. Wright Mills, Clarence Senior, and Rose Kohn Goldsen, The Puerto Rican Journey: New York’s Newest Migrants (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950). 13. Margarita Cervantes-­Rodriguez, International Migration in Cuba (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Portes and Stepick, City on the Edge. 14. Portes and Stepick, City on the Edge, chap. 3. 15. Stepick, Pride against Prejudice. 16. Alejandro Portes and Ariel Armony, The Global Edge: Miami in the Twenty-­First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), chap. 6. 17. Sherri Grasmuck and Patricia R. Pessar, Between Two Islands: Dominican International Migration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); José Itzigsohn, Encountering American Faultlines: Race, Class, and the Dominican Experience in Providence (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011). 18. Alejandro Portes and Luis E. Guarnizo, “Tropical Capitalists: U.S.-­Bound Migration and Small Enterprise Development in the Dominican Republic,” in Migration, Remittances, and Small Business Development, ed. Sergio Diaz-­Briquets and Sidney Wintraub (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991), 101–­131. 19. Roger Waldinger, The Cross-­Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants, and Their Homelands (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015). 20. Susan Eva Eckstein, The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Changed the U.S. and Their Homeland (New York: Routledge, 2009); Portes and Armony, Global Edge, chap. 6. 21. Luis E. Guarnizo, “The Economics of Transnational Living,” International Migration Review 37, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 666–­699; Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 22. Guarnizo, “Economics of Transnational Living”; Alejandro Portes, “Immigration, Transnationalism, and Development: The State of the Question,” in The State and the Grassroots: Immigrant Transnational Organizations in Four Continents, ed. Alejandro Portes and Patricia Fernandez-­Kelly (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015), 1–­24. 23. Levitt, Transnational Villages; Patricia Landolt, “Salvadoran Economic Transnationalism: Embedded Strategies for Household Maintenance and Immigrant Incorporation,” Global Networks 1, no. 3 (2001): 217–­242. 24. Raul Delgado-­Wise and James Cypher, “The Strategic Role of Mexican Labor under NAFTA: Critical Perspectives on Current Economic Integration,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 610 (2001): 120–­142; Levitt, Transnational Villages.

chapter 2

z The Role of State Actors in Puerto Rico’s Long Century of Migration, 1899–­2015 Carlos Vargas-­Ramos

The presence of Puerto Ricans in the United States precedes the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico in 1898. Yet the presence and growth of Puerto Ricans as a distinct group in the United States are marked not simply by the U.S. takeover of the island but by the policies of Puerto Rico’s federal and colonial governmental institutions. While some theoretical approaches toward migration may recognize the importance of “country context” in explaining large sustained movements of people across borders, the role of the state as a critical actor in creating contexts in such accounts remains largely diminished or marginal. Puerto Rico, a colonial territory of the United States, however, presents an instructive case for the roles of different state actors at the local and federal levels in the promotion and sustenance of a long-­standing migration stream between Puerto Rico and the United States and migration as a cultural practice. As recently as 1999, Aristide Zolberg stated, “It is remarkable that the role of states in shaping international migration has been largely ignored by immigration theorists.”1 Zolberg specifically criticized the tendency of international migration theorists to ignore or minimize the role of the state in the process by which people moved across geopolitical boundaries, given by the state’s authority and tendency to regulate the entrance and exit into territory under its control. Zolberg was also critical of the tendency by immigration scholars to reduce the role of immigrants and migrants to that of utility, maximizing agents seeking to improve their position by their mobility. Zolberg contended that migrants and immigrants seek to insert themselves not only into the economic system but also into the social and political community. The polities these immigrants join also establish not just the extent to which they are inserted into the economic sphere as economic agents but also the extent to which they may be included as members in the social, 17

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political, and cultural spheres. Migration, immigration, and settlement policies stem from the interplay of these economic and sociopolitical imperatives. From this perspective, migration, therefore, is an eminently and thoroughly political process. The neglect of the role of the state in the migration processes of Puerto Ricans that Zolberg has noted more broadly has not been apparent. On the contrary, analysts and scholars studying Puerto Rico’s population growth and movement have been keenly aware of the role of state institutions. Because of the wealth of information on the involvement of the state in the Puerto Rican migration, I am able to outline more readily the role of the state in such processes. In the space that follows, I outline how the role of the state at different levels of jurisdiction and involving different polities has conditioned the movement of Puerto Ricans to other destinations, predominantly the United States. I argue that this role has been structured by the federal arrangement by which the United States has been organized, which includes the U.S. government, the governments of the several states, and other entities, including the colonial governments of Puerto Rico. The role of the U.S. state has been structured not only by a vertical form of federalism that is often evident when discussing federalism generally, but such relations between states and the U.S. government and among the states themselves have been structured by a horizontal federalism that allows for the actions of one state to extend beyond its jurisdictional boundaries. In describing how the actions of the different entities that make up the U.S. state have intervened in the Puerto Rican migration, I argue that the governments established to rule Puerto Rico and its residents form part of the U.S. state, and it is for this reason that the governments of Puerto Rico have been able to operate with so much leeway in relation to their citizens residing beyond the jurisdictional boundaries of Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rican Migratory Trends The 2010 census showed for the first time in more than 250 years that Puerto Rico had lost population (see figure 2.1). The last time this had happened was early in the colonization period, when the reason for the decline of its population was the migration of colonists to the newly “discovered” territories in North, Central, and South America—­mostly Mexico and Peru. The island’s Spanish colonial authorities at the time attempted to stem the population loss with harsh anti-­emigration regulations. They ultimately failed as colonists decamped for greener pastures with the cry “¡Qué Dios me lleve al Perú!” (May God take me to Peru!). Nowadays, Puerto Ricans might be crying, “May God take me to Orlando!” From a historical perspective, there is evidence of governmental measures by the Spanish colonial administration to stem the population loss during the sixteenth century. While they ultimately failed, given the enormous structural incentives residents had to try their fortunes elsewhere, governmental measures were nevertheless critical in establishing migration to the Americas, immigration into Puerto Rico, and emigration from the island. Population growth was indeed promoted by

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4 ,000,000 3,500,000 3,000,000 2,500,000 2,000,000 1,500,000 1,000,000 500,000 0 00 20 70 19 40 19 10 19 87 18 36 18 20 18 01 18 98 17 94 17 91 17 88 17 85 17 82 17 79 17

Figure 2.1.  Total population in Puerto Rico, 1779–­2015. (Sources: Francisco A. Scarano, and Katherine J. Curtis, Puerto Rico’s Padrones, 1779–­1802, Inter-­university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 2011, https://​doi​.org/​10​.3886/​ICPSR30262​.v1; for 1812 to 1899 data, U.S. War Department, Report of the Census of Porto Rico, 1899 [Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900], 57; for 1910 to 2015 data, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Population [Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, multiple years].)

governmental measures. A number of centuries later, the Real Cédula de Gracias (Royal Decree of Graces) of 1815, for instance, promoted population growth along with economic growth for the colony by means of tax exemptions for trade, subsidies, land grants, and the loosening of immigration regulations. In the aftermath of the enactment and implementation of those governmental policies, immigrants flocked to Puerto Rico, the general population grew, and the economy of the island experienced a remarkable awakening.2 Governmental policies are still crucial in the process of people moving across borders, whether inbound or outbound. Puerto Rico, presently a colonial territory of the United States, however, offers an instructive case for the roles of different state actors at the local and federal levels in the promotion and sustenance of a long-­standing migration stream between Puerto Rico and the United States and migration as a cultural practice. By the time the United States took over the island of Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898, there were 953,000 people on the island and about 600 in the United States, many of the latter residing in exile or as expatriates as a result of their political activities against the Spanish colonial regime (see figure 2.2). For the next two decades, the Puerto Rican population in Puerto Rico continued growing, as had been the trend under Spanish colonialism. This trend of population growth in Puerto Rico continued until 2005, when the trend reversed into one of decline, driven mostly by emigration.

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c a r l o s v a r g a s -­r a m o s 6,000,000 5,000,000 4 ,000,000 3,000,000 2,000,000 1,000,000 0

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Figure 2.2.  Population in Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in the United States, 1899–­2015. (Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Census of Population [Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, multiple years], data for the years 1950–­1990, and decennial census 2000, 2010; U.S. Census Bureau, “American Community Survey, Demographic and Housing Estimates,” 2011–­2015, https://​data​.census​.gov/​cedsci/​table​?d​=​ACS​% 205​-Year​% 20Estimates​ %20Data​% 20Profiles ​& ​table ​= ​DP05​& ​t id​=​ACSDP5Y2018​.DP05​&​g​=​0400000US72, data for the years 2010 and 2015; C. Gibson and E. Lennon, Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-­Born Population of the United States: 1850 to 1990, U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division Working Paper no. 29, 1999, http://​w ww​.census​.gov/​population/​w ww/​ documentation/​t wps0029/​t wps0029​.html​.)

While Puerto Ricans in the United States grew as well, this growth was punctuated by eminently political decisions by state actors described below. The Puerto Rican population in the United States continued to grow steadily, particularly after 1940. While this growth was initially driven by the migration from Puerto Rico, ultimately the growth of the Puerto Rican population in the United States became driven by the natural growth of those Puerto Ricans born and raised in the United States. Migration from Puerto Rico contributed enormously to this trend. However, the migration from Puerto Rico, although always greater than the return of migrants to the island, fluctuated throughout the decades (see figure 2.3). This migration from the island flowed through the 1920s, then ebbed through the 1930s and early 1940s to increase again after World War II. Migration from Puerto Rico peaked during the 1950s, diminished during the 1960s and 1970s, spiked again during the 1980s, and slowed down through the 1990s. The 2000s saw sharp increases in Puerto Rico’s emigrants, with even greater increases in the half decade since 2010. Undoubtedly, structural factors, as those that infuse economic or political economy explanations of the Puerto Rican migration (and others), are crucial in establishing the context(s) in which individuals and institution-­based actors make the decision to migrate or to promote or hinder migration. Explanations relying on

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2,000,000 1,500,000 1,000,000 500,000 0

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Figure 2.3.  Puerto Ricans in the United States. (Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Census of Population [Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, multiple years], data for the years 1950–­1990, and decennial census 2000, 2010; U.S. Census Bureau, “American Community Survey, Demographic and Housing Estimates,” 2011–­2015, https://​data​.census​ .gov/​cedsci/​table ​?d ​=​ACS ​% 205​-Year​% 20Estimates​% 20Data​% 20Profiles ​& ​table ​=​DP05​&​ tid​=​ACSDP5Y2018​.DP05​&​g​=​0400000US72, data for the years 2010 and 2015; C. Gibson and E. Lennon, Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-­Born Population of the United States: 1850 to 1990, U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division Working Paper no. 29, 1999, http://​w ww​.census​.gov/​population/​w ww/​documentation/​t wps0029/​t wps0029​.html.)

individual-­level or even collective-­level decision-­making to account for the migration process are paramount, since it is the individual or smaller social units (i.e., family, kin, village) that make the decision and undertake the process of migrating from one location to another. Yet the role of governmental institutions in framing the decision of individuals or smaller collective units to migrate is unavoidable. The state intervenes in this process to a greater or lesser extent. It does so by establishing whether individuals or groups of individuals can in fact move between given territorial jurisdictions and the extent to which they can do so. The state also intervenes by determining what type of individual or groups of individuals may migrate and for how long. It may even establish where migrants can move to and settle.

Bringing the State In The role of the state as a delimiting factor in the migration process should not imply an omnipotent and omniscient entity that can overwhelmingly determine the ability of individuals and groups of individuals to migrate between territorial jurisdictions. Issues of varying state capacity or changeable or conflicting interests circumscribe state action itself. Yet the state always plays an intervening role in the migration process, encompassing explanations of the migration process in general or the migration of sets of individuals in particular.

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In the case of Puerto Rico, however, the role of the state has been identified to be instrumental in the migration of Puerto Ricans from the island to other destinations, most notably the United States.3 But which state? What entity serves as the state as it involves the migration of Puerto Ricans? Is it the colonial metropolitan government (i.e., the U.S. federal government) or the local colonial governments in their different iterations (1898–­1900, 1900–­1917, 1917–­1952, post-­1952)? The United States is arranged in a federal system of government, diffusing state power and capacity among constituent units: the federal government, the several states, and other subordinate jurisdictions of government. In the case of the United States, the federal government assumes the role of establishing who enters its national territory and the conditions under which those outsiders may come in (i.e., immigration policy), but it does not assume full responsibility for the incorporation of migrants beyond processing residency and work permits or naturalizing long-­term migrants who indicate their desire to join the political community (i.e., immigrant policy).4 The process of migrant incorporation in the receiving society is more haphazard, informal, and inconsistent.5 This responsibility may fall by default on state governments or subordinate units such as county or municipal governments. In the United States, state power and capacity are further distributed and diffused in its separation between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. In the case of the Puerto Rican migration, the role of the state is further complicated by the relation between a federal government and a colonial government; the latter is subordinate to the former but not necessarily powerless or without agency. The federal arrangement of the U.S. political community entails that there is more than one government operating, whether the colonial metropolitan government (i.e., the U.S. federal government) or the insular colonial governments in their different iterations. But is there more than one state operating as well? Or are all these governmental entities part of the same state? Allan Erbsen argues that the federal organization of the United States along vertical and horizontal planes stems from a division of sovereignty between the federal government and state governments spelled out in its constitution. The Constitution “establishes a hierarchy and boundaries between federal and state authority (on a vertical plane), and horizontal plane that attempts to coordinate fifty coequal states that must peaceably coexist.”6 The separation of authority that exists in the United States between its national government and subnational governments results in the diffusion of authority from national to local units, a centralization of national authority, a separation of national and state authority, and the empowerment of both the national and subnational government. As a consequence of this arrangement, “the federal government must interact with the states, and the states must interact with each other.”7

State? What State?! Vertical Federalism While current imagery about the immigration process to the United States may give the impression of a robust federal presence and virtual monopoly in the process of

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admittance of people into its national territory, whether captured in the image of a Customs and Border Protection officer reviewing passports at any given point of entry into the country, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent detaining an unauthorized person, or a Citizenship and Immigration Service employee processing a request for permanent residence, the reality is that historically, the U.S. federal government has not had such a monopoly. In fact, for the first century of its existence as a country, the process of immigration was administered and managed by what the U.S. Constitution refers to as “the several states” (e.g., Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia, etc.) and not by the federal government.8 Moreover, once the federal government began to arrogate to itself, if reluctantly, the responsibility of overseeing the immigration process in the late nineteenth century, it nevertheless delegated to states many of those administrative functions until well into the twentieth century.9 For more than a century, therefore, states such as New York or Maryland or California established immigration policy and regulatory practices. The reason for the leading role of subnational governments (i.e., states) in the immigration process was the federal government’s reluctance or lack of interest in taking up the task. This reticence on the federal government’s part spurred state governments to step in to address what they perceived to be a dire need.10 In the nineteenth century, northeastern states sought to avoid the economic and social “liability” that undesirable immigrants (e.g., the poor, the sick or disabled, the criminal) might present to them by barring those persons, while southern states sought to protect the chattel slavery system and white supremacist racial order by barring groups of individuals suspected of being disruptive of that system (e.g., free blacks, foreign black sailors). Anna Law underscores the motivation of northern and southern states in controlling migration into their jurisdiction as a matter of “self-­preservation and guarding [of] the public welfare.”11 This perspective on the part of state government elites was based on sovereignty grounds and, concomitantly, on the states’ police power doctrine—­the right of state governments to regulate conduct for the benefit of the general welfare and the public good.12 Indeed, local and regional politics and claims at the subnational level continue to create conditions that lead state governments to take the initiative in legislating and establishing policies that impinge on immigration and immigrant policy even prior to any action by the federal government, Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 or California’s Proposition 187 being two salient and relatively recent examples. These states’ initiative and impetus notwithstanding, the judicial branch of the federal government has categorically established “the primacy of the federal government over immigration control and noncitizen rights” since 1874 up to as recently as 2012.13 Admission of immigrants into the country is a national state prerogative, even as the federal government has “invited” subnational governments to take part and share in the role of immigration enforcers (e.g., bestowing on state and local law enforcement the prerogative to enforce national immigration law section 287(g) of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996). But several states still assert a politically—­if not always juridically defensible—­critical involvement in the process of what persons or types of persons live in their midst.

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The recent cases of cities and states establishing sanctuary status for unauthorized immigrants and the recently passed state legislation restricting the type of assistance state agencies may provide federal agents in their discharge and enforcement of immigration policy are cases in point. Individual states in the United States are key actors in another relevant aspect related to the presence of persons within their boundaries—­that of immigrant policy. Law refers to immigrant policy as “the policies that govern the rights, privileges, and benefits immigrant have once they are within U.S. territory.”14 The role of subnational states’ immigration policy stems from a similar reluctance of the federal government to participate in the process of incorporating immigrants and other peoples who come from abroad. But whereas the federal government was compelled by federal courts to involve itself as the primary actor in the process of immigration policy (e.g., Passenger cases [1849], in re Ah Fong [1874], Chy Lung v. Freeman [1875], Henderson v. Mayor of the City [1876]), the primacy and supremacy of the federal government on issues of immigrant incorporation has not been established, asserted, or directed, and the federal government has not taken the initiative to undertake it beyond facilitating a constitutionally mandated task: the naturalization of aliens. The integration of foreigners in the United States has been laissez-­faire.15 Bloemraad and de Graauw argue that such an approach to immigrant incorporation means that “immigrants are largely expected to use their own resources, family, friendship networks, and perhaps the assistance of the local community to survive and thrive in the United States.”16 While there may be evidence of national and subnational policies that address the integration of immigrants, they argue, there is at best a haphazard national immigrant policy. By and large, it is subnational units that provide the more proximate response to immigrants, as these appear in the midst of communities in the different states, with counties (i.e., administrative dependencies of states’ governments) and municipalities discharging the overwhelming bulk of service that may contribute to immigrant integration in lesser or greater measure. Examples of these are language acquisition programs, the overall education of children, the provision of health care, and public assistance.17 (National government policies toward refugees may be an exception to this pattern of federal detachment from immigrant integration.) It is often the reaction to this de facto federal delegation of immigrant integration policy to states—­and by extension, their municipalities—­that states and municipalities have reacted with measures that either welcome and accommodate newcomers or, alternatively, reject them, forcing the federal government to take action and address the issue of these newcomers’ presence and the federal responsibility for integrating or expelling them.

Horizontal Federalism These relations between the national-­ federal state unit and the subnational state units in regard to immigrant and immigration policy therefore involve a

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vertical relationship between the units. The U.S. Supreme Court has established the supremacy of the federal government in the area of immigration policy for more than 150 years. And the practice of the federal government toward the subnational units around immigrant policy has been one of de facto delegation. But in addition to this vertical relationship, there is also a horizontal type of relation between subnational units, which may be regulated by the federal government as the need arises, with bearing on the integration of migrants and immigrants. Horizontal federalism, then, entails a series of mechanisms that are constitutionally valid and available to prevent or mitigate friction between states when the decisions from outside the boundaries of a given state affect that state.18 One aspect of this horizontal relationship is captured in the states’ extraterritorial powers. Extraterritoriality is evident to most people in the actions of a state in regard to its citizens when they are abroad—­for instance, in the works of consular officers in a foreign country.19 Historically, in ancient Greek and Rome as well as during medieval and modern times, there were representatives of sovereigns (whether principalities, kingdoms, empires, or nation-­states) who not only looked after the interests of those sovereigns and their subjects beyond their boundaries but applied the laws and customs of those sovereigns to their citizens while abroad with the consent and agreement of local authorities.20 Within the federal system of government in the United States, there are parallel elements of territoriality among the several constituent states.21 The doctrine of states’ extraterritorial powers stems from the assertion that subnational state units can regulate their citizens even when those citizens are out of the home state.22 The rights of states to regulate their citizens emanates from the sovereignty these states enjoy in the federal system of government of the United States. Though mostly deployed as a legal doctrine and practice by which subnational states can create regulations that apply to their citizens even when out of state, the doctrine stems from another sanctioned doctrine: a state’s police power. Therefore, in discharging their authority to regulate their citizens for the purpose of safeguarding the general welfare and public good, subnational states may create regulations that extend beyond their borders. Simply stated, “as a matter of federal law, states’ regulatory powers do not end at their borders. Under appropriate circumstances, states have the power to apply their laws to their citizen’s out-­of-­state activities.”23 The extent to which states will abide by and respect another state’s extraterritorial power beyond its boundaries is dependent on their forbearance and tolerance of such extraterritorial action and the good faith of the state exerting its extraterritorial power. This ability of a state to extend its power beyond its boundaries exists because there are limitations to it. These limitations take the form of constitutional sanctions as well as instances where the U.S. Congress assumes authority, as with the prerogative to regulate commerce between states, and also by the full faith and credit clause of the U.S. Constitution (i.e., Article IV, Section 1). But even when such limitations on states’ extraterritorial powers do not exist, states may decide

26

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for themselves or coordinate to determine the extent to which they respect such extraterritorial powers.24 Some examples of these state-­level extraterritorial powers relate to what is known as travel evasion—­for instance, when an individual flees a jurisdiction after committing a crime and is extradited from the jurisdiction that person has fled to. A state’s extraterritorial power was also evident in anti-­ miscegenation laws or more recently in anti-­same-­sex marriages or unions until they were struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. But they may also be evident in the regulation of abortion procedures and requirements, such as parental notification for minors seeking abortions across state lines. Extraterritoriality, as a principle and a practice, may then afford states within a federal arrangement the ability to regulate their “citizens” beyond the confines of their states and also the ability, if they so choose to exercise it, to act on behalf of their citizens while they remain outside of the confines of the state’s boundaries. Migration, then, may also be subject to a “state’s” extraterritorial power. In the case of Puerto Ricans, the application of this extraterritoriality was evident with the creation of agencies of the colonial government to manage the migrations of Puerto Ricans from the island to the United States (e.g., the Migration Division). In all, then, in the United States, the state entails the authority and action of the federal government as well as the state governments, regulated by the Constitution, on the basis of the principle of sovereignty. The state in the United States encompasses, therefore, the federal government and states’ governments in all their components: the executive branch and its bureaucracy, the legislative branch, and the judicial branch.

Puerto Rico in the U.S. Federal System How does Puerto Rico fit into the U.S. federal system? Puerto Rico is not a constituent state of the United States. It is not one of the “several states” referred to in the Constitution. Rather, Puerto Rico is a territory—­a colony—­of the United States. This tie of Puerto Rico to the United States is structured by the Treaty of Paris of 1898, which transferred sovereignty over Puerto Rico from Spain to the United States; the Constitution, particularly its territory clause (Article IV, Section 3, Clause 2), which gives Congress plenary powers over Puerto Rico; and numerous judicial decisions by the Supreme Court. The treaty and constitutional provisions establish the nature of the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. But the congressional action and the judicial decisions, all institutions of the state, are critical to understanding the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States because they have defined and shaped the particular nature of this relationship. For instance, in exercising its sovereignty and plenary powers over Puerto Rico, Congress gradually extended several measures of self-­rule—­under the Foraker Act (1900), the Jones–­Shafroth Act (1917), and Public Law 600 (1950; collectively, the Puerto Rico Federal Relations Act)—­ culminating in the present colonial arrangement. Supreme Court decisions from

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the Insular Cases to, most recently, Puerto Rico v. Sánchez Valles (2016) and Puerto Rico v. Franklin California Tax-­free Trust (2016) have established that Puerto Rico is not part of the United States, but it belongs to the United States; that irrespective of any grant of self-­government, Puerto Rico is still subject to the plenary powers of Congress; and that because the United States holds sovereignty over Puerto Rico, it can delegate any such self-­government. The Supreme Court has also held that even before Puerto Ricans became U.S. citizens, they were U.S. nationals and therefore entitled to enter the United States without restrictions (Gonzales v. Williams 1904). By virtue of the Jones–­Shafroth Act, Puerto Ricans did become U.S. citizens. However, the Supreme Court established that regardless of that grant of citizenship, Puerto Rico was an unincorporated territory that was not automatically expected or considered for admission into the U.S. union as a member on equal standing with all others. Its future was therefore legally dependent on whatever decision Congress made in this regard.25 An impermanent but also indefinite status with the United States distinguishes Puerto Rico from the states that form the United States, which have both a permanent and definitive relationship with the U.S. state. Nevertheless, Puerto Rico remains a part of the U.S. federal system, since the Constitution has granted Congress the plenary power to rule over territories and property of the United States, and in the exercise of such vast power, Congress has extended self-­government to Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is subject to the Congress of the United States, its president, and its courts. While not a constituent state of the United States or a permanent unit in the U.S. federal system, Puerto Rico’s government is nevertheless a unit of the U.S. state by virtue of the civilian colonial state created in 1900 and extended in 1917 and 1950–­1952. The civilian colonial state is an extension of the U.S. state, a subnational unit of the U.S. state. Its relationship with the federal government is a vertical one, as with the several states of the union, albeit a subordinate one. As a subnational unit of the U.S. state, Puerto Rico also maintains a horizontal relationship with the several states of the union. This horizontal relationship may be tenuous and uncertain because it is not stipulated by the Constitution. Moreover, because Puerto Rico is not part of the United States but only a territorial possession of it, it is unclear whether the horizontal relationship may be in fact sanctioned legally. On this point, the Supreme Court has not ruled. Yet in practice, over the course of decades, a horizontal relationship has been maintained as if Puerto Rico were in fact another state, including exercising extraterritorial power. It is this lack of action on the part of other institutions of the state in regard to Puerto Rico, which have not sanctioned negatively or limited Puerto Rico’s horizontal relationship with states of the United States, that allows for Puerto Rico to continue to operate on such bases in regard to states of the United States as if it too were such a constituent part of the United States. Moreover, with the grant of autonomy extended by Congress to Puerto Rico, it has also gained the ability to establish and execute its own police powers.

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It is the extraterritoriality the governments of Puerto Rico have engaged in, in the context of horizontal federalism, that accounts for the large involvement of those governments in the migration process of Puerto Ricans to the United States and their settlement and integration in the several states. It is for this reason that the governments of Puerto Rico have acted as protector and benefactor, labor agent and worker’s advocate, lobbyist and civic organizer of its citizens in the United States through institutional mechanisms such as, for instance, the Migration Division of Puerto Rico’s Department of Labor or the Puerto Rican Federal Affairs Administration. It is the exercise of extraterritorial powers in the context of horizontal federalism that may explain the seemingly contradictory image of a colonial government behaving as an independent entity in relation to its metropolitan government and the constituent states of that metropolitan entity, with colonial governmental officers conducting business on behalf of the nominal citizens of the colony in the metropolitan territory as if they were consular officers.26 Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States. It has been so since 1898 and continues to be so presently. Yet as part of the organization of the U.S. government, the U.S. state has very many entities. It has one federal government with its own sovereignty to establish policies independent of and superseding to any that may exist within the territory over which it claims jurisdiction. It has fifty state governments with their own claims of sovereignty, albeit bounded, within the jurisdiction they claim. It has several recognized Native American tribes with varying degrees of sovereignty claims. And there is the colonial government of Puerto Rico (and the other territories and possessions of the United States), which has not exercised any other sovereignty beyond what has been granted by Congress, upon which such sovereignty resides. All these governmental entities form part of the U.S. state, and they all have some bearing on immigration and immigrant policy and have often intervened in the process of migration of people in general and, in this case, Puerto Ricans in particular. What is the impact of Puerto Rico’s position in the U.S. federal system on migration policy? The role of the state in regard to the Puerto Rican migration therefore involves several layers. It entails the role of the federal government and the role of the insular colonial government(s). But Puerto Ricans are not subject to U.S. immigration policy, since whether as U.S. nationals or citizens they have been able to enter the United States freely. As a result, it has been immigrant policy—­policies and practices structuring the incorporation of Puerto Ricans in the United States—­that has operated with respect to their migration. This incorporation has taken place at the state level. Therefore, the role of the state in Puerto Rican migrations involves the role of state governments where Puerto Ricans have sought to settle.27 This may even involve the municipal governments where Puerto Ricans originally were residents and the municipalities where they would seek residence.28 Furthermore, the role of the state may be and actually is divided among its several branches—­the legislative, the judiciary, and the executive with its attendant bureaucracy. The historical experience of Puerto Rican

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migrants has been touched by the actions of the three branches of the federal government, the legislative (but primarily the executive) branch of the insular colonial government, and various municipal governments in the United States and in Puerto Rico.

Immediacy of State Action In addition to how the federal system of government reflects the role of the state in Puerto Rican migration, both in its vertical dimension and in its horizontal dimension, the analysis of state policies and involvement having a bearing on migration generally and Puerto Rican migration in particular may be conducted on the basis of how direct and immediate or indirect and remote those policies and actions may be to the act of migration for any one individual or group of individuals. As a result, a typology of state action can be crafted. There are state policies and actions that have an immediate effect on whether a person moves. These I refer to as proximate reasons. Other policies and actions may have an effect that is more distant and contextual and may broaden or limit the migration options an individual may have in choosing whether to migrate and where to. These I refer to as distal reasons. Still other state actions and policies have a more intermediate effect on the decision of migrants to migrate. Those I understand as medial reasons. Therefore, based on concepts of immediacy and directness of state actions and policy, one can then observe how a person in Puerto Rico may decide to migrate to the United States, but that decision is contingent on the fact that there is an institutional relationship between the two, given by the acquisition of Puerto Rico from Spain after its invasion in 1898, formalized by the Treaty of Paris; by the fact that the Supreme Court ruled in 1904 that as U.S. nationals, Puerto Ricans could have unrestricted access to the United States; by the fact that Congress extended the ability of Puerto Ricans to travel freely between Puerto Rico and the United States after 1917 by granting citizenship to them; and by the actions of the U.S. Employment Service to recruit Puerto Ricans for work in the United States in 1918 (see table 2.1). As documented by the History Task Force, this latter action by a federal agency was a proximate reason for the immigration of approximately ten thousand Puerto Ricans to the United States, as it created direct and immediate mechanisms by which that number of Puerto Ricans, and up to seventy-­five thousand, were actively recruited and their transit facilitated by governmental authorities.29 The judicial decisions by the Supreme Court in 1904 and 1922 were medial reasons for this migration, as they clarified the type of relationship Puerto Ricans had with the United States and how that could affect their movement between the two places—­a relationship that was established in 1898 and structured in 1900 and 1917 as a distal reason.

Hart-­Celler Act (1965)

McCarran–Walter Act (1952)

Migrant Labor Agreement (Bracero program: 1951–­1964)

Johnson-­Reed Act (1924)

Johnson Quota Act (INA-­1921)

Public Law 600 (1950)

Jones Act (1917)

Foraker Act (1900)

Treaty of Paris (1898)

Joint: Congress/president

Operation Wetback (1954)

Emergency Farm Labor Program (Bracero program: 1942–­1951)

Creation of Commonwealth regime (1952–­present)

Distal:

Distal:

President/executive:

Insular and municipal governments in Puerto Rico

U.S. government

U.S. state and municipal governments

table 2.1 distribution of state actions on the migration process of puerto ricans by immediacy of action and jurisdictional level

U.S. Bureau of Insular Affairs identifies Puerto Rican surplus labor as a source to satisfy labor demand after 1924 immigration law

President/executive:

Medial

Downes v. Bidwell (1901)

Judicial

Central American-­DR Free Trade Agreement (2012)

North American Free Trade Agreement (1994)

Caribbean Basin Initiative: Caribbean Basin Recovery Act (1983) and Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act (2002–­2020)

Section 936 Internal Revenue Code (1976–­1996 [2005])

Section 931 Internal Revenue Code (1954)

Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (1996)

Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986)

U.S. government

Recommendation of Insular Labor Bureau to Insular Legislature promoting emigration of workers to Cuba and Dominican Republic using Puerto Rican government contracts (1914)

Medial:

Insular and municipal governments in Puerto Rico

(continued)

NYC Mayor’s Committee on Puerto Rican Affairs

U.S. state and municipal governments

Industrial Incentives Act (1947)

Hernandez Flecha et al. v. Quiros (1977)

Labor contract agents recruit 2,000 workers in Puerto Rico for Hawai’i (1900–­1901)

Insular law funding repatriation of workers in Mexico (1911)

Operation Bootstrap (1945): Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company > Aid to Industrial Development program

Balzac v. Porto Rico (1922)

Proximate:

Insular Bureau of Employment and Identification opens office in NYC (1930)

NYC Department of Education

Erie County (NY) Health Department

Recommendation of Bureau of Insular Affairs (U.S. War Department) to promote migration and settlement of workers to DR, and as farmhands in U.S. (1917) Insular law to regulate emigration from Puerto Rico (1919)

NYS Joint Legislative Committee on Migrant Labor

NYS Commission on Human Rights

U.S. state and municipal governments

Puerto Rican governor Yager proposal to promote population and settlement in Dominican Republic (1915)

Insular and municipal governments in Puerto Rico

Gonzales v. Williams (1904)

Judicial:

McCarran–Walter Act (1952), H-2 visa program

U.S. government

table 2.1 distribution of state actions on the migration process of puerto ricans by immediacy of action and jurisdictional level (continued)

U.S. Employment Service arranges construction labor placement of 10,000 and up to 75,000 Puerto Rican workers in the United States (1918)

U.S. government

Municipal policy to relocate drug users to the United States (Torruella 2012)

Public Law 22 (2012): total tax exemption on passive income to new residents

Migration Division and Farm Labor Program (1947–­1993)

Insular Public Law 25 creates the Bureau of Employment and Migration

Insular Public Law 89 required contracts and government approval to hire labor in Puerto Rico (1947)

Assistant Commissioner of Labor and Agriculture investigates working conditions for Puerto Rico contract workers in Arizona (1926)

American Manufacturing Company recruits workers in Puerto Rico under the terms of the 1919 law regulating emigration (1921)

Insular and municipal governments in Puerto Rico

U.S. state and municipal governments

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The civilian colonial governments established by the U.S. government in 1900 and 1917 under the Foraker and Jones–­Shafroth Acts, respectively, were distal reasons for the migration of Puerto Ricans that immigrated to the United States and elsewhere because those governments created the institutional apparatus and policies that facilitated the movement of workers to the United States, its territories (e.g., Hawai’i), and elsewhere (e.g., the Dominican Republic). However, the insular Labor Bureau’s specific actions recommending to the insular legislative body in 1914 the immigration of workers to Cuba and the Dominican Republic with contracts overseen by the insular colonial government and the proposal of colonial governor Yager to promote the permanent immigration of Puerto Ricans to the Dominican Republic were medial reasons, as those proposals contributed to steer workers to migrate to specific locations for specific purposes. Proximate reasons for return migration were the allocation of funds by the insular legislature in 1911 to repatriate workers dissatisfied with the working conditions they found after moving to Mexico for work. Proximate was also the recruitment by the American Manufacturing Company in 1921 under the terms of a 1919 law regulating immigration (a medial intervention). Proximate actions were also those undertaken by the insular colonial government beginning in 1947 with the creation of the Bureau of Employment and Migration, the Migration Division, and the Farm Labor Program, which followed as ancillaries the policies of Operation Bootstrap in 1945 with the creation of the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Corporation and the Industrial Incentives Act (1947), themselves medial reasons for the migration. A more coherent approach to manage the immigration of Puerto Ricans to and their settlement in the United States took place after the establishment of the commonwealth government in 1952, a distal factor, which in turn created additional programs to facilitate migration by, for instance, exposing potential migrants to English-­language lessons through adult education programs by the Department of Public Instruction.30 More recently, the commonwealth government has been interested in promoting the in-­migration of individuals with capital to invest in Puerto Rico in light of the decade-­long economic crisis. Consequently, the legislature passed and the governor enacted Public Law 22 in 2012 providing total tax exemption on passive income to new residents of the island. Approximately one thousand individuals have taken advantage of this proximate governmental policy.31 The actions of municipal governments in Puerto Rico have also had a proximate effect on the emigration of people from Puerto Rico, as Torruella shows concerning the practices of municipal mayors covering the cost of airfare for travel to the United States for low-­income drug users seeking treatment.32 The actions of state and municipal governments in the United States have also been instrumental in the migration process of Puerto Ricans, mostly when it comes to the integration of migrants into the communities to which they have migrated. Oftentimes, these immigrant policy actions, which tend to fall on those state and municipal governments after immigrants and migrants find themselves in the national territory of the United States, have a medial effect, although given

t h e r o l e o f s t a t e a c t o r s 35

the extent of government responses to the immigration of outsiders, they may also have proximate effects. As the actions of state and municipal governments in the United States tend to focus on language acquisition programs, the overall education of children, the provision of health care, and public assistance, as Bloemraad and de Graauw have pointed out, by and large, they are focused on the ambiance immigrants and/or migrants feel at their reception and on whether they feel their new environment is welcoming, indifferent, or hostile.33 These actions may not have an effect on the decision and process of migrants to settle in the national territory of the United States—­unless the policies and practices at those levels of governmental jurisdictions are generalized. However, in practice, in the different states and municipalities in the United States, opinions about immigrants and migrants vary greatly. Therefore, if a migrant encounters a hostile state or municipal environment, the migrant may simply decide to move to a more welcoming or at least neutral and indifferent environment instead of simply abandoning the U.S. territory altogether, though this is always a possibility. A hostile environment may serve as a proximate cause for a migrant to abandon the United States, but by and large, the actions of municipal and state governments tend to be more medial. This has often been the case for Puerto Rican migrants in the United States. Therefore, when public opinion in New York City became hostile immediately after the Second World War, as evident in the printed media of the time, the municipal government in New York created a Mayor’s Committee on Puerto Rican Affairs in order to address the incorporation of recent arrivals from Puerto Rico. The Mayor’s Committee engaged not only representatives from the Puerto Rican community already in New York City but also representatives of the government of Puerto Rico in order to coordinate the way in which the influx and incorporation could be managed.34 These efforts on the part of the municipal government were medial in explaining the Puerto Rican migration to the United States. As a way to address the backlash evident by the sudden inflow of Puerto Ricans to New York City, the colonial government of Puerto Rico sought to divert the migration stream to other areas of the United States—­Chicago, for instance.35 Yet the public outcry in New York City never forced the municipal government to institute policies discouraging further migration into the city. Similarly, as Puerto Rican farmworkers were settling in the fields of northwestern New York and facing a hostile environment in the mid-­1960s, the state government intervened on their behalf, sending the state lieutenant governor, the New York State Commission on Human Rights, and the Erie County Health Commissioner.36 The intervention of these governmental entities in New York illustrates the extent to which jurisdictions beyond the national government play a role in the process not of entry but of incorporation of migrants and immigrants, contributing to the migration process. Oftentimes, the migration of Puerto Rican farmworkers to fields in the northeastern and midwestern states was encouraged also by a series of distal federal governmental actions—­namely, immigration laws passed by Congress and enforced by the executive branch created conditions for labor demand and supply that influenced the individual and collective decision-­making process to migrate.

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The immigration and naturalization laws of 1921 (Johnson Quota Act) and 1924 (Johnson–­Reed Act) imposed national origin quotas that severely restricted the immigration of southern and eastern Europeans to the United States until 1965. (They also reaffirmed the previous exclusion of Asian immigrants.) Immigrants from Latin America, however, were exempt from the quota system. The demand for labor generally and farm labor in particular created the conditions that fostered the emigration of farmworkers from Puerto Rico and allowed colonial insular governments to institute their farm labor programs. The Bracero program (Emergency Farm Labor Program, 1942–­1951; Migrant Labor Agreement, 1951–­1964) and the H-2 program established by the 1952 McCarran–­Walter Act also had an impact on the demand of farm labor that contributed to the demand or lack thereof of Puerto Rican farmhands, as did the 1965 Hart–­Celler Act, which reopened the immigration gates in the United States. Other distal federal government actions that contributed to creating the economic environment that fostered the emigration of Puerto Ricans (or their return migration) were, for instance, Sections 931 and 936 of the Internal Revenue Code, which allowed for tax exemptions to earnings by “foreign” firms in Puerto Rico, providing the island with a comparative advantage over other territories and countries in the Caribbean region and incentivizing its economic activity. One the other hand, federal action—­such as the Caribbean Basin Initiative, North American Free Trade Agreement, or the Central American Free Trade Agreement—­served to undermine Puerto Rico’s competitive advantage in relation to other countries in the region and, by ending the tax incentives provided for by Section 936 of the Internal Revenue Code, set the stage for a deteriorating economic situation that is still being felt today.

Conclusion The Puerto Rican migration has entailed the movement of millions of people between the island and the United States over the course of more than one hundred years in a process that involves individuals or families making decisions at the most microscopic level about how to respond to circumstances that constrain or promote their livelihood. One ever-­present factor in the migration process has been and continues to be the state. In the case of Puerto Ricans, this includes the U.S. federal government, the many state-­level government agencies and their substate units (i.e., counties and municipalities), and the insular colonial governments in Puerto Rico. These different entities of the U.S. state are involved, to some extent, in immigration or immigrant policy, creating legislation and instituting policy practices that affect the entry into, exit from, and incorporation of people in their jurisdictions, with varying results. The vertical relationship that the federal arrangement of the U.S. state creates by subordinating subnational entities does not eliminate the capacity of these subnational jurisdictions to take action in regard to outsiders within their borders as well as insiders beyond their borders. Different claims of sovereignty and their

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deployment of police powers provide the officers of these governmental agencies with the authority and ability to intervene and interject themselves in the movements of populations. Claims or grants of sovereignty and the desire to enforce police powers within and without their jurisdictions also create the conditions for the exercise of extraterritoriality among nominally equal horizontal governmental entities. This extraterritoriality has also characterized the actions of the insular colonial governments in Puerto Rico, extending to the commonwealth arrangement. As they have unfolded, the actions in the form of laws, institutions, policies, rulings, and practices taken by these different components of the U.S. state have conditioned the movement of Puerto Ricans to and from the island in the Caribbean to the United States to the extent that presently, the majority of people who identify as Puerto Rican reside outside of Puerto Rico. These laws, institutions, policies, rulings, and practices of the state are not merely a background against which individuals and groups of individuals operate daily; they are indeed concrete and consequential to the lives of citizens and migrants. Their effect, while not omnipotent, is inescapable.

Notes 1. Aristide R. Zolberg, “Matters of States: Theorizing Immigration Policy,” in The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, ed. Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh DeWind (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), 71. 2. James L. Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico Institutional Change and Capitalist Development (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986); Francisco Scarano, Puerto Rico: Cinco siglos de historia (Bogota: McGraw-­Hill Interamericana, 1993). 3. For more on Puerto Rican migration, see Michael Lapp, “Managing Migration: The Migration Division of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in New York City, 1948–­1968” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1991); Edgardo Meléndez, Sponsored Migration: The State and Puerto Rican Postwar Migration to the United States (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017); Ismael García-­Colón, “‘We Like Mexican Workers Better’: Citizenship and Immigration Policies in the Formation of Puerto Rican Farm Labor in the United States,” CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 29, no. 2 (2017): 134–­171; Jorge Duany, The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Jorge Duany, Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Carmen T. Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); Gina Pérez, The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 4. Anna O. Law, “Lunatics, Idiots, Paupers, and Negro Seamen—­Immigration Federalism and the Early American State,” Studies in American Political Development 28 (2014): 107–­128. 5. Irene Bloemraad and Els de Graauw, “Immigrant Integration and Policy in the United States: A Loosely Stitched Patchwork,” in International Perspectives: Integration and Inclusion, ed. James Frideres and John Biles (Montreal: McGill–­Queen’s University Press, 2012), 205–­232. 6. Allan Erbsen, “Horizontal Federalism,” Minnesota Law Review 93 (2008): 494. 7. Erbsen, 501. 8. Daniel J. Tichenor and Alexandra Filindra, “Raising Arizona v. United States: Historical Patterns of American Immigration Federalism,” Lewis and Clark Law Review 16, no. 4 (2012): 1215–­1247.

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c a r l o s v a r g a s -­r a m o s

9. Law, “Lunatics.” 10. Tichenor and Filindra, “Raising Arizona.” 11. Law, “Lunatics,” 112. 12. Randy E. Barnett, “The Proper Scope of Police Power,” Notre Dame Law Review 79, no. 2 (2003): 429–­495; Brian W. Ohm, “Some Modern Day Musings on the Police Power,” Urban Lawyer 47, no. 4 (2015): 625–­663. 13. Tichenor and Filindra, “Raising Arizona,” 1220. 14. Law, “Lunatics,” 108. 15. Irene Bloemraad, Becoming a Citizen: Incorporating Immigrants and Refugees in the United State and Canada (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Bloemraad and de Graauw, “Immigrant Integration,” 205–­232. 16. Bloemraad and de Graauw, “Immigrant Integration,” 205. 17. Bloemraad and de Graauw, 205. 18. Erbsen, “Horizontal Federalism.” 19. Consuls are authorized by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations to protect the interests of their co-­nationals; to report on local economic, commercial, cultural, and scientific conditions and developments to the sending state and give information to persons interested; to issue passports, visas, and travel documents; to assist in general their co-­nationals; to act as notaries, civil registrars, and certain administrative functionaries as long as the laws of the receiving state are not violated; to safeguard the interests of co-­nationals in estate matters in accordance with the laws of the receiving state; to protect the interests of minors and other persons lacking full capacity who are nationals of the sending state within the limits imposed by the laws of the receiving state; to represent or arrange appropriate representation for conationals before local tribunals and other authorities insofar as the laws of the receiving state permit; to transmit judicial documents or execute letters rogatory or commissions in order to take evidence for the courts of the sending state in conformity with treaties or laws of the receiving state; to assist, supervise, and inspect vessels and aircraft having the nationality of the sending state and to exercise certain jurisdiction over the crews in accordance with the laws of the sending state; and to perform any other functions not prohibited by the laws of the receiving state. See Luke T. Lee, “Vienna Convention on Consular Relations,” International Conciliation 37 (1969): 53 (emphasis mine). 20. Lee, 41–­76. See also Pär K. Cassel, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-­Century China and Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 21. Mark D. Rosen, “Extraterritoriality and Political Heterogeneity in American Federalism,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 150, no. 3 (2002): 855–­972; and Mark D. Rosen, “State Extraterritorial Powers Reconsidered,” Notre Dame Law Review 85, no. 3 (2010): 1133–­1155. See also Katherine Florey, “State Extraterritorial Powers Reconsidered: A Reply,” Notre Dame Law Review 85, no. 3 (2010): 1157–­1162. 22. Rosen, “Extraterritoriality,” 855–­972. 23. Rosen, 864. 24. Rosen, “State Extraterritorial Powers,” 1133–­1155. 25. Politically, Puerto Ricans could arrogate sovereignty for themselves and declare themselves an independent nation with the desire and aspiration to create a nation-­state. But the leadership of its political institutions has not taken such a step. Such political institutions have indeed accepted the grant of self-­government from the U.S. Congress. More recently, some political leaders have requested admission into the union, although Congress has ignored this request. 26. Meléndez, Sponsored Migration. 27. García-­Colón, “‘We Like Mexican Workers,’” 134–­171. 28. Rafael Torruella, “On the Relocation of Drug Users to the United States for Drug Treatment Services,” CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 24, no. 2 (2012): 68–­83; García-­Colón, “‘We Like Mexican Workers,’” 134–­171.

t h e r o l e o f s t a t e a c t o r s 39 29. History Task Force, Sources for the Study of Puerto Rican Migration, 1879–­1930 (New York: Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, City University of New York, 1982). 30. Meléndez, Sponsored Migration. 31. Antonio R. Gómez, “Acierto para el fisco las empresas de Ley 20 y 22,” El Nuevo Día, December  31, 2016, https://​w ww​.elnuevodia​.com/​negocios/​economia/​nota/​aciertopara elfiscolasempresasdeley20y22​-2276955/. 32. Torruella, “On the Relocation.” 33. Bloemraad and de Graauw, “Immigrant Integration.” 34. Meléndez, Sponsored Migration. 35. Pérez, Near Northwest Side Story. 36. Ismael García-­Colón, “Claiming Equality: Puerto Rican Farmworkers in Western New York,” Latino Studies 6, no. 3 (2008): 269–­289.

chapter 3

z “May God Take Me to Orlando” the puerto rican exodus to florida before and after hurricane maria Jorge Duany

Hurricane Maria, which razed Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017, was the worst natural disaster on the island since Hurricane San Felipe II (also known as the Okeechobee hurricane) in 1928. Maria caused catastrophic damages in Puerto Rico, estimated at more than $100 billion, after the island suffered the effects of Hurricane Irma two weeks before. Maria’s havoc in Puerto Rico included an official toll of 2,975 deaths, the virtual destruction of the electrical power system, the damage to thousands of physical structures, the collapse of telecommunications, the interruption of the circulation of drinking water, the obstruction of numerous roads and bridges, and the loss of most agricultural crops. One of the most notable effects of Puerto Rico’s humanitarian crisis after the hurricane was the unprecedented rise in immigration to the U.S. mainland. In March 2018, the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños (Centro) at Hunter College estimated that more than 135,000 Puerto Ricans had relocated stateside since Maria, mainly in Florida. A more recent Centro brief, published in September 2018, suggested that nearly 160,000 residents of Puerto Rico had relocated in one of the fifty states.1 In October 2017, Centro researchers had projected that between 114,000 and 213,000 inhabitants of the island would move abroad in the next year. According to these calculations, between 2017 and 2019, Puerto Rico could lose up to 470,335 inhabitants because of out-­migration, primarily oriented toward Florida (between 40,998 and 82,707 persons).2 Such estimates, at least for Florida, may prove too conservative. According to the Office of the Governor of Florida, more than 367,000 persons arrived from Puerto Rico through the state’s two main airports (Miami and Orlando) and Port Everglades between October 3, 2017, and February 2, 2018. It remains unclear exactly how many of these persons stayed in Florida, moved to other states, or returned to the island when living conditions improved there. However, an online survey 40

“ m a y g o d t a k e m e t o o r l a n d o ” 41

conducted by the Univision TV network between October 20 and December 11, 2017, found that 72 percent of the respondents then living in Puerto Rico said they would leave the island and that 52.3 percent of these would reside abroad for more than five years.3 In another telephone survey I codirected between January 10 and 12, 2018, all the interviewees responded that they were planning to move from Puerto Rico to the United States. More than two-­thirds (65.2 percent) of the interviewees declared that they would remain indefinitely in the United States.4 By all accounts, the post-­Maria exodus experienced an extraordinary upsurge, intensifying the island’s depopulation during the economic recession initiated in 2006. This chapter analyzes the migratory flow from Puerto Rico to the continental United States before and after Hurricane Maria. It focuses on the immigrants’ historical backgrounds, settlement patterns, and socioeconomic characteristics.5 My analysis of the current migration wave from the island relies primarily on the most recent statistical data from the U.S. Census Bureau, specifically the American Community Survey (ACS), conducted annually. I dwell on the exodus from the island to Florida, which has already displaced New York as the migrants’ preferred destination, and especially on the metropolitan areas of Orlando–­Kissimmee–­Sanford, Miami–­Fort Lauderdale–­West Palm Beach, and Tampa–­St. Petersburg–­Clearwater, where most residents of Puerto Rican origin concentrate. The growing dispersal of Puerto Ricans away from their traditional destinations in the U.S. Northeast and Midwest toward the Southeast and Southwest has long-­term consequences for the migrants’ cultural identities and socioeconomic progress. As this chapter will document, Puerto Rican communities in Orlando, Miami, and Tampa differ substantially from their counterparts in New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia not only in their socioeconomic origins and settlement patterns but also in their modes of incorporation into the receiving society. The current Puerto Rican experience in Florida is largely unprecedented, especially in comparison with previous migrant waves from the island to the U.S. mainland. Moreover, the post-­Maria exodus has acquired the massive dimensions of “environmental refugees”—­people displaced by sudden or long-­term changes in their habitats, such as natural disasters. Scholars are still struggling to assess how the hurricane has reshaped Puerto Rican migration to the United States. More recently, many people have fled to the mainland in the aftermath of several major earthquakes on the island.

Historical Background According to the 2014 census estimates, Florida became the second state after New York with more than one million residents of Puerto Rican origin (1,006,542). This demographic fact represents a milestone in the long history of Puerto Rican migration. After World War II, New York City and other northeastern cities attracted the bulk of the Puerto Rican exodus. Since the 1960s, however, Puerto Ricans have scattered widely throughout the mainland. During the 1990s, the number of Puerto Ricans in Florida nearly doubled to almost half a million persons, displacing New

42

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Jersey as home to the second-­largest concentration of stateside Puerto Ricans. By 2010, the census counted 847,550 residents of Puerto Rican descent in Florida, including 374,172 persons born on the island.6 By 2017, the Puerto Rican population in Florida (1,128,225) had surpassed that in New York (1,113,123).7 The growth of Florida’s Puerto Rican population has been spectacular, from slightly more than 2 percent of all Puerto Ricans in the United States in 1960 to more than 20 percent in 2018. According to the ACS, 255,928 residents of the island moved to Florida between 2006 and 2017.8 Puerto Ricans now represent the second-­largest Latino group in Florida, after Cubans, and the largest in Central Florida, mainly in the Orlando–­Kissimmee–­Sanford metropolitan area. In 2018, one out of five Latinos in Florida was of Puerto Rican origin.

Origins The modern history of Puerto Rican migration to Florida dates to the late nineteenth century. The earliest trickle of Puerto Rican migrants, from about 1885 to 1940, settled primarily in the Tampa Bay area, particularly in Ybor City, the core of the U.S. cigar-­making industry. Hillsborough County was the center of Florida’s small Puerto Rican population until 1930. Between 1940 and 1980, Puerto Rican migrants shifted their main destination to South Florida, especially to Miami, which provided job opportunities in seasonal agriculture, the garment industry, and tourism. A small number of prosperous business owners and professionals from Puerto Rico also settled in the Miami area in the 1940s and 1950s. Long before the emergence of Orlando as a major migrant destination, Miami’s Dade County recorded 17,329 Puerto Rican residents in 1970 and 44,656 in 1980. (However, the Cuban exodus after the 1959 revolution greatly overshadowed Puerto Rican migration to Miami.) Since the 1980s, most Puerto Ricans have moved to Central Florida, above all to the Orlando area, including veterans who had been stationed in Florida’s numerous military bases and engineers recruited by NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in nearby Cape Canaveral.9

The Farmworkers The first large-­scale movement of Puerto Ricans to Florida took off under the contract farmworker program sponsored by the Migration Division of Puerto Rico’s Department of Labor. Between the 1940s and 1960s, this program brought thousands of Puerto Ricans to mainland farms, mostly in northeastern states, recruited by U.S. agricultural businesses seeking cheap labor. The Puerto Rican newspaper El Mundo published several articles during the 1950s about the growing Puerto Rican presence in Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Counties. Most were seasonal workers specializing in the harvesting and processing of vegetables, such as potatoes, beans, avocados, corn, tomatoes, and lettuce. During the summer, many traveled north to work in farms and returned south during the winter. In 1953, about three thousand Puerto Ricans toiled in Florida farms, representing one-­fourth of all contract farmworkers in the state.10

“ m a y g o d t a k e m e t o o r l a n d o ” 43

The Exodus to Central Florida Puerto Rican migration to Central Florida began in earnest in the late 1960s. Hundreds of islanders acquired properties in the city of Deltona in Volusia County with the intention of retiring in the area. During that period, advertisements in Spanish-­ language newspapers on the island began to advertise cheap lots in Central Florida. Among others, the Sentinel Realty Agency represented Mackie Brothers, a Floridian firm that developed a project under the name of Deltona Corporation, which sold homes to clients in Puerto Rico. However, widespread media coverage of real estate frauds in Florida denounced that out-­of-­state individuals purchased swampland and other properties unfit for future construction and development. Thus the Sentinel Realty Agency paid for Puerto Rican journalists to visit the Deltona homes and lots to reassure potential buyers. The agency even organized three-­and four-­day excursions from the island to Deltona so that prospective buyers could inspect the lots and homes firsthand.11 In 1971, the opening of Walt Disney’s first theme park in Orlando spurred real estate speculation in the region, and middle-­class residents of the island saw a lucrative investment opportunity there. According to one journalist, “The first wave of Puerto Ricans to settle here [in the Orlando area] were largely retirees attracted to the quiet, safer lifestyle portrayed in Central Florida at a time when the island, and particularly San Juan, was experiencing a sharp increase in crime.”12 The migrant stream later drew on other Puerto Rican communities in New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, attracted by better living and working conditions as well as a milder climate in the U.S. South. By 1980, the census counted 6,662 residents of Puerto Rican descent in Orange County, 2,079 in Seminole, and 417 in Osceola.13 Puerto Rican migration from both the island and the mainland surged in the mid-­1980s. By then, small Puerto Rican enclaves had emerged in several counties of Central Florida, particularly Orange and Osceola. New migrants could find temporary housing with established relatives, follow their leads to potential job opportunities, and visit stores that sold Puerto Rican products and food. Local government agencies also noticed the increasing influx of migrants. As early as 1982, officials from the Orange County Public Schools contacted the Miami branch of the Commonwealth’s Migration Division, seeking information about the growing number of Puerto Ricans in their school district.14 Real estate advertisements continued to appear in newspapers in Puerto Rico and New York, encouraging the purchase of affordable houses in Central Florida. In the late 1970s, Landstar Homes started to aggressively market home sales in Orange and Osceola Counties, especially to Puerto Ricans. Landstar, which developed such neighborhoods as Buenaventura Lakes and Meadow Woods, opened sales offices in both New York and Puerto Rico in 1989 to pitch sales and book tours for potential buyers. Thousands of Puerto Ricans first learned about Central Florida through the marketing efforts of Landstar and other real estate companies that quickly imitated its strategies.15

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Between 1990 and 2000, the city of Orlando experienced the largest increase (142 percent) in the number of stateside Puerto Ricans. Today, the Orlando–­Kissimmee–­Sanford metropolitan area houses the second-­largest concentration of Puerto Ricans in the United States after New York City, a larger population than in such well-­established centers of the diaspora as Philadelphia and Chicago. During the first two decades of the twenty-­first century, Central Florida and especially the Orlando–­Kissimmee–­Sanford metropolitan area witnessed the greatest expansion of the stateside Puerto Rican population. The post-­Maria exodus has only reinforced Orlando’s central place in Puerto Rican migratory circuits.

The Puerto Rican Exodus and Its Changing Settlement Patterns Volume of the Migrant Flow A basic problem in documenting the Puerto Rican diaspora is the absence of reliable records on the exact number of people who move between the island and the mainland.16 This situation is due to Puerto Rico’s peculiar condition as an “unincorporated territory” of the United States, the treatment of Puerto Ricans as not “aliens” by U.S. immigration authorities since 1904, and the extension of U.S. citizenship to those born in Puerto Rico in 1917. As U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans do not need immigrant visas when they travel to one of the fifty United States. Nevertheless, official statistics on passenger movement provide a crude estimate of migration patterns between Puerto Rico and the United States. Compiled by Puerto Rico’s Planning Board and reproduced by the Government Development Bank, these figures show that more than two million people have relocated from the island to the United States since the beginning of the twentieth century (see figure 3.1). The magnitude of this exodus is even more staggering when one recalls that Puerto Rico’s population had not reached four million at the beginning of the twenty-­first century. According to these statistics, emigration became massive during the 1940s, peaked during the 1950s, contracted during the 1960s and 1970s, and resurged during the 1980s and 1990s. In 2006, the ACS estimated that for the first time, more persons of Puerto Rican origin were living stateside than on the island. This year also marked the onset of the island’s prolonged economic recession, which propelled migration to the United States.17 The displacement of the island’s population reached record highs during the second decade of the twenty-­first century. According to the ACS, the contemporary Puerto Rican diaspora has surpassed the size of the “Great Migration” between 1945 and 1965 (see figure 3.2). Between 2010 and 2018, the island’s population decreased by 14.3 percent, from 3.7 million to 3.2 million, largely due to high out-­migration rates. Population loss increased after the onslaught of Hurricane Maria in September 2017 and probably accelerated as a result of the earthquakes that shook the island between December 2019 and January 2020.

“ m a y g o d t a k e m e t o o r l a n d o ” 45

500 400 300 200 100 0 1900–9

1920–29

1940–49

1960–69

1980–89

2000–9

Figure 3.1.  Net migration between Puerto Rico and the United States by decade (thousands). (Sources: Banco Gubernamental de Fomento para Puerto Rico, “Indicadores económicos,” accessed March 28, 2018, http://​w ww​.bgfpr​.com/​spa/​economy/​latest​-information​-monthly​ -indicators​.html; and Junta de Planificación de Puerto Rico, Estadísticas socioeconómicas [San Juan: Junta de Planificación de Puerto Rico, 1972–­1989]; Informe económico al Gobernador [San Juan: Junta de Planificación de Puerto Rico, 1980–­1998]; Movimiento de pasajeros entre Puerto Rico y el exterior: Años fiscales [unpublished manuscript, Junta de Planificación, Programa de Planificación Económica y Social, Subprograma de Análisis Económico, San Juan, 2001].)

Changing Settlement Patterns The geographic distribution of Puerto Ricans in the United States has shifted greatly over the last five decades (see table 3.1). Although Puerto Ricans still concentrate in the state of New York, their proportion decreased from nearly three-­fourths of the total in 1960 to one-­fifth in 2018. For the first time ever, the number of persons of Puerto Rican descent in New York declined (albeit slightly) during the 1990s. Meanwhile, the proportion of Puerto Ricans has quickly increased elsewhere, above all in Florida. The states with the largest increases in their Puerto Rican population include Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Texas.

Geographic Distribution of Puerto Ricans in Florida As table 3.2 displays, Puerto Ricans cluster in Central Florida, particularly in Orange, Osceola, Polk, and Seminole Counties. In 2018, the ACS estimated that 446,166 persons of Puerto Rican origin lived in those four counties. Although Orange had the largest number of Puerto Rican residents in the state, Osceola had the largest percentage. A secondary concentration is in South Florida, composed of Miami-­Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Counties. According to the ACS, 239,180 Puerto Ricans were living there in 2018. A third Puerto Rican cluster is found around Tampa Bay,

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jorge duany

100

75

50

25

0 2006

2008

2010

2012

2014

2016

Florida Figure 3.2.  Migration from Puerto Rico to Florida and the United States, 2006–­2017 (thousands). (Source: U.S. Census Bureau, “State-­to-­State Migration Flows,” accessed March 28, 2018, https://​w ww​.census​.gov/​data/​tables/​t ime​-series/​demo/​geographic​-mobility/​state​ -to​-state​-migration​.html.)

which includes Hillsborough, Pinellas, and Pasco Counties, with 193,247 Puerto Rican residents in 2018. Puerto Ricans compose most of the Latino population in Osceola, Volusia, Pasco, Marion, and St. Johns as well as the largest Latino group in Orange, Seminole, Hillsborough, Hernando, Lake, and Pinellas. Florida’s Orange County has been by far the leading destination of migrants from the island at least since the end of the twentieth century (figure 3.3). Moreover, five of the top ten destinations of Puerto Rican migrants (Orange, Hillsborough, Osceola, Broward, and Palm Beach) were in Florida. Between 2000 and 2009, 18.4 percent of all persons relocating from the island moved to those counties. Between 2010 and 2014, the corresponding percentage was 19.8.18 Thus the recent Puerto Rican diaspora has been increasingly oriented toward Central and South Florida. Florida now has three of the top ten metropolitan areas in the United States with the largest Puerto Rican populations: Orlando–­Kissimmee–­Sanford, Miami–­Fort Lauderdale–­West Palm Beach, and Tampa–­St. Petersburg–­Clearwater (table 3.3). In 2018, the Orlando area had the second-­largest concentration of stateside Puerto Ricans after the New York area. Moreover, Puerto Ricans are the largest Latino group in the Orlando and Tampa areas and the second-­largest in Fort Lauderdale (after Cubans). In the Orlando area, more than 15 percent of all residents are of Puerto Rican descent, a higher share of the total population than in the New York area (about 6 percent).

“ m a y g o d t a k e m e t o o r l a n d o ” 47 table 3.1 geographic distribution of the puerto rican population in the united states by state, 1960–­2017 (percentages in parentheses) 1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2017

California

28,108

50,929

93,038

126,417

140,570

189,945

224,500

Connecticut

(3.1) 15,247

(3.6) 37,603

(4.6) 88,361

(4.6) 146,842

(4.1) 194,443

(4.1) 252,972

(3.8) 291,603

Florida

(1.7) 19,535

(1.9) 28,166

(4.4) 94,775

(5.4) 247,010

(5.7) 482,027

(5.4) (5.2) 847,550 1,128,225

Illinois

(2.2) 36,081

(2.0) 87,477

(4.7) 129,165

(9.1) 146,059

(14.2) 157,851

(18.3) 182,989

(20.2) 195,046

Massachusetts

(4.0) 5,217

(6.1) 23,332

(6.4) 76,450

(5.4) 151,193

(4.6) 199,207

(3.9) 266,125

(3.4) 334,959

New Jersey

(0.6) 55,351

(1.6) 138,896

(3.8) 243,540

(5.5) 320,133

(5.8) 366,788

(5.7) 434,092

(5.9) 470,640

New York

(6.2) 642,622

(9.7) 916,608

(12.1) (11.7) (10.8) (9.4) (8.4) 986,389 1,086,601 1,050,293 1,070,558 1,113,123

Ohio

(72.0) 13,940

(64.1) 20,272

(49.0) 32,442

(39.8) 45,853

(30.8) 66,269

(23.1) 94,965

(19.9) 126,554

Pennsylvania

(1.6) 21,206

(1.4) 44,263

(1.6) 91,802

(1.7) 148,988

(1.9) 228,557

(2.0) 366,082

(2.2) 445,442

Texas

(2.4) 6,050

(3.1) 6,333

(4.6) 22,938

(5.5) 42,981

(6.7) 69,504

(7.9) 130,576

(7.9) 184,643

Other states

(0.7) 49,156

(0.4) 75,517

(1.1) 155,045

(1.6) 265,677

(2.0) 450,669

(2.8) (3.3) 787,862 1,073,929

(5.5)

(5.3)

(7.7)

(9.7)

(13.2)

Total

(17.0)

(19.2)

892,513 1,429,396 2,013,945 2,727,754 3,406,178 4,623,716 5,588,664 (100.0)

(100.0)

(100.0)

(100.0)

(100.0)

(100.0)

(100.0)

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, “American FactFinder,” accessed March 28, 2018 http://​factfinder​ .census​.gov/​faces/​nav/​jsf/​pages/​index​.xhtml.

The Orlando–­Kissimmee–­Sanford metropolitan area has four major Puerto Rican residential enclaves—­namely, the eastern section of the city of Orlando, the south-­central area of Orlando, the city of Kissimmee (in Osceola County), and the Poinciana area (in Osceola and Polk Counties). In 2018, Buenaventura Lakes in Osceola County, with 15,917 Puerto Rican residents, was the largest Puerto Rican neighborhood in Central Florida. The adjacent Meadow Woods development in Orange County, with 13,344 Puerto Rican residents, was the second largest. The

table 3.2 top ten counties with residents of puerto rican origin in florida, 2017 Number of persons

As percent of Puerto Ricans in state

As percent of Latinos in county

As percent of all residents in county

Orange

194,754

17.3

45.9

14.4

Hillsborough

126,875

11.2

31.4

9.0

Osceola

101,359

8.9

53.5

29.7

Miami-­Dade

93,190

8.3

4.9

3.4

Broward

81,157

7.2

14.1

4.2

Polk

62,302

5.5

40.7

9.1

Seminole

55,171

4.9

55.8

11.9

Palm Beach

48,754

4.3

14.9

3.3

Volusia

34,337

3.0

46.0

6.4

Pasco

32,827

2.9

41.3

6.2

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, “American FactFinder,” accessed March 28, 2018 http://​factfinder​ .census​.gov/​faces/​nav/​jsf/​pages/​index​.xhtml.

Osceola, FL Bronx, NY Hartford, CT Palm Beach, FL Kings, NY 0

10

20

30

40

50

Figure 3.3.  Main destinations of migrants from Puerto Rico to the United States, 2010–­2017 (thousands). (Source: U.S. Census Bureau, “County-­to-­County Migration Flows,” accessed April 2, 2018, https://​w ww​.census​.gov/​topics/​population/​migration/​g uidance/​county​-to​ -county​-migration​-flows​.html.)

“ m a y g o d t a k e m e t o o r l a n d o ” 49 table 3.3 top ten metropolitan areas with residents of puerto rican origin in the united states, 2017

New York–­Newark–­Jersey City Orlando–­Kissimmee–­Sanford Philadelphia–­Camden– ­Wilmington Miami–­Fort Lauderdale–­West Palm Beach Chicago–­Naperville–­Elgin Tampa–­St. Petersburg–­Clearwater Boston–­Cambridge–­Newton Hartford–­West Hartford–­East Hartford Springfield New Haven–­Milford

Number of Puerto Ricans

As percent of Latinos

As percent of all residents

1,263,803

25.3

6.2

380,055 264,688

49.7 45.7

15.1 4.3

223,101

8.0

3.6

203,349 195,353 143,382 116,020

9.5 32.5 26.5 64.4

2.2 6.3 2.9 9.6

104,838 101,682

82.0 65.1

16.6 11.8

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, “American FactFinder,” accessed March 28, 2018 http://​ factfinder​.census​.gov/​faces/​nav/​jsf/​pages/​index​.xhtml.

latter two housing subdivisions have very high densities of Puerto Ricans, between 36 and 46 percent of all residents.19 The persistence of residential segregation among Puerto Ricans in Central Florida has attracted scholarly attention.20 Nonetheless, the physical and socioeconomic features of many Puerto Rican settlements in Florida are typical of middle-­class suburban neighborhoods, departing from the inner-­city barrios of New York and other northeastern states.21

Demographic and Socioeconomic Profile Birthplace According to the 2018 ACS, 40.9 percent of Florida’s residents of Puerto Rican origin were born on the island, while 59.1 percent were born elsewhere, predominantly in the United States. The proportion of island-­born residents was even higher, 46.3 percent, in the Orlando–­Kissimmee–­Sanford metropolitan area. The Puerto Rican population in Florida has a much larger share of persons born on the island than in New York (23.4 percent) and the entire United States (29.3 percent). This trend reflects the recent flow from the island to Florida compared to New York and other northeastern and midwestern states.

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jorge duany

Gender The gender distribution of Puerto Ricans in Florida, New York, the United States, and Puerto Rico is very similar. The four populations approximate an equitable distribution of women and men. However, Puerto Ricans in Florida and in the entire United States have a higher share of males (49.6 and 49.9 percent, respectively) than does Puerto Rico (47.6 percent). The data suggest that Puerto Rican migration to Florida is not highly selective by gender.

Age Two-­fifths of all Puerto Ricans in Florida are young adults (between 18 and 44 years of age), with a similar proportion for Puerto Ricans in the entire United States and slightly more than one-­third for New York and Puerto Rico (figure 3.4). The median age for Puerto Ricans in Florida and in New York (33.6 and 34.7, respectively) was much younger than on the island (42.9) but older than in the entire United States (30.6). Only 11.2 percent of Puerto Ricans in Florida were aged 65 or more, whereas the island’s population had a much larger share of older adults (20.7 percent). This finding confirms that Puerto Rican migrants to Florida tend to be younger than the island’s population.

Race Figure 3.5 compares the racial composition of Puerto Ricans in Florida, New York, the entire United States, and Puerto Rico, according to the categories used by the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2018, most Puerto Ricans in Florida described themselves

Florida New York United States Puerto Rico 0%

25% Male

50%

75%

100%

Female

Figure 3.4.  Gender distribution of Puerto Ricans in Florida, New York, the United States, and Puerto Rico, 2017. (Source: U.S. Census Bureau, “American FactFinder,” accessed March 28, 2018 http://​factfinder​.census​.gov/​faces/​nav/​jsf/​pages/​index​.xhtml.)

“ m a y g o d t a k e m e t o o r l a n d o ” 51

White

Florida

Black or African American American Indian or Alaska Native Asian or Pacific Islander Some Other Race

New York United States Puerto Rico

Two or More Races

0%

25%

50%

75%

100%

Figure 3.5.  Racial self-­classification of Puerto Ricans in Florida, New York, the United States, and Puerto Rico, 2017. (Source: Steven Ruggles et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 6.0 [machine-­readable database], University of Minnesota website, 2020.)

as white on the census (77.5 percent), while few classified themselves as black (4.3 percent). In New York, slightly less than half (48.8 percent) of Puerto Ricans categorized themselves as white; the rest reported mainly as “some other race” (32.3 percent) or black (10.1 percent). Florida’s residents of Puerto Rican origin reported the highest proportion of whites among the top ten states with the largest Puerto Rican populations.22 How can one interpret this racial self-­classification pattern? To begin, the more privileged class background of Puerto Rican migrants to Florida—­compared to other U.S. states—­helps explain the larger percentage of persons of European descent. Second, the preponderance of island-­born Puerto Ricans in Florida suggests that many still employ the prevalent racial categories in Puerto Rico, where most residents classify themselves as white. Finally, the presence of a large Latino population in Florida, especially of Cuban origin, which considers itself predominantly white, may skew the census results in favor of that racial category. In any case, other groups, such as non-­Hispanic whites and blacks, often treat Puerto Ricans as nonwhite.23

Education On average, the educational levels of Puerto Ricans in Florida are higher than elsewhere in the United States and Puerto Rico. In 2018, 84.7 percent of Puerto Ricans in Florida had completed a high school education compared to 80.5 percent nationwide, 77.5 percent on the island, and 75.1 percent in New York. Nonetheless, the proportion of college graduates was lower among Puerto Ricans in Florida (22.8 percent) than in Puerto Rico (26.7 percent) but higher than in New York (17.8 percent) and in the entire United States (20.7 percent). The migrants’

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relatively high educational attainment is reflected in their ability to speak English. In 2018, only 20.5 percent of Puerto Ricans in Florida said they spoke English “less than very well” compared to 17.1 percent in New York and 76.7 percent in Puerto Rico. Thus Puerto Ricans in Florida are drawn disproportionately among people with some college education and English-­language proficiency.

Occupation Puerto Ricans in Florida represent a broad cross section of the labor force, particularly white-­collar workers (table 3.4). In 2018, more than half (56.6 percent) of Puerto Rican workers in Florida (more than the 53.7 percent for the entire United States and more than the 56.1 percent for New York) were employed in administrative support, sales, and professional, technical, and managerial occupations. Contrary to some media reports, Puerto Ricans in Florida do not represent a “brain drain” in the statistical sense of drawing disproportionately from white-­collar workers in Puerto Rico. Instead, Florida’s Puerto Rican population has a slightly larger share (43.3 percent) of blue-­collar and service workers than the island’s population (42.5 percent).

Industry Puerto Ricans on and off the island concentrate overwhelmingly in the service sector of the economy (table 3.5). However, Puerto Ricans in Florida are more likely to be employed in retail trade; professional, scientific, and managerial services;

table 3.4 occupational distribution of puerto ricans in florida, new york, the united states, and puerto rico, 2017 (in percentages) Florida

New York

United States Puerto Rico

Management, business, science, and arts

26.8

29.0

28.4

33.5

Sales and office

29.7

27.9

26.3

27.3

Natural resources, construction, and maintenance

9.6

6.7

8.1

8.5

Production, transportation, and material moving

11.4

10.4

13.9

10.2

Service

22.4

26.0

23.4

20.4

Total

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

Note: Civilian employed population sixteen years and over. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, “American FactFinder,” accessed March 28, 2018 http://​factfinder​ .census​.gov/​faces/​nav/​jsf/​pages/​index​.xhtml.

“ m a y g o d t a k e m e t o o r l a n d o ” 53 table 3.5 industrial distribution of puerto ricans in florida, new york, the united states, and puerto rico, 2017 (in percentages) Florida

New York

United States Puerto Rico

Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, and mining

0.3

0.2

0.4

1.4

Construction

6.0

4.7

5.2

5.1

Manufacturing

5.0

4.7

8.6

8.2

Wholesale trade

3.0

2.3

2.6

2.8

Retail trade

14.0

11.2

12.7

13.4

Transportation/warehousing and utilities

6.9

6.8

6.4

3.9

Information

1.5

2.2

1.9

1.6

Finance/insurance and real estate and rental and leasing

6.4

7.9

6.2

5.7

Professional, scientific, and management, and administrative and waste management services

12.7

10.2

10.9

9.8

Educational services and health care and social assistance

20.4

29.5

23.5

24.4

Arts, entertainment, and recreation and accommodation and food services

14.8

9.4

11.6

9.1

Other services (except public administration)

5.4

5.5

4.7

5.6

Public administration

3.6

5.4

5.3

8.9

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

Total

Note: Civilian employed population sixteen years and over. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, “American FactFinder,” accessed March 28, 2018 http://​factfinder​ .census​.gov/​faces/​nav/​jsf/​pages/​index​.xhtml.

transportation; finance, insurance, and real estate; and accommodation and food services than in Puerto Rico. Conversely, a higher proportion of Puerto Ricans on the island than in Florida work in manufacturing, public administration, education, health care, social assistance, and agriculture. In New York, Puerto Ricans are more likely to work in education, health care, social assistance, finance, insurance, real estate, transportation, and utilities than in Florida. These differences reflect the structure of the labor market in each location. For instance, the tourist industry in the Orlando metropolitan area employs a much larger share of the labor force than elsewhere.

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Income and Poverty In 2017, the median household income for Puerto Ricans in Florida ($50,547) was more than double that of residents of Puerto Rico ($20,296), much higher than in New York ($40,061), and higher than nationwide ($46,809). Such relatively high income levels are even more impressive when one considers that average wages are lower in Florida than in New York. Furthermore, Puerto Ricans in Florida had a relatively low poverty rate (18.3 percent) compared to the entire United States (22 percent), New York (25.8 percent), and Puerto Rico (43.1 percent).

Business Ownership In 2018, 3.9 percent of Puerto Rican workers over sixteen years of age in Florida were self-­employed compared to 3.6 percent in New York, 3.5 percent nationwide, and 9.6 percent in Puerto Rico. According to the 2012 Survey of Business Owners, Puerto Ricans owned 71,291 businesses in Florida. In the 2007 survey (the latest database providing more detailed geographic information), 24,150 Puerto Rican–­owned businesses were in the Miami–­Fort Lauderdale–­Pompano Beach metropolitan area, 6,738 were in the Orlando–­Kissimmee–­Sanford area, and 4,621 were in the Tampa–­St. Petersburg–­Clearwater area. Most firms specialized in administrative and support services, professional services, transportation and warehousing, construction, retail trade, real estate, health care and social assistance, and other services.24 Many Puerto Rican enterprises have followed the migrants to Florida. Island-­ based businesses of various sizes have been extended to Central and South Florida, including the Ana G. Méndez Educational Foundation, Banco Popular de Puerto Rico, Carlos Albizu University, Los Cidrines, Cooperativa de Seguros Múltiples, Empresas Barsan, Empresas Fonalledas, Goya Foods, Inter-­American University, Martín’s BBQ restaurant, El Mesón Sandwiches, Plaza Gigante, Polytechnic University, Puerto Rican American Insurance Company (PRAICO), and R-G Crown Bank. Puerto Ricans currently dominate the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Metro Orlando and have also established the Puerto Rican Chamber of Commerce of Central Florida as well as a similar organization in South Florida and in other Florida cities. In addition, the Puerto Rico Chamber of Commerce has developed strong ties with the Orlando Regional Chamber of Commerce and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Metro Orlando.

Conclusion The settlement patterns of Puerto Ricans have changed drastically during the last five decades. Whereas New York had been the primary destination for Puerto Rican migrants during the 1940s and 1950s, Florida became their favorite location during the 1990s. The data presented in this chapter suggest that Puerto Ricans in Florida could follow a different path from other Puerto Rican diaspora communities. To

“ m a y g o d t a k e m e t o o r l a n d o ” 55

begin, the class background of Puerto Ricans in Florida tends to be more favorable than that of earlier population flows from the island. On average, Puerto Ricans in Florida have higher income, occupational, and educational levels than in other states such as New York. Besides, Puerto Ricans in Florida describe themselves as white more often than elsewhere in the United States. Many of them have avoided living in poor inner-­city neighborhoods and have resettled in suburban middle-­ class areas in the Orlando, Tampa, and Miami areas. The recent Puerto Rican diaspora has had a substantial demographic, economic, and cultural impact in Florida and may have a political impact as well. First, Puerto Ricans have added to the “Latinization” of Florida, where Hispanics now represent more than one-­fourth of the population. Second, Puerto Ricans have contributed their skills and capital to local labor markets, especially in the service sector. Numerous Puerto Rican entrepreneurs and professionals have thrived in South and Central Florida. Third, Puerto Ricans have furthered Florida’s ethnic and cultural diversity. Many retain ties to the island’s culture through their linguistic, musical, religious, and food practices, which they celebrate through countless festivals and parades. Lastly, although the political potential of Puerto Ricans as a voting bloc in a “swing state” in U.S. presidential elections is still unrealized, it is likely to favor the Democratic Party. Despite the opposition of some established groups, the Puerto Rican and Latino populations in both Florida and the United States will continue to expand. The lingering effects of Hurricane Maria will probably accelerate the rate of growth of Puerto Rican migration to Florida, particularly toward the Orlando area. It is still too early to predict how many Puerto Ricans will relocate to Florida and other parts of the United States. Nonetheless, the post-­Maria exodus is clearly the largest outflow of people in the history of the Puerto Rican diaspora, which will further contribute to the island’s depopulation. During the early 1500s, poor Spanish settlers in Puerto Rico were said to plead, “¡Dios me lleve al Perú!” (May God take me to Peru!), seeking better economic opportunities in a colony that was rich in mineral resources. Nowadays, thousands of Puerto Ricans seem to be proclaiming, “¡Dios me lleve a Orlando!” (May God take me to Orlando!) in the aftermath of its most devastating hurricane in recent memory.

Notes This chapter updates and expands materials included in some of my previous work on the subject. See Jorge Duany, “The Orlando Ricans: Overlapping Identity Discourses among Middle-­Class Puerto Rican Migrants,” in Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 105–­134; “Mickey Ricans? The Recent Puerto Rican Diaspora to Florida,” in La Florida: Five Hundred Years of Hispanic Presence, ed. Viviana Díaz Balsera and Rachel A. May (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 224–­241; and The Puerto Rican Exodus to Florida: A Demographic, Socioeconomic, and Cultural Portrait (unpublished report prepared for Pietrantoni Méndez & Álvarez LLC, San Juan, 2015). See also Duany and Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, Puerto Ricans in Orlando and Central Florida, Policy Report 1, no. 1 (New York: Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, City University of New York, 2006); Duany and Patricia

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Silver, “The ‘Puerto Ricanization’ of Florida: Historical Background and Current Status,” CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 22, no. 1 (2010): 4–­31. 1. Jennifer Hinojosa, “Puerto Rican Exodus: One Year since Hurricane Maria” (research brief, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, City University of New York, September 2018), https://c​ entropr.​ hunter.​ cuny.​ edu/s​ ites/d ​ efault/​fi les/​R B2018​-05​_ SEPT2018​ %20 ​%281​%29​.pdf. 2. Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, “New Estimates: 135,000+ Post-­Maria Puerto Ricans Relocated to Stateside,” Hunter College, City University of New York, March 2018, https://​ centropr​.hunter​.cuny​.edu/​sites/​default/​fi les/​data ​_ sheets/​PostMaria​-NewEstimates​-3​-15​-18​ .pdf. See also Edwin Meléndez and Jennifer Hinojosa, “Estimates of Post–­Hurricane Maria Exodus” (research brief, Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, City University of New York, October 2017), https://​centropr​.hunter​.cuny​.edu/​sites/​default/​fi les/​R B2017​- 01​ -POST​-MARIA​%20EXODUS​_V3​.pdf. 3. “Governor Scott to Travel to Puerto Rico Next Week,” flgov​.com, February 2, 2018, https://​w ww​.flgov​.com/​2018/​02/​02/​gov​-scott​-to​-travel​-to​-puerto​-rico​-next​-week/. See also Univisión Noticias, “¿Estás pensando en irte de Puerto Rico? ¿Quieres volver? Con este cuestionario sabrás cuántos piensan como tú,” October 20, 2017, http://​w ww​.univision​.com/​ noticias/ ​huracan​-maria/​e stas​-pensando ​- en​-irte​- de​-puerto ​-rico ​- quieres​-volver​- con​- este​ -cuestionario​-sabras​-cuantos​-piensan​-como​-tu. 4. The Miami-­based consulting firm Integrated Communications Research, led by Eduardo Gamarra, conducted the survey. The interviews were carried out from an international call center in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. 5. Elsewhere I have explored the political potential of Puerto Ricans in Florida, especially during presidential elections. See Duany, “Mickey Ricans?”; and Duany and Matos-­Rodríguez, Puerto Ricans in Orlando. See also José A. Cruz, “Barriers to Political Participation of Puerto Ricans and Hispanics in Osceola County, Florida: 1991–­2007,” CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 22, no. 1 (2010): 243–­285; and Patricia Silver, “Sunshine Politics: Puerto Rican Memory and the Political in New Destinations,” CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 29, no. 2 (2017): 4–­37. 6. U.S. Census Bureau, “Hispanic or Latino by Type, 2010 Census Summary File 1,” American FactFinder, accessed June  19, 2019, https://​factfinder​.census​.gov/​faces/​tableservices/​jsf/​ pages/​productview​.xhtml​?pid​= ​DEC​_10​_ SF1​_QTP10​& ​prodType​= ​table; and “Place of Birth by Citizenship Status, 2010 American Community Survey 1-­Year Estimates,” American FactFinder, last revised June  19, 2019, https://​factfinder​.census​.gov/​faces/​tableservices/​jsf/​pages/​ productview​.xhtml ​?pid ​=​ACS ​_10​_1YR ​_ B05002 ​& ​prodType ​= ​table. 7. U.S. Census Bureau, “Selected Population Profile in the United States: 2017 American Community Survey 1-­Year Estimates,” American FactFinder, last revised January 25, 2020, https://​factfinder​.census​.gov/​faces/​tableservices/​jsf/​pages/​productview​.xhtml ​?pid ​=​ACS ​_17​ _1YR ​_ S0201​& ​prodType ​= ​table. 8. U.S. Census Bureau, “State-­ to-­ State Migration Flows,” accessed March 28, 2018, https://​w ww​.census​.gov/​data/​t ables/​t ime​-series/​demo/​geographic​-mobility/​state​-to​-state​ -migration​.html. 9. Víctor Vázquez-­Hernández, “The Boricua Triangle: Tampa, Miami, and Orlando—­a Historical Overview of the Development of a Transnational Puerto Rican Diaspora in Florida,” FCH Annals: Journal of the Florida Conference of Historians 22 (2015): 155–­170, http://​fi les​ .ctctcdn​.com/​765b22b5001/​8ff689e3​- 0a57​-43d0​-acc4​-8a53a919c541​.pdf; Duany and Silver, “‘Puerto Ricanization’ of Florida,” 9; Elizabeth M. Aranda, “Puerto Rican Migration and Settlement in South Florida: Ethnic Identities and Transnational Spaces,” in Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States: Essays on Incorporation, Identity, and Citizenship, ed. Ana Margarita Cervantes-­Rodríguez, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Eric Mielants (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009), 111–­130; Marcos Feldman, “The Role of Neighborhood Organizations in the Production of Gentrifiable Urban Space: The Case of Wynwood, Miami’s Puerto Rican Barrio” (PhD diss., Florida International University, 2011), 60; U.S. Census Bureau, 1980 Census of Population (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983); Patricia Silver, “‘Culture Is More Than Bingo and Salsa’: Making Puertorriqueñidad in Central Florida,”

“ m a y g o d t a k e m e t o o r l a n d o ” 57 CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 22, no. 1 (2010): 57–­83; Patricia Silver and William Vélez, “‘Let Me Go Check Out Florida’: Rethinking Puerto Rican Diaspora,” CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 29, no. 3 (2017): 98–­125. 10. James F. Cunningham, “Patronos americanos elogian braceros boricuas en Florida,” El Mundo, July 22, 1953, 1, 14; “Puertorriqueños en Florida,” El Mundo, February 2, 1953, 8; “Migración a Florida,” El Mundo, May 19, 1954, 6; Rafael Santiago Sosa, “Desalojan a miles de boricuas,” El Mundo, August 2, 1958, 18. See also U.S. Department of Labor, Puerto Rican Farm Workers in Florida: Highlights of a Study (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Employment Security, 1953). 11. Rafael López Rosas, “Puertorriqueños ‘invaden’ Florida: Muchos adquieren terrenos allí,” El Mundo, June 2, 1968, 20; “Una de las mejores inversiones de su vida,” El Mundo, April 9, 1970, 20. 12. Larry Lipman, “City Council Election Indication of Growing Hispanic Political Clout,” Cox News Campaign 2000 Archive, 2000, http://​w ww​.coxnews​.com/​2000/​news/​cox/​052800​ _hispanic​.html. 13. U.S. Census Bureau, 1980 Census of Population, vol. 1, Characteristics of the Population (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982). 14. See Linda Medina, “Letter to Miami Officials,” Offices of the Government of Puerto Rico in the United States, Miami Regional Office, February 11, 1982, archives of the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, City University of New York. 15. See Simone Delerme, Latino Orlando: Suburban Transformation and Racial Conflict (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020); Julio R. Firpo, “Forming a Puerto Rican Identity in Orlando: The Puerto Rican Migration to Central Florida, 1960–­2000” (master’s thesis, University of Central Florida, 2012); Karl Ross, “Landstar Capitalizes on Puerto Rican Exodus,” Orlando Sentinel, August  7, 1994, http://​a rticles​.orlandosentinel​.com/​1994​- 08​- 07/​business/​ 9408050188​_1​_puerto​-rico​-landstar​-tiri. 16. The Institute of Statistics of Puerto Rico has compared various estimates of the recent migrant flow based on different sources of information such as the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Bureau of Transportation, and the Puerto Rican Ports Authority. See “Perfil del migrante: 2017,” Instituto de Estadísticas de Puerto Rico, February 5, 2017, https://​estadisticas​.pr/​fi les/​ Publicaciones/​PM ​_ 2017​_ IEPR ​_1​.pdf. 17. The immediate cause of the Island’s current recession was the 2006 phasing out of Section 936 of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code, which offered federal tax exemptions to U.S. corporations operating in Puerto Rico. For more information, see my Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 97–­98, 100–­103. 18. Steven Ruggles et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 6.0 [machine-­ readable database], University of Minnesota website, 2020. 19. Kevin Archer and Kris Bezdecny, “Searching for a New Brand: Imagining a New Orlando,” Southeastern Geographer 49, no. 2 (2009): 185–­199; Ramón Luis Concepción Torres, “Puerto Rican Migration, Assimilation, and Settlement Patterns in the Orlando MSA” (master’s thesis, State University of New York at Binghamton, 2008); Simone Delerme, “‘Puerto Ricans Live Free’: Race, Language, and Orlando’s Contested Soundscape,” Southern Spaces, March  24, 2014, http://​southernspaces​.org/​2014/​puerto​-ricans​-live​-free​-race​-language​-and​ -orlandos​-contested​-soundscape; Luis Sánchez, The New Puerto Rico? Identity, Hybridity, and Transnationalism within the Puerto Rican Diaspora in Orlando, Florida (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009); and U.S. Census Bureau, “American FactFinder,” accessed March 28, 2018, http://​factfinder​.census​.gov/​faces/​nav/​jsf/​pages/​index​.xhtml. 20. See Carlos Vargas-­Ramos, Settlement Patterns and Residential Segregation of Puerto Ricans in the United States, Policy Report 1, no. 2 (New York: Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, City University of New York, 2006); William Vélez and Giovanni Burgos, “The Impact of Housing Segregation and Structural Factors on the Socioeconomic Performance of Puerto Ricans in the United States,” CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 22, no. 1 (2010): 175–­197; Jacqueline Villarrubia-­Mendoza, “The Residential Segregation of Puerto Ricans in New York and Orlando,” Latino(a) Research Review 6 (2007): 119–­131; and “Characteristics of Puerto Rican Homeowners in Florida and Their Likelihood of Homeownership,” CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 22, no. 1 (2010): 155–­173.

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21. Still, Héctor R. Cordero-­Guzmán has documented that many recent immigrants from Puerto Rico suffer multiple socioeconomic disadvantages when compared with established residents of Florida. See Cordero-­Guzmán, Opportunity in the Sunshine State: Characteristics of Recent Movers from Puerto Rico to Florida (Washington, D.C.: National Council of La Raza, 2016). 22. Ruggles et al., Integrated Public Use. 23. For more discussion of racial issues among Puerto Ricans in Florida, see Delerme, Orlando Latino; Elizabeth M. Aranda, Sallie Hughes, and Elena Sabgogal, Making a Life in Multiethnic Miami: Immigration and the Rise of a Global City (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2014); Aranda and Fernando I. Rivera, “Puerto Rican Families in Central Florida: Prejudice, Discrimination, and Their Implications for Successful Integration,” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 4, no. 1 (2016): 57–­85; Mydalis Lugo Marrero, “En busca de algo mejor: Discursos sobre la emigración y las representaciones identitarias de la diáspora puertorriqueña en el área metropolitana de Orlando, Florida, Estados Unidos (2006–­2016)” (PhD diss., National University of La Plata, 2017); Patricia Silver, “Latinization, Race, and Cultural Identification in Puerto Rican Orlando,” Southern Cultures 19, no. 4 (2013): 55–­75; Patricia Silver, “Remembering Abuela: Memory, Authenticity, and Place in Puerto Rican Orlando,” Latino Studies 13, no. 3 (2015): 376–­401; Silver, “Sunshine Politics,” 4–­37; and Patricia Silver, “‘You Don’t Look Puerto Rican’: Collective Memory and Community in Orlando,” Memory Studies 9, no. 4 (2016): 405–­421. 24. U.S. Census Bureau, “American FactFinder.”

chapter 4

z Caribbean Mediascapes ruins and debt in puerto rico Jossianna Arroyo

Las cuentas del alma: no se acaban nunca de pagar. Soul accounts: are never ever paid. —­Rubén Blades

El Apagón During these months, I only had images, and images became substitutes—­metonymic substitutes for the faces, smells, and voices of my family members who could not communicate with me in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. First came the darkness and desperation as posts from friends and family members started to disappear from my feed. The day Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico (September 20, 2017), I lost contact with my sister and her family at 4:00 a.m. Then after four or five days, I was unable to communicate with my immediate family members. As images of the devastation that Hurricane Maria left on the island started to emerge, as well as news from the ground, the desfase between what was happening there and the knowledge available abroad was abysmal. Puerto Ricans were not able to communicate, as all phones and electric power went down. Diaspora Puerto Ricans became a source for their families on the island. Once Wi-­Fi antennas slowly came back, social media helped island Puerto Ricans to gather information, images, and coverage of the crisis from abroad. Many families remained without electricity for long periods of time (six months to two years). Abroad, Puerto Ricans were witnessing an interesting shift: for the first time in years, Puerto Rico was on the local primetime news coverage on CNN, ABC, and MSNBC. President Trump’s attacks on the people of Puerto Rico and his short visit to the town of Guaynabo, where he threw paper towels to the audience; the inefficiency of the colonial government; and the grim reality described by the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, and correspondents on the ground like David Begnaud put us on the radar. 59

60

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A few weeks later, as phone signals were coming back through (Red Claro), the voices of individual and collective rescue missions from all parts of the island, cleaning brigades, and other independent journalistic sources provided us with news from local sites. Ever since, the local colonial press kept “praising the efforts” of FEMA and covering up for the inept bureaucracy and the stalling and pillaging of resources sent to help those in need; it has also manipulated the number of deaths on the ground in houses and hospitals, making social media networks like Twitter and Facebook—­as well as the group of journalists at Centro de Periodismo Investigativo—­were the only sources of trusted news.1 Barely one month after the disaster, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz became the global face and voice of a group of desperate Puerto Ricans in the media. From Twitter to NBC’s comedy show Saturday Night Live, Yulín Cruz overshadowed Puerto Rico’s governor Ricardo Rosselló with her presence in the media and on the ground. Once again, media presence took precedence over the realpolitik, a sign of contemporary neoliberal times, when media convergence relies on twenty-­four-­ hour news or related information from different platforms. Just weeks after Hurricane Maria, the crisis was once again feminized, this time with the figure and voice of Yulín Cruz. The fact is that during the first two months after the hurricane, Puerto Rico received more media coverage in the U.S. local news than it had in the last twenty years. Yulín Cruz, portrayed as President Trump’s antagonist, became a symbol of the disaster at home and abroad, while explanations of Puerto Rico as a U.S. territory created the following conundrum: Did the U.S.A. Congress need to save Puerto Ricans because they are human beings who are facing the consequences of a terrible natural disaster? Or was the United States supposed to help because Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens? It might seem contradictory that from el apagón and the current electricity crisis, a proliferation of images and media coverage has emerged—­ironically, the fullest U.S.-­based coverage of the island in the last two or three decades. If the U.S. media has organized this coverage under the note “Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens” (even when they lived on that island, and islands are rodeadas de agua), I argue that this legitimacy connects with other forms of spectrality and debt—­representations promoted by the U.S. media, on the one hand, and re-­ created by local artists, performers, and photographers from the island and abroad who have been documenting or using their art to reflect on the crisis, on the other. This chapter uses these media representations (memes, caricatures) as a point of departure to move into other performances and mediums such as dance-­theater, literature, and photography in order to explore the presence of nature to discuss matter and the material in the face of an economic crisis. While the trope of ruins and ruination has been a common thread in Cuban studies since the Special Period in the 1990s, Puerto Ricans’ colonial condition and the exploitation of nature and natural resources have been a commonality of its history that have led to what appear to be more nuanced or less critiqued forms of ruination. Writer Eduardo Lalo, born in Cuba and raised in Puerto Rico, has explored the trope in his writings, videos, photography, and art installations. In many ways, his

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work anticipated a generation of writers, photographers, and performers who have worked on Puerto Rico’s economic crisis in the last couple of years. In these recent works, and similar to many Cuban contemporary artists, the crisis is manifested in art pieces, performance or photography, that involve bodies and lives that have been figuring themselves in posthuman realms with connections to a necro-­ontology. Here nature, creativity, matter, and the reconstruction of geographical spaces are related to struggles for survival. The analysis of images, art, and performance in the Puerto Rico pre-­and post-­Maria discusses the language of debt and the current economic crisis. Puerto Rico’s economic debt ($70 billion) and the role that the new plan for the crisis, or PROMESA (Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act), created by the Obama administration in 2016, and its representative, the Junta de Control Fiscal, have created a new order of law and economic assessment in Puerto Rico. If in 1917 the Jones-­Shafroth Act offered Puerto Ricans citizenship, this citizenship came with a territoriality clause that made Puerto Ricans consumers of U.S. goods and economies and unable to trade with other countries unless this trade took place on U.S. vessels. This embargo situation worsened the state of emergency created in the months after the hurricane, as the neighboring Caribbean or Latin American countries could not offer immediate help. Puerto Rico’s current economic debacle started to develop acutely in 2006, when the provision known as Section 936 ended in Puerto Rico, and the tax revenue offered to U.S. corporations on the island expired. Many Puerto Ricans were left unemployed and had to migrate; others were left on the island in a desperate situation. Cuts in all areas of life—­particularly in infrastructure and energy—­have created a physical ruination of space. Many artists have created works that reflect on these changes. Water, sleep, and suspension have been the main metaphors of these works, and many anticipated the conditions of suffocation, drowning, and despair in Puerto Rico. One example is a photographic series by Adál Maldonado (ADÁL), Puerto Ricans Underwater (Los ahogados), a project started on social media (Facebook and Instagram) that has gone viral and now has been collected into a small book of photographs.2 Another example is his recent ongoing series Los dormidos, which has added images that represent the reality post-­Maria.3 On the other hand, Javier Cardona’s dance performance Hasta el cuello (2016) reflects on the ruination of space and gentrification in Santurce.4 These works, by focusing on the crisis, delve into what Naomi Klein has described as Puerto Rico’s “perfect storm” of economic and social ruin by starting discussions about indebted and fugitive bodies, action, citizenship, and debt.5 A new generation of photographers such as Adriana Parilla, a graduate of the University of Puerto Rico currently pursuing a master of art in photography in Paris, took the first images of post-­Maria destruction, since the hurricane hit when she was visiting her family in the island, and as she traveled across the island as a Red Cross volunteer trying to reach families in remote towns.6 This chapter will put these works in conversation with some images of the media coverage from the United States, Cuba, and Puerto Rico (and their critical interpellations

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on the island); al son, del medley, the mega (the son, the medley, the mega); and “Despacito” (which was weeks or months after the natural disaster), as well as Hasta el cuello by performer Javier Cardona and the photographic series Puerto Ricans Underwater by Adál Maldonado, which were completed in 2016–­2017 and explore the crisis in all its dimensions. In other words, they foreshadow the life in Puerto Rico postdisaster as they explore race, racism, gender, class, subjectivity, and the migration of four hundred thousand Puerto Ricans to the United States, particularly to the state of Florida.

Humor and Critique Political cartoons have emerged to criticize the current crisis. Contrary to traditional forms of media, political cartoons have the power to offend, as we saw with the Charlie Hebdo controversies around racism, representations of African and Muslims in 2015, and the recent firing of a political cartoonist from a major newspaper in the United States. In Puerto Rico, political cartoons have provided a space to represent social realities and criticism. Since his election, President Trump has been present in political cartoons all over the world. In the first cartoon, created by De la Nada!’s animator and cartoonist Rangely J. García Colón (Rangy), we see a political satire on Puerto Rican local candidates, including the prostatehood governor. Rangy has a Facebook page and a YouTube-­ based channel and has created cartoons such as “La culpa la tiene Palmagül” (It’s Palmagül’s fault). The name of the skit is a composite of the name of the Turkish soap opera, Fatmagul, and the symbol of the prostatehood party, the palm tree (la palma). After Hurricane Maria, as Ricia Anne Chansky argues, García worked on a webcomic diary entitled, Ave María: A Comic Diary of a Category 5 Disaster. Using a dim internet signal from a close Burger King, she was able to publish some of these cartoons on a daily basis on her Facebook De la Nada! platform.7 The cartoons I am examining here were published on Facebook only a few days later after President Trump’s short visit to Puerto Rico on October 4, 2017. In the first cartoon, there is a long line of Puerto Ricans at the airport (see figure 4.1). Their faces look sad and desperate. Above the long line, President Trump’s face appears from a television monitor that says, “Puerto Ricans have thrown the budget out of whack,” a quote from his short press conference. An angry Puerto Rican answers, “Guess now we will have to throw your reelection out of whack!”—­a comment that relies on the fact that Puerto Ricans that move to the mainland United States can vote in presidential elections. In the second cartoon, also by Rangely, many hands lift a battered island of Puerto Rico, the people, artists, diaspora, government, the mayor of San Juan, and even the U.S. military while an obese, orange Trump tweets, “Ingrates,” on a sinking throne made out of his own golf clubs (see figure 4.2). As we have seen with the impact of Hurricanes Irma and Maria—­our second and third natural disasters covered by social media after Haiti’s earthquake in 2010—­photography, or what could be described as iconic images, have become important sources

Figure 4.1.  Rangely García, De la Nada!, cartoon, October 2017.

Figure 4.2.  Rangely García, De la Nada! 2, cartoon, October 2017.

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of information in the aftermath of the disaster. They also illustrate how natural disasters have an effect on our sense of time, space, and life. Iconic images arrived from Cuba and invaded social media just a day after Hurricane Irma hit Havana and the northern coast of the island. In one such image, a group of neighbors play dominoes in a flooded street in Centro Habana. The men are concentrated on the game while many are around either watching or collecting debris. This image—­a continuity of space and time—­was debated on social media, as it showed resilience and continuity as well as masculine poise. Another image that shows several Cubans bathing in the rain and celebrating in the flooded waters was criticized by Cubans, as it showed resilience in a “popular way and classless way” by representing Cuban ignorance or detachment from disaster. A meme with a line from the song “Hasta que se seque el malecón” by Cuban reggaetón artist Jacob Forever—­also a popular tune, sung by locals and international tourists—­completed the image. Contrary to what many believed, the meme was created by the Cuban tourist company Online Tours, which has offices in Havana, Barcelona, Madrid, and Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. The agency is owned by Javier Leal Estébanez, son of historian Eusebio Leal, architect and director of many restoration projects in Old Havana.8 In one image and meme, the exoticism and local color offered by poor, unruly women and one man became an offensive joke and a marketing tool—­an affective turn on how and why Cubans and Caribbean peoples understand their losses “in a certain way” (de cierta manera), as Antonio Benítez Rojo reminds readers in his essay (and later, book) La isla que se repite.9 Caribbean peoples’ “certain way” is not a nationalistic claim but a difficult encounter with time and resources in moments of dire scarcity; a pact with debt, labor, and the condition of the “undercommon”; a political dissent in times of invisibility.10 In later interpretations, many discovered that the domino players were workers who were resting after hours spent picking up the debris of their own neighborhoods. The Cuban women and children who were dancing in the rain probably knew they were being photographed, so their cheerfulness might have been performed for the lens. This behavior is a form of play and engagement that situates the lens as a power instrument. “That magic” produced by the destitute, the poor, and the undercommons is still a conundrum for political thought, and as Richard Iton reminds us in the case of African Americans, it remains the key to understanding why the creative is always imposed in images or imaginaries of the popular and the need of many contemporary artists to look for these local town-­or cityscapes to use as backgrounds for their productions.11 While sometimes the ethnographic eye of these images remains similar, the digitalization and conversion of a group of citizens into a meme is similar to the dehumanization of racialized subjects and use of digital blackface in contemporary memes.12 Artistic photography looks for local color but sometimes relies on the consent of those photographed while the photographer tries to maintain the iconicity of the image. In the following images shot by Puerto Rican photographer Adriana Parrilla

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in her series entitled ¡Santa María! taken in October 2018, the natural disaster is represented in the faces of those who are hopeless. Parrilla was vacationing on the island with her family when the hurricane hit on September 20, 2017. Similar to Rangely, she named the series after the popular plena song about a hurricane: “Santa María, líbranos de todo mal, ampáranos señora, de este terrible animal” (Santa María, liberate us from evil, protect us our lady from this terrible beast). The pictures show the impact of the disaster on the natural and living conditions and were taken during rescue missions across the countryside. Figure 4.3 shows the impact of the hurricane on nature, particularly tree life. We see the back of a house while a small creek crosses behind. The accumulation of trees lets us see the level of damage, as the natural landscape coexists with the living space—­the house and debris. Many of those impacted were the elderly who had to take the recovery effort into their own hands. An elderly woman holds a packed blanket in her hands and two bottles of Clorox (see figure 4.4). It could be assumed that these are recent provisions offered to her by rescuers and that she will use them to clean what is left of her living space. She looks seriously at the camera, but her face is not one of complete resignation. She is ready to take whatever comes into her hands. The power of this image is deep and resides mainly in the direct gaze of this elderly woman, someone who has lived and experienced many other natural disasters on the island. The elderly population across the island was the most vulnerable months after the disaster. What is left for her? Whatever is left, she will clean tidily and reorganize. That is her present.

Figure 4.3.  Destruction in Puerto Rico. Adriana Parrilla, ¡Santa María! photography series, October 2017. Courtesy of the photographer.

Figure 4.4.  Woman with detergent bottle, Puerto Rico. Adriana Parrilla, ¡Santa María! photo­ graphy series, October 2017. Courtesy of the photographer.

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Deudas and the Undercommon A group of neighbors gathers to eat some meat and rice from the only one who is able to get gas. A shopping cart—­suspended in the air—­becomes the only way of transporting water and food through a destroyed bridge to hundreds who cannot and would not desire to leave their houses or land. A community effort is organized to cut trees that have fallen on electric lines; children bring out their plastic trucks to help. Some ice is shared with an elderly patient who needs to keep his insulin cold. Families do not have time to cry for their ill or bury their dead. Many are living in tents on the island and abroad. The darkness—­the full darkness—­is making it possible for many to look within and across, to be able to see in the face of their family member or their neighbor a conversation, a needed connection, a form of grieving or acting together in the face of despair. The crisis is the past, the present, and the future. How can one think about the future of the crisis or futurity in relation to it? Puerto Ricans have anticipated disasters, have lived through and survived them. As Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri jokingly and acutely points out, we are the “cockroaches” of the beginning, the past, the present, and the future; the alfa y omega of survival; the creatures of the tenement and the blue tarps adapting from and for the elements.13 Years, decades, centuries of debt and colonialism make Puerto Ricans “indebted citizens.” Indebted citizenship, negotiated in the case of Puerto Rico within its colonial relationship with the United States, is an important trace of neoliberalism that marks many of the current trends of capital in the greater Caribbean—­for example, in Cuba and Hispaniola, whose triangular relationship with the United States has been marked by dictatorships such as Trujillo’s and Batista’s and the Cold War. If capitalism makes us all citizens of debt, what happens now in neoliberal times when debt forms and informs citizenship? What happens with these Caribbean islands, particularly Puerto Rico, where the perfect storm of local greed and corruption, neoliberal reforms, and mega natural disasters has hit the core of our daily lives, relationships, sense of self? How do Puerto Ricans not only negotiate but also enact the undercommons of fugitive debt? Is there a now? Puerto Ricans have historically paid their debts with their bodies. Since Hurricanes Irma and Maria, bodies have become the currency of debt and indebted citizenship. But what is “indebted citizenship” in the case of Puerto Rico? Answering this entails focusing on how the global market (featured in our global musical hit “Despacito”), the media, and local artists (photographers and performers) have proposed and re-­presented their imaginaries of the real world within the crisis in relation to debt and capital. State and police repression, including illegal incarceration, since the protests on May 1, 2018, and the later protests of Verano19 that outed Governor Ricardo Rosselló have taken a toll on a population that is already tired of abuses and has realized that this antidemocratic stance is the new “state” of Puerto Rican society.

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The excessive show of force by the police and the silence of the local government brings back the reality that for the Puerto Rican colonial condition, debts have been and are paid with bodies. The people have been attacked, gassed, put down—­these are the bodies of children, the elderly, teachers, those who cannot breathe. Yet they continue to live against all odds. To exist and to survive. As Christina Sharpe writes, “In the wake with no state or nation to protect us, with no citizenship bound to be respected, to act life despite death: to think and be, and act from there.”14 For humanity in the wake, visibility and protests come with a price—­in this case, the price of consumption under a neoliberal script or even physical death. Puerto Ricans have been part of this script since the release of the song “Despacito” in January of 2017. Ironically, months before the worst national disaster in the last one hundred years, the tune—­cowritten by Puerto Rican Luis Fonsi and Panamanian Erika Ender and sung by Fonsi, rap star Daddy Yankee, and Justin Bieber—­became the song of the summer. Because of its success, it also became an anthem for attracting international and local tourism to the island.

“Quiero Respirar Tu Cuello Despacito” “Despacito” is a song about seduction and desire. This will, the will of desire, is centered on seeing, touching, talking, and particularly breathing. “Quiero respirar tu cuello despacito”—­the phrasing of the song playing with erotic longing and fantasy. The fact that “Despacito” is not only the most popular song on YouTube but also the song that has had more remakes (in almost every language from Swedish, to Chinese, to Bengali, to Hindi) speaks to its popularity and to the fact that the song exudes a global beat of reggaetón-­rumba-­flamenca-­bachata that translates into sensuality and desire. The fact that this beat accommodates so many languages derives from the Afro-­Asian roots of these rhythms. At the same time, the lyrics and local geography of the music video (La Perla, San Juan) locate the global beat in an exotic place—­a poor barrio where gentrification is (as yet) nonexistent and the demands of authenticity are reflected and portrayed. This global imprint; the presence of the only Puerto Rican black ex–­Miss Universe, Zuleyka Rivera; and local color made this video the most-­watched YouTube brand, with billions of hits. You don’t have to know Puerto Rican Spanish to understand the global beat of the song, and many of these viewers do not know what the lyrics mean. Not surprisingly, when I analyzed it with a mixed group of Anglo-­American and African American students, a higher percentage of them did not know that the song alludes to a sexual encounter. Years before Hurricane Maria hit the island, La Perla gained more visibility through the video, and their local businesses profited from “Despacito,” making it an asset for global and local tourism. Middle-­class Puerto Ricans from the island and the diaspora who never thought about visiting La Perla started visiting local businesses in the area.15 In the video, a group of local Puerto Ricans take the “Despacito Tour.” The tour is sponsored by callejeandoPR​.com, a local tourist organization in favor of internal

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tourism. The goal of the company is “practicar un turismo responsable. Que nuestra gente visite simples pero excepcionales destinos. Impulsar el turismo interno para conservar los recursos naturales. Aportar a la culinaria puertorriqueña degustando nuestros productos” (to practice responsible tourism. That our people visit simple but exceptional destinations. To enhance internal tourism to conserve natural resources. To contribute to the Puerto Rican culinary tradition by tasting our products).16 Yashira Gómez, the community leader at La Perla, takes the group to different sites: El Callejón de los Cuernos, where local women and U.S. marines used to have sex; the building with the Lares flag; the site where the first Head Start Program was inaugurated by former governor Felisa Rincón in the early ’60s and a community where local students can do their practice for school; a basketball court founded with money offered by NBA players such as J. J. Barea; a cuchifrito (Puerto Rican fritters) stand; and the Park Luis Ramírez. The group leader says, “Este es uno de los mejores spots, aqui se puede tomar fresco” (This is one of our best places, here you can get some fresh air) and “Aquí se filmó el video de Cultura Profética del Banco Popular” (they filmed the Prophetic Culture of the Banco Popular video here), which talks about a local initiative that although it wants to help local tourism, presents the mediascape as the main sustained ideology for coming into La Perla. At the end of the clip, it looks as if these local tourists are admiring the view more than the community itself. If “Despacito” is a local-­global sensorium, it is clear that these images transform both the local rhythm and paces into “sponsored identities” that define scripts of neoliberal multiculturalism. I want to return to breathing, the intimate breathing on your neck from a desiring and willing partner, as a metaphor for what happens next: “Yo no tengo prisa yo me voy a dar el viaje / Empezamos lento, después salvaje”—­the invitation to the dance and the erotic encounter and its cadences and rhythms into a climax. To read the opposite—­the absence of breathing—­we turn to the Puerto Rican condition in Javier Cardona’s Hasta el cuello and some photographs from Adál Maldonado’s Puerto Rico Underwater and Los dormidos.

Hasta el cuello , Puerto Ricans Underwater , and Los dormidos When Javier Cardona performed Hasta el cuello in an abandoned lot in Barrio Gandul in Santurce in November 2016, I could not attend. Thus watching the performance in video format opened new ways of viewing and assessing the movement via my computer screen. From the beginning, a mediation is set; at the same time, the fourth wall of the theater-­participatory space is complicated, as the digital image can be stopped and the perception of each movement gets closer. The techne of the scenography is complex. An abandoned lot or junkyard in Barrio Gandul contains four cars; pieces of metal, glass, and mortar bricks are mixed with mud and rainwater. A mural of baseball star Roberto Clemente is in the background,

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bearing witness to the action. In this abandoned lot, three black bodies of two men (Javier Cardona and Aramis Garay) and one woman (Lydela Rodríguez from the collective performance group Las Nietas de Nonó) exist as creatures whose movements—­from crablike motions, to jumps, to violent and sometimes love-­like embraces—­hint at the geographies of Puerto Rico and its present crisis of economic drowning. When the presenter, a character with an illuminated mask in her head (Aneek Hernández), enters the space with lights on her head, the installation piece begins. Initially, the three dancers, moving like creatures, appear behind a fence, their crablike movements starting slowly and then intensifying. One dancer (Cardona) jumps from a car to the roof of the shack and suspends himself from several objects. It appears that this body wants to transcend or escape, making space for the others. At the same time, the remaining dancers enter and leave the cars; they sit with their legs outside and hang from the doors and car tops to prove the connection between man and machine. The abandoned vehicles on the site serve a function of mobility and action, as they appear to respond to the energy of these movements. The bodies hit the car in what appears to be a rape scene, when the only woman attacks the man—­and vice versa. After this scene, Cardona’s character walks around the shattered glass, adding an extra soundscape (stress, brokenness) into broken phrases. In the second act, the three dancers behind the fence move together, separately and fiercely as their bodies get swept with mud (from the space) and dirt from rolling on top of the cars. The act ends when Cardona’s body hangs from an upper position along with the other male character from the right-­side wall—­his body falls while the other male dancer also jumps in a parallel movement, ending the piece on a high note of climax (see figure 4.5). The soundscape of Hasta el cuello created by music artist Recluso is a mix of electronic, natural, and cityscape sounds. By coincidence, the soundscape I am listening to includes the voice-­over and music from Alexandra Lúgaro’s political campaign. Lúgaro, who was a candidate for governor in the elections of 2016 for the party Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana, was holding a meeting close to the site of the performance that same evening. In an eerie turn of events, the soundscape became more political, while the dancers’ feet broke pipes, glass, and debris. While Recluso’s original score played with the deconstruction of musical tropes of Puerto Rican nationalism, like our national anthem “La Borinqueña” and “Preciosa” (Rafael Hérnandez), the dancers’ bodies in a frenzy reflected on the broken illusions of the Free Associated State (Commonwealth) as a failed political future. In ADÁL’s series Puerto Ricans Underwater (Los ahogados) and Los dormidos, both done for social media sites and part of the 2018 exhibit Puerto Rico Under Water at Columbia University, we attend to the psychic, affective intrusions of debt and anguish but also solitude and creativity in the body. The series that started in 1987, with ADÁL’s self-­portrait underwater, anticipated social media sites but reflected on his life in New York. The bodies underwater scream, smile, open their eyes, and have icons of self-­expression that mark them. Water, the source of life, is

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Figure 4.5.  Javier Cardona, Hasta el cuello. Photo by Antonio Ramírez Aponte. Courtesy of Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, “MAC en el Barrio” project, San Juan, PR.

the liminal crossroad in these images, where “holding your breath” is making the shot possible and “giving birth” to the final shot (see figures 4.6 and 4.7). The sink is a powerful container of possibilities—­the one that holds and protects but also puts you in that liminal space—­“el ahogo.” The punctum in these images reminds us of Victorian death photography (particularly the black-­and-­white ones). In others, we assess the performance of the self as a labor-­affective social matter. To give birth, but also to conceive life, in dire conditions reflects on the islands the impossibility of what poet Virgilio Piñera called “la condición del agua por todas partes.”17 Thus water is our subjective affirmation and possibility. Sexuality and desire appear as inherent parts of the self, played for the camera but also as part of an intimate-­introspected erotic game. Thus in Puerto Ricans Underwater, desire, sexuality, and art open up dimensions “beyond the sink.” In a way, these suspended bodies in water son, “they are,” and create even in these self-­imposed conditions. In the video of Los dormidos—­what Maldonado has called “waking up Puerto Ricans from an ecological and colonial crisis”—­a young woman sleeps covered with the Puerto Rican flag; the distorted scream of waking up haunts the sleep of the woman, who does not move.18 In other images, the tropes of travel and migration can be seen, but ideas of intimacy and love also come through (see figure 4.8). As with Puerto Ricans Underwater, the bed is only the “framing” of many actions revealed in the image. Puerto Rico’s archipelagos, in many areas underwater, have shifted the historical and human geography in and of the island.19 The island

Figure 4.6.  Andrea del Pilar, ADÁL, 2016. Series “Los ahogados.” Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 4.7.  Francisco Felix, ADÁL, 2016. Series “Los ahogados.” Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 4.8.  Isa Idepunto + Caribe, ADÁL, 2018. Series Los dormidos. Courtesy of the artist.

pre-­Maria is not the one that we left or the one that we will encounter when we return. Images from the disaster zone, still coming out, appear to be more present for diaspora Puerto Ricans than for people on the mainland due to the fact of isolation and faulty communication. Years after the hurricane, the crisis continues, as real displacement, death, and drowning (in debt) are present.

Image and Fugitive Debt To conclude, I would like to return to a line of “Despacito” to remark on the role of debt, and indebted citizenship, in the age of neoliberalism and what that means for Puerto Rico and Caribbean society today. If, as Ariadna Godreau Aubert has declared in a recent book Las propias: Apuntes para una pedagogía de las endeudadas, being in debt “es un estado material, político, social y afectivo que significa tener y sentirse a la vez, desposeída de algo”20—­place as a condition and dis/placement as a sign build into the body not only a form of longing but also a form of return. Puerto Ricans owe, and in their owing and refusal to pay, they are enacting a form of fugitivity that is currently being punished by those who created the crisis. If “Despacito” is a fantasy call—­to read it as a locus of neoliberal multiculturalism in relation to debt—­debt is yet to be understood through its feminized, racialized dimensions. In other words, there is a collective fuck where there is no erotic seduction but violent rape. Creators of the crisis psychologize these citizens/denizens, those who refuse to pay, as the main cause of the problem, displacing the colonial support (mantengo) to a made and remade “culture of poverty,” where impoverished Puerto

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Ricans, mostly women (jefas de familia), are blamed for their expenses and their “incapacity for work.” The fact is that during the first two months after the hurricane, Puerto Rico received more media coverage in U.S. local news than in the last twenty years. After the short, twenty-­minute visit by Pence and President Trump and the paper towel fiasco, the figure of San Juan’s mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz—­portrayed as President Trump’s antagonist—­became a symbol of the disaster at home and abroad, while explanations of Puerto Rico as a U.S. colonial territory turn our analysis back to these questions: Do we need to save Puerto Ricans because they are human beings who are facing the consequences of a terrible natural disaster? Or is the United States supposed to help Puerto Rico because the island is part of the United States and Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens? These questions reverberate on the notion of citizenship and offer another layer to the neoliberal crisis that has emerged, particularly and in the case of Puerto Rico after the abolition of the 936 corporations in 1996 and their final expulsion in 2006. Lazzarato writes that the neoliberal crisis in Europe started in 2007; what he describes “as the priorization of sovereign and disciplinary exercise of power within a security society by establishing authoritarian governmentality”21 has been the reality in Puerto Rico through our colonial history and has received a neoliberal imprint since the 1990s. Citizens “pay” with their bodies and honor their faulting debt. The local banks at fault are protected under PROMESA as well as the Junta de Control Fiscal. The several examples examined in this chapter—­the cartoons by Rangely García and the tour in La Perla, the performance by Javier Cardona, and the photographs by Adriana Parrilla and ADÁL—­present creative and symbolic allegorical viewpoints of the crisis. In them, we see collectives in movement, either in the promotion of local tourism or in creative art, and dance and theater in a moment of crisis. While in the “Despacito” and La Perla video, there is an ethno-­fascination with “otherness” and “the exotic” that deploys forms of neoliberal multiculturalism, the residents of La Perla see these self-­explorations as possibilities for business, for building in the community. As we see in the Cuban picture created by Online Tours, contemporary tourism follows the neoliberal script of exoticism, exploiting the local poor and the destitute. If for Cuba it is the bodies of the poor that are put on display in relation to the natural disaster, in Puerto Rico it is the success of the popular song that marks the interest of local Puerto Ricans to visit La Perla. In both examples, this neoliberal script is marked by the popularity of reggaetón, a global sound coming from the Caribbean diaspora via Jamaica and Panama and finding fusion in Puerto Rico. While reggaetón marks the neoliberal soundscape, the soundscapes and body movements in Cardona’s Hasta el cuello deconstruct national symbols and audioscapes to build a new “strident” mobile audioscape that is pessimistic and projects the ecologies of black bodies becoming one with the elements—­matter, mud, water, glass, debris—­suspended in space. The images in ADÁL’s photography speak to the diversity, uniqueness, and creative process of self-­making of the Puerto Rican condition. This condition—­psyched, artistic, suffering, and in agony—­in its humorous irony is displaced and forged into the

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punctum between life and death. As it happens in the wake of a natural disaster in Cuba or Puerto Rico, the islands struggle with the push to be open to a tourist market and the economic crisis and poverty of its citizens. An “undercommons,” or fugitive class—­“el de las cuentas de la vida, pero también del alma”—­rises. If owing to others and the self is the stream of the neoliberal script, Puerto Rico’s owning and refusal of this debt and Cuba’s resilience in front of its political dilemmas are key to the contemporary dilemmas of both the Puerto Rican and Caribbean conditions.

Notes 1. The Centro de Periodismo Investigativo is an independent network of Puerto Rican journalists that works to produce and democratize news in contemporary Puerto Rico, promoting access to the truth without the manipulation of information or control of other journalistic resources and media. It was founded in 2012 and has been key to the recent reports and discussions about the death toll after Hurricane Maria. In July 2019, Centro journalists released more than nine hundred pages of a chat in the application Telegram that involved Governor Rosselló and five of his assistants. The chat conversations, as well as the indignation of many who felt tired of abuses by his administration, led to the movement Verano19, in which millions of Puerto Ricans led demonstrations that resulted in Roselló’s resignation. 2. Ádal Maldonado, Puerto Ricans Underwater [Los ahogados], foreword by Mercedes Trelles, Nuyorican in Exile ed. (San Juan: Strange Cargo Press, 2017). 3. Ádal Maldonado (ADÁL), Los dormidos, series photography, 2017–­2018. 4. Javier Cardona, Hasta el cuello, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Series for Barrio El Gandul, November 2016. 5. See Naomi Klein, The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes On the Disaster Capitalists (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2018). 6. Adriana Parrilla, ¡Santa María!, photography series, October 2017, https://​v isura​.co/​ parrilla/​projects/​santa​-maria. 7. Rangely J. García Colón (Rangy) is a Puerto Rican illustrator, cartoonist, and storyboard artist. She graduated from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale and is currently based in Puerto Rico. She started working with “¡Atención! ¡Atención!,” a pedagogical tool with rock music for young children. Currently she is the director and creative artist behind De la Nada! Productions, a YouTube and Facebook channel with cartoons and videos that represent and critique current political events in Puerto Rico. See her interview in Spanish at “Ella es la creadora de los videos animados de ‘De la Nada,’ Rangely García—­Masacote Ep 144” YouTube, January 17, 2017, https://​w ww​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​YQgZpVGLCDg. For an analysis of her cartoons after Hurricane Maria, see the essay by Ricia Anne Chansky, “Auto/Biography after Disaster: The Year in Puerto Rico,” Biography 42, no. 1 (2019): 124–­131. 8. See “‘Hasta que se seque el Malecón’: La indolencia de Online Tours,” Diario las Américas, September  13, 2017, https://w ​ ww.​ diariolasamericas.​ com/​a merica​-latina/​hasta​-que​-se​-seque​ -el​-malecon​-la​-indolencia​-online​-tours​-n4131893. 9. Antonio Benítez-­Rojo, La isla que se repite: El Caribe y la perspectiva posmoderna (Mexico City: Ediciones del Norte, 1989). 10. Fred Moten and Stefano Hardey, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Autonomedia, 2013). 11. Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post–­Civil War Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 12. Memes or GIFs of black people reacting have become popular online to show affective or humorous reactions. The phenomenon, more popular since 2000, has gained popularity with the creation of black digital personas or avatars. See Ellen E. Jones, “Why Are Memes of Black

c a r i b b e a n m e d i a s c a p e s 77 People Reacting So Popular Online?,” Guardian, July 8, 2018, https://​w ww​.theguardian​.com/​ culture/​2018/​jul/​08/​why​-are​-memes​-of​-black​-people​-reacting​-so​-popular​-online. 13. Pedro Pietri, “Suicide Note of a Cockroach in a Low Income Project,” YouTube, September  28, 2011, https://​w ww​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​= ​tV6JTieh9S8. 14. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016). 15. “Despacito Tour, La Perla Video,” YouTube, August 31, 2017, https://​w ww​.youtube​ .com/​watch​?v​=​7​_q4Qv2hmg8. 16. See the website at http://​w ww​.callejeandopr​.com/. 17. Virgilio Piñera, “La isla en peso,” in Obra poética (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 2000), 37–­49. 18. Adál Maldonado (ADÁL), “Los dormidos/ Wake Up!/Video by ADÁL,” YouTube, March  26, 2018, https://​w ww​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​= ​pwd6fogmz0w. 19. Since December 2019, a series of earthquakes swarms have been affecting Puerto Rico’s southern towns (with epicenters close to Guánica). Around eleven have been of high magnitude, but the largest so far happened on January 7, 2020, with a magnitude of 6.4. See “2019–­2020 Puerto Rico Earthquakes,” Wikipedia, accessed July 27, 2020, https://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​w iki/​ 2019 ​% E2 ​% 80 ​% 9320​_ Puerto​_ Rico​_ earthquakes ​# :​~: ​text​= ​Starting ​%20on​%20December​ %2028​%2C​%202019​,of​%20magnitude​%205​%20or​%20greater. 20. Ariadna Godreau Aubert, Las propias: Apuntes para una pedagogía de las endeudadas (San Juan: Editorial Folium, 2018). 21. Maurizio Lazzarato, Governing by Debt (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015).

chapter 5

z Circumscribed Citizenship caribbean american visibility Vivian Halloran

The woefully inadequate U.S. response to the devastation wrought upon the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico during the 2017 hurricane season gave ample proof that the body politic, embodied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), does not really consider these U.S. territories in the Caribbean Basin to fall within its jurisdiction. Adding insult to injury, President Trump’s visit to the affected islands was rife with blunders, such as the claim that he had met with the president of the Virgin Islands.1 Equally damaging was the ill-­conceived photo-­op while throwing rolls of paper towels to a group of hurricane survivors in Puerto Rico, which demonstrated his lack of familiarity with or concern for those U.S. citizens whose lives were severely upended by these natural catastrophes.2 These public events took place against a backdrop of tweets and posts from well-­meaning activists, celebrities, and concerned Americans using social media to get the message across that both U.S. Virgin Islanders and Puerto Ricans are American citizens and thus deserve their compatriots’ compassion and assistance. Not quite a year after Hurricanes Irma and Maria were on the news, footage from a cell phone video went viral. It depicted a June 14 incident at Humboldt Park in which an Illinois police officer ignored Mia Irizarry’s pleas for assistance as a man accosted her for wearing a Puerto Rican flag T-shirt.3 The officer in question resigned his position without explaining his failure to act. I juxtapose these two examples of misrecognition—­where the Americanness of the islands themselves and of individuals hailing from there is rendered all but invisible—­to suggest that the imagined community of the United States as a political and social entity has not come to terms with its colonial involvement around the world, even as its political boundaries are constantly under public discussion. Ironically, even those U.S. territories as proximate to the continental United States as are Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands remain firmly out of the national imaginary even as people of Caribbean American descent have recently acquired greater national recognition as a demarcated subsection of the population. 78

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Over thirty years have passed since James Clifford breezily proclaimed in The Predicament of Culture, “We are all Caribbeans now in our urban archipelagos.”4 As if to help fulfill that vision, U.S. Representative Barbara Lee (D-­CA) successfully sponsored legislation in 2005 to establish an official Caribbean American Heritage Month as a tribute to her political mentor, the late congresswoman and Barbadian American Shirley Chisholm.5 When the Senate finally signed off on the bill a year later, President George W. Bush issued a presidential proclamation marking June as Caribbean American Heritage Month, thereby institutionalizing within the national social calendar of the United States a new level of visibility for Caribbean Americans. This government-­approved month-­long period of national reflection upon and recognition of the many contributions Caribbean Americans have made to the commonweal begs the question of who, precisely, may be counted as “Caribbean Americans”? We might also justly ponder what kind of work—­political, emotional, or intellectual—­the generic umbrella term Caribbean American performs in contradistinction to the specific national or diasporic labels that are equally available for people’s self-­identification? Despite this high national profile and the awareness efforts that accompany the yearly presidential proclamation heralding the beginning of Caribbean American Heritage Month, very few Americans ever joined Clifford in considering themselves to be “Caribbeans now” or, frankly, ever. The very institutionalization of Caribbean American Heritage Month within the political landscape of other congressionally approved national celebrations—­African Americans (February), Irish Americans (March), Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (May), Jewish Americans (May), Hispanics (September 15–­­October 15)—­perpetuates immigration as the origin story of how this group came to participate in and belong to the United States. This logic establishes “the Caribbean” exclusively as a region existing outside of and in contradistinction to the United States and thereby circumscribes “Caribbean Americans” as subjects whose existence may be recognized only within the larger immigrant narrative. This rhetorical distancing has the unintended effect of normalizing the continental configuration of the United States as the location wherein Americanness can be performed and citizenship bestowed, thereby foreclosing the possibility that “Caribbean American” may be an identity category that applies beyond and outside of the continental United States. Though it may appear that my effort to test the capaciousness of the term Caribbean American is nothing but an attempt to draw a distinction without a difference, my goal is rather to probe how invisible the United States’ role as a colonial power is to its own citizenry even when faced with repeated appeals for recognition from American citizens living in the Caribbean territories. I contend that rather than contributing even more diversity to our already multicultural national discourse, the real value of this moniker lies not on the geographic specificity of the first part, the Caribbean, but rather on the broadness of the second, American. By exoticizing national identity with a tropical twist, the category “Caribbean American” harkens back to a condition, a way of being American, that was written into law a century earlier. The passage of the Jones–­Shafroth Act of 1917 granted U.S. citizenship to

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people born in Puerto Rico after 1898. The formal purchase and transfer of control of the Virgin Islands from Denmark to the United States likewise concluded in 1917, though U.S. citizenship was only formally granted to Virgin Islanders through an act of Congress in 1932.6 Thus from a legal and a political vantage point, it is fair to say there have been significant numbers of “Caribbean Americans,” by which I mean U.S. citizens born and living in the U.S. Caribbean territories for more than a century. In what follows, I offer a close reading of the first two presidential proclamations of June as Caribbean American Heritage Month issued by each of the last three presidents of the United States as documents that set the tone for how these administrations see the overlap between their foreign and domestic agendas. I argue that regardless of the executive’s ideological leanings, all these official texts subsume the “Caribbean American” identity category within the larger rubric of the “immigrant,” effectively enacting the logic of the Supreme Court decisions in the Insular Cases and relegating Puerto Ricans and Virgin Islanders in particular to being eternal outsiders, “foreign in a domestic sense.”7 The presidential proclamations are a suitable archive for this type of analysis because, as Rose Cuison Villazor has argued, “the U.S. territories remain largely invisible in American society,” and thus her own legal scholarship and that of like-­minded peers constitute “a necessary step towards emphasizing that these territories belong to the American political family.”8 Offering this textual critique of presidential proclamations as a valid and accessible gauge of how a given administration balances its conflicting internal duties toward its citizenry and its external obligations toward its neighbors should help combat the entrenched disenfranchisement of colonial American subjects. The enactment of Caribbean American Heritage Month as a national observance each June was the brainchild of savvy engineer and businesswoman Dr. Claire Nelson rather than being the culmination of a grassroots campaign demanding more representation. According to the “History” tab of the official Caribbean American Heritage Month website, Dr. Nelson herself drafted the bill’s language and then enlisted Congresswoman Barbara Lee to act as the bill’s sponsor.9 Both houses of Congress approved the bill in February 2006, and President Bush issued the first proclamation in June of that year. Among the lesser-­known ceremonial duties of the office of the presidency of the United States is the power to issue proclamations, rhetorical tools through which the chief executive may address U.S. citizens directly and instruct them on the proper way to carry out their civic duty as part of their everyday lives, as national correspondent Gregory Korte reminds us.10 Though formulaic and written largely with the help of a speechwriter, these texts nonetheless serve as a gauge of a president’s view of his constituents, the people who make up the nation he leads. Since Caribbean American Heritage Month is a relatively new observance, the available number of presidential proclamations is mercifully small; they total thirteen. I chose to limit the data set even further, to each president’s first two proclamations, both because Caribbean-­American Heritage Month only came to pass during the last few years of the Bush administration and because in order

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to track a similar arc, Barack Obama and Donald Trump each initially crafts a message that fulfills the standard duty of office and then imbues the text with his own inimitable style the next time around. This small archive reflects each leader’s working definition of who “Caribbean Americans” are and how their respective administrations ascribe to them specific contributions to the continuing project of building the American nation. Though they vary widely in measures such as length, ideology, and purpose, the three sets of presidential proclamations also share several features in common, which will be the basis of my close reading. First, they all describe Caribbean Americans primarily as an immigrant group. In his inaugural proclamation of this month, President George W. Bush sets out to make this new ritual feel familiar by invoking the prevailing national narrative marking immigration as the defining feature that distinguishes the United States from other countries around the world: “Our Nation has thrived as a country of immigrants, and we are more vibrant and hopeful because of the talent, faith, and values of Caribbean Americans.”11 His is an inclusive vision, and in addressing the American people, this statement portrays immigration as a dynamic and positive force directly contributing to the national character and the overall outlook of its people as “hopeful.” President Bush’s second address downplays this group’s immigration journey, focusing instead on the U.S.-­based diaspora community through his reference to the “generations of Caribbean Americans [who] have helped shape the spirit and character of our country.”12 Again, by emphasizing contributions over time, this characterization depicts assimilation as a dynamic process whereby these immigrants’ own perspectives and cultural background leave as much of a mark upon the American culture as the latter does upon them, and together they give rise to a richer, fuller, more rewarding shared country with a defining “spirit.” President Obama’s first proclamation appears to echo his predecessor’s welcoming gesture by incorporating the new group into the national family lore. However, President Obama’s characterization of this immigrant group is more nuanced and complex, acknowledging that the term Caribbean American encompasses a wide range of cultural backgrounds and experiences: “Generations of immigrants have preserved the traditions of their homelands, and these traditions have defined our Nation’s identity. Caribbean Americans bring a unique and vibrant culture. This multilingual and multiethnic tradition has strengthened our social fabric and enriched the diversity of our Nation.”13 Capitalization plays an interesting role in distancing the people (immigrants), who are actors guarding a formal set of rituals and practices (traditions) associated with their birthplaces (homelands) from their more passive destination, a collective sociopolitical state (Nation) that receives the amalgamation of affective ties and changes accordingly. This characterization of immigration as an ongoing process also echoes Bush’s recognition of the diasporic dimension of Caribbean Americans as a group whose emotional and kinship relations to their homelands remain unbroken, as conveyed through the lowercase font that includes not merely immigrants and their respective homelands but also the new connections they forge across difference, thereby creating a strong “social fabric.”

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Unsurprisingly, President Obama’s first proclamation purposefully complicates this somewhat generic tale of migration by explicitly alluding to the horrors of the Middle Passage as one means through which Caribbean Americans found themselves on U.S. shores: “Unfortunately some Caribbean Americans were forced to our country as slaves; others arrived of their own volition.”14 However, the Middle Passage is only one of several ways in which Caribbean Americans were transported across the Atlantic without their consent; indentured servants from Ireland, China, and India also traded their freedom for passage to the European colonies in the Caribbean region and were then transported to the United States by those to whom they had pledged their service. So this statement is as much a temporal marker that supports the earlier claim that immigration from the Caribbean to the United States is a long-­standing and ongoing process as it is a recognition of the trauma of forced deterritorialization. By his second proclamation, President Obama more directly confronts the legacy of the peculiar institution and distinguishes between immigrants and enslaved persons brought to American shores without their say so: “Throughout our history, immigrants from Caribbean countries have come to our shores seeking better lives and opportunities. Others were brought against their will in the bonds of slavery.”15 By breaking up references to these two travel modalities into two distinct sentences rather than maintaining a tenuous connection between immigrants and unfree persons via a semicolon, this second proclamation acknowledges that the Atlantic slave trade was a discrete chapter in the longer story of the American project. This likewise makes it possible to discuss Afro-­Caribbeans as immigrants whose own ancestors may not have had the opportunity to make such choices. Whereas Obama’s and Bush’s visions of the past imagine teeming multitudes of newcomers, Donald Trump’s penchant for celebrating individual accomplishment is in evidence in his two proclamations of Caribbean American Heritage Month thus far. Each of them introduces the idea that Caribbean Americans are immigrants through references to specific historical figures who immigrated from the Caribbean to the United States, such as Founding Father and Nevis-­born Alexander Hamilton;16 the architect who designed the U.S. Capitol, Dr. William Thornton, who hailed from the British Virgin Islands; and in an apparent nod to his predecessor’s district, a shout-­out to the so-­called Founder of Chicago, Jean Baptiste du Sable, who hailed from Haiti. Trump’s proclamations promote a view of immigrants as industrious, self-­made men whose labor directly enriches the nation’s coffers: “Caribbean Americans embody the American spirit, with their talents and hard work contributing greatly to America’s economy.” In this view, the “Nation,” which once more is capitalized to establish distance, serves as the sole beneficiary of the Caribbean American’s contributions. The assumption is that Caribbean Americans have already internalized American values prior to their arrival to such a degree that they have become exemplary emissaries from afar who already “embody the American spirit” and merely seek to have their Americanness confirmed when “we celebrate the Caribbean Americans who have enriched our Nation.”17 The introductory paragraphs of both of Donald Trump’s proclamations

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distinguish between Caribbean nationals (“the peoples of the Caribbean” / “our neighbors in the Caribbean”) and Caribbean Americans who have presumably cut ties with their birthplaces.18 However, the relationship these proclamations envision between Caribbean Americans and the U.S. “Nation” is clearly unidirectional—­all the effort comes from the “Americans with Caribbean roots [who] have sewn their own unique thread into the fabric of our Nation.”19 Given the Trump administration’s plans to revoke citizenship from naturalized Americans,20 it is not too far of a stretch to speculate that those Caribbean Americans whose needle-­threading is found wanting will be “fired” from the United States. The second common element present in all three sets of presidential proclamations is the acknowledgment of the common or shared history that the United States has with Caribbean countries. This is an interesting reflection upon their status as postcolonial countries who threw away the shackles of European imperialism. This revisionist rhetoric also tacitly acknowledges the lasting legacy of slavery in shaping the physical, social, and legal landscape of the greater Caribbean Basin. President Bush deploys the language of fraternity by alluding to “friendship between the United States and the Caribbean countries.”21 Though President Obama affirms this warm and fuzzy vision in the context of his reference to the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, he primarily refers to the region geographically, as “the Caribbean.”22 As discussed previously, President Trump’s references to the island countries bear the stamp of his background in real estate—­he uses the term neighbors to describe the countries from whence “Americans with Caribbean roots” hail.23 What is interesting in this context is that none of the three presidents takes on the task of specifying which countries make up the Caribbean “neighborhood.” Within this limited corpus, there are two references to Haiti (one each by Presidents Obama and Trump) and one to the British Virgin Islands (by President Trump). Otherwise, there is a deafening silence surrounding the U.S. Caribbean territories—­Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands—­which really beggars belief. As interstitial spaces that constitute a bridge between the foreign (non-­U.S.) and the domestic Caribbean, these islands are the birthplace or even the factories that keep producing ready-­made “Caribbean Americans” whose own contributions to the larger “social fabric” of American society ought to be fully celebrated and recognized. The only oblique means through which such an acknowledgment might be detected within these proclamations is through the presidential expressions of gratitude for the service Caribbean Americans have extended to their nation as active members of the U.S. Armed Forces. This is an especially important acknowledgment, considering that Puerto Ricans and Virgin Islanders have served in the military with distinction for as long as they have been able to enlist. The opening paragraph of Shannon Collins’s article in the Department of Defense news webpage effectively sums up how Puerto Ricans have fought for freedom since the passage of the Jones–­Shafroth Act: “As citizens of the United States, Puerto Ricans have participated in every major United States military engagement from World War I onward, with the soldiers of Puerto Rico’s 65th Infantry Regiment distinguishing

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themselves in combat during the Korean War.”24 U.S. Virgin Islanders have likewise enlisted to serve their country in the armed forces. The U.S. military aided in the rescue and recovery efforts during the 2017 hurricane season, thereby marking one concrete way in which the armed forces have contributed to the well-­being of Caribbean Americans in the recent past. President Trump’s first proclamation frames gratitude as a function of the state rather than a sentiment expressed by the commander in chief: “Our Nation is particularly grateful to the many Caribbean Americans who have served and are currently serving in our Armed Forces, protecting our Nation, and promoting freedom and peace around the world.”25 The repetition of “our Nation” within the same sentence reinforces this sense of distance between the feeling alluded to and the president who refuses to stand in sympathy with the supposed affective response of the country he leads. A contrast may be drawn with President Bush’s first proclamation, in which he uses a similar rhetorical construction but imbues the message with his personal emotional investment through his use of a single adverb: “Our Nation is deeply grateful to the Caribbean Americans who defend our liberty as members of our Armed Forces. The service and sacrifice of these courageous men and women are helping lay the foundation of peace for generations to come.”26 By characterizing the extent of the gratitude owed to the country’s bravest citizens, this phrase conveys this president’s awareness of the enormity of the sacrifice he asked so many Americans to make during the two wars his administration waged overseas. President Obama’s proclamations take a radically different approach to thanking servicemen and women of Caribbean descent for their participation within the armed forces. Rather than dwelling on the risks that battle readiness places upon the volunteers who make up the American military, his proclamation flips the script and celebrates the heroic and patriotic dimensions of volunteering to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces: “In their pursuit of success, Caribbean Americans exhibit the traits all Americans prize: determination, a devotion to community, and patriotism. They have made their mark in every facet of our society, from art to athletics and science to service. Caribbean Americans have also safeguarded our Nation in the United States Armed Forces.”27 This rhetorical strategy elevates ambition, the innate “pursuit of success,” as characteristic of Caribbean American exemplariness—­something that could benefit “all Americans.” This statement is the inverse of President Trump’s conviction that Caribbean Americans immigrants prove they belong because they already “embody” the undefined American spirit. Finally, the last element that every presidential proclamation I examined shares is its adherence to formulaic closing comments, wherein the president instructs the American people on the proper observance of this dedicated month. The one notable shift in tone in this regard is one of attitude or perhaps aptitude. The first three proclamations under discussion, two by President Bush and Obama’s first, assume that the proper way to mark the observance of this new heritage month is through study. Bush “encouraged” and Obama “urged” “all Americans to learn more about the history and culture of Caribbean Americans and their contributions to our

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Nation.” Education was a hallmark of First Lady Laura Bush’s portfolio, and her influence is evident in this formulation. President Obama quickly changed his tone, however, perhaps in an effort to dispel his law-­professor persona. In his second proclamation, Obama strikes a more festive tone, now urging his compatriots to “celebrate the history and culture of Caribbean Americans with appropriate ceremonies and activities.”28 Not surprisingly, the call to “celebrate” this month is the one thing President Trump chose to keep from Barack Obama’s rhetorical style. The question is whether anybody out there is eager to heed this call. My personal experience might be illustrative here. Though I have been a Caribbean studies professor for the past seventeen years, I only became aware of the existence of Caribbean American Heritage month in 2016 when I saw a tweet by President Trump announcing his proclamation. Incredulously, I did a web search rather than follow the link and found, to my amazement, that this had been an annual tradition since President Bush’s second term. Though I felt momentarily ashamed of my ignorance upon finding out about this, I then realized that the reason this celebration had escaped my notice was that June has also been Pride Month. Trump’s refusal to issue a proclamation to help celebrate LGBTQIA Americans made headlines, and his choice to continue observing Caribbean American Heritage Month was seen as a way to make the snub against the gay community more apparent. Ironically, this all took place around the one-­year anniversary of the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. A lot of the victims in that attack were both queer and of Caribbean American descent, and President Trump did tweet out an acknowledgment on the date of the anniversary. Trump’s machinations to pit two segments of the Caribbean American community against one another have not succeeded because of intersectionality—­LGBTQIA Caribbean Americans can be both without having to choose one or the other. However, the lack of broad awareness of this commemoration, together with the general sense of uncertainty about who may be “counted” as Caribbean American, further effaces U.S. Virgin Islanders’ and Puerto Ricans’ status as American citizens hailing from the Caribbean Basin. Perhaps this chapter can shed some light on the rhetorical violence that exclusion from public discourse can wage upon a disenfranchised segment of American citizens with a tropical twist.

Notes 1. Majita Gajanan, “Trump Says He Met with the President of the Virgin Islands. But That’s Him,” Time, October  13, 2017, http://​t ime​.com/​4982458/​donald​-trump​-president​-virgin​ -islands/. 2. Janell Ross, “In Puerto Rico, Trump’s Paper Towel Toss Reveals Where His Empathy Lies,” Washington Post, October  6, 2017, https://​w ww​.washingtonpost​.com/​news/​post​-nation/​w p/​ 2017/​10/ ​06/​i n​-puerto​-rico​-trumps​-paper​-towel​-toss​-reveals​-where​-his​-empathy​-lies/​?utm​ _term​=​.ae189713a340. 3. Gregory Pratt and Brian L. Cox, “Woman Berated for Puerto Rican Flag Shirt Hopes Her Experience, ‘Shines a Light on What’s Going on with Racism,’” Chicago Tribune, July 13, 2018, http://​w ww​.chicagotribune​.com/​news/ ​local/​politics/​c t​-met​-puerto​-rico​-flag​-shirt​ -hate​-crime20180713​-story​.html#.

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4. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-­Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 173. 5. “Rep. Barbara Lee Introduces Bill to Designate a Caribbean-­American Heritage Month,” Congresswoman Barbara Lee, February  16, 2005, https://​lee​.house​.gov/​news/​press​-releases/​ rep​-barbara​-lee​-introduces​-bill​-to​-designate​-a​-caribbean​-american​-heritage​-month. 6. “Purchase of the U.S. Virgin Islands, 1917,” U.S. Department of State Archive, accessed July  16, 2018, https://​2001​-2009​.state​.gov/​r/​pa/​ho/​t ime/​w wi/​107293​.htm. 7. Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244 (1901) https://​supreme​.justia​.com/​cases/​federal/​us/​ 182/​244/​case​.html. 8. Rose Cuison Villazor, “Problematizing the Protection of Culture and the Insular Cases,” Harvard Law Review 131, no. 6 (2018): 138. 9. “History,” Caribbean American Heritage Month, accessed July 16, 2018, https://​w ww​ .caribbeanamericanmonth​.org/​ncahm​_ history. 10. Gregory Korte, “The Executive Action Toolbox: How Presidents Use Proclamations, Executive Orders and Memoranda,” USA Today, October 12, 2017, https://​w ww​.usatoday​ .com/​story/​news/​politics/​2017/​10/​12/ ​how​-presidents​-use​-proclamations​-executive​-orders​ -and​-presidential​-memoranda/​702751001/. 11. “Presidential Proclamation 2006, Caribbean American Heritage Month 2006,” Caribbean American Heritage Month, June 5, 2006, https://​w ww​.caribbeanamericanmonth​.org/​ presidential ​_proclamation ​_ 2006. 12. “Proclamation 8153—­Caribbean American Heritage Month, 2007,” American Presidency Project, June  1, 2007, http://​w ww​.presidency​.ucsb​.edu/​ws/​?pid​=​75158. 13. “Proclamation 8390—­National Caribbean-­American Heritage Month, 2009,” American Presidency Project, June  2, 2009, http://​w ww​.presidency​.ucsb​.edu/​ws/​?pid​= ​86225. 14. “Proclamation 8390.” 15. “Proclamation 8530—­National Caribbean-­American Heritage Month, 2010,” American Presidency Project, May  28, 2010, http://​w ww​.presidency​.ucsb​.edu/​ws/​?pid​= ​87983. 16. “President Donald J. Trump Proclaims June 2017 as National Caribbean-­American Heritage Month,” Whitehouse​.gov, May 31, 2017, https://​w ww​.whitehouse​.gov/​presidential​ -actions/​president​- donald​-j​-trump​-proclaims​-june​-2017​-national​- caribbean​-american​ -heritage​-month/. 17. “President Donald J. Trump Proclaims June 2018 as National Caribbean-­American Heritage Month,” Whitehouse​.gov, May 31, 2018, https://​w ww​.whitehouse​.gov/​presidential​ -actions/​president​- donald​-j​-trump ​-proclaims​-june ​-2018 ​-national​- caribbean​-american​ -heritage​-month/. 18. “President Donald J. Trump Proclaims June 2017.” 19. “President Donald J. Trump Proclaims June 2018.” 20. Karen J. Greenberg, “Trump Wants to Take Away Your Citizenship,” Nation, March  21, 2019, https://​w ww​.thenation​.com/​a rticle/​t rump​-wants​-to​-take​-your​-citizenship​ -denaturalization/. 21. “Presidential Proclamation 2006.” 22. “Proclamation 8530.” 23. “President Donald J. Trump Proclaims June 2018.” 24. Shannon Collins, “Puerto Ricans Represented throughout U.S. Military History,” U.S. Department of Defense, October 14, 2016, https://​ w ww​ .defense​ .gov/​ News/​ A rticle/​ Article/​974518/​puerto​-ricans​-represented​-throughout​-us​-military​-history/. See also the Jones–­Shafroth Act, Pub. L. No. 64-­368, 39 Stat. 951 (1917), http://​w ww​.legisworks​.org/​ congress/​64/​publaw​-368​.pdf. 25. “President Donald J. Trump Proclaims June 2017.” 26. “Presidential Proclamation 2006.” 27. “Presidential Proclamation 2006”; “Proclamation 8153.” 28. “Proclamation 8530.”

chapter 6

z From Father to Humanitarian charting intimacies and discontinuities in ricky martin’s social media presence and writing Edward Chamberlain

In my family, communication has always been very open. I have always had a great communication with my mother, and nowadays my communication with my dad is exemplary. But sex was just not something we could talk about back then. —­Ricky Martin, Me

In November 2010, the cover of the popular weekly magazine People featured several striking headlines that concerned tales of celebrity figures, including the famous Puerto Rican musician Ricky Martin. The magazine’s editors positioned Martin’s story alongside bold headlines that read as being scandals, including the eye-­catching title “Portia De Rossi’s Anorexia Nightmare.”1 Next to it is Martin’s slightly smaller headshot and a headline that reads “Ricky Martin: Inside My Secret Life.” Set in this context, the magazine dramatically conveys the idea that Martin kept secrets that might jeopardize his career, but upon closer inspection, the magazine’s story actually focuses on a news item already circulating in the public sphere. It explores Martin’s sense of self as a “gay man,” his new memoir, and his experience of becoming a father to twin boys via surrogacy.2 Even though this magazine tries to make money by capitalizing on Martin’s sexuality, we can read the story in another light. That is, this piece functions as a coming-­out narrative that points to the struggles occurring at the intersections of family, public life, and sexuality. Whereas this magazine’s approach may appear suspect, their piece partly encourages readers to reflect on the social challenges of coming out as a gay Puerto Rican father in several contexts. Much as Ricky Martin explains in his memoir about family life, open discussions of sexuality were an obstacle for him, and this challenging set of circumstances can be traced to the fact that sexual desire has been relegated to private spaces as well as constrained by authorities such as the U.S. Congress and Puerto Rican political 87

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arenas. To “come out” as a gay Puerto Rican man is by no means an easy process because previously, there had been long-­standing legislation such as antisodomy laws that communicated the idea that nonconforming sexualities are criminal acts in Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland.3 These oppressive laws and the resulting struggles point to the need for alternative ways of telling one’s story. In his 2011 memoir Me, Martin points to his own alternatives when he states, “From the moment when I clicked SEND to announce my truth to the world, the rain of love that I’ve received has been astounding, almost startling.”4 With the word send, Martin highlights that his coming out across several media platforms in March 2010 allowed him to see social media as a space with multiple potentials, such as communicating across borders and connecting with likeminded peoples. His appreciation of digital communication technology is most visible in his engagement with popular social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter. Accessible through the internet and smartphones, Martin’s postings have attracted millions of “followers” who receive updates about his humanitarian work, family experiences, and social life. Through these connections, Martin cultivates a social space for an alternative form of intimacy that allows the public to get closer to Martin through observing his commentary, photographs, and videos. While these connections appear almost ordinary today when many celebrities are posting about a range of topics, I contend that Martin’s social media presence functions as a notable challenge to some dominant U.S. systems and powerful groups that attempt to diminish and silence underprivileged communities, including people who are Latinx, migrants, and queer. With his digital postings, Martin’s followers can witness how he acts as a father figure and humanitarian. Coupled with his postings about his children, Martin extends his fatherly persona online by putting forth a resistance to dominant cultures across the world that overlook problems such as homophobic violence, the illegal trafficking of young people, and the damage from the 2017 Hurricanes Irma and Maria. For example, following the hurricane devastation, Martin educated the public about Puerto Rican strife via social media and the Ellen DeGeneres Show, which is hosted by the lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres.5 Likewise, after transgender people were being targeted in the public sphere, Martin addressed this unfair treatment via social media, challenging oppressive patriarchal culture. Though it may appear surprising for Martin to comment on such public matters and his sexuality, we discern a logic to his efforts as we examine his writing. In his memoir Me, Martin explains how he has come to appreciate speaking out. After facing “relentless scrutiny” and remaining silent about his sexuality, he declared his sexual identity, which was a great relief.6 He explains that his own coming out over Twitter was “only positive and empowering.”7 While many queer and transgender people face rejection online, Martin found Twitter to be a “dream tool” that granted him a meaningful way to share and connect.8 Historically, gay Latinx men such as Martin have been afforded very few social spaces to share their personal stories, yet social media allows people who have digital technology to interact with others facing similar obstacles. The dearth of physical spaces for

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Latinx people and sexual minorities can be traced to how governments, colonialist ideologies, and migration politics have deprived people of safe public spaces. Social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram as well as gay-­friendly venues like the Ellen DeGeneres Show offer spaces for marginalized groups to connect and continue the process of contesting colonial legacies of homophobic thought that impede the building of bridges. Over the past several decades, scholars such as José Quiroga have theorized about the manner in which colonial ideologies have led to a heterosexist perspective on nonconforming genders and sexualities. In his examination, Quiroga articulates the prevalence of homophobia in “political structures” and “minority politics,” which creates multiple challenges for critics and researchers who seek to advance the dialogues about the intersectionalities of queer Latinx cultures, including the lived experiences of migrants.9 The problem of homophobia, whether it be external or internalized in form, frequently curtails and prevents open discussions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) experiences. It is also imperative that we take into account how homophobia has been a product of colonial projects, such as prior centuries’ empire-­building and contemporary U.S. governance over Puerto Rico. While nations like the United States claim a separation of church and state, the government’s policies remain predicated on an unspoken set of white Christian beliefs, which also have been cited as the basis for penalizing nonwhite and LGBTQ peoples. Further, the aftermath of homophobic and racist colonialism has seeped into familial contexts, political processes, businesses, and a range of other social structures, hence threatening the potentialities for queer Latinx peoples to attain agency and well-­being. In spite of constraints, Martin creates challenges to the aforesaid homophobia and monoculturalism through Twitter and Instagram in minute and blatant forms, thus making him a hero among Latinx populations and communities of LGBTQ people. This is not to say that Martin has decolonized all his life or that his deviations from the norm should be read as the most radical of discontinuities. Instead, Martin’s efforts to connect people as well as his digital deviations from normative practices largely function as an inspiring social blueprint for creating alternatives beyond the puritanical social order that reigns across the United States. Through digital communication, Martin illuminates the importance of reflecting more carefully on the pressing social issues of AIDS, bullying, and inequity, even as he posts some seemingly quotidian imagery of himself, his husband, and three children at random moments. It is the social significance of this mix of imagery, social engagement, and textual material that serves as the focal point of this chapter’s critical examination. Along with examining Martin’s efforts to create awareness and foster a digital family, we must also be cognizant that Martin’s social media presence is modulated by the touch of capitalist enterprise, such as when Martin shares pictures seemingly for the sake of encouraging his fans to purchase products like the easy-­to-­make Nescafé coffee and trendy Calvin Klein underwear.10 Such advertisements show Martin participating in a capitalist system that requires a sanitized and conventionally beautiful look, which is an image he maintains

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across his media. But what would happen if Martin presented a more radical and queerly femme persona? Considering Martin’s personal history of presenting a rather traditional macho look, such radical gender performance appears unlikely, but this social dynamic points to how capitalism influences Martin’s self-­portrayal. Popular male performers like Martin may be able to cross one line by being outwardly gay, but he faces risks with crossing another. Still, Martin remains one of the more outspoken Latinx musicians whose social media presence continues to evolve and connect people. His social media posts offer a politically progressive and hybrid dynamic due to the way he subscribes to some dominant standards as well as contests limiting U.S. ideologies of family-­making and monoculturalism. Ultimately, by presenting himself as “a family man” now, Martin creates provocative bridges between generations, languages, and cultures, thus making possible new connectivities.

Approaches and Concepts for Theorizing Fatherhood in Martin’s Digital Intimacies To make sense of Martin’s digital approaches, I conduct an analysis of his representation’s discourse and visuals by employing scholarly lenses attuned to sociopolitical dynamics of gender, ethnicity, nationhood, and sexuality in Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland. This chapter’s critical approach also is inspired by the scholarship of Frances Negrón-­Muntaner, Marisel Moreno, and Lawrence La Fountain-­Stokes, who proffer relevant analytical frameworks for theorizing Martin’s digital positioning and self-­representation as a gay father, humanitarian, and performer who endeavors to influence and effect change through social media. In this way, my chapter theorizes the potentialities of Martin’s digital efforts at creating change while also critiquing how his efforts partly extend cultural myths like the American dream and the gran familia puertorriqueña (great Puerto Rican family)—­two enduring paradigms that can have the effect of reifying normativities in LGBTQ contexts as well as downplaying radical politics. For many decades, representations of the American dream and the gran familia puertorriqueña have been read as key guideposts and the measures of success, yet the social discourses of celebrities like Ricky Martin are offering us the idea that we need not be constrained, and henceforth, change is possible. Martin’s desire for change is evident in a sizable percentage of his digital postings, such as his posts about the problems of bullying as well as the ongoing fundraising projects that are intended to provide support to people in Puerto Rico who continue to be affected by hurricane damage.11 Despite the progress made under the administration of President Barack Obama, the steps toward creating a more equitable and socially inclusive society have been markedly slow for forward-­thinking populations. In part, this slow form of progress can be traced to the durable cultural myths that are embedded in film, print, and television, which rely on dominant cultural ideals to tell stories. In regarding the notion of the gran familia puertorriqueña, for instance, scholars have observed problematic potentials. Scholar Marisel Moreno posits, “The cultural myth of la

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gran familia puertorriqueña, the great Puerto Rican family, thus emerged as a predominant narrative grounded on principles of exclusion. Women, blacks, and more recently, Puerto Rican migrants in the U.S., have all been marginalized and symbolically excluded from the national imaginary as a result of this myth.”12 Moreno sheds light on the ways that Puerto Rican women writers resisted such oppressions, showing also how familial narratives like those of Martin similarly challenge normativities. Relatedly, scholar Juana María Rodríguez rightly points out that “U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico needs to be simultaneously interrogated through an examination of the incalculable ways that Puerto Ricans have forever transformed the social, cultural, linguistic, and political landscape of the United States.”13 Such examinations require us to recognize the lasting impact of colonial laws such as the Jones–­Shafroth Act of 1917, which led a multitude of Puerto Rican families and figures to envision employment and places beyond Puerto Rico as being significant opportunities for young people such as Martin; however, such opportunities for migration also involve painful, long-­distance separation. In Martin’s case, such separations led his younger self to miss his family greatly, particularly in the first year after moving to Orlando, Florida, and traveling abroad with the popular band Menudo. According to Martin, he called home to his parents when he was still new to the business of touring and said, “I can’t take it anymore.”14 Of course, Martin decided to stay with the group, though his great distance from family made him reflective about the significance of family. Martin’s personal circumstances are clearly atypical in the larger political histories of Caribbean migrations, yet his multilayered story of success speaks to some of the exigencies of being a Puerto Rican migrant seeking to succeed in an exclusionary entertainment industry that mainly values youth, good looks, light skin, and performance skills. Having these attributes enabled Martin to develop a greater, hybrid knowledge of the cultural contexts in Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland. Instead of embracing a monocultural stance, Martin has connected with multiple audiences through his career and coming out, thus offering the idea that his personal creative work, digital postings, and relationality exhibit the connective philosophy that Jorge Duany and Steve Vertovec call “bifocality.”15 Duany explains this bifocality arises in several contexts, arguing, “Many migrants routinely engage in activities and relationships that bind them to both ‘here’ and ‘there’ in their everyday lives.”16 Martin bound these personal experiences of history and place through his own migration to the states and beyond, thereby becoming savvier at negotiating varying forms of social landscapes. These skills play a role in his digital efforts, in which he enacts an intervention in the dominant paradigms of fatherly intimacy. Posting pictures and stories of his children and husband is a political act that largely rejects a nationally ingrained homophobic discourse. Being able to share such material requires Martin to accept and navigate the real social challenges of positing an alternative notion of familia, which resembles the “new family configurations” that Lawrence La Fountain-­Stokes has theorized in his exegesis of queer Puerto Rican visual cultures.17 Taking several forms, these novel kinship configurations provide the architecture (or blueprint) for imagining and creating a queer world that is,

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as Jose Esteban Muñoz has explained, “not-­yet” fully realized.18 In this manner, Martin’s social media presence, including his photographs of family and loved ones, offers a blueprint for constructing a bridge that links the normative practices of Puerto Rican and U.S. familism with that of queerness and the media system, creating a social syncretism that expands our visions of fathering. Broadening our notions of family, Martin’s fatherly intimacy includes the gran familia puertorriqueña and allows gay fathers to instantiate alternatives that build on those of the past while also innovating. Even as Martin’s digital presence suggests an effort to embody the characteristics that usually are championed by proponents of the American dream and the gran familia puertorriqueña, he especially focuses on an element frequently discussed in these two fields of thought: the intimate connection between children and family and the polity. Martin’s Instagram postings speak to these personal connectivities in several forms, including his humanitarian support for children at the Lebanon-­Syrian border, where families have been torn asunder by political discord.19 These struggles as well as his own challenges inspired Martin to be mindful of the challenges that arise when youths are separated from their parents, whether it is due to a family member’s need to migrate, homophobia at home, or a similarly powerful social force. This familial consciousness can be said to play a role in the way that Martin fashions his public intimacies, or what might be best called an online family, through bridging the roles of father and celebrity humanitarian in a way that aims to protect youth populations who are vulnerable to human trafficking. In these contexts, Martin enacts a sociopolitical phenomenon that I theorize as a hybrid relationality—­a set of connectivities that have the social closeness of family life—­yet these interpersonal dynamics are constituted through a form of social kinship that is based not on relations of blood but on structures such as caretaking, friendship, and mentoring. This heuristic device of hybrid relationality is envisioned as a helpful means of putting a name to the multiform social intimacies and thought that are created by engaging in media in an integrative manner, which brings together a substantial swath of people across a vast expanse of space. To understand the relationality of Ricky Martin’s digital representation, I began by piecing together a makeshift narrative from Martin’s digital postings, curating a select number of pieces that speak to Martin’s online familism. Assembling this narrative has led me to build on several fields of thought, including feminist studies, digital humanities, and cultural studies. Drawing on these fields, I make use of historical and socially conscious lenses that explain why Martin’s social interactions and postings are meaningful and trailblazing. By working with these scholarly frameworks, I create a critical lens for explicating how Martin both perpetuates and rewrites time-­honored concepts of fatherhood. To be more precise, I am interested in how Martin represents the social dynamics of familial and domestic lives, which also illuminate the quotidian intimacies and struggles of Puerto Rican queers in the contemporary era. Already, researchers such as Shaka McGlotten have explained how some online intimacies are far from utopic in their outcomes.

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McGlotten states, “Virtual intimacies signaled new possibilities even as they foregrounded the perceived failures of intimate belonging. Virtual intimacies were a failure before the fact.”20 McGlotten’s well-­developed research calls attention to the idealistic dreams of online socializing among queer populations, showing that real-­world challenges have inhibited the ideal intimacies, where social closeness brings happiness and pleasure. Yet if virtual intimacies never deliver the intimate ideal (as McGlotten’s research portends), what is the point of pursuing these online postings and their mixed relationality? For many social media participants such as Martin, there remains some hope for achieving that ideal of improving lives, which is similarly visible in what José Esteban Muñoz has theorized as “queer futurity.”21 Just as Muñoz has suggested, I observe that there is a great need to imagine and synthesize a more queer world for the purposes of developing an energizing sense of hope and alternative pathways that allow queers to thrive. This futurity is necessary for queer Puerto Rican youths in particular because, as Muñoz says, the present is a “toxic” time for queer people of color due to the antiqueer hatred and racist violence that continue to pervade the U.S. public sphere. Digital intimacies like those of Martin provide desirable alternative planes of existence even if they are ephemeral, and given the current societal structures where brevity is privileged, such efficiency is useful for Martin’s purposes and the larger public sphere. As the economics of late capitalism have evolved, the free time of laborers and elites has been carved up and reduced to minuscule amounts. Consequently, our time to be social has been similarly reduced, which has led to briefer interactions and similarly brief blogging. Hence instead of creating full-­fledged intimacies and providing clear road maps to social justice, this celebrity father’s postings largely point to issues without substantively laying out a plan for addressing them. For instance, on March 13, 2017, Ricky Martin tweeted a message in all caps, saying, “TRANS EQUALITY NOW!”; likewise, on February 24, 2017, Martin tweeted, “Removing laws protecting fellow #Trans in the #USA? NO NO NO, THIS IS ALSO WRONG. SO WRONG. So sad #humanrights.”22 Martin posted these tweets when the relatively new Trump administration began removing the prior administration’s support for trans people, which had begun to take shape during the era of President Obama. In sharing these short comments, Martin quickly contributed to an evolving conversation and became a thought leader who partly generates the social dynamic and helps build a movement. Guiding his followers like a parent teaches their child, Martin instantiated a model for others to follow. Blending the vernacular language with digital communication, Martin encouraged his followers and others who were sitting on the sidelines to become involved at a significant moment in U.S. politics. By producing these brief postings on social media, this celebrity father challenges the idea that sociopolitical life and familial storytelling should be told in a traditional and sensible, linear manner. In a prior century, stories of the community and family often would be told from beginning to end near the family’s hearth, recounted in diaries and letters, or written in chronologies like those inscribed

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in a family’s Bible. In the case of microblogging like that of Twitter, users such as Martin disperse familial storytelling through short tweets, breaking up larger moments such as a child’s fourth year of life into partial stories. This dynamic has been theorized by the antioppressive educator Kevin Kumashiro, who explains that “stories are always partial. They include some things and exclude others. . . . Recognizing this partiality requires that we read stories in activist ways.”23 Much as Kumashiro suggests in his study of queer Asian and Pacific American autobiographies, the act of storytelling involves multiple voices from diverse groups, many of whom continue to be underrepresented in mainstream media outlets. To read Ricky Martin’s efforts in “activist ways” requires observers to be mindful of Martin’s positionality as an out gay father who exists in two languages and faces a homophobic world that has a history of disapproving of queer parenting. To cut through the ongoing noise and negativity, he posts several assertive and brief statements, creating a socially provocative hybridity in terms of content, structure, and style. Part personal narrative and part epistolary fiction, these short digital texts largely challenge conventions and taxonomies in the same way that coming-­out stories have upended heteronormative storytelling. Thus we need to adopt a more novel reading strategy to make sense of these partial stories and social platforms. Specifically, I begin by integrating the critical practice of “close reading” to connect elements of Martin’s postings to broader cultural and historical implications that I derive using the lenses of contemporary cultural studies research. The social particulars and cultural contexts are made visible by looking more closely at how and what is being posted. For instance, Martin ostensibly aims to activate his followers by tweeting imperative sentences (or motivators) that show an attempt to shape his audience. Martin creates a potentially uplifting tweet when he posts, “Be unique. Be remarkable. Be rare. This world needs it.”24 In this message, Martin leads his followers to be themselves, which is an encouraging message for young people who feel bullied and shamed for going against the grain or having a personal story that strays from the American dream. Though Martin may replicate some elements of the dream (he has two sons and a daughter), he pursues these familial developments in an innovative manner (through surrogacy). He most recently welcomed a baby girl, la nena—­news that he tweeted to the world in May 2019.25 Martin’s writing offers a way for people to create their own stories. For this reason, this chapter develops this discussion of intimacy and relationality by looking at how queer people tell stories in nontraditional yet meaningful ways in digital formats. Like prominent media scholars such as Richard G. Jones and Bernadette Marie Calafell, I utilize this concept of personal narratives for the sake of analyzing how Martin speaks about and shares very, very short stories, many of which are fragmented or require the reader to look back into the celebrity’s timeline on the social media platform.26 These miniature personal narratives may be perceived as contradicting the genre of familial storytelling due to the way they are spread out. I also read Martin’s approach as making queer relationality more accessible, present, and real. As a case in point, we can consider images that Martin posts on Instagram, such as a photograph of his son on the beach in which his happy face is covered

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with sand, offering viewers a sense of Martin’s closeness to his children as well as the messy realism of parenting.27 His child’s very sandy face resembles a move away from yesteryear’s tidy respectability, in which cleanliness was the standard and a sign of one’s morals. Embracing the messiness, Martin’s shared reality is a positive, significant way of nurturing LGBTQ Latinx youths as well as a larger population who may desire to have a family.

Situating Martin’s Online Fatherhood Practices in Cultural and Historical Contexts In looking to the dominant representation of fathers, dads are less often cast as the nurturers or child rearers in the family home at the start of the twenty-­first century. This pattern plays out in social discourse, media images, and everyday practices that have congealed into a cultural and social paradigm. However, as scholars such as Abigail Locke have affirmed, the social imaginary and representation of fathers have been changing with the advent of new economic conditions such as recessions.28 Even so, there continues to be relatively little representation of fathers who are Puerto Rican, queer, or migrants. Of those who have researched the work of Ricky Martin, scholar and filmmaker Frances Negrón-­Muntaner offers a cogent examination of Martin’s success and star persona by elucidating the way Martin is perceived as being blanquito (a little white) and exhibits commonalities with the legendary rock musician Elvis Presley.29 In considering the pernicious colorism and white supremacy that has long been rampant among the mainstream media and music industry, we discern how Martin’s light skin has granted him a desirability that enables him to obtain opportunities from exclusive companies. His own digital postings also exhibit his gender conformity and manly exterior, including his elaborate tattoos on his well-­developed arms. His resemblance to U.S. gender normativities runs in the opposite direction of many queer and gender-­fluid corporealities, suggesting that he conforms in visual ways so he can keep a certain powerful status, which allows him to speak out more queerly. Historically, queer and transgender celebrities and parents have been portrayed by the dominant U.S. media as laughable spectacles because their lives run counter to the accepted daily experience of social mores. In a 2010 issue from the popular magazine Entertainment Weekly, the editors pigeonholed Martin’s sexuality with a peculiar headline that read “In Fact, He Doesn’t ‘She Bang.’”30 Referencing his 2000 hit song “She Bangs,” the headline pokes fun at Martin’s admission that he engaged in sexual relationships with men. In saying he has pushed beyond the boundaries of conventional sexual behavior, Martin becomes a target of homophobic media groups, which happens in various forms. This situation also is evidenced in the cases of prominent trans figures such as Caitlyn Jenner, Renée Richards, and Billy Tipton, who have been critiqued after having children and transitioning to another gender identity publicly. To be a queer or trans parent in the United States is perceived as anathema to traditionalists. As family roles have been cemented by the rituals of public familial practices (like baby showers and weddings), any rupture

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from the norm causes a hullabaloo, particularly when a famous parent is involved. On social media, such an uproar becomes even more visible and painful as followers on Twitter can witness cruel comments being lobbed against LGBTQ celebrities. Studying these events, we are reminded of why so few celebrities choose to come out or transition in the public spotlight. Such public attacks come about for a range of reasons, such as the perceived threat of reimaging the ingrained domestic ideal and possibly influencing people. Such reimaginings often are seen as desacralizing traditional cultural practices, yet this imaginative approach also allows LGBTQ communities to adapt and survive amid a sometimes unkind heteronormative world. Though such reimagining may be seen as attacks on domestic ideals or discontinuity from norms, researchers such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick highlight how queerness is not part of an attack but rather a widespread phenomenon. Sedgwick explains that queerness involves “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, or anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”31 Sedgwick’s scholarship illuminates the ways that queerness is localized in intellectual, social, and physical experiences, suggesting that queerness is more than opinion or artifice. At the same time, scholars in the field of Latinx studies such as José Quiroga articulate how homosexual “praxis” and lives in Latinx communities take multiple forms that are different from those of white gay contexts.32 This difference plays out in varied ways beyond sex, including personal choices such as Martin’s commitment to family and having children, which is pigeonholed as simple conformity by some white queer theorists.33 In contrast, I observe Martin’s representation as exhibiting a provocative form of nonnormativity through his construction of a family life that relies on fathering and seemingly no mothering. Suggesting alternative familial constructions, cultural studies scholar Shelley M. Park and legal scholar Kathleen Franke offer approaches for understanding the domestic and heteronormative circumstances of queer peoples’ homes, analyzing the ways in which homes and homelands are structured as “domestinormative” in composition.34 In Park’s eyes, one of these conventional ways of living domestically is assuming and embracing the public-­private binary. In her challenge to the public-­private binary embedded in domesticity, Park writes, “Living intimacy within the complex configurations of time and space inhabited by mothers and children in adoptive and blended families requires abandoning the notion of home as a fixed and static location where one always feels safe, protected.”35 Like Park, I envision a broader range of acceptable and worthwhile intimacy that can come about through an extensive range of quotidian circumstances. Park specifies that such alternatives take shape when we center adoptive and blended families in the theorizing of motherhood, which ultimately would allow for a “notion of families as coalitional entities requiring practices of solidarity among and between the various inhabitants of diasporic homes.”36 Through such critiques, these scholars lay the framework for charting other social counterpoints to everyday forms of gender and familial normativity. Although Martin himself

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might not identify his family in such terms, his familial representation in digital contexts exemplifies a similar form of alternativity. In contrast to the ingrained domestinormative thinking of the public sphere, Martin provides online users with poignant modalities for living life in a more inclusive and integrative formulation. Across the United States, the sociocultural acts of fathering have evolved over time and have taken several trajectories. Despite some essentialists’ claims, the research shows that the discourses and modes of parenting continue to evolve. Scholars David R. Coon and Yolanda Mayo argue that events and pressures beyond the family unit’s control have influenced how diverse figures like Martin constitute their concepts of family and masculinity.37 In her study, Mayo explains that “migration has significantly eroded the patriarchal structure,” which allows for alternative fatherly formulations produced by gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer parents.38 In this same manner, the development of social media such as Twitter and Instagram have paved the way for people such as Martin’s followers to find role models and mentorship by following their favorite celebrities. Already, scholars Lorin Basden Arnold, May Friedman, Linda Layne, and BettyAnn Martin have conveyed compelling critical examinations of gender and parenting in media contexts.39 However, as researcher Lynda Goldstein has argued, there is much more to be said about the ways in which nonnormative experiences of sexuality and ethnicity intersect in popular representations of parenting.40 In working with these approaches, we must develop a critical praxis that includes a recognition of how queerness has granted theorists and critics new ways of analyzing the cultural dimensions of U.S. family phenomena. That is to say, queerness can and should be recognized within a plethora of familism, including the stories and sensibilities that arise from politics and allyship with heterosexuals. Across the field of cultural studies research, the concepts of queerness, jotería, and lesbianism commonly are perceived as being associated with radical and unruly political actions; however, scholars such as sociologist Katie Acosta have theorized that these experiences of family and nonconforming sexuality are by no means mutually exclusive.41 There are overlaps and spectrums that prevent a totalizing theory of gay families and parenting. Still, as scholar Siobhan Somerville explains, queer remains a volatile term that often signifies rebellion and is used to “challenge identity categories that are presented as stable, transhistorical or authentic.”42 Yet there remains much debate about how the experience of “queer” can and should be conceptualized due to its untold and variegated history. Indeed, there are benefits to the flexibility of the term queer, particularly when it comes to discussing shape-­shifting social media. In a similar vein, I withhold applying the concept of gay in a unilateral manner here, as the identities imbricated in this social media landscape cannot be easily subsumed under one facile category. As a result, I remain conscious of the fact that some readers may perceive these postings as signifying everyone and everything and are imbued with queer meaning, since they are presented in a context that has accrued a sense of nonnormative desire and feeling. This multidimensional polysemy of Martin’s digital postings emanates from

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subjective readings of Martin’s integrative messages. Consequently, assigning just one significance to these short missives and imagery would be a rather reductive approach that ignores the pleasing positivity of imagining multiple interpretations in Martin’s social media landscape.

Looking Forward and Back: The Ethics and Status of Martin’s Digital Fathering In examining Ricky Martin’s mix of postings more closely, one of the elements that shines through much of the photography and writings is the affluent lifestyle of Martin and his family members. Beautiful vacations, exquisite homes, and stylish clothing stand out, and unlike many new media users who post images of quotidian forms of life, we get to observe him lounging in gorgeous locations and relaxing comfortably with his family. Certainly, his upper-­class status goes against the realities experienced by the millions who follow Martin on Twitter and Instagram. However, for many viewers, these images lend a sense of fun and intrigue and inspire them to set goals—­to create a better life for themselves. This dimension of Martin’s online intimacy brings to mind one of the false promises of the American dream: the potential for Americans to have social mobility. For many migrants and economically disadvantaged peoples, such a meteoric rise remains an impossibility due to a host of discomforting circumstances, including the unfair labor conditions and biases that many workers face and their struggles to find regular work after migrating to a new landscape. Though Martin’s postings make his success look easy, there are nevertheless multiple boundaries including governmental policies and authorities that hinder progress and prevent fathers from creating the ideal childhood for their families that many have strived to instantiate. Even as critics have praised the tools of social media for being a “democratizing” space of “freedom” where anyone can succeed, a myriad of scholars finds evidence of exclusionary social dynamics in digital spaces that mirror reality and contribute to the oppression of diverse groups.43 At times, such inculcated oppressions are partially mitigated by the desirability that comes with physical sculpting: Ricky Martin’s ideal physicality regularly receives a tremendous amount of adulation through social media, and bringing his fans into proximity with his body in this manner ultimately fosters a questionable social intimacy based in sexualization. Such forms of self-­sexualization seemingly run counter to his goals of combatting the trafficking of young people across borders, which creates a grotesque kind of slavery based on the sexualization of children, young women, and young men. Martin’s message is exacerbated by the fact that his images tell an instructive kind of story—­that gay men should look traditionally masculine—­which in turn has fostered a homonormativity that may also undercut fathers and parents who depart from the inculcated notions and ideals of parenting. Yet the American ideal of the father as breadwinner is based on a set of domestic ethics originating in a prior century, and thus for many

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critics, this traditionalist notion requires a reinvention because family-­building and parenting have been evolving since they went online. As researcher Ruth E. Page suggests, the ethics that are instantiated within social media interactions are by no means singular because there is a variegated range of activities, approaches, goals, personalities, and platforms where similar phenomena occur, but such a preponderance does not indicate a widespread approval of such approaches in these same activities.44 In a similar fashion, scholars Bala A. Musa and Jim Willis have spoken to the question of ethics in online sites, showing how the common belief of the need to “do the right thing” involves a far more multidimensional debate and thought process than many assume prima facie.45 In the contexts of the internet and popular culture, the debate about what counts as ethical is entrenched in thorny systems of power and privilege. Regardless of the social progress that has been made in domestic contexts, stay-­ at-­ home dads and nonconforming father figures often are regarded as unmanly due to their alternative approach to living their lives. Certainly, Martin breaks from this dynamic even as he reinforces the predominant physical and gender paradigms, which arguably enables him to speak out to a larger audience. His straight-­acting performance in a cisgender body allows Martin to stay in the spotlight and vocalize his critiques of exclusionary politics. Similarly, his Instagram postings about his equally handsome husband function as extensions of his critical approach insofar as he resists the belief that homosexuality is a taboo that should remain obscured for the purpose of maintaining a good reputation. This movement from the silent straight singer to the more openly gay father reads as a digital migration to a more inclusive social environment; however, Martin’s coming out and growth into fatherhood are still ongoing, and thus his story remains partial. Though Martin’s act of speaking out is only a partial narrative of the complex and diverse realities of being a gay Puerto Rican parent, his postings foster a noteworthy family dynamic that illuminates possibilities for equity and inclusion. As such, this digital presence and alternative family dynamic enable his audience to imagine a more egalitarian future based on justice. Further, asking celebrities like Ricky Martin to perform a particular form of justice misses the mark because they are blazing a trail, which involves experimentation and integration of multiple efforts in real time. Though Martin’s digital postings and writing ostensibly involve less complexity than some multipronged initiatives to strengthen families, his postings nevertheless help link people and inspire new ways of conceptualizing family and fatherhood. Such efforts enable his fans and the larger public to speak to the relationality that brings together communities and creates change. In his memoir, Martin partly speaks to this matter of unity when he says, “Maybe I had to go through the experience of being a father, to have my two beautiful angels, to be able to take a step back and understand that this is no longer about me.”46 Martin’s inimitable family structure led him to realize the importance of looking beyond his own needs and of opening himself up to a new ethic of connectivity where testifying about his family life becomes a means to

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challenge the status quo. Being honest in this way is by no means easy or possible for some members of the LGBTQ communities due to the acute pressures and negativities that frequently are attached to coming-­out experiences. However, in recent years, there has been an efflorescence of inspiring representation highlighting the considerable courage, dedication, and social innovation of fathers like Ricky Martin, Lee Daniels, Neil Patrick Harris, Alec Mapa, and Rufus Wainwright, to name a few among the growing list of gay celebrity fathers.47 Even as these personal stories may resemble frivolous fluff to some critics, for a multitude of LGBTQ and Latinx peoples, Martin’s efforts have generated meaningful messages that expand our capacities for imagining inclusive futures. Martin’s social engagement allows us to map out alternative paths and futurities where all people can be unafraid of speaking out about their desires and thus create the heartening social environment that supports their development and well-­being.

Notes 1. “Ricky Martin: Inside My Secret Life,” People, November 15, 2015, cover image. 2. “Ricky Martin,” 91. 3. José Dávila-­Caballero, “Discrimen por orientación sexual: El denominado estatuto de sodomía de Puerto Rico,” Revista Jurídica Universidad de Puerto Rico 69 (2000): 1185–­1267. 4. Ricky Martin, Me (New York: Penguin, 2010), 12. 5. Ellen DeGeneres Show, Telepictures, Warner Brothers, September 28, 2017. 6. Martin, Me, 136. 7. Martin, 272. 8. Martin, 267. 9. José Quiroga, Tropics of Desire: Interventions in Queer Latino America (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 201. 10. Ricky Martin (​@ricky​_martin), “Up Close with This Rainbow,” Instagram, June 25, 2017, https://​w ww​.instagram​.com/​p /​BW​_16XLFN​_ i/​?hl​= ​en. 11. Ricky Martin (​@ ricky​_ martin), “Mi gente quedan pocos días para que puedas comprar tu camisa #Allin4PR,” Twitter, November 25, 2018, https://​t witter​.com/​ricky​_ martin/​status/​ 1066807734828449797. 12. Marisel Moreno, “Family Matters: Revising La Gran Familia Puertorriqueña in the Works of Rosario Ferré and Judith Ortíz Cofer,” Centro Journal 22, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 76. 13. Juana María Rodríguez, “Getting F*****D in Puerto Rico: Metaphoric Provocations and Queer Activist Interventions,” in None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era, ed. Frances Negrón-­Muntaner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 138. 14. Martin, Me, 36. 15. Jorge Duany, Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 2; Steve Vertovec, Transnationalism (New York: Routledge, 2009), 67. 16. Duany, Blurred Borders, 2. 17. Lawrence La Fountain-­Stokes, Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 121. 18. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press), 3. 19. Ricky Martin (​@ ricky​_ martin), “Just spent 3 days at the lebanese/syrian border,” Instagram, June  3, 2016, https://​w ww​.instagram​.com/​p /​BGMIe1cP​_ Nb/​?hl​= ​en. 20. Shaka McGlotten, Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect and Queer Sociality (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013), 4. 21. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 18.

f r o m f a t h e r t o h u m a n i t a r i a n 101 22. Ricky Martin (​@ ricky​_ martin), “Removing laws protecting fellow #Trans in the #USA? NO NO NO. THIS IS ALSO WRONG. SO WRONG. So sad #humanrights,” Twitter, February  24, 2017, https://​t witter​.com/​ricky​_ martin/​status/​835281053304647683. 23. Kevin Kumashiro, Restoried Selves: Autobiographies of Queer Asian / Pacific American Activists (Binghamton, N.Y.: Haworth Press, 2008), xxv. 24. Ricky Martin (​@ ricky​_ martin), “Be unique. Be remarkable. Be rare. This world needs it,” Twitter, July  8, 2017, https://​t witter​.com/​ricky​_ martin/​status/​883894679313555456. 25. Ricky Martin (​@ ricky​_ martin), “La nena,” Twitter, May 17, 2019, https://​t witter​.com/​ ricky​_ martin/​status/​1129439860425723904. 26. Richard G. Jones and Bernadette Marie Calafell, “Contesting Neoliberalism through Critical Pedagogy, Intersectional Reflexivity, and Personal Narrative: Queer Tales of Academia,” Journal of Homosexuality 59, no. 7 (2012): 957–­981. 27. Ricky Martin (​@ ricky​_ martin), “My #life. Mi #vida,” Instagram, December 24, 2015, https://​w ww​.instagram​.com/​p /​_ sTAhmv​_ EZ/. 28. Abigail Locke, “Masculinity, Subjectivities, and Caregiving in the British Press: The Case of the Stay-­at-­Home Father,” in Pops in Pop Culture: Fatherhood, Masculinity, and the New Man, ed. Elizabeth Podnieks (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 195–­212. 29. Frances Negrón-­Muntaner, Boricua Pop and the Latinization of American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 247–­253. 30. “In Fact, He Doesn’t ‘She Bang,’” Entertainment Weekly, no. 1134–­1135, December 2010, 22. 31. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 8. 32. Quiroga, Tropics of Desire, 12–­15. 33. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 17. 34. Kathleen Franke, “The Domesticated Liberty of Lawrence v. Texas,” Columbia Law Review 104 (2004): 1415; Shelley M. Park, Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood: Resisting Monomaternalism in Adoptive, Lesbian, Blended, and Polygamous Families (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2013), 9. 35. Park, Mothering Queerly, 13. 36. Park, 13. 37. David Coon, Look Closer: Suburban Narratives and American Values in Film and Television (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 141–­178; Yolanda Mayo, “Machismo, Fatherhood, and the Latino Family: Understanding the Concept,” Journal of Multicultural Social Work 5, no. 1/2 (1997): 50. 38. Mayo, 50. 39. Lorin Basden Arnold and BettyAnn Martin, “Introduction: Mothering and Social Media; Understanding, Support, and Resistance,” in Taking the Village Online: Mothers, Motherhood and Social Media, ed. Lorin Basden Arnold and BettyAnn Martin (Bradford, Ontario: Demeter Press, 2016), 1–­11; May Friedman, “Daddyblogs Know Best: Histories of Fatherhood in the Cyber Age,” in Pops in Pop Culture: Fatherhood, Masculinity, and the New Man, ed. Elizabeth Podnieks (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 87–­103; Linda Layne, “Documenting Gay Dads: Seven Documentaries about Gay Fatherhood,” Reproductive BioMedicine and Society Online 5 (2017): 31–­34; and May Friedman, Mommyblogs and the Changing Face of Motherhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). 40. Lynda Goldstein, “Queering Daddy or Adopting Homonormative Fatherhood,” in Deconstructing Dads: Changing Images of Fathers in Popular Culture, ed. Laura Tropp and Janice Kelly (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2016), 213–­246. 41. Katie Acosta, Amigas y Amantes: Sexually Non-­conforming Latinas Negotiate Family (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2013); Robert McKee Irwin, “Queer,” in Dictionary of Latin American Cultural Studies, ed. Robert McKee Irwin and Mónica Szurmuk (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 287; Siobhan Somerville, “Queer,” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, ed. Glenn Hendler and Bruce Burgett, 2nd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 188. 42. Somerville, “Queer,” 188.

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43. Jentery Sayers, “Technology,” in Keywords, ed. Hendler and Burgett, 238. 44. Ruth E. Page, Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction (New York: Routledge, 2012). 45. Bala A. Musa and Jim Willis, eds., From Twitter to Tahrir Square: Ethics in Social and New Media Communication (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2014). 46. Martin, Me, 276. 47. Daniel Reynolds, “33 Famous Gay Dads for Father’s Day,” Advocate, June 18, 2015, https://​w ww​.advocate​.com/​families/​2015/ ​06/​18/​33​-famous​-gay​-dads​-fathers​-day.

chapter 7

z Terripelagoes archipelagic thinking in culebra, puerto rico, and guam Yolanda Martínez-­San Miguel

In this chapter, I will focus on U.S. colonialism by working with the notion of territory as developed in U.S. constitutional law (Territorial Clause) and colonial Latin American studies. I then briefly discuss two specific cases—­Guam and Puerto Rico—­both linked to Spanish and U.S. colonialism and both redefined for the contemporary period in 1898 as a result of the Insular Cases.1 I analyze each case through a historical and cultural studies approach to show how colonialism and territoriality are articulated in contexts in which geographical discontinuity makes empires create special categories of overseas possessions that “belong, but are not a part” of the United States. I use artivism, or artistic activism, as a contestatory space in which these colonial territories are reimagined as alternative archipelagoes, or terripelagoes.2

Coloniality of Insularities: Guam and Puerto Rico, 1898 Although it may seem odd to look at both Puerto Rico and Guam, there is a clear historical link that almost every child learns in the insular colonies. In 1898, after Spain “lost” the Spanish-­American War, the Treaty of Paris was signed, and as a result, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam were ceded to the United States as a booty of war. Therefore, Guam and Puerto Rico share common characteristics as former colonies of Spain that are today U.S. colonies. Like Guam, Puerto Rico is also both a military and environmental reserve, a shared trait that Craig Santos Perez has explored in his article entitled “Blue-­Washing the Colonization and Militarization of Our Ocean” on “how U.S. Marine National Monuments protect environmentally harmful U.S. military bases throughout the Pacific and the world.”3 Finally, in both cases, being a territory of the United States has sparked a 103

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series of artistic political interventions that I study as part of what I have denominated as an archipelagic poetic. Guam is a small island of thirty miles by twelve miles located in the Pacific Ocean. Originally discovered for the Euro-­centric Western world by Ferdinand Magellan in 1521, the island would remain “unclaimed” to Western history until 1565, when General Miguel López Legazpi arrived and began the colonization process. Evangelization began in 1680, with the establishment of the first Catholic Church. Instead of New Spain’s castas, Spaniards imposed the Catálogo alfabético de apellidos (Alphabetic catalog of surnames) that was also used in the Philippines, and this is why many Chamorus have Spanish surnames.4 Guam has been known by different names throughout history, like Isla de las Velas Latinas and Isla de los Ladrones, and by the native name of Guåhan. The island was first administered by the Viceroyalty of New Spain (like the Caribbean) and after Mexico’s independence was transferred to the Philippines. Between 1565 and 1815, the island was an important stopover for the Spanish Manila galleons, the coveted route to the Orient that Columbus was looking for when he found the Americas for the European imaginary. Between 1898 and the Second World War, Guam, American Samoa, Hawai’i, and the Philippines were the only American jurisdictions in the Pacific Ocean. Guam was captured by the Japanese on December 7, 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor and was occupied for thirty months. The United States recaptured the island on July 21, 1944.5 In 1950, the Organic Act of Guam established the island as an unincorporated organized territory of the United States, structured the government, and granted U.S. citizenship to its inhabitants. In the 1980s and 1990s, Guamanians tried to become a commonwealth and attain a level of self-­government similar to Puerto Rico, but the federal government rejected the proposal, arguing that it was incompatible with the Territorial Clause.6 Twenty-­nine percent of the island’s territory are U.S. military bases, and Guam has the highest per capita enlistment in the U.S. military forces.7 Andersen Air Force Base in Guam played a major role in the Vietnam War. In the twenty-­first century, the island is still a military hub of cybersecurity and was recently in the middle of the debate of the Trans-­Pacific Partnership, a “NAFTA on steroids” that was supposed to remove trade barriers in the Pacific (and from which the United States recently withdrew).8 In 2017, Guam also became the possible target for a North Korean attack as a reprisal against the United States for its opposition to nuclear weapon development. As of 2015, the island has 161,785 inhabitants, and the two main sources of its economy are tourism and the U.S. Armed Forces. The island’s official languages are English and Chamoru, a Malayo-­Polynesian language with lexical influence from Spanish due to extended colonial contact. Puerto Rico is the smallest of the Hispanic Antilles, which is also an unincorporated territory of the United States that is known as the Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico (Commonwealth of Puerto Rico) and is composed of an archipelago of around 140 islands, islets, and keys.9 The main islands are Puerto Rico, Vieques, Culebra, and Mona. Like Guam, Puerto Rico, as part of the Caribbean, was

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administered by New Spain from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In this chapter, I focus on Culebra, one of the smallest islands of the archipelago of Puerto Rico. Culebra is an island municipality that is approximately seven by five miles and has 1,818 inhabitants.10 Culebra is itself an archipelago composed of a main island and twenty-­three smaller islands. Originally “found” for the Euro-­centric Western history by Columbus in his second voyage, the island has been known as Isla Pasaje, Isla de San Ildefonso, Isla Chiquita, and Última Virgen. Culebra was “discovered” in 1493 and then became a refuge for runaway Taínos and pirates until Spaniards offered incentives to settlers in 1880. Culebra became a site for U.S. military exercises in the early 1900s. In 1903, the United States established a naval reservation followed by a bird refuge in 1909 that was used as a pretext to transfer lands for navy use. In 1939, the island became a military practice site in preparation for U.S. intervention in World War II. In 1970, the U.S. Navy tried to evict the entire population of the island, and this sparked a massive political mobilization. In 1971, the people of Culebra began the Navy-­Culebra protests, and the U.S. Navy left the island for Vieques in 1975. Interestingly, the people of Culebra were able to stay on their land thanks to a court case that invoked President Roosevelt’s order of 1909 to establish a bird refuge on the island. The protection of endangered animal species was more powerful in court than arguments about U.S. citizenship for colonial subjects in Culebra. Many people come to Culebra to visit Flamenco Beach, located on the north coast, which ranked number two in the top ten most exotic beaches in the world. One of the main modes of arrival to the island is a ferry that is taken in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, to the village of Dewey, located on the southern end of the island. Dewey is “named after Admiral George Dewey who, in 1898, was in command of the fleet that destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manilla, ushering in the Spanish-­ American War.”11 Forty-­three years after the U.S. Navy left, the island is still a dumpster of military debris, and every now and then the military has to remove or implode live munition. Flamenco Beach is one of the places where the U.S. Navy left military debris, tanks, live munition, and several pollutants. By using an archipelagic lens, I am able to revive the historical connections that exist between these two apparently very distant insular locations in what were formerly known as the Spanish East and West Indies. Archipelagic thinking has been a source of theoretical, geographical, sociopolitical, and historical meditations in Atlantic and Pacific studies since the mid-­1990s.12 More recently, several scholars have proposed insular, ocean, and nissology approaches for the study of groups, networks, or systems of islands.13 Notions like “aquapelago” and “aquapelagic asssemblages”14 or “terripelago” and “archipelagraphy” all explore the relationship among oceans, islands, nation-­states, commonwealths, and overseas possessions in the articulation of other kinds of identity formation beyond the framework of a national language or a sovereign state.15 My work explores questions from history, political economics, and geography to examine the meaning of the archipelago as a theoretical prism through which literary and artistic conceptualizations of the Caribbean have been developed. Taking debates about territoriality in U.S.

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American studies (in the Insular Cases and the Territorial Clause in the Constitution) and colonial Latin American studies as my point of departure, in this chapter, I examine Craig Santos Perez’s notion of territoriality in his poetry book series from Unincorporated Territory (2008–­2017) in dialogue with Jorge Acevedo Rivera’s public and artivist interventions in the military debris left behind by the U.S. Navy in Culebra to reflect on the links between archipelagic territoriality and colonialism.

Colonial Territories and Overseas Possessions Santos Perez refers to the etymology of territory to propose a neologism: “The word territory derives from the Latin territorium (from terra, ‘land,’ and -­orium, ‘place’). Territorium may derive from terrere, meaning ‘to frighten’; thus, another meaning for territorium is ‘a place from which people are warned off.’ With this in mind, I propose a new term, terripelago (which combines territorium and pélago, signifying sea), to foreground territoriality as it conjoins land and sea, islands and continents.”16 By putting together archipelago and territory, Santos Perez invited me to also put together two separate spaces of my academic training and my historical and experiential knowledges. For those of us trained and raised in colonial contexts, territory has a very specific meaning. In my case more particularly, the U.S. Constitution includes the Territorial Clause under Article IV, Section 3, which states, “The Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State.”17 According to the Supreme Court, “The Island of Porto Rico is a territory appurtenant and belonging to the United States, but not a part of the United States.”18 The natives of unincorporated territories therefore have access to a statutory (defined by law), not constitutional, citizenship, and the Constitution applies to us only in part. In order to understand the actual legal and historical meaning of a territory in the context of the United States, a brief historical review is in order. The legal notion of territory predates the Spanish-­American War and is actually closely related to the national expansion of the United States after the consolidation of the thirteen colonies as an independent nation. Thirty-­one of the current fifty states were part of a U.S. territory. According to Torruella, the main goal of U.S. national expansion was the creation of more states and not the acquisition of territories to be held in a subordinate status indefinitely.19 The basis for such argument comes from a decision of the Supreme Court in Scott v. Sanford in 1856 that stated as follows: “There is certainly no power given by the Constitution to the Federal Government to establish or maintain colonies bordering on the United States or at a distance, to be ruled and governed at its own pleasure; nor to enlarge its territorial limits in any way, except by admission of new States. . . . [No] power is given to acquire a Territory to be held and governed [in a] permanently [colonial] character.”20 Yet the definition and nature of territories gained a new meaning by the end of the century. After the end of the Spanish-­American War, the United States acquired

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control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. Three of those regions would eventually become unincorporated territories that would be administered under the Territorial Clause of the Constitution. In this context, unincorporated territories were basically defined as regions that belong to the United States and were under the control of Congress but were not part of the nation or had the possibility of becoming states.21 The lands submitted to this new definition of territory “were non-­contiguous islands separated by thousands of miles of ocean from the U.S. continental main-­land . . . populated by established communities whose inhabitants differed from the dominant state-­side societal structure with respect to their race, language, customs, cultures, religions, and even legal systems.”22 A second debate developed around the nature and context of territories and the extent to which the Constitution is applicable in these regions. Five articles published between 1898 and 1899 in the Harvard Law Review served as precursors to the debates held by the Supreme Court in the so-­called Insular Cases.23 The debate included three main positions: those who questioned the constitutional principle by which the United States could govern these new insular possessions, for how long, and under which authority; those (in the minority) who adopted the doctrine of ex propio vigore, or who believed that the Constitution applied to all U.S. possessions (also known as “the constitution follows the flag”); and those (the majority of scholars) who supported a doctrine of plenary powers of Congress over U.S. possessions and territories with limited or no constitutional restrictions.24 The opinion that prevailed among the majority of legal and constitutional scholars unleashed a complex discussion about the level of civilization and the capability of self-­government of the insular territories. To resolve the tensions and contradictions emerging from this constitutional discussion, a new distinction was created between possessions and territories. According to this distinction, possessions did not form part of the United States and as such were not subject to the constitutional protections of U.S. territories. The configuration of political, legal, and constitutional discourses around insular possessions continues to be a legacy with important consequences even today. In November 1997, the U.S. General Accounting Office submitted a report entitled U.S. Insular Areas: Application of the U.S. Constitution, which is an update of a previous report on the same topic filed in 1991.25 The report includes Pacific Ocean and western Caribbean insular areas (see report for maps of these regions) and refers specifically to Puerto Rico; the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands; Guam; the U.S. Virgin Islands; American Samoa; Palmyra Atoll; Hawai’i; Navassa Island; Johnston Atoll; Baker, Howland, and Jarvis Islands; Kingman Reef; Midway Atoll; and Wake Atoll, most of them acquired through the 1856 Guano Islands Act and the 1898 Treaty of Paris.26 The 1997 report summarizes “significant judicial and legislative developments concerning the political or tax status of these areas, as well as court decisions since our earlier report involving the applicability of constitutional provisions to these areas.”27 This report demonstrates the persistence of the insular overseas possessions as central in the contemporary U.S. imperial imaginary, a fact that has been key for the articulation of an archipelagic turn in

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American studies that has taken place during the last decade.28 This legal distinction has been recently revisited for Puerto Rico in two cases submitted for the consideration of the Supreme Court related to the island’s state sovereignty to prosecute legal cases and its capability to file for bankruptcy and restructure its current debt.29 Furthermore, the issue of U.S. citizenship was also recently discussed in courts for the case of American Samoa.30 In these three cases, the uncommon status of the U.S. overseas insular possessions has become unreadable or quite intractable in contemporary U.S. international and national law. Thus when I think about the notion of territory, I am thinking about this particularly enigmatic, if not absurd, condition of belonging to but not being a part of the United States. Another definition of colonial territories was advanced by Walter Mignolo in a foundational but unfortunately less read article from his early interventions as a Latin American colonial studies scholar. Mignolo takes as a point of departure the individual and collective identities that are linked to a particular place or location. His conceptualization of place takes into account the density and synchronicity of spaces as conceived in human experiences and shared traditions. In many respects, Mignolo may even be using the bioecological definition of the notion of a territory as a specific niche of a particular animal species. Human beings, as part of the animal kingdom, share with other species the tendency to build notions of identity and belonging around specific experiences with lived spaces. Mignolo’s crucial contribution, however, is his proposal of coexisting indigenous, European, and Creole notions of territory that compete for legitimation during the colonial period in Latin America.31 This conceptualization invites us to consider the density and the intersecting power structures informing the rearticulation of spaces when more than one cultural or ethnic community occupies or claims control over the same spaces. This theorization proves particularly illuminating to understand syncretic articulations of spaces during the colonial and postcolonial periods as well as the violent acts of dispossession and displacement that characterize the experiences of indigenous, diasporic, and immigrant communities. I would like to continue my meditation on the links between territory and colonialism by adding an archipelagic layer that further complicates the articulation of spaces from colonial and imperial contexts. I consider how different notions of the territory (as overseas possessions for the United States and as contestatory locations of belonging for the natives of these places) coexist and collide in contemporary public artistic projects from Guam and Culebra.

Guam: The Unincorporated Poetics of Craig Santos Perez Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru from Guam who resides and teaches at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa after completing an MFA in creative writing at the University of San Francisco and an MA and PhD in ethnic studies at the University of California at Berkeley. His artistic work has been recognized with several prestigious awards, among which one stands out: “In 2010, the Guam Legislature passed Resolution No. 315-­30, recognizing and commending Craig ‘as an accomplished

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poet who has been a phenomenal ambassador for our island, eloquently conveying through his words, the beauty and love that is the Chamoru culture.’”32 His poetic series entitled from Unincorporated Territory is composed of four books, subtitled [hacha] (one; 2008), [saina] (parent, elder; 2010), [guma’] (house, dwelling; 2014), and [lukao] (procession; 2017).33 These books invite us to consider another way of reading. First, all the poems included in these collections have titles that refer to their belonging to other collections of poetry (by including subtitles in the book that refer to the poems as coming from/ginen another collection of poems). Second, Santos Perez uses a variety of poetic genres and sources—­oral histories and family stories, historical documents, verbal and geographical maps, and testimonies from public hearings—­which are all integrated into his poetic fabric. Santos Perez emphasizes the borrowed, nonoriginal nature of his poetry, rejecting modern notions of authorship and showcasing popular traditions and collective orality as legitimate sources for local knowledges and identity-­affirming discourses. Santos Perez himself admits that he does not have a complete command of Chamoru or several of the other languages included in his poetry, so his writing explores the limit of the known and the unknown under colonial and postcolonial conditions.34 In the first book of this series, [hacha], Santos Perez refers to the concept of reducción, a term that is very familiar to those of us working with Caribbean and Latin American colonization and that refers quite directly to the administration and marginalization of native populations in the Americas: “Redúccion” [sic] is the term the Spanish used to name their efforts of subduing, converting and gathering natives through the establishment of missions and the stationing of soldiers to protect these missions. Guahan has always been captured (and thus defined) for its strategic position in the Pacific (as a stopping post on the Spanish Galleon Trade route, as a significant advancement for the Japanese Army during World War II, and as a continuing military colony of the U.S.). My hope is that these poems provide a strategic position for “Guam” to emerge from imperial “redúccion(s)” into further uprisings of meaning.35

The colonial notion of reducción serves as a crucial point of departure for Santos Perez’s poetic. On the one hand, it refers to the many ways in which colonization means a literal reduction or dismissal of the culture, history, and epistemologies of the colonized. The term’s etymology is quite telling, since it comes from the Latin reductio, which means “to return something where or how it was,” but in the case of the Spanish colonies, the word came to mean “la rendición, sumisión y sujeción de algun reino, lugar, etc. por medio del poder” (the surrender, submission or subjection of a kingdom through power) and “el pueblo de indios convertidos á la verdadera religion” (the indigenous population converted into the true religion).36 More concretely, we know that in the case of the Pacific islands, colonization translated into a “combination of military and missionary efforts” to suppress “the Islander’s maritime mobility.”37 Santos Perez uses reducción as a decolonial provocation to explore the multiplicity of meanings that become possible as a result

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of the diverse experiences of “extended colonialism” in Guåhan.38 In that context, his poetry attempts to explore the many layers of meaning palimpsestically contained in diverse references to Guamanian Chamoru, history, collective memory, and storytelling. In other words, poetry offers a space to represent, meditate, and process the excessive meaning denied or suppressed by an imperial reducción that flattens the multiplicity of regional and local modes of expression and signification. I want to focus on another dimension of Santos Perez’s poetic as well. In this poetry, the strong visual component of the text adds another important layer to the process of close reading. I would like to comment on the “visuality” of this poetic to propose a close looking of the book. Therefore, instead of quoting passages by transcribing them into the body of this chapter, I am actually interpreting poetic pages as visual objects that need to be simultaneously “seen” and “read.” Taking this as a point of departure, this first book includes a series of poetic cartographies in which the multiple reducciones of Guam are unsettled. That is the case of “from Liseinsan Ga‘lago,” a poem about the colonial, imperial, and native names of Guåhan (see figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1.  Craig Santos Perez, “from Lisiensan Ga‘lago,” in from Unincorporated Territory [guma’] (Richmond, Calif.: Omnidawn, 2014), 15. Courtesy of Omnidawn, all rights reserved.

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In this poem, the “archipelago of chamoru last names” for Guåhan—­Isla de las Velas Latinas, Isla de los Ladrones, Guåhan—­is transformed into a historical and poetic account of the multiple layers of Guamanian identity that emerge to produce their own nominal and imaginary sovereignty. The poem represents history as an imperfect assemblage of layers of meaning, sort of proposing an archipelagic chronotope. Parataxis suggests a lack of a single or explicit teleology and logic and opens up the possibility of metonymical reading that is articulated through contiguity. Reading becomes difficult, spatial, visual, incomplete, episodic. Here Guåham’s diversality/pluriversality becomes textually significant.39 The reader has to do the work of completing meaning and recognizing gaps that are informed by our first-­ world Euro-­and Anglocentric modes of knowing. The ideal of the complete and final exegesis of the text is abandoned for a process of interpretation that is partial, imperfect, and located in between different languages, knowledges, and historical and cultural traditions. In a similar way, these texts explore spatial distribution as a significant dimension of poetic signification. Cartography and typography coexist textually to render another meaning for Guåhan. The verbal maps included on pages 28, 29, and 30 reorient the centrality and visibility of Guam in a global context for world history, including the early modern as well as the contemporary period. Figure 7.2 is an example of one of the three cartographic maps included in the book. The poetic mapping proposed in these poems makes three important interventions: First, it questions traditional occidental mapping to privilege audiovisual and oceanic “cartographic impulses.”40 Second, it allows us as readers to consider the transformation of Guåham throughout history, from an aggregate of imperial names in the colonial period, to a hub of Pacific communications in the present. Third, it aggregates, assembles, and establishes the cartographic identity of the Pacific in relation to the many layers of Chamoru, Spanish, English, and Japanese cultural and historical referents to invite the reader to engage in a different exercise of interpretation, characterized by “occasional epiphanies about meaning” and interspersed moments of resonance and misunderstanding.41 Maps are at the core of the project. They even transform our notion of the modern book. For example, in the collections [saina], [guma’], and [lukao], the table of contents is transformed into a “Map of Contents,” making the process of reading a literal journey throughout a disparate set of verbal and intertextual locations. The first book of poems, subtitled [hacha], is also visually puzzling, as it interrogates the linearity of reading that is taken for granted by the structure of the modern book. Santos Perez is like a Guaman Poma in reverse: while the latter visually imitates the structure and distribution of the modern book, the first one undoes the common expectations of literary reading and interpretation, of textuality and intertextuality. For example, [hacha] includes poems that come from seven poem collections:

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Figure 7.2.  Craig Santos Perez, “War: In the Pacific Ocean,” in from Unincorporated Territory [guma’] (Richmond, Calif.: Omnidawn, 2014), 29. Permission of Omnidawn, all rights reserved.

Lisiensan Ga‘lago Achiote Tidelands Ta(la)ya Aerial Roots Stations of Crossing Descending Plumeria These different textual referents are included in alternation in the text yet seem to belong to the same source, which is not necessarily a single or known author or authority. Furthermore, the structure of the book requires a form of engagement that differs from Western reading. The dedication and acknowledgments are at the

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end of the book, and a partial glossary is included on page 71 out of the 98 pages. There are blank spaces, epigraphs from several authors, phrases that belong to family members from older and younger generations that try to recover a divergent shared memory about the Japanese occupation, references to U.S. imperialism, Guåhan’s history, and the elusive presence of Chamoru lexicon. How do we read these poems? What is the guiding source that articulates this series of lines “acting in concert” as part of an assemblage of references that should be and are episodically familiar and uncanny at the same time?42 How does this kind of nonnormative reading become “an attempt to begin re-­territorializing the Chamoru language in relation to my own body, by way of the page”?43 In this rather unusual visual dimension, Santos Perez’s poetic establishes an important dialogue with “concrete poetry” from the 1950s and 1960s and contemporary “visual poetry.” Concrete poetry emerged after the Second World War, and it is usually linked to the Noigrandes group in Brazil (Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari) and Eugen Gomringer, born in Bolivia in 1925 and head of the Institute of Concrete Poetry in Germany. It converses with typographic poetry and poetic typography (and even with the more recent trends in digital hypertextual poetry), spoken word and orality, and visual and sound poetry. Concrete poetry not only plays with the disposition of words on the page to reproduce or index certain objects, but it also showcases the spatial dimension of meaning. The Manifiesto: Poesía Concreta (Concrete poetry manifesto) published in 1956 insists, “The concrete poem or ideogram becomes a relational field of functions.”44 Visual poetry further divorces verbal and representational language from its visual creation, leaving “behind the old poetic function of orality” that was more central in concrete poetry.45 The poetry series from Unincorporated Territory provides the reader with fragments of poems from several other poetry series as a visual archipelago from which meaning can be navigated, glimpsed, reconstituted, and even constantly reimagined. It encourages (or even pushes) us to exercise another way of reading that in many respects questions the primacy of the book and modern writing to emphasize the materiality of expression in oral and visual spaces. This dialogue with concrete poetry is also important because, as Rachel Price notes, there is a criticism of modernity and the teleology of developmentalism and objectivity that is also at the core of these poetic projects.46 Price focuses on negativity, blank spaces, and absence marks (strategies that are very important for Santos Perez), but I would like to focus on orality and tachaduras (crossing out)—­a strategy similar to Sor Juana’s borrones—­as another decolonial poetic that questions the primacy of the explicit over the implicit or censored textualities.47 The supposedly organic interplay among objectivity, modernity, and development is further interrogated in Santos Perez’s work with the use of multiple oralities that cross each other out and establish a competition between what is said and what is censored, what is part of the imperial archive and what is hidden in the colonial poetic corpus that is proposed here as a living, oral tradition, collective memory counterarchive. In [guma’], Santos Perez uses public documents and voices in his poetry as another dimension of his artistic work that invites a different kind of reading. In

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“ginen fatal impact statements,” he uses public responses to the draft of the Department of the Navy’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) prepared in 2009 to assess the impact of further military buildup in Guam.48 The document was eleven thousand pages long, and the community had ninety days to process and respond to the report. Guamanians submitted more than ten thousand comments to the proposed military buildup, and Santos Perez uses citations from the documents and the people’s responses in a poem. In this section of the book, Santos Perez dialogues with an important tradition of poets performing in public hearings organized by the U.S. military in Guam to poll people about changes and expansions in its policies toward the island.49 I would now like to meditate on the role and function of artivism in another colonial island: Culebra, Puerto Rico.

Culebra: Visual Artivism of Jorge Acevedo Rivera In the case of Culebra, art has emerged in the midst of an ecological crisis generated by the abandonment of military debris left behind by the U.S. Navy to rot on the beaches of the island (see figure 7.3). These tanks immediately reminded me of Shalini Puri’s work on trauma and memory in the case of Grenada—­specifically her analysis of a series of abandoned airplanes that have been there since the time of the Grenada Revolution and U.S. intervention in 1983.50 Yet when we look at the two sites, there is a significant difference (see figure 7.4). As we can see, the airplanes left behind from the time of the Grenada Revolution and the U.S. invasion have been abandoned to the tropical elements, with minimal or no human intervention. In Culebra, the tanks left behind have experienced a significant artistic and activist transformation. While the planes in Grenada are sometimes covered by natural vegetation and have become the source of speculation for a younger generation that does not have easy access to the actual history of the Grenada Revolution, the tanks in Culebra have become a site of public dialogue and intervention through collective and sometimes anonymous art. These tanks actually have more in common with Jeepneys, U.S. military jeeps left or sold in the Philippines after World War II, which have become one of the most popular means of transportation in the country and are currently being redesigned by several artists. In Culebra and the Philippines, the military debris that indexes the very visible legacies of colonialism in these insular territories has been transformed into sites of public expression for local artists. In Culebra, military debris is constantly transformed into public art. In some cases, we see open questions about the state of pollution and abandonment of the debris on the island. On other occasions, this art refers to the Culebra-­Navy protests and the triumph of the people of the island. Jorge Acevedo Rivera has also painted the tanks with different kinds of art. He is an artist and musician who has been a resident of Culebra since 1997. In both anonymous and authored artivism, however, visual art incorporates written words on reclaimed military tanks to

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Figure 7.3.  Tank in Flamenco Beach, Culebra, Puerto Rico. Photo by Yolanda Martínez-­San Miguel, December 18, 2013.

explore another dimension of the visuality of the word on the artistic surface of an object (see figure 7.5). The plot of this exercise of artistic intervention thickens when we put archipelagic colonial migrations and displacements into focus. Acevedo Rivera is, like many residents of Culebra, a diasporic and oceanic subject. He was actually born in Hawai’i to Puerto Rican parents in the 1970s, although they lived there less

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Figure 7.4.  Planes in Grenada. Photo by Shalini Puri, c. 2007. https://​urgentmemory​.com/​ images/​a irplanes/.

than a year. He spent his very early childhood in Hawai’i and then most of his life in the continental United States and the islands of Puerto Rico and Culebra. As an adult, he received visual arts training in Boston, Afro-­Puerto Rican percussion training with one of Los Hermanos Ayala (Tito) in Boston, and spent time living in San Juan, Boston, and Culebra until he finally settled in Culebra.51 If Santos Perez explores concrete or visual poetics in his books, Acevedo Rivera transforms the word into another aspect that signifies in the artistic recovery of military debris. He began to paint tanks in 2000, and he built an art studio that served as a community center until 2012, when he was evicted to build a hotel in the same area. Acevedo Rivera has become a public intellectual and artist; he even updated some of his artistic interventions to celebrate the forty-­year anniversary of Ley 66, the law approved in 1975 to preserve the “ecological integrity” of the Culebra archipelago (see figure 7.6).52 Acevedo Rivera has also produced more traditional art about Flamenco Beach, such as paintings like Flamenco: Tanque III, in which he repeats his unique dancing fish / human skeleton motif, the tank that is also a crab, and the pelicans that look like military jets. He also keeps a blog where his art is linked to political artivism.53 In this regard, like Santos Perez, whose poetry dialogues with performances during public hearings of the U.S. Navy in Guam, Acevedo Rivera’s work has important links with other forms of artivism, like independent and urban art projects such as “Santurce es ley” and “Culebra es ley,” which took place in Puerto Rico in 2014.54 This apparently small gesture of painting the tanks should be seen in a larger context. On the one hand, the artistic intervention resignifies tanks as remnants of a military superpower that are transformed by the power of nature. On the other hand, painting the tanks preserves them as historical traces of the military occupation and, later, the imperial dismissal of the ecological and human safety of this tiny, marginal archipelago on the outskirts of a tiny, unincorporated territory of the United States.

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Figure 7.5.  Detail, tank in Flamenco Beach, Culebra, Puerto Rico. Photo by Yolanda Martínez-­San Miguel, December 18, 2013.

As the draconian recommendations of the Junta PROMESA (Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act) linger over the economic future of the island while the United States waits to send humanitarian aid to Puerto Rico and the Caribbean after Hurricanes Irma and Maria, the tanks in Culebra serve as a reminder of the continual intervention and dismissal of human and animal life in one of the ecological reserves of the U.S. National Park system.55

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Figure 7.6.  Photo by Ashish Bhatia. Jorge Acevedo’s tank. “Puerto Rico in 4 Days,” https://​ ashishb​.net/​a ll/​trip​-to​-puerto​-rico​-nov​-2015/.

At the same time, by thinking about Culebra in dialogue with Guam, we can reconstitute both islands as two instances of the U.S. imperial archipelago, or the colonial terripelago of the United States. Both islands share a history of colonialism and militarization, struggles of ecological preservation, and public acts of artivism. Santos Perez and Acevedo Rivera also share a multilayered archipelagic diasporic condition. From Guåhan to Hawai’i via San Francisco and Berkeley in the case of Santos Perez and from Hawai’i to Culebra via Boston and San Juan for Acevedo Rivera, both artists share diasporic colonial experiences that inform their artistic engagements. In this way, archipelagic frameworks, colonialism, and intracolonial diasporas can allow us to see the specificity of the Caribbean while also recognizing the multiple layers of connectivity with other archipelagic colonial regions of the world.

Conclusion: Decolonial Archipelagic Geopoetics What is gained when we think about colonial archipelagoes and colonial territories (or colonial terripelagoes together)? On the one hand, colonialism complicates the notion of the territory by creating a short circuit between ownership and belonging. On the other hand, the spatiality of the colonial archipelago invites us to reimagine the role of art and poetry as discursive and visual practices from which territories as spaces of belonging are reconstituted from beneath and beyond imperial histories

Figure 7.7.  Jorge Acevedo, Flamenco: Tanque III, oil on canvas, 67″ × 47″, Culebra 2003, http://​w ww​.artefango​.com/​lienzocanvas/.

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of military appropriation. In both Guåhan and Culebra, territories—­as marginal overseas possessions that lie beyond the confines of laws and the Constitution—­are transformed by the artistic intervention in locations of imagination. Poetic and visual artivism (in this case, produced by two multiply diasporic artists) reclaim Guåhan and Culebra as territories of belonging—­as homes of identification in which meaning is layered, difficult, complex, or as Glissant would have it, opaque. Santos Perez, Acevedo Rivera, and the peoples of Guåhan and Culebra interrogate the uncertain place of colonial archipelagic territories, described in 1901 by Supreme Court Justice Melville Weston Fuller in a dissenting opinion to Downes v. Bidwell (one of the Insular Cases) as “a disembodied shade in an intermediate state of ambiguous existence for an indefinite period.”56 They suggest that in liminal or suspended colonial spaces, communities defy imperial ownership to build their own narratives of rich, fluid, and complex identities. Yet these are communities that are conceived not as land based or as static but rather as archipelagic and diasporic. In the history of both islands, translocation and diasporas are prevalent. Colonialism seems to both coerce and potentiate the diasporic globalization of colonial subjects. The two cases I have discussed here urge us to think about other ways of reading and looking or of interpreting that take into account how colonialism produces a grammar or script that is undone by the public intervention of the act of imagination. By linking colonial territories and archipelagoes reimagined in a tension between the regional and the diasporic, I am suggesting that it is only when these categories are activated in dialogue and tension that we can fully grasp the multiplicity of dimensions of occupied spaces and how central imagination is to unleashing their many meanings.

Notes 1. George F. Edmunds and George S. Boutwell, Insular Cases (Boston: New England Anti-­ imperialist League, 1901). 2. According to Chela Sandoval and Guisela Latorre, “The term artivism is a hybrid neologism that signifies work created by individuals who see an organic relationship between art and activism.” Sandoval and Guisela Latorre, “Chicana/o Artivism: Judy Baca’s Digital Work with Youth of Color,” in Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media, ed. Anna Everett (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 82. 3. Craig Santos Perez, “Blue-­Washing the Colonization and Militarization of Our Ocean,” Hawaii Independent, June  26, 2014, http://​hawaiiindependent​.net/​story/​blue​-washing​-the​ -colonization​-and​-militarization​-of​-our​-ocean. 4. According to Lukban, The Catálogo Alfabético de Apellidos was produced and approved names were assigned to families in all towns. Civil servants assigned family names in alphabetical order causing some small towns with only a few families ending up with all names starting with the same letter. Names were also issued based on the town of origin. “A” for example was issued to primary capitals, “B” for secondary towns, and “C” for tertiary towns. Surnames were also based on the first letter of the town. Before the modern human migration and intermarriages among ethnicities, one can tell the hometown origin of an individual based on their Iberian last name.

t e r r i p e l a g o e s 121 “Clavería Decree of 1849: On Filipino Surnames,” Lukban, accessed July 10, 2020, http://​w ww​ .lukban​.org/​history​-of​-our​-name​.php. See also Narciso Clavería y Zaldúa, Catálogo alfabético de apellidos (1849; Philippine National Archives, Manila, 1973). 5. Frances Negrón-­Muntaner, War for Guam, PBS, April 2, 2015, https://​cdn​.itvs​.org/​ war​_for​_ guam​-pressrelease​.pdf. 6. “Commission on Decolonization 2014,” Guampedia, December 3, 2016, http://​w ww​ .guampedia​.com/​commission​-on​-decolonization/. 7. Michael Lujan Bevacqua, “The Song Maps of Craig Santos Perez,” Transmotion 1, no. 1 (2015), https://​journals​.kent​.ac​.uk/​index​.php/​t ransmotion/​a rticle/​v iew/​159/​564. 8. See “Withdrawal of the United States from the Trans-­Pacific Partnership Negotiations and Agreement,” Whitehouse​.gov, January  23, 2017, https://​w ww​.whitehouse​.gov/​t he​-press​ -office/​2017/ ​01/​23/​presidential​-memorandum​-regarding​-withdrawal​-united​-states​-trans​ -pacific. 9. Harrison Flores Ortiz, “Archipelago of Puerto Rico,” Enciclopedia de Puerto Rico, accessed January  27, 2019, https://​enciclopediapr​.org/​en/​encyclopedia/​a rchipelago​-of​-puerto​-rico/. 10. “Quick Facts: Puerto Rico,” U.S. Census, accessed February 28, 2018, https://​w ww​.census​ .gov/​quickfacts/​fact/​table/​PR/​PST045216. 11. Carlo A. Cubero, “The Caribbean Ruptures—­Making Sense of a Demilitarized Beach,” in Ruptured Landscapes, ed. H. Sooväli-­Sepping, Hugo Reinert, and Jonathan Miles-­Watson (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2015), 9–­24. 12. See Jay L. Batongbacal, “Defining Archipelagic Studies,” in Archipelagic Studies: Charting New Waters, ed. Jay L. Batongbacal (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Systemwide Network on Archipelagic and Ocean Studies, 1988), 183–­194; Édouard Glissant, Traité du tout-­monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). 13. See Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, ed. Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau’ofa (Suva: School of Social and Economic Development, 1993), 2–­17; Godfrey Baldaccino, “Islands, Island Studies and Island Studies Journal,” Island Studies Journal 1, no. 1 (2006): 3–­18; Elaine Stratford, “The Idea of the Archipelago: Contemplating Island Relations,” Island Studies Journal 8, no. 1 (2013): 3–­8; Jonathan Pugh, “Island Movements: Thinking with the Archipelago,” Island Studies Journal 8 (2013): 9–­24; Françoise Lionnet, “Continents and Archipelagoes: From E Pluribus Unum to Creolized Solidarities,” PMLA 123, no. 5 (2008): 1503–­1515; Phillip Steinberg, “Insularity, Sovereignty and Statehood: The Representation of Islands on Portolan Charts and the Construction of the Territorial State,” Geografiska Annaler 87, no. 4 (2005): 253–­265; Grant McCall, “Nissology: A Proposal for Consideration,” Journal of the Pacific Society 17, no. 2/3 (1994): 93–­106. 14. Philip Hayward, “Aquapelagos and Aquapelagic Assemblages,” Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures 6, no. 1 (2012): 1–­10; Helen Dawson, “Archaeology, Aquapelagos and Island Studies,” Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures 6, no. 1 (2012): 17–­21. 15. Craig Santos Perez, “Transterritorial Currents and the Imperial Terripelago,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2015): 619–­624; Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “‘The Litany of Islands, the Rosary of Archipelagoes’: Caribbean and Pacific Archipelagraphy,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 32, no. 1 (2001): 21–­51. 16. Santos Perez, “Transterritorial Currents,” 619–­624. 17. U.S. Const. art. IV, § 3. 18. Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244, 287 (1901), https://​supreme​.justia​.com/​cases/​federal/​ us/​182/​244/​case​.html. 19. Juan R. Torruella, “The Insular Cases: The Establishment of a Regime of Political Apartheid,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law 29, no. 2 (2007): 289, http://​ www​.law​.upenn​.edu/​journals/​jil/​a rticles/​volume29/​issue2/​Torruella29U​.Pa​.J​.Int​%27lL ​.283​ %282007​%29​.pdf. 20. Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857), https://​w ww​.ourdocuments​.gov/​doc​.php​ ?flash​=​false​&​doc​=​29.

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21. Downes, 182 U.S. at 244, 287. 22. Juan R. Torruella, “Ruling America’s Colonies: The Insular Cases,” Yale Law & Policy Review 32, no.  1 (2013): 74–­81, http://​digitalcommons​.law​.yale​.edu/​cgi/​v iewcontent​.cgi​ ?article ​=​1652 ​& ​context​=​ylpr. 23. See Albert H. Howe, The Insular Cases (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1901). For a summary and analysis of these cases, see Christina Burnett and Burke Marshall, eds., Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion and the Constitution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 5–­6; Torruella, “Insular Cases,” 291–­296, 300–­312; and Lanny Thompson, Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories under U.S. Dominion after 1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010). 24. Thompson, Imperial Archipelago, 189–­190. 25. U.S. General Accounting Office, U.S. Insular Areas: Application of the U.S. Constitution, report to the Chairman, Committee on Resources, House of Representatives, November 2017, http://​w ww​.gao​.gov/​a rchive/​1998/​og98005​.pdf. 26. The Guano Act provides that an island on which guano is discovered by a U.S. citizen and which is not claimed by another government may be considered, at the discretion of the President, as “appertaining to the United States.” 48 U.S.C. § 1411. (U.S. General Accounting Office, 10, n. 15, https://​uscode​.house​.gov/​v iew​.xhtml​?path​=​/​prelim​@ title48/​chapter8​&​ edition​= ​prelim). The 1898 Paris Treaty was signed at the end of the Spanish-­American War, and in it, Spain agreed to cede Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam to the United States, effectively losing its last colonies in the Americas. 27. U.S. General Accounting Office, U.S. Insular Areas. 28. See American Studies Association, “Dimensions of Empire and Resistance: Past, Present, and Future” (annual conference, San Juan, November 15–­­18, 2012); Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens, “Introduction: Archipelagic American Studies; Decontinentalizing the Study of American Culture,” in Archipelagic American Studies, ed. Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), 1–­54. 29. The two cases are Commonwealth of Puerto Rico v. M. Sánchez Valle et al., 579 U.S. (2016), argued January 13, 2016, and decided June 9, 2016; and Commonwealth of Puerto Rico et al. v. Franklin California Trust et al., 579 U.S. (2016), argued March 22, 2016, and decided June 13, 2016. 30. See Tuaua v. United States, No. 13-­5272 (D.C. Cir. 2015). Petition for writ of certiorari denied June 13, 2016. 31. Walter Mignolo, “La lengua, la letra, el territorio (o la crisis de los estudios literarios coloniales),” in Lectura crítica de la literatura americana: Inventarios, invenciones, revisiones, ed. Saul Sosnowski (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1996), 3–­29. 32. See Craig Santos Perez’s personal blog at http://​craigsantosperez​.wordpress​.com. 33. Craig Santos Perez, from Unincorporated Territory [guma’] (Richmond, Calif.: Omnidawn, 2014); from Unincorporated Territory: [hacha] (Kaneohe: tinFish Press, 2008); from Unincorporated Territory: [lukao] (Oakland, Calif.: Omnidawn, 2017); from Unincorporated Territory: [saina] (Richmond, Calif.: Omnidawn, 2010). 34. Craig Santos Perez, personal communication with the author, October 5–­­6, 2016. 35. Santos Perez, from Unincorporated Territory: [hacha], 11 (my emphasis). 36. Eduardo de Echegaray, Diccionario general etimológico de la lengua española (Madrid: Faquineto, 1887–­1889). 37. Otto Heim, “Locating Guam: The Cartography of the Pacific and Craig Santos Perez’s Remapping of Unincorporated Territory,” in New Directions in Travel Writing Studies, ed. Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 185. 38. I use the term extended colonialism to refer to insular regions that experienced a colonialism that began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and lasted until the twentieth century (and sometimes until today) and that frequently includes the coexistence of more than one colonial system (Spanish and French in Martinique; Spanish and United States in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines; Spanish, French, and English in many islands of the Anglo-­Caribbean). See Martínez-­San Miguel, Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-­colonial Migrations in a Pan-­Caribbean Context (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

t e r r i p e l a g o e s 123 39. I use diversality/pluriversality here as opposed to universality to refer to the multiplicity of meanings that become significant in this poetic project. On origin of diversality, see Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Éloge de la Créolité / In Praise of Creoleness, trans. Mohamed B. Taleb-­Khyar (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). For border thinking and pluriversality, see Walter Mignolo, “La lengua, la letra, el territorio (o la crisis de los estudios literarios coloniales),” Dispositio 11, no. 28/29 (1986): 137–­160; and Walter Mignolo, “La revolución teórica del zapatismo: Sus consecuencias históricas, éticas y políticas,” Orbis Tertius 2, no. 5 (1997): 63–­81. 40. I use this phrase as developed by Anjali Nerlekar in her course “The Cartographic Impulse,” offered at Ithaca College in 2008, which refers to “the usage of the concept and the imagination of the cartograph, whether through actual maps in texts or through the metaphor of the map, to spatialize literary narratives” (Nerlekar, personal communication with the author, March 3, 2018). 41. Collier Nogues, “Two Thirds: Mabi David’s Spleen and Craig Santos Perez’s from Unincorporated Territory [guma’],” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal 25 (September 2014), http://​w ww​ .asiancha​.com/​content/​v iew/​1826/​467/. 42. Baldaccino, “Islands, Island Studies,” 3–­18. 43. Santos Perez, from Unincorporated Territory: [hacha], 12. 44. Manifiesto: Poesía Concreta, “Revista ad—­arquitetura e decoração,” no. 20 (November–­ December 1956), 27. 45. Manifiesto, 27. 46. Rachel Price, “Object, Non-­object, Transobject, Relational Object: From ‘Poesia Concreta’ to ‘A Nova Objetividade,’” Revista de Letras 47, no. 1 (January–­June 2007): 31–­32. 47. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a poet from the seventeenth-­century New Spain, uses the word borrones (“drafts” and/or “scratches”) to refer to her writings showcasing feminine, colonial, and indigenous knowledges from the New World, as comparable to the authority of other European canonical literary and philosophical texts: “Bien así, a la luz de vuestros / panegíricos gallardos, / de mis oscuros borrones / quedan los disformes rasgos” (Obras completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, vol. 1, ed. Alfonso Méndez Plancarte [Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1951], 161). 48. For more information, see U.S. Department of the Interior, “Impact of Military Build-­Up in Guam,” statement of Nikolao I. Pula, May 1, 2008, https://​w ww​.doi​.gov/​ocl/​hearings/​110/​ MilitaryBuildUpInGuam​_050108. See also U.S. Department of the Navy, Draft: Environmental Impact Statement / Overseas Environmental Impact Statement Guam and CNMI Military Relocation, Joint Guam Program Office, November 2009, http://​w ww​.guambuildupeis​.us/​ documents/​volume ​_9/​DEIS ​_Vol ​_9​-AppendixA ​_ Nov09​.pdf. 49. “It’s My Home Too,” YouTube, January 9, 2010, https://​w ww​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​ =​R IynY9RDaqQ; Jayton Okada, “Testifying at the 2nd Military Buildup Public Comment Hearing,” YouTube, January  9, 2010, https://​w ww​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​= ​CqM5Yzytt5Y. 50. Shalini Puri, The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), https://​urgentmemory​.com/​images/​a irplanes/. 51. Cubero, “Caribbean Ruptures,” 9–­24. 52. Acevedo Rivera, personal communication with the author, September 19, 2019. 53. See his blog here: https://​w ww​.artefango​.com/​culebra​-ley​- 66/. See also https://​w ww​ .change​.org/​p /​defiende​-santuario​-de​-mangle​-rojo​-en​-culebra​-pr. 54. Josenid Orozco Velázquez, “Arte crea lazos entre Culebra y Santurce,” El Vocero, December  11, 2014, http://​elvocero​.com/​a rte​-crea​-lazos​-entre​-culebra​-y​-santurce/. 55. See Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), S. 2328, 114th Cong. (2016), which became Pub. L. No. 114-­187, https://​w ww​.congress​.gov/​ bill/​114th​-congress/​senate​-bill/​2328/. 56. Quoted in Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall, eds., Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion and the Constitution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001).

chapter 8

z The Caribbean in the U.S. Imagination travel writing, annexation, and slavery Daylet Domínguez

During the mid-­nineteenth century, an increasing number of North American travelers visited and wrote about Cuba. Richard Henry Dana, George W. Williams, Octavia Walton Le Vert, Julia Ward Howe, and Samuel Hazard are just a small sample of the many travelers who frequented Cuba during that period. In 1859, 5,034 U.S. travelers came to Cuba. At the same time, the number of North Americans living on the island escalated rapidly. In 1846, there were 1,256 U.S. citizens residing in Cuba; by 1862, the number had increased to 2,500. Three years later, in 1865, with the defeat of the Confederacy at the end of the U.S. Civil War, a new wave of immigrants arrived on the island.1 Clearly, the development of nautical technology in the mid-­nineteenth century led to more maritime communication between the United States and Cuba as well as to the democratization of travel. The increase in U.S. travelers in Cuba resulted in the appearance of a significant number of travel accounts; between 1850 and 1900, seventy-­five books about travel to Cuba were published in the United States.2 As Christopher McBride asserts, Cuba came to occupy a significant place in the North American imagination in the mid-­nineteenth century.3 This new network between the United States and Cuba began to emerge in 1762 with the British occupation of Havana, when criollo elites in Cuba had the opportunity to establish the first commercial ties with British North America. It further developed with the 1776 American War of Independence and was consolidated after the Haitian Revolution in 1804, when Cuba substituted the French colony as the first sugar producer in the Atlantic world. By the nineteenth century, Cuba had stopped being a marginal colony of the Spanish Empire and was now the richest sugar colony in the world. Along with Brazil and the southern states of the United States, Cuba emerged as one of the new slaveholding societies of the nineteenth century, a phenomenon Dale Tomich has called the second slavery.4 Even though Cuba 127

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remained a colony of Spain until 1898, the United States became the most important economic partner of the island, replacing Spain as Cuba’s commercial metropole. The numerous nineteenth-­century U.S. travel accounts, which circulated widely in the United States, changed the ways in which the Caribbean was incorporated into the U.S. imagination. While eighteenth-­century depictions of the region were associated with natural history, nineteenth-­century representations were connected to travel writings. The change from natural history to travel writing precipitated the move from nature to culture, which was essential to modernizing how the Caribbean was imagined in the United States. The U.S. travelers’ emphasis on culture, history, and types enabled them to construct a more modern vision of the Caribbean beyond the dominant view of the eighteenth-­century natural history books that associated the region only with nature and agricultural crops. Hence these U.S. travel accounts established a different model of traveler, one closer to the figure of the tourist, thereby establishing new travel narrative conventions. This was the end of traveling and the birth of tourism; with it, a different Caribbean emerged in the nineteenth-­century U.S. imagination. However, the nineteenth-­century U.S.-­Cuba relationship was not defined solely by the presence of U.S. travelers and citizens on the island and the exportation of U.S. technology to Cuba. The migratory flow from the island to the United States also played a key role in the way Cuba was imagined in the emerging empire. By the mid-­nineteenth century, Cuban migration to the United States had started to impact life in the north in terms of culture, economy, and ethnicity.5 Cubans’ experience in the United States was fundamental to the Cuban criollo reaction against Spanish colonialism, the defining of Cuban nationality, and the future of the island. It was not just U.S. travelers who set the tone for how Cuba and its inhabitants would be imagined in the United States; Cubans themselves were fundamental in advancing these narratives through their alliances and with the print culture they developed in the United States. They played a significant role in shaping and disseminating annexation sentiments in the public sphere and among the higher authorities of the U.S. government, including the president. In this chapter, I focus on reading the Caribbean in U.S. cultural history through the texts of travelers who visited Cuba in the 1850s and 1860s, a period in which the annexationist movement reached its peak. I argue that these travel books make up a literary corpus in which the history of travel writing is linked to the history of empire. Most U.S. travelers were in favor of annexation and sought to promote knowledge of Cuba within the United States and to expand tourism and sugar investments on the island. I read several travel accounts that share the same annexationist impulse, but I work closely with Samuel Hazard’s Cuba with Pen and Pencil. Among nineteenth-­century U.S. travel accounts, it occupies a significant place; the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz would publish it in Spanish in 1928 in his book series Colección de Libros Cubanos, thereby incorporating it into the Cuban literary canon.6 I am interested in tracking the different ways in which the Caribbean entered the U.S. imagination in the second half of the nineteenth century. In

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mid-­nineteenth-­century travel writings, U.S. travelers depicted the Caribbean as the American Mediterranean and Cuba as the southernmost border of the United States—­a touristic destination and a therapeutic space. The island was also seen as a place to preserve slavery before the U.S. Civil War. Most important to their annexationist plans, the writers all portrayed an island that had become more North American than Spanish. The Caribbean that emerges in their texts is not only a space of different borders that have the ability to connect the Americas with Europe and vice versa but also a place between empires where the United States needs to secure its presence in order to achieve global hegemony. The ways in which the U.S. travelers depicted the island of Cuba were mediated by Fredrika Bremer’s The Homes of the New World.7 Bremer’s emphasis on the geographical proximity between the United States and Cuba, her use of the typification technique, and her critique of colonial despotism on the island turned out to be key narratives in U.S. annexationist travel accounts. It was this European woman traveler who became the most important reference for U.S. travelers in the second half of the nineteenth century. Lastly, my chapter complicates the relationship between imperial and national projects, which sometimes were articulated on the basis of similar principles. I claim that Cuban annexationist groups on the island and in the United States crafted the main arguments for incorporating the island into the union, setting the tone in the U.S. public sphere with regard to Cuba. Hence proponents of U.S. expansionism coincided with Cuban annexationists in defending their interests on the basis of the same principles. When read from this perspective, it becomes clear that travel narratives formed part of an evolving geopolitical project that combined both U.S. imperialism and the criollo reformist agenda.

Nineteenth-­C entury U.S. Travelers in the Caribbean Since the eighteenth century, North American readers had been familiar with the Caribbean through the specific genre of natural history. Natural history accounts were responsible for the construction of strong associations between the Caribbean and the southern colonies of North America. Most of the books associated with the scientific discipline depicted the southern region as an extension of the Caribbean not only because of the climate and agricultural products but also due to the existence of slavery.8 Most eighteenth-­century natural histories were focused on the English Caribbean and insisted on representing the region as nature and as a site of danger, contagion, and disease due to its excess of heat. However, this conception would change in nineteenth-­century U.S. travel accounts. With them, the Caribbean stopped being understood as a site of degeneracy and began to be portrayed as a place for regeneration, improvement, and progress—­a therapeutic and touristic place. After all, the existing proximity between the Caribbean and the United States required a more optimistic vision of the former. This transformation coincided or rather was the result of an important change in the United States’ nineteenth-­century relationship with the Caribbean. If natural history accounts focus extensively on the English Caribbean, nineteenth-­century

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travel writing addresses the Spanish Caribbean, and it is not until the nineteenth century that Cuba occupies a significant role in the U.S. imagination.9 The shift from English to Spanish Caribbean was important for the new conceptualizations of the region. As Antonio Benítez Rojo has argued, the English Caribbean followed the model of colonies of exploitation, while the Spanish Caribbean developed as colonies of settlement.10 The distinctions among the Caribbean colonies were, at the time, central to the representation of the region and demanded different writing genres. Natural history was more oriented toward nature, climate, and agricultural resources, while travel writing enabled the incorporation of a more diversified society. With the passage from naturalist to traveler, different components of the culture emerged in the nineteenth-­century accounts. The figure that marked to a large degree the transition from natural history to travel writing for the U.S. imagination was Fredrika Bremer. The Swedish traveler and pioneer of European feminism visited the island between February and May of 1851 after a long voyage in the United States.11 Her impressions of North America and the Caribbean were collected and translated into English in three volumes in 1853. Bremer became the most valuable reference for U.S. travelers visiting the island in the second half of the nineteenth century. She was closer to nineteenth-­ century U.S. travelers than Alexander von Humboldt for several reasons. Humboldt arrived in Cuba in 1800 and then in 1804, when criollo elites were in the process of transforming Cuba into a slave society; by contrast, Bremer stayed on the island during a period in which the idea of annexing Cuba to the U.S. was approaching its peak. While Humboldt and his Political Essay on the Island of Cuba were associated with the scientific traveler and the discipline of natural history, Bremer resembled more the figure of the tourist.12 Her views on Cuba would determine the way the following generation of U.S. travelers would write about the Caribbean. Most U.S. travelers read Bremer’s Home of the New World before embarking on their trips to the island. Some U.S. travelers also repeated Bremer’s itinerary in Havana and Matanzas. For instance, Richard Henry Dana, a prominent North American abolitionist, arrived in Cuba in 1859 after reading Bremer’s book and visited the same plantation frequented by Bremer in the vicinity of Matanzas, L’Ariadne. By going to the same plantation, he proved that Bremer’s account resonated strongly in U.S. literary and intellectual circles. Bremer’s stay on the island also inspired U.S. women to vacation there. In Souvenirs of Travel, Octavia Walton Le Vert, a notable literary figure from the South, recognizes Bremer as a source of inspiration for visiting the island.13 Wanting to meet the Afro-­Cuban cabildos, Julia Ward Howe alludes to Bremer’s visit to these places to justify her own.14 One might say that Bremer’s voyage set the path for future U.S. journeys and the tone for subsequent travel accounts. Bremer’s travel accounts depict a colony that was becoming increasingly less Spanish and more cosmopolitan, open to cultural and economic exchange with France, Germany, and the United States. Visiting the island in 1851, Bremer frequented North American and French criollo planters in Matanzas and Havana. When reading Home of the New World, one can easily imagine Bremer’s

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conversations in English and French, but not in Spanish. The strong presence of North American planters in the western part of the island allowed the traveler to use English and to experience U.S. culture in the Caribbean. U.S. travelers emphasized this changing scenario. In To Cuba and Back, Dana praises Matanzas as a city built under North American supervision, affirming that French, English, and American influences prevail despite Spanish control.15 In his strolls around Matanzas, he noticed the presence of North American faces; during his stay on the plantations, he engaged in conversations with North American engineers. Here again, Matanzas looked not like a Spanish colony but like a cosmopolitan locale. For Dana, Matanzas was the city of the future. Another North American traveler, George W. Williams, relates similar impressions in Sketches of the Old and New World: “Havana is crowded with Americanos, as the Cubans call us.”16 Williams was delighted to encounter people from Boston, New Orleans, and Charleston in his voyage around the western part of Cuba.17 As John Patrick Leary’s studies show, these travel narratives illustrate the way in which “the U.S. presence in the Caribbean begins to trouble the clear oppositions between foreign and domestic, abroad and home.”18 The familiarity U.S. travelers experienced on the island became a literary commonplace in travel writings and soon a case for annexation. There were other reasons U.S. voyagers felt more affinity with the Swedish traveler than with Humboldt. Among the most significant of these was Bremer’s emphasis on the geographical proximity between the United States and Cuba. In Home of the New World, Cuba figures as a geographical extension of the United States despite its cultural, political, and linguistic differences. Because she visited the Caribbean between voyages to the north and south of the United States, Bremer located Cuba and the United States within a similar symbolic imaginary and portrayed the island as the southernmost border of the United States. Her travel account, which covers her impressions of both the United States and Cuba, was fundamental to North American readers’ imagining of both regions as part of the same geopolitical cartography. Moreover, Bremer’s use of the typification technique to describe the island’s population permeated nineteenth-­century U.S. travel accounts. Her descriptions of different Africans, Spaniards, and white, mulato, and black criollos—­all absent from Humboldt’s accounts—­led nineteenth-­century U.S. travelers to rely more on Bremer than on Humboldt as a source. Also, Bremer’s critique of colonial censorship and the lack of civil and religious freedoms on the island became significant arguments in the nineteenth-­century U.S. travel accounts that defended annexing the island. Certainly, her views on Cuban colonial affairs were not new to North American intellectual, literary, and political circles. Humboldt himself had addressed most of these issues in his Political Essay on the Island of Cuba, and other U.S. travelers had done so before Bremer as well. For instance, in Cuba, and the Cubans, Richard B. Kimball clearly states that the island was in a state of despotism and that only annexation to the United States would bring civil and religious liberty.19 Bremer simply made these arguments more appealing to U.S. readership, although she herself never favored Cuba’s annexation to the United States.

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Among U.S. travelers who visited the island during this period, none of them elaborated on the subject of geography in a more sophisticated way than Williams. In his narrative, geographical proximity amounts to a political justification for annexing the island to the union: “Cuba belongs to us geographically, and it must be ours politically.”20 Geography and politics appear interchangeable in a context where proximity prevails. As a South Carolinian, Williams also noted the resemblances between the southern landscape of North America and that of the Caribbean. In his book, he describes Key West as a tropical place, notes similarities between Yumuri Valley and Nacoochee Valley, and locates Louisiana and Trinidad in the same geographical cartography.21 These analogies, abundant in eighteenth-­century natural histories of the Caribbean, were transferred to the travel writing archive of the nineteenth century; here they signaled not only a utilitarian perspective, as they had in natural history accounts, but also an aesthetic dimension. The discourse on social types also came to occupy a central role in nineteenth-­ century travel literature. This does not mean that eighteenth-­century natural histories were not focused on the population; the description of people was an important part of that genre. In fact, as Nancy Stepan and David Spurr have shown, the principles of classification of natural history were adaptable to the study of human races. In nineteenth-­century travel writing, nature became a point of reference in describing the population; that is, most of the language used to describe nature was transferred to the human domain.22 Whereas in the eighteenth century, the concepts of lineage and blood were central to the classification of the population, in the nineteenth century, the notion of type came to be understood as the key to identifying the different sectors of society. This was precisely the historical moment when the category of race was becoming an increasingly important form of identification at both the individual and collective levels, marking the paradigm shift from the concept of blood to the racial, corporeal, and biological.23 Among the most popular types described by travelers were the calesero (a caleche driver, who was also a slave and occupied a prominent place within the slave hierarchy due to his proximity to the slave master; he was usually well dressed); white, mulata, and black women; and the guajiro (Cuban small-­subsistence peasant usually associated with Spanish origin). This technique of typifying allowed travelers to insert the local population into an international, globalized, and cosmopolitan network. In Walton’s travel account, for example, Cuban guajiros are compared to European gypsies: “We drove about fifteen miles into the country, passing many of the huts of the guajiros or monteros [hunters], a peculiar type of people, said to retain many of the characteristics of the Indians . . . these people have the look of European gypsies.”24 For Walton, guajiro authenticity resided in their connection to the indigenous population who inhabited the island before 1492; however, what made them identifiable was their supposed resemblance to European gypsies. Alongside the discourse on types, U.S. travelers incorporated politics into their travel accounts. One of the central political questions was the state of despotism and censorship to which Cubans had been reduced. In Trip to Cuba, Julia Ward Howe uses the metaphor of slavery to signal the Spaniards’ subjugation of

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the criollos, claiming that criollos endured more from the Spanish government than what they inflicted on their slaves.25 Most writers insisted on representing Spain as a backward, savage, and oppressive empire, while the United States was the enlightened, modern, and liberating nation. The notion that emerged in these travel accounts was that by annexing the island, the United States would liberate Cuba from its despotic regime. In fact, that idea was crafted by Cuban elites on the island and abroad in order to advance their annexationist agenda. To a large extent, they provided the main arguments for incorporating the island into the union and set the tone that would prevail in future negotiations. During the antebellum period in the United States, the question of whether to annex Cuba was one of the most intense political debates. However, these discussions did not originate solely in the interventions of North Americans in the U.S. public sphere; Cuban criollo elites also played a significant role. After the victory of the North over the South in the U.S. Civil War, the topic of Cuba’s annexation did not vanish at all. U.S. travelers visiting the island after 1865 continued to feature annexationist propaganda in their accounts and advocate for annexing Cuba to the union. At the same time, the first Cuban war of independence, the Ten Years’ War, which broke out in 1868 on the island, was born in conjunction with the annexation debate. Anticolonial and independence programs in Cuba had a history of complicity with proannexation agendas, which also formed part of the reformist movement that was changing nineteenth-­century Caribbean political life. As historian Louis Pérez Jr. asserts, “Only weeks after the ‘Grito de Yara,’ Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Pedro Figueredo, and Bartolomé Masó petitioned Secretary of State William Seward to consider Cuban admission to the Union. A year later the constituent assembly of Guaimaro explicitly proclaimed annexation as the ultimate purpose of the Cuban rebellion.”26 As I will argue in the following section, imperial and national projects were articulated on the basis of similar principles. U.S. imperialism and the criollo reformist agenda were strongly aligned during the 1840s and 1850s.

Annexation and Criollo Reformism The case for annexation was based to a large degree on the idea of U.S. exceptionalism. As John Patrick Leary has pointed out, the Cuban exile community in the United States was important in shaping and consolidating the idea of U.S. exceptionalism.27 North American superiority was formulated on the basis of two premises: the first was related to the antimonarchical character of its institutions—­that is, its republicanism—­while the second had to do with the supremacy of the white race. By stressing the differences between a democratic, modern, and civilized North America and a despotic and old-­fashioned Spain, Cuban criollos legitimized the U.S. intervention in the Caribbean. In underlining the racial distinctions between a white North America and a heterogeneous Spain, they aspired to convince their fellow Cubans that annexation would eventually whiten the island.

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Gaspar Betancourt Cisneros, an ardent defender of Cuba’s annexation, exiled in New York between 1846 and 1856, made both arguments in his letters to José Antonio Saco, the keenest opponent of Cuba’s annexation. Exiled in Paris, Saco led the public debate around the issue of annexation by publishing two political essays, Ideas sobre la incorporación de Cuba en los Estados Unidos (1848) and Réplica de Don José Antonio Saco a los anexionistas (1849). Saco’s main argument in both pamphlets resided in the idea that annexing the island to the union would drive the loss of Cuban nationality. For his part, Betancourt Cisneros questioned Saco’s argument about the existence of Cuban nationality. In a letter dated August 30, 1848, writing in New York, he replied to Saco that the racial mixture prevailing in Cuba did not allow for the formation of the national community. The extended mestizaje among Amerindians, blacks, criollos, and Spaniards had produced a degenerate race. Thus the criollo considered the heterogeneity of the Cuban population an insurmountable difficulty in the process of creating cohesive communities and achieving progress.28 For Betancourt Cisneros, annexation would fulfill two important functions: first, it would prevent the Africanization of the island; second, it would carry out the political, social, and civil modernization of Cuba. Betancourt Cisneros was part of a transnational network that integrated Cuban annexationists in the United States and on the island through two important organizations. The first one, Club de la Habana, created in 1847 in Cuba, included wealthy planters and intellectuals such as José Luis Alfonso, Cristobal Madan, Miguel Aldama, Ramón de Palma, Cirilo Villaverde, and the North American John S. Trasher. The second one, Consejo Cubano, was formed in New York in 1848 and joined by Betancourt Cisneros, among others.29 Both annexationist groups established very close relations with the United States, situated themselves as important interlocutors with the North American government, and tried to influence U.S. policy toward Cuba. In doing so, they formed indispensable alliances with prominent public figures. For instance, the editors of the New York newspapers the Sun (Moses Yale Beach) and the Democratic Review (John O’Sullivan) were key Cuban allies. The newspaper La Verdad, the most important annexationist paper founded by Cubans in New York, edited by Betancourt Cisneros and published in English and Spanish, received strong support from Beach, who allowed the paper to be printed at no cost at his own publishing house. In 1847, Beach and O’Sullivan traveled to Havana and had meetings with important members of Club de la Habana. Both were instrumental mediators between the U.S. government and Cubans on the island and in exile—­both as major proponents of Cuban annexationists’ interests in the White House and as the facilitators of meetings between U.S. presidents and cabinet members and Cuban exiles in New York.30 In 1848, Betancourt Cisneros, alongside José Aniceto Iznaga and Alonso Betancourt, met with President James Knox Polk to get him involved in the Cuban annexationist cause. O’Sullivan was also the intellectual author of the phrase Manifest Destiny and the brother-­in-­law of the aforementioned Madan, “a wealthy Cuban sugar planter exiled in New York who led the Cuban campaign for annexation.”31 O’Sullivan’s

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definition of Manifest Destiny echoes the central arguments elaborated by the Cuban community for annexing the island to the union. As Caroline Levander points out, “The term manifest destiny was used . . . to describe not only U.S. westward expansion but also ‘the daring ambition’ of Southern leaders . . . to liberate Cuba from its ‘despotic oppressor,’ Spain.”32 Hence U.S. military leaders were in many ways motivated by the Cuban annexationists themselves. While Club de la Habana used diplomatic resources to carry out its annexationist plan, it also attempted to convince U.S. general William J. Worth, one of the most important generals in the Mexican War, to lead a foreign army against Spain in Cuba. Hence filibusterism became an important part of the annexationist program. The United States’ westward expansion occurred at the same time that the country was incorporating territories beyond its southern frontier. As a result, imperial development toward the West and the South inspired Cuban criollos to seek North American support in their struggle against Spain. But unlike what Philip S. Foner argues, filibusterism was not organized by the Southern slave planters of the United States.33 In the words of Rodrigo Lazo, the filibustering movement was characterized by its multilingual and multiethnic dimensions.34 It was, above all, a movement planned by Cubans and North Americans, initiated by the former and supported by U.S. allies. The movement’s most emblematic figure was the Venezuelan criollo Narciso López. Once López—­who had left the island in 1849 and established himself in New York—­changed his operational center from New York to New Orleans, filibusterism gained force in the South. After carrying out several expeditions to the island, López was captured and killed in Cuba by the Spanish authorities in 1851, at which point he was turned into a martyr figure. His political trajectory and death gave U.S. and Cuban annexationists a common hero for their cause. He ended up being the spearhead of filibusterism in the South and became a central figure in U.S. travel accounts. In Sketches of the Old and New World, George W. Williams refers to López in the following terms: “I also visited the fortress of the Punta, where General López was garroted. . . . López’s last words were: ‘I die for my beloved Cuba, dear Cuba.’ You may next hear from me locked up in the Cabañas. And waiting my turn at the garrote.”35 As in the case of Williams, most U.S. travelers visited the place where López was executed and paid tribute to him.36 Thus López was converted into a martyr and used by North American and Cuban annexationists to promote their propaganda against Spain and to support the end of its colonial regime in Cuba. Analyzing both annexationist groups, Cuban historian Herminio Portell Vilá sheds light on the complexities of the annexationist movement. According to him, annexation should be understood not as a homogeneous phenomenon but as a very diverse one that had different political and economic agendas. On the one hand, Portell Vilá insists on distinguishing the annexationists who were driven by patriotic interests—­Betancourt Cisneros, Villaverde—­from those driven by economic motivations—­Alfonso y García, Madan. Moreover, while some annexationists favored the abolition of slavery and thought of annexation as the best means to abolish slavery on the island, others conceived of annexation as the perfect solution

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in order to perpetuate slavery. In spite of its heterogeneous composition, Portell Vilá defends the idea that nineteenth-­century annexation was a type of patriotism and nationalism, as it was meant to end Spanish domination on the island.37 National and annexationist projects overlapped with each other, and sometimes it was very difficult to distinguish between the two. Betancourt Cisneros, for example, stipulated independence as the ultimate goal of the Cuban revolutionary program.38 In his political pamphlet Addresses Delivered at the Celebration of the Third Anniversary in Honor of the Martyrs for Cuban Freedom, Betancourt Cisneros is highly critical of the U.S. government’s response to Cuba’s annexation. While Cuban criollos tried to engage the United States and to figure in the process as a strong political force with self-­determination, U.S. authorities ignored them, instead initiating negotiations with Spain to buy the island and therein excluding the Cubans’ participation. In Betancourt Cisneros’s piece, it is evident that he is not only condemning the position adopted by the U.S. government but also dismantling the main narratives used to justify the Cuban criollos’ marginalization from the process of political annexation. The reason most often given for this marginalization was that Cubans were not prepared for liberty, nor were they capable of managing their own interests. These arguments were repeated ad nauseam not only by U.S. political and intellectual figures but also by the travelers who visited the island in this period. Even after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, U.S. travelers continued to address and defend Cuba’s annexation. This was the case of Samuel Hazard, who arrived in Havana in 1866 seeking to recover his health after being injured in the Civil War. Hazard believed Cubans were not ready for self-­determination and supported annexing the island. In doing so, he repeated the same premises used by U.S. travelers who had stayed on the island a decade before, when the campaign for annexation was at its peak. When describing the guajiros, Hazard portrayed them as white but also attributed vagrancy to them as their main characteristic. The image that represents the guajiro type in his illustrated travel account is accompanied by the caption “Too Lazy to Live.”39 Hazard also underscored the island’s reputation of having the best mineral springs in the world for bronchial and rheumatoid conditions and asserted that he was completely cured after ten days in Isla de Pinos (today, Isla de la Juventud).40 He was also proud to come across towns founded by North Americans, Cardenas among them. Traveling around Cienfuegos, he admired one of the finest and best-­managed plantations in the region, the Ingenio Carolina, which was the property of a North American family.41 Hazard’s Cuba with Pen and Pencil would become the most-­read U.S. travel account of the island.

Samuel Hazard’s Cuba with Pen and Pencil When Samuel Hazard went to Havana in 1866 and later published his book Cuba with Pen and Pencil in 1871, there was already a significant presence of North Americans on the island, and numerous travel accounts had been published. Little known in the United States, Hazard’s book became part of nineteenth-­century

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Cuba’s literary canon.42 This was thanks to the effort of Fernando Ortiz, who published it in Spanish in his well-­known Cuban Books Series (Colección de Libros Cubanos) in 1928. From that moment on, Hazard’s book was consumed as Cuban literature. The question arises: What made Ortiz choose Hazard’s book out of all the nineteenth-­century U.S. travel writing? There were many reasons for this. Hazard did not limit himself to only visiting Havana and Matanzas; he also circumnavigated the island and crossed its eastern and western interior. Unlike the majority of U.S. travelers and naturalists, whose journeys only went as far as Trinidad, Hazard’s book expanded the vision of Cuba to include areas distant from the capital. Moreover, Hazard’s book contains extraordinary work with historical, literary, and visual sources related to Cuba. He had read Alexander von Humboldt, Ramón de la Sagra, Washington Irving, José Martín Félix de Arrate, and Pedro José Guiteras and quotes them extensively in his own travel account. Hazard also reproduced some of Frédéric Mialhe’s most important engravings along with his own drawings. In this sense, Hazard’s descriptions of his journey through the interior of the island and eastern provinces were accompanied by Mialhe’s engravings. If von Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Island of Cuba was central in disseminating knowledge about Cuba in the first half of the nineteenth century, Mialhe’s engravings shaped the world’s view of Cuba.43 In a way, Mialhe’s Viage pintoresco alrededor de la isla de Cuba (1848) was an important precedent for Hazard because it marked the shift from the coast to the interior, from the capital to the inland, and from a focus on just the western provinces to the island as a whole.44 While Hazard followed Mialhe’s itinerary and used his engravings to illustrate his own travel account without recognizing Mialhe’s authorship, he distanced himself from von Humboldt. Unlike the European naturalist who had previously defined Latin America in terms of nature, as Mary L. Pratt has shown, Hazard insisted on portraying the island as a site where nature and culture coexisted. In Hazard’s chapters on Havana, for example, nature appears domesticated—­reduced to the botanical garden of the capital city. While the western part of the island is marked by the proliferation of technology, it is the eastern part of the island, Guantanamo in particular, that Hazard considers as nature.45 Thus by the mid-­ nineteenth century, U.S. travel to Cuba was not understood simply as an encounter with nature, and U.S. travelers did not rely on the categories of newness and wilderness to describe the island.46 The possibility of imagining the Caribbean beyond the realm of geography produced a less deterministic interpretation and the opportunity of integrating the island into a modern imaginary. This paradigm shift from nature to culture also allowed for the incorporation of history into travel writing. Among the U.S. travelers who visited the island in the second half of the nineteenth century, Hazard was the most insistent on incorporating Cuban history into his accounts. Unlike eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­ century naturalists and philosophers, who located the Caribbean and Latin America outside the domain of history, Hazard framed his travel writing with a strong historiographical narrative. Thus his traveling story is couched in a historiographical framework that recounts the past of the colony. In Cuba with Pen and Pencil, the

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past is encapsulated with a historiographical lens while the present is narrated through a traveling perspective. Both standpoints added an appealing dimension to the island; while the latter reaffirmed Cuba’s place as a touristic destination, the former allowed for the island to become a nation with a long intellectual tradition. The incorporation of cultural and historical domains must have seemed attractive to Ortiz, who at that time had begun to redefine the discipline of anthropology as a science oriented not toward race but rather toward culture.47 Another important factor for Ortiz in choosing Hazard’s travel account was how the defense of Cuba’s annexation appears in his book. Unlike other prominent U.S. travelers who openly disclose their annexationist sentiments throughout their works, Hazard conveys his in the last lines of his book, relegating them to the end after his journey was almost completed. Aside from this brief passage, in which Hazard reveals his true leaning with regard to the island, there is no other moment in his book where Hazard makes explicit reference to his annexationist stance. Curiously, the annexationist project is filtered through the episodes he chooses to narrate on Cuban history. The way in which Hazard organizes Cuban history in the last section tends to emphasize the common episodes between the United States and the island. As a result, the British occupation of Havana and, later, the execution of the prominent annexationist leader Narciso López are two of the most important events in Hazard’s historiographical narrative. If the geographical similarities between the southern states and the Caribbean legitimated the U.S. expansion into the tropical region, the shared history between the United States and Cuba facilitated the inclusion of the latter into the North American imagination. What makes Hazard’s book unique is his use of costumbrista literature. Costumbrismo, a nineteenth-­century literary phenomenon based on the description of local types and customs, was very popular by the time Hazard arrived in Cuba. By the 1830s and 1840s, costumbrismo had become a technology that allowed Latin American and Caribbean writers to insert local figures into an international and global network. The genre formed a space of representation in which local and regional subjectivities could be articulated, on the basis of which letrado elites could then affirm the ethnic differences and similarities between metropolis and colonies. Costumbrismo, therefore, was marked by its capacity to operate as a machinery of description and classification, which was then harnessed to construct the racial and social typologies accompanying the different nation-­building projects.48 During his stay in Cuba, Hazard immediately captured costumbrismo’s significance and reappropriated its discourse on types to describe the lower sectors of the Cuban population and their customs. Among them were the guajiro, the fruit seller, the chicken seller, the milkman, the Chinese crockery man, and the mulata.49 In doing so, he reproduced well-­known types, along with their lithographs, in his travel account. By incorporating the costumbrista discourse into his travel writing, Hazard complicates the history of exchange between travel literature and costumbrismo and refigures the relationship between the traveler and the costumbrista. Costumbrismo’s legitimacy was possible thanks to the topological and conceptual relationships the literary movement maintained with travel accounts. Among the

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most attractive premises the costumbristas rearticulated regarding travel literature was the model of the traveler. Many costumbristas portrayed themselves in their sketches as travelers. Hence the costumbristas were, to a large extent, travelers in their native land, and as with travel writers, the foundation of their literary practice was the crucial exercise of observation. The travelers fashioned a work methodology and a visual economy that became central to costumbrista practice. However, by the mid-­nineteenth century, foreign travelers could not ignore costumbrismo’s efficacy and centrality in describing the local population, as Hazard’s use of costumbrista types demonstrates. In publishing Hazard’s book in 1928, Ortiz recognized the importance of the traveler for the study of nineteenth-­century culture. In a way, Ortiz acknowledged the figure of the traveler as the predecessor of the anthropologist and the significance of travel literature for the constitution of anthropology as a modern practice and discourse.50 Hazard’s travel account proved to be very popular. Soon after its publication, the U.S. government asked him to write a second book, this one about the Dominican Republic. His volume on Cuba became an important reference for his Santo Domingo, Past and Present: With a Glance at Hayti, published in 1873.51 In his new book, he would come to defend the idea of annexing the Dominican Republic instead of Cuba because slavery had been abolished there.

Conclusion The issue of slavery was central to the annexationist movement driven by Cuban and U.S. intellectuals, planters, travelers, and Confederate leaders alike. However, if most of them coincided on the importance of annexing Cuba into the union, not all of them agreed on the subject of slavery. In the case of Cuban criollos, most wealthy planters who supported annexation pronounced themselves in favor of slavery and saw annexation as a way to continue slavery in Cuba amid speculation that Spain would yield to England’s abolitionist pressure. But there were other Cuban planters who opposed the regime of slavery. Among them, Gaspar Betancourt Cisneros favored replacing slave labor with white wage labor. He was an ardent proponent of white colonization and experimented with free labor on his own sugar plantations. On the whole, one might suggest that Cuban abolitionist reformers sympathized more with the Northerners than with the Southerners, but the desire to throw off the yoke of Spanish colonialism made them establish military and intellectual alliances with Southern political and intellectual figures and confederate leaders. In the hope of overthrowing the Spanish government, they prioritized annexation over abolition and even self-­governance. As a result, a great number of Cuban annexationists came to be strongly allied with Southern slaveholders. Cubans and Southern slaveholders imagined the island as an important part of North America. Before the antebellum period, the South’s relationship to Cuba and the Caribbean intensified. In 1850, in Cuba, and the Cubans, Richard B. Kimball compared the importance of Havana to that of New York: “If annexation was fully and freely established, Cuba would be as valuable to

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this confederacy as New York itself.”52 For his part, George W. Williams addressed the intimate relationship between Cuban planters and Southerners in Sketches of the Old and New World: “There is a marked partiality among the Creoles for the southerners: they know we are sound on the Nebraska question.”53 During that period, Cubans’ and Southerners’ interests overlapped and intersected in important ways. As Matthew Guterl has shown, both were bound together as slaveholders in the Americas; they used a common vocabulary to respond to the rise of abolitionism in the Atlantic world and developed a proslavery argument that relied on scientific racism. The decline of slavery and the postemancipation labor problem were part of the Cuban and Southern slaveholders’ concern. The future of slavery led them to transcend imperial and national circuits. As tensions between the North and South and between Cuba and Spain increased, Cuban and Southern slaveholders turned to each other and imagined themselves as part of the same geographical cartography, one united by chattel bondage.54 For their part, Julia Ward Howe and Samuel Hazard were prominent abolitionists who favored Cuba’s annexation into the union. Howe, an advocate for abolitionism and a social activist, concluded her travel account with a critique of slavery. For her, the abolition of slavery in Cuba was connected to the fate of slavery the United States. Hazard participated in the Civil War and fought alongside the North. The coexistence of abolitionist and proslavery positions regarding the annexation of Cuba indicated that the issue could not be reduced to the problem of slavery in the United States. Despite their disavowal of slavery, abolitionists such as Henry Richard Dana agreed that the slave institution was more benign on the island. Dana was an active member of the Free-­Soil Party, which opposed the extension of slavery into other U.S. territories, and as a result, he resisted Cuba’s annexation. Among Howe, Dana, and Hazard, Howe was undoubtedly the strongest in her pronouncement against slavery. In the case of Dana, his views on slavery in Cuba were focused, as Christopher McBride asserts, “on the loss of the traditional patriarchal master/slave relationship, which erode[d] what he [saw] as the ‘beauty and strength’ of a traditional plantation.”55 Meanwhile, Hazard, when visiting the plantations owned by Cubans and North Americans, did not declare himself to be against slavery. Williams acknowledged the high number of Northern planters in Cuba in his travel account: “I find quite a number of planters from the United States residing here, and they nearly all hail from the Northern States.”56 In this sense, not only do the ambivalent positions on Cuba of abolitionists like Dana and Hazard complicate the history of the antislavery movement in the United States; these travel accounts also problematize the distinction between the abolitionist North and the slaveholding South. In believing that slavery was to be rejected in the South but in some way accepted in the Caribbean, the abolitionist inclinations of Dana and Hazard overlapped dangerously with proslavery views.

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Notes 1. Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 19–­22. 2. Patrick J. Leary, A Cultural History of Underdevelopment: Latin America in the U.S. Imagination (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 51. 3. Christopher Mark McBride, The Colonizer Abroad: Island Representations in American Prose from Herman Melville to Jack London (New York: Routledge, 2004), 41. 4. Dale W. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 57–­71. 5. On this topic, see Louis A. Pérez Jr.’s On Becoming Cuban (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), 17–­51. 6. Samuel Hazard, Cuba with Pen and Pencil, introduction by Richard Gott, trans. Adrián del Valle (Oxford: Signal Books, 2007). Originally published as Cuba a pluma y lápiz (Havana: Cultural, 1928). 7. Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, 3 vols. (London: Arthur Hall, 1853). 8. Christopher J. Iannini, Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 282–­283. 9. As Alice R. Wesler points out, the first full-­length travel book about Cuba written by a North America did not appear until 1829 with the title of Letters Written in the Interior of Cuba. See Wesler, “Sex, Race and Character in Nineteenth Century American Accounts of Cuba,” Caribbean Studies 18, no. 3/4 (October 1978–­January 1979), 117. 10. Antonio Benítez Rojo, The Repeating Island (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996). Originally published as La isla que se repite: El Caribe y la perspectiva posmoderna (Mexico City: Ediciones del Norte, 1989). 11. On Bremer, see Adriana Méndez Rodenas, Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-­Century Latin America (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2014). 12. Alexander von Humboldt, Political Essay on the Island of Cuba, intro. and ed. Vera M. Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 13. Octavia Walton Le Vert, Souvenirs of Travel (Mobile, Ala.: S. H. Goetzel, 1857), 203. 14. Julia Ward Howe, Trip to Cuba (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860), 126. 15. Richard Henry Dana, To Cuba and Back (London: Smith, Elder, 1859), 97. 16. George W. Williams, Sketches of the Old and New World (Charleston, S.C.: Walker, Evans & Cosgwell, 1871), 8. 17. Williams, 25. 18. Leary, Cultural History, 62. 19. Richard B. Kimball, Cuba, and the Cubans (New York: S. Hueston, 1850). 20. Williams, Sketches, 35. 21. Williams, 2, 29. 22. Nancy Leys Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–­1960 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1982), xiii. See also David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 61–­65. 23. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 135–­159. 24. Walton Le Vert, Souvenirs of Travel, 305. 25. Walton Le Vert, 21–­22. 26. Pérez Jr., Cuba and the United States, 51. 27. Leary, Cultural History, 32. 28. Gaspar Betancourt Cisneros, Cartas a Saco (Havana: Editorial Cuba, 1937), 13–­14. 29. See Herminio Portell Vilá, Narciso López y su época, 1850–­1851, vols. 1–­2 (Havana: Libros y Folletos, 1958); and Pérez Jr., Cuba and the United States, particularly chap. 2. 30. According to Portell Vilá, O’Sullivan was also the person who awakened President Polk’s interest in buying the island. See Portell Vilá, Narciso López, 1:10. For a detailed account on

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O’Sullivan’s and Beach’s activities, see Philip S. Foner, A History of Cuba and Its Relations with the United States, vol. 2 (New York: International Publisher, 1963), 20–­32. 31. Hazard, Cuba with Pen and Pencil, viii. 32. Carolina Levander, “Confederate Cuba,” American Literature 78, no. 4 (December 2006): 824. 33. Foner, History of Cuba, 41–­74. 34. Rodrigo Lazo, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 22. 35. Williams, Sketches, 46. 36. López was also an important character in the novel The Free Flag of Cuba by Lucy Petaway Holcombe Pickens (Baton Rouge: Louisina University Press, 2002), originally published in 1854. The author is also known as “the Queen of the Confederacy.” 37. The idea that annexation was a type of patriotism and nationalism is worth repeating because, as Rafael Rojas points out, the idea that nationalism arose from the nineteenth-­century independence movement has dominated postcolonial Cuban historiography. See Rojas, “De la provincia a la nación: Ensayo sobre el nacionalismo autonomista,” in Cien años de historia de Cuba (1898–­1998), ed. Manuel Moreno Fraginals (Madrid: Verbum, 2000), 47. See also Portell Vilá, Narciso López, 2:192. 38. Gaspar Betancourt Cisneros, Addresses Delivered at the Celebration of the Third Anniversary in Honor of the Martyrs for Cuban Freedom (New Orleans: Sherman, Wharton, 1854), 6. 39. Hazard, Cuba with Pen and Pencil, 535. 40. Hazard, 388. 41. Hazard, 402. 42. Hazard’s book had three editions in a short period of time. The first two were published in New York and Hartford in 1871; the third one was printed in London in 1873. The book was not published again in the United States until 2007. 43. Emilio Cueto, Mialhe’s Colonial Cuba: The Prints That Shaped the World’s View of Cuba (Miami: Historical Association of Southern Florida, 1994). 44. Frédéric Mialhe, Viage pintoresco alrededor de la isla de Cuba (Havana: Marquier, 1848). 45. Hazard, Cuba with Pen and Pencil, 473. 46. For a discussion of these two conceptual categories and their use in relation to Latin American nature, see Leary, Cultural History, 44–­69. 47. Anke Birkenmaier, The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature between the Wars (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 20–­46. 48. See Jill Lane, Blackface Cuba, 1840–­1895 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 49. See Nara Araújo, “La isla de Cuba: Viaje, imagen y deseo,” Cuban Studies 40, no. 1 (2009): 8. 50. See Daylet Domínguez, “Cuadros de costumbres en Cuba y Puerto Rico: De la historia natural y la literatura de viajes a las ciencias sociales,” Revista Hispánica Moderna 69, no. 2 (2016): 133–­149. 51. Samuel Hazard, Santo Domingo: Past and Present with a Glance at Hayti (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1873). 52. Kimball, Cuba, 194. 53. Williams, Sketches, 38. 54. Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 5–­9. 55. McBride, Colonizer Abroad, 34. 56. Williams, Sketches, 38.

chapter 9

z Contemporary Afrocubana Feminisms race, gender, and sexuality in havana Devyn Spence Benson

In a post dated December 19, 2016, Afrocubana activist Sandra Álvarez describes the challenges of blogging about race, sexism, and homophobia in Cuba. Álvarez is the author of the black feminist blog Negra cubana tenía que ser (Black Cuban woman I had to be), and she celebrated the ten-­year anniversary of her blog in 2016. She admits that it is difficult to blog about racism in Cuba, “a country [unlike the United States] where it is rare that a person will be murdered for being black.” Instead, she describes the prevalence of “racial profiling,” stereotyping, and racist jokes that target blacks and says she wants her blog to draw attention to these attitudes despite the common misconception that racism does not exist in socialist Cuba. She also describes her positionality as a black lesbian in Cuba: “Besides being a black woman, I’m a lesbian woman, therefore activism for the rights of LGBTQ persons is also of great interest to me.” Not only does the title of Álvarez’s blog force readers to see black queer women in Cuba by claiming that Álvarez had to be a black woman—­meaning that her life experiences left her with no other option than to claim blackness—­the anniversary post written from Hannover, Germany, where Álvarez has lived since 2013, also highlights the transnational quality of the new Afrocubana movement in Havana and the Cuban diaspora.1 Black and mulata women have participated in constructing Cubanidad since the beginning of the Cuban republic in 1902.2 However, the largely male-­dominated national narrative that has made Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s “New Man” famous since 1959 frequently overshadows their interventions. Even today, when commentators discuss normalizing U.S. relations with Cuba or visiting the island for the first time, they are imagining the Cuba of José Martí, Fidel Castro, and Ernest Hemingway. Moreover, since the fall of the Soviet Union and the economic crisis of the 1990s, uneven economic development in Cuba has often seen black women’s 143

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bodies resexualized or (re)mammyfied—­as shown in the sales of tourist figurines, T-shirts, and dolls with black minstrel faces and exaggerated features. Images of Cuba as a tourist paradise filled with pristine 1950s Chevrolets and Cadillacs, white-­sand beaches, and exotic women have enticed hundreds of thousands of North Americans to visit the island since President Barack Obama eased travel restrictions in 2016—­U.S. Americans repeatedly say that they want to “see Cuba before it changes.”3 But hidden inside this language of a static Cuba is a desire for an island from the 1950s, when tourists (and many white Cubans) imagined black women as either overly sexualized prostitutes and cabaret dancers or maids in luxury hotels and upper-­class homes. Despite this combination of invisibility (silence around Afrocubanas’ contributions to the nation) and visibility (as sexualized objects), Afrocubanas (like Álvarez) have consistently challenged narratives of exclusion and contributed to antiracist and antisexist movements in Cuba. As theater critic Inés María Martiatu Terry explains in the introduction to the very first book published by the Afrocubana working group in 2011, one of the goals of their Havana-­based project is to “feminize negritude and to blacken feminism.”4 Using recently published books by black and mulata women, ethnographic research from my time attending the Afrocubana working group’s meetings in Havana, and online publications like Álvarez’s blog, this chapter places the new Afrocubana feminist movement in its historical and contemporary context. Black feminist cultural productions from the early revolutionary period paved the way for the contemporary antiracist movement. As Afrocubanas claim a space in today’s antiracist movement in Cuba through their scholarly publications and everyday activism, new technologies allow Cuba’s black feminists to reach across borders, especially given the fact that many of the most vocal Afrocubana activists no longer live in Cuba. A close examination of how Afrocubanas challenge negative stereotypes about black women, use history as politics, and mobilize social media to combat both racism and sexism highlight the intersectionality of activism in contemporary Cuba and its diaspora.

* * * Today antiracist activists in Cuba are building on the work of Afro-­Cuban intellectuals and revolutionary leaders from the 1960s. In Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution, I examined the contradictory nature of the new government’s 1960s national integration movement and how this campaign both allowed for and silenced Cuba’s decades-­long tradition of black activism stemming from the nineteenth century. Beginning in March 1959, Fidel Castro and other revolutionary leaders launched an unprecedented antidiscrimination campaign. This campaign, which lasted for three years, targeted existing informal segregation practices including integrating previously mostly white private schools, beaches, and recreational facilities and worked to provide equal opportunities to all Cubans.5 Revolutionary leaders largely based this movement on nineteenth-­century ideas of a raceless Cuba—­an island that was “not white, not black, only Cuban”—­which, as we will

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see, left little space for alternative forms of antiracist nationalism. Nevertheless, this program had tremendous success. As historian Alejandro de la Fuente has shown, by the 1980s, Cubans of African descent had equal levels of high school education rates, numbers of professional positions, and life expectancy as their white counterparts.6 However, while Cuba’s 1959 revolution created unprecedented social opportunities for blacks and mulatos, the early 1960s social reforms also allowed for the persistence of racism. In fact, the preemptive celebration of the completion of the campaign in 1961 and declaration by revolutionary leaders that racism had been eliminated left little room for Afro-­Cubans to demand future reforms or to talk about persistent racism without being labeled as counterrevolutionary.7 But Afro-­Cubans were not passive recipients of revolutionary actions, and they too participated in building and sometimes challenging the new government’s raceless rhetoric. Intellectuals like Juan René Betancourt and Walterio Carbonell rejected independence leader José Martí’s vision of a raceless Cuba and critiqued white revolutionaries’ version of antiracism (a program often led by whites that focused more on tangible fixes than challenging long-­held antiblack sentiments). Instead, these black activists pursued a national identity that valued African history and culture. Unfortunately, their ideas were not welcomed by the new leadership, and revolutionary officials banned both Betancourt’s and Carbonell’s groundbreaking books, El Negro: Ciudadano del futuro (The black: Citizen of the future; 1959) and Critica: Cómo surgió la cultura nacional (Critique: How to build a national culture; 1961), respectively.8 As a result, Betancourt and his family went into exile in the United States, and Carbonell was sent to labor camps and received electric shock treatment, after which he never regained his public intellectual footing. Despite these obstacles, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, more and more black and mulato men and women were adopting antiracist strategies that strove to highlight Afro-­Cuban contributions to Cuban history and revalorize blackness, albeit in covert and less direct ways. As public spaces for debate about racism closed, much of this antiracist work occurred in private through home study groups or through visual arts, film, and literature. While others left the island, Afrocubanas, like filmmaker Sara Gómez, poets Georgina Herrera and Nancy Morejón, and theater critic and author Inés María Martiatu Terry remained in Cuba and played a central role in this cultural antiracist work in the late 1960s and 1970s.9

* * * In the mid-­2000s, a group of black and mulata women began meeting in one another’s homes to strategize about how to tackle new economic difficulties and racial discrimination that emerged during Cuba’s economic crisis of the 1990s. Following the collapse of Cuba’s chief trading partner, the Soviet Union, in 1989, the island’s financial transactions came to a near standstill as the United States tightened its trade embargo instead of offering aid. Called the “Special Period in times of peace” (período especial en tiempos de paz), or “Special Period” for short, this moniker referred to the austerity measures taken by the state to try to

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overcome the crisis—­including warlike economic rationing in a time of peace. Cuban leaders enacted dramatic economic changes to try to jump-­start the economy with mixed results. For example, the state legalized the dollar, an act that encouraged more remittances from Cuban exiles wanting to support struggling family members. Leaders also opened the economy to international investment and joint business ventures that included building new hotels for the island’s emerging tourist sector. Despite these changes, the economy recovered slowly throughout the 1990s. All Cubans faced dire economic instability and experienced the rolling electric blackouts, food shortages, and absence of basic necessities during the Special Period. But black and mulato Cubans suffered these hardships even more than their white counterparts because of their limited ability to access foreign currency. They did not receive remittances from family members in the United States to the same degree, nor did they have the fair or white skin—­the so-­called buena presencia (good presence/appearance)—­needed to qualify for tourist jobs in Cuba’s new economy.10 Black women in particular were denied sought-­after positions in the newly opened hotels because of their looks, and many were assumed to be prostitutes as sex tourism expanded on the island via white male foreigners looking to explore sexual fantasies with women of African descent. Public discourse challenging discrimination in Cuba emerged strongly as a result of these growing inequalities. Residents, public intellectuals, and scholars began to debate what numerous people have since referred to as the “return of racism.”11 As de la Fuente describes in “The New Afro-­Cuban Cultural Movement and the Debate on Race in Contemporary Cuba,” much of this new antiracist work began in the 1990s and occurred via cultural productions like visual arts and music, especially hip-­hop. Hip-­hop musicians, or raperos, combined African American beats and Cuban rhythms to critique their inability to find hotel jobs despite speaking multiple languages. Afro-­Cuban academics published articles, held community forums, and gave lectures about the history of racism in Cuba, the island’s cultural connections to Africa, and potential solutions moving forward.12 Today, this emergent activism has evolved into a rich antiracist movement with transnational ties. Maybe one of the most notable but heretofore understudied spaces for activism in Cuba have been organizations created and led by black and mulata women seeking to combat the negative stereotypes about Afrocubanas that impede their social opportunities in Cuba’s new economy. Since 2006, I have attended meetings of the Afrocubanas group whenever I visited Havana for research. The group is composed of a variety of black and mulata women of different ages, professions, and sexualities who share a common desire to better their communities and promote a positive image of black Cuban women. Initially founded by historian Daisy Rubiera Castillo, theater critic Inés María Martiatu Terry, psychologist and blogger Sandra Álvarez Ramírez, poet Carmen González, and painter Paulina Márquez in the mid-­2000s to create a space where black women could express their concerns about being left out of the new Cuban economy and to theorize about the ways black women were talked about in the past and how that impacts the present, the group has evolved into a diverse activist

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movement. Its stated objectives are to “recognize the contribution and the work of black Cuban women” and to “stimulate the existence of a counter discourse to dismantle the negative, racist, and sexist stereotypes [that exist in Cuba] about black women.”13 Rubiera describes how the group has both external and internal goals: “We want to make them [black women] visible in the core works of history and literature . . . but we also want to show them who they are and that they aren’t just the simple stereotypes that have existed about them since the colonial period.” The Afrocubanas project produces intellectual and cultural works to meet the first goal and holds workshops and seminars (tertulias) in Havana that educate black women and men about Afrocubana history and experiences to achieve the second.14 Afrocubanas are determined to dismantle negative stereotypes that undervalue black womanhood while oversexualizing mulatas. For example, Gloria Rolando, another prominent Afrocubana, uses film to offer a counterdiscourse to the ways that black women’s bodies are imagined and represented in and by Cuba’s tourist industry. Rolando is the only other black woman filmmaker to work at the Cuban National Film Institute (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos; ICAIC) since Sara Gómez’s death in the 1970s, and she uses techniques similar to her predecessor to highlight black women’s experiences in Cuba. Rolando’s most recent documentary, Diálogo con mi abuela (Dialog with My Grandmother; 2015) is based on a conversation she had with her grandmother, Inocencia Leonarda Armas y Abrea, on February 17, 1993, and is a magical blend of her grandmother’s voice, Afro-­Cuban religious incantations, and Rolando’s narration about central moments in Cuba’s past.15 It took over twenty years for Rolando to rediscover the cassette tape where she had recorded the initial conversation and to find the funds to create the documentary in conjunction with her own private film company and ICAIC. In a 2016 interview, she admits that she had not planned to use the recording. The filmmaker and her grandmother talked all the time, and that day in 1993 had been no different. Only in recent years while caring for her ailing mother did Rolando decide that she wanted to give something back to the women who had given so much to her.16 One of the ways the film challenges negative stereotypes about black women in Cuba is through a focus on her grandmother’s labor and contributions to her family and the nation as a whole. While Inocencia recounts her childhood in Santa Clara and tells stories of attending dances in some of the city’s most well-­known black social clubs, the camera flits back and forth between family photographs and the hands of an aging black actor clutching a handkerchief. Repeatedly, the only image on the screen is that of Rolando and her grandmother’s hands. Rolando says, “This is a story of the many black women who washed, ironed, and who were the foundation of our families. This is why I showed her hands; out of respect for those hands that worked so hard to build a family.”17 But it is the documentary’s final scene that visually contradicts the idea of Cuba as America’s playground and stereotypes about black women in the island’s new economy. In a halting voice, as images of blackface minstrels on tourist shirts and figurines of black women smoking cigars flash across the screen, Rolando

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concludes, “There is something I can’t avoid saying. They’ve wanted to distort my grandmother’s image many times. . . . Since the colonial times they’ve invented the patterns for an industry that doesn’t represent us. But sadly many people in Cuba and other countries still reproduce and sell those disrespectful colonial versions. Why that false and degrading picture of the black woman? Why? Why? Why?”18 Each why is punctuated by a rhythmic drumbeat and a different figurine smashing to the ground. This final scene showing the broken pieces of a Cuban paradise that sells black faces to tourists and devalues Afrocubana bodies sits in stark contrast to the story of the woman featured in Diálogo con mi abuela. Not only does Rolando challenge viewers to decide which Cuba they want to see; she is also challenging the state to broadcast another image of black women’s lives. Since its release, Diálogo con mi abuela has won both national and international acclaim. Initially screened to a packed house in the Charlie Chaplin Theater in Havana in May 2016, it has been nominated as the Best Short Documentary in the 2017 Pan African Film Festival competition in Los Angeles, and Rolando recently completed an international tour in the United States where she visited colleges, universities, and community centers to screen the film.19 However, Rolando’s efforts to have Diálogo con mi abuela shown on Cuban television for Mother’s Day were initially not well received by state media officials who seemed to disapprove of the documentary’s conclusion, where a hand smashes the popular black figurines sold in nearly every tourist gift shop on the island. In fact, Diálogo con mi abuela only debuted on a national television station in May 2018 following two years of Rolando’s persistent requests. This combination of international success and limited domestic circulation speaks to the challenges that Afrocubanas negotiate as they try to insert new representations of black and mulata women into popular media spaces in Cuba.

* * * Members of the Afrocubana project have focused on rewriting history as a way of inserting the voices of black women into contemporary debates about racial discrimination. To this end, founder Rubiera uses the Latin American genre of testimonial literature to highlight the experiences of black women in twentieth-­ century Cuba through testimonios like Reyita, sencillamente: Testimonio de una negra cubana nonagenarian (1996) and Golpeando la memoria: Testimonio de una poeta cubana afrodescendiente (2005).20 Reyita examines Ruberia’s mother’s involvement in the Garvey movement in the 1910s and 1920s, the economic challenges she faced during the Cuban republic, her decision to marry a white man to improve her children’s life chances, and the loss of one son in the explosion of the ship La Coubre in the Havana harbor in the 1960s. When discussing Reyita, Rubiera hones in on the way her work fills a gap in current narratives about race in Cuba: “I wanted to add the voice of a black woman to the national discourse. Reyita is the other side of what it means to be Cuban.”21 Reyita has been met with a mixed reception in Cuba. On one hand, to Rubiera’s knowledge, the University

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of Havana does not include the book in any of its coursework, even though it is the only testimonio published about a black woman in Cuba. In contrast, Miguel Barnet’s popular Biografía de un cimarrón (1966), a testimonio about the life of a 108-­year-­old black man (Esteban Montejo) who escaped slavery and fought in Cuba’s wars for independence in the late nineteenth century, is frequently used there.22 On the other hand, in the 2000s, Raúl Castro ordered that selections from Reyita be published in the armed forces magazine, Verde Olivo; had a version of the book reprinted and included in the military’s library; and made it mandatory reading for all of Cuba’s ministers. In fact, Rubiera remembers being on a flight from Havana to Santiago de Cuba to visit her family and seeing the minister of agriculture furiously reading the book in the seat in behind her and learning from Mariela Castro that her father, Raúl, always carried a copy of the book in his bag to give to others.23 While Raúl’s actions may seem surprising, they fit with the Cuban state’s history of mixed reactions to black activism, where some things and individuals are permitted and applauded but other more general or codified changes that might affect the university curriculum or future grand narratives are not made. Following these two books, Rubiera and Martiatu organized the Afrocubana group to publish its first collaborative project, the 2011 edited collection Afrocubanas: Historia, pensamiento, y prácticas culturales (Afro-­Cuban women: History, thought, and cultural practice). The book includes essays about black and mulata women fighting against slavery and for Cuban independence in the nineteenth century and their struggles in the twentieth-­century republic and contemporary pieces on hip-­hop and discrimination in the tourist industry.24 It is also the first book in Cuba to use the term Afrocubana in its title. A somewhat controversial term in Cuba, Afro-­Cuban has long been associated with folklore or cultural traditions instead of a racial identity.25 Many Cubans, when asked, would not identify as Afro-­ Cuban and see it as a racially divisive word stemming from the hyphenated African-­ American, which conflicts both implicitly and explicitly with Cuba’s unifying slogan of “not white, not blacks, only Cuban” promoted by revolutionary nationalists since the late nineteenth century. For the authors of the collection, however, Afrocubana signifies much more than its previous designations. It is a term that highlights the intersectional nature of black and mulata women’s experiences. Rubiera argues that the term also connects the Afrocubana project to other afrodescendiente movements in the Americas.26 That Rubiera and Martiatu chose to use the word to name their working group and their first edited collection highlights another way that they are bringing more visibility to black women’s experiences and changing the discourse about race in contemporary Cuba. The Afrocubana group published their second collaborative book project, Emergiendo del silencio: Mujeres negras en la historia de Cuba (Emerging from silence: Black women in the history of Cuba), in 2016 after Martiatu’s death.27 The flyer for the new book’s release stated that the work specifically aims “to fill gaps in the historiography.” Noting that it “provides another important step in the reconstruction of the historical memory of African descended Cuban women,” the authors claim that this recovery project is important not only because it “recognize[s]

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women from the past and present” but also because “this type of research has to be included in the agenda of whatever contemporary debate [we have today] about racial issues.”28 The Afrocubana project used the book’s release to celebrate the anniversary of Martiatu’s death and pay homage to her life and legacy. Noting that even a few days before her death in the hospital, Martiatu was enthusiastically talking about the new book, Rubiera recounts how even though Martiatu was not physically present for the book’s launch, she will always be present in their work. In particular, Rubiera marks the book as the realization of another “one of her [Martiatu’s] dreams”—­not only to insert black women into Cuba’s literary canon and debates on race but to “construct and develop racial consciousness and a feeling of pride in the next generation of negras.”29 These publications succeed in meeting one of the Afrocubana project’s principal goals, to offer a counterdiscourse about black women, but they are forced to do so in the face of Cuba’s current economic situation. Due to paper and ink shortages, most Cuban presses only publish a limited number of books a year, and when a book is published, it is often released in small quantities and rarely reprinted. This situation means that many books run out within weeks of publication. Such was the case with the first edited collection. Within two months of Rubiera and Martiatu presenting Afrocubanas at the Dulce María Loynaz Cultural Center during Cuba’s annual international book fair, the five thousand books published by the Editorial Ciencias Sociales had sold out.30 It is now almost impossible to obtain a copy of Afrocubanas on the island.31 Additionally, since the state controls all the print publishing houses (independent presses are nonexistent in Cuba), the content of most books and magazines is still highly regulated. For the Afrocubanas group, this creates a situation where despite the need for books like their edited collections, it is still very difficult for most Cubans to get their hands on the materials. Outside of the capital of Havana, access to books like Reyita, Golpeando, Afrocubanas, and Emergiendo is even harder. The role of rewriting Cuban history in the contemporary Afrocubana movement cannot be overlooked, and some Cubans are using social, rather than print, media to spread information about black women’s historical experiences. Blogger Sandra Álvarez, who is also a founding member of the Afrocubanas group, frequently profiles the lives and work of black women from the past in her blog Negra cubana tenía que ser—­including the 1960s filmmaker Sara Gómez.32 Similarly, in 2016, Álvarez created and launched the Directorio de Afrocubanas (Afrocubana Directory), a digital archive with essays, photographs, and links to the works of prominent Cuban women of African descent.33 It currently profiles more than 350 women from a variety of industries, historical moments, and regions. In a 2018 interview for the radio station Caribe Nuestra, Álvarez described how the project evolved from a nugget of an idea she discussed with Martiatu in her home in Centro Habana to a website with hundreds of entries. Like other work being done by Afrocubanas, the Directorio is completely self-­financed and a volunteer project that Álvarez and her team do outside of their normal work hours. Álvarez used a GoFundMe page to raise money for the site; teamed up with a Chilean feminist, Alejandra Aravena,

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to build the web page’s technology; and creates profiles about black women based on information sent to her from young volunteers she interacts with virtually.34 In many ways, access to social media has made the Directorio possible. Not only has Álvarez used websites like Facebook, Instagram, and GoFundMe to raise money and awareness for this project, but she has also promoted her work on YouTube by creating short public service announcement (PSA) videos that educate viewers about why it is important to study Afrocubana history and culture.35 Three things stand out about the Directorio. First, it includes women of a variety of different shades of brownness, since Álvarez makes it clear in her interview that any woman who self-­identifies, has been identified historically, and/or has lived as a woman of African descent is welcome on the website because Álvarez is not interested in deciding “who is more or less black.” She also directly addresses a common critique that the Directorio “creates racial division” or is “reverse discrimination” by stating that it only takes one glance at most Cuban blogs, encyclopedia entries, or textbooks to see that they are predominantly “white, heterosexual, and usually white men and that no one says anything about that.”36 The misplaced notion that studying, profiling, and/or highlighting the lives of Afrocubanas is somehow racist fits with some of the early criticism mobilized when the Havana working group first used the term Afrocubana to identify their group and the titles of their books. This idea is usually launched by Cubans who are uncomfortable or opposed to antiracist work and see it as antithetical to Cuba’s ideas of revolutionary, raceless nationalism. Álvarez clearly refutes this notion in the online activism seen in her blog and the Directorio.37 Second, the Directorio is transnational. It celebrates black and mestiza women from Cuba’s diaspora in the same way that it profiles women on the island. Pages dedicated to women intellectuals and performers who lived or are living in the United States such as Eusebia Cosme, Lourdes Casal, Celia Cruz, and Las Krudas highlight transnational Afrocubana contributions to Cuban history, politics, and culture. In fact, Álvarez directs the website from her home in Germany where she has resided since 2013. In a blog post titled “I Am Still Not an Emigrant,” Álvarez describes how she never thought she would leave Cuba but says that “I emigrated for love and because of the impossibility of legalizing my union with my partner in Cuba.”38 As a black lesbian, Álvarez was unable to legally marry or enter into a same-­sex union in Cuba. Despite the recent activism against homophobia on the island, spearheaded by Raúl Castro’s daughter, Mariela Castro, and the National Center for Sex Education (Centro Nacional de Educación Sexual; CENESEX), Cuba has yet to pass legislation allowing same-­sex marriages. Álvarez also notes on her blog how her partner, an Afrocubana whose family left Cuba in 1957 (she identifies her as a “Cubana de afuera”), could not easily move to Cuba because the island’s economic situation would not allow her to find employment earning comparable money to what she earned in Germany. As a result, she continues her activism in Germany. Yet this work is not without its challenges. Frequently, readers of the blog ask “Are you Cuban, Cuban?” or “When was the last time you were in Cuba?” to delegitimize her seemingly

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radical opinions as not being fully valid because she no longer experiences the daily rhythms and challenges of living in Cuba. Álvarez not only disagrees and refuses to be silenced by her detractors, but she also sees Cuba as her only home. She declares, “I am still not an emigrant. I live in Cuba legally, I have my permanent residence there, and even more than that spiritually and emotionally I live on the island. My family is there, my friends, my loves, my past and my present, and of course part of my work has to do with Cuba.”39 Importantly, Álvarez hopes that Cuba’s political and economic situation will evolve to recognize the transnational lives of the over two million Cubans who live outside of the island.40 Bringing together Afrocubanas in the diaspora and Afrocubanas on the island in the Directorio is one way she is promoting and encouraging this dialogue even as her blog continues to challenge sexism, racism, and homophobia globally. Lastly, Álvarez very much sees the Directorio as a part of Cuba’s contemporary antiracist movement even though it was developed abroad. In the acknowledgments at the end of one of the YouTube videos promoting the Directorio, Álvarez thanks “the companerxs who are on this path of antiracist activism [with me] . . . my dead and living [partners] without whom this project would have been impossible . . . Lalita, Yoya, y Daisy.”41 These final references to the founders of the Afrocubana working group in Havana—­Inés María Martiatu Terry, Georgina Herrera (Yoya; often called the “member of honor” of the group), and Daisy Rubiera Castillo—­highlight how influential these black women have been in supporting Álvarez’s projects even from afar. Álvarez travels frequently to Havana to maintain connections to her home, participate in activism on the island, and spread the news about the Directorio. She is highly aware of the difficulty most Cubans have in accessing the internet or other forms of social media.42 In response, when she presented the Directorio at a conference in Havana in June 2016, she distributed CDs with its information to Cubans who might not have access to the internet.43 Álvarez and her team hope to create additional “offline” versions of the website and are currently fundraising to increase the Directorio’s accessibility and impact on Afrocubanas on the island.44

* * * Álvarez’s blog contributes vital activism to Cuba’s antiracist movement, but it is not coincidental that she and some other Afrocubana lesbians live abroad.45 In some ways, this movement is more intersected than ever, and that outspoken intersectionality has led some Afrocubanas like Álvarez and the black queer hip-­hop group Las Krudas to leave the island. Norma Guillard, a Havana-­based social psychologist, examines the intersectionality between race, gender, and sexuality in her essay “To Be a Black Woman, a Lesbian, and an Afro-­Feminist in Cuba Today.”46 Like other members of the Afrocubanas project, Guillard agrees that it is important to fight against negative stereotypes. She notes that “in the popular consciousness, to be a Black Woman is synonymous with dirt, of amorality. . . . We are considered sexual objects, great prostitutes, and good in bed.”47 But she also recognizes the additional

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challenges black lesbians face as a result of being disowned by their families and targeted by black heterosexuals. In fact, in an essay where Guillard interviewed ten lesbians, common themes of added persecution based on race and sexuality emerge. Many of her interviewees were members of Grupo OREMI, an all-­lesbian, majority black–­identified support group sponsored by CENESEX, of which Guillard was a founding member. Her interlocutors recount, “The rejection of lesbians comes from how we dress, act, project ourselves, and is overall a response to their belief that we are a mistake, an error, in society; I am criticized because I always wear pants; I’ve been stopped by the police for kissing my girlfriend; I’ve lost friendships when my friends find out about my identity; some family members think I have an illness; I was critiqued even more so for being a black lesbian; my husband tried to take my kids away from me.”48 Like Álvarez, Guillard finds that despite advances in the larger LGBTQ community in Cuba since the establishment of CENESEX, black queer women continue to be excessively marginalized because they do not fit into any of the common groups that are served. Nevertheless, Guillard continues to call for additional state support and legislation while also advocating for grassroots work by black queer women themselves, especially through transnational networks with other Afro–­Latin American feminist thinkers like Sueli Carneiro and Ochy Curiel, who are frequently cited in her work. The dissolution of the Grupo OREMI and the lack of other services focusing on black lesbians in Cuba lead to the continued invisibility of lesbian Afrocubanas and are just two of the reasons many have left the island. Sociologist Tanya Saunders recounts the contrast between typical Cuban neighborhood friendliness and how she observed neighbors interacting with Olivia Prendes and Odaymara Cuesta, the two black queer women who make up the hip-­hop duo of Las Krudas: “People are very neighborly in Cuba. Neighbors visit each other regularly. . . . Over the three years that I visited Las Krudas in Cuba, I never saw the neighbors or their children stop by to play congas or sing in Las Krudas’s apartment. If the neighbors spoke to Las Krudas, they stood at least fifteen to twenty feet from Las Krudas’s apartment.”49 Describing this phenomenon as “social isolation,” Saunders demonstrates how a combination of homophobia and racism makes black lesbians social pariahs in a society that is heavily dependent on neighborhood support and interactions for basic economic survival.50 Recently, Prendes and Cuesta described a moment when they were made to feel invisible by other members of society. Before leaving Cuba, they frequently performed community theater while wearing stilts in Old Havana. These street performances offered new readings of Cuban history and art and were widely popular.51 However, Prendes and Cuesta’s performances also led to criticism about how they presented their sexuality. One father speaking to his daughter said, “They’re not lesbians; they are artists,” implying that it was safe and acceptable to be an artist but not a lesbian. Moreover, stripping the artists of their sexuality was a specific way that their identities were made invisible.52 Despite these challenges, Las Krudas continued to offer street performances in Havana, and they joined the emerging hip-­hop scene in the 1990s. Hip-­hop was one of the spaces for antiracist activism

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in Cuba at the end of the twentieth century and early twenty-­first century, but it was not especially welcoming to Las Krudas because of their queer affect and outspoken intersectional activism. Prendes and Cuesta describe not being taken seriously by male rappers because they were women in a predominantly male space and because of their sexuality. And once the state nationalized hip-­hop by creating the Agencia de Rap (Rap Agency)—­an institution that required artists to be licensed and perform in approved venues—­there was little space for their work. A combination of economic hardship from not being able to perform (they were not granted a license and were rarely included in the lineups for approved venues) and also feeling suffocated as black lesbians led the two women to leave Cuba in 2006 and move to Austin, Texas.53 Like Álvarez in Germany, Las Krudas continue the antiracist and antisexist work they began in Havana while living in the United States. Most importantly, being outside of Cuba has allowed them to develop a social media profile and have their music reach more listeners. Las Krudas’s music (many with English subtitles) can be found on YouTube, including “Mi cuerpo es mio” (My body is mine), “La gorda” (Fat/phat girl), “En el solar” (In the building plot), “Mi barba” (My beard), and numerous others. The lyrics to each song encourage pride and a love of black bodies while also challenging state and individual patriarchy. In “Mi cuerpo es mio,” the artists defend women’s sexual rights by rapping “Get your rosaries out of our ovaries! Get your doctrines of our vaginas! Neither master nor state, nor party, nor husband” as the screen shows images of female activists protesting around the globe. In fact, the song begins with a dedication to women of all sexualities: “Whose bodies? Our bodies! Whose rights? Our rights! . . . Representing womyn and queer people’s choices.” And while the video includes images from various countries, the specific reference to “neither state, nor party” (ni estado, ni partido) highlights the localness of the video as Prendes and Cuesta declare their independence from a Cuban state that does not allow same-­sex marriage.54 “La gorda” continues their critique of normative gender roles and appearances by highlighting their pride in being large-­size women. Las Krudas made this video when the group was still composed of three women, and it begins by flashing still photographs of each member along with the words “Phat girl” across the screen as a narrator repeats “gorda, gorda, gorda,” in a dramatic fashion. Noting that her size is a forty-­inch waist and fifty-­two-­inch chest, Cuesta dances confidently while describing how she enjoys being a “phat girl” and saying that she “is at peace with herself.” The use of the African American colloquial word phat, which generally signifies that something is “cool” but when used in reference to women means “hot or tempting,” emphasizes how Las Krudas’ African diasporic perspective allows them to reject traditional beauty norms in a racialized way.55 Throughout their videos, Las Krudas celebrate blackness and Cubanidad by describing themselves as negras (black women) from Cuba (often pictured holding Cuban flags) and as Afro-­Latino Americana, Caribeña (Afro–­Latin American and Caribbean women).56 The chorus of “La gorda” adds a body size image to their already intersected identity: “The phat girl has arrived. The phat girl has arrived. They call me phat, round, sphere. They call me phat. Yes,

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I am a phat girl.” These lyrics promote not only body acceptance but a reclaiming of the word gorda and its repurposing as phat and beautiful. Both the beginning and the ending of the video show Las Krudas performing live, and the audience’s reaction to the performance is telling. As the clip closes, Las Krudas and the audience participate enthusiastically in a call-­and-­response chant: “Black / Beautiful / Heavy / More beautiful!”57 By linking both blackness and heaviness to beauty, Las Krudas persist in the Afrocubana project of breaking down stereotypes that deem women who look like them as unattractive and nonvaluable. Las Krudas live transnational lives, and their frequent trips to the island allow them to continue their activism by creating music in a Cuban context and supporting aspiring black female and black queer artists. One of their recent music videos, “En el solar,” was filmed and produced in their neighborhood in Old Havana. It chronicles Prendes and Cuesta walking down the street and speaking to neighbors as they rap about the difficult economic conditions facing Cubans in their neighborhood.58 In contrast to the feelings of alienation Saunders describes observing when she visited Las Krudas, this video is a celebration of their community and all its inhabitants. Lyrics like “Havana, I love you” and a chorus dedicating the video to “all the solares in Havana, to all the solares with the sound of slippers and washing bins, where Cuban families live, especially Havana 1014, San Isidro” showcase appreciation and love for their home.59 The images function to highlight black women’s struggles, especially in terms of doing laundry, cooking food, or waiting in long lines for basic materials. But the video also praises Cubans’ abilities to inventar (invent) or improvise in order to survive. Las Krudas’s creative productions work to both draw attention to the situation their family members face in Cuba and aid younger artists trying to enter Havana’s music scene. In 2014, Álvarez’s blog featured an essay by another black queer author named Logbona Olukonee titled “Krudas Cubensi: Timón del nuevo afro-­feminismo queer Cubano” (Krudas Cubensi: The rudder of the new Afro-­feminist queer Cuban [movement]). Describing how despite “living in the diaspora,” Prendes and Cuesta’s regular presence on the island allows “their songs, community actions, presentations, conferences, etc., to impact many youth and women,” the author finds that their mere existence challenges the heteropatriarchal space of hip-­hop in Cuba.60 Olukonee offers an example of Prendes and Cuesta’s work in the community when she details a screening they hosted of a documentary about U.S. black feminist Audre Lorde. During this same visit, Las Krudas offered three concerts and a conference on theory and art, “where they shared the stage with young female rappers and activists to promote their work.” Olukonee concludes, “Las Krudas are feminizing Cuban Hip Hop by educating black female rappers and activists . . . and most importantly [they are] expanding the agenda of the antiracist struggle to include other social demands like the emancipation of women, a recognition of the marginalization of people of African descent from Cuba’s society and economy, the LGBTQ fight, and other questions that the Cuban state needs to confront.”61 Like the other Afrocubanas discussed, Las Krudas are offering an intersected critique that is pushing the antiracist movement in Havana to recognize black women’s issues.

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* * * The Afrocubana movement in Cuba has transcended the island’s boundaries both out of necessity and because of the challenges of being black and queer in Cuba. The January 2018 edition of the online magazine Cuba posible, titled “Silencios y voces” (Silences and voices), was dedicated to black feminism in Cuba. The dossier included interviews with five contemporary Afrocubana scholar–­activists, including Álvarez and Olukonee, and each interviewee made frequent reference to the foundational works of Rubiera and Martiatu. The editor notes in the introduction that this collection of black feminists is composed of women born between 1973 and 1985; therefore they had all grown up with the revolution, all five had degrees from the University of Havana (graduating between 1996 and 2008), and four out of the five “live outside of Cuba right now.”62 That 80 percent of the women featured are no longer in Cuba highlights the role migration has played in the lives of Afrocubana scholar–­activists. This transnational movement has opened the door for new collaborations between Cubans in the diaspora and Cubans on the island and between Afrocubana feminists and other Latin American feminists of African descent and sometimes with African Americans as well despite the U.S. embargo to the island. Whether it is collecting oral histories and writing testimonios, publishing edited collections, blogging, or launching the first website dedicated to black Cuban women’s lives, Afrocubana activists have focused on recovering and rewriting the past as a means of reimaging their present and future. Their work to revise grand narratives of Cuban history that have repeatedly silenced black and mulata women’s stories fits with the work being done in transnational black feminism.63 But this type of Cuban activism is often overlooked because it is less direct than the marches black women have led in Brazil or Colombia and because it does not directly antagonize the Cuban state like the more well-­known (at least in the United States) Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White). Nevertheless, these Afrocubanas are leaving a lasting legacy by rewriting the past, making the invisible visible even in Cuba’s contemporary antiracist moment, and creating new sources for future scholars and historians. Afrocubanas are applying the tools and the opportunities provided by the early 1960s social reforms along with the legacies of early Afrocubana activists to push for the revolution to live up to its promises. As a part of the new antiracist movement in Cuba and its diaspora that includes hip-­hop groups, intellectuals, and artists, it is clear that Afrocubana activists today are both aware of their past and looking to build a new, more intersected future.

Notes Portions of this chapter have been published previously in my Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); “On Teaching Afro-­ Cubana Feminisms,” Black Perspectives (blog), March  4, 2017, https://​w ww​.aaihs​.org/​on​ -teaching​-afro​-cubana​-feminisms/; “Representations of Black Women in Cuba,” Black Perspectives (blog), May  4, 2017, https://​w ww​.aaihs​.org/​representations​-of​-black​-women​-in​-cuba/;

c o n t e m p o r a r y a f r o c u b a n a f e m i n i s m s 157 and Devyn Spence Benson, ed., “Editor’s Introduction” in Afrocubanas: History, Thought, and Cultural Practices, trans. Karina Alma (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020). Reprinted with permission. Special thanks to Daisy Rubiera and the other Afrocubanas who welcomed me into their group and shared so many resources for this chapter. I also want to thank my Davidson College students for their research support and thought-­provoking discussions that contributed to this work—­especially research assistants Itziri Gonzalez-­Bárcenas and Isabel Ballester and students in both the spring and fall 2017 sections of my AFR/LAS 300: Afrocubana Feminisms course. 1. Sandra Álvarez Ramirez, “Brevisimos apuntes sobre los principales retos del movimiento Cubano antirracista,” Negra cubana tenía que ser (blog), December 19, 2016, https://​ negracubanateniaqueser​.com/​2016/​12/​19/ ​brevisimos​-apuntes​-sobre​-los​-principales​-retos​ -del​-movimiento​-cubano​-antirracista/. 2. See Takkara Brunson, “Writing Black Womanhood in the Early Cuban Republic, 1904–­1916,” Gender and History 28, no. 2 (2016); and Takkara Brunson, “‘In the General Interest of All Conscious Women’: Race, Class, and the Cuban Women’s Movement, 1923–­1939,” Cuban Studies 46, no. 1 (2018). 3. General sentiment expressed repeatedly to author and in many public forums. U.S. Americans are obsessed with the Cuba of the past and fear that opening Cuba to U.S. tourism and businesses will disrupt an imagined pristine, untouched 1950s space. This U.S.-­centric notion fails to recognize that Cuba has traded with and received visitors from around the globe for decades and only the United States maintains a trade embargo against the Caribbean nation. 4. Daisy Rubiera Castillo and Inés María Martiatu Terry, Afrocubanas: Historia, pensamiento, y prácticas culturales (Havana: Editorial Ciencias Sociales, 2011), 2. 5. Benson, Antiracism in Cuba. 6. Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-­Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 7. Benson, Antiracism in Cuba. 8. Juan René Betancourt, El Negro: Ciudadano del futuro (Havana: Cárdenas y Cía, 1959); and Walterio Carbonell, Critica: Cómo surgió la cultura nacional (Havana: Ediciones Yaka, 1961). 9. For additional information about Sara Gómez and continued Afro-­Cuban activism in the late 1960s and 1970s, see Devyn Spence Benson, “Sara Gómez: AfroCubana (Afro-­Cuban Women’s) Activism after 1961,” Cuban Studies 46, no. 1 (2018): 134–­158. I am researching and writing a book about the lives and contributions of the black activists who stayed in Cuba and challenged racism in the late 1960s and 1970s through their connections with Caribbean intellectuals titled, Black Consciousness in Cuba: The Untold Revolution. 10. Alejandro de la Fuente, “Recreating Racism: Race and Discrimination in Cuba’s Special Period,” in A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution, ed. Brenner Phillip et al. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 316–­326. 11. Elsewhere I unpack and question the use of this phrase “return of racism” as silencing the antiblack racism in Cuba that persisted despite radical social changes in the lives of people of African descent after the 1959 revolution. See Benson, Antiracism in Cuba, 20. 12. Alejandro de la Fuente, “The New Afro-­Cuban Cultural Movement and the Debate on Race in Contemporary Cuba,” Journal of Latin American Studies 40, no. 4 (2008): 697–­720. For additional reading on hip-­hop in Cuba, see Marc D. Perry, Negro Soy Yo: Hip Hop and Raced Citizenship in Neoliberal Cuba (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015); and Tanya L. Saunders, Cuban Underground Hip Hop: Black Thoughts, Black Revolution, Black Modernity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015). 13. Proyecto Afrocubanas, Estatutos, copy in the author’s possession, received April 2, 2013. 14. Daisy Rubiera Castillo, “A Bilingual Conversation with Afro-­Cuba Scholar-­Activist Daisy Rubiera Castillo” (lecture given at Davidson College, April 19, 2017). Also see Rubiera Castillo, “Afrocubanas: Un grupo, un proyecto, un sueño, un reto,” Negra cubana tenía que ser (blog), November  15, 2016, https://​negracubanateniaqueser​.com/2​ 016/1​ 1/1​ 5/a​ frocubanas-​ un-​ grupo​ -un​-proyecto​-un​-sueno​-un​-reto/. 15. Gloria Rolando, dir., Diálogo con mi abuela (Havana, 2015).

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16. “Hablando del film ‘Diálogo con mi abuela’ con Gloria Rolando,” YouTube, May 6, 2016, https://​w ww​.youtube​.com/​watch ​?v​= ​OIaoNy​_ KwQ0. 17. “Hablando del film.” 18. Rolando, Diálogo con mi abuela. 19. Diálogo con mi abuela, YouTube, November 24, 2016, http://​w ww​.afrocubaweb​.com/​ gloriarolando/​mi​-abuela​.html. 20. See Daisy Rubiera Castillo, Reyita, sencillamente: Testimonio de una negra cubana nonagenarian (Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1996); Rubiera Castillo, Reyita: The Life of a Black Cuban Woman in the Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); and Rubiera Castillo and Georgina Herrera, Golpeando la memoria: Testimonio de una poeta cubana afrodescendiente (Havana: Ediciones Unión, 2005). For additional reading on Reyita, see Paula Sanmartín, Black Women as Custodians of History: Unsung Rebel (M)others in African American and Afro-­Cuban Women’s Writing (Amherst, N.Y.: Cambria Press, 2014); and Karen Ruth Kornweibel, “Daisy Rubiera Castillo’s Reyita: ‘Mujer Negra’ from Objectified Symbol to Empowered Subject,” Letras Hispanas 7 (Fall 2010): 67–­79. 21. Daisy Rubiera Castillo, lecture to Williams College students, Havana, Cuba, January 16, 2012. 22. Miguel Barnet, Biografía de un cimarrón (Havana: Academia de Ciencias de Cuba, Instituto de Etnología y Folklore, 1966). 23. Daisy Rubiera Castillo, lecture to Williams College students, Havana, Cuba, January 16, 2012. 24. Rubiera Castillo and Martiatu Terry, Afrocubanas. 25. See Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onís (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995); and Fernando Ortiz, Los cabildos y la fiesta afro-­ cubanos del Día de los Reyes (Havana: Editorial Ciencias Sociales, 1992). 26. Rubiera Castillo, lecture to Williams College students. Also see Rubiera Castillo, “Afrocubanas”; and Sandra Álvarez Ramirez, “Las Afrocubanas ya tienen su libro,” Negra cubana tenía que ser (blog), December  16, 2011, https://​negracubanateniaqueser​.com/​2011/​12/​16/​las​ -afrocubanas​-ya​-tienen​-su​-libro/. 27. Daisy Rubiera Castillo and Oilda Hevia Lanier, Emergiendo del silencio: Mujeres negras en la historia de Cuba (Havana: Editorial Ciencias Sociales, 2016). 28. Daisy Rubiera Castillo, “Recordando a Lalita,” Afromodernidades (blog), January 6, 2017, https://​afromodernidades​.wordpress​.com/​2017/ ​01/ ​07/​afromodernidades​-158/. 29. Rubiera Castillo. 30. Daisy Rubiera Castillo, personal communication with the author. 31. To combat this absence, Rowman & Littlefield International published an English edition of Afrocubanas in 2020. See Devyn Spence Benson, ed., Afrocubanas: History, Thought, and Cultural Practices, trans. Karina Alma (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020). 32. Sandra Álvarez Ramirez, “Sara Gómez en su propia voz,” Negra cubana tenía que ser (blog), May  29, 2012, http://​negracubanateniaqueser​.com/​2012/​05/​29/​sara​-en​-su​-propia​ -voz. Gómez is a frequent topic of this black feminist blog, with at least four articles about the filmmaker in the 2013–­2014 year. 33. Sandra Álvarez Ramirez, Directorio de Afrocubanas, accessed July 27, 2020, http://​ directoriodeafrocubanas​.com. 34. “Entrevista—­Conoce el Directorio de Afrocubanas—­Sandra Álvarez—­Marzo 2018,” YouTube, March  8, 2018, https://​w ww​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​= ​oPdpV6wHviU. 35. See “Directorio de Afrocubana,” YouTube, June 5, 2016, https://​w ww​.youtube​.com/​ watch​?v​=k​ etegm5o588; “Promoción Directorio de Afrocubanas,” YouTube, October 20, 2016, https://​w ww​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​= ​pBPybHBBvmk​& ​t​=​29s. 36. “Entrevista.” 37. “Entrevista.” For more on the debate about the term Afro-­Cuban, see Alberto Abreu, “Por qué me defino afrocubano,” Negra cubana tenía que ser (blog), June 25, 2017, https://​ negracubanateniaqueser​.com/​2017/​06/​25/​por​-que​-me​-defino​-afrocubano/. 38. Sandra Álvarez Ramirez, “Emigrante aún no soy,” Negra cubana tenía que ser (blog), July  9, 2016, https://​negracubanateniaqueser​.com/​2016/​07/​09/​negracubana​-emigrante​-aun​ -no​-soy/.

c o n t e m p o r a r y a f r o c u b a n a f e m i n i s m s 159 39. Álvarez Ramirez. 40. Álvarez Ramirez. Also see Sandra Álvarez Ramirez, “Cuando salí de la Habana,” Negra cubana tenía que ser (blog), March 17, 2018, https://​negracubanateniaqueser​.com/​2018/​03/​ 17/​cuando​-sali​-de​-la​-habana/. 41. “Directorio de Afrocubana.” 42. See Yvon Grenier, Culture and the Cuban State: Participation, Recognition, and Dissonance under Communism (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2017), for more information about internet access in Cuba. She notes that Cuba has “one of the Western hemisphere’s lowest Internet penetration rates—­only 5% of the population.” 43. Presentation of the Directorio at a conference in the Casa de Africa, Havana, Cuba, June 2016. 44. “Entrevista.” 45. Here I use the term lesbian because this is how Álvarez and other black queer women in Cuba identify. For additional reading on the challenges black lesbians face in Cuba, see Tanya L. Saunders, “Grupo OREMI: Black Lesbians and the Struggle for Safe Social Space in Havana,” Souls 11, no. 2 (2009): 167–­185; Tanya L. Saunders, “Black Lesbians and Racial Identity in Contemporary Cuba,” Black Women, Gender + Families 4, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 9–­36. 46. Norma Guillard, “To Be a Black Woman, a Lesbian, and an Afro-­Feminist in Cuba Today,” Black Diaspora Review 5, no. 2 (Spring 2016). 47. Guillard. 48. Norma Guillard, Resistencia y subjetividad: Lesbianas afrodescendientes (unpublished manuscript presented at the Latin American Studies Association Conference, San Francisco, California, 2012). 49. Saunders, “Black Lesbians,” 29. 50. Saunders, 29, 33. 51. Saunders, Cuban Underground, 257. 52. Olivia Prendes and Odaymara Cuesta, class visit to Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina, October 4, 2017. 53. Krudas Cubensi, “Mi cuerpo es mio,” YouTube, June 21, 2014, https://​w ww​.youtube​.com/​ watch​?v​=x​ -​ Pgwldfx8U; Krudas Cubensi, “La gorda,” YouTube, November 5, 2015, https://​w ww​ .youtube​.com/​watch​?v​= ​l9MgdTrE1CM​& ​l ist​= ​PLTDy3mxdiMf45kr11BLA3bzb5u7JlwWfL; Krudas Cubensi, “En el solar,” YouTube, March 26, 2016, https://​w ww​.youtube​.com/​watch​ ?v​= ​D0LCwU6gQXY; Krudas Cubensi, “Mi barba,” YouTube, July 24, 2017, https://​w ww​ .youtube​.com/​watch ​?v​= ​lUt3HhkyLGA. 54. Krudas Cubensi, “Mi cuerpo es mio.” 55. Urban Dictionary, s.v. “phat,” last updated March 19, 2013, https://​w ww​.urbandictionary​ .com/​define​.php​?term​= ​phat. 56. Krudas Cubensi, “Mi cuerpo es mio.” 57. Krudas Cubensi, “La gorda.” 58. This translated titled is taken directly from the music video website. Another translation for solar might be “tenement building.” 59. Krudas Cubensi, “En el solar.” 60. Logbona Olukonee, “Krudas Cubensi: Timón del nuevo afro-­feminismo queer Cubano,” Negra cubana tenía que ser (blog), February 24, 2014, https://​negracubanateniaqueser​.com/​ 2014/ ​02/​24/​k rudas​-cubensi​-timon​-del​-nuevo​-afro​-feminismo​-queer​-cubano/. 61. Olukonee. 62. Pedro Alexander Cubas Hernández, “Aprendizajes sobre feminismo negro: Diálogo con cinco mujeres negras intelectuales cubanas,” Cuba Posible 58 (January 2018): 1–­3. 63. For additional reading on black feminism in Latin America, see Sonia E. Alvarez, Kia Lilly Caldwell, and Agustín Laó-­Montes, “African Descendant Feminisms in Latin America. Part I: Brazil” and “African Descendant Feminisms in Latin America. Part II: South and Central America and the Spanish-­Speaking Caribbean,” special issues, Meridians: Feminisms, Race, and Transnationalism 14, nos. 1–­2 (2016).

chapter 10

z Going Back to Cuba how enclaves of memory stimulate returns and repatriations Iraida H. López

At the end of their sojourn in Cuba in December 1977, the fifty-­five members of the Antonio Maceo Brigade’s first contingent held an unexpected encounter with Fidel Castro. Well into the four-­hour meeting, the comandante raised the subject of the brigadistas’ expressed desire to live in their birthplace. The topic had been broached during an earlier discussion with Armando Hart and Alfredo Guevara, both of Castro’s inner circles. While the brigade members, the eager sons and daughters of Cuban exiles, were welcomed on the island, Castro acknowledged, they had a job to do outside of Cuba as advocates for the revolution amid the tensions of the Cold War. Having witnessed firsthand the achievements of the revolution, they were now ready to spread the word outside of Cuba. Consequently, they would have to settle for the yearly trips to the island sponsored by the brigade at a time when traveling, much less returning to Cuba for good, was still highly restricted for the expatriate community.1 Fast-­forward to 2017. Forty years after the historic trip of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, sources such as Café Fuerte and CiberCuba reported that fourteen thousand people had obtained repatriation the year before, a record number since revamped migration laws went into effect in early 2013.2 The new law authorizes Cubans living abroad to apply for reentry and permanent residence in Cuba—­except those who have engaged in undefined hostile actions against the state. The number of applicants who completed the process in 2016 is higher than the combined number, thirteen thousand, from the previous three years (2013–­2015). And it is a far cry from the one thousand who, according to one report, applied for repatriation every year just before the reforms got underway.3 To mark this milestone, the TV news program Mesa redonda devoted one of its segments to migration and repatriation, with Cuban officials referring to the Cubans who decided “to return to live permanently 160

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in Cuba” as being part of a trend that is gathering momentum.4 Here, repatriation, which means “to return to one’s own country,” translates into permanent residency in the country. However, as this chapter demonstrates, the neat conflation of repatriation and permanent return is at variance with my findings. Evidently, a sea change occurred between 1977 and 2017, a period during which a spectrum of returns materialized due to the attachment of Cuban nationals to their place of origin. Post-­1959 narratives of return began to see the light of day in the late 1970s, authored mostly by the descendants of exiles who sought to forge ties with their homeland. After a lull, they reappeared with renewed vigor in the early 1990s, when travel intensified. The narratives on the subject of return do not just depict a going back; they also provide affirmation that, far from opting for a single mental space, many Cubans share a transmigrant imaginary that views returning not as the culmination of a migratory journey but as a step in a cyclical process that shortens the distance across nations.5 Already in 2009, Susan E. Eckstein’s research on what she calls the “new Cubans” underscores the difference between these and the pre-­1990 exiled Cubans, shedding light on how the more recent arrivals’ habits are enmeshed in life back home through travel, remittances, and communication.6 Jorge Duany too has dispelled the notion of the unidirectionality of the exile mindset that is supposedly widespread among Cuban Americans, which would preclude transnationalism, arguing instead for the recognition of the robust ties that bind all Cubans, fanned partially by travel.7 The back-­and-­forth flow takes place regardless of whether government policies on either side facilitate or, more often than not, hinder this transnational frame of mind.8 Yet the possibility, since 2013, to apply for repatriation adds a new dimension to this dynamic. There are as many motivations for returning as there are returnees. However, going back to the homeland triggers intense emotions in the subjects, many of whom partake of what might be called a transnationalism of the heart. This may be described as a two-­way movement nourished by the emotions and sentiments that render the transcending bonds meaningful and resilient, irrespective of the positive or negative value one attaches to those bonds. Sara Ahmed, who has analyzed at length the social meaning of emotions, states, “Emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities . . . through the very intensity of their attachments.”9 The strong ripple effect of emotions gives rise to what the same critic calls “the ‘sociality’ of emotion” to convey how the structures of feeling circulate and stir depending on “histories that remain alive insofar as they have already left their impressions.”10 Emotions cannot be extricated from historical and political contexts that provide a range of entry points to the object appended to those emotions. Furthermore, there is a performative aspect of this theory that works to differentiate between inside and outside.11 Finally, not only do emotions mediate—­or rather, circulate—­between individuals and collective entities; they also engender “enclaves of memory,” a phrase coined by oral historian Miren Llona to refer to the stubborn traces of impressions, reactions, and feelings engraved in one’s body. Llona alludes to the “emotional imprint that lived experience stamps into memory.”12 The “lived experience” may be the outcome of either direct or indirect exposure to what elicits the memory.

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Both Llona’s and Ahmed’s reflections on memory and affect can be applied to Cuban stories of return. Stories, traditions, and reminiscences, many of them infused with emotion, all of which the Cuban communities in Miami and elsewhere are continually replenishing, conform the enclaves of memory connecting the past and the present, and they are all intertwined with identity issues and feelings of belonging that have a bearing on bodies.13 This array of practices and identifications emerging from both the private and public domains helps explain Cuba’s allure even among those Cuban Americans who were born in the United States as much as it helps also reveal the variety of forms “returning” has taken. This chapter will first address the literal and figurative returns of the one-­and-­a-­half generation, continue with the “return” of U.S.-­born Cuban Americans, and conclude with the recent surge of repatriations.14 Autobiographical narratives, journal essays, and nearly twenty interviews that I conducted between May 2017 and February 2018 serve as the basis for the analysis.

Myriad Returns Born in Cuba and arriving in the United States between infancy and young adulthood, Cuban Americans of the one-­and-­a-­half generation are subjects whose cultures coexist and intermingle.15 Politically a mixed lot, they nevertheless share an interest in the insular landscapes and the time periods that shaped them. Cuba is a staple in the self-­referential work of writers and artists of this cohort—­Cristina García, Achy Obejas, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Ruth Behar, Elías Miguel Muñoz, Pablo Medina, Roberto G. Fernández, Carlos Eire, Ernesto Pujol, and Ana Mendieta, among others. Some in this group embrace an exile ethos that prevents them from physically going back to Cuba; yet even among them, an emotional “return” is enabled by enclaves of memory rooted in their childhood experiences on the island and carried over into exile as empowering stories of origin. Among the visual narratives on childhood are those of Ernesto Pujol, who left Cuba in 1961 when he was four and grew up in Puerto Rico. There, “memory machines” embodied by his two exiled grandmothers and four aunts fed his imagination with endless Cuba stories.16 These stories passed down through generations are quintessential ingredients of the enclaves of memory. Pujol went back to Cuba no less than five times between 1995 and 1997, and on one of those occasions, he was invited to mount an exhibit titled Los hijos de Pedro Pan at Casa de las Américas.17 The exhibit was composed of five large gender-­inflected installations using an assortment of objects evoking childhood and the past, such as cribs, antique toys, and baby clothes, among others. In one of these, Tendedera (Clothesline), there is an outline of Cuba drawn on the ground while a dozen children’s shirts set in hangers hover overhead. With the disembodied shirts, Pujol signals the void left by the flight of over fourteen thousand Operation Pedro Pan children, which casts an onerous shadow over the nation. Interestingly, the idea of childhood embedded in most of the artifacts appearing in the installations, including the heavy furniture associated with colonial homes, recalls an earlier period in Cuban history, as if

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Pujol had relied on his older relatives’ memories rather than his own, which may well be lacking, to reconstruct his early years. While some narratives may betray gaps in the memory, there may be an excess of it in others—­as well as a different focus. This is the case with Carlos Eire’s and Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s autobiographical narratives, which feature an emphasis on the trauma of departure. After publishing successfully in his field of expertise, religious studies, scholar Carlos Eire turned out not one but two childhood memoirs in less than a decade, Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (2003) and Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy (2010).18 Delving into his own painful memories, he decries in both books the loss of his father as well as of a privileged way of life on the heels of his departure from Cuba through the Pedro Pan Operation. A few years before, Gustavo Pérez Firmat authored his own memoir, Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano’s Coming-­of-­Age in America (1995), providing a window into the parting of the ways represented by the revolutionary takeover and the concomitant growth of Little Havana as a community of exiled Cubans in Miami from the 1960s on.19 A central theme in the book is the gulf between former and present selves and therefore the urge to go back to an earlier time period in order to dwell on happy memories, first, and then come to terms with the distressing rupture, relying on narrative as a palliative tool. The narrative leads to the past in another country, one that both authors have refused to visit in person but that is still capable of eliciting both positive (when dealing with the distant past) and negative (as it gets closer to the rupture) strong emotions. Being older than Pujol when they came to the United States, both Eire and Pérez Firmat are able to draw directly from their own enclaves of memories to craft these memoirs. Another type of recurrent return weighs on the shoulders of fictional characters in novels such as Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992), a crossover debut novel that reasserts the will of a sector of the Cuban community—­since the emergence of the Antonio Maceo Brigade and Grupo Areíto—­to rise above a binary approach to Cuba. An alter ego for García, the young protagonist of the novel, Pilar, goes back to the island against all expectations, drawn by the telepathic communication she enjoys with her beloved grandmother, who will endow Pilar with the wellspring of family lore. Her oft-­quoted last statement just before she departs from Cuba, “I’m afraid to lose all this, to lose Abuela Celia again. But sooner or later I’ll have to return to New York. I know now it’s where I belong—­not instead of here, but more than here,” sums up the double allegiance corresponding to the one-­and-­a-­half generation even if it turns out to be a lopsided equation.20 What is important, though, is that the young protagonist comes back enriched with the Cuba family archive, one that will emotionally sustain her. García’s second novel, The Agüero Sisters (1998), also moves between both shores in its pursuit of the elucidation of a family secret literally buried in Cuban soil. Fifteen years later, in The King of Cuba (2013), the same author devises a plot that requires spending equal time in Cuba and Florida as it presents an aging Fidel Castro and an exiled freedom fighter, both in a less-­than-­favorable light.21

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The third type of narrative makes the most of actual returns, which allow for a rekindling of memory on the ground. Among the Cuban Americans who have written about definite return trips, anthropologist Ruth Behar merits mentioning. Behar left Cuba with her family at age four and went back for the first time as a graduate student in 1979. Since the 1990s, she has been an advocate of building bridges between Cuba and the United States. Behar is the author and editor of several books whose underlying message is the urgency to revoke what for her amounts to an “emotional blockade” that is just as draining as the trade embargo. The edited volumes Bridges to Cuba / Puentes a Cuba (1995) and The Portable Island: Cubans at Home in the World (2008) are a testament to Behar’s commitment to that goal over the years.22 Both volumes feature an array of testimonies by Cubans of the same cohort who argue for the need to find common ground and come together as individuals and as a nation. In collaboration with President Obama’s inaugural poet Richard Blanco, Behar launched a blog, Bridges to/from Cuba: Lifting the Emotional Embargo, where numerous narratives with the same emphasis have appeared.23 This expansive blog was initiated in the spring of 2015, shortly after the walls erected between Cuba and the United States since the 1960s began to come down. On December 17, 2014, Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro announced the beginning of a process that would culminate with the restoration of diplomatic relations on July 20, 2015. Relaxing travel controls and smoothing the way for large numbers of Americans, Cuban Americans included, to go back to Cuba, the agreement entitled many to talk openly about the travel they were undertaking in a climate of tolerance and goodwill. With the media ready to lay bets on homeland trips, countless return accounts were disseminated in print and digital format.24 John Paul II’s visit to Cuba in 1998 had a similar impact, effectively encouraging many émigrés who had been reluctant to visit Cuba to do so without fear of retaliation.25 These two instances of détente helped open the floodgates for memories to come forth, luring émigrés to act on their yearnings to return and to publicly address them. Among those who have “returned” since the political opening are Cuban Americans who were born in the United States of one or two Cuban parents. This implies traveling to a country about which the visitors have heard poignant stories in both the public and private arenas that foster a sense of identity and belonging. Eckstein notes that although some second-­generation Cuban Americans honor their parents’ mantra of keeping Cuba at arm’s length until the Castros disappear, many others act on their desire to get to know the ancestral land, especially if they have lived outside of Miami, free from the pressures to conform to the rules set by the first generation of exiles.26 Asserting their right to travel and even to set up house in Cuba, these younger Cuban Americans have come out against the familial and economic embargoes that have barred them from fashioning a usable relationship with Cuba. Writer, playwright, and journalist Vanessa Garcia, the author of White Light (2015), has been publishing articles on Cuba since before the opening of diplomatic relations between her ancestral land and the United States.27 As an American-­born

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Cuban—­or ABC, as she calls herself—­she believes her generation has a mission to accomplish, as she wrote two days after the historic 2014 press conference: “Our voice, as people who can see and understand both sides of this debate, is of utter importance going forward. We have longed for a bridge and now we have the ability to become that bridge, finally connecting Miami to La Habana after so many years of drifting.”28 For Garcia, as well as others of her age group, traveling to the island turns into an echo chamber amplifying the stories passed down through generations. The resulting feeling is “shaped by contact with the memory, and also involves an orientation towards what is remembered.”29 The trips afford occasions to see, as Garcia writes, a “Havana that existed before I ever saw it for myself—­in my bones, my collective unconscious, my DNA.”30 The trips also verify the visitor’s comforting acquaintance, thanks to family and community stories, with the iconic sights of the city and the sounds of staccato Cuban Spanish. Narratives like Garcia’s are an example of the enduring power of enclaves of memory, for they show that certain remembrances, as well as the approaches to the object remembered, are engraved in the body. Vanessa Garcia perceives that this engraved memory affords an a priori, alleged feeling of belonging that is automatically activated in a Cuban environment. In an NPR interview aired February 18, 2013, Richard Blanco also elaborates on the intuitive sense of familiarity that in part explains the attraction exerted by Cuba on him: “The first time I went back to Cuba . . . it does feel literally like you’re going back because there’s so much—­you grow up with so much family lore, so many photographs and stories and things like that, that you feel like you have been there in some way, emotionally. So, when you do go, it does feel like a going back.”31 Blanco’s prior immersion in the images and narratives that make up the enclaves of memory nurturing cubanidad eases the way to a reclaimed homeland. Although born in Spain, Blanco was raised in Miami-­Dade County and took in the sights and sounds of the Cuban neighborhood of Westchester. Garcia and Blanco “went back” to Cuba for the first time before 2016. Had they waited until that year, they could have joined the ranks of the CubaOne Foundation, a Miami-­based nonprofit organization created by young Cuban Americans with the purpose of taking their peers, ages twenty-­two to thirty-­five, to Cuba, all expenses paid.32 This has been described as a program by millennials for millennials who want to explore their Cuban heritage as well as engage ordinary Cubans. Generating a flurry of reports the year it was introduced, CubaOne received 1,100 applications for the forty spots it had available in the four 2016 Tu Cuba (Your Cuba) trips.33 The CubaOne tours have inspired numerous essays from which a narrative is beginning to take shape, one that helps bridge the gaps between received stories and lived experience. It is a story of mostly reluctant parents and risk-­taking children who may not feel authentically Cuban or be fluent in Spanish, a story that nonetheless yields a positive outcome, such as recovering estranged relatives and finding pictures of themselves in homes they had never visited or gathering further material for bolstering a plural identity that is not anchored to just one

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place or category. Another outcome is the resolve to build on the relationship ignited by a growing consciousness of the needs, resilience, and ingenuity they find among the Cuban people. The Tu Cuba trips’ results have occasionally included a commitment to the advancement of Cubans on the island in a transnational gesture of support. The tours have also made participants realize that in order to move forward, they, like the youngest among the one-­and-­a-­half generation, need not only to go in search of existing enclaves of memory but also to contribute to their renewal and ongoing relevance. Before his first trip with the foundation, Derek Palacio wrote the eloquent essay “The Repeating Cuban” about his feelings toward the island.34 Although Palacio’s father left Cuba as a young man and had little recollections of his life there, his fragmented memories are the “foundational myths” from which the young Palacio draws inspiration. Because of their meager supply, Palacio has built a Cuba of his imagination. Although he questions his own Cubanness, Palacio’s writing is nevertheless intimately connected to his father’s disjointed memories of Cuba. Given his keen awareness of the distance between himself and the “real” Cuba, Palacio anticipates that the CubaOne trip will foreground the inevitable fissures. There is a silver lining to this recognition, however. The trip would also bring about “a different way of being Cuban on the page, working from my own experiences and letting go, after a lifetime of inspiration, of my father’s memories.”35 But rather than completely letting go of those memories, Palacio is likely to integrate them into his own “new” memories in order to arrive at the “Tu Cuba” the trip organizers highlight in their promotional literature. This is a Cuba he needs to build for himself out of all these pieces. The Cuba in Palacio’s essay is not too dissimilar from the one he and others of his generation have shaped through fiction, benefitting from inherited memory. Palacio’s own novel, The Mortifications (2016), written before his first trip to Cuba, spans both sides of the Florida Straits, with multigenerational characters that leave and later go back to the island seeking self-­definition.36 His second-­generation Cuban American peers likewise resort to symbolic returns in novels by Ana Menéndez, Chantel Acevedo, and Robert Arellano and in short stories by Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés, Jennine Capó Crucet, and Gabriela Garcia. It is not unusual that a novel or short story appears partly set in Cuba, with characters that move more or less at ease across both sides of the straits. There is also the case, of course, that a Cuban American background in the narrative serves merely as a backdrop to a story that doesn’t address Cuba at all. Will the ties betrayed by all these narratives prevail in future discourses? As Michael Jones-­Correa writes, “the full significance of transnationalism in the second generation, both for the United States and for immigrant-­sending nations, is as yet unknown.”37 For now, though, the vitality with which some among this cohort have capitalized on the enclaves of memory at their disposal bodes well for the continuation of transnational practices in terms of both emotional investment and real engagement in the form of collaboration, communication, and remittances,

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among others. What remains to be done is to bring about the structural conditions that allow for exchanges to thrive.

The Double Meaning of Repatriations Most of the second generation’s narratives appeared during the Obama administration’s opening to Cuba, which paved the way for individual people-­to-­people travel as a new category in the general license under which travelers were able to go. As significant as this new opening was under President Obama, others that would have a formidable impact on the nature of migration and return have been enacted unilaterally by the Cuban government. On October 16, 2012, the Cubans announced the liberalization of official policies on travel. Among other measures that facilitate travel abroad, the Decree-­Law No. 302, replacing the 1976 Law on Migration, stipulates that citizens may depart for up to two years without relinquishing their rights and obligations. Furthermore, Cubans who have emigrated may apply for repatriation. The new law, which went into effect on January 14, 2013, also repealed the December 1961 law sanctioning the confiscation of property and other assets belonging to Cubans who settle abroad.38 It appears that some Cubans were ready to act under the new regulations, including the application to reestablish residency in Cuba. As mentioned, the media broadly reported that the number of repatriations rose to fourteen thousand in 2016. However, few details have been forthcoming. There is a dearth of publications, not to mention personal narratives, on the subject. As a partial remedy to this lack, I have been conducting interviews, both on the island and in the United States, with Cubans who have been approved for repatriation or have initiated the process. This is a small sample of nineteen migrants, a heterogeneous group in terms of age, gender, race, class, and migration history. While most come from the United States, the rest are from the Cuban diaspora in Italy, Spain, Germany, Great Britain, and Canada. A majority of the repatriados are between the ages of twenty-­six and fifty-­five and left Cuba after 1995; only three are retirees over age sixty-­five. Another four who have gone through the process did not agree to be interviewed, declining to give an explanation.39 Still, the nineteen interviews I was able to complete offer invaluable insights about the motivation for taking the step, the impact that repatriation is likely to have at the personal and collective levels, and the ambivalent meaning of repatriation, going beyond merely “returns.” Many of the repatriated are moved by the emotional pull of enclaves of memory, but there are other reasons as well. A different political, post–­Cold War, post–­Fidel Castro landscape serves as a backdrop to their actions, contributing to the emergence of an “imagined generation” of like-­minded people bent on bringing back full normalization by exercising their long-­denied rights.40 They may have left Cuba at various times and for widely divergent reasons, and they may be driven by different goals, yet they converge in Cuba at an important juncture. All are facing a changed economic and political environment in the homeland, made possible by the growth of the private sector,

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however constrained it has been; the widespread use of the dual currency; and the liberalization of migration laws likely to benefit migrants as well as nonmigrants. Whereas the returnees of the one-­and-­a-­half generation were moved by the search for emotional healing and reconnection and those of the second generation by the longing to build on their heritage and transcend the rift, most of the repatriates’ narratives reveal a mix of altruistic and pragmatic reasons for resettling. Some of the interviewees spoke about the sentimental connection to their motherland as a key factor in their decision to return. A Cuban American writer and retired professor who was approved for repatriation and now lives part of the time in a comfortable apartment in El Vedado spoke about her discontent with the reigning social and racial order in the United States and her appreciation for what the Cuban regime has pulled off from a legal standpoint in this regard as a strong motivation to go back. The writer left Cuba with her family in 1966, went back for the first time in 1980, and thereafter made multiple trips before contemplating repatriation. She, therefore, is moved not by a naive vision of Cuba hatched from afar but rather by matters of the heart. As she wrote in an essay that appeared in a mainstream Cuban journal, “El corazón no emigra” (The heart doesn’t migrate). This condition enables émigrés to keep the landscape of their youth intact in their hearts and minds: “En esos personajes que construyo emigran sus cabezas, donde habita la imaginación y los sueños de un futuro mejor, las que organizaron el viaje. Emigran los pies que los llevan al nuevo país, emigran las manos con las que trabajan para sobrevivir, pero el corazón de cada uno de ellos sigue viviendo en el país donde nacieron o donde nacieron sus padres porque el corazón no emigra. Al menos el de mis personajes y el mío, no.”41 Going back may well draw from “enclaves” of heartfelt emotions rather than cold calculations. Yet the same informant is also well aware of her privileged position as a transnational citizen, published writer, and savvy consumer. Having succeeded in reinserting herself into Cuban intellectual circles and publishing venues through her own networks, she nonetheless plans on keeping her apartment in New York City and traveling back and forth. Alongside many others, she is not one to burn bridges. Kinship and love no doubt weigh in the determination to repatriate. An Afro-­ Cuban woman who left as a child with her family for West Germany before the revolution went back to Cuba permanently to look after her ailing mother in 2017. She is returning in kind what her mother did for this woman’s grandmother in 2003 after living in Germany and Spain for almost fifty years. The woman now works as a translator out of the home that belonged to her grandmother. Living in West Germany was hardly bliss given both overt and indirect forms of racial discrimination. Acting on her wish to return to her homeland, she first went to Cuba in 1984 through London, where she was a graduate student, and repeatedly after 1990. Sixty-­six years old at the time of the interview and able to live on her pension, she is “a citizen of the world,” a Cuban with an unusual cadence in Spanish, a multicultural other that disturbs the notion of a homogeneous national subject no matter where she lives. Yet she feels at home in Cuba. A second translator/ writer who works at the United Nations left Cuba in 1994 for New York via Paris.

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Returning for the first time in 2016, he fell in love with a Cuban woman whom he married. He now splits his time between New York and Havana, where he is slowly coming to terms with a more uncertain post-­Soviet cultural landscape that is no longer correlating to clear-­cut government policies. A diversity of subtle hurdles to feeling at home did arise in some of the interviews. Some of the interviewees spoke about the positive contributions they make when they move back into a neighborhood or become cuentapropistas (entrepreneurs). The retired professor mentioned earlier signaled her intention to give back to the community by eventually running a writers’ workshop out of her home. The owner of a bakery in Centro Habana, an Afro-­Cuban man in his midforties, spoke about helping improve his fellow citizens’ dietary habits. The kinds of nutritious bread he makes foster an appetite for a more wholesome gastronomy. Aware of the ingrained racism he senses all around him, more glaring to him now after being away for over a decade, the bakery owner has also become an activist in the fight against racial discrimination. Showcased in the bakery’s storefront are photographs of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Barack Obama, and Nelson Mandela, which frame a clear message of racial empowerment. Other returnees echoed the call for effecting change in ways large and small through ideas, values, and behaviors conducive to the general improvement of communities. The work ethic and social behavior in public spaces, deemed wanting, were targeted as areas that could be enhanced with the cultural capital that returnees bring with them. It is not merely their financial resources and know-­how that are important. The returnees see themselves as contributing to the refinement of the urban social fabric and built environment. Many anticipate material gains, and they are far from being shy about admitting as much. Several have benefitted or are now benefitting from a nascent real estate market in Havana and elsewhere in Cuba, a new development since the 2011 overhaul of the real estate law guaranteeing the right to own, transfer, or inherit housing to purchase a home.42 A good number of those with whom I spoke see this benefit as a major incentive behind repatriations. There are websites—­such as Revolico, OnCubaRealEstate, and Point2Cuba—­offering a variety of housing options for sale, and a leisurely walk around some neighborhoods in Havana yields frequent “For Sale” signs. Buyers see this opening as an opportunity to own a property in a central location, a house or apartment that would be beyond their means in expensive metropolitan areas in the United States and other developed countries. If their immediate relatives own a piece of property, the applicants want to ensure their eligibility to inherit it now that the 2011 real estate law regulates that right. By becoming a full member of Cuban society, they are entitled to the inheritance along with a carnet de identidad, access to public health, and a libreta de abastecimiento, or ration card. Through homeownership as well as entrepreneurship, the returnees become entangled in everyday life in Cuba. There are further reasons for opting for repatriation. A Cuban male who departed before finishing his university degree took advantage of the new migration law to go back and complete his degree free of charge. He can use his newly

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acquired credentials to get ahead on the other side of the straits. A visual artist in his thirties shared with me that he did not gain access to the Miami real estate mogul and art collector Jorge M. Pérez until he began to spend time in a studio in Havana after being approved for repatriation. Being considered a “Cuban” as opposed to the Cuban American artist that he is gives him an edge in the art market, an advantage that he would not have if he lived permanently off the island. Although it did not come up in this set of interviews, retirees, who join an increasingly senescent population on the island, may be looking to stretch their fixed incomes or receive free health care. Another interviewee referred to the opportunity repatriation gave her to further familiarize her two young daughters with her native culture now that she plans to spend more time in Cuba. The mother of two is refurbishing a colonial house in Old Havana. Two of the returnees learned their trade in Spain and Italy, respectively, and have opened their own businesses, a successful restaurant in the Playa neighborhood and the above-­mentioned innovative bakery in Centro Habana, thus translating return migration into upward mobility. Even though I did not interview him, Carlos Acosta has joined this group of entrepreneurs at a grander scale. He opened the Carlos Acosta International Dance Foundation in Havana after spending years as a principal dancer at the Royal Ballet in London and, previously, the American Ballet Theatre. A spacious, renovated building in Vedado’s Calle Línea houses his new dance company, for which they were recruiting at the national level in June 2017. In the future, Acosta plans to split his time between Havana and England. Due to the U.S. embargo, the option of investing freely in a business venture in Cuba has been (so far) out of bounds to repatriated subjects who are also U.S. residents, while on the Cuba side, the role of Cuban Americans in the economy is still a matter of debate. However, as this sample reveals, there are many other practical reasons for repatriation. I was surprised to find that a majority of the narratives undermine the notion of permanent returns. The Cuban American writer and professor mentioned previously who resettled in Havana while keeping her residence in New York City is joined by others in a two-­way movement that goes against the grain of official accounts. The Afro-­Cuban translator keeps her apartment in Hanover and regularly visits her children in Germany and Great Britain, two of whom married Cuban men. These circumstances strengthen as well as redefine people’s links to Cuba. At twenty-­six years old, a man from Santa Clara told me that he was a border-­crosser and his future spanned Cuba, the United States, and perhaps other countries. For now, he travels frequently to Cuba after having left as a university student in 2012 because his girlfriend still lives there, and he has since joined forces with a friend in his hometown managing a hostel part time. He foresees spending more time there if the space for civic participation expands in the future. This account reverberated in the testimony of the bakery owner in Centro Habana, as his wife is still in Italy and he goes back to Europe twice a year. Their encounters sometimes take them to a third country. The migratory trajectory of the young man who completed his university degree in Havana takes him at least

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once a year to Germany, his first stop after leaving Cuba and the birthplace of his daughter. Even the minority in this sample, who spend more time in Cuba than abroad, have not severed the international linkages established as a result of dispersion. And only seven of the nineteen people I interviewed own a residence in Cuba. The media may be reporting permanent returns, but the interviews suggest that a breakdown is in order. How many of the repatriated are truly repatriated and how many come and go? More research is needed to answer this question of far-­reaching implications. There are distinctions to be made if we are to arrive at a nuanced assessment of the fluidity reflected in this set of interviews, which has the potential of reformulating both migration and the nation. Rather than permanent returns, some of the cases discussed are examples of circular migration if we take the term to signify spending time in both receiving and sending countries. Notwithstanding circular migration, there are some who unpredictably opt for permanent residency in Cuba. Among those who have done just that is a second-­ generation Cuban American who was still living in an Airbnb in Nuevo Vedado when I interviewed her at the end of July 2017. Having been born in Miami of Cuban parents who were the owners of a popular restaurant in Havana and later in Miami, this forty-­five-­year-­old woman had just been approved for avecindamiento, the label given to the process designed for those born overseas. Until recently, this particular track required applicants to spend three months in Cuba before they were permitted to submit the required documentation. Like the rest of the repatriates, she now has six months to secure her own place and ship her possessions in a sealed container headed for Havana. If she misses the deadline, she forgoes the right to import her belongings and needs to make do with inadequate offers on location. The daughter of exiles has not been discouraged by the limited internet service in Cuba even though she works as a producer, writer, consultant, and digital media expert. Neither has she been dampened by the struggle to express herself fluently in Spanish. Were it not for the emotions that are at the root of her decision, it is doubtful she would have chosen to live in Cuba. After many visits since 1997, she is forging ahead with her plans to settle down in Havana, undaunted by the drawbacks. The resumption of diplomatic relations with the United States gave much hope to her and others, even though that optimism has been somewhat slashed under Trump. She nonetheless wants to be in Cuba as progress unfolds, however slowly, at the same time that cities like New York and Los Angeles also figure in her future. The interview reveals a combination of emotional and practical reasons for returning. In the interviewee’s words, “There’s a spiritual side of me that needs to be here, but the business side of me, the Americana side, believes this is an emergent market.” On the spiritual side, the avecindada draws from enclaves of memory that brought tears to her eyes the first few times she visited her former family establishment in Havana. On the business side, there are a wait-­and-­see attitude and a willingness to take risks. Will the emotions that fed her decision be enough to counter the uncertainty facing her as well as Cuba? As this and the other cases illustrate, there are disparate reasons for repatriation—­ an emotive drive, altruistic intentions, an adventurous attitude, economic advantages,

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kinship ties, a life-­stage transition, or a combination thereof. Yet underlying them all is the crucial role played by enclaves of memory, allowing for the maintenance of the ties that bind. In the Cuban context, attempting to understand going back exclusively through the lens of official figures and nation-­bounded explanations, relying just on statistics and the single-­return paradigm, falls short of offering a full picture of Cuban returns given the complexity of the Cuban migratory experience and the myriad complications for travel that have surfaced over the past several decades. For two full decades after the revolution, there was no contact allowed between Cubans on the island and abroad. Given these unique circumstances, in addition to the recent indefinite returns that have materialized and warrant further scrutiny, one should also examine the various forms that going back has acquired and that have successfully circumvented political roadblocks, such as the large numbers of visits to the homeland, many through a third country, and the so-­called repatriations, which do not always lead to permanent returns. As noted, Cubans have also relied on fiction and nonfiction genres as a vehicle for traveling, with each generation undertaking the journey according to its needs and potentials. It would seem that polarizing political rhetoric, on the one hand, and repeated actions taken on the ground by transmigrants, on the other, continue to be at odds. Alternative forms of return would slip through the cracks were we to focus only on quantitative data, bypassing the existing testimonial literature that brings those forms to the fore. As the narratives show, boomeranging to Cuba in a variety of ways is part and parcel of Cuban displacement. A majority of the expatriates and children of expatriates who have pursued traveling one way or another have been propelled by enclaves of memory that allow emotional and affective ties to do their connecting and not always visible work.

Notes 1. See Jesús Díaz’s documentary 55 hermanos (Havana: ICAIC, 1978) featuring the first trip of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, made up of the children of exiles, who returned to Cuba against all odds. At least two of the brigade members were eventually allowed to stay after marrying Cuban nationals. The exiles as a whole did not regain the right to visit their relatives on the island until 1979. For details about the politics surrounding travel to Cuba, see Iraida H. López, Impossible Returns: Narratives of the Cuban Diaspora (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015), 34–­60. 2. The number reportedly includes both Cubans who reside abroad and “foreigners,” although the latter is presumably a negligible number. It is not clear why they are lumped together under the repatriation rubric. 3. “Cuba: Mil emigrados retornan cada año para quedarse en el país,” Café Fuerte, October  24, 2012, http://c​ afefuerte.​ com/c​ sociedad/2​ 282-​ cuba-​ mil-​ emigrados-​ retornan-​ cada-​ ano​ -para​-quedarse​-en​-el​-pais/. 4. Yvette Leyva Martínez, “Cuba: 14 mil personas se repatriaron durante el pasado año,” Café Fuerte, June  25, 2017, http://​cafefuerte​.com/​cuba/​30989​-cuba​-14​-mil​-personas​-se​ -repatriaron​-pasado​-ano/. See also Rafa Pérez, “Mesa redonda revela interesantes cifras sobre la migración cubana,” CiberCuba, June 30, 2017, https://​w ww​.cibercuba​.com/​v ideos/​ noticias/ ​2017​- 06 ​-17​-u73624 ​- e20037​-mesa​-redonda​-revela​-interesantes​- cifras​-migracion​ -cubana ​?utm ​_ source ​= ​OneS ​& ​utm ​_campaign ​= ​OneS ​_U13 ​& ​utm ​_ medium ​= ​push.

g o i n g b a c k t o c u b a 173 5. Glick Schiller and colleagues define transmigrant as “immigrants whose daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders and whose public identities are configured in relationship to more than one nation-­state.” Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, “From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration,” Anthropological Quarterly 68, no. 1 (1995): 48. 6. Susan Eva Eckstein, The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Changed the U.S. and Their Homeland (New York: Routledge, 2009), 2–­3. 7. Jorge Duany, Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 143. 8. Currently, part of the traveling involves a back-­and-­forth movement, as recent statistics show. See Yvette Leyva Martínez for specific numbers as well as “Más de 600,000 cubanos viajaron al exterior tras eliminarse permiso de salida,” El Nuevo Herald, January 14, 2017, http://​ www​.elnuevoherald​.com/​noticias/​mundo/​a merica​-latina/​cuba​-es/​a rticle126597054​.html. 9. Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 119, http://​muse​.jhu​ .edu​.library2​.ramapo​.edu:​2048/​a rticle/​55780/​pdf. 10. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 8. 11. Ahmed, 194. 12. Miren Llona, “The Healing Effect of Discourses: Body, Emotions, and Gender Subjectivities in Basque Nationalism,” in Memory, Subjectivity, and Representation: Approaches to Oral History in Latin America, Portugal, and Spain, ed. Rina Benmayor, Pilar Dominguez Prats, and María Eugenia Cardenal de la Nuez (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 77. 13. Studies about the emergence of the Cuban enclave in Miami-­Dade have proliferated, all commenting on the creation of not only a material culture around restaurants, schools, funeral parlors, cigar factories, theaters, and art galleries resembling those of prerevolutionary Havana but also incommensurable traditions such as festivals, lectures, seminaries, religious processions, and radio programs, among others, bolstering the preservation of Cuban culture. For a recent account, see Guillermo Grenier and Corinna J. Moebius, A History of Little Havana (Charleston, S.C.: History Press, 2015). 14. Although the return of the “new Cubans” featured in Eckstein’s Immigrant Divide is not explicitly addressed, a portion of these new Cubans, who unlike the first waves of exiles never turned their backs on the island, have benefitted from the repatriation process. The two can, and do, overlap, as the interviews I conducted show. 15. Rubén G. Rumbaut, “Ages, Life Stages, and Generational Cohorts: Decomposing the First and Second Generation in the United States,” International Migration Review 38, no. 3 (2004): 1167. See also Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-­American Way (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 4. 16. Ernesto Pujol, personal communication with the author, April 17, 2012. 17. Operation Pedro Pan was a program sponsored by the Catholic Church that extended visa waivers issued by the U.S. government to 14,048 unaccompanied Cuban minors who entered the United States between December 1960 and October 1962. 18. See Carlos M. N. Eire, Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy (New York: Free Press, 2010); and Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003). 19. Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano’s Coming-­of-­Age in America (New York: Doubleday, 1995). 20. Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), 236. 21. Interestingly, between The Agüero Sisters and The King of Cuba, García published Monkey Hunting (2003), A Handbook to Luck (2007), and Lady Matador (2010), in which she seemed to be moving away from a totally Cuban-­centered narrative. While the first of the three is partially about Chinese immigrants in Cuba, the latter is set in a fictional Central American country. 22. Ruth Behar, ed., Bridges to Cuba / Puentes a Cuba (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015). See also Ruth Behar and Lucía M. Suárez, eds., The Portable Island: Cubans at Home in the World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 23. Ruth Behar and Richard Blanco, eds., “Bridges to/from Cuba: Lifting the Emotional Embargo,” Bridges to/from Cuba (blog), accessed July 10, 2020, http://​bridgestocuba​.com.

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24. Adriana López Labourdette and I have been collecting such accounts in “Volver a Cuba / Returning to Cuba,” a Facebook page launched in August 2015 for this purpose. It contains over a hundred return narratives. 25. Eckstein, Immigrant Divide, 142. 26. Eckstein, 145–­147. 27. Vanessa Garcia, White Light (New York: Shade Mountain Press, 2015). 28. Vanessa Garcia, “ABCs Middle Line Breaks the Cuban-­American Hardline,” Huffington Post, December  19, 2014, http://​w ww​.huffingtonpost​.com/​vanessa​-garcia/​abcs​-middle​-line​ -breaks​-t​_b​_ 6354614​.html. 29. Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 7. 30. Vanessa Garcia, “My Family Left Communist Cuba. Last Week I Took a Cruise There,” Narratively, May  16, 2016, http://​narrative​.ly/​my​-family​-fled​-communist​-cuba​-last​-week​-i​ -took​-a​-cruise​-there/. 31. Richard Blanco, “I Finally Felt like I Was Home,” interview by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, NPR, February  18, 2013, http://​w ww​.npr​.org/​2013/​02/​18/​171903179/​inaugural​-poet​-richard​ -blanco​-i​-finally​-felt​-like​-i​-was​-home. 32. Cherie Cancio, a community relations professional, founded the CubaOne Foundation with attorney Andrew Jimenez, former consultant Daniel Jimenez, and public relations professional Giancarlo Sopo. They have put nearly $100,000 of their own money to fund the trips. 33. See Alyson Kruger, “The Cuban-­American Generation Gap,” New York Times, August 16, 2016, https://​w ww​.nytimes​.com/​2016/​08/​18/​fashion/​c uban​-american​-parents​-children​ -travel​.html?​_r​=​1. 34. Derek Palacio, “The Repeating Cuban,” Bridges to/from Cuba (blog), September 26, 2016, http:// ​bridgestocuba​.com/​2016/ ​09/​t he​-repeating​-cuban/. 35. Palacio. 36. Derek Palacio, The Mortifications (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2016). 37. Michael Jones-­Correa, “The Study of Transnationalism among the Children of Immigrants: Where We Are and Where We Should Be Headed,” in The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation, ed. Peggy Levitt and Mary C. Waters (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), 239. For more about these writers, see Iraida H. López’s and Eliana S. Rivero’s anthology Let’s Hear Their Voices: Cuban American Writers of the Second Generation (New York: SUNY Press, 2019). 38. Philip Peters, “Migration Policy Reform: Cuba Gets Started, the U.S. Should Follow,” Lexington Institute, December 2012, https://​w ww​.american​.edu/​clals/​upload/​CubanMigration​ -1​.pdf. 39. Their reluctance to speak about repatriation may have to do with the uncertainty brought about by the Trump administration’s shift toward Cuba, the existing legal hurdles related to the transfer of money between the two countries, or the fear to announce repatriation plans in social circles that are not totally amenable to return. One of the interviewees remarked that many in Miami still fear to come out of the closet regarding their relationship with Cuba. 40. Susan Eckstein, “On Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Meaning of Immigrant Generations,” in The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation, ed. Peggy Levitt and Mary C. Waters (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), 214–­215. 41. Sonia Rivera-­Valdés, “El corazón no emigra,” La Gaceta de Cuba 1 (January–­February 2017): 43. 42. See Carmelo Mesa-­Lago, ed., Voces de cambio en el sector no estatal cubano (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2016), for detailed information on real estate in Cuba. One of the leading causes for the boom in real estate in 2013 was the rise in migration (126–­127). Since the average Cuban cannot afford to buy a house or apartment, most of the buying is done by those with access to remittances or by Cuban Americans and foreigners who use a figurehead to close the transaction. Using a figurehead, however, is against the law (134). Trump’s more restrictive policies toward Cuba have a direct impact on migration and, by default, the real estate market on the island.

chapter 11

z The Floating Generation cuban art in the post-­soviet period, 1991–­2017 Rafael Rojas Translated by Ellen Ryan Robinson and Anke Birkenmaier

More than a quarter century has passed since the disintegration of the socialist bloc, formed by the popular democracies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Cuba’s principal connection with the world for many years. And Cuban art, as all spheres of life, clearly changed. I would like to contribute to an understanding of that change, localizing the mutations of art and its ties with the state and market, society and culture, of the last three decades. I begin with the observation that such a change, having started in the 1990s and continuing into the last few years, has in the 1980s an antecedent of great relevance. Even though I coincide with those who understand the 1980s in Cuba as an interregnum, utopia, or as an end or collapse of an old visual regime, I argue that rather than the foundation of a new system of Cuban art, the Havana Biennials and the art production of the 1980s through the first decades of the 2000s had to do with the refunctionalization of the old institutional system.1 While a lot seemed to change, the close relationship between artists and the state has continued to be decisive for Cuban art in the new millennium. In the first biennials of this century, the new system took shape by way of a conflictive cohabitation between the state and the market, a negotiation between institutional politics and artistic poetics. By then, the state’s hegemony allowed for the application of increasingly uninhibited market logic principles—­gallery owners, art collectors, dealers, and curators from notable Western cities were allowed to directly represent Cuban artists—­in the production and circulation of art on and outside the island. Cuban critic Marilyn Machado, in her recent book Fuera de revoluciones (2016), has spoken of an “unplanned transition towards a new social configuration” in which art is reproduced according to a capitalist logic under a planned socialist system of political and economic control.2 175

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In terms of public interpellation, such a coexistence presents challenges to Cuban art and artists, given that it forces them to position themselves doubly against two hegemonies that share the same link with power. The anxieties associated with such double demands are more understandable if one keeps in mind that Cuban art hails from a long, contestatory, avant-­garde tradition going back to the 1920s, which, in the second half of the twentieth century, transitioned rapidly from the model of an autonomous aesthetic to one of deep political commitment with the new social order. This tradition of both avant-­garde experimentation and political commitment in turn, however, generated from early on tensions and fractures within the intellectual field.3 The exploration of discursive tensions between art and power in Cuba must be accompanied by a more precise analysis of the migratory change that Cuban culture experienced at the beginning of the twenty-­first century. In other places, we have spoken of the emergence of a “floating generation” in the Cuban cultural scene that manipulates to its favor the intensification of twenty-­first-­century migratory flows.4 If the generation of artists from the 1980s followed a diasporic itinerary in the following decade that complicated the space of the “exiled Cuban,” the next generation became defined in its discursive and artistic production by the context of the Migratory Law of 2013. This law facilitates temporary stays abroad, trips to the island, and in certain cases, repatriations, creating a new type of mobile or nomadic residency.

From Order to Utopia In the 1960s and 1970s, a self-­designated socialist institutional art order was created in Cuba, which laid claim to the mid-­twentieth-­century avant-­garde legacy, personified by figures such as Wifredo Lam, Amelia Peláez, Víctor Manuel, Carlos Enríquez, René Portocarrero, and Mariano Rodríguez—­but with a series of limits and taboos in accordance with state ideology. This socialist art order assimilated the prerevolutionary avant-­garde from the point of view of a conservative teleology, brushing away avant-­garde concerns such as aesthetic autonomy and the pacts that had been made within Cuban Republican culture while at the same time subordinating all Cuban art to the metahistorical course that resulted in the 1959 revolution and its cultural politics.5 During those decades, the attempts to impose an aesthetic patron akin to Soviet bloc–­style socialist realism, officially proclaimed by the orthodox fractions of the Cuban bureaucracy, were widely resisted. While essays such as Juan Marinello’s Conversación con nuestros pintores abstractos (1958) rejected both abstract art and concrete art, the figurative poetics of neoexpressionist Antonia Eiriz, the pop style of Raúl Martínez, or the homoeroticism of Servando Cabrera Moreno chose entirely different aesthetic directions.6 Nevertheless, as Elvis Fuentes has shown, the institutionalization of cultural politics, especially in the first half of the 1970s, did end up reproducing patrons of pictorial representation that favored a certain academic realism or excessively literal symbolism similar to that of Soviet bloc countries.7

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From the end of the 1970s on, a series of now legendary exhibits—­among them Seis nuevos pintores (Six new painters; 1978), Volumen uno (Volume 1; 1981), and the work of the group 4 × 4 (1982–­1987)—­began to show that artistic production from the island was experiencing an explosion of expressive registers, resourcefulness, and richness, placing Cuban visual arts at the forefront of Latin American art. Art critics of the time, some of them still writing today—­Gerardo Mosquera, who wrote catalogs for some exhibits, as well as Desiderio Navarro, Osvaldo Sánchez, Madeline Izquierdo, Iván de la Nuez, and Lupe Álvarez—­noted from early on an abundance of new poetic conceptualizations that was quickly transforming Cuban art history.8 In the first half of the 1980s, it seemed that multiple pictorial strategies sprung up, including the new pop style of Ricardo Rodríguez Brey, the painting labels of Rubén Torres Llorca, the coarse surfaces of Juan Franciso Elso, the first archeological exercises of José Bedia, the paintings with natural materials of José Manuel Fors, the informal style of Gustavo Pérez Monzón, the landscapes of Tomás Sánchez, tropical cardboard collages of sickle and hammer by Flavio Garciandía, and the neolandscape or neoabstractionism of Gustavo Acosta and Carlos García. Soon, new Cuban art overtook painting—­Arturo Cuenca’s conceptualist palimpsests or Consuelo Castañeda’s framed texts—­while some like Garciandía and Torres Llorca transcended painting altogether with their installations and artifacts (see figure 11.1). In the second half of the decade, in a similar vein to their older peers, a younger group of artists used creative groups or art collectives—­Provisional, Arte Calle, Puré, Castillo de la fuerza, Hacer, El objeto esculturado, or Arte y Derecho—­to produce new creative endeavors, such as performances but also public interventions, street protests, anthropological experiments, and a copious archive of manifestos, treaties, and playful theoretical interventions.9 Artists such as Aldito Menéndez, Abdel Hernández, Alexis Somoza, Félix Suazo, Ángel Delgado, and Lázaro Saavedra made the politicization of Cuban art a radically civic matter by taking it to the center of the public sphere, while others tried to produce political art through more heterogeneous routes, among them Antonio Eligio (Tonel), Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas, Adriano Buergo, Ana Albertina Delgado, Tomás Esson, Ciro Quintana, Magdalena Campos, Segundo Planes, Marta María Pérez Bravo, and Alejandro Aguilera. The first tactic opened the artistic discourse to the literalness of the political, while with the second tactic, art reaffirmed its autonomy as a language of its own. This explosion of Cuban art from the 1980s has led art historians Luis Camnitzer and Rachel Weiss to talk of a “renaissance” or “riot” in comparison to the aesthetic of the 1970s.10 Perhaps it is more appropriate to use Albert Camus and Octavio Paz’s term rebellion, understood as an insurgency within the revolution.11 In addition to an enormous renovation of expressive registers, artists from the 1980s attempted alternative forms of sociability and institutionalism within Cuban culture. As projects such as Castillo de la fuerza and El objeto esculturado by Alexis Somoza and Félix Suazo show, both dimensions were related to the demand for transversal spaces of circulation and reception for new art forms that transgressed traditional or modern aesthetics limits. Suazo and Somoza observed in 1990 that

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Figure 11.1.  Flavio Garciandía, Segundo viaje de Marco Polo (1992). Courtesy of the artist.

curiously, this radical transgression of aesthetic limits produced itself in Cuba before the experience of the “modernism” typical of industrial or postindustrial societies.12 Nevertheless, the enthusiastic reception on the island of conceptualist artists (such as the German Joseph Beuys, to whose artistic principles Cuban artists José Bedia, Rubén Torres Llorca, Arturo Cuenca, Consuelo Castañeda, Lázaro Saavedra, Glexis Novoa, Luis Gómez, Abdel Hernández, and Aldito Menéndez felt greatly indebted) indicated that a radical revision of the aesthetic and institutional

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principles of the Cuban art system had happened. Conceptualism was, to a degree, the pathway toward imagining parallel tracks for Cuban visual arts—­one institutional, the other a critique of institutional precepts, but from within the system. In a conversation with various creators, in relation to the influence of Beuys, Suazo told Navarro that what was most attractive about the German artist’s project was that his work implied “a critique of the habitual means of production, distribution, and consumption of art as an institution” and that his multidirectional activity of “social sculpturing,” in pedagogical and civic terms, allowed for “inserting oneself critically into the development of society.”13 It was this sociological or anthropological angle, directed toward the artist’s and the spectator’s constitution as political subjects, that attested to the crisis of a modernism sui generis—­not capitalist but “real socialist,” like that of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and located in the Caribbean of the Cold War. The critique of the institutional order of art—­or more specifically, of the cultural politics toward the visual arts—­constitutes, according to sociologist Velia Cecilia Bobes, “the first step of a critique of the symbolic universe of real socialism with which artists from the 1980s did not identify anymore.”14 Nevertheless, in the ensuing aesthetic insurgency, the options of escape from the art institution gravitated not toward the replacement of the state by the market but toward the civic activation of the aesthetic discourses, along the same lines of what happened in Soviet bloc countries during the same period. Boris Kagarlitsky’s account of cultural changes in the USSR during perestroika and glasnost has many similarities with what was happening in Cuba in the late 1980s.15 Further, a discursive convergence produced itself where French poststructuralism, Frankfurt School critical theory, and the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev were read and discussed all at the same time, and critics and artists seemed to arrive at the tacit agreement that Cuban art was experimenting something called “postmodernism.”16 It seemed that this polysemous concept brought together all the artistic projects that questioned the modes of representation and the institution of culture in Cuba. The reaction from the cultural policy makers, at an ideological level, was to disqualify postmodernism as an enemy philosophy, one that threatened the Marxist-­Leninist bases of state ideology and, above all else, the national identity that would become the touchstone concept of a cleaned-­up revolutionary nationalism in the 1990s.17 Cuban postmodernism, different perhaps from its European or North American counterparts of the same era, preserved and even reactivated utopian pronouncements by keeping its distance from the triumphant neoliberalism that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was concerned with a utopia where, as Mosquera observes, the desire to reform the institutional Cuban art inherited from the Soviet socialist model was intertwined with the reclaiming of the emancipatory theories of the decolonizing and Third World New Left movements of the 1960s.18 Contrary to the known definition by Frederic Jameson, Cuban postmodernism did not incline itself toward the “populist aesthetics” until well into the 1990s, nor did it replace history with “historicism” or set aside the “radical past” in favor of nostalgic discourses.19 All these tendencies

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surfaced later with the fracturing of the Cuban visual arts community in the 1990s. In the 1980s, when that community remained on the island, Cuban postmodernism still had a strong utopian and emancipatory sense.

From Diaspora to Nomadism Between the end of the 1980s and the middle of the 1990s, the disagreement between artistic poetics and cultural politics, alongside the typical precariousness of life produced by the economic crisis of the Special Period, led to the departure of numerous artists who took up life in the diaspora. In very little time, some of the biggest names of the 1980s (Tomás Sánchez, José Bedia, Rubén Torres Llorca, Arturo Cuenca, Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas, Consuelo Castañeda, Moisés Finalé, Humberto Castro, Gustavo Acosta, Carlos García, Tomás Esson, Glexis Novoa, and Magdalena Campos) had established themselves in the United States or Europe—­by way of Mexico in many cases thanks to the relationship with Nina Menocal’s art gallery there. The direct representation of Cuban diaspora artists by gallery owners like Menocal came to alter the type of state-­mediated relationships that other gallery owners like Sandra Levinson had established with Cuban artists, always respecting the rules of the game by preserving ties with the island and guarding the limits of the so-­called solidarity with the revolution. Whether they liked it or not, once they were living abroad, their position as diaspora artists politicized their work and contributed to the crisis of the agreement. A peculiarity of the 1990s was that artists of the new diaspora needed to compete against Cuba-­based artists in a market located mainly in the United States and were stigmatized by the Cuban government. The wager of important galleries like that of Barbara Gladstone for Alexis Leyva (Kcho)—­and later Sean Kelly for Carlos Garaicoa, Alexandre Arrechea, and Los Carpinteros—­had to do with this dispute. Some important figures from the 1980s—­like René Francisco, Eduardo Ponjuan, Lázaro Saavedra, José Toirac, and Tania Bruguera—­remained on the island and eventually contributed to the formation of a new generation of artists (Kcho, Carlos Garaicoa, Carlos Estévez, Sandra Ramos, Glenda León and the group Enema, Liudmila and Nelson, Abel Barroso and the trio Los Carpinteros, Marco Antonio Castillo, Dagoberto Rodríguez, and Alexandre Arrechea). This new generation of artists had firmly established itself by the second half of the 1990s on the island and in gallery circuits, museums, and biennials of global art. Because of the departure of so many, the national visual arts production of the 1990s, like so many other art forms in Cuba, became spatially fractured. Yet as some critics soon noticed, a number of motifs or modules of representation—­like the raft and ruin, the market and power—­were repeated by artists from all latitudes. De la Nuez was one of the first to perceive a thematic convergence in the exhibition Cuba: La isla posible (Cuba: The possible island; 1995) in Barcelona and later in the showing La isla futura: Arte joven cubano (The future island: Young Cuban art; 1998), curated by Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego in Gijón, Spain, for which

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de la Nuez wrote the main catalog text. In artists from the first exile of the 1960s like Luis Cruz Azaceta, who painted many self-­portraits as a rafter, or balsero, as well as in other artists from the 1990s diaspora such as José Bedia or Marta María Pérez Bravo or island-­based artists like Kcho, de la Nuez observed modalities of the raft as a symbol of a perpetual Cuban migratory story line (see figure 11.2).20 Another recurring image from 1990s art was the ruin, alluded to equally by artists from the island like Saavedra and Garaicoa and from the diaspora like Gustavo Acosta and Atelier Morales (see figure 11.3). Rafts and ruins, although they have lost referentiality, continue to appear in Cuban visual art, as can be observed in

Figure 11.2.  Marta María Pérez, No zozobra la barca de su vida. Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 11.3.  Atelier Morales, Cimarrones. Serie Los Ingenios. Homenaje a Édouard Laplante. 2004. Courtesy of the artists.

the performances of Carlos Martiel or in the graffiti of Niels Reyes in recent years. In a conversation with writer Carlos Alberto Aguilera, Cruz Azaceta conceives the figure of the boatman as an archetypal subject of Cuban visual art.21 Likewise, in the 1990s, there was a siege of images of power questioning the idea that in that decade, Cuban art became depoliticized in relation to the turmoil of the 1980s.22 For example, Tania Bruguera in Memorias de la posguerra rejected the closing of various publications on the island after the collapse of real socialism. José Toirac worked with the image of Fidel Castro, something that since the exhibition of René Francisco y Ponjuan in the project Castillo de la fuerza had become an unnegotiable, official taboo. Lázaro Saavedra made caricatures and drawings that denounced intolerance, repression, and censorship. In the 2000s, some artists from the 1990s like Carlos Garaicoa took the interpellation of power to a new level by depicting apparatuses of state security, such as in the series Las joyas de la Corona, which was presented at the tenth Havana Biennial in 2009. That series served as the basis for Antonio José Ponte’s book Villa Marista en plata (Villa Marista in silver; 2010), a work about technology and repression in Cuba.23 The panoptic image of the Presidio Modelo prison on Isla de Pinos as a “reading room” in the series by Los Carpinteros also draws on the metaphor of power in Cuba (see figure 11.4). From the perspective of Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault, the panopticon would be the requisite artifact of vigilance and penitentiary punishment but also the location of instruction and ideological enlightenment of future leaders of revolutionary Cuba. Looking at the wooden model of Los Carpinteros’ Presidio Modelo, one might think that totalitarianism would have been intellectually conceived in such a prison through readings distributed in an airy, lightweight structure, despite sustaining the self-­contained building of the state.

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Figure 11.4.  Los Carpinteros, Sala de lectura. Courtesy of the artists.

However, the maximum expression of political art would arrive with Tania Bruguera’s performance series El susurro de Tatlin (Tatlin’s whisper), where a microphone was located at a public space to be used freely for one minute by any spectator. In 2009, Bruguera was able to carry out the performance at the Wifredo Lam Center in La Habana, relying on the participation of dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez, among others (see figure 11.5). The last version of El susurro de Tatlin, in December 2014, scheduled for viewing in the Plaza de la Revolución in La Habana, could not take place because the artist was imprisoned. This repression was followed by the migratory retention of the artist on the island for almost a year, defied by Bruguera herself through the creation of the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism. In May 2015, coinciding with the Havana Biennial, the institute produced a first series of readings of Hannah Arendt’s treaty of political philosophy The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) at an apartment in Old Havana. The government tried to silence the artist by improvising disruptive and raucous street repairs and arresting Bruguera again.24 In the 2000s, a new generation of artists has emerged, born between the 1970s and 1990s (Wilfredo Prieto, Yoan Capote, Alejandro González, Yeni Casanueva, Alejandro Campins, Rocío García, Osvaldo González Aguiar, Adonis Flores, Carlos Martiel, Michel Pérez, Niels Reyes, Rafael Domenech, Reynier Leyva Novo, and Elizabeth Cerviño), accompanied by its own group of critics: Héctor Antón, Píter Ortega, and Frency Fernández.25 Like the previous generations, this one has begun to divide their time between the island and the diaspora, practicing all genres of visual arts from painting to performance. If in Campins or Cerviño there was a return to the canvas or an alternating between painting and performance, the

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Figure 11.5.  Tania Bruguera, El susurro de Tatlin (Tatlin’s whisper). Courtesy of the artist.

pieces and installations of Capote and Prieto explore a more metaphysical zone that investigates the limits of visual representation, connecting with the avant-­garde refunctionalization of art inherited from Marcel Duchamp and updated, starting in the 1990s, by British artists Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin or more recently with the work of Spaniard Santiago Sierra or Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco. The performances by Martiel or Cerviño, in line with those of Ana Mendieta and Tania Bruguera, propose the intervention of the body itself as a narcotic ritual, one that suspends judgment and the memory of the subject. There would be in this gesture an admission to the world of the impolitic, as studied by the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito; its antithesis could be found in the precise recollections of the Sovietization of the island in the arrangements of Alejandro González or in the hermeneutical documents of official history in recent visual arts by Leyva Novo (see figure 11.6).26 Again, the political character of the young Cuban art is at odds with strategies of depoliticization that, as critics Antón and Ortega have stated, are implemented by way of well-­known art institutions such as museums, biennials, and galleries. In recent years, these institutions have been further helped by the relative expansion of the art market on the island, as captured in certain photomontages by Liudmila and Nelson. This chapter’s rapid journey through Cuban visual arts in the post-­Soviet period permits, as said before, a deeper questioning of the supposed commercialization of visual culture on the island in the last two decades. Without a doubt, the diaspora has challenged the institutionalism of art in Cuba and forced the powers that be to develop subtle or makeshift forms of co-­optation or negotiation of the autonomy of artists, as exemplified by the election of Kcho as the representative to the National Assembly of People’s Power or in granting the National Award for Visual Arts to certain emblematic artists from the 1980s who did not go into exile in the 1990s.

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Figure 11.6.  Reynier Leyva Novo, A Happy Day (2017). Courtesy of the artist.

In recent years, after limited reforms directed at the market, the new Migratory Law of 2013, and the reestablishment of relations with the United States in 2014, mechanisms of negotiation around autonomy make new resources available for artists and the state, curators and private collectors, and museums and official galleries. Among them are the possibility of repatriation, the opening of studios on the island, and greater ease at accessing collections, museums, and galleries outside of the island. Added to a state ideology in decadence that has lost any capability of persuasion is now a stratified market that neutralizes and even renders frivolous any kind of artistic discourse. As we know, this is not a situation that is exclusive to the Cuban context. However, in the case of the island, it calls into question an avant-­garde tradition of notable continuity that was able to survive official dogmatism better than literature or other arts. The simultaneity between ideological depression, political control, and commercial segmentation produces a favorable atmosphere for a rearticulation of the pact between art and power in Cuba, one that would deprive the island’s

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culture and its relationship with civil society of one of the most effective outlets for public criticism. The most recent Cuban artistic production is yet again considering the place of critique in the close relationship between art and power on the island while at the same time redefining the migratory condition of the Cuban diaspora. On each side there occurs a displacement of the limits between culture and politics and between what is national and what pertains to migration—­one that forces a reformulation of analytical categories. Beneath the tension between art and power, the mechanisms of the market and of nomadism are at work; these mechanisms disrupt both strategies of civic representation and notions of national belonging, of an artistic message, and of who constitutes the public.

Notes 1. On the 1980s as utopia, see Elvia Rosa Castro, “Parole, parole, parole,” in Déjame que te cuente: Antología de la crítica en los 80, ed. Margarita González, Tania Parson, and José Veigas (Havana: Artecubano Ediciones, 2002), 7–­14; Rachel Weiss, To and From Utopia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 2. “Una transición no planificada hacia una nueva configuración social.” Mailyn Machado, Fuera de revoluciones: Dos décadas de arte en Cuba (Leiden: Almenara, 2016), 224. 3. For more on the topic of the tensions regarding aesthetics and politics within abstract art in Cuba up until the present day, see Ernesto Menéndez-­Conde, Trazos en los márgenes: Arte abstracto e ideologías estéticas en Cuba (New York: Dador, 2019). 4. Rafael Rojas, “Un ethos de la lectura,” in Reading Cuba: Discurso literario y geografía transcultural, ed. Alberto Sosa Cabañas (Valencia: Aduana Vieja, 2018), 41–­54. 5. For example, see Graziella Pogolotti, “The Path of the Masters,” in Déjame que te cuente, ed. González, Parson, and Veigas, 17–­19. See also Luz Merino, “The New Image in Everyday Life,” in Déjame que te cuente, ed. González, Parson, and Veigas, 50–­52; Lillian Yanes, “Los caminos de la vanguardia en la cultura cubana,” in Cuba: Vanguardias, 1920–­1940, ed. IVAM Institut Valencia d’Art Modern (Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, 2006), 22–­35. 6. Abigail McEwen, Revolutionary Horizons: Art and Polemics in 1950s Cuba (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016). 7. Elvis Fuentes, “Soviet Visual Culture in Cuban Art, 1960–­1991” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2016). 8. Desiderio Navarro, “La retroalimentación geométrica: Un arte sin problemas; El sólo lo que ves” and “Un Beuys, en fin, cubano,” in Déjame que te cuente, ed. González, Parson, and Veigas, 215–­222; 259–­266. See also Osvaldo Sánchez, “Tras el rastro de los fundadores: Un panorama de la plástica cubana,” in Déjame que te cuente, ed. González, Parson, and Veigas, 203–­214. 9. Antonio Eligio Tonel, “Trece que fueron uno,” in Déjame que te cuente, ed. Gonzalez, Parson, and Veigas, 141–­145. 10. Luis Camnitzer, New Art of Cuba (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). 11. Octavio Paz, La casa de la presencia: Poesía e historia (Mexico City: Círculo de Lectores, 1994), 524. 12. Alexis Somoza and Félix Suazo, “El objeto esculturado,” in Déjame que te cuente, ed. González, Parson, and Veigas, 269. 13. In the original Spanish, “Una crítica a los medios habituales de producción, distribución y consumo de la institución arte . . . insertarse críticamente en el desarrollo de la sociedad.” Félix Suazo, in Navarro, “Un Beuys, en fin, cubano,” 266. 14. Velia Cecilia Bobes, Los laberintos de la imaginación: Repertorio simbólico, identidades y actores del cambio social en Cuba (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 2000), 203.

t h e f l o a t i n g g e n e r a t i o n 187 15. Boris Kagarlitsky, Los intelectuales y el estado soviético (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2005). On similar developments in Cuban art, see Juan Carlos Betancourt, “The Rebel Children of the Cuban Revolution: Notes on the History of ‘Cuban Sots Art,’” in Caviar with Rum: Cuba-­ USSR and the Post-­Soviet Experience, ed. Jacqueline Loss and José Manuel Prieto (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 69–­85. 16. Gerardo Mosquera, “Los catorce hijos de Guillermo Tell,” in Déjame que te cuente, ed. González, Parson, and Veigas, 273–­282. 17. The official reaction against postmodernism from the perspective of “national identity” can be found in the following works: Armando Hart, Cultura en revolución (Mexico City: Nuestro Tiempo, 1990); Enrique Ubieta, Ensayos de identidad (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1993); and Abel Prieto, “Cultura, cubanidad y cubanía” (paper presented at the Conference of “La nación y la emigración” in Havana, Cuba, April 1994). 18. Mosquera, “Los catorce hijos,” 274–­275. 19. Frederic Jameson, El postmodernismo o la lógica cultural del capitalismo avanzado (Barcelona: Paidós, 1991). 20. See Iván de la Nuez, Cuba: La isla posible (Barcelona: Destino, 1995); “Arte cubano e intemperies globales,” in La isla future: Arte joven cubano, ed. X. Antón Castro, Iván de la Nuez, and Alberto Ruíz de Samaniego (Gijón, Spain: Ayuntamiento de Gijón, 1998), 23–­36; and La balsa perpetua: Soledad y conexiones de la cultura cubana (Madrid: Editorial Casiopea, 1998). 21. Luis Cruz Azaceta, No Exit (Nashville: Turner, 2016). 22. Héctor Antón, “Los últimos postmodernos,” El Caimán Barbudo, December 18, 2014, http://​w ww​.caimanbarbudo​.cu/​a rticulos/​2014/​12/​los​-ultimos​-posmodernos/. 23. Antonio José Ponte, Villa Marista en plata (Madrid: Colibrí, 2010). 24. A thorough overview of the Bruguera affair can be found in Carlos Manuel Álvarez Rodríguez, La tribu: Retratos de Cuba (Mexico City: Sexto Piso, 2013). 25. See, for example, Héctor Antón, “Via Crucis de una Bienal: Apuntes de un viaje hacia ninguna parte,” in Nosotros los más infieles: Narraciones sobre el arte cubano, 1993–­2005, ed. Andrés Isacc Santana (Murcia, Spain: Cendeac, 2007), 399–­405; Píter Ortega, “Arte cubano 2000–­2012: Una cartografía necesaria,” Revista Artecubano 1 (2013): 15. 26. Roberto Esposito, Categorías de lo impolítico (Buenos Aires: Katz, 2006).

chapter 12

z “It Would Make a Rat Puke” diasporic thinking in contemporary jamaican art practices Jane Bryce

My aim in this chapter is to trace a line of diasporic thinking about the centrality of culture to notions of identity with a focus on three snapshots that exemplify this thinking in action. These relate to three recent cultural experiences that concretize the meanings and manifestations of diasporic thinking in the arts. The first of these experiences was a visit to the Diaspora Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in August 2017. This was the first time the diaspora had been accorded its own pavilion—­though it is important here to pause and outline the contours of the particular “diaspora” concerned. As a British initiative, with British-­diasporic artists and British selectors, it reflected a diaspora linked historically to Britain’s colonial past and existing in its postcolonial present. Its full title, “Tactical Interventions: Curating a Black British Diaspora Pavilion,” reveals another determinant—­that of race—­which in Britain has been largely defined by the postwar influx of Anglophone Caribbean workers now known as the Windrush generation. One should be aware, however, that the term black British is much less specific than, for example, African American, designating people of African, Caribbean, and Asian (Indian, Pakistani) descent as well as, loosely, various minority others. The other key term, curating, alerts us to the centrality of curatorship in the power nexus of mentorship, exhibition, and critical recognition through which artists are enabled to subsist and build a career. As a “tactical intervention” in this nexus, the Diaspora Pavilion was the brainchild of a body called the International Curators Forum (ICF), which describes itself as “an open peer-­to-­peer network and arena to connect ideas that have migrated across the world with professional developments that are increasingly global, but particular in their impact.” According to David Bailey, director of ICF, “In a climate where difference is currently criticized and threatened, this project not only celebrates English/UK diversity, but foregrounds it at the world’s most prestigious event for the visual arts, the Venice Biennale.”1 188

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It was apparent that this organizing principle, based on an idea of diaspora as part of a global network (as opposed to a presence existing at the margins of recognized national entities), was radically at odds with the rest of the biennale. According to art critic Waldemar Januszczak, in Venice, “it is the countries that threw their beach towels onto the sunbeds first—­the old colonial powers—­that have the best locations and the most lavish presence.”2 Explicitly interrogating this inbuilt hierarchy, Bailey describes the Diaspora Pavilion as “conceived as a challenge to the prevalence of national pavilions within the structure of an international biennale and tak[ing] its form from the coming-­together of nineteen artists whose practices in many ways expand, complicate and even destabilize diaspora as term, whilst highlighting the continued relevance that diaspora as a lived reality holds today.”3 This represents in practice what Nicholas Mirzoeff theorizes as the essential paradox of diaspora: “A diaspora cannot be seen in any traditional sense and it certainly cannot be represented from the viewpoint of one-­point perspective. The nation, by contrast, has long been central to Western visual culture.”4 This essentially diasporic take on cultural identity was embraced by art critics like Anthony Horowitz, who called the Diaspora Pavilion “a brilliant initiative that challenges the very nationalism of the Biennale.”5 Similarly, Caroline Douglas feels that its nineteen artists “speak eloquently of the infinite complexities of the very idea of nationality. Overwhelmingly one comes away with the profound sense of identity being constantly under construction, of the ongoing interrogation of heritage in relation to the individual, whether that be via ethnicity or intellectual and artistic commonality.”6 In attesting to the way diasporic art practice today puts pressure on any unified concept of a national identity, the Diaspora Pavilion was aligned with the second of my three experiences: the Jamaica Biennial 2017 at the national gallery in Kingston. The gallery’s (now retired) director, Veerlye Poupeye, explains how the organizers wrestled with the question of “how far we should go with regionalizing the Biennial and whether it should become a full-­fledged Caribbean Biennial open to Caribbean and Caribbean Diaspora artists.”7 That this had been a long-­term curatorial preoccupation for the gallery is borne out by a special Curator’s Eye exhibition some twelve years earlier titled “Identity and History: Personal and Social Narratives in Art in Jamaica (2005–­6).” Here, the invited curator, black British contemporary art historian, curator, artist, and professor at the University of Texas, Eddie Chambers, comments on the impossibility of defining “Jamaican art”: “Jamaica plays host, for longer or shorter periods of time, to artists born and raised elsewhere. . . . Likewise, countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States play host . . . to artists born in Jamaica and artists of Jamaican parentage. Given the seemingly perpetual and multiple movements of people both into and out of the country, it seems to me that Jamaica’s artistic product is far too indelibly international and far too fluid in its migratory impulses to be prefixed with something suggestive of well-­defined, monolithic and universally accepted national characteristics.”8 In a keynote conversation in the 2017 Jamaican Biennial catalog, the international selectors, Amanda Coulson, director of the National Gallery of the Bahamas,

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and Trinidadian artist Christopher Cozier, demonstrate that this issue is still alive. As Coulson declares, “The whole idea of a national gallery comes already with a colonial ideology, as it inherently ‘claims’ a territory. . . . How can a national institution embrace the diverse voices that make up the country and be able to help identify a national voice without tipping into a jingoistic propaganda that is exclusive and alienating?”9 Agreeing, Cozier points to the mobility of artists and the materiality of the work shown as always already diasporized: “Most nationalist and now contemporary production and dialogues are shifting between spaces, between the islands and the diaspora. Work can be imagined in one location, produced in another location and often shown in another.”10 The increased mobility of goods, services, and people (of which art and artists are a part) as an effect of globalization and virtual networks has not only redefined the national space since the 1990s; it has also enabled the emergence of a new kind of diaspora, one driven by voluntary migration for educational and professional purposes, teaching opportunities and residencies, and to some degree, tourism. That this kind of diaspora, however, comprises a relatively privileged minority was borne out by my third experience: visiting the Grenfell Tower in London in the days following the catastrophic fire in June 2017. One of those who lost their lives in the fire was Khadija Saye, a young artist of Gambian parentage whose work was shown in Venice at the Diaspora Pavilion. Her photographs, showing herself in relation to certain traditional healing practices learned from her mother (who also died in the fire), appeared under the haunting title “Dwelling in This Space We Breathe.” Taken together, these examples illustrated for me the contradictory and elusive nature of diaspora, its paradoxical precariousness and open-­endedness, how the possibilities and privileges mobilized by its expressive forms are forever in tension with the lived realities of urban poverty, and the insecurities of transnational migration. These are recent examples, but culture has always been central to diasporic thinking. As long ago as 1949, Trinidadian thinker C. L. R. James discovered in Hollywood movies a new way of understanding America that led him, in turn, to a new way of understanding the Caribbean—­as part of the Americas. According to scholar Bill Schwartz, “James’s period in America actively reordered his intellectual cosmos and . . . gave him the means to integrate insights drawn from his own West Indian culture into his larger politics.”11 The means by which this came about was popular culture, in which he found “a modernity in minor key . . . a modernity of the street and the home . . . a modernity rooted in the unassuming narratives of the everyday.”12 In American Civilisation, written in 1949–­1950, James anticipated the new ways of thought that would be institutionalized half a century later as cultural studies, proposing that “in modern popular art, film, radio, television, comic strip, we are headed for some such artistic comprehensive integration of modern life, that the spiritual, intellectual, ideological life of modern peoples will express itself in the closest and most rapid, most complex, absolutely free relation to the actual life of the citizens tomorrow.”13 Most importantly, Schwartz emphasizes “James’ insistence that Americanized mass culture carried the promise of transcending the fixed cognitive categories inherited from the abstractions of European thought.”14 Some

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forty years later, Sylvia Wynter comes to the same conclusion, critiquing traditional aesthetics and film criticism as bound by the rules of a Judeo-­Christian symbolic order whose imperative is the restoration of social order through the exclusion of the marginalized.15 In an insight remarkably similar to James’s, she discovers in the then new forms of black popular culture (films like The Harder They Come and Do the Right Thing, the music of Bob Marley and Public Enemy) a “counter-­signifying practice” that breaks with “our present hegemonic cultural Imaginary” in favor of “a still emergent global popular Imaginary whose most insistent challenge is carried by the new video-­like Black popular musical forms and their counter-­poetics of rhythm.”16 To engage with these forms, she says, requires a criticism that will go beyond interpretation to be what she calls “a deciphering practice . . . [that] will reveal their rules of functioning rather than just reproduce these rules.”17 Both James and Wynter emphasize a new individualism over a narrowly class-­based concept of taste traditionally naturalized as the norm. For Wynter, the referent of the emerging global popular imaginary “is that of the well-­being of the individual human subject and, therefore, of the species.”18 These two thinkers anticipated to a great extent current ways of theorizing the significance of diasporic cultural forms. For visual arts critic Kobena Mercer, for example, in the longue durée of Western art, “the late twentieth century breakthrough of black diaspora artists reveals a rupture of epic proportions. . . . What was once a monologue about otherness became a dialogue about difference.”19 For him, the art that emerged in the 1980s (roughly the same period that Wynter addresses) was “predicated on a semiotic model in which the production of meaning was understood to be inherently social,” and because it “intervenes to disrupt such embedded rules within the symbolic order of culture, has the potential to bring about a momentary crisis in our lived relation to reality, thereby cutting an opening into the imaginative realm in which alternatives become thinkable.”20 Mercer, in turn, credits Stuart Hall with creating the ground on which he was able to chart his own intellectual course. Hall has, perhaps, done more than anyone in the Anglophone world to redefine diaspora away from, as Mercer puts it, “the Euclidean geometry that once posited a binary divide between diaspora and homeland . . . in favour of a relational conception of the circulatory networks in which identities, like cultural artefacts such as books and vinyl records, or photographs and sculptures, migrate in back and forth patterns across a fractal space of becoming that cannot be delimited by outside/inside boundaries.”21 In his work over many decades, Hall interrogates notions of cultural authenticity and racial essentialism and makes a commonplace of notions of diasporic hybridity, transculturalism, and dialogism. He has consistently argued for a larger concept of diaspora than one of geophysical dislocation such that the Caribbean, rather than a displaced fragment of a lost motherland, is always-­already creolized and “irretrievably impure.”22 Though Hall acknowledges the importance of “Africa” to Caribbean identities, he emphasizes location over origin and prefers to view the Caribbean and its diasporas as dialogic—­to be understood not as original and copy but as “one diaspora to another” and therefore “subversive of traditional nation-­oriented

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cultural models.”23 The Caribbean, he says, is “the signifier of migration itself—­of travelling, voyaging and return as fate, as destiny; of the Antillean as the prototype of the modern or postmodern New World nomad, continually moving between centre and periphery.”24 As a result, Caribbean identity (in fact, all identity) must be viewed “as a ‘production’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.”25 In taking cinema as one of the most important ways of representing and shaping identity, Hall’s thinking is synchronic with that of Wynter and James. For him, migration is a “defining theme . . . destined to cross the narrative of every film script or cinematic image,” and cinema is therefore “that form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which to speak.”26 Turning now to particular examples of contemporary art practices in and from Jamaica, I want to ask how they advance this project of subject-­constitution and what places they reveal from which the subject is enabled to speak. I will focus on what Wynter identifies as “the systematic pariah figures of the Ivans and Raheems and their respective ‘captive populations’”27—­in other words, the figure of the gangsta and his ghetto community. I am interested in the way these have continued to recur since the 1970s both as the subaltern protagonist of contemporary Jamaican cinema and literature and as the iconic gangsta figure of art and photography. I will ask why the gangsta and the ghetto are such enduring tropes in the Jamaican imaginary and its visual culture. If a recurring feature of diasporic identities is a multidirectional relationship that resolves itself in the endless syncretic process of creolization, what does contemporary Jamaican art have to say about how this process is working itself out in today’s Caribbean? How far does it perform the “deciphering turn” called for by Wynter and fulfill the “vocation of modern black cinemas” spelled out by Stuart Hall “by allowing us to see and recognise the different parts and histories of ourselves, to construct those points of identification, those positionalities we call in retrospect our ‘cultural identities’”?28

Black Modernity and the Aesthetics of Bling The Harder They Come, the film that so struck Sylvia Wynter when it came out in 1972, set a pattern for Jamaican moviemaking that persists to this day. In the films that followed—­Rockers (1978), Children of Babylon (1980), Countryman (1982), Third World Cop (1998), and Dancehall Queen (1998)—­the emblematic figures of the reggae artist, the Rasta, the rude boy, and the ghetto gangsta recur, as do the focus on subaltern communities and the use of reggae and dancehall soundtracks.29 So too in the films made since the turn of the century—­Shottas (2002), One Love (2004), Better Mus Come (2010), and Ghett’a Life (2011), among others less noteworthy—­while Marlon James’s 2014 novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, which outside of music has been the most highly visible Jamaican cultural text internationally in the last few years, not only recycles these ingredients but returns to the key period of the 1970s as an incubator for the conditions that created the social and political landscape of today’s Jamaica.

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James’s novel pivots on the moment in 1976 when, on the eve of a concert that aimed to bring warring political factions together ahead of an election, Bob Marley and his entourage were attacked by gunmen from the ghetto in Marley’s home in Kingston. In following the fortunes of the seven shooters and others connected to them, the narrative dramatizes a social world, in both Kingston and its diasporas in New York and Miami, characterized by violence, rebellion, and retribution—­a world in which the attributes of masculinity are paramount and life expectancy short. Collectively, the novel and movies construct a Jamaica in a state of permanent instability, underpinned, as Mirzoeff shows, by a regime of power that orders and shapes reality for others.30 This regime he calls “visuality,” and its deep history is the slave plantation “monitored by the surveillance of the overseer, the surrogate of the sovereign.”31 It is legitimized through “a discursive practice for rendering and regulating the real that has material effects” that operates in three stages. Different groups are first classified and then organized socially through separation. Finally, the practice “makes this separated classification seem right and hence aesthetic.”32 Close in spirit to Wynter but somewhat recasting the terms, Mirzoeff proposes that the counter to visuality is “the right to look,” the refusal of the naturalization of boundaries that keep class, race, and sexuality in their place. Like Wynter’s decipherment, the right to look is ultimately the claiming of a right to a different reality. In visual or artistic terms, it involves a new kind of realism: “The ‘realism’ of countervisuality is the means by which one tries to make sense of the unreality created by visuality’s authority while at the same time proposing a real alternative. It is by no means a simple or mimetic depiction of lived experience but one that depicts existing realities and counters them with a different realism.”33 I want to suggest that this different realism that claims the right to look is the aesthetic at work in Jamaican cultural forms—­from James’s novel to ghetto cinema to certain examples of contemporary art practice—­and that this aesthetic is a product of diaspora as previously defined. To illustrate this, I will focus on an artist who was featured in a posthumous tribute at Jamaica Biennial 2017. The work of Peter Dean Rickards, a self-­taught photographer and videographer who died in 2014 at the age of forty-­five, is visible on a website called the Afflicted Yard with the tagline “Doing the Lord’s work since 1999.”34 In a declaration, he pinpoints the ambivalence and contradiction inherent in both diaspora aesthetics and cultural identity: “We are Jamaicans living within and without cultural control. We are at once proud nationalists and harsh critics of our country of origin. . . . An island filled with beauty unsurpassed and ugliness that would make a rat puke.”35 Jamaica, he says, “is a modern society . . . [that] now has intermittent electricity and phone service as well as cellular communication infrastructures that allow the majority of Jamaicans [who live in Miami] to call their loved ones at home.”36 The composite title for a series of collections of images, Work, Life, Love, Hate and Death in the Afflicted Yard, holds in view the contradictions and oppositions of the society under scrutiny, while the Creole designation yard defines and delimits a particular space—­that of urban working-­ class Jamaica. One of the subsections exhibited under this title is “Death in Tivoli

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Gardens,” the ghetto most often cited under the disguise of Copenhagen City in Seven Killings (7K). Through Rickards’s unflinching photographic gaze, we are brought face-­to-­face with Mirzoeff’s “countervisuality . . . that depicts existing realities and counters them with a different realism.”37 The conundrum of representing the Kingston ghetto photographically is articulated by Alex Pierce, one of the characters in Seven Killings (7K), a music journalist in pursuit of an interview with the Singer. Trying to capture the ghetto for his readers, he writes, “There’s a reason why the story of the ghetto should never come with a photo. . . . You visit a ghetto, particularly a ghetto in West Kingston, and it immediately leaves the real to become this sort of grotesque. . . . It cannot be photographed because . . . the inherent beauty of the photographic process will lie to you about just how ugly it really is.”38 Here James, through his character, speaks directly to the question of aesthetic naturalization raised by Mirzoeff—­the difficulty, therefore, of representing what is classified by a regime of visuality as “ugly” or “grotesque.” In Rickards’s sequence, the aesthetic is one of respectful intimacy, neither focusing on nor flinching from the gory spectacle of bloodied walls but rather situating them within a framework of ordinary life as manifested in interior decoration and furniture. Though the sequence is almost devoid of human figures, the materiality of detail emphasizes their absence and the violence of truncated lives. Rather than spectacularizing or aestheticizing violence, it could be said that what Rickards does is create a memorial out of the traces of human subjects otherwise held as of no account. Rather than moralizing the abjection (the means by which, according to Wynter, certain groups are expelled from or marginalized in society), he familiarizes it, claiming “the right to look” at what is usually shunned and rejected (see figures 12.1, 12.2, and 12.3). Theorizing the change in diasporic artistic practice between the 1960s and the 1980s, Stuart Hall charts the transition “from the binary of ‘pure abstraction’ versus ‘documentary realism’ to the more mixed or hybrid mode—­in photography—­of the constructed image and—­in the visual arts more broadly—­the ‘return to the figural,’ best located in the foregrounding of the black body as the key racial signifier. This is especially striking in photography, which for a time dispensed with the documentary mode altogether and turned to the consciously staged image—­the photograph aspiring to the condition of the work of art.”39 In Rickards’s images, we can, I think, detect both tendencies—­documentary in the close-­ups of bullet holes and constructedness or the staging of a work of art in the empty set–­like interiors and the abstract paint–­like effects of blood spatter. The material traces of human occupation—­the framed picture with the legend “I Love You,” the bullet-­holed mirror frame missing its glass—­paradoxically emphasize the way these rooms have been emptied of life. Yet the near absence of the human figure in the Tivoli Gardens sequence is unusual, since Rickards is predominantly concerned with what Hall calls “putting the self” in the frame: relocating the stereotyped, abject, black body of racialized discourse “in the field of vision.”40

Figure 12.1.  Peter Dean Rickards, blood2.jpg, Tivoli Gardens series. January 2008. Courtesy of Ross Sheil.

Figure 12.2.  Peter Dean Rickards, frame2.jpg, Tivoli Gardens series. January 2008. Courtesy of Ross Sheil.

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Figure 12.3.  Peter Dean Rickards, mirror2.jpg, Tivoli Gardens series. January 2008. Courtesy of Ross Sheil.

In her 2015 book Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practices, Krista Thompson sees younger Jamaican artists as engaged in “exploring aesthetic practices and demographic changes that emerged in dancehall since 2002” and Rickards as an example of how they are “attentive to . . . modes of self-­fashioning in Jamaica’s urban cultures.”41 This self-­fashioning is on display in Rickards’s study of a classic rude boy and dancehall figure, DJ Ninja Man, a self-­ confessed reformed coke addict and gangsta who made the transition to movie actor in films like Third World Cop. Ninja Man is a performer who is familiar and comfortable with the camera, in control of his own image, and consciously manipulating the visual tropes of a gangsta persona.42 In one portrait, he slyly holds up a card printed with the words “Get Out Of Jail Free.” In another, he stands under a dancehall poster with his hand cocked to resemble a gun, while in one more picture, he poses with two actual handguns in a stance reminiscent of the famous movie still of Jimmy Cliff as Ivan posing as a gunslinger (see figure 12.5) from The Harder They Come. In all the pictures, Ninja Man’s body language and facial expression signify his “hard” credentials, while his ostentatious rings, signifying wealth, are prominently on display. After he was arrested for murder in 2009, Ninja Man adopted another mode of performance: while on bail awaiting trial, he became a Christian, created a channel for donations to needy families, and also opened a recording studio. (He was eventually convicted in 2018.) In this ambiguous amalgam of do-­gooding and violence, he is a metonym for the larger-­than-­life figures of ghetto dons who feature in 7K and so many Jamaican films. By offering his body to the camera in these photos, Ninja Man performs, in Hall’s terms, “the staging

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of a claim”—­to subjecthood and, ultimately, to the right to present himself as he sees himself, not as he is he constructed by the regime of visuality. But that seeing of himself is also, palpably, through the lens of dancehall—­the performance of an urban masculinity whose surface is marked by bling (the rings), swagger, and one-­ upmanship and underpinned by a latent capacity for violence (the hand gesture, the posing with guns). Thompson’s thesis in Shine is that what characterizes contemporary diasporic artistic practice is the attention to light and the desire by ghetto subjects to be seen in the light. The wearing of flashy jewelry, along with skin bleaching to make the skin’s surface more receptive to photographic light, are two symptoms of the bling aesthetic. Bleaching by men in Jamaica, a practice regarded as feminine, complicates and destabilizes conventional codes of masculinity. Dancehall DJ Vybz Kartel, a notorious skin-­bleacher (who has also been arrested for murder), makes his artistic intentions clear when he declares, “Ever since I see the tattoo on Tupac’s stomach, I decide[d] to make my skin a living, breathing canvas for the visuals” (see figure 12.4).43 Wearing bling and bleaching, then, are devices for making the self visible in a context where, for a black subaltern diasporic class, visibility is a route to power and opportunity denied them by traditional class-­based avenues such as education, the professions, or the democratic process. Though this is clearly related to an expansion of consciousness subsequent to globalization and the digital economy, it also

Figure 12.4.  Vybz Kartel lecturing at the University of the West Indies, 2011. Photo by Varun Baker. (Source: ap, “‘I Decided to Make My Skin a Living, Breathing Canvas’: Vybz Kartel at UWI,” Anniepaul​.net, March  11, 2011, https://​a nniepaul​.net/​2011/​03/​11/​i​-decided​-to​-make​ -my​-skin​-a​-living​-breathing​-canvas​-vybz​-kartel​-at​-uwi/.)

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has roots in earlier cultural forms. In a completely different context, the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, who calls his own playing with fonts and typefaces “Sycorax video style” or “writin in light,” explains, “The computer has made it much easier for the illiterate, the Caliban, actually to get himself visible . . . the miracle of that electronic screen means that the spoken word can become visible in a way that it cannot become visible in the typewriter where you have to cease physically. . . . The computer has moved us away from scripture into some other dimension which is ‘writin in light.’ It is really nearer to the oral tradition than the typewriter is.”44 Brathwaite’s equating of orality with visibility and both of these with light is echoed by Thompson’s assertion of light as essential to dancehall—­another space where orality is supreme. In this reading, forms as apparently separate as written poetry and dancehall culture are linked by the drive toward visibility and the harnessing of technology in the service of a self-­conscious subaltern consciousness. Harking back to The Harder They Come, Veerle Poupeye draws our attention to another such linkage: “The iconic ‘rude boy’ photographic portrait of Ivanhoe Martin/ Jimmy Cliff in The Harder They Come (1972), which marries male sartorial style and demonstrative gun-­slinging and in the film represented a highly subversive act of visual provocation of the police and the establishment on the part of an elusive ‘wanted man.’ This photograph, with its ornate photo studio backdrop, is a clear visual and conceptual ancestor.”45 Though Poupeye is thinking here specifically of the gangsta portraits of artist Ebony Patterson, Rickards’s photograph of Ninja Man posing with guns can also be seen as referencing the earlier portrait of Ivan. The synchronic connections among representations of “systematic pariah figures”—­from Ivan in The Harder They Come to those by artists like Marlon

Figure 12.5.  Jimmy Cliff as Ivan. Still photo from The Harder They Come, film directed by Perry Henzell, 1972. By kind permission of the Henzell family.

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James, Ebony Patterson (whose Of 72 installation also references a killing in Tivoli Gardens), and Peter Dean Rickards—­become clearer when we understand the contextual continuity between the 1970s and the 2000s. In 7K, the character Josey Wales is clearly based on Lester Coke, don of Tivoli Gardens and father of Dudus, who assumed his father’s mantle until he was notoriously extradited to the United States in 2010. Lester Coke, who was himself extradited in 1990 and burned to death in a U.S. jail two years later, was an actor in the Cold War drama that justified U.S. intervention in the Caribbean and Latin America in the name of defeating communism. He was also a classic diasporic subject who spent the money he made from selling drugs in Miami on creating a social services network in Tivoli Gardens, providing its residents with the jobs and welfare the state had failed to provide. Powerful as he was, Lester Coke drew his authority from the Jamaican political class. His fiefdom was the creation of Edward Seaga, the right-­wing leader of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) who was allegedly supported by the CIA and used American money to arm his ghetto henchmen in opposition to the left-­leaning Michael Manley of the People’s National Party (PNP). The synchronicities are compounded when we consider that Tom Tavares-­Finson, the lawyer who represented Lester, Dudus, and a JLP senator, was married to the woman who had been Bob Marley’s girlfriend at the time of his shooting, Cindy Breakspeare, a former Miss World and the mother of Marley’s youngest son, musician Damian Marley.46 Or when we consider that Edward Seaga himself was a record producer and musician before entering politics and thereafter continued to promote Jamaican music. This tangled skein of connections among politics, music, and crime; the elite and the ghetto, drugs and good works; gangsta culture and Rastafari; and local, diasporic, and global flows of money, drugs, guns, and people is the stuff of which contemporary Jamaican art is made. For Krista Thomson, the key signifier of contemporary Jamaican artistic practice—­the place where all these connections come together—­is dancehall, and she spells out the diasporic subtext of dancehall culture as follows: “For many people in the dancehall community, hip-­hop and its bling-­bling expressions were not seen as foreign, American, black American or as neo-­colonial expressions. Rather, they viewed hip-­hop and dancehall as different articulations of the same diasporic routes. Hip-­hop was thus not simply representative of contemporary diasporic exchange but signified something of a return of and reclamation of a cultural expression already seen as Jamaican and as a shared transnational and modern African diasporic urban culture.”47 In a 2007 interview, Rickards expresses his consciousness of his diasporic identity in this way: “Right now I’m not in Kingston. I’m walking around the planet carrying Jamaica with me in my laptop.”48 Through this self-­possessed mobility, he asserts his place as a member of a privileged diasporic class equally at home in multiply situated territories, possessed of a shared consciousness of the continuities between differently situated cultural forms. As a photographer, Rickards implicitly interrogates power by reversing the usual direction of the gaze—­the framing of the global south by the news and arts media of the metropolitan north. In the “Travel” section of the Afflicted Yard

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website, Rickards brings to bear on the United States the same ambivalent vision he brings to his native Jamaica, melding intimacy and familiarity with the strange and grotesque. In sequences like “Weirdness on S. Kennedy Road” (Brampton), “Texas—­Bush country,” “Afflicted Miami,” “Random New York,” and “One Day in Brooklyn,” he performs the act of “diaspora talking to diaspora.” In this way, Rickards demonstrates his affiliation to both the older artists and diasporic thinkers who preceded him and younger Jamaican artists, for whom modernity and diaspora are synonymous. Rickards’s posthumous presence at Jamaica Biennial 2017 is a sign of the curators’ recognition of this affiliation. Like Khadija Saye, his work and his presence haunt us, reminding us of the lived realities of diaspora. Diaspora art is more than exhibits in a gallery, more than a product in a commercial marketplace. It is a testament to the dangers of marginality in a world where visibility—­the essential lifeblood of artists—­depends on gatekeepers, and belonging cannot be taken for granted.

Notes Though developed separately, this chapter formed the basis for a longer piece on Jamaican art, “Beyond a Boundary: The Gangsta as Modern Black Subject in Contemporary Jamaican Art Practices,” in Black Camera 11, no. 1 (Fall 2019): 281–­303. 1. See “Diaspora Pavilion, beyond the Frame,” International Curators Forum, accessed September  1, 2017, https://​w ww​.internationalcuratorsforum​.org/​# x​-section​-2. 2. Waldemar Januszczak, “Phyllida Barlow Puts on a Jolly Good UK Show for the 57th Venice Biennale, but the Event’s French Chief Curator Has Sadly Lost Her Long-­Winded Way,” June  2, 2017, http://​waldemar​.tv/​2017/​06/​a rt​-review​-venice​-biennale/. 3. David Bailey, quoted in Robert Roos, “The Diaspora Tent in Venice,” Africanah​.org, June  11, 2017, http://​africanah​.org/​t he​-diaspora​-pavilion​-in​-venice/. 4. Nicolas Mirzoeff, ed., Diasporic Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews (London: Routledge, 2000), 2. 5. Anthony Horowitz, “The Real Star of the Venice Biennale? It Isn’t the Art,” Daily Telegraph, May  22, 2017, https://​w ww​.telegraph​.co​.uk/​t ravel/​destinations/​europe/​italy/​veneto/​ venice/​a rticles/​a nthony​-horowitz​-at​-the​-venice​-biennale/. 6. Caroline Douglas, “Diaspora Pavilion at the Venice Biennale,” Contemporary Art Society, accessed September 5, 2017, http://​w ww​.contemporaryartsociety​.org/. 7. Veerle Poupeye, introduction to Jamaica Biennial 2017 (Kingston, Jamaica: National Gallery of Jamaica, 2017; exhibition catalog), 10–­15. 8. Eddie Chambers, Curator’s Eye II, Identity and History: Personal and Social Narratives in Art in Jamaica, National Gallery of Jamaica, December 11, 2005–­March 18, 2006. 9. Amanda Coulson and Christopher Cozier, “Thinking Aloud/Allowed about the Things Made in the ‘Island X,’” in Jamaica Biennial 2017, ed. Veerle Poupeye (Kingston, Jamaica: National Gallery of Jamaica, 2017; exhibition catalog), 18–­27. 10. Coulson and Cozier, 22. 11. Bill Schwartz, “C.L.R. James in America,” New Formations: A Journal of Culture, Theory & Politics, no. 24 (Winter 1994): 178. 12. Schwartz, 180. 13. Schwartz, 182. 14. Schwartz, 182. 15. Sylvia Wynter, “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes towards a Deciphering Practice,” in Ex-­ iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema, ed. Mbye Cham (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1992), 252–­256. 16. Wynter, 260.

“ i t w o u l d m a k e a r a t p u k e ” 201 17. Wynter, 261. 18. Wynter, 269. 19. Kobena Mercer, Travel and See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 2–­3. 20. Mercer, 4. 21. Mercer, 7. 22. Stuart Hall, “Thinking the Diaspora: Home-­Thoughts from Abroad,” Small Axe 6 (1998): 8. 23. Hall, 10. 24. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 234. The seminal essay quoted here was first published in the avant-­garde Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, edited by Jim Pines in 1989, and has been republished numerous times since, including in Mirzoeff, Diasporic Visual Culture. It is instructive to see how closely Mirzoeff agrees with Hall in, for example, his own designation of hybridity as “not just an interaction with the ‘host’ nation but among diasporas themselves” (Diasporic Visual Culture, 4). Mirzoeff also provides the useful term intervisuality to denote this intradiasporic dialogue. 25. Hall, “Cultural Identity,” 222. 26. Hall, 234, 236–­237. 27. Wynter, “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics,’” 258. 28. Hall, “Cultural Identity,” 237. 29. Emiel Martens, “‘A Black Man’s (Outcry) in a White Man’s World’: Articulations of Cultural Identity and Resistance in Postcolonial Jamaican Film,” Society for Caribbean Studies Annual Conference Papers 6 (2005): 7. 30. Documentary films like Esther Figueroa’s Jamaica for Sale (2009) and Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt (2001) effectively analyze the continuities with the plantation economy in the politics of dependency that dictate Jamaica’s economic reality today. Raoul Peck’s Assistance mortelle / Fatal Assistance (2013) does the same for Haiti. 31. Mirzoeff, Diasporic Visual Culture, 475. 32. Mirzoeff, 476. 33. Mirzoeff, 485. 34. Peter Dean Rickards, The Afflicted Yard, accessed July 207, 2020, http://​w ww​.afflictedyard​ .com/. Rickards asserts his copyright by stating at the bottom of his website, “STEAL THEM WITHOUT MY PERMISSION AND NOT ONLY WILL YOU GET SHITTY SLICED-­UP LO-­ RES JPEGS BUT I WILL ALSO HIRE A CRACKHEAD TO FIND YOU AND KILL YOU:: IF YOU WANT ANY OF THESE IMAGES, E-MAIL ME AT [email protected] AND MAYBE I WILL SELL YOU THE 300DPI VERSIONS.” 35. Quoted in the tribute to Peter Dean Rickards in Jamaica Biennial 2017, 61. 36. Rickards, “Afflicted Yard.” 37. Mirzoeff, Diasporic Visual Culture, 485. 38. Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (New York: Riverhead Books, 2014), 81. 39. Stuart Hall, “Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three ‘Moments’ in Post-­war History,” History Workshop Journal 61, no. 1 (2006): 16. 40. Hall, 17. 41. Krista Thompson, Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practices (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 156. 42. The importance attached to specific images and the way they are used became clear when permission to include an image from Rickards’s Ninja Man photo series was denied for this chapter, citing the “need to maintain the value of the photo.” It can be seen at http://​w ww​ .afflictedyard​.com/. 43. Vybz Kartel, “Pretty as a Colouring Book: My Life and My Art,” lecture at University of the West Indies, March  10, 2011, http://​t heislandvibes​.com/​v ideo/​v ybz​-kartel​-uwi​-lecture​ -very​-1. 44. Stewart Brown, “Interview with Edward Kamau Brathwaite,” Kyk-­over-­al 40 (December 1989): 84–­93.

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45. Veerle Poupeye, “Gangstas and Bush Cockerels: The Body, Gender and Masculinity in the Work of Ebony G. Patterson,” Caribbean Quarterly: A Journal of Caribbean Culture 60, no. 4 (2014): 12. 46. See Constantino Diaz-­Duran, “Christopher Dudus Coke: Who Is the Jamaica Drug Lord,” Daily Beast, May  28, 2010, http://​w ww​.thedailybeast​.com/​christopher​-dudus​-coke​ -who​-is​-the​-jamaica​-drug​-lord. 47. Thompson, Shine, 237–­238. 48. Peter Dean Rickards, “The Controversial Propaganda; Peter Dean Rickards,” interview by Booi, Jeune Magazine (Indonesia), July 2007, 34–­35, available at the Afflicted Yard, http://​ afflictedyard​.com/​jeune​.htm.

chapter 13

z Kreyòl Sung, Kreyòl Understood haitian songwriter bic (roosevelt saillant) reflects on language and poetics Rebecca Dirksen and Kendy Vérilus Introduction by Rebecca Dirksen

The Haitian singer-­songwriter BIC (Roosevelt Saillant) has been a friend for many years. In his contemporary mix of acoustic guitar-­based ballads, folk rhythms, and rap kreyòl (Haitian rap), BIC follows in the troubadour tradition of storytelling that counts among its musical greats the singer-­songwriters Manno Charle­ magne (1948–­2017), Coupé Cloué (Jean Gesner Henry, 1925–­1998), and Kandjo (Auguste Linstant de Pradines, 1879–­1947). As an ethnomusicologist / music scholar, I have been captivated by Saillant’s poetic approach to lyrics since at least 2010, when his song and accompanying music video “Yon ti kalkil” (A little calculation), released in October of that year, resounded loudly in the postearthquake environment just nine months after the disaster.1 “How many bodies must we have to fill our cemeteries? / How many buckets do we need to catch the rainwater?” he plaintively sang. But he equally pressed to know “How many among us are writing rules but don’t follow them ourselves?” and “How many bad drivers have we allowed to drive us around?” It is a song that demands accountability—­on the part of the nation’s leaders, on the part of his fellow citizens, and on the part of the international community engaged in Haitian affairs. And we heard; I heard. In fact, my visceral reflection on this song, for whatever reason, was the only thing I could get down in writing in the month after I completed a formal year of dissertation fieldwork and had returned to Los Angeles. This reflection came as I was processing the range of complex events that had occurred while I was living in Haiti in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, during the cholera outbreak (in October 2010), and when, within the span of a few weeks in February and March 2011, the population saw the stunning and unexpected return of two polarizing, long-­exiled former leaders: Jean-­Claude Duvalier, who followed his father, François Duvalier, into the role of “President for Life,” and 205

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Jean-­Bertrand Aristide, the nation’s first democratically elected president. It was BIC, with his verbal acuity, focused social critiques, and melodic phrasing, who helped me and many listeners make some sense out of this period in recent Haitian history. And really, the entire album on which this song is found, Kreyòl Chante Kreyòl Konprann, Vol. 1 (Kreyòl sung, Kreyòl understood, vol. 1; 2010), has stuck with me. It also offers a prime example of contemporary mizik sosyal, or “socially engaged music,” a genre-­crossing expressive form that has been core to Haitian musical thought and performance over centuries. BIC is clear in his commitment to creating socially engaged music and unabashed in sharing his hope that listeners will hear and seriously consider the meaning in his lyrics. A prolific artist with subsequent albums Recto-­vèso (Both sides; 2014) and Vokabi-­lari (Street vocabulary; 2016) to his name, he is also explicit about his efforts at crafting language—­Haitian Kreyòl in particular—­to convey messages to his fans. That sense of linguistic fidelity readily emerged during an interview filmed and recorded in July 2017. We are delighted to share the transcript of that interaction here. What follows is an excerpt from a longer conversation, to which we have added excerpts of BIC’s songs with his permission. His lyrics give a sense of the poetic public voice BIC has had in Haiti and beyond since 2010.

Roosevelt Saillant Translated from Kreyòl; original syntax preserved Gen de bagay ki pa gen pri, mizik se youn nan yo Gen de bagay ki pa gen bri, powezi se youn nan yo Gen peyi ki chaje talan, Ayiti se youn nan yo Gen fanatik ki krezi, ou se youn nan yo Nou mete m sou yon pedestal, m di nou mèsi Nou ban m chalè, nou ban m lòv, nou ban m respè, m di nou mèsi Some things have no price, music is one of them Some things make no noise, poetry is one of them There are countries full of talent, Haiti is one of them There are fans who are crazy [very enthusiastic], you are among them You put me on a pedestal, I say thank you You give me heat, you give me love, you give me respect, I say thank you

There was a time in Haiti—­I remember as though it were today—­when someone would tell you that he or she was a poet. They’d say [in French] “I’m a poet.” That would give you the impression that to be a poet, [you would have to use] another language, a language other than Kreyòl. You could be a poet [speaking] French—­in fact, that’s what worked best in Haiti: French poetry. I believe that from the appreciation of Shakespeare to anyone else that the world has recognized, you can be a poet in any language; poetry can be made in any language. In my case in Haiti, I believe that for Haitians, if there’s a language they understand best, it’s

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Kreyòl. If there’s a language that can best translate how they are feeling, it’s Kreyòl. And if there’s a language that’s worthy of carrying their burdens or demonstrating their happiness or joy, it’s Kreyòl. So I have come to understand that what they don’t see in Kreyòl, what Haitian poets haven’t recognized in Kreyòl, let me draw their attention to it. That’s why for 80 percent or even 90 percent of my texts, I’ve followed this path—­to demonstrate Kreyòl’s strengths and beauty and the magic it holds. Because today it’s easier for a young man to charm a young Haitian woman in Kreyòl than in any other language if he recognizes the strength of Kreyòl, if he knows what words he should look for. The second thing behind my philosophy when I’m writing in Kreyòl is this myth—­in any case in Haiti, we’ve got incredible hypocrisy. On one hand, the country claims we’ve got two official languages. That’s written down, and they make us read it, and so we say it. On the other hand, there’s so much hypocrisy against anyone who goes somewhere where Kreyòl is spoken, yet they tell you when you arrive and speak Kreyòl that you’re not educated. I think this is a big battle that goes way back. At any rate, during the seventeen years of my career that I’ve been creating beautiful lyrics in Kreyòl, I’ve come to understand that many Haitians, many Haitian poets today, have a different approach to the language. They are prouder to be writing beautiful texts in Kreyòl, and that’s a huge step. I’m not talking about a number of elders who have already done a lot of work [to advance Kreyòl]; I’m not including Maurice Sixto, who, in my mind, has been impeccable about how he has shared the country’s culture through the spirit of the Kreyòl language. But I believe there is still much work to be done. Today I’m happy that many Haitian poets have begun to see that Kreyòl is a tool, just like any other language, that can create beautiful poetry and can bring about great changes. . . . Mwen grandi nan mitan zanmi, m grandi san papa Manman m te toujou di m si m pa al lekòl, sa m pran se pa m Mwen grandi nan mitan mank, mwen grandi nan mitan bank bòlèt M grandi nan legliz, manman m aprann mwen bay la kòlèt Li te toujou di m fòk mwen aprann fè zèv, men se pa pou l bèl zèb Pou m mare chwal mwen bò falèz I grew up surrounded by friends, I grew up without a father My mother would always tell me that if I didn’t go to school, whatever I took is mine [i.e., I own the results] I grew up around scarcity, I grew up surrounded by shacks where lottery tickets are sold I grew up in church, my mother taught me to give an offering She always told me I must learn to achieve, but even if the grass is beautiful I shouldn’t tie my horse up by the cliff.

A language is a means of communication; it’s a question of the environment. If I were to take a child born in Haiti, and I send him or her to China, even if they were a poor student, they’d end up speaking Chinese. So people must disabuse

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themselves [of stereotypes]: it’s not because I speak in French that makes me knowledgeable. No. There’s no connection. Whether I have real understanding bears no relation [to the language I speak]. So I will be intelligent when I’m intelligent; I will gain knowledge when I seek to understand, . . . when I devote myself to gaining knowledge. Because knowledge serves nothing if I simply say that I have it—­in brief, if it remains in a theoretical phase. Rather, language is a tool of communication, and there’s no other language to date that the native Haitian understands better than Kreyòl. . . . My friend, the feedback I get on my lyrics, it makes me feel that if the Haitian had found several people to encourage him or her to love Kreyòl, they’d love it, because people are always congratulating me on my lyrics. In fact, they always find themselves in the texts; it’s their lives. Nan chache pou n sanble ak moun, m pa konn kisa n sanble Genlè n panse nou ka fè farin san ble Alèkile, ti gason pa woule sèk ankò Alèkile, raf nan bokal pa alamòd ankò Alèkile, ti fi pa penyen poupe tèt kwòt ankò In seeking to seem human, I don’t know what we resemble It seems we think we can make flour without wheat Nowadays, young boys don’t roll hoops down the street with sticks anymore Nowadays, the raffle jar isn’t in style anymore Nowadays, young girls don’t style their dolls’ hair to be kinky anymore

Today, I’m not here to convince anyone that they’re Haitian. We’ve gone beyond that step already. I’m here to tell each and every Haitian what they can do to make every Haitian proud of Haiti. The Haiti that we’re talking about, that we believe in, what we each can do so that that image [that we’re proud about] circulates outside the country—­because whether you want it or not, we are Haitian, full stop. But then, in relation to the images we insist on sending out, in relation to the images created abroad that get sent back, we are victims to many things, including ourselves. And yet I believe that Haiti remains one of the most beautiful climates for any foreigner in the world. That’s to say, there’s insecurity, yes, but if we succeed in managing all of this, Haiti will be a destination that everyone in the world will need to know. We will need to prove that effectively, this is what it is—­and that’s not easy. Because there was a time when the intellectuals were all leaving the country, and today we have the manpower that’s leaving, so that we’re nearly at a point where we don’t know who’s left. It’s not like long ago when the intellectuals would go study abroad and then not return. Today it’s the workforce, those who originated in the provinces, who [normally work in the fields to feed the country], and so it’s not just that we don’t have the intellectuals but also that we don’t have anyone to feed us, and we don’t have the land that can support food production. That’s where the problem lies. That’s what we need to focus on. . . .

k r e y ò l s u n g , k r e y ò l u n d e r s t o o d 209 Manman m se yon sòyèt, men l s’on fanm ki gen brenn Dinyite l fèt an asye, po tòti orengeng Manman m se yon koutiryè, ki pote 7 pitit sou do li Manman m se yon fanm ki bèl, menm si l gen mak lavi sou po li Manman m se yon imòtèl, manman m se pechè de latè Vye van lavi soufle sa pa sifi pou l met do l atè Se pa yon intelektyèl, manman m s’on madan sara 1957–­2017, manman m se yon lò 60 kara Manman m se yon tigrès, sa vle di l se pitit tig Manman m se yon nègrès, papa m rankontre l Péligre Li tèlman sèviyab, l ap sèvi moun ki nan vèy li Manman m renmen m anpil, li rele m tèt sèkèy li Manman m se yon moniman, manman m se dènye grenn nan Li pa yon po piman en en, se li ki grenn nan My mother is of humble origins, but she’s a woman who has brains Her dignity is made of steel, of a tortoise shell My mother is seamstress, who carried seven children on her back My mother is a beautiful woman, even though she’s got the scars of life on her skin My mother is an immortal, my mother is the flesh of the earth Life’s blowing winds are not enough to make her lay down [resign] She’s not an intellectual, my mother is a market woman 1957–­2017, my mother is 60-­carat gold My mother is a tigress, that’s to say she’s the daughter of a tiger My mother is a black woman, my father met her at Péligre [lake in the Artibonite Valley]. She’s so helpful, she’ll serve those who attend her wake My mother loves me so much, she calls me her lead coffin bearer My mother is a monument, my mother is the last seed

Those born in Haiti need to reconstruct in the minds of every young Haitian, to project another education, because even within the educational system, sometimes we dismiss the Kreyòl language and don’t want to use it to study. But a kid, oftentimes, when he or she opens a book, they’ll see the prairie, a book with foreign images that don’t correspond to their reality. These books, the children’s books they’re studying, they need to be reenvisioned in terms of their environment, their reality, so that they can see themselves living in the book. Because when I’m reading a book, the words I’m reading shouldn’t be foreign—­my friends, the Little House on the Prairie—­these types of things. When I open a book, I need to see myself in the lesson I’m studying. And that’s what’s going to help me better understand who I am. The Haitian still regards him-­or herself as though they were French, because we’re strongly influenced by the French educational system. And so every time they

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speak with you, you get the impression that you’re speaking with a French person, or someone in the course of becoming more French [rather than Haitian], because everything he or she reads—­they depart from there to build conceptions, illustrations, to discover themselves in books. I believe that all of this is important. Let’s start creating books that allow us to see ourselves when we’re reading them. . . . Alèkile, raf nan bokal pa alamòd ankò Alèkile, ti fi pa penyen poupe tèt kwòt ankò Alèkile nou pa benyen anba lapli ankò Alèkile, moun an pwovens pi pè vòlè ke bann chanpwèl Gen mwens bis obama k ap sikile ke rache pwèl Pa gen konatra ankò bagay sa pèsòn pa kwè l Nowadays, the raffle jar isn’t in style anymore Nowadays, young girls don’t style their dolls’ hair to be kinky anymore Nowadays, we don’t bathe under the rain anymore Nowadays, people in the provinces are more afraid of thieves than a secret society of malefactors There are fewer [large] buses circulating the streets than pick-­up trucks There are no konatra [form of public transportation] anymore, that thing is something no one would believe

The first foreign connection with Haiti is music, that’s the first thing, because what connects, the first thing that connects someone in the diaspora to Haiti, is music. Above all, it’s konpa music—­that is, [someone in the diaspora] has a jazz [group] that they like, they have a music. There’s Tropicana, there’s Septentrional, there’s nouvèl generation [a type of konpa], so that’s the first thing that connects them. Maybe they have ties to politics, and they’ll get news of the family, but to connect, it’s really music. So they are always happy to see us [musicians]. When I’m abroad, I realize that I’ve brought a ray of sunshine to give them. You see someone living in Boston or above all in Montreal. When you start playing, you feel a bit of sun in the music, you can smell the goat roasting [a favorite meal] through the music, and for a few seconds, they’re transported; they see that they’re there [in Haiti]. Once they open their eyes, they say, “Darn, I can’t go because there are other issues to deal with.” But in the lyrics, we can bring [Haiti] to them, and they’re happy to have a bit of heat. They are happy to reconnect, to come get [reenergized] with us, especially the more they find themselves oppressed, the more problems they’ve got, the more they’ve got things to say. Well, we’ve got a whole generation of musicians with lots to say. And people come to hear these things because often, they find themselves so immersed with work abroad, OK, and their only way to connect with Haiti is through the music. . . . Alèkile—­e—­ Lougawou pa fè aktyalite ankò Wete trip mete pay nou pi mal Mete bak pi vitès maksimal

k r e y ò l s u n g , k r e y ò l u n d e r s t o o d 211 Mande, mande sa kape pase pèsòn pa fouti di yon mou, nou vin pi mal M te konn manje zaboka ak wayal Alèkile se lèt ak sereyal Alèkile-­kile BIC tizon dife, pa ka pale pale Alèkile, ti gason pa woule sèk ankò Alèkile raf nan bokal pa alamòd ankò Alèkile, ti fi pa penyen poupe tèt kwòt ankò Alèkile nou pa benyen anba lapli ankò Nowadays—­eh—­ Werewolves don’t make the news anymore To be merciless, we’re even worse We’re going in reverse at maximum speed Ask, ask what’s going on, but no one will say anything at all, and things get worse I used to eat avocado and cassava bread with peanut butter Nowadays, it’s milk and cereal Nowadays-­adays, [name of BIC’s record label] can’t speak, speak Nowadays, young boys don’t roll hoops down the street with sticks anymore Nowadays, the raffle jar isn’t in style anymore Nowadays, young girls don’t style their dolls’ hair to be kinky anymore Nowadays, we don’t bathe under the rain anymore

This is one of the rare countries where they don’t use our native language to teach. Let me share my experience from when I was a teacher. You tell the kids today that we are going to talk about the present perfect, and you start by saying that the present perfect corresponds to the perfect tense in French. You give them two problems: First, they don’t know what the perfect tense is; they haven’t mastered it yet. And now you tell them that the perfect present is the perfect tense, and you’ve put two problems in their hand, you see? That means that you’re trying to solve a problem through another problem. So first, they would learn the language faster if you taught it in that language. Let’s say that the child would speak English quicker and better if you were to teach it in English, but here they teach it through French. The kids haven’t mastered French, and we speak French with them to teach them English—­we give them two problems. So to start with, I completely agree with you because that’s how it still is in the world: you can’t be excellent when you learn in a language that you have not mastered; you have too many problems to resolve. You can’t be excellent when they give you a book that has little to do with your experience, you can’t be excellent. You can’t be excellent when they make you believe in everything that originates from outside; you’ll just desire more to resemble what’s outside. School in Haiti, what does it do? It trains us to be selfish, to be distant. It trains us to give the other “a long stick.” Because not only does my mother want to put me in school, but she has to put me in a school where the neighbor can’t put her kids. That’s the first challenge in the area. My child’s in this school, [her] child’s in

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that school. Education! This is at the base—­that is, I’m here, you’re there—­that’s the first problem to solve. The second problem: How do you think we’re going to have good schools when those who govern us do not have any children in school here? The president of the United States, where do his kids go to school? The president of the Dominican Republic? At some point, you can go elsewhere to study, but if you do not put kids in the schools here, that means we don’t believe in the schools here. . . . M grandi avèk esperans, m grandi nan doulè M grandi san m pa t gen twòp chans nan yon katye popilè Lekòl se pi bèl rezo, m te pote nan yon sak a do Manman m se pi gwo trezò ke lavi a fè m kado I grew with hope, I grew through pain I grew up without much luck in a popular neighborhood School was the most beautiful network that I carried in a backpack My mother is the greatest treasure that life has given me

The Haitian people have reached a level. They work really hard for their voice to not count; it seems they come to believe that their voice really doesn’t count. They work with [all they’ve got]. In that sense, they wake up one morning and believe it. And they say, “Whether I say it or not, it’s all the same.” So if saying it or not is all the same, let’s take it in the sense that “Greet the devil, he’ll consume me; don’t greet him, and he’ll still consume me.” I believe that that’s what I’m doing when I choose to sing in Kreyòl and about things that should concern us. It’s not that which makes me know it; it’s because I know that I want to share it with you. And I do it in Kreyòl because I know this is the language we speak, myself included. But there I’ll [go back in circles] because when I will tell you that we’ve all got our own responsibilities, we’ll reach a point when they say that the state has its responsibilities, but really, why doesn’t that disgust anyone? That’s a huge question. Thus far [the public] allows the 10 or 20 percent [who speak some French] to impose a language that they do not understand, to tell them that this is the language you must speak to be human. And those who are strongest among them don’t say a thing, so it’s really—­on the contrary, this is a subject for me to reflect on what it’s all about. But it’s true. Twenty percent have come to impose something on you. So as far as I know about reflexes, you see when someone does this to [strangle] you? Even if you are an angel, the first reflex you have is to remove [the hand]—­that’s the first reflex. I don’t know why we don’t have this reflex. They’re cramming a language that we do not understand down our throats, and we prefer to struggle, and we’re the ones who will [have to] take our mouths and open them. I think it’s a big question, and I’ve promised myself to think more about it and to question others about it in my own way, through music. Because until we have achieved this, we won’t advance anywhere in our education.

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Note This interview was conducted by Rebecca Dirksen and Kendy Vérilus, filmed and edited by Vérilus, transcribed by Esther Laguerre, and translated by Dirksen. 1. The music video for “Yon ti kalkil” may be viewed on YouTube at https://​youtu​.be/​ 7mwT7emHw9o. The song is found on BIC’s 2010 Kreyòl Chante Kreyòl Konprann, Vol. 1 album.

chapter 14

z Migration and Its Discontents the dominican films of laura amelia guzmán and israel cárdenas Anke Birkenmaier

The most difficult thing to get hold of, in studying any past period, is this felt sense of the quality of life at a particular place and time: a sense of the ways in which the particular activities combined into a way of thinking and living. . . . This is potentially of very great importance, and I think the fact is that we are most conscious of such contact in the arts of a period. —­Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution

Migration may be considered a fact of life in the Caribbean and globally. When we refer to it, we assume that people leave their countries of origin for any number of reasons, even though often their decisions are influenced by disparities between income levels, what migration historian Dirk Hoerder has called “global apartheid”—­ that is, internationally segmented labor markets.1 We therefore accept that some countries, such as the United States, are considered “receiving countries,” whereas others with less economic or political fortune, such as the Dominican Republic or Haiti, have for a long time been “sending” countries. In this chapter, I would like to study how leaving one’s local community impacts, following Raymond Williams, the “structure of feeling” that exists beyond the practices and patterns of the “culture of migration” studied by social scientists of the Caribbean.2 I explore migration here not so much as a point of departure but as a possibility, a catalyzer of behavior and consciousness alternatively reaffirming or disturbing the notion of a national, diasporic, or familial community itself. Migration is in my interpretation a “structure of feeling” that we can study especially well, as Williams points out in the passage quoted above, through analyzing the arts. As Williams has it, a structure of feeling represents the tones and nuances of communication that can evoke a sense of a “deeper community” at a particular time and place.3 Interestingly, the idea of migration functions, in the films analyzed 214

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here, as a means of “destructuring” communities, a factor of discontent or malestar that may only be overcome through more communication. I will specifically discuss two films by the director team Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas depicting life in the Dominican Republic inspired by real-­ life subjects. Much has been written about the long-­standing informal relations between Haitians and Dominicans, despite political tensions that led more recently to the 2014 Dominican citizenship bill, withdrawing Dominican citizenship from undocumented migrants born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents. Guzmán and Cárdenas in their films, however, tell stories where the experience or the possibility of leaving challenges one’s sense of place even in the home country. While enhancing one’s subjective sense of agency, in another case, it risks annihilating the subject. Guzmán and Cárdenas’s film Jean Gentil (2010) is framed by two scenes set on a beach at dusk.4 In the first, the protagonist walks away from the camera to the sound of the waves. At the end of the film, the protagonist will again walk on a beach, this time with the camera hovering above him, as he falls down into the sand and remains there motionless while the camera zooms out and then veers toward the sky, finally swooping down again, this time on a city in ruins, Port-­au-­Prince. The liminal condition of Jean Gentil, a Haitian immigrant to the Dominican Republic, is highlighted by these scenes. The film takes its audience on a journey, following Gentil along on his path away from the city to the countryside, trying to become one with nature and yet failing to achieve inner peace. Finished in 2010, as news of the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti was moving people around the world, the film does not dwell much on the catastrophic destruction brought by the earthquake. Its protagonist seems to be from a middle-­class background—­speaking, next to Kreyòl and French, Spanish and English—­and has lived in the Dominican Republic for some time. As the plot goes, Gentil searches for work and reaches out to other Haitians or to Dominican fellow workers. While it is difficult for him to find work as a language instructor, he experiences kindness from many sides. Still, he suffers the drama of inadaptation of many migrants who find themselves without a social safety net. Dólares de arena (Sand Dollars; 2014), Guzmán and Cárdenas’s third feature film, depicts a different kind of migrant to the Dominican Republic: the tourist who comes to the island in search of erotic adventure. The story is based on an autobiographical novel by Jean-­Noël Pancrazi and is about the relationship between an older French woman, Anne, and the Dominican girl Noelí. Yet when looking closer, the story is about more than lesbian love, sex tourism, or old age, as fascinating as that would be. It begins as Noelí obtains her Dominican passport, supported by Anne’s request, making it possible for the lovers to travel together to France. The film makes it clear how difficult it would be under other circumstances for Noelí to acquire a visa and a flight ticket to Europe, all of which Anne facilitates for her. Yet both women have doubts. In conversations with rich friends, Anne ponders whether it would be too much of a “shock” for Noelí to come to Paris and what a scandal their life together there would be. Noelí, on the other hand, tries to find

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out from her boyfriend, Yeremi (whom she passes off as her brother), how her departure would affect their relationship, only to find out that he is mostly concerned with her sending him “his share” during their separation. Noelí, it becomes clear, is being exploited by both, even though it seems that she has feelings for both too. The possibility of migration, however, disturbs the fragile balance in the relationship triangle. In these two movies, as in two others set in Mexico, Cochochi (2007) and Carmita (2013), Guzmán and Cárdenas have focused on the particularities of place, choosing locations for their films with which they are intimately familiar.5 As Guzmán puts it, for them, “places speak and tell stories, sometimes more so than the characters.”6 Inspired by twenty-­first-­century Mexican filmmakers, they have also chosen settings in the countryside instead of the big city.7 As a consequence, their films present a particular angle on the movement of people away from places. The possibility of departure or return—­either away from the Dominican Republic or returning to Haiti—­is indeed, in both Jean Gentil and Dólares de arena, a defining moment in the characters’ life journeys, one that changes their connection with their immediate environment. Exploring the feeling of a place rather than the individual’s impulse away from it allows Guzmán and Cárdenas to create a circular, almost stagnant sense of movement. They call our attention to how local communities are affected by a global regime where tourism and a construction boom respectively overwhelm the precarious social fabric of people there; instead of creating opportunities for locals, these global economies end up destabilizing existing social networks. Guzmán and Cárdenas are both graduates of the Escuela de Cine y Televisión in San Antonio de los Baños in Cuba and are currently based in Santo Domingo. They were among the first in the Dominican Republic to make experimental films that contrasted with more genre-­driven Dominican diaspora films such as Sanky Panky and Santi Clo or the Dominican-­made action film La soga. Their semi-­ fictional films explore a tension typical of Cuban revolutionary and other Latin American cinema between fictional and documentary registers.8 Making movies in the manner of auteurs, with a distinctive style and a strong documentary element, also has meant that their films have circulated less in mainstream movie theaters in the Dominican Republic, but they have had success at international film festivals in Latin America and beyond: Dólares de arena was the Dominican Republic’s entry for the eighty-­eighth Academy Award for Best International Feature Film and has garnered the International Federation of Film Critics prize at the Cairo International Film Festival, next to other awards from the Chicago and the Havana Film Festivals. Jean Gentil won awards from the Buenos Aires, Gramado, Jeonju, Las Palmas, Lima, and Miami Film Festivals. Guzmán and Cárdenas are part of a growing group of ambitious Dominican filmmakers who are making films based in the Dominican Republic, profiting from a new law, the Ley de Cine Dominicano (2013), which has opened up tax incentives and new funding possibilities to Dominicans. This nascent Dominican film culture has been rife with new points of view and formats, where experimental formats and shorts have flourished.9

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Working with untrained actors is crucial to Guzmán and Cárdenas’s approach. The story of Jean Gentil is a reworking of the real-­life story of the Haitian man Jean Gentil, whom Guzmán and Cárdenas met when looking for a Haitian Kreyòl language instructor in Santo Domingo. In a less pronounced way, the story of Noelí in Dólares de arena incorporates elements of the life of Yanet Mojica, who plays Noelí and who is a nonprofessional actor who used to be a dance instructor in Las Terrenas in the Dominican Republic, where the story takes place and was also filmed. Guzmán and Cárdenas, in their search for authenticity and local film sets, build, of course, on patterns existing elsewhere in Latin American cinema, as Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page have studied in their coedited volume Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America (2009). There, Page argues that the slippery incorporation of both documentary and fictional registers has been a hallmark of Latin American cinema for a long time and that it is a “fulcrum for contemporary controversy over the nature of the relationship between the cinematic sign and its referent.”10 On the other hand, it is undeniable that Guzmán and Cárdenas’s films, in moving closer to the lives of their subjects, aim at something larger than each one of them: they are storytellers of life in the Dominican Republic, reworking individual experiences into recognizable narratives of a milieu or an environment, with its own drama, able to accommodate the subject as well as the viewer. The turning point of that drama, I’d like to suggest, is migration as the vector determining whether a subject is able to adapt sufficiently to rapidly occurring changes or not. Both Jean Gentil and Dólares de arena depict two distinct, booming economies in the Dominican Republic—­on the one hand, the construction boom in large urban areas like Santo Domingo; on the other, the sex tourism economy of the island. In both movies, tensions build up between the locals who are able to fully submit to these economic forces and those who represent immaterial or creative skills, who are tied to a place or a tradition and therefore are left out. Yet both films also show that there are forms of agency having to do with the management of affect, allowing for some negotiations. Jean Gentil portrays what one might call an abject migrant: the protagonist experiences a complete breakdown of his faculties of distinction between himself and his surroundings. As he claims from early on in the movie, he does not feel that he is living; instead, he has to watch others live their lives. What at first looks like the melancholy state of a migrant who, like many other Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic, has no contact with his family in Haiti and experiences a difficult moment after having lost his job and the room he rented is enhanced by Gentil’s dress, profession, and demeanor: wearing a shirt and dress pants, he is quite obviously overqualified for the construction work that he is being offered repeatedly. He also is religious—­early on, we watch him attending a sermon in Kreyòl given by an evangelical priest—­and he has never been with a woman. As an outsider to both Dominican society and the Haitian migrant community working in low-­skilled jobs, Gentil is abject in Julia Kristeva’s sense, meaning that he defies common categories of recognition, leaving his acquaintances no way of relating to

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him.11 As the film moves on, Gentil’s condition of liminality increases even more: he travels from Santo Domingo to the countryside, which Dominicans might recognize as the peninsula of Samaná, where he tries to make a home for himself amid what looks like a beautiful wilderness. Yet like the condominiums built in Santo Domingo by Haitian construction workers for wealthy Dominicans, this land, too, is owned by an absentee landlord whose watchman turns out to be Haitian. There are moments when things look up for Gentil, such as when he teaches Kreyòl to a man who wants to establish relations with a Haitian woman nearby or when he teaches French to a woman who seems to like him, but eventually, he always is left alone. As we learn from his prayers (in Kreyòl), it turns out that Gentil is ill—­he complains of headaches—­but it is unclear whether it is his illness and depression that render him unfit for company and unable to return to his family or whether it is his intention to stay on this side of the border, and material difficulties are getting in his way. Gentil appears thus as both a neoliberal subject and a melancholy subject. As a neoliberal subject, he is one of many migrant workers in the Dominican Republic’s fast-­moving economy who are losing out. With relative political stability since the end of Joaquín Balaguer’s rule in 1996, a series of privatization and austerity measures, and the increase of remittances coming back to the Dominican Republic from its growing migrant population in the United States, the Dominican Republic has seen its economy explode since the end of the 1990s, with increasing demand for migrant workers in a variety of low-­skill areas beyond the sugar plantation and its bateyes.12 Within a diversified market, Haitian migrants have turned even more so than before into part of the exploited and oppressed working class, competing against the Dominican unemployed and “ethnicized”—­that is, consistently offered lower salaries because they are Haitian.13 In the case of our protagonist, he is not only out of work, but as a single man, he is without a strong social network. There simply is no mechanism allowing Gentil to survive in an environment that is unprepared to give higher-­level jobs to Haitians and where he seems to depend on word of mouth to identify potential employers.14 The camera’s preference for darkness and its repeated moves between close-­ups and long-­distance shots in turn create an atmosphere that goes beyond a merely documentary look at Gentil’s experience as an unemployed migrant. The use of natural light and preference for scenes set at dusk, during rainy days, and amid cloudy skies seem to echo Gentil’s overall sadness and melancholy. Interestingly, however, the zooming in and out of the camera on counted occasions—­at one construction site, in the countryside in Samaná, and at the end—­emphasizes a point of view that is separate from Gentil: we are not supposed to identify too closely with his plight. Guzmán comments with respect to this: “Queríamos que [el punto de vista de la cámara] fuese el punto de vista de la tierra que ve al hombre que lucha para desarrollarse mientras sucede el desarrollo de edificios, carreteras, proyectos” (We wanted the point of view of the camera to be the point of view of the earth that sees the man who struggles to advance while at the same time, buildings, roads, and projects develop).15 The camera in this way adds another character

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representing nature itself to the story, encouraging the viewer to focus on the interaction between nature and the protagonist. This explains further why there is relatively little dialogue happening during the film. Even in the scenes where Gentil spends time with others, his interlocutors speak more than he does. The camera’s zooming in and out of a scene and frequent birds-­eye shots thus interrupt the audience’s desire for suture or identification.16 To judge from the visual language of the film, then (following Williams), rather than its dialogues, we see in Gentil a melancholic, modern subject unable to reconcile with his environment and, in the end, swallowed up by it. While his mental condition is of course closely tied to his migrant condition and separation from his family in Haiti, and while of course the final scene of a Port-­au-­Prince ravaged by the earthquake implies a premonition of this recent natural disaster, the camera suggests that it is the fraught relationship with nature—­his happiness at having arrived in the countryside and yet, in the end, his inability to find a place for himself in it—­that is the cause of his final undoing. This movie, then, tells a story that might be taken to carry a broader message regarding modern migrancy. While it speaks to the difficulties of Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic, the story that Guzmán and Cárdenas choose to tell about Jean Gentil is one of a man who struggles to make himself at home in the world or, in Marshall Berman’s words, to become a subject as well as an object of modernization.17 It is his inability to articulate a story about himself as a liminal subject, more so even than the difficulties he has finding a job and a place for himself in the Dominican Republic, that leads to his ultimate demise. The filmmakers have to tell his story for him by emphasizing his interactions with his immediate environment—­at first, the city; later, the countryside—­paying a great deal of attention to everyday life and noises and providing both close-­ups and long-­shot views of the environment with which Gentil is attempting to blend. Through their camerawork they reveal a larger dimension of the cultural and affective challenges faced by migrants in the Dominican Republic. In Dólares de arena, the action is driven more by the dialogues among the three protagonists, Anne; her Dominican lover, Noelí; and her boyfriend, Yeremi. Yet here too, nonlinguistic cues provide an understanding of the voids that are notable in this story. In this love triangle, bachata music takes on a protagonist’s role. The opening scene of Dólares de arena shows bachatero Ramón Cordero singing a song, “La causa de mi muerte.” The characteristically ambiguous lyrics are about a man who loves a woman whose “pleasures” he is not able to enjoy. He reminds her that he loves her like no one else and that if she does not love him back, it will be “the reason of my death,” as the refrain goes. As an opening scene, this song sets a mood for this film, seemingly pointing to Yeremi’s love for Noelí, in the melodramatic, exaggerated register typical of the Dominican bachata, which almost always is about unrequited or unhappy love. But more broadly, the song can be read as encapsulating the love triangle among Noelí, Yeremi, and Anne, since it remains ambiguous all along whether Anne’s love for Noelí is returned by her and, in turn, whether Noelí’s and Yeremi’s relation is one of mutual love or convenience. While at the beginning, the song seems to allude only to the desire Noelí provokes in both Anne

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and other male tourist lovers, it acquires a new more existential meaning later on when Noelí becomes pregnant and the possibility of her departure with Anne for France becomes concrete. Her imminent departure threatens to unhinge Yeremi’s life, as he becomes afraid of losing not only her and the remittances she would be able to send back but also their unborn son. While Anne offers to support the mother and the child in Europe, Yeremi decides that he does not want his son to leave the country. It’s a true bachata dilemma! As Guzmán writes, the music serves indeed to “light up” the film: “A pesar de estar situada en un context difícil, es una película muy luminosa, muy dominicana, donde prepondera la música (la bachata sobre todo), y donde los personajes emanan vitalidad y crecimiento” (Even though it is placed in a difficult context, this is a film full of light, very Dominican, where music dominates—­mostly bachata music).18 The bachata-­like mood of the film is enhanced by several dance scenes where Noelí dances with Anne and by the fact that Yeremi himself is a percussionist in a bachata ensemble. Ironically, this local tone creates a distancing effect between the audience and the protagonists of the story. As the bachata music seems to typecast the characters, the audience focuses on the aspects of the story that remain untold or only suggested. It becomes a story that is less about sex tourism in the Dominican Republic and instead more about the relations of Dominicans among each other and their perceptions of citizenship and belonging. Noelí, in fact, takes money from Anne to give it to Yeremi, and her going to France with Anne is fine with him as long as she will send him “his share.” The couple is able to negotiate this and the fact that she has taken an older woman as a lover, challenging heterosexual norms that are still dominant in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere in the Caribbean. They do seem to reach a limit, however, once Noelí is pregnant with Yeremi’s child. Yeremi cannot tolerate the idea of his son or daughter leaving the country. Major work has been done on the long history of sexual labor in the Caribbean and how it has created perceptions of hypersexuality and also of heavily heterosexually oriented Caribbean societies.19 As we see in this film and as we read in Kamala Kempadoo’s work in particular, sex work in the Caribbean relies on a global economic structure: “As a playground for the richer areas of the world to explore their fantasies of the exotic and to indulge in some rest and relaxation, the labor, sexuality, and bodies of Caribbean women and men constitute primary resources that local governments and global tourism industry exploit and commodify, to cater to, among other things, tourist desires and needs.”20 While sex tourism in the Caribbean is an uneven playing field indeed, where the economic power of rich tourists determines who gets to earn money and who gets to travel, Dólares de arena suggests subtle ways in which local women and men get to manipulate the stories they tell tourists as well as their own love stories. In this case, the love triangle ends where it began: as Noelí returns to Yeremi, she takes all of Anne’s money, leaving Anne as the duped foreigner, a stand-­in used by Noelí to build a conventional, heterosexual family life for herself and Yeremi. She chooses to stay in the Dominican Republic rather than migrating.

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To return to my initial question: What is the “structure of feelings” explored in these two films set in the Dominican Republic and what is the role played by migration in relation to it? Like Jean Gentil, Dólares de arena relies on characters, as David Puig suggests, who are out of place: “The narrator is, more than a foreigner, a character out of place both in his native society and the one he visits. This mismatch that allows lateral commentary about reality is a condition shared by the main characters of the fiction and documentary films by Laura and Israel.”21 This almost modernist mismatch or alienation from the place in which they live can be taken indeed to apply to the main characters of the two films discussed here. Migration is in this sense not the answer to their problems but the horizon that reveals their discontent with the situation they are dealt with. Both Gentil’s and Anne’s look into Dominican society reveal, in the end, a condition rather than desire: those who are able to manage their affects, exploiting the industrial production of desire rather than subscribing to it, are able to make themselves at home in the Dominican Republic, all the while continuing to operate within a transnational industrial setting. While Jean Gentil is unable to subscribe to this neoliberal logic and is stuck in his modernist desire for becoming one with nature, Noelí and Yeremi smartly manipulate Anne’s feelings up to the point where Noelí derives the maximum profit from her, all the while ironically echoing Cordero’s refrain and ruining Anne’s hope of finding love in her old age. Both films in this way are parables of neoliberalism, where creative work like Yeremi’s musical skills and Gentil’s language abilities pay less than exploitative transnational industries such as sex tourism and corporate construction, yet both also allude to modern tropes of alienation and a distinct nostalgia for returning to traditional structures of living. By zooming in on local lives and on the difficulty of communicating transitions from one place to another, the two films by Guzmán and Cárdenas allow us to better understand the human cost of not just migration but neoliberal modernization in small-­scale communities, affecting family structures and gender relations. Indeed, in the small island economies of the Caribbean, we can perhaps see more easily the inextricable ties between migration and modernization and how both produce uniquely marginalized people who are unable to maintain ties with their compatriots or hosts. The two movies make clear that while on the ground there are “blurred borders” between hosts and migrants, Haitians and Dominicans, and Dominicans and tourists, there continues to be a hard border for the poor and those representing nonmaterial, traditional value systems. A sense of local agency may also be noted, however, in the two film productions considered here, which lies in the subject’s ability to manipulate his or her own narrative. In the case of Dólares de arena, the protagonist is able to deftly manipulate a love narrative by withdrawing from her love interest in key moments. In this way, she activates her lovers’ feelings, allowing her to remain in the country and eventually form a family. In the case of Jean Gentil, one could argue in turn that the protagonist becomes marginalized and unravels because he is unable to love, to

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seduce, or to articulate any story. His melancholy is speechless, and the story told by the camera lens is to remain incomplete; he himself rejects agency. Guzmán and Cardenas’s films allow us to find inroads, therefore, into the workings of community formation in the Dominican Republic, and the way in which transnational economies and the option of migration intervene.

Notes 1. Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 8. 2. For perhaps the best informed anthropological approach to Caribbean cultures of migration, see Jorge Duany’s work, in particular his Blurred Borders, where he argues that what unites Spanish Caribbean island communities are the transnational practices of migrants from there, the fact that they remain in touch with their home countries and those who stay behind, and the ways in which they continue to contribute economically or politically to their home country. Duany, Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 7–­10. 3. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 48. 4. I want to thank Laura Amelia Guzmán for the feedback given on some of the ideas of this chapter. 5. Guzmán and Cárdenas’s first two films were Cochochi (2007), set in the Sierra Tarahumara (Chihuahua, Mexico), and a documentary film, Carmita (2013), about Cuban actress Carmen Ignarra, set in her mansion in Monterrey, Mexico. 6. Laura Amelia Guzmán, personal communication with the author, August 2, 2018. 7. “Cuando los mexicanos a principios de siglo [veintiuno] empezaron a retomar el hábito de sacar las historias de las ciudades ambos nos sentimos muy identificados y motivados a contar historias rurales” (Guzmán, personal communication). 8. As Robbins shows, Cuban film of the first revolutionary decade used what were then experimental aesthetic means learned from Italian neorealism, among them montage technique, the inclusion of news clips and advertising, Afro-­Cuban popular music, work with nonprofessional actors, and filming on location (instead of on sets) to convey the camera’s closeness to regular people. 9. Tanya Valette’s Corto que te quiero corto (unpublished manuscript presented at the Indiana University Latino Film Festival, Bloomington, Indiana, 2014) describes a large number of high-­quality productions of short films by Dominican directors. 10. Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page, eds., Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 3. 11. As Julia Kristeva states, “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-­between, the ambiguous, the composite.” Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. 12. According to a 2004 survey by the International Organization for Migrations and FLACSO, sugar plantations are not the main employers of Haitian migrants anymore. The Dominican Republic’s economy has since the late 1990s drastically changed from an agro-­ exporting to a service-­oriented one, where the migration of Dominicans elsewhere has created the demand for Haitian migrants able to work in construction, public works, street trade, domestic service, transport, tourism, and medium-­scale agriculture. The report also notes that the majority of Haitian migrants now come from Haitian urban centers and not from rural areas, with the majority of them being literate. See Pastor Vásquez Frías, Exodo! Un siglo de migración haitiana hacia República Dominicana (Santo Domingo: Editorial Santuario, 2013), 271–­272. 13. Haroldo Dilla, quoted in in Vásquez Frías, 282–­283.

m i g r a t i o n a n d i t s d i s c o n t e n t s 223 14. According to Vásquez Frías, Haitian migrants are predominantly employed in construction and agricultural work—­to the point that many Dominicans perceive this type of work as desirable only for Haitians. Vásquez Frías, 293–­294. 15. Guzmán, personal communication. 16. Peter Verstraten explains the use of the Lacanian concept suture in film analysis as follows: “As soon as a subject gains access to an entire field of meaning, it necessarily must sacrifice its untranslatable ‘being’ in the process. . . . Suture refers to the ongoing process of supplementation in which each reverse shot presents itself as the answer to a missing perspective while at the same time summoning a new absence.” Verstraten, Film Narratology, trans. Stefan van der Lecq (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 88–­89. 17. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into the Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 5. 18. Guzmán, personal communication. 19. For a study of sex tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, see Amalia L. Cabezas, Economies of Desire: Sex and Tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Republic (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009); and Kamala Kempadoo, Sexing the Caribbean: Gender, Race, and Sexual Labor (New York: Routledge, 2004). For a more comprehensive look at sex work throughout the Caribbean, see Kamala Kempadoo, ed., Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). 20. Kempadoo, Sexing the Caribbean, 139. 21. Quoted in “Dólares de Arena: From Book to Netflix,” Colección Cisneros, April 1, 2016, http://​w ww​.coleccioncisneros ​.org/ ​e ditorial/ ​s tatements/​d ​% C3 ​% B3lares​- de ​-arena​-book​ -netflix.

chapter 15

z Transnational Hispaniola the first decade in support of a new paradigm for haitian and dominican studies Kiran C. Jayaram and April J. Mayes

To draw a boundary around anything is to define, analyse, and reconstruct it, in this case select, indeed adopt, a philosophy of history. —­Fernand Braudel

This chapter provides a description of the past, present, and possibilities of transnational Hispaniola (TH), a new approach that emerged from Haitian and Dominican studies at the beginning of the twenty-­first century. We begin by describing how we came upon the still contentious issue of the name. Next, we show how TH as an intellectual social formation (ISF) emerges from a longer history of inquiry as well as what projects have been associated with it, how it engages with Haitian and Dominican studies, and what questions arise when considering future research.

Defining Transnational Hispaniola During their tenure as Fulbright scholars in Santo Domingo in 2009–­2010, Yolanda Martín and April J. Mayes decided to organize a conference that would bring together feminist activists, leaders in women’s movements in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and scholars from across the island to discuss the current state of women and women’s politics in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and their respective diasporas. After much discussion with others, the initial conference idea shifted to include a broader conversation among Dominican and Haitian specialists in various fields to voice concerns about current affairs and Dominican-­Haitian relations and to identify areas of research into issues that affected the island as a whole. In consultation with then director of the Pedro Francisco Bonó Philosophical Institute Pablo Mella, “Transnational Hispaniola” emerged as the title for this event. Due to an important intervention by our mentor, Dominicanist literary 224

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critic Silvio Torres-­Saillant, April and Yolanda initially took transnational to refer to the transborder and binational exchanges of people, commerce, ideas, and environments that have long undermined attempts by colonial powers and ruling classes to make the border a rigid, transhistorical entity. This initial definition of transnationalism insisted that cross-­border, cross-­ linguistic, and cross-­ethnic interactions have long characterized relations between Dominicans and Haitians and that governing elites have purposefully denied peoples this history. Over the next few years, though, we recognized that the notion of transnationalism appeared to be reifying the categories we were contesting.1 For example, we subsequently learned that republican projects in Haiti and the Dominican Republic dramatically differed. The Haitian republican project occurs at the expense of the nation.2 In contrast, at our 2016 Transnational Hispaniola Conference, Dominican anthropologist Fátima Portorreal called attention to how Dominican republicanism combines state with nation (estado-­nación) in ideological and biological terms. Dominican state formation has become ethnicized, thus justifying a violent and violently defended separation from Haiti and Haitianness. Our conceptualization of the transnational, therefore, could not simply assume that nation meant the same thing across borders. To address this problem, we returned to earlier discussions on transnationalism. In the 1990s, a group of scholars led by Nina Glick Schiller came together to grapple with what they witnessed as new patterns related to international migration and community formations by migrants that ignored national boundaries, specifically among Haitian and other Latin American and Caribbean migrants in the United States.3 For them, transnational referred to “a social process in which migrants establish social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders.”4 Through comparative analysis, they posited that earlier paradigms regarding migration such as push-­pull and traditional conceptualizations of ethnicity creation, usually grounded in theories of assimilation or multiculturalism, failed to explain the new ways that people moved from and also between their home countries and the United States, supporting families and communities in the process. For this generation of scholars, transnationalism addressed an important failure, or limit, of other paradigms that relied on “bounded social science concepts such as tribe, ethnic group, nation, society, or culture.” Culling a new scholarly imagination, early scholars of the transnational considered the migrant experience as less in relation to nation-­states and more “inextricably linked to the changing conditions of global capitalism.”5 Since these debates in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the notion of transnationalism has been expanded to follow recent developments in critical anthropology regarding human mobility, global flows of capital and labor, and ecology.6 The shift in interest from, say, migration to mobility (and its oft-­implied counterpart, immobility) and toward ecology rather than environment required decentering the nation-­state as a natural unit of analysis. This move had several key advantages to previous scholarship. First, rather than eliminating the state, it becomes, along with national belonging, one of many aspects to consider in social interactions and

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imaginations. Second, this approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of how certain local, regional, national, and international forces create conditions that enable some people and things to move on and off the island while preventing others from doing so. Third, this new understanding draws on Sidney Mintz’s scholarship on commodities as constitutive of dynamics of larger systems.7 While transnational, in our view, was meant to signal the agency of the peoples and communities so often marginal to the national narratives, we then struggled to identify a term that brought these histories, movements, and cross-­border ties into a conceptual frame: Transnational . . . what? To name the island as a whole and yet also unpack the complex ways the island both had served as the site of modernity and had been systematically integrated into a global economic order since its founding as a colony, a decision was made to use the contested term Hispaniola to emphasize that Haitian and Dominican histories are unalterably intertwined. David Geggus argues that the choice to use the name Haiti at the moment of the country’s independence “raises interesting questions about ethnicity and identity, and historical knowledge in the Caribbean.”8 We believe that our choice does so exponentially. We kept the name Hispaniola precisely to draw attention to how imperialism, global capitalism, and inequalities in the international system continue to form the island.9 With this move, however, we waded right into a contentious debate, one that dated back to the nineteenth century and reached its zenith in the 1930s. In 1871, Major Robert Stuart, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in Great Britain, bemoaned that there was “no integral name at present for the whole island.”10 As he wrote, “The island was called ‘Haïti’ by the Indians [sic], ‘Hispaniola’ by the Spaniards, ‘St. Domingue,’ or ‘Santo Domingo,’ by the French.”11 In his report to the society, he settled on Haiti when referring to the entire island because he found Santo Domingo insufficient.12 Then in 1874, Haiti and the Dominican Republic agreed that the island should be called l’Ile d’Haïti ou St. Domingue.13 An international host of scholars apparently ignored the wishes of Haitian and Dominican geographers, since they continued to debate the proper name that should be given to the whole island. They also did not explain why the island, home to two independent republics, required a single name anyway. Clearly, it was acceptable for the French colony St. Martin and the Dutch colony St. Maarten to occupy one island. In line with the wishes of the island’s intellectuals, the U.S. Geographic Board’s 1921 report referred to the entire island as Haiti.14 However, in 1931, the board, in consultation with the British Permanent Committee on Geographical Names, “took up the problem of what to call the island on which the Dominican Republic and Haiti are located. It decided to seek the assistance of the Department of State and to determine, if possible, whether the governments of both countries could agree on the name of the island. On June 3, the Board rescinded its decision on the name Haiti for the island and eventually decided on the name Hispaniola, which was published in the Sixth Report [in 1931]. (Palmer 2018, Personal Communication).”15 The U.S. Geographic Board’s decision unleashed a torrent of criticism from Haitian and Dominican geographers and historians alike. Haitian historian Dantès

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Bellegarde wrote letters to the U.S. Secretary of State, which were followed by communications from anthropologists Jean Price-­Mars and Léon Laleau.16 These letters explained in diplomatic detail that the name Hispaniola invoked “the cruel regime that brought about the extermination of the indigenous population and introduced African slavery in the New World.”17 For their part, members of the Dominican Geography and History Society noted that the name of the island could never be Hispaniola, since that term was a “barbarism” and a neologism invented by Pedro Mártir de Anglería as a Latin approximate for La Española, which he thought meant “Little Spain.” In a flurry of letters from various groups and individuals published in Revista de Educación, not one mention was made of an 1871 agreement between Haiti and the Dominican Republic; instead, commentators proposed alternatives such as La Española, Bohío (from the Taíno word for “home”), and Isla de Santo Domingo, with the eastern side of the island denominated as the Dominican Republic and the western side as the Republic of Haiti.18 In the early twenty-­first century, Haitian public intellectual Odette Roy Fombrun advocated for calling the island Quisqueya, one of the indigenous names used for the island that “recalls the past of resistance to oppression, a past shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti.”19 In 2009, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (the new name of the U.S. Geographic Board) received a proposal from the public to change the name of the island to Santo Domingo, but the board decided against this after research concluded that Hispaniola was now a common term for the island, used by both Haitian and Dominican governments as well as other geography reference sources.20 After the 2010 earthquake, anthropologist and practitioner Rachelle Doucet gave a thorough critique of possible names (Quisqueya, Bohío, Haiti, and Hispaniola, among others), finally resigning herself to accept the name Hispaniola.21 Roy Fombrun responded in print the following week disagreeing with this, stating that Hispaniola is “synonym with indigenous genocide.” She added that both the Dominican ambassador to Haiti and the Dominican Secretary of Culture used the name Quisqueya in official functions.22 In response to a call for papers to the 2016 Transnational Hispaniola Conference, one Haitian scholar refused to participate in something with that name, adding, “It’s time for the name Hispaniola, which carries the stench of colonialism and slavery, [to] disappear from all documents.”23 As we have explained elsewhere, Hispaniola may be an imperfect and unjustifiable choice, but we had considered other possibilities that were just as imperfect and difficult to justify.24 For example, there is still some debate about whether Haiti was used by Taínos to refer to the entire island or just to the mountainous areas where Columbus found them. Meanwhile, Quisqueya appears to be a nineteenth-­ century invention and is in turn embedded in particular forms of Dominican nationalism. One view we can offer, however, is this: we agree that Hispaniola is synonymous with genocide as it relates specifically to the era of colonialism, which also gave rise to African slavery in the Americas. Indeed, Hispaniola is a misnomer that reminds us of the island’s centrality in the development of capitalism and its continued subordination to external forces that maintain its continued colonial status.

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Intellectual Social Formations The concept of an ISF concerns knowledge production.25 Coined by Kevin Yelvington to explain the dynamics that brought to fruition Melville Herskovits’s paradigm concept of African survivals, an ISF refers to a “praxis of communities of practitioners and the production of knowledge.”26 In this case, it is one that led to the development of sociocultural anthropology in the Caribbean and the United States and informed the development of African diasporic studies in the course of the twentieth century.27 A variation on the Marxian concept of “social formation,” ISFs include various economic, social, political, and ideological components that contribute to the production, exchange, and consumption within a historical (in fact, a historical materialist) analysis. According to Yelvington, the ISF that created the “New World Negro” as a subject of analysis included scholars from the United States (Herskovits, Clews Parsons), Haiti (Price-­Mars), Cuba (Ortiz), Arthur Ramos (Brazil), and Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (Mexico) but excluded others, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and philosopher Alaine Locke, who became a strident critic of the search for African survivals among New World black populations.28 While the meanings of African survivals addressed the political and cultural needs within distinct national contexts, the gathering of knowledge about African descendants in the Americas took shape within international circuits of intellectual exchange that included personal letters, articles, conference papers, and the collection and display of artifacts.29 An ISF involves more than a simple exchange of ideas. One way to think about an ISF is as an ensemble of knowledge producers who, brought together through material, social, and institutional support, jointly contribute to the production, exchange, consumption, and institutionalization of concept paradigms and lines of inquiry. While the ISF of TH is a recent development, we situate it within a much older line of inquiry that implements thinking beyond the borders of the nation-­state. At the end of the eighteenth century, as Maria Cristina Fumagalli has shown, Moreau de St. Mery, a French Creole historian from Martinique, “had realized that, in order to be fully understood, the island of Hispaniola had to be approached in its entirety.”30 Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the grandfather of Haitian anthropology, Antenor Firmin, engaged with the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris to denounce the racist ideology-­cum-­science of Arthur de Gobineau and assert the equality of the races in his monumental tome.31 In his work, Firmin refuted racist stereotypes by referencing ethnological data from Haiti and “the Dominican population of Hispaniola.”32 Just before the turn of the twentieth century, more of the same cross-­border thinking emerged in the persons of Frenchman Robert Gentil and Haitian Henri Chauvet, who wrote that to describe the mountains and the waters, “it is of utmost importance to embrace the whole of the island. . . . It is impossible to explain the system of the island waters, if one was limited to first study separately the Republic of Haiti, then the Dominican Republic. Therefore, we repeat, we must consider [the island] as a whole when we want to describe the physical aspect.”33

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These early works contribute four important lines of inquiry that, in our view, are the historical foundations for the ISF that TH has become. First, they consider data from across the entire island rather than simply one or another country. Second, they all use the name Hispaniola. Third, these contributions draw from eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­ century sources, suggesting historical continuity. Fourth, these scholars participated in political and intellectual communities that were forged beyond the territorial boundaries of their nation-­states. In some important cases, these intellectuals also supported Pan-­Antillean and Pan-­African sociopolitical movements, just two examples of imagining belonging well beyond the nation-­state system of the twentieth century. In the second half of the twentieth century, the Duvalierist dictatorship in Haiti and the Dominican authoritarian regimes caused some scholars to go into exile, creating distinct academic pursuits on and off the island.34 In 1971, the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México sponsored “a colloquium of social science problems of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.”35 This major event brought together scholars to Mexico from Haiti (Jean Casimir, Suzy Castor, Gérard Pierre-­Charles, Cary Héctor, Hérard Jadotte), the Dominican Republic (Isis Duarte, Carlos Ascuaciati, Lil Despradel, Pedro Mir, Hugo Tolentino), Belgium (André Corten), and Puerto Rico (Manuel Maldonado Denis) to discuss the island.36 Presentations covered the topics of migration, the development of nation-­states, the imprint of the U.S. occupation on both sides of the island, anti-­Haitianism, economics, and fascism. These chapters largely draw on Marxist ideas and dependency theory for their historical-­materialist approaches to their content, showing clearly how the two countries are united at different levels yet have been subjugated under imperial forces at different times. As a result of this colloquium, the scholars united there proposed the creation of “a Dominico-­ Haitian Association of Social Science and of the Caribbean, in charge of promoting the rapprochement of the peoples through the study of their social realities and the discovery of the most appropriate means for unity and national solidarities.”37 In a sense, they called for the formation of an ISF like TH. On the island, starting in the 1970s, figures such as Frank Moya Pons, Ruben Silié, Guy Alexandre, Baez Evertsz, Carlos Dore Cabral, Franklin Franco, Isis Duarte, Diogenes Abreu, Tahira Vargas, and Fátima Portorreal began to research and write against what Samuel Martínez has called the fatal-­conflict model of Haitian-­Dominican scholarship, in which the people of the two countries are imagined as two cocks destined to fight in perpetuity due to their inherent differences.38 Many of these people became interlocutors and intellectual guides for the subsequent generation of scholars, including those of TH.

Transnational Hispaniola as an Intellectual Social Formation In discussions at conferences and other events, the question arises of exactly what TH is. Through conferences, a “collective” and “idea,” and an edited volume,39 we

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engaged different people in dialogue to figure out how to define TH as an entity. The evolution of our thought that led to our recognition of TH as an ISF reflects what Lave describes as the praxis-­based process whereby scholars come to “embody and inhabit a theoretical/empirical stance.”40 To date, the TH collective has held three conferences (2010, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; 2012, New Jersey, United States; 2016, Port-­au-­Prince, Haiti), produced an article describing its overall project, and created a special edition of Estudios Sociales published by Centro Bonó and an edited volume.41 Each of these involved specific economic, political, social, and linguistic contributions to the ISF. The Transnational Hispaniola conference in Santo Domingo (TH I) started as a project of Mayes (a Dominican American woman) and Martín (a Spanish woman), yet its conceptual shape involved conversations with two Dominican scholars: Mella in Santo Domingo and Torres-­Saillant in New York. Funding came primarily from the Centro Franklin (U.S. Embassy, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic), with Centro Bonó making in-­kind contributions and conference participants and attendees paying a small registration fee along a sliding scale. TH I mainly followed a traditional conference format, with plenary session concurrent panels, mostly within history and social sciences.42 Fortuitously, the organizers were able to hold an evening event featuring a conversation between former Haitian ambassador to the Dominican Republic Guy Alexandre and then Dominican ambassador to Haiti Rubén Silié, both of whom had written scholarly works related to Haitian-­Dominican issues. Most speakers presented in their language of ease, either Spanish or English, and the lack of translation was not a major issue.43 The notable exception to the “language of ease” rule was Jayaram, who caused turmoil by presenting in Haitian Kreyòl, even though he projected a PowerPoint of major points in Spanish.44 The conference forced consideration of issues of the effects of the 2010 earthquake on the Haitian intellectual landscape, false rumors about a goal of island unification, and the manner in which U.S. government ties simultaneously create suspicion and facilitate engagement.45 The second event (TH II), held at Rutgers University in New Jersey, focused on “transnationalism as a lens to examine those connective circuits that tie the economies, politics, and cultures of neighboring states within the Caribbean, the rest of Latin America, and beyond.”46 The main organizer was Carlos Decena (a Dominican man), who presented on the closing panel at TH I. To address the critique that TH I did not include enough Haitians or Haitianists, Decena asked for assistance from then doctoral student Kiran C. Jayaram (Indian American) and then postdoctoral fellow Yveline Alexis (Haitian American). Beyond the coorganizers, Decena required connections across Rutgers University, especially to the Center for Latino Arts and Culture, to bring the event to fruition. This conference was funded mainly by various entities within Rutgers University, with support from the U.S. Embassy in Haiti paying for Dominican activists’ travel. In the main, this followed the scholarly format of TH I, but many presentations and plenaries directly related to arts and humanities. The plenary on music brought Haitian musicians Sanba Zao and Mireille together with Dominican musicians Toné Vicioso and Irka Mateo, with

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Paul Austerlitz joining on bass clarinet. Haitian American scholar and artist Gina Ulysse gave a performance piece. Other plenaries involved discussions of literature and visual arts. The organizers dedicated the final day to the memory of recently deceased activist Sonia Pierre. In addition to a testimonial by Pierre’s daughter, Solange; coworkers at Movimiento de Mujeres Dominico Haitianas (MUDHA); and Ana Maria Belique Delba, Julissa Reynoso (who had just been named U.S. ambassador to Uruguay by Secretary of State Clinton) addressed the importance of Pierre’s work in the Dominican Republic.47 To handle linguistic issues, volunteers provided individual translations between Haitian Kreyòl, Spanish, and English at every panel and plenary for attendees. From these two conferences, Mayes and Jayaram developed a coedited volume.48 The first part presents historical material that undermines the notion of perpetual national contradistinction through examining the unity of populations along the border, the unnaturalness of the 1844 Dominican separation from Haiti, and the existence of nineteenth-­century cross-­border family ties. The second part draws on literary analysis to explore historical traumas, the body, race, nation, gender, and sexuality. Next, social science scholarship reveals the changes in sexuality, sustainability, and citizenship that began in the twentieth century, when governments sought to align their economies with the interests of global capital. The final chapters concern cultural production through music and curriculum building. This notion of putting theory into practice extends to the appendix, which includes several syllabi that attempt to teach TH. A few years later, while continuing to foster the intellectual and creative production from earlier conferences, the third event (TH III) took the additional step of offering three days of practical research modules tailored toward Haitian university students. Jayaram headed this iteration of the conference with help from Mayes, Haitian American doctoral student Darlene Dubuisson, and Dr. Jhon Picard Byron (Université d’Etat d’Haïti) and with input from Yolanda Martín, Carlos Decena, and Haitian American doctoral student Vadricka Etienne. Due to his recent Fulbright Scholar Award and ongoing role as a research consultant, Jayaram was able to secure funding from the Public Affairs Section of the U.S. Embassy in Haiti and from the World Bank, respectively.49 This event involved two parts. The main event occurred at the Plaza Hotel in Port-­au-­Prince and included eight sessions where a team of two or five presenters would teach their expertise to the audience in a two-­hour module. Presenters were from the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Brazil, England, Italy, the United States, and Spain. Topics included anthropology and economics, political ecology, digital humanities, human rights, peasantries, border studies, feminism, activism after the 2013 Sentencia decision, and pedagogy. There were one hundred Haitian students who attended the modules. The second part of the conference allowed interested parties to give formal papers or organize traditional panels at the Caribbean Studies Association (CSA) meetings, which were held simultaneously at the Hilton Hotel. Jayaram coordinated with the program cochairs (Angelique Nixon and Marie-­José Nzengou-­Tayo) and the president of CSA (Carole Boyce-­Davies)

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so that participants could flag their submissions as TH-­related, thus helping their acceptance and scheduling. The CSA organizers also helped Jayaram, who, after reaching out to a listserv of TH supporters, completed the process whereby TH was proposed, voted on, and approved as an official working group of the CSA, which happened at the CSA Business Meeting. Thus TH had established a renewable institutional presence. As another TH-­inspired project, in 2019, Kiran C. Jayaram and Luisa Rollins Castillo coorganized a workshop entitled “Island Anthropologies: Knowledge Production in Haiti and the Dominican Republic” with the Wenner-­Gren Foundation, which provided most of the funding for the event.50 The workshop contributed to world anthropologies by fostering cross-­border discussions of the past, present, and future of social and cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, ethnology, and archaeology in the context of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The organizers designed the program to develop a “genuine science of humankind” by supporting conversations that transcended national and linguistic divisions of scholars and scholarship, by working collaboratively to consider the relevance of Haitian and Dominican Republic studies to broader theoretical debates within anthropology, by increasing the participation of historically marginalized people (including indigenous and African diasporic populations and women) within international academic exchange, and by recognizing anthropologies beyond the Anglophone North Atlantic.51 The workshop’s three goals were to (1) place in conversation scholars from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and beyond who work on the island on anthropologies of social inequality, migration, and environment, and cultural heritage; (2) discuss the history of such inquiry and training in Haiti and the Dominican Republic; and (3) discuss how future research and teaching of anthropology and archaeology within Haiti and the Dominican Republic can use south-­south exchanges to contribute to broader engagements. The organizers anticipate publishing the proceedings in the Dominican Republic (in Spanish), Haiti (Kreyòl), and the United States (English). In a sense, this workshop works against the recent trends identified by Slocum and Thomas in Caribbean research by promoting collaborative scholarship among the social sciences.52

Current Research and Future Questions Before concluding with questions for future research, we highlight some current research projects as a part of the TH intellectual social formation. Many of the participants from the TH conferences continue to produce knowledge from their work within social sciences, humanities, and interdisciplinary studies. Within the domain of applied research, Tahira Vargas (independent researcher), Fátima Portorreal (Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo), Bridget Wooding (Observatorio Migrantes del Caribe), and Rachelle Doucet (Université Quisqueya) make important contributions to pressing social issues facing the island’s populations. Among the TH-­affiliated social sciences, Ana Maria Belique Delba has given her sociological reflexive analysis of what she calls “civil genocide,” Marion Werner

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has examined how local actors contest unequal geographies of power within an island-­wide and global capitalist system, and Cruz Bueno has demonstrated how intimate-­partner violence in the Dominican Republic requires the consideration of broader political, economic, and social factors.53 From anthropology, Scott Freeman is working on imaginaries associated with vetiver, an essential component to many high-­end European perfumes, and Jennifer Shoaff has depicted the struggles that some Haitian migrant women have faced associated with their mobility in the Dominican Republic.54 Scholars of humanities, gender studies, and the arts continue to contribute to a TH-­related agenda. Jhon Picard Byron has continued his scholarship on anthropological knowledge production within Haiti.55 Gina Ulysse edited an important volume of E-misférica on transnational feminism and sexuality with a contribution by TH II conference organizer, Carlos Decena.56 Erin Durban-­Albrecht analyzed anti-­LGBTQ+ violence in Haiti in 2013.57 Within the arts, Angelina Tallaj describes new musical styles rooted in Dominican migrant experiences in New York.58 In 2018, musician and scholar Paul Austerlitz released a trilogy of albums that combines U.S. jazz with Dominican and Haitian music, and Sanba Zao and his partner, Mireille, continue performing and composing in Haiti and around the world.59 April J. Mayes is currently conducting ethno-­historical research along the U.S.-­Mexico borderlands, a space that quite recently has become a transit site and a home for Haitians leaving Brazil, Venezuela, and Chile. This project aims to disrupt two ideas: that the U.S.-­Mexico border has been defined only in relation to U.S. westward expansion and that the ideology of Manifest Destiny was limited to mainland conquest. Mayes argues that the recent presence of Haitians along the U.S.-­Mexico border demonstrates that restrictions on mobility and the militarization of the border has historically accompanied U.S. expansion across the continent and into the Caribbean since the nineteenth century. Mayes argues that the dynamic of expansion and exclusion in combination with the persistent movements of enslaved and then freed people of African ancestry through and within the boundaries of the U.S. empire help redefine Latin America as a conceptual landscape to include Haiti/Hispaniola. At the same time, Mayes uses ethnographic methodologies to analyze how Haitian migrants in three locales along the U.S.-­Mexico border—­Tijuana / San Diego; Nogales, Mexico/Nogales, Arizona; and Mexicali/Calexico—­learn to navigate Mexican governmental and educational institutions and become Haitians in dyaspora, supporting families in Haiti while creating and maintaining transnational families in the border zone. Mayes also investigates how religious belief, particularly evangelical Protestantism, informs the meanings Haitians give to their migratory experiences. Kiran C. Jayaram’s most recent work has concerned the meaning of mangoes in postearthquake Haiti.60 In addition to building on Sidney Mintz’s work, the article engages with scholarship on rural labor and the domestic unit. It examines the social consequences of rural Haitians’ participation in the production of a commodity destined for grocery stores in the North Atlantic. Jayaram argues that the growth and harvesting of Haitian mangoes for export lead to a differentiation

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between those who can organize labor according to monetized relations and those who incorporate the domestic unit into commodity production. Furthermore, as more production shifts to work based on monetized relations, the balance of economic power shifts toward adult men. Obviously, the above references do not capture all the TH-­related scholarship. We see TH as an ongoing project that invites participation from scholars around the world, especially those in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. To that end, we conclude with questions about what to study and considerations about who will participate in future research regarding this island.61 First, scholars need to address what the geographic imaginations in their work are. Do research questions require a focus within the confines of a single country or are scholarly works implicitly nation-­centric and methodologically nationalist?62 Clarifying such boundaries would move us toward sounding out—­rather than silencing—­the historical, ecological, demographic, economic, and political connections between the two countries. Second, going beyond previous imaginations will lead us to questions about the guiding concepts for Haitian and Dominican research that may require reconsideration. For example, what do we learn when we juxtapose knowledge of a “Pacific exceptionalism” with the exceptionalism associated with Haiti?63 Haiti has been associated with many taglines and symbols, which new narratives should counteract, but does Haiti require such change more than other countries do? Third, how does our research address the pressing issues of our time? As Deborah Thomas and Karla Slocum propose for Caribbean scholarship, this rightly includes scholarship on women’s movements, contemporary social movements, refugee and deportee studies, drug-­related violence, and second-­or third-­generation migrant family members, which several TH-­affiliated scholars have conducted.64 Beyond this, where is the concentration of scholarship in Haiti and the Dominican Republic on climate change; on human migration to places outside of the North Atlantic (including novel forms of mobility); on contemporary movements of people, money, and commodities from China; on pharmaceuticals and other industrial commodities in less than industrialized spaces; on so-­called global humanistic imperatives (e.g., millennium development goals); on the state; on national elites; and on middle classes? Beyond those directions, studies in the fields of archaeology, biological anthropology, and many natural sciences remain to be undertaken. Lastly, we pose the question of who is involved in research and other ISFs. Beyond the island, Haitians, Dominicans, and their descendants have played major roles in knowledge production about the island and diasporic populations, as seen in the important work that has emerged from the Haitian Studies Association and the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute. Would it be useful to cultivate ISFs between diasporic scholars and those living and working on the island for the practical and scholarly good while avoiding Americocentrism?65 Next, the island has been inundated with education abroad programs, nongovernmental organizations, missionaries, foreign medical teams, and other patchwork development squads. What is our relationship with them? Further consideration regarding collaboration

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concerns language and money. How can we overcome scholars’ linguistic limitations to contribute to a more robust intellectual discussion and broader community of scholars? This would yield novel data and research questions. Economically, how can we support academic collaboration on the island in the face of increasingly limited funds available only for research along market or national security imperatives? Finally, what role should governments play in our efforts? We are committed to continued work with scholars, artists, and practitioners to grow the ISF that is TH. In this era of “fake news” and an increasingly emboldened xenophobic minority, such socially relevant research is needed more than ever. Yet we also hope that our labors will continue to “disturb mental habits,” as Michel-­ Rolph Trouillot reminds us, regarding an understanding of the positions in the world of this thing called Haiti, the thing called the Dominican Republic, their relationship, and all of the island’s peoples across the globe.66

Notes 1. This became a point of interesting conversations during the thirty-­fourth congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), held in New York City, May 27–­­30, 2016. Three panels, one of which was the official panel of the Haiti–­Dominican Republic section of LASA that year, addressed cross-­border relations centrally. “Border Crossings in Recent Scholarship in Haiti and the Dominican Republic” featured the work of emerging scholars, “Transborder and Binational Relations between Haitians and Dominicans” was a workshop organized by Henry (Chip) F. Carey and chaired by Yolanda Martín that involved various commentaries about cross-­island relations, and “Citizenship Laws and Human Rights Discourses in the Dominican Republic and Haiti” highlighted historical and contemporary perspectives on nation-­state formations across the island. During the discussion after the panel, “Citizenship and Human Rights,” April J. Mayes wondered aloud if the wrong lessons had been learned from years of scholarship about Dominican and Haitian transnationalism. 2. Michel-­Rolph Trouillot, Haiti, State against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990). 3. Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, “Towards a Definition of Transnationalism: Introductory Remarks and Research Questions,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 645 (1992): ix–­xiv. 4. Glick Schiller, Basch, and Szanton Blanc, ix. 5. Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, “Transnationalism: A New Analytic Framework for Understanding Migration,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 645 (1992): 5. 6. Nina Glick Schiller and Noel Salazar, “Regimes of Mobility across the Globe,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39, no. 2 (2013): 183–­200. See also Noel Salazar and Kiran Jayaram, Keywords of Mobility: Critical Engagements (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016). 7. Sidney N. Mintz, “The So-­Called World System: Local Initiative and Local Response,” Dialectical Anthropology 2, no. 4 (1977): 253–­270. See also Sidney N. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1986). 8. David Geggus, “The Naming of Haiti,” New West Indian Guide 71, no. 1/2 (1997): 43. 9. This choice was made in sharp contrast to an earlier decision made by our colleagues and mentors, Henry (Chip) F. Carey and Emelio Betances, founders of the Haiti–­Dominican Republic section of LASA in 1998–­1999. 10. Maj. R. Stuart, “Haïti, or Hispaniola,” Journal of the Royal Geographic Society 48 (1878): 234. 11. Stuart, 234. 12. Stuart, 234.

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13. In Spanish, the Dominicans agreed to la Isla de Santo Domingo o Haití. See Dantès Bellegarde, “Haïti ou Hispaniola,” Revue de la Sociéte d’Histoire et de Géographie d’Haïti 6, no. 17 (1935): 5. 14. U.S. Geographic Board, Fifth Report of the United States Geographic Board 1890–­1920, prepared by Charles S. Sloane (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1921), 113. 15. Trent Palmer, email to April J. Mayes, July 2, 2018. 16. Bellegarde, “Haïti ou Hispaniola,” 5. 17. Bellegarde, 5. 18. “¿Debe cambiarse el nombre de la isla?,” Revista de Educación 3, no. 12 (1931): 162–­184. 19. Odette Roy Fombrun, “Rename the Island: Quisqueya, Not Hispaniola,” Ile-­ en-­ ile, accessed January  11, 2003, http://​i le​-en​-ile​.org/​odette​-roy​-fombrun​-rename​-the​-island​ -quisqueya​-not​-hispaniola/. Notably, Fombrun published her most cited book, Ayiti des Indiens, in 1992 to mark the five-­hundreth anniversary of the beginning of the genocide of the indigenous people of the Americas. 20. Trent Palmer, personal communication with the author, July 2, 2018. 21. Rachelle Charlier Doucet, “Haïti, Quisqueya ou Bohio: Comment donc appeler cette île?,” Alterpresse, July 15, 2011, http://​w ww​.alterpresse​.org/​spip​.php​?article11280. In a later article, Doucet more strongly recommends that the two countries should come together to decide a name and recommend it jointly to the Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names. Rachelle Charlier Doucet, “«Quisqueya», «Quisqueyens», les enjeux d’une appellation,” Le Nouvelliste, February  12, 2014, https://​lenouvelliste​.com/​a rticle/​127447/​quisqueya​ -quisqueyens​-les​-enjeux​-dune​-appellation. 22. Odette Roy Fombrun, “A Rachel Charlier Doucet, en réponse à son article: Haïti, Quisqueya ou Bohio. Comment donc appeler cette ile?,” Le Matin, July 22, 2011, http://​lematinhaiti​ .com. 23. Kiran C. Jayaram, personal communication with the author, August 16, 2015. 24. April J. Mayes et al., “Transnational Hispaniola: Towards New Paradigms in Haitian and Dominican Studies,” Radical History Review 115 (2013): 26–­32. 25. The term resembles electoral politics (Michel-­Rolph Trouillot, “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness,” in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present [Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press, 1991]), but it synthesizes historical context with social dynamics and practices of knowledge production. 26. Kevin A. Yelvington, “‘A Conference That Didn’t’: African Diaspora Studies and an Episode in Anthropology’s Identity Politics of Representation,” Critique of Anthropology 38, no. 4 (2018): 408. See also Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941). 27. For more on how Latin American anthropologists reinforced race in their respective contexts, see Anke Birkenmaier, The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature between the Wars (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016). 28. Yelvington, “‘Conference That Didn’t,’” 407–­432. In a cogent summary of the concept’s model, Yelvington uses the terms production of knowledge, reproduction of knowledge, institutionalization of knowledge, and reception of knowledge. 29. For example, Jean Price-­Mars’s emphasis on traits linked to Africa simultaneously acted as a critique of the collective bovarysme of certain Haitian populations as well as a political move toward a new Haitian identity forged in the fires of U.S. military occupation. This position differs from the meaning of Herskovits’s ideas in the United States, which sought to attack one of “the principal supports of race prejudice in this country” (Myth of the Negro Past, 1) by demonstrating the value of African cultural traits within a diasporic context. 30. Maria Cristina Fumagalli, On the Edge: Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). 31. Antenor Firmin, The Equality of Human Races: Positivist Anthropology, trans. Asselin Charles (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002). The authors note that one critique of Firmin is that he never fundamentally questions the notion of race—­only that of racial hierarchy. 32. Firmin, 68.

t r a n s n a t i o n a l h i s p a n i o l a 237 33. Robert Gentil and Henri Chauvet, Grande geographie de l’ile d’Haïti (Paris: Imprimerie Goupy, 1896), 30. 34. See Kevin A. Yelvington, “Constituting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora, 1900–­1950,” Black Scholar 41, no. 1 (2011): 64–­76; “The Invention of Africa in Latin America and the Caribbean: Political Discourse and Anthropological Praxis, 1920–­1940,” in Afro-­Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora, ed. Kevin A. Yelvington (Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press, 2006), 35–­82; and “‘Conference That Didn’t’” for a discussion of one ISF in which Jean Price-­Mars figured. 35. Gérard Pierre-­Charles, Política y sociología en Haití y la República Dominicana (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1974), 9. 36. Pierre-­Charles and Castor were living in exile in Mexico at the time. Intellectual ties between Haiti and Mexico extend from the present moment back at least to the 1940s. As Dr. Saint Paul, director of the CUNY Institute of Haitian Studies, earned his doctoral degree at the Colegio de México; Rémy Bastien earned his doctoral degree at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in the late 1940s; and ethnologist Jacques Roumain was posted to Mexico in 1942. 37. Pierre-­Charles, Política y sociología, 11. 38. This model is best demonstrated in the work of Michele Wucker, Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999). Implicitly, it can be found in Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Penguin, 2005). Indeed, one might argue that the conflict model itself rests on a deliberate decision not to engage with Haitian and Dominican scholars. See also Samuel Martínez, “Not a Cockfight: Rethinking Haitian-­Dominican Relations,” Latin American Perspectives 30, no. 3 (2003): 80–­101. 39. Mayes et al., “Transnational Hispaniola,” 26–­27; see also April J. Mayes and Kiran C. Jayaram, Transnational Hispaniola: New Directions in Haitian and Dominican Studies (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018). 40. Jean Lave, Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 12. 41. Mayes et al., “Transnational Hispaniola,” 26–­32. See also Centro Bonó, “Programa Transnational Hispaniola,” issuu​.com, June 1, 2010, https://​issuu​.com/​comunicacionbono/​ docs/​programa​_transnational​_ hispaniola; Mayes and Jayaram, Transnational Hispaniola. 42. Centro Bonó, “Programa Transnational Hispaniola.” 43. Before the event, some Dominican supporters bristled at the idea of presentations in their country in English, a notion that was countered by the reminder that many descendants from British colonies in the Dominican Republic are still native English and Spanish speakers. 44. Mayes et al., “Transnational Hispaniola,” 26–­32. An audience member stopped the presentation after one minute because of her concern that few people in attendance understood Haitian Creole. 45. Mayes et al., 26–­32. 46. Mayes et al., 26–­32. 47. Rutgers University, TH2_Program.pdf, accessed June 29, 2018, https://​libguides​.rutgers​ .edu/​ld​.php​?content​_ id​=​13707908. 48. Mayes and Jayaram, Transnational Hispaniola. 49. Special thanks go to Indran Amirthanayagam (U.S. Embassy) and Melissa Adelman (World Bank). 50. The Museo del Hombre Dominicano, the Biblioteca Nacional, and the University of South Florida provided essential support as well. 51. Faye Harrison, Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation, 2nd ed. (Arlington, Va.: American Anthropological Association, 1997). 52. Deborah A. Thomas and Karla Slocum, “Caribbean Studies, Anthropology, and U.S. Academic Realignments,” Souls 10, no. 2 (2008): 123–­137. 53. Ana Maria Belique Delba, “Genocidio civil de dominicanos y dominicanas de ascendencia haitiana en la República Dominicana,” Meridional 10 (2018): 179–­186. See also Marion Werner, Global Displacements: The Making of Uneven Development in the Caribbean (Malden,

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Mass.: Wiley Blackwell, 2015). On intimate partner violence in the Dominican Republic, see Cruz Caridad Bueno, “Bargaining or Backlash? Evidence on Intimate Partner Violence from the Dominican Republic,” Feminist Economics 23, no. 4 (2017): 90–­116. 54. Scott Freeman, “Perfume and Planes: Ignorance and Imagination in Haiti’s Vetiver Oil Industry,” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 24, no. 1 (2019): 110–­126. See also Jennifer Shoaff, Borders of Visibility: Haitian Migrant Women and the Dominican Nation-­ State (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017). 55. Jhon Picard Byron, Production du savoir et construction sociale: L’ethnologie en Haïti (Laval, Quebec: Presses de l’Université de Laval, 2014). 56. Gina A. Ulysse, ed., “Special Issue: Caribbean Rasanblaj,” e-mesférica 12, no. 1 (2015), https://​hemisphericinstitute​.org/​en/​emisferica​-121​-caribbean​-rasanblaj​.html. 57. Erin Durban-­Albrecht, “Performing Postcolonial Homophobia: An Analysis of the 2013 Public Demonstrations against Same-­Sex Marriage in Haiti,” Women & Performance 27, no. 2 (2017): 160–­175. 58. Angelina Tallaj, “Dominican Migrants, Plural Identities, and Popular Music,” American History Review 46, no. 2 (2017): 1–­7. 59. Paul Austerlitz, Marasa Twa/Magic Triplet/Vodou-­Jazz-­Merengue. Santo Domingo: Round Whirled Records, 2018, compact disc. 60. Jayaram, “Fruits of Colonialism,” 461–­482. 61. Many of these apply to all knowledge production, but we feel they bear repeating in the context of establishing a research agenda. 62. Myriam Jimeno, “Naciocentrismo: Tensiones y configuraciones en la antropología sociocultural colombiana,” Revista Colombiana de Antropología 41 (2007): 9–­32. 63. Teresia K. Teaiwa, “On Analogies: Rethinking the Pacific in a Global Context,” Contemporary Pacific 18, no. 1 (2006): 71–­87. 64. Thomas and Slocum, “Caribbean Studies,” 123–­137. 65. Leon Wainwright, “Americocentrism and Art of the Caribbean: Contours of a Time–­Space Logic,” Journal of American Studies 47 (2013): 417–­438. 66. Michel-­Rolph Trouillot, “Theorizing a Global Perspective,” Crosscurrents 4, no. 1 (1996): 3.

chapter 16

z New Points of the Rhizome rethinking caribbean relation in u.s. latinx poetry Emily A. Maguire

“What took place in the Caribbean, which could be summed up in the word creolization, approximates the idea of Relation for us as nearly as possible. It is not merely an encounter, a shock . . . a métissage, but a new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea, in harmony and in errantry.”1 This is Martinican writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant describing Relation, a term he proposes as a replacement for what he deems the static concept of universalism. Relation, for Glissant, is a dynamic mode of circulation, dialogue, and exchange, a way of being in the midst of multiple nodes of cultural contact. A “poetics of Relation,” which Glissant proposes in his 1990 book of the same name, takes this kind of multivalent interaction to the space of poetic discourse: “The landscape of your word is the world’s landscape. But its frontier is open.”2 A poetics of Relation celebrates travel and encounter, allowing for transformation and change without collapsing into generality. As Glissant’s statement indicates, the Martinican writer views the Caribbean as a paradigmatic space of Relation. Although Poetics of Relation marked an opening out of his Caribbean-­centered focus from his earlier work Le discours Antillais (Caribbean Discourse; 1981) towards more philosophical and poetic questions, his presentation of Relation begins from his understanding of the region.3 He recognizes the history of the circum-­Caribbean—­marked by colonization, slavery, and numerous subsequent exilic and errant journeys—­as having produced writers, St. John Perse and William Faulkner among them, whose work is fundamentally Relational in nature. Even as Glissant’s later writing expanded out from Relation to what he termed “archipelagic thinking,” he continued to see the Caribbean as a generative space. As Michael Wiedorn observes, “The play of rootedness and relation that the tiny countries of the Caribbean have long known so well looks very much like 239

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the radical interconnection within difference that is (for [Glissant]) the hallmark of the (post)modern condition.”4 Although the Caribbean may not occupy the centrality it once did in world economies, the movements of errantry and exile that take place in the region continue to be symptomatic of movements of people. Indeed, the early 1990s, when Glissant introduced his idea of Relation, was only beginning to see the intensity in the movement of populations and information that has characterized the following decades. In our new(ish) millennium, in which islands and their diasporas are engaged in an ever more complex interweaving and copenetration, Relation, as both an actual and a literary “interconnectedness within diversity,” seems more relevant than ever.5 Celia Britton argues, rightly, that Relation is the cornerstone of Glissant’s philosophy and a key to the anti-­imperialist aspects of his thought: “‘Relation’ is in the first place a relation of equality with and respect for the Other as different from oneself. It applies to cultures but more especially to other cultures and other societies.”6 This dynamics of ethical being is also important for conceptualizing how to relate to the other-­in-­self. Just as he contraposes Relation and universalism, Glissant contrasts what he sees as the dynamic unpredictability of creolization against the static purity of hybridity. With Relation, Glissant articulates identity as a process (rather than a static construction) achieved through engagement with the other rather than in isolation. Building on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, he contrasts rhizomatic identity, secured in Relation, with an identity anchored in a single root.7 In rhizomatic thought, “each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the other.”8 As Wiedorn observes, while root identity is focused on a past origin (often singular), rhizomatic identity reaches out to other cultures in the present.9 Where root identity is monolingual and monocultural, rhizomatic identity, formed through Relation, exists in multiplicity. In their dynamic, ethical relationship with alterity, I believe that new writing coming out of the Caribbean’s diasporas is perhaps more exemplary of a poetics of Relation than the literary masters (García Márquez et al.) that Glissant himself mentions in Poetics of Relation. Latinx-­Caribbean writers today are directly taking up some of the themes that the Martinican philosopher identifies as central to Relation: multilingualism, the flexibility of genres, and the relationship between orality and written literature, in particular. In thinking about the new ways in which Relation might be continuing to operate, I return to Glissant’s characterization of the poetics of Relation as “a modern form of the sacred.”10 For Caribbean—­and especially for Latinx-­Caribbean—­writers today, Relation is not something to be gleaned from reading between the lines. Rather, it exists as a thematic leitmotif, as a generative understanding, and above all as a kind of identitarian-­spiritual praxis. This is true as much for authors writing from the Caribbean—­Mara Pastor, Jon Torres—­as it is for those newly in diaspora, such as Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, or those who were raised in diaspora communities (Aracelis Girmay and Yesenia Montilla are two writers who come to mind). In order to show how a poetics of Relation operates in recent Latinx-­Caribbean literature, this chapter turns to poetry, specifically the work of two Latinx-­Caribbean poets, Urayoán Noel and

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Adrian Castro. Approaching Relation from strikingly different, sui-­generis modes of poetic praxis, Noel and Castro nonetheless both inhabit, enact, and expand upon Glissant’s rhizomatic thinking of alterity. Raised in Puerto Rico by an American father and a Puerto Rican mother, Urayoán Noel identifies himself on his website as “a stateless poet.”11 Although the term stateless can be read as a barbed reference to Puerto Rico’s status, Noel goes on to elaborate, “The moniker ‘stateless’ refers to the poet’s flux between island and mainland, and between textual forms (print, body, web). Of course, it also alludes to the ultimate ‘statelessness’ of identity, and to a poetics of unstatement by turns deterritorialized and (dys/utopian) in its damaged/ unmanageable bodies.”12 Noel thus characterizes himself and his work as not only constituted through movement but as embodying errantry or “flux.” This is perhaps most clearly visible in his linguistic choices. As I have noted previously, his texts, including Las flores del Mall (2003), Kool Logic (2005), Boringkén (2008), Hi-­Density Politics (2010), Edgemere Letters (2013), and Buzzing Hemispheres (2015), occupy what I have elsewhere called “an interzone beyond Spanish and English” through the way in which they code-­switch, pun, and self-­translate.13 At the same time, Noel’s work is in dialogue with a truly trans-­American body of writing that reflects not only his peers and contemporaries but also what Harris Feinsod has called a “poetry of the Americas,” a corpus that includes Latin American avant-­garde writers, American language poets, and writers from contemporary Latinx and African American slam poetry scenes.14 The Miami-­based son of Cuban and Dominican parents, Adrian Castro, like Noel, displays an awareness of the fraught nature of movement and cultural exchange in the region as well as the possibilities that arise from them. His three books of poetry, Cantos to Blood and Honey (1997), Wise Fish: Tales in 6/8 Time (2005), and Handling Destiny (2009), inhabit a world shaped by the Caribbean region, its histories of colonization and slavery, its various diasporas and exiles. His poetry is similarly linguistically marked by these journeys, shifting fluidly between English and Spanish (although without Noel’s commitment to translation or afán for wordplay). Castro’s texts also pay homage to a range of intellectual and artistic influences from across the Americas, including the Cuban visual artist José Bedia, Mexican writer Octavio Paz, Nuyorican poet Víctor Hernández Cruz, and African American choreographer/ethnographer Katherine Dunham. Reflecting on Castro’s work in a critical essay, Noel identifies Castro as one of a group of Latinx poets who practice an “undocumentary poetics”: “a poetics that works against the supposed neutrality of the documentary by performing its loyalties, highlighting its autoethnographic component.”15 Grounded in the histories and cultures of Cuba and the Dominican Republic yet reaching out to other (diasporic) spaces, particularly the pan-­Caribbean and pan-­Latinx spaces of South Florida and New York, Castro’s poetry both mines the broad richness and common elements of transcultural engagement and zeroes in on the details and challenges of life in these contact zones. The idea of an “undocumentary poetics,” which speaks to the dynamics of a Relational existence within diversity, could just as easily be applied to Noel’s own poetic production. Despite—­or perhaps because of—­his

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description of himself and his work as “stateless,” his writing works to establish a connection to the specificities of place, whether that place be Puerto Rico, San Francisco, New York, or Tampa. Noel’s and Castro’s work shares with that of contemporaries like Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez a desire to excavate the past within the present, a need to understand present experiences (and memories) as shaped by histories of unequal encounter. What both Castro and Noel bring to a poetics of Relation is a renewed focus on embodied encounters alongside—­or in addition to—­literary trajectories. Castro’s work does this via its movement within an Afro-­Caribbean spiritual world. Castro is a priest of Ifá, a philosophical and divinatory path related to the Yoruba-­derived religious tradition popularly known as Santería, and his poems are permeated with allusions to Ifá as well as other African-­derived Caribbean religious systems such as Cuban Abakuá, Brazilian Candomblé, Jamaican Obeah, and Haitian Vodou. Ifá ritual appears in Castro’s work as part of a daily reality. His texts become both evidence of and participants in a world in which the sacred is everywhere; the ritual actions and material elements of Afro-­Caribbean spiritual practice function as the “glue” that connects the general with the specific, allowing for a progressively more complex exploration of Relational trajectories (including the African spaces where these practices arose). Just as initiates into Afro-­Cuban religious practice gain a new “mother” and/or “father” (technically, a godmother or godfather, a madrina or padrino) as they become part of a religious community, Castro’s poetry proposes the creation of a new Relational family through the various kinships that his poems establish with “fathers” and “mothers” both literary and spiritual. If Relation operates in Castro’s work via an exploration of the fundamental role played by the African diaspora in shaping Caribbean culture, Noel reshapes Relation through the profoundly performative and dialogic nature of his work. The speaker in Noel’s poetry is engaged in a multiplicity of dialogues—­intertextually, with an array of other writers; with the fellow denizens of the often urban spaces he chronicles; and with the reader, from whom Noel’s poems frequently demand an active, performative engagement. Even as his texts acknowledge the complex dynamics of different geographic and cultural sites, the speaker in his poems articulates the extended search for interlocutor(s) who, beyond dialogue, can provide embodied connection, a search that finds its most concrete gesture in Noel’s own connection to the performance of poetry. Simply put, both Noel’s and Castro’s poems forge Relation through relations—­concrete communication that is both linguistic and physical. They insert a key element of emotional affect into the ethical-­situational positioning that Glissant understands as Relation.

Many-­L ayered Crossings: Adrian Castro’s Reinscription of the Sacred Allusions to Afro-­Caribbean spiritual belief and religious practice function in various ways in Castro’s texts. Figurative references to orishas (gods or goddesses) and the inclusion of elements of religious rituals operate in a culturally descriptive

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way to create an atmosphere and, from a religious perspective, as tropes that add multiple levels of meaning to a text. Afro-­Cuban religion is present on a musical, rhythmic level—­what Noel terms “full visual, corporeal, and sonic engagement”—­ that at times allows Castro’s poems themselves to enact a ritual.16 Finally, Castro’s poetry maintains what could be called an intracorporeal intertextuality: his poems revisit scenes or images multiple times, a technique that communicates a thematic coherence and enhances the ritual-­like quality of his writing as we return to perform or witness the ceremony again. Through these elements, the incantatory nature of his texts establishes a close relationship between the spiritual power of the word and poetry’s own creative and communicative force. Wise Fish: Tales in 6/8 Time, Castro’s second book of poetry, is a good place to witness the poet’s continued reworkings of ritual symbols and gestures across time and space. The collection is organized around two central leitmotifs: (1) the clave, rhythmic center of son and salsa, as well as much African-­derived religious music, and (2) the titular “wise fish,” who appears in numerous poems of the collection. On a secular level, the “wise fish” becomes a metaphor for the traveler, the savvy Caribbean migrant who must cross water and learn to survive and thrive in new environments. A “wise fish” not only completes but also successfully learns from the journey, as in the final stanza of “1959—­the First Mass (for Instance),” the first poem in the collection: This is why We arrived with integrity (in spite of the chaos of the Florida Straits in spite of the waves with fins that nibble at the identity)—­ why we’ve become mostly wise fish (ae!     aeeeeee!)17

Wise fish is a survivor, someone who can survive the “chaos” of physical, cultural, and linguistic transitions. Yet the Florida Straits are very specific waters; the title of the poem makes reference to the Cuban Revolution and thus suggests that the crossing is a Cuban journey of exile. The dangers that await those “fish” who cross are not just physical but psychological: things that “nibble at the identity.” Wise fish, then, are those who can maintain their “integrity,” who can avoid losing parts of themselves in the crossing—­and who can implicitly avoid the negative pressures of assimilation once arrived. As a survivor, there is the sense that wise fish bear witness to the struggles of others. In “Un Rezo to Reconcile,” a poem that meditates on the tragedies and dangers of ocean crossings (rezo being Spanish for “prayer”), the wise fish appear in the poem’s final lines: And there are wise fish who circle the bridge they hear fumbled memories witness new arrivals

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cloaked in a mantle of indigo hands stained by silver breath they huddle to send smoke signals to whoever will listen18

These wise fish do more than watch the newcomers arrive from across the water; they gather up the tales of these journeys and share them. If, to continue from the previous poem, wise fish are those who survive the crossing with themselves intact, then they are also the mediators, those who can move between worlds, translating for those who are just arriving. They are, in short, the perfect figures for a discourse of Relation. As it appears in “Un Rezo to Reconcile” and “1959—­the First Mass,” the figure of the “wise fish” seems at first glance to be a secular metaphor for surviving the forces of change brought to bear on those undergoing diasporic journeys. For someone familiar with Afro-­Cuban religious traditions, however, the wise fish might also recall Tanzé, the fish that appears in one of the foundational narratives of the Abakuá religious tradition in Cuba as the repository of spiritual knowledge and power.19 Through his voice (the drum), Tanzé’s power became, for the Abakuá, the secret at the heart of their spiritual practice. In the context of this legend, the “wise fish” could be understood as a materialization of godliness, someone moving in the world of the illumination of spirit. Those “wise fish” who witness the crossings (and struggles) of others thus bear witness even as they are connected to something else that sustains them. Yet as this spiritual symbol, the wise fish is not merely a witness but also a voice, one who can give testimony. Castro’s poem “Back Home a Splash Can Only Come from a Fish” explores the significance of the wise fish as both relational storyteller and spiritual witness. The poem begins at the banks of a river, “where my mother sprung from,” a statement that may allude simultaneously to the speaker’s heritage and to Oshún, the orisha connected to fresh water. We are in Africa, far from “this portal in el Caribe,” yet the Caribbean is present in the poem as a window into this space and others. The poem goes on to describe a ritual offering at the river, where “small shadowy fish” are present as people make offerings at the water’s edge. Moving away from the scene of the ritual, the poem’s last stanza offers a directive: “They said to perform this ceremony back home / with a red African Grey feather on your head—­/ you will remember the countless miles traveled / stories only wise fish can tell.”20 The speaker is a spiritual conduit; his performance establishes a connection between “back home” and the site of the sacred river, bringing new life as the ritual is re-­ created in a new place. The repetition of the ceremony memorializes the speaker’s trajectory and reveals how the ritual has changed through the journeying. The red feather—­placed on the head of an initiate as a sign of protection—­is not the same as the “red feathers for dorsals” revealed by the small river fish, just as the original river is far away from its Caribbean counterpart, but the wise fish carries the experience of both these places with him. As Noel puts it, he is “both attuned to motion and weighted down by space and geography.”21 With the parrot feather, an echo of the feathery fins of the African fish, on his head, the speaker enacts not only the

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transcultural ritual itself but also the witnessing. Only a “wise fish”—­someone who can hold these multiple awarenesses within himself—­can give voice to these stories that are at once secular and spiritual. Castro returns to the scene at the river and to the images of the red-­finned fish and the red feather in “Petition at Oshún River,” a poem from Handling Destiny, his third collection.22 This time, the poem’s title clearly locates the river ritual in Africa and identifies the “mother” mentioned in both poems as Oshún, implicitly the speaker’s spiritual “mother.” The temporally indeterminate ritual scene described in “Back Home” becomes two ritual moments (and two distinct stanzas) in “Petition”: a past “once” that alludes to a historic moment of need—­ “Once they arrived fleeing aggressors with indigo turbans & / horseback”—­and a contemporary “now” that shows how the site has acquired the status of a religious monument: “Now at the gateway open twin brass doors / fish & people-­like figures swell from metal / they welcome women who come carrying calabashes / in the name of fertility and community.”23 The fish’s appearance on these formal doors reveals that just as the original petition has become codified and ritualized through practice, the fish have moved from their first witnessing of the ritual (when they “chorused the petition”) to occupying an official position: You arrive at the riverbank with certain leaves selected throughout Oshogbo an empty calabash black soap You wash your head kneeling To form it like water shapeless & necessary The feathered fish streams its response rinses the black soap you petition again for peace24

Here the fish are not fellow supplicants but something closer to officiates, approving and sealing the ceremony. The Caribbean practitioner in “Back Home” seems to be observing the African ritual so that he can perform it at home. The Caribbean initiate in “Petition” enacts his first version of the ritual where it began, allowing the sacred water to “form” his head, thus shaping his story. Although the practitioner is addressed in the second person, three lines in parentheses prior to the ritual—­“(Having come from across the waters / survived the onslaught of man / to re-­tell history with your words)”—­connect his ritual actions with the poetic voice. In addition to communicating a sense of thematic coherence, this enhances the ritual-­like quality of his writing; we return to perform or witness the ceremony again, even if the details or conditions of the ritual are different each time. Just as the fish have evolved in their functions, the speaker is now both religious supplicant and writerly “wise fish,” renewing his faith and connecting rituals across continents and centuries.

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Rhythm provides another arena in which Castro’s poetry utilizes Afro-­ Caribbean spiritual elements to create an atmosphere of Relation. Castro’s loose and dynamic free verse is both shaped by and punctuated by rhythm. His poetic line breaks guide the reading of his poems, and many of his poems utilize both extensive musical or rhythmic onomatopoeia and call-­and-­response elements. Music is also present thematically; drums are frequent presences in his poetry, as are references to famous drummers and conga players (Chano Pozo, Mongo Santamaría). Castro is not, of course, the first Latinx poet to represent rhythm on the page. His poetry is marked by the work of predecessors—­such as Vicente Hernández Cruz, particularly his Snaps (1969), and Quincy Troupe—­and by the rhythms of Beat poetry and spoken-­word verse. What sets his work apart with respect to rhythm is the strong connection between sound and religious utterance. Through both the descriptive inclusion of drums and the re-­creation of their rhythm, his poems evoke scenes of musical performance both religious and secular, conjuring a poetic worldview in which music becomes another language of sharing and cultural and personal exchange. “Music & Guarachas When Stories Sound Too Tall” (Cantos to Blood and Honey) exemplifies the ways in which Castro uses rhythm to connect Latinx-­ Caribbean culture with Afro-­Caribbean spirituality. The poem’s speaker begins by declaring both his musical intentions and cultural affinities: “Enough of bogus stories / the moment has come / for a guaracha.”25 The speaker’s identification of his poem as a guaracha, the Cuban rhythm par excellence, lets us know we are in a Latinx-­Caribbean space. The poem then functions like a camera close-­up; rather than describing a scene from a panoramic narrative view, it builds it through details, engaging all the senses: Warm rain drums on dancing pavements seeming as if roads were puffing tabaco smoke at the rain Their union puffing rings of hope their union playing a furious clave:         one-­two one            two-­three took-­took took           took-­took That sonorous groove infecting even chickens Cuba with her rumba infecting even sugar cane Santo Domingo with merengue infecting even the coqui Puerto Rico with her plena26

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The guaracha begins not with musical instruments but with the natural environment: the beat of the rain against a hot summer pavement, the steam rising from the hot ground. The poem then goes on to construct the clave’s rhythm on the page, counting out the six-­eight beat first as counts, then as onomatopoeic sounds (perhaps even the cluck of a chicken?). There is an echo of Puerto Rican poet Luis Palés Matos’s classic poem “Preludio en Boricua” in the references to Cuban rumba, Dominican merengue, and Puerto Rican plena, but where Palés Matos’s poem only mentions the various island musical forms, establishing its own rhythm through a consonant rhyme scheme and an abundance of sonorous vowels, Castro lays out the guaracha itself on the page before connecting the specific rhythm we have been beating out to the musical traditions of the different islands.27 Indeed, “Music & Guarachas” could be read as a response to Palés Matos’s poem; “Preludio,” a kind of lyric “preface” to Palés Matos’s collection Tuntún de pasa y grifería (1937), ends with a stanza that describes the subsequent poems as containing “algo entrevisto o presentido / poco realmente vivido / y mucho de embuste y de cuento” (something half-­seen or felt / little really lived / and much exaggeration and tall tales).28 Castro’s speaker explicitly rejects “bogus stories,” and while it is hard to know exactly what he means by this, the poem does ground itself in the experiential rather than the narrative: beginning in rhythmic performance, moving outward to cultural experience, then back again to phenomenological specifics. Rumba, plena, and merengue all start with the foundational clave, with the percussive experience of rhythm, a gesture that the poem itself repeats by inserting the clave’s rhythm—­“took-­took / took took-­took”—­two more times at different moments in the poem. The lyric voice of “Music & Guarachas” may reject “tall tales,” but other kinds of narratives, particularly those with spiritual connections, are present within the celebratory atmosphere of Castro’s trans-­Caribbean guaracha. The poem’s penultimate stanza brings things back to African beginnings: Amidst the embrace of the motherland colonies we survive a granddaughter of Yoruba slaves with her skirt entices the wind. . . . Yet people are drunk with that trancing took-­took took         took-­took if only for a while Because la gente remember countless cocos & caracoles dug from the muddy feet of cotton trees which then began to speak29

The shadow of slavery and the Middle Passage lingers—­is remembered even amid the celebration. The rhythm of the clave produces a trance, which could be simply

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the trance of euphoric movement but could also be a reference to religious trance. Besides the rhythm, the other things that speak are cocos (coconuts) and caracoles (shells), both instruments of Afro-­Cuban divination. That they must be dug from the base of cotton trees serves as a reminder of the ways in which slaves had to disguise their religious practices. The secular musical celebration—­a pan-­Caribbean, Latinx dance—­takes place against the backdrop of religious practice, an echo of the original religious offerings. As its title indicates, Wise Fish: Tales in 6/8 Time is a collection undergirded by the musical and rhythmic elements of the poems. A beat in six-­eight time is the rhythm of the clave, a percussive instrument formed by two sticks hit together. This is the primary beat of such Latin music as salsa and rumba, but the rhythms of the clave are in fact far older and can actually be traced to West African religious music. In the Abakuá foundational legend, the fish Tanzé’s power was transferred, upon his death, to the drum, an instrument of spiritual importance in Abakuá ritual. Although, as Noel observes, the six-­eight time highlights the Caribbean and Latinx aspects of these poems, the title also gestures to the spiritual nature of the poems’ rhythmic elements.30 If these poems are “tales,” their storytelling function occurs through and alongside spiritual rhythms. “Fishing at the Crossroads” takes the spiritual and secular metaphors of “wise fish” to an urban Latinx environment. The poem begins with an epigraph from Mexican poet Octavio Paz’s “Hablo de la ciudad” (“I Speak of the City”).31 Like Paz’s poem, Castro’s text is an exploration of the character of an urban space, of the multitudes it contains, of what it feels like to move through it, observing and engaging with its different parts. Yet where Paz describes a kind of ur-­city, unidentified and unidentifiable, Castro paints an intimate physical and cultural portrait of Miami: “near the ocean, lakeside, railroad tracks, a spring in someone’s / backyard, a baseball field sequestered by an intercoastal, / Cuban cafeterias serving pit stops of café, tabacos Padron y Maribel.”32 Cultural encounters occur through (re)unions of a more physical kind: “where Dominican marries Cuban, & Cuban Jamaican, Jamaican / marries Colombian, & Colombian Haitian, Haitian marries / Brazilian, & Brazilian Boricua, Miami is us, unidos thus.”33 The stories of these intercultural travelers can be traced through their material detritus: “crowded hills of paper plates, cups, improvised fans, / teenage love letters, photos, break-­ups, reunions, first / kisses, honeymoons.”34 In this Relational, pan-­Latinx space, people from all over the Caribbean and the Americas engage with each other, even as they maintain contact with those they have left behind in other places. For Miami, this cultural crossroads, is also a spiritual cuatro caminos, a space for communication between the flesh-­and-­blood world and that of the spirit. Castro performs this juxtaposition between the material and the spiritual through rhythm. The poem’s initial structure is reminiscent of Paz’s poem, with long lines marked by enjambment, but Castro’s text takes on a stronger rhythmic regularity through an insistent use of anaphora; the repeating of near and where every three to five lines creates a regular beat for the poem. This rhythm continues until two-­thirds of the way through the poem, when the spiritual appears: “near neighbors scattered like

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spots on leopards who come & go / from the spirit world by uttering certain words, archaic / African words, they drift temporarily, listen, nod, then / bring back the message, pull it from a pocket magically.” The following section, which describes the work of the babalawos (priests of Ifá), ends abruptly with a single line set off from the lines before and after it by several spaces: “okonkolú     Iyá Ilú     Itotélè.”35 These are the names of the three ceremonial batá drums, and their rhythmic interruption acts as a bridge between the two worlds. As the poem goes on to state, the drums “send telegrams to the citizens of the other world in a / tonal tongue, the KÁ-­KÚN-­KÚN-­KÚN-­KÍ KA-­KÍ-­KÍ KA-­KÚN, KA-­KÚN, / KÀ, coats your plexus with globs of honey, your lips lap up / the sweetened sound like a hungry fish.”36 Here the onomatopoeic rhythm of the drums performs the telegram, one that both the reader and the orishas receive. Here the listener is the fish, hooked by the drums’ beats. Spiritual sound changes the substance of the poem, visible in the smoothness offered by the alliteration of the following lines (“lips lap,” “sweetened sound”). When the last stanza of the poem returns to the image of the crossroads, it is the crossroads as it functions within the Afro-­Caribbean religious tradition—­namely, as a place for leaving offerings, particularly to Eshu/Elegguá, the orisha who controls this space: “Near the empty plate of food at the feet of the ficus, the crossroads / crack with the sparkle of hope that makes América thus—­.”37 The orishas may find offerings here, but the speaker recognizes the sacred rhythms of an American space transforming itself.

The Uncomfortable Buzzing of Relation In his discussion of Relation, Glissant is careful to acknowledge that although relational movement is governed by a utopian impulse, Relation is always an incomplete encounter. The errant Relational poet he envisions “strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he will never accomplish this.”38 This less-­than-­total knowledge / unbridgeable distance of the other is made possible through what Glissant calls “opacity,” or the right of each person and culture to maintain some things as untranslatable. Since his first collection Las flores del Mall (2001), Urayoán Noel has revealed an interest in what we might call the awkwardness of Relation—­“the poem as a difficult relating,” as he calls it in his poem “HI-­THEN (salutation).”39 His work explores what Brent Hayes Edwards, in his study of black internationalism, has identified as “disarticulation,” which refers to not only those moments of communication and sympathy but also “the points of misunderstanding, bad faith, unhappy translation”—­in short, the diversity of what happens in the spaces where people, cultures, languages, and literatures brush and bump up against one another.40 Contact in Noel’s poems is as physical as it is literary; his poetic speakers frequently narrate their in situ interactions with their surroundings. The disarticulations his poems document are not only literary or textual but also experiential and, as Samuel Ginsburg has observed, sonic.41 Noel’s speakers often situate themselves, metaliterarily, in the midst of the process of composition so that the literary and

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geographic-­cultural relating comes together. Noel is fascinated by the act of constructing a poem and the intervention of technology in the writing process, and some of his poems, such as “babel o city (el gran concurso)” (Hi-­Density Politics) or “Voz quebrada” (Buzzing Hemisphere), either describe the speaker narrating the poem into a smartphone or, in the case of “Voz quebrada,” subtitle the poem as “poema oral improvisado en un smartphone / (Cripple Creek, Tallahassee, Florida, 2009),” highlighting the oral process and physical location of the poem’s creation.42 In the most radical edge of this experimentation with technology, such as the “Trillset” series from Hi-­Density Politics or the poem “You Have the Nice Weather” (Buzzing Hemisphere), a poem in English is produced by reading a Spanish poem (César Vallejo’s Trilc, in the case of “Trillset” and a sonnet by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in the latter example) into voice-­recognition software so that the final text is produced through the concrete interaction of the original Latin American text, Noel’s voice, and computer technology. The poem “uncertain cruising altitudes” (Hi-­Density Politics) exemplifies the way in which Noel’s work utilizes a situated speaker to articulate Relation on multiple levels. The poem begins by locating the speaker in the midst of journeys both physical and literary: On the plane from Argentina Reading Lamborghini An Argentine poet Born the same day I was The same year as my father43

In this first stanza, the speaker’s reading of the Argentine poet Osvaldo Lamborghini coincides with his physical return from Argentina, outlining a journey of Relation taking place on two levels. The somewhat circumstantial connections that the speaker establishes between himself and the Argentine writer in this stanza—­their shared birthdate, Lamborghini’s generational relationship to the speaker’s father—­set the stage for the rest of the poem, in which the speaker reflects on what he has in common with Lamborghini as well as what sets them apart. This is, above all, an ambivalent reflection. What the speaker most clearly shares with Lamborghini is their vocation as writers; he describes the Argentine writer as “Embedded like I am / In lang itch,” as description that creates a double entendre from the spoken sounds of language as it suggests that writing itself is an uncomfortable, “itchy” condition. At the same time, Lamborghini, who wrote sexually explicit texts “about incest, bestiality, pederasty, literary theory,” is not the sort of writer one necessarily easily identifies with. As the speaker later observes, punning on Lamborghini’s name, “Lamb or genie? / Who’s to say—­/ Pet him and see.”44 The poem reveals itself as a staging of this push-­pull of the speaker’s interest in the Argentine poet, in part through the speaker’s reflections on Lamborghini’s life and in part through fragments of Lamborghini’s texts, translated into English, which appear inserted between stanzas, in another column and in italics, as if the two poets were literally in dialogue. The poem’s title also reflects these complicated

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positionings: on the one hand, “cruising altitude” makes a direct reference to the speaker’s plane ride from Argentina; at the same time, the word cruising operates as a veiled allusion to Lamborghini’s homosexuality, something the speaker may implicitly share with him. Read this way, the “uncertainty” of the “cruising altitude” articulates the speaker’s relating to Lamborghini’s work in the midst of his ambivalence. The gerund cruising in the title “uncertain cruising altitudes” communicates the performative, present-­tense nature of the speaker’s relating to Lamborghini. Elements of the poem suggest that it too is being written during this plane ride; when the speaker wants to share his favorite verse of Lamborghini’s, the reader experiences this gesture of poetic creation “in real time,” as the poem includes a description of the speaker’s actions: My favorite verse of his is (SHUFFLE THROUGH SELECTED POEMS) “Me niego totalmente a escribir en mi lengua” (Chosen at random: “I totally refuse To write in my tongue”) Notice the italics—­ But aren’t all Argentines Italics?45

The description of the speaker shuffling through Lamborghini’s collected poetry, presented almost as a stage direction, shows the speaker immersed in an encounter with Lamborghini’s work. However, the staging of this encounter belies the reader’s apparent easy access to the process. The speaker perversely reveals his “favorite” verse to be chosen at random. He then translates Lamborghini’s declaration into English, as if he too were “refusing” to write in his native Spanish. The pull of commonality—­the implicit positioning of both speaker and Lamborghini as (diasporic) outsiders by choice—­is followed by the push-­away of the pun on italics/Italics—­as if Lamborghini’s Italo-­Argentine identity is what sets him apart (from the speaker) and not his linguistic choice. In the poem’s last major stanza, the speaker concludes, “His poems read like fake diary entries / sort of like what you’re reading.”46 The simultaneous staging is revealed as potentially a setup; is this “diary entry” real or fake? Has the speaker revealed something of himself through his relating to Lamborghini, or has it all been an elaborate smokescreen, a game of wordplay, a “cruising” from which there will be no actual hookup? The question is answered, if not revealingly, in the last couplet: “his shit was real primal / but then again whose shit isn’t.”47 Lamborghini’s modes of expression may be exceptional, but the poet has recognized the deeper, perhaps universal, commonalities at their root. One of the primary ways that Noel engages with and in Relation is through the use of translation itself. Many of his books are almost completely bilingual, and Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor hemisférico, his most recent work, is truly multilingual; although written primarily in Spanish and English, its poems also contain words and phrases from Portuguese, Haitian Kreyòl, Garifuna, Papiamento,

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Inupiat, Tupí-­Guaraní, and Mixtec, making it a truly hemispheric creation in the most linguistically expansive sense of the word. (The buzzing or rumor that is the other half of the title seems to conjure up the auric sensation of a polyphonic multilingual encounter.) Noel’s texts often “translate themselves” in that they present a verse in English or Spanish and then include the same verse again in the other language. This echoing, which shows the two languages literally brushing up against each other, can create a kind of productive discomfort for the reader, a feeling that highlights the opacities that may be present. At the same time, these disarticulations provide a space for multiple meanings and ideas to emerge. “Alphabet City / Ciudad alfabeto,” the first poem from Buzzing Hemisphere, exemplifies the way in which simultaneous translation in Noel’s work creates an expansive space within the poem. The poem’s title, again displaying Noel’s gift for and love of double entendre, references the New York’s Alphabet City neighborhood, a slice of the far East Village that is home to a long-­standing Puerto Rican community (and the location of the Nuyorican Poets’ Café). It also refers more concretely to the fact that part of the poem is an alphabet poem, in which each line of verse begins with a different letter of the alphabet, moving from A to Z.48 In its spatial organization on the page, the poem appears almost as two poems, alphabet and city: on each of the poem’s eight pages, an alphabet poem (in Spanish and then in English) is framed by borders of text, the upper border in English and the lower border in Spanish. These two groupings of text create their own kind of suggestive relation, forming a pattern that resembles something like subway tracks or even boats sailing between two shores. The alphabet poems are not exact translations; although there are moments of translative contact—­“weekend xenófobo / yanquilandia zigzagueando” becomes “weekend xenophobia / yankees zigzagging”—­much of each poem is different, in part, one assumes, to remain in keeping with the alphabet form. The border poems, on the other hand, are translations of each other; the repetition, or echo, of the same ideas brings additional force to the images that they express, even as the subtle differences they exhibit are brought into relief. The structure of “Alphabet City / Ciudad alfabeto” reinforces the shifting, dialogic movement of its content. “Come down and die with me,” the speaker begins, addressing an interlocutor (the reader) in the second person, a sentiment that is not quite echoed on the bottom of the page as, “Baja a morir conmigo”; with this shift in pronoun, it now seems as if the dying is the intention rather than the result.49 “Come down with me” is repeated at the beginning of each new section, creating a continual feeling of movement. The repetition of down in both English and Spanish—­and as both adverb and verb—­lends the poem an epic touch, as if the speaker were Virgil, guiding the reader through a new kind of afterworld. In the first stanza, this down is even more concrete in nature: “Come down and die with me as lacquer shades our lack and people walk off / subways limning the wound our bodies mere bodies salivating syllables.”50 The speaker takes us literally down to the subway platform, below the level of the street, where communication is as much physical as it is verbal. The uneven, heterogeneous spacings between phrases

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create an uneven movement, a preparation for how the alphabet poem will make its way down through the alphabet. In New York geography, however, down has another meaning: to go “downtown”—­to Alphabet City—­signals a movement through neighborhoods, a crossing of different cultural spaces. The poem takes us progressively down through various spaces—­the banking centers, airports, “the island and its buoys”—­that offer a kind of tour of the spaces of errantry, a tracing of routes of both humans and capital. The fragmented lists that make up the alphabet poems in the center flesh out these journeys and add a counterbeat to this progression: “archipiélago / brillo ciego / delta estruario / flujo global.”51 The alphabet poems identify this journey as relational from the beginning, but the “prose” sections make us aware that we are following the narratives of empire. The journey on which the speaker takes the reader occurs “in the shadow of slave ships,” “en ciudades migratorias sin asilo,” and via “this memory of empire.”52 In this (re)tracing of routes, the poem both reminds us that Manhattan is an island (and a port city) and restores its place in a chain of islands from which and through which Relation occurs. As the speaker notes in the last stanza, “El mar es como nos hablamos de memoria.”53 The sea, the flowing movement that connects these disparate archipelagoes, is how we connect to what has been and what still is—­even if this existence takes place “en la media vida de islas.” There is a communicative, relational afterlife in this underworld. If “Alphabet City” takes us through the spaces of Relation, “Signs of the Hemisphere / Letreros del hemisferio,” the last poem of Buzzing Hemisphere puts the emphasis more squarely on language and the challenges of an American communication. The poem returns to the divided structure that Noel introduced in “Alphabet City.” This time, the upper and lower “banners” of text on the first page are composed of a list of signs in English: “(as seen from a bus, New York City to Albany, 2011),” followed on the next page by a list of signs in Portuguese (letreros, ônibus, Rio de Janeiro a São Paulo, 2009).54 The signs in Portuguese are accompanied by a center text in Spanish that is a mirror translation of the English text on the preceding page. If the shift from English to Spanish in the translations of the center pieces of text creates a space for both the weight of repetition and subtle differences in meaning, then the encounter between Spanish and Portuguese creates a further kind of dissonance. Beyond—­or in spite of—­the overwhelming calls of signage, the speaker’s own communication is born from this multilingual dissonance. He begins with an appeal: “hear me out human as I rise from the hum the humor and rumor / of my tongue.” In the English version, the “human” seems almost like an apostrophe it is not until we arrive at the Spanish translation—­“heme aquí y que humano surgiendo del humo”—­that we realize that “human” refers to the speaker’s characterization of himself. “Missing the tongues of the tribe,” he is searching for a way to communicate beyond the signage, building a poetics that can connect, recover lost routes.55 His “hum” is the sound of a not-­quite language; a growing, still-­not-­yet-­ripe attempt to cross linguistic and spatial borders. The speaker in “Signs” makes it clear that his is a Pan-­American project of Relation: “mine’s the hum of hemisphere.” This “hum” travels across different

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continental American spaces—­ the Bronx’s Grand Concourse, Buenos Aires’s Avenida 9 de Julio—­but it is, above all, a “hum” that constructs a Pan-­American relational poetics: “instead mine is the hum of Césaire’s / archipelagos and Damas’s tam-­tams and Haroldo’s galaxies and Vallejo’s / deserts and Neruda’s elements . . .”56 The speaker traces the genealogy of the poetry of the Americas, but this list is not meant to suggest that communication has been codified. On the contrary, these lyric predecessors in Relation point the way to something new—­ “the hum of becoming”—­a poetics of Relation that is as expansive, or more so, than their work. For the speaker, this new communication is as much about bodies and how they move and interact as it is about voices: “even without attributes we are still tribulators our fate always in play our bodies bound by the spray of bullets and ocean.”57 That is, Relation is always contingent on history and positioning. This awareness of positioning produces a fusion of the speaker and the interlocutor in the last two pages of the poem: “seen through your eyes I see at last the outlines of the hemisphere / I find my hum in harmony with you that is in dissonance with self in / shared discord in a storm front shared and so I name my condition of / islandness.”58 In a kind of reversal of the Levinasian gaze of the other, here it is the union of perspectives, the ability to exist in difference, that makes possible the creation of something new. If the signs that outline the poem offer imperatives with little regard for the individuals (and languages they address), the speaker is constituted in dialogic Relation through the different “you” who will—­as interlocutor, as another speaker—­help shape his “hum.” The new liberatory language he has begun to shape by the end of the poem would not have been possible in isolation: “with your help I begin I’m reciting the cyst I’m resisting the sigh I’m restoring the song with your help I’m resetting the sky.”59 Only in community, in Relation, the speaker suggests, can language begin to remake the world.

Rituals of Relation Glissant says of Relation that it “is not an absolute toward which every work must strive but a totality.”60 We are how we are, when we are. Through the relationships that emerge between urban spaces and corporeal spaces—­between ritual, texts, and performance—­poetry for both Castro and Noel becomes a space of optimistic, if fleeting and imperfect, understanding. The tools that Castro has chosen—­Afro-­ Cuban and Afro-­Caribbean religious symbology and rhythms—­do not necessarily make his construction of Relation easy; they gesture to what Glissant has identified as Relation’s (and the Caribbean’s) opacity as much as Noel’s omnipresent, voracious translation and multilingualism risks losing the reader in so much buzz. Yet as work that locates itself at a crossroads between physical and spiritual experience, Castro’s poetry communicates the power of the ritual of writing to bridge the many cultural worlds of the Americas as well as the world of the spirit, worlds that are in constant interdependent transformation. Similarly, even as Noel’s poems explore the discomfort of statelessness, the fragmentations and disarticulations of diasporic subjectivity, they simultaneously celebrate the messiness of urban encounters,

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the formation of a dissonant communitarian we. The poem may be a difficult negotiation, an imperfect performance, but in the complex, living urban spaces that Castro’s and Noel’s poems create and inhabit, it is the reaching out—­into Relation—­that counts.

Notes 1. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 34. 2. Glissant, 33. 3. Édouard Glissant, Le discours antillais (Paris: Seuil, 1981). 4. Michael Wiedorn, Think like an Archipelago: Paradox in the Work of Édouard Glissant (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018), xvi. 5. Wiedorn, 9. 6. Celia Britton, Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 11. 7. A rhizome is type of plant that reproduces by sending out new shoots from the nodes of its roots, resulting in a connection between old and new plants. In their discussion of the figure of the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari contrast the rhizome with the tree: while the tree’s formation—­roots connected to a single stem—­“plots a point, fixes an order,” the rhizome operates according to “principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be” (7). They see the rhizome as representative of the behavior of certain systems, both linguistic and relational. It is this idea of the rhizome that Glissant takes up in his formulation of Relation. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 8. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 14. 9. Wiedorn, Think like an Archipelago, 11. 10. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 16. 11. See his personal website, http://​urayoannoel​.com/. 12. Urayoán Noel, welcome page, Urayoán Noel’s personal website, accessed July 27, 2020, http://​urayoannoel​.com/ (bold in original). 13. Emily Maguire, “‘The Shuffle of the City Finally Becomes Us’: The Corporality of Place in the Poetry of Urayoán Noel,” ASAP/Journal 2, no. 1 (2017): 166. For Urayoán Noel’s poetic production, see Boringkén (San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2008); Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor Hemisférico, Camino del Sol Series (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015); Hi-­Density Politics (Buffalo, N.Y.: BlazeVOX, 2010); Kool Logic / La lógica kool (Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Press, 2005); and Las flores del mall (object-­book, 2000). 14. See Harris Feinsod, The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 2. 15. Urayoán Noel, “Bodies That Antimatter: Locating U.S. Latino/a Poetry, 2000–­2009,” Contemporary Literature 54, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 861. 16. Noel, 863. 17. Adrián Castro, Wise Fish: Tales in 6/8 Time (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2005), 2. 18. Castro, 21. 19. In this story, the god Obon is reincarnated as a fish in the river separating two rival tribes, the Efor and the Efik. Sikán, a woman of the Efor tribe, discovers Tánze in the river. In some versions of the story, Sikán betrays her tribe by sharing this story with the Efik and is sacrificed as punishment; in others, when she shares the knowledge with her own tribe, she is sacrificed so that the men of the tribe can have Tánze’s power. Tánze’s spirit eventually passes to Ekué, the sacred drum of the Abakuá. See Lydia Cabrera, La sociedad secreta abakuá narrada por viejos adeptos (Miami: Ediciones CR, 1970), 88. 20. Castro, Wise Fish, 13.

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21. Noel, “Bodies That Antimatter,” 864. 22. This last book of Castro’s is in fact explicitly organized around ritual: the text’s core section, “Handling Destiny,” is a group of sixteen poems, each of which seems to meditate on one of the sixteen principles of Ifá. Sixteen is a symbolic number for Ifá in multiple ways. The principal means of divination in Ifá is by throwing sixteen palm nuts. There are thus sixteen times sixteen possible combinations, each of which has a saying or story associated with it. See William Bascom, Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); and Awo Falokun Fatunbi, “Igoke: The Ifa Concept of Spiritual Growth,” Oya N’Soro: Oyá Speaks! An Explorative Ezine of Orisha/Ifa Understanding 1, no. 1 (August 2003), http://​oyansoro​.com/​a rchives/​A rchives/​O yansoro/​ FirstIssue/​A rticles/​Igoke​.htm. 23. Adrián Castro, Handling Destiny: Poems (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2009), 65. 24. Castro, 66. 25. Adrián Castro, Cantos to Blood and Honey (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1997), 46. 26. Castro, 46. 27. See Luis Palés Matos’s poem “Preludio en Boricua” in his Tuntún de pasa y grifería (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2000). 28. Palés Matos, 4. Palés Matos’s text is a classic of avant-­garde Puerto Rican poetry and one of the first texts of that era to explore the figuration of an Afro-­Caribbean subject. The intertextual use of it here is further evidence of the ways in which Castro locates his work within a broader Caribbean tradition in both Spanish and English. 29. Castro, Cantos to Blood and Honey, 48. 30. Noel, “Bodies That Antimatter,” 864. 31. Octavio Paz, “Hablo de la ciudad,” in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957–­1987, trans. Eliot Weinberger (New York: New Directions, 1991), 510–­516. 32. Castro, Wise Fish, 43. 33. Castro, 45. 34. Castro, 44. 35. Castro, 45. 36. Castro, 45. 37. Castro, 46. 38. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 20. 39. Noel, Hi-­Density Politics, 17. 40. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 14. 41. Samuel Ginsburg, “Sonic Modernity and Decolonizing Countersounds in the Poetry of Urayoán Noel,” Latin American Research Review 54, no. 1 (2019): 135–­150. 42. Noel, Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor hemisférico, 14. 43. Noel, Hi-­Density Politics, 42. 44. Noel, 42. 45. Noel, 42. 46. Noel, 43. 47. Noel, 43. 48. Noel explains in an interview that the idea for the poem came from “walking and texting” around the neighborhood: “I had been teaching upstate in Albany and walking through Loisaida, right by where I started at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in 1999, I was struck by how many ghosts surrounded me. . . . Using the alphabet constraint and then forcing myself to translate within it helped me speak to the difficulty of what I felt, the untranslatability of the experience.” See Alexandra van de Kamp, “Gemini Ink: The Bilingual Buzz behind Poet Urayoán Noel,” Rivard Report (blog), March  1, 2016, https://​t herivardreport​.com/​t he​-buzz​-and​-bilingual​ -hum​-of​-puerto​-ricanny​-poet​-urayoan​-noel/. 49. Noel, Buzzing Hemisphere, 4. 50. Noel, 4. 51. Noel, 8. 52. Noel, 10–­11.

n e w p o i n t s o f t h e r h i z o m e 257 53. Noel, 11. 54. Noel, 95. 55. Noel, 95. 56. Noel, 99. 57. Noel, 99. 58. Noel, 101. 59. Noel, 101. 60. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 35.

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the dialogue I had with my Caribbeanist colleagues at Indiana University Bloomington. Heartfelt thanks go to Vivian Halloran, Arlene Díaz, Luis Fuentes-­Rohwer, Michael Martin, Eileen Julien, Oana Panaite, Marvin Sterling, and Deborah Cohn for their generous insights and conversations. The seeds for the dialogue among us as contributors were laid at a conference organized by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Indiana University, which took place on September 29–­­30, 2017. I am grateful to everyone who attended for their brilliant presentations and the empathetic company they kept in the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, which had brought great destruction to Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands and affected a number of us personally. We were able to hold a conference on Caribbean Migrations in the Midwest of the United States thanks to the support of a number of units on campus. I would like to thank the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, who gave us a New Frontiers / New Currents Grant; the College Arts and Humanities Institute; the Institute for Advanced Study at Indiana University; the Department of American Studies; the Department of Spanish and Portuguese; the Department of French and Italian; the Department of History; the Latino Studies Program; and the Black Film Center/Archive for their generous support. I also want to thank my conference coorganizer, Vivian Halloran, graduate research assistant Ellen Ryan Robinson, and the CLACS staff—­particularly graduate student assistants Matthew Cesnik, Rosie Eyerman, and Cairo Briceño—­for their tireless dedication and care. A special thank-­you goes to the dean of the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, Ambassador Lee Feinstein, who was interested in the subject of migration from the beginning and supported us in more than one way. I’m also grateful for funds received towards this book from the Office of the Vice Provost of Research at Indiana University through their Grant-in-Aid Program. 259

260 a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

This book profited much from the comments of two anonymous reviewers, one of whom had the generosity to read the full manuscript twice. Repeated feedback from the series editors of Critical Caribbean Studies made this book much more consistent in its structure and outlook. Finally, I am much obliged to Kimberly Guinta, editor at Rutgers University Press, for her vision, guidance, and patience, to editorial assistant Jasper Chang for so much good-­humored back-­and-­forth, and to the punctilious copyeditors that I was fortunate to work with.

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Notes on Contributors

Jossianna Arroyo is a professor of Latin American and Caribbean literatures and cultures at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Travestismos culturales: Literatura y etnografía en Cuba y Brasil (2003) and Writing Secrecy in Caribbean Freemasonry (2013). The chapter included in this volume is part of her forthcoming book Caribbeans 2.0: Media, Globalization and Cultures. Devyn Spence Benson is an associate professor of Africana and Latin American studies and the chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Davidson College. She is a historian of nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century Latin America with a focus on race and revolution in Cuba. Benson’s first book, Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution (2016), was based on over eighteen months of field research in Cuba, where she has traveled over twenty times since 2003. Anke Birkenmaier is a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University Bloomington specializing in Caribbean and Latin American literature, sound studies, and the avant-­garde. She served as the director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies from 2015 to 2019. The author most recently of The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature between the Wars (2016) and coeditor of Havana beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mappings after 1989 (2011), she has widely published on modern Cuban and Latin American literature and culture. Jane Bryce is Professor Emerita of African Literature and Cinema at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill (Barbados). Born in Tanzania, she was educated there, in the United Kingdom, and in Nigeria, where she studied for her PhD and wrote for numerous journals and newspapers. She has published cultural, literary, and film criticism; fiction; and creative nonfiction in a range of academic journals and essay collections.

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Edward Chamberlain is an assistant professor in the Department of Culture, Arts, and Communication at the University of Washington Tacoma. In recent years, he has published research in such journals as the CEA Critic, Pacific Coast Philology, Lateral, and Writing from Below. His research interests include the study of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in popular culture, film, and several forms of writing. Currently, he is completing a book about the representation of Latinx intimacies and social spaces in the 1990s and early 2000s. Rebecca Dirksen is an ethnomusicologist working across the spectrum of musical genres in Haiti and its diaspora. Her research concerns cultural approaches to development, crisis, and disaster; sustainability, diverse environmentalisms, and ecomusicology; and applied/engaged/activist scholarship. She is an associate professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington and is the author of After the Dance, the Drums Are Heavy: Carnival, Politics, and Musical Engagement in Haiti (2020). Daylet Domínguez is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley. Her book Ficciones etnográficas (2020) studies the interplay of literature and science in nineteenth-­century Hispanic Caribbean. It particularly emphasizes the importance of literature (travel writing, costumbrista sketches, and the realist novel) for the establishment of the social sciences in the insular Hispanic Caribbean. Her articles have been published in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Hispanic Review, Cuban Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Iberoamericana, among others. Jorge Duany is the director of the Cuban Research Institute and a professor of anthropology at Florida International University in Miami. He has written extensively about migration, race, ethnicity, nationalism, and transnationalism in the Caribbean and the United States. He has published twenty-­one books, including Picturing Cuba: Art, Culture, and Identity on the Island and in the Diaspora (2019), Puerto Rico: What Everyone Needs to Know (2017), and Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States (2011). Vivian N. Halloran is a professor of English and American studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum (2009) and The Immigrant Kitchen: Food, Ethnicity, and Diaspora (2016). She is currently at work on a monograph analyzing how Caribbean Americans have added their voices to ongoing public dialogues shaping American culture and politics. Kiran C. Jayaram is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Florida. His research focuses on mobility, education, and anthropological knowledge production. He received a Fulbright Student Award (Dominican Republic, 2007) and a Fulbright Scholar Award (Haiti, 2015).

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Iraida H. López is the author of Impossible Returns: Narratives of the Cuban Diaspora (2015) and La autobiografía hispana contemporánea en los Estados Unidos: A través del caleidoscopio (2001) and coeditor of Let’s Hear Their Voices: Cuban American Writers of the Second Generation (2019). Iraida prepared the critical editions of Ena Lucía Portela’s novel Cien botellas en una pared (2010) and short story collection El viejo, el asesino, yo y otros cuentos (2009). A Fulbright fellowship allowed her to teach and conduct research in Chile in fall 2019. She is a professor of Spanish and Hispanic literatures as well as Latinx and Latin American studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey. Emily A. Maguire is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University, where she specializes in the literature of the Hispanic Caribbean and its diasporas. She is the author of Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography (2011), and her articles have appeared in Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Small Axe, A Contracorriente, ASAP/Journal, and the Routledge Companion to Latino Literature, among others. She is currently at work on a book project that explores science fiction as a temporal mode in recent Caribbean literature. Yolanda Martínez-­San Miguel is the Marta Weeks Chair in Latin American Studies at the University of Miami. She specializes in colonial, postcolonial Latin American, and Caribbean literatures. She is the author of four books: Saberes americanos: Subalternidad y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana (1999), Caribe Two-­Ways? Cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico (2003), From Lack to Excess: “Minor” Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (2008), and Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-­colonial Migrations in a Pan-­Caribbean Context (2014). She has coedited two anthologies: Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought (2016) and Trans Studies: The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities (2016). She is coediting an anthology with Michelle Stephens titled Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations and working on her fifth book project, Archipiélagos de ultramar: Rethinking Colonial and Caribbean Studies, which uses comparative archipelagic studies as a historical and theoretical framework to propose a different research agenda for the study of cultural productions in the Caribbean between 1498 and 2010. April J. Mayes is an associate professor of history at Pomona College. She is the author of the book The Mulatto Republic: Class, Race, and Dominican National Identity and, with Dr. Kiran C. Jayaram, coeditor of Transnational Hispaniola: New Directions in Haitian and Dominican Studies. Alejandro Portes is the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Sociology (emeritus) at Princeton University and a professor of law and distinguished scholar of arts and sciences at the University of Miami. He is the founding

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director of the Center for Migration and Development at Princeton. He has formerly taught at Johns Hopkins University, where he held the John Dewey Chair in Arts and Sciences; Duke University; and the University of Texas at Austin. He was the president of the American Sociological Association in 1998–­1999. Portes is the author of more than 250 articles and chapters on national development, international migration, Latin American and Caribbean urbanization, and economic sociology. He has published forty books and special issues, including City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami (1993), coauthored with Alex Stepick; Immigrant America: A Portrait, Spanish Legacies: The Coming of Age of the Second Generation (4th edition, 2014); and his most recent book, The Global Edge: Miami in the Twenty-­First Century (2018). His current research is on the adaptation process of the immigrant second generation in comparative perspective, the role of institutions in national development, and the comparative study of immigrant transnational organizations. Rafael Rojas is a historian and essayist living in Mexico. He is the award-­winning author of more than twenty books on the cultural and political history of Latin America, Mexico, and Cuba. A member of the Mexican Academy of History, he is a professor and researcher at the Center for Historical Studies at Colegio de México, having taught many years as a professor at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) in Mexico City. His latest book is La polis literaria: El boom, la Revo­lución y otras polémicas de la Guerra Fría (2018). Rojas is a member of the editorial board of the magazine Cuban Studies. Carlos Vargas-­Ramos is the director of public policy, external and media relations, and development for the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. As a social scientist, he has worked on the impact of migration on Puerto Rican political behavior, political attitudes, and orientations as well as on issues of racial identity. A political scientist by training, Vargas-­Ramos is coeditor, along with Edwin Meléndez, of Puerto Ricans at the Dawn of the New Millennium (2014) and author, among others, of “Puerto Ricans: Citizens and Migrants—­a Cautionary Tale,” Identities: Global Studies in Identity and Power 20, no. 6 (2013): 665–­688, and “Migrating Race: Migration and Racial Identification among Puerto Ricans,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 37, no. 3 (2014): 383–­404. Kendy Vérilus is a Haitian filmmaker who specializes in ethnographic documentary and music video genres. One documentary on STEM education in Haiti received a 2015 Public Choice award from the National Science Foundation, and a number of his short films have been selected for international festivals, including the New York Film Festival; the Festival Film Jacmel; the Festival Cinamazonia in French Guiana; gatherings of the Cinéastes de l’Afrique, du Brésil, des Caraïbes et de leurs diasporas (ABCD Cinéma) in the Dominican Republic and Cuba; the Haiti Cultural Exchange Haiti Film Fest in Brooklyn; and the 13a Bienal de Artes Mediales in Santiago, Chile. He is also a numismatist at the Musée Numismatique d’Haïti.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Abakuá religious tradition, 242, 244, 255n19 abjection, 194, 217–­218, 222n11 abolitionism, 125, 130, 139 Abreu, Diogenes, 229 Acevedo, Chantel, 166 Acevedo Rivera, Jorge, 106, 114–­118, 120 Acosta, Carlos, 170 Acosta, Gustavo, 177, 180, 181 Acosta, Katie, 97 ACS. See American Community Survey activism, 144, 146–­147, 149, 156; music and, 153–­154, 155; online, 151–­152 ADÁL. See Maldonado, Adál aesthetics: diasporic, 193; limits, 177–­178; naturalization of, 194; politics and, 176, 186; populist, 179 Afflicted Yard (website; Rickards), 193, 199–­200, 201n34 Africanization, 134 African survivals, 228 Afro-­Caribbean spiritual practices, 242–­243, 246, 249, 254 Afrocubanas, 143, 144, 146, 150, 151, 156; antiracist work by, 145; directory of (see Directorio de Afrocubanas); feminism and, 125; use of term, 149, 151; working group, 144, 146–­147, 148–­152 Afro-­Cuban religion, 243, 244, 248, 254 Afro-­Cubans, 130, 144, 145, 146; use of term, 149 Agencia de Rap (Rap Agency; Cuba), 154 agency, 4, 215, 217, 221, 226; rejection of, 222 Aguilera, Alejandro, 177

Aguilera, Carlos Alberto, 182 Aguirre Beltrán, Gonzalo, 228 Ahmed, Sara, 161, 162 Aldama, Miguel, 134 Alexandre, Guy, 229, 230 Alexis, Yveline, 230 Alfonso, José Luis, 134 Alfonso y García, José Luis, 135 alterity, 240, 241 Álvarez, Lupe, 177 Álvarez Ramírez, Sandra, 143, 146, 150–­152, 156; Negra cubana tenía que ser, 143, 150 American Community Survey (ACS), 41, 42, 44, 45, 49 American dream, 90, 94, 98 Americanness, 78, 79, 82 American Samoa, 104, 108 American War of Independence, 127 Americocentrism, 234 Aniceto Iznaga, José, 134 annexation of Cuba, 130, 142n37; as liberation, 133, 135; motivations for, 135–­136; slavery and, 135–­136, 139–­140; travel accounts and, 128, 129, 131, 138; as whitening, 133–­134 anthropology, 139, 222n2, 228, 233; race and, 138, 228 antiblackness, 145, 157n11 anti-­Haitianism, 229 anti-­imperialism, 240 antiracism, 125, 144–­145, 146, 156; music and, 153, 154; opposition to, 151; versions of, 145 antisexism, 144, 154

293

294 i n d e x Antón, Héctor, 183, 184 Antonio Maceo Brigade, 160, 163, 172n1 Aravena, Alejandra, 150–­151 archipelagic poetic, 104 archipelagic thinking, 105, 239 Arellano, Robert, 166 Arendt, Hannah, 183 Aristide, Jean-­Bertrand, 206 Arnold, Lorin Basden, 97 Arrechea, Alexandre, 180 artivism (artistic activism), 103, 106, 114–­118, 120, 120n2; Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism, 83 Ascuaciati, Carlos, 229 assimilation, 81, 225 Atelier Morales, 181 Aubert, Ariadna Godreau, Las propias, 74 austerity measures, 145–­146, 218 Austerlitz, Paul, 231, 233 authenticity, 68, 132; cultural, 191 avant-­garde, 176, 184, 185, 256 bachata music, 68, 219–­220 Baez Evertsz, Franc, 229 Bailey, David, 188, 189 Balaguer, Joaquín, 218 Barnet, Miguel, Biografía de un cimarrón, 149 Barroso, Abel, 180 Beach, Moses Yale, 134 Beat poetry, 246 beauty norms, 154–­155 Bedia, José, 177, 178, 180, 181 Behar, Ruth, 162, 164 Belique Delba, Ana Maria, 231, 232 Bellegarde, Dantès, 226–­227 belonging, 108, 118, 120; imagining of, 229; intimate, 93; national, 225–­226 Benítez Rojo, Antonio, 130; La isla que se repite, 64 Berman, Marshall, 219 Betancourt, Alonso, 134 Betancourt, Juan René, 145 Betancourt Cisneros, Gaspar, 134, 135, 136, 139; Addresses Delivered at the Celebration of the Third Anniversary in Honor of the Martyrs for Cuban Freedom, 136 Beuys, Joseph, 178, 179 BIC. See Saillant, Roosevelt bifocality, 91 blackness, 143, 145, 154, 155 Blanco, Richard, 164, 165 bling aesthetic, 197 Bloemraad, Irene, 24, 35 blogs, 93, 94, 116, 143 Bobes, Velia Cecili, 179 Boyce-­Davies, Carole, 231 Bracero program (U.S.), 36

Brathwaite, Kamau, 198 Breakspeare, Cindy, 199 Bremer, Fredrika, The Homes of the New World, 129, 130–­131 Brief History of Seven Killings, A (7K; James), 192–­193, 194, 196, 199 British Virgin Islands, 82, 83 British West Indies Program (1943), 5 Britton, Celia, 240 Bruguera, Tania, 180, 184; Memorias de la posguerra, 182; El susurro de Tatlin, 183, 184 Bueno, Cruz, 233 Buergo, Adriano, 177 Bush, George W., 79, 80, 81, 83, 84–­85 Bush, Laura, 85 Cabrera Moreno, Servando, 176 Calafell, Bernadette Marie, 94 Camnitzer, Luis, 177 Campins, Alejandro, 183 Campos, Magdalena, 177, 180 capitalism, 2, 8, 67, 175, 227; global, 225, 226, 231; late, 93 Capó Crucet, Jennine, 166 Capote, Yoan, 183, 184 Carbonell, Walterio, 145 Cárdenas, Israel. See Guzmán, Laura Amelia, and Israel Cárdenas Cardona, Javier, 61, 62, 69–­70, 71, 75 Carey, Henry F., 235n1 Caribbean American Heritage Month, 5, 79, 80–­83, 84–­85 Caribbean Americans, 82–­83, 85; historical figures, 82; as identity category, 79, 80; military service of, 83–­84; presidential definitions of, 81; recognition of, 78 Caribbean Studies Association (CSA), 231–­232 caricatures, 182 Carneiro, Sueli, 153 Carpinteros, Los (art collective), 180, 182; Sala de lectura, 183 cartography, 111, 123n40, 131 cartoons, 62, 63, 75 Casal, Lourdes, 151 Casanueva, Yeni, 183 Casimir, Jean, 229 Castañeda, Consuelo, 177, 178, 180 Castillo, Marco Antonio, 180 Castor, Suzy, 229 Castro, Adrián, 204, 241–­249, 254, 256n28; “Back Home a Splash Can Only Come from a Fish,” 244–­245; Cantos to Blood and Honey, 241, 246; “Fishing at the Crossroads,” 248–­249; Handling Destiny, 241, 245, 256; “Music & Guarachas

i n d e x 295 When Stories Sound Too Tall,” 246–­248; “1959—­the First Mass (for Instance),” 243; “Petition at Oshún River,” 245; “Un Rezo to Reconcile,” 243; Wise Fish: Tales in 6/8 Time, 241, 243, 248 Castro, Fidel, 143, 144, 160; image of, in art, 182 Castro, Humberto, 180 Castro, Mariela, 149, 151 Castro, Raúl, 149, 164 Catálogo alfabético de apellidos (Alphabetic catalog of surnames), 104, 120n4 Catholic Church, 104, 173n17 celebrities, 88, 90, 92, 99; LGBTQ, 95, 96 CENESEX. See Centro Nacional de Educación Sexual censorship, 113, 131, 132, 182 Centro Bonó, 230 Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, 40 Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, 60, 76n1 Centro Franklin, U.S. Embassy, Dominican Republic, 230 Centro Nacional de Educación Sexual (CENESEX; National Center for Sex Education), 151, 153 Cerviño, Elizabeth, 183, 184 Chambers, Eddie, 189 Chamoru, 104, 108–­109, 110; language, 109, 113 Chansky, Ricia Anne, 62 Charlemagne, Manno, 205 Chauvet, Henri, 228 Chisholm, Shirley, 79 cinema. See film circular migration, 171 citizenship, 75, 231; Dominican, 215, 220; indebted, 67, 74. See also U.S. citizenship Civil War. See U.S. Civil War classification, 132, 138, 193 Clews Parsons, Elsie, 228 Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture, 79 Club de la Habana, 134, 135 code-­switching, 241 Coke, Christopher “Dudus,” 199 Coke, Lester, 199 Cold War, 160, 199 Collins, Shannon, 83 colonialism: extended, 110, 122n38; globalization and, 120; Hispaniola naming and, 227; homophobia and, 89; indebtedness and, 67; legacies of, 6, 114, 203; marginalization and, 4; Portuguese, 2; Spanish, 2, 19, 103, 128, 139; territoriality and, 103, 106; territory and, 108, 118 coloniality: of diasporas, 2; of power, 1–­2

colonization, 3, 239, 241; reducción and, 109; Spanish, 8, 9, 104; white labor and, 139 colorism, 95 Columbus, Christopher, 104, 105 coming out, 87, 88, 100 commonwealth government, 5, 30, 37 community formation, 222, 225 conceptualism, 177, 178–­179 Confederacy (U.S. Civil War), 127, 139–­140 connectivity, 90, 92, 99–­100 consular relations, 25, 28, 38n19 Coon, David R., 97 Corten, André, 229 Cosme, Eusebia, 151 costumbristas, 138–­139 Coulson, Amanda, 189–­190 counterpoetics, 191 counter public, 4 countervisuality, 194 Coupé Cloué. See Henry, Jean Gesner Cozier, Christopher, 190 creolization, 191, 192, 239, 240 criollos, 127, 128, 129; Cuban annexation and, 133–­136, 139; slavery and, 130, 139; U.S. engagement by, 135, 136 crossroads, 248, 249, 254 Cruz, Celia, 151 Cruz Azaceta, Luis, 181, 182 CSA. See Caribbean Studies Association Cuba: annexation of (see annexation of Cuba); diplomatic relations with U.S., 164, 167, 171, 185; economy of, 143–­144, 145–­146, 150; fiction about, 166, 172; Hurricane Irma and, 64, 75, 76; languages of, 203; literary canon, 128, 137; migration from, 42, 128 (see also Mariel exodus); neoliberalism and, 67; publishing in, 150, 182; as raceless, 144–­145, 151; racial narratives in, 148–­149; religion in, 243, 244; repatriation to (see repatriation, Cuban); slavery and, 127, 140; “Special Period” in, 60, 145–­146, 180; travel accounts of, 127, 128–­129, 130–­132, 135, 136–­139, 140; Treaty of Paris and, 103, 107, 122n26; in U.S. imagination, 127, 130, 166; U.S. open-­arms policy, 11; whitening of, 9–­10, 133–­134 Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 (U.S.), 5 Cuban Americans: first generation, 164; one-­and-­a-­half generation, 162, 163, 166, 168; second generation, 164, 166–­167, 168 Cuban art: institutional order of, 176, 179; motifs of, 180–­181; politicization tactics, 177–­179, 182–­184; postmodernist, 179–­180; post-­Soviet, 125–­126, 175–­176, 180–­186; power and, 182, 185–­186

296 i n d e x Cubanidad, 143, 154, 165 Cuban National Film Institute. See Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos Cubanness, 166. See also Cubanidad Cuban Revolution, 125, 160, 172, 243; film and, 222n8; migration after, 10–­11, 42; race and, 144–­145, 157n11 CubaOne Foundation, 165–­166, 174n32 Cuba with Pen and Pencil (Hazard), 128, 136–­139, 142n42 Cuenca, Arturo, 177, 178, 180 Cuesta, Odaymara, 153–­155 Culebra, Puerto Rico, 105, 106, 114–­118, 120 cultural myths, 90–­91 cultural politics, 176, 179, 180 curation, 126, 188, 189, 200 Curiel, Ochy, 153 Dalleo, Raphael, 4 Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White), 156 Dana, Richard Henry, 127, 130, 140; To Cuba and Back, 131 dance, 61, 69–­70, 75. See also individual dances dancehall, 192, 196, 197, 199 de Arrate, José Martín Félix, 137 debt, 60, 67–­68, 74, 76 Decena, Carlos, 230, 231, 233 decolonialism, 6n2, 109–­110, 113 decolonization, 2, 3, 89, 179 Decree-­Law No. 302 (Cuba), 167 de Graauw, Els, 24, 35 de la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés, 113, 123n47, 250 de la Fuente, Alejandro, 145, 146 de la Nuez, Iván, 177; Cuba exhibition, 180; La isla futura exhibition, 180–­181 de la Sagra, Ramón, 137 de las Casas, Bartolomé, 8 Deleuze, Gilles, 240, 255n7 Delgado, Ana Albertina, 177 Delgado, Ángel, 177 de Palma, Ramón, 134 Department of Labor, Puerto Rico, 28 dependency theory, 229 depoliticization, 182, 184 depopulation, 12, 40, 41 “Despacito” (Fonsi and Ender), 62, 67, 68–­69, 74, 75 Despradel, Lil, 229 deterritorialization, 241 dialogism, 191 diaspora, 151–­152, 156, 186, 193; African, 154, 199, 228, 242; black artists in, 191; Cuban artists in, 176, 180–­182, 184;

film and, 216; intersectionality in, 144; multilayered, 118; music and, 155, 199; paradox of, 189 diaspora artists, 120, 126, 180 Diaspora Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2017, 188–­189, 190 diasporic thinking, 188, 190, 200 Díaz, Jesús, 55 hermanos, 172n1 Directorio de Afrocubanas (Afrocubana Directory), 150–­152 disarticulation, 249, 254 distal actions, 29, 30, 35–­36 diversality, 111, 123n39 Dólares de arena (Sand Dollars; Guzmán and Cárdenas), 215–­216, 217, 219–­220, 221 Domenech, Rafael, 183 domestic ethics, 98–­99 domestinormativity, 96, 97 Dominican Republic, 30, 139, 219–­220, 221, 233; ambassadors of, 230; economy of, 217, 218, 220, 222n12; film in, 215–­222; government of, 229; Hispaniola naming and, 226, 236n13; language in, 237n43; languages of, 203; migration from, 11; relations with Haiti, 215; separation from Haiti, 225, 231; U.S. interventions, 5, 11, 229 Dominican Studies Institute, City University of New York, New York, 234 Dominican Supreme Court, 231 Dore Cabral, Carlos, 229 Doucet, Rachelle, 227, 232, 236n21 Douglas, Caroline, 189 Downes v. Bidwell, 120 Duany, Jorge, 91, 161, 222n2; Blurred Borders, 2 Duarte, Isis, 229 Du Bois, W. E. B., 228 Dubuisson, Darlene, 231 Dunham, Katherine, 241 Durban-­Albrecht, Erin, 233 du Sable, Jean Baptiste, 82 Duvalier, François, 205 Duvalier, Jean-­Claude, 205 earthquakes: in Haiti, 62, 83, 205, 227, 230; in Puerto Rico, 41, 44, 77n19 Eckstein, Susan E., 161, 164; Immigrant Divide, 173n14 Edwards, Brent Hayes, 249 Eire, Carlos, 162, 163 Eiriz, Antonia, 176 Eligio, Antonio (Tonel), 177 Elso, Juan Franciso, 177 embargoes, 61, 145, 156, 157n3, 170; familial, 164

i n d e x 297 emotion, 161–­162, 164, 171; repatriation and, 168 enclaves of memory, 161, 162, 163, 165, 167, 171, 172 Enema art collective, 180 English language, 30, 52, 131, 203, 211, 231, 237n43; poetry in, 241, 251–­252 Enríquez, Carlos, 176 Erbsen, Allan, 22 Esson, Tomás, 177, 180 Estévez, Carlos, 180 ethnicization, 218 Etienne, Vadricka, 231 exceptionalism, 133, 234 exile: Cuban, 161, 162, 164, 176, 243; Dominican, 229; Haitian, 229 exoticism, 64, 75 exoticization, 79 expansionism, U.S., 106, 129, 135 expatriates, 11, 12 ex propio vigore doctrine, 107 extradition, 26 extraterritoriality, 25, 28, 37 familism, 92, 97 family, 94–­95, 97, 231; alternative constructions of, 96; digital, 89; ideologies of, 90; online, 92; structures of, 221. See also gran familia puertorriqueña fatal-­conflict model, 229, 237n38 fathers, 87, 88, 95, 97, 98–­99; gay men as, 92 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 78 federalism, 18; horizontal, 24–­26, 28; vertical, 22–­24, 27, 36–­37 Feinsod, Harris, 241 FEMA. See Federal Emergency Management Agency Fernández, Frency, 183 Fernández, Roberto G., 162 Figueroa, Esther, Jamaica for Sale, 201n30 filibusterism, 135 film, 147–­148, 192, 196, 198–­199, 203, 215–­222; experimental, 216, 222n8 film festivals, 148, 216 Finalé, Moisés, 180 Firmin, Antenor, 228, 236n31 Flamenco Beach, Culebra, Puerto Rico, 105, 116 Flores, Adonis, 183 Florida, 40–­44, 54–­55, 241; Cuban migration to, 11 (see also Cuban Americans); demographics, Puerto Rican, 49–­51; Jamaican migration to, 10; Mariel exodus and, 11; Puerto Rican population of, 41, 45–­47; socioeconomic statistics, Puerto Rican, 51–­54

Florida, cities in: Deltona, 43; Fort Lauderdale, 46; Kissimmee, 47; Miami, 11, 41, 42, 46, 52, 164, 248; Orlando, 42, 43, 44, 47, 85; Tampa, 41, 42, 45–­46, 52 Florida, counties in: Broward, 45, 46; Hernando, 46; Hillsborough, 42, 46; Lake, 46; Marion, 46; Miami-­Dade, 45, 165, 173n13; Orange, 43, 45, 46; Osceola, 43, 45, 46, 47; Palm Beach, 45, 46; Pasco, 46; Pinellas, 46; Polk, 45, 47; Seminole, 43, 45, 46; St. Johns, 46; Volusia, 43, 46 Foner, Philip S., 135 Foraker Act of 1900 (U.S.), 26, 30 Fors, José Manuel, 177 France, 9, 209–­210. See also French language Francisco, René, 180, 182 Franco, Franklin, 229 Franke, Kathleen, 96 Freeman, Scott, 233 free trade agreements, 36 French language, 203, 206, 208, 210, 211, 212 Friedman, May, 97 Fuentes, Elvis, 176 Fuller, Melville Weston, 120 Fumagalli, Maria Cristina, 228 gangsta figure, 192, 196 Garaicoa, Carlos, 180, 181, 182 García, Carlos, 177, 180 García, Cristina, 162, 163, 173n21 Garcia, Gabriela, 166 García, Rocío, 183 Garcia, Vanessa, 164–­165 García Colón, Rangely J. (Rangy), 62, 75, 76n7 Garciandía, Flavio, 177; Segundo viaje de Marco Polo, 178 Garvey movement (Cuba), 148 gatekeeping, 126, 200 gay men, 87, 88, 92. See also LGBTQ people Geggus, David, 226 generations, 162, 164, 165; of artists, 176 genocide, 227, 236n19; civil, 232 Gentil, Robert, 228 Geography and History Society (Dominican Republic), 227 ghetto, 192, 194 Gladstone, Barbara, 180 Glick Schiller, Nina, 173n5, 225 Glissant, Édouard, 4, 120, 204, 239–­241, 249, 254; “Caribbean Relation,” 4; Le discours Antillais, 239; Poetics of Relation, 239, 240 global apartheid, 214 global humanistic imperatives, 234

298 i n d e x globalization, 2, 197; diasporic, 120 Gobineau, Arthur de, 228 Goldstein, Lynda, 97 Gómez, Luis, 178 Gómez, Sara, 145, 147, 150 Gómez, Yashira, 69 González, Alejandro, 183, 184 González, Carmen, 146 González Aguiar, Osvaldo, 183 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 179 gran familia puertorriqueña (great Puerto Rican family), 90–­91, 92 Grenada, 114, 116 Grenfell Tower, London, England, 190 Grupo Areíto, 163 Grupo OREMI, 153 guajiros, 132, 136 Guam, 15, 108–­114, 118, 120; history of, 104; names in, 104, 120n4; Treaty of Paris and, 103, 107, 122n26; U.S. military in, 114 Guano Islands Act of 1856 (U.S.), 107, 122n26 Guattari, Félix, 240, 255n7 Guevara, Alfredo, 160 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 143 Guillard, Norma, 152–­153 Guiteras, Pedro José, 137 Guterl, Matthew, 140 Guzmán, Laura Amelia, and Israel Cárdenas, 215, 216, 217; Carmita, 216, 222n5; Cochochi, 216, 222n5; Dólares de arena, 215–­216, 217, 219–­220, 221; film techniques of, 218–­219, 220; Jean Gentil, 215, 216, 217–­219, 221–­222 Haddu, Miriam, Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, 217 Haiti, 9, 11, 82; ambassadors of, 230; government of, 229; Hispaniola naming and, 226–­227; intraregional movements from, 10; languages of, 203; postearthquake, 233; relations with Dominican Republic, 215; separation from Dominican Republic, 225, 231; 2010 earthquake (see Haitian earthquake); U.S. interventions, 5, 229; U.S. occupation of, 236n29 Haitian earthquake (2010), 62, 83, 205, 227, 230 Haitian Kreyòl language, 203, 209; music lyrics in, 206, 212; poetry in, 206–­212, 251; spoken at conferences, 230, 231, 237n44 Haitianness, 225 Haitian Revolution, 127 Haitian Studies Association, 234

Hall, Stuart, 191–­192, 194, 196–­197, 201n24 Hamilton, Alexander, 82 Hardt, Michael, 2 Hart, Armando, 160 Hart–­Celler Act of 1965 (U.S.), 36 Hasta el cuello (Cardona), 61, 62, 69–­70, 71, 75 Havana, Cuba, 64, 137, 153, 155, 165; British occupation of, 127; real estate market, 169 Havana Biennials, 175, 182, 183 Hawai’i, 10, 104 Hazard, Samuel, 127, 136–­139, 140; Cuba with Pen and Pencil, 128, 136–­139, 142n42; Santo Domingo, Past and Present, 139 Héctor, Cary, 229 Henry, Jean Gesner (Coupé Cloué), 205 Henzell, Perry, The Harder They Come, 192, 196, 198 Hernández, Abdel, 177, 178 Hernández Cruz, Vicente, Snaps, 246 Hernández Cruz, Víctor, 241 Herrera, Georgina, 145, 152 Herskovits, Melville, 228, 236n29 heterogeneity, 133, 134, 255n7 heteronormativity, 94, 96 heteropatriarchy, 155 heterosexism, 89 heterosexuality, 220 hip-­hop, 146, 153–­155, 199 Hispaniola, 9, 67, 234–­235; approaches to understanding, 228; cross-­border relations, 235n1; name of, 203–­204, 226–­227, 229, 236n13, 236n21; unification rumors, 230 Hoerder, Dirk, 7n7, 214 homonormativity, 98 homophobia, 88, 89, 92, 94; in Cuba, 143, 151, 153; in media, 95 Horowitz, Anthony, 189 Howe, Julia Ward, 127, 130, 140; Trip to Cuba, 132–­133 humanitarians, 88, 92 human trafficking, 88, 92, 98 Humboldt, Alexander von, 130, 131, 137; Political Essay on the Island of Cuba, 130, 131 Humboldt Park, Chicago, Illinois, 78 Hurricane Irma, 5, 40, 64, 78, 88, 117 Hurricane Maria, 5, 40–­41, 59–­60, 74, 75; media coverage of, 60, 61, 75, 88; Puerto Rican migration and, 44, 55; U.S. response to, 78, 117 Hurricane San Felipe II, 40 hybridity, 90, 91, 94, 191, 194, 240 hypersexuality, 220

i n d e x 299 ICAIC. See Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos ICF. See International Curators Forum identity: categories, 79, 80, 97; cultural, 4, 189; national, 79, 189; plural, 165–­166; as process, 240; as production, 192; rhizomatic, 240; root, 240 Ifá, 242, 249, 256n22 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (U.S.), 23 imaginary: cultural, 191; global popular, 191; imperial, 107; Jamaican, 192; social, 95; symbolic, 131; transmigrant, 161 imagination: colonial, 125; of Cuba, 127, 130, 166; geographic, 234; locations of, 120; social, 226; U.S., 128–­129 immigrants: incorporation of, 22, 24, 28, 35; policy, 22, 24, 28, 34–­35 immigration: policy, 22, 24, 25, 28; quotas, 36; U.S. Immigration Acts, 5 imperial archipelago, 118 imperialism, 226; European, 83; U.S., 1, 129, 133 indigenous population, 2, 8, 9, 109 industrial revolution, 2, 10 Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC; Cuban National Film Institute), 147 Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México City, México, 229 Insular Cases (U.S. Supreme Court), 27, 103, 106, 107, 120 intellectual social formation (ISF), 4, 224, 228–­229, 234 International Curators Forum (ICF), 188 internationalism, 249 International Organization for Migration, 7n8 internet, 2, 62, 88; access to, 152, 159n42; ethics and, 99 intersectionality, 85, 89, 144, 149, 152, 154–­155, 156 intertextuality, 111, 242, 243, 256 intervisuality, 201n24 intimacy, 94, 96; fatherly, 91, 92; forms of, 88; online, 92–­93, 98; public, 92; virtual, 93 invisibility, 64, 78, 80, 126, 144, 153 Irving, Washington, 137 ISF. See intellectual social formation Iton, Richard, 64 Izquierdo, Madeline, 177 Jadotte, Hérard, 229 Jamaica: arts and, 126, 189, 192, 193–­194, 196–­199; economy of, 201n30; migrations from, 10; politics in, 199

Jamaica Biennial 2017, 189–­190, 193, 200 Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), 199 James, C. L. R., 190–­191, 192; American Civilisation, 190 James, Marlon, 198–­199; A Brief History of Seven Killings, 192–­193 Jameson, Frederic, 179 Januszczak, Waldemar, 189 Jean Gentil (Guzmán and Cárdenas), 215, 216, 217–­219, 221–­222 JLP. See Jamaica Labour Party John Paul II, 164 Johnson, Lyndon B., 11 Johnson Quota Act of 1921 (U.S.), 36 Johnson–­Reed Act of 1924 (U.S.), 36 Jones, Richard G., 94 Jones-­Correa, Michael, 166 Jones–­Shafroth Act of 1917 (U.S.), 4–­5, 26, 27, 30, 61, 79–­80, 83, 91 Junta de Control Fiscal, Puerto Rico, 61, 75 Kagarlitsky, Boris, 179 Kandjo. See Pradines, Auguste Linstant de Kcho. See Leyva, Alexis Kelly, Sean, 180 Kempadoo, Kamala, 220 Kimball, Richard B., Cuba, and the Cubans, 131, 139–­140 Kingston, Jamaica, 189 kinship, 81, 91–­92, 168 Klein, Naomi, 61 knowledge production, 228, 233, 234, 236n25, 236n28, 238n61 Korte, Gregory, 80 Kreyòl language. See Haitian Kreyòl language Kristeva, Julia, 217–­218, 222n11 Kumashiro, Kevin, 94 labor, 82, 98; class division of, 2, 218, 233–­234; demand and supply, 35–­36; sexual, 220; slavery and, 10, 139 labor markets, 52, 55, 214 La Fountain-­Stokes, Lawrence, 90, 91 Laleau, Léon, 227 Lalo, Eduardo, 60–­61 Lam, Wifredo, 176 Lamborghini, Osvaldo, 250, 251 language, 6, 203, 215; acquisition programs, 35; Hispaniola scholarship and, 235; official, in Haiti, 207; visual, 219. See also individual languages La Perla, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 68–­69, 75 LASA. See Latin American Studies Association Las Krudas, 151, 152, 153–­155

300 i n d e x Latin American Studies Association (LASA), 235n1 Latinization, 55 Law, Anna, 23 Layne, Linda, 97 Lazo, Rodrigo, 135 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 75 Leary, John Patrick, 131, 133 Lee, Barbara, 79, 80 León, Glenda, 180 lesbians, 88, 143, 151, 153–­154. See also LGBTQ people Levander, Caroline, 135 Levinson, Sandra, 180 Ley de Cine Dominicano (2013), 216 Leyva, Alexis (Kcho), 180, 181, 184 Leyva Novo, Reynier, 183, 184; A Happy Day, 185 LGBTQ people, 85, 89, 143, 151, 155; communities of, 96; Latinx, 88, 96; online socializing of, 93; Puerto Rican, 92, 93; storytelling and, 94; violence against, in Haiti, 233. See also gay men; lesbians; transgender people liminality, 71, 120, 215, 218, 219 Little Havana, Miami, Florida, 163 Liudmila and Nelson work team, 180, 184 Llona, Miren, 161, 162 Locke, Abigail, 95 Locke, Alaine, 228 López, Narciso, 135, 138, 142n36 López Legazpi, Miguel, 104 Lorde, Audre, 155 Machado, Marilyn, Fuera de revoluciones, 175 Madan, Cristobal, 134, 135 Maldonado, Adál (ADÁL), 61, 62, 70–­71, 74, 75; Los dormidos photography series, 74; Puerto Ricans Underwater photography series, 72, 73 Maldonado Denis, Manuel, 229 Manifest Destiny, 135, 233 Manifiesto: Poesía Concreta (Concrete poetry manifesto), 113 Manley, Michael, 199 Manuel, Víctor, 176 Marcelin, Louis Leslie (Sanba Zao), 230, 233 Marcelin, Mireille, 230, 233 marginalization, 136, 153, 221 Mariel exodus, 11 Marinello, Juan, Conversación con nuestros pintores abstractos, 176 Marley, Bob, 193, 199 Marley, Damian, 199 Márquez, Paulina, 146

Martí, José, 143, 145 Martiatu Terry, Inés María, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150, 152, 156 Martiel, Carlos, 182, 183, 184 Martin, BettyAnn, 97 Martin, Ricky, 91, 100; coming out, 87; digital presence of, 92, 93, 97–­98, 99; familial representation by, 96–­97; Me, 88; messages of, 94; “She Bangs,” 95 Martín, Yolanda, 224, 230, 231, 235n1 Martínez, Raúl, 176 Martínez, Samuel, 229 Martínez-­San Miguel, Yolanda, 2, 7n3 Mártir de Anglería, Pedro, 227 Marxism, 229 masculinity, 97, 98, 193, 197 Matanzas, Cuba, 130, 131 Mateo, Irka, 230 Mayes, April J., 224, 230, 231, 233, 235n1 Mayo, Yolanda, 97 Mayor’s Committee on Puerto Rican Affairs, New York City, New York, 35 McBride, Christopher, 127, 140 McCarran–­Walter Act of 1952 (U.S.), 5, 36 McGlotten, Shaka, 92–­93 medial actions, 29, 34–­35 Medina, Pablo, 162 melancholy, 217, 218, 219, 222 Mella, Pablo, 224, 230 memes, 64, 76–­77n12 memory, 125, 161–­162, 163, 165, 166. See also enclaves of memory Mendieta, Ana, 162, 184 Menéndez, Aldito, 177, 178 Menéndez, Ana, 166 Menocal, Nina, 180 Mercer, Kobena, 191 merengue, 246, 247 mestizaje, 134 mestizas/os, 10, 151 Mexico, 18, 30, 104, 180, 233, 237n36 Mialhe, Frédéric, Viage pintoresco alrededor de la isla de Cuba, 137 Middle Passage, 82, 247 Mignolo, Walter, 108 Migration Division, Department of Labor, Puerto Rico, 26, 28, 42 Migratory Law of 2013 (Cuba), 160, 167, 176, 185 Milanés, Cecilia Rodríguez, 166 militarization, 118 military bases, 103, 104 military debris, 105, 106, 114–­118 millennium development goals, 234 Mintz, Sidney, 226, 233 Mir, Pedro, 229 Mireille (musician). See Marcelin, Mireille

i n d e x 301 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 189, 193, 194, 201n24 mizik sosyal (socially engaged music), 206 mobility, 125–­126, 199, 225, 233; novel forms of, 234 modernity, 190, 200 modernization, 128, 134, 219; neoliberal, 221 monoculturalism, 89, 90, 91 monolingualism, 6, 203 Monroe Doctrine (U.S.), 1 Moreau de St. Mery, Médéric Louis Élie, 228 Morejón, Nancy, 145 Moreno, Marisel, 90–­91 Mosquera, Gerardo, 177, 179 Movimiento de Mujeres Dominico Haitianas (MUDHA), 231 Moya Pons, Frank, 229 MUDHA. See Movimiento de Mujeres Dominico Haitianas mulatas/os, 9–­10, 145, 147 multiculturalism, 69, 225 multilingualism, 204, 240, 251–­252, 254 Muñoz, Elías Miguel, 162 Muñoz, José Esteban, 92, 93 Musa, Bala A., 99 music, 210, 230–­231, 233; in films, 219–­220; global market and, 67, 75; language and, 203, 204; mainstream industry, 95; poetry and, 243, 246; as socially engaged, 206. See also individual genres music videos, 68, 154–­155 National Assembly of People’s Power (Cuba), 184 National Award for Visual Arts (Cuba), 184 National Center for Sex Education (Cuba). See Centro Nacional de Educación Sexual national imaginary, 78, 91 nation-­states, 11, 38n25, 173n5, 228, 235n1; decentering of, 225–­226 natural history, 128, 129, 130, 132 natural resources, exploitation of, 9, 60 Navarro, Desiderio, 177, 179 Navy-­Culebra protests (Puerto Rico), 105 Negri, Antonio, 2 Negrón-­Muntaner, Frances, 90, 95 Nelson, Claire, 80 neocolonialism, 16 neoexpressionism, 176 neoliberalism, 60, 67, 74, 179, 221; multiculturalism and, 69, 75 neoliberal subject, 218 Nevis, 82 “new Cubans,” 161, 173n14 New Jersey, Puerto Rican migration to, 41–­42, 43 New Spain, 104, 105, 123n47

“New World Negro,” 228 New York City, New York, 11, 35, 41, 42, 252, 256n48 New York State, 241; Puerto Rican migration to, 35, 52; Puerto Rican population of, 45, 46, 49; Puerto Rican workers in, 52–­53 Ninja Man (DJ), 196–­197, 198 Nixon, Angelique, 231 Noel, Urayoán, 204, 240–­242, 248, 249–­255, 256n48; “Alphabet City / Ciudad alfabeto,” 252–­253, 256n48; “babel o city,” 250; Boringkén, 241; Buzzing Hemisphere / Rumor hemisférico, 241, 250, 251–­252, 253; Edgemere Letters, 241; Las flores del Mall, 241, 249; Hi-­Density Politics, 241, 250; Kool Logic, 241; “Signs of the Hemisphere / Letreros del hemisferio,” 253; “Trillset” series, 250; “uncertain cruising altitudes,” 250–­251; “Voz quebrada,” 250; “You Have the Nice Weather,” 250 nonnormativity, 96, 97 Novoa, Glexis, 178, 180 Nuyorican Poets’ Cafe, New York City, New York, 252, 256n48 Nzengou-­Tay, Marie-­José, 231 Obama, Barack, 61, 90, 93; Caribbean American Heritage Month proclamations, 81–­82, 83, 84–­85; Cuban policy, 144, 164, 167 Obejas, Achy, 162 Olukonee, Logbona, 155, 156 opacity, 249, 254 Operation Bootstrap (1945), 30 Operation Pedro Pan (1960–­62), 162, 163, 173n17 orality, 109, 113, 198, 240 Organic Act of Guam of 1950 (U.S.), 104 orishas, 242, 249 Ortega, Píter, 183, 184 Ortiz, Fernando, 128, 137, 138, 139, 228 O’Sullivan, John, 134–­135, 141–­142n30 otherness, 75, 191 Page, Joanna, Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, 217 Page, Ruth E., 99 Palacio, Derek, 166 Palés Matos, Luis, 256n28; “Preludio en Boricua,” 247; Tuntún de pasa y grifería, 247 Pancrazi, Jean-­Noël, 215 parenting, 94, 95, 97, 98–­99 parents, LGBTQ, 95, 97

302 i n d e x Park, Shelley M., 96 Parrilla, Adriana, 61, 64–­65, 75; ¡Santa María! photography series, 65, 66 patriarchy, 88, 97, 154 Patterson, Ebony, 198; Of 72, 199 Paz, Octavio, 177, 241; “Hablo de la ciudad” (“I Speak of the City”), 248 Peck, Raoul, Assistance mortelle / Fatal Assistance, 201 Peláez, Amelia, 176 Pence, Tom, 75 People’s National Party (PNP; Jamaica), 199 Pérez, Louis, Jr., 133 Pérez, Michel, 183 Pérez Bravo, Marta María, 177, 181 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 162; Next Year in Cuba, 163 Pérez Monzón, Gustavo, 177 Permanent Committee on Geographical Names (Great Britain), 226 Philippines, 103, 104, 107, 114, 122n26 photography, 61, 64–­65, 75, 98, 193, 199–­200 Picard Byron, Jhon, 231, 233 Pierre, Sonia, 231 Pierre-­Charles, Gérard, 229 Pietri, Pedro, 67 Piñera, Virgilio, 71 Planes, Segundo, 177 plantations, 2, 130, 193, 222n12; economy of, 201n30 plena music, 65, 246, 247 plenary powers, 26–­27, 107 pluriversality, 111, 123n39 poetic mapping, 111, 112 poetic praxis, 204, 241 poetics: vs. cultural politics, 180; decolonial, 113; figurative, 176; of Relation, 239, 240, 242–­243, 254 poetry, 109–­114, 204, 240–­248, 249–­255; concrete, 113; languages of, 206–­212; role of, 118, 120; visual, 113 “poetry of the Americas,” 241, 254 police powers, 27, 37; states’, 23, 25 Polk, James Knox, 134, 141–­142n30 Ponjuan, Eduardo, 180, 182 Ponte, Antonio José, Villa Marista en plata, 182 popular culture, 16, 99, 190, 191 population shifts, 2, 7n8 Port-­au-­Prince, Haiti, 231 Portell Vilá, Herminio, 135–­136 Portes, Alejandro, Immigrant America, 3 Portocarrero, René, 176 Portorreal, Fátima, 225, 229, 232 Portugal, 9 possessions, 28, 103, 107, 108, 120

Poupeye, Veerle, 189, 198 poverty, 10, 12, 52, 74–­75, 76 power, 64, 176, 185–­186; coloniality of, 1–­2; extraterritorial, 25–­26, 27; images of, 182; inequalities of, 15; interpellation of, 182; state and federal, 22, 27 Pradines, Auguste Linstant de (Kandjo), 205 Pratt, Mary L., 137 Prendes, Olivia, 153–­155 Price-­Mars, Jean, 227, 228, 236n29 Prieto, Wilfredo, 183, 184 production of knowledge. See knowledge production PROMESA. See Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act proximate actions, 29, 30, 35 proximity, geographical, 129, 131, 132 Public Law 22 (Puerto Rico), 30 Public Law 600 (U.S.), 26 Puerto Ricans Underwater photography series (Los ahogados; ADÁL), 61, 62, 70–­71, 72, 73 Puerto Rico, 15, 75, 83, 108; as cultural nation, 5; depopulation of, 40–­41, 55; extraterritoriality and, 26; history of, 42–­44, 104–­105; homophobia in, 89; Hurricane Maria and, 5, 40–­41, 59–­60, 74–­75, 78; indebtedness and, 74; languages of, 203; political cartoons in, 62; population of, 18–­19, 44; relation with states, 27; Treaty of Paris and, 103, 107, 122n26; in U.S. federal system, 26; U.S. takeover of, 10, 17, 19; whitening of, 9–­10 Puerto Rico, economy of, 19; economic crisis, 30, 60, 61, 76; 2006 recession, 41, 44, 57, 75; U.S. policy effects on, 36 Puerto Rico, governments of, 18, 22, 27, 36, 67–­68; extraterritoriality and, 28 Puerto Rico, migration from, 17, 18, 20, 22, 35–­37; after Hurricane Maria, 40–­41, 55; settlement patterns, 45–­47, 54–­55; statistics, 44; volume of, 44 Puerto Rico Industrial Development Corporation and the Industrial Incentives Act (1947), 30 Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA; 2016), 61, 75, 117 Puerto Rico v. Franklin California Tax-­free Trust, 27 Puerto Rico v. Sánchez Valles, 27 Puig, David, 221 Pujol, Ernesto, 162–­163; Los hijos de Pedro Pan, 162 Pulse nightclub shooting, Orlando, Florida, 85 Puri, Shalini, 114

i n d e x 303 queer futurity, 93 queerness, 92, 96, 97 queer people. See LGBTQ people Quijano, Aníbal, 1 Quincy Troupe, 246 Quintana, Ciro, 177 Quiroga, José, 89, 96 racelessness, 144–­145, 149, 151 racism, 143, 145, 153, 169; antiblack, 157n11; invisibility of, 125; scientific, 140, 228 Ramos, Arthur, 228 Ramos, Sandra, 180 “Random New York” (Rickards), 200 rap, 68, 154–­155 Rap Agency (Cuba). See Agencia de Rap raperos (hip-­hop musicians), 146 rap kreyòl (Haitian rap), 205 Real Cédula de Gracias (Royal Decree of Graces), 19 real estate, 43, 169, 174n42 real socialism, 179, 182 receiving countries, 3, 214 reducción, 109–­110 refugees, 10–­11, 24; environmental, 41 reggae, 192 reggaetón, 64, 68, 75 Relation, 204, 239–­241, 244, 249, 250, 251, 253–­255 relationality, 91, 93, 94, 99; hybrid, 92 remittances, 11, 146, 218; culture of, 12 repatriation, Cuban, 125, 162; artists and, 185; Migratory Law and, 160, 161, 167, 176; narratives of, 167, 168–­171; as permanent, 160–­161; reasons for, 171–­172; Trump administration and, 174n39 republicanism, 133 republican projects, 225 residential segregation, 49 return, 162; emotional, 162; motivations for, 161, 172; narratives of, 161, 164; permanent, 170 “return of racism,” 146, 157n11 Reyes, Niels, 182, 183 Reynoso, Julissa, 231 rhizome, 240, 241, 255n7 rhythm, 68, 69, 146, 191, 246–­249, 254 Rickards, Peter Dean, 193–­194, 196–­198, 199–­200, 201n34; “Death in Tivoli Gardens” photography series, 193–­194, 195. 196; Ninja Man photography series, 196, 198, 201n42 Rodríguez, Dagoberto, 180 Rodríguez, Juana María, 91 Rodríguez, Mariano, 176 Rodríguez Brey, Ricardo, 177

Rodríguez Cárdenas, Carlos, 177, 180 Rojas, Rafael, 142n37 Rolando, Gloria, Diálogo con mi abuela, 147–­148 Rollins Castillo, Luisa, 232 Roosevelt, Theodore, 105 root, vs. rhizome, 240, 255n7 Rosselló, Ricardo, 67, 76n1 Royal Geographical Society (Great Britain), 226 Roy Fombrun, Odette, 227, 236n19 Rubiera Castillo, Daisy, 146, 147, 149, 150, 152, 156; testimonios by, 148–­149 rude boy figure, 192, 196, 198 Ruiz de Samaniego, Alberto, 180 rumba, 68, 246, 247 Saavedra, Lázaro, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182 Saco, José Antonio, 134 Saillant, Roosevelt (BIC), 4, 205, 206–­212 same-­sex marriage, 26, 151 Sanba Zao. See Marcelin, Louis Leslie Sánchez, Osvaldo, 177 Sánchez, Tomás, 177, 180 Sánchez, Yoani, 183 sanctuary cities, 24 Sand Dollars (Guzmán and Cárdenas). See Dólares de arena San Juan, Puerto Rico, 68–­69 Santería, 242 Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 216, 217, 230 Santos Perez, Craig, 103, 108–­114, 116, 118, 120, 242; from Unincorporated Territory, 106, 109–­114 Santurce, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 61, 69 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 10 Satzewich, Vic, 3 Saunders, Tanya, 153, 155 Saye, Khadija, 190, 200 Schwartz, Bill, 190 Scott v. Sanford, 106 Seaga, Edward, 199 second slavery, 127 Section 936, U.S. Internal Revenue Code, 36, 57n17, 61, 75 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 96 sending countries, 3, 11–­12, 214 Sentencia decision (Dominican Supreme Court), 231 separation, 193; of authority, 22; of church and state, 89; from family, 92, 219; migration and, 91 settlement, 9, 10, 130; patterns of, 41, 45–­47, 54–­55 7K. See Brief History of Seven Killings, A Seward, William, 133

304 i n d e x sexism, 143, 144, 147, 152 sex tourism, 146, 215–­216, 217, 220 sexualization, 98, 144 Sharpe, Christina, 68 Shoaff, Jennifer, 233 Silié, Rubén, 229, 230 Sixto, Maurice, 207 skin bleaching, 197 slavery, 23, 82, 129, 193, 247–­248; Caribbean economy and, 2, 9–­10; in Cuba, 125, 127, 129; Cuban annexation and, 135–­136, 139–­140; end of, 10, 136; Hispaniola naming and, 227; as metaphor, 132–­133 Slocum, Karla, 232, 234 socialism, Cuban art and, 175, 176 socialist realism, 176 social landscapes, 83, 91 social media, 88–­89, 90, 96, 150, 151; access to, 152; as artistic outlet, 61, 70, 154; coming out and, 88; connection and, 90; after disasters, 59, 60, 62, 64, 78; dynamics in, 98; ethics and, 99; Facebook, 60, 61, 62, 76n7, 151; Instagram, 61, 88, 89, 92, 94–­95, 151; landscapes of, 98; role models and, 97; storytelling and, 93–­95; Twitter, 60, 88, 93, 94, 96; YouTube, 62, 68, 76n7, 151, 152, 154 Société d’Anthropologie de Paris (France), 228 Somerville, Siobhan, 97 Somoza, Alexis, 177–­178, 182 Sor Juana. See de la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés sovereignty, 23, 26–­27, 38n25, 108, 126; claims of, 36–­37; division of, 22; grants of, 37; of states, 25, 28; of territories and possessions, 28 Soviet bloc, aesthetics and, 176, 179 Sovietization, 184 Soviet Union, 143, 145, 175 Spain: colonies ceded to U.S., 19, 26, 29, 103, 122; colonization by, 8, 9; criollo representations of, 133, 135; Cuban annexation and, 136, 140; Cuban economy and, 128; Hispaniola naming and, 226; Puerto Rican migration and, 18; slavery and, 139; U.S. writers on, 133, 135 Spanish-­American War, 103, 105, 106–­107 Spanish language, 165, 203, 231; poetry in, 241, 251–­252 “Special Period in times of peace” (Cuba), 60, 145–­146, 180 Spurr, David, 132 state: actions, 29, 34–­35; actors, 17, 19, 21–­22; ideology, 176, 179, 185. See also police powers: states’ statelessness, 241, 242, 254

Stepan, Nancy, 132 stereotypes: challenging of, 147–­148, 152–­154, 228; language and, 208 storytelling, 110, 205, 217; familial, 93–­95 street performances, 153 structure of feeling, 214, 221 Stuart, Robert, 226 Suazo, Félix, 177–­178, 179, 182 suture, 219, 223n16 Taíno, 105, 227 Tallaj, Angelina, 233 tanks, 105, 114–­115, 116–­118 Tavares-­Finson, Tom, 199 taxes: exemptions, 30, 36, 57n17, 61; incentives, 216 Ten Years’ War, 133 terripelagoes, 103, 106, 118 Territorial Clause (U.S. Constitution), 26, 103, 104, 106, 107 territoriality, 25, 61, 103, 105–­106 territory, notions of, 108, 118 testimonios, 148–­149 TH. See transnational Hispaniola Third World New Left movements, 179 Thomas, Deborah A., 232, 234 Thompson, Krista, 199; Shine, 196, 197 Thornton, William, 82 Tivoli Gardens, Kingston, Jamaica, 193–­194, 199 Toirac, José, 180, 182 Tolentino, Hugo, 229 Tomich, Dale, 127 Toné Vicioso (musician), 230 Torres Llorca, Rubén, 177, 178, 180 Torres-­Saillant, Silvio, 225, 230 Torruella, Rafael, 30, 106 tourism, 12, 104, 125, 216; Cuba and, 144, 157n3; “Despacito” and, 68–­69; after disasters, 76; neoliberal script of, 75; vs. traveling, 128, 130. See also sex tourism tourist industry, 10, 52, 146, 149 transculturalism, 191 transgender people, 88, 93, 95. See also LGBTQ people translation, 251, 254 transmigrants, 161, 172, 173n5 transnational Hispaniola (TH), 224; Collective, 203; conference, 2010 (TH I), 224–­225, 230; conference, 2012 (TH II), 230–­231; conference, 2016 (TH III), 225, 231–­232; definitions of, 229–­230; as ISF, 230; ISF of, 228–­229, 232–­233; ongoing work of, 234–­235 transnationalism, 166, 235n1; definitions of, 225–­226; of the heart, 161; as suspended, 11–­12

i n d e x 305 transnationality, 2–­3, 4, 6, 152, 155, 222n2; activist movements and, 143, 146; networks of, 134, 151 Trans-­Pacific Partnership, 104 Trasher, John S., 134 travel accounts, 127, 128–­129, 136–­139, 141n9; politics and, 132–­136 travel evasion, 26 Treaty of Paris (1898), 26, 103, 107, 122n26 troubadour tradition, 205 Trouillot, Michel-­Rolph, 235 Trujillo, Rafael, 11 Trump, Donald, 81, 93; Caribbean American Heritage Month proclamations, 82–­83, 84–­85; Cuban policy, 171, 174n39, 174n42; Hurricane Maria response, 59, 60, 75, 78; in political cartoons, 62, 63 Tu Cuba trips, 165–­166 typification, 129, 131, 132 typography, 111, 113, 198 Ulysse, Gina, 231, 233 “uncertain cruising altitudes” (Noel), 250–­251 “undocumentary poetics,” 241–­242 unincorporated subjects, 15, 16 unincorporated territories, 15, 27, 44, 104, 106; definition of, 107 United States: art market in, 180; Caribbean interventions, 5, 11, 133, 199, 229; Caribbean trade and, 128, 145; continental, 79; island claims of, 122n26; as postcolonial, 83; representations of, 133 universalism, 239, 240 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México City, México, 229 University of Havana, Cuba, 148–­149, 156 untranslatability, 223n16, 249, 256n48 U.S. Board on Geographic Names, 226–­227 U.S. Census Bureau, 41 U.S. citizenship: Americanness and, 79; American Samoa and, 108; effacement of, 85; Guam and, 104; immigrants and, 6; Puerto Rico and, 4–­5, 11, 44, 61, 79–­80, 85; revocation of, 83; Virgin Islands and, 80, 85 U.S. Civil War, 127, 129, 133, 136, 140 U.S. Constitution, 22, 23, 25, 120; Territorial Clause, 26, 103, 106, 107 U.S. Department of State, 226 U.S. Embassy, Haiti, 230, 231 U.S. Employment Service, 29 U.S. Geographic Board. See U.S. Board on Geographic Names U.S. government: branches of, 28–­29; colonial, 22; federal, 22, 23, 35–­37;

organization of, 18, 28; subnational, 22, 23–­25; suspicion of, 230 U.S. Internal Revenue Code, 36, 57n17 U.S. Marine National Monuments, 103 U.S.-­Mexico border, 233 U.S. military, 104, 105, 114, 135, 236n29; Caribbean American service in, 83–­84 U.S. Navy, 105, 114 U.S. Supreme Court, 25, 26, 106, 107, 120 U.S. Virgin Islands, 78, 80, 83, 84 utopia, 179, 180 Vallejo, César, Trilc, 250 Vargas, Tahira, 229, 232 Vásquez Frías, Pastor, 223n14 Venice Biennale 2017, 188–­189 Verano19 movement (Puerto Rico), 67, 76n1 verbal maps, 111, 112 Verstraten, Peter, 223n16 Vertovec, Steve, 91 Vilá, Portell, 141–­142n30 Villaverde, Cirilo, 134, 135 Villazor, Rose Cuison, 80 Virgin Islands. See U.S. Virgin Islands visibility, 68, 79, 111, 197–­198; of Afrocubanas, 144, 149; of artists, 200; media and, 6, 68 visual culture, 91, 184, 189, 192 visuality, 110, 193, 194 Vybz Kartel (DJ), 197 Walton Le Vert, Octavia, 127; Souvenirs of Travel, 130, 132 Warner, Michael, 4 Weiss, Rachel, 177 Werner, Marion, 232–­233 Wesler, Alice R., 141n9 whitening, 9–­10, 133–­134 white supremacy, 23, 95, 133 Wiedorn, Michael, 239–­240 Williams, George W., 127, 132; Sketches of the Old and New World, 131, 135, 140 Williams, Raymond, 214, 219 Willis, Jim, 99 Windrush generation, 188 Wooding, Bridget, 232 World War I, 83 World War II, 7n8, 35, 41, 104, 105, 109 Worth, William J., 135 Wynter, Sylvia, 191, 192, 193, 194 xenophobia, 235 Yelvington, Kevin, 228 Yulín Cruz, Carmen, 60, 75 Zolberg, Aristide, 17–­18