We had never seen such people before: Puerto Rican literature and the writing of the other (segunda parte)

 

Puerto Rico had been a colony of the Spanish Empire since 1493. The sense of a local literature and a creole specificity is older, but during the 19^th century there was, in spite of censorship and political persecution, an emergent literature written in Spanish, nurtured by cultural institutions established in the last third of the century and by a number of periodicals and literary journals that had networks of contributors in Latin American countries such as Argentina, Chile and México, as well as connections with publishing houses, journals and newspapers in the United States. New York, for example, was a major publishing center for Spanish language books, and the literary events of the city were known and reviewed in Puerto Rican literary journals.

The construction of a national or regional identity was a complex issue. ‘Pureza de sangre’, institutionalized racism, was an infamous practice. Slavery was abolished as late as 1873. Many authors did not write or speak from a “we” that included peoples of color, although the best writers, the more aware and cultivated people, were advocates for the abolition of slavery and for women´s rights.

In the early twentieth century the complexities of national identity and the factors of gender, race and class were present in the literature written by black working class writers and by women, socialists and labor agitators like Tomás Carrión Maduro and Luisa Capetillo, but they hardly entered the canonic corpus of writers studied at the university and the schools. I guess the same is true of American literary studies,

Black slavery is one of the threads that connects cultural spheres between the Caribbean and the United States. Derek Walcott in the poem Omeros, follows the thread from the Caribbean to a Georgia plantation. The Harlem Renaissance was inspired by Caribbean intellectuals like Marcus Garvey and the Puerto Rican Arturo Alfonso Schomburg.

But back to Osuna, who is buried with his wife, in the neighboring town of Orangeville. He was obviously an intelligent young man and was offered a scholarship to study in the United States in the year 1901. Due to his naiveté and his youth, he sharply experienced the sensation of being an alien. 

His trip to the United States was inserted in the educational policies of the United States government toward the population of the island. The first decades were marked by a strong emphasis on radical and swift transculturation (la americanización) and the need to train native teachers who would be fluent American English speakers. Osuna was not prepared to even envision the atmosphere of his destined school, Carlisle. As some of you may know, I am referring to the Carlisle Indian School. Carlisle was established in 1879 on a former military base. (Other Puerto Ricans, were sent to the Booker T. Washington The Tuskegee Negro Normal Institiute at Tuskegee, Alabama, which seems to have followed similar pedagogical goals.)

Decades later, Osuna still remembered his culture shock. About his reaction Pablo Navarro Rivera wrote:

Juan José Osuna arrived at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (CIIS) in Carlisle, Pennsylvania at six o'clock on the morning of May 2, 1901. He was fifteen years old, stood four feet six inches in height, and weighed just 80 pounds. Osuna, who would become a noted Puerto Rican educator, wrote of his arrival at Carlisle: “We looked at the windows of the buildings, and very peculiar-looking faces peered out at us. We had never seen such people before. The buildings seemed full of them. Behold, we had arrived at the Carlisle Indian School! The United States of America, our new rulers, thought that the people of Puerto Rico were Indians; hence they should be sent to an Indian school, and Carlisle happened to be the nearest.

Of course Osuna was “seeing and feeling” from the false consciousness of his own racism and prejudices, the despicable “pureza de sangre” heritage, but nevertheless his displacement was the result of a trial and error policy. About sixty other Puerto Ricans were also subjected to the experiment at Carlisle, which closed in 1918. Carlisle was a trade school and its stated objective was the radical transculturation of children from first nations that had been secluded in reservations. Its founder Richard Pratt surely saw himself as a liberal, enlightened educator when he wrote: “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

From Carlisle, Osuna was sent to Orangeville, near Bloomsburg, as an apprentice to the house of a person named Mira Welsh. The Welsh family is an old local family, according to the book Historical and Biographical Annals of Columbia and Montour Counties. In this environment he learned English and seems to have developed a passion for this region and its history as well.

Osuna returned to Puerto Rico where he was a Dean at the University. In 1923 he wrote his dissertation. In it he he denounced the absurdity of imperial educational policies that could be described by the Carlisle mission statement. “Kill the Puerto Rican to save the Puerto Rican.” And the truth is that these policies were defeated in practice while continuing to create havoc and confusion for decades to come, sometimes as comically absurd as the  decisions documented by Osuna in his dissertation.

We had never seen such people before: Puerto Rican literature and the writing of the other (primera parte)

 

                                                                                                         Marta Aponte Alsina

A Pablo Navarro

What could the literature of Puerto Rico share with the very distinct culture of this region in Pennsylvania, itself a crossroads of peoples and cultures? Usually connections are subtle or hidden underground, like the roots of trees or the waters of underground rivers. According to certain mythologies there is a father or a mother river from which other rivers spring. There is also a tree whose roots embrace the earth. Narrations and myths are related since prehistory, when as you know, people gathered to hear stories.

In spite of their antiquity myths are very much alive. They survive and thrive in pop culture. The science of ecology also reveals the interaction between all regions of the earth. However, the cultural history of nations seems to have moved in the opposite direction, stressing difference. But we don’t have to look back into mythic origins to find a unifying story between this region of the Susquehanna River and the literature of an island in the Caribbean Sea, between the Appalachians and the Valley of Caguas, Puerto Rico.

When professor Hidalgo told me about Juan José Osuna I thought that in spite of Kipling´s verse, east and west do mix. East is East because a capitalist adventurer decided that West is West. Rather the West is one and the other, and the East is also one and the other. The same failure of binary opposition holds true for North and South. They have always mixed, in economic and cultural geography, even though the borders are policed and the lines are drawn.

This common story between a Caribbean island and Bloomsburg begins in the last decade of the 19th century. Caguas, Puerto Rico, was a sugar cane and tobacco producing region. An orphaned young man served as an apprentice at a tobacco warehouse. You can imagine his waking and sleeping hours pervaded by the acrid smell of dry tobacco leaves and cigars. He was an orphan and had to work to help support his family, a fate typical of families and communities all over the world. What was not typical was a destiny imposed by territorial imperative. In 1898 the US Army invaded the island and substituted a very short lived autonomic government under the Spanish Empire for a military government and later for a mixed electoral system with the governor appointed by the president of the United States until 1948. Cuba and Puerto Rico were the last territories in America under the Spanish flag. They also were the first territories South of Texas to be invaded by a power that still sees itself in official discourses as exceptional, according to a historian Jackson Lears, and that after its civil war, embraced its “redemptive responsibilities in the drama of world history” (Jackson Lears, Divinely Ordained, London Review of Books, 19 May 2011, p. 3). Redeeming Cubans and civilizing Puerto Ricans was part of a “manifest destiny”. Taking over the island as a coaling station and stepping stone in the control of Central and South America was, of course, seen as a right.  

But the US could not accept without doubts its imperial role. There was then the need to create an empire without seeming to do so, while carrying out a civilizing mission for countries “not prepared for democracy.” How could this be accomplished? The story was written by the judges of the Supreme Court. According to scholar Amy Kaplan, from the University of Pennsylvania, the so called insular cases, which defined Puerto Rico as an unincorporated territory that belongs but is not part of the US, “turned the space of Puerto Rico into a buffer zone, a blurred borderland between the domestic and the foreign onto which project the threats of hybridity… of a phantasmic invasion of the US. The ambiguous space of Puerto Rico as “unincorporated”, as “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense”, both embodies and allays these fears of foreign bodies” (Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire, Introduction).

But this intricate political novel of the insular cases is not the common story I would like to share with you. The historical personage who was Juan José Osuna has, to my mind, a more immediate pertinence to our exchange. Osuna´s story is worth telling. Here, at Bloomsburg, we are at the university that received his papers, part of his legacy and that is remarkable. Moreover his story sets the stage for a look at the relationship between literature and its place of enunciation or the place –geographical and cultural and ideological- from where a writer writes and the mode of her or his writing the other.

PR 3 Caribe, inventarios del archipiélago

Un condensador de sentido, un imán de papel: eso es el monumental ScientificSurveyof Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands (1913 a 1970). Encuentra un lugar en este libro sobre mi padre por analogía. Así como el terror a la deslealtad engendra la mirada policial, el amor propietario pretende abarcarlo todo con los instrumentos del saber. Las islas imantan al deseoso de conquista. Cuando volví a casa tras haber vivido en continentes la mayor parte de lo que llevaba de vida, cuando regresé al pueblo donde nací, quise saberlo todo de este lugar, no menos la composición de los suelos que la textura elemental de las plantas, las corrientes de agua, la antigüedad de los líquenes. Casi un inventario como el poema de Corretjer, que no es palabra lírica sino definición de una manera corriente de sentir cuando se sale de encierros, de un exilio hostil, de una depresión. 

No adquirí con paciencia conocimientos que me hubieran desviado hacia una vida en las escalas mayores del tiempo. Ahora se disuelve la forma de algunas imágenes. La revelación de la intensidad de los colores se evapora en el olvido. Privilegio y dolor de la mirada que pierde el respaldo de la memoria. Pero persisten las ganas de saber fuera de mapas coloniales, con la facultad de imaginar adiestrada en la observación de lo mínimo y la evocación de sus correspondencias distantes, con cautela de espía y prisa por apuntar, mirar, tocar, oler, escribir, ante la nostalgia prematura de la agonía.

Esa linda pasión de hablar sola, dando voces a las cosas que me rodean, tal vez sea la mejor manera de cumplir con los días y noches que me restan. Pero espiar no necesita encarnaduras animistas. También puede alzarse sobre el deseo de poseer. Entonces el espionaje de la naturaleza se hace sistemática labor de asedio. Para darle un principio de conocimiento al móvil que ha regido los destinos políticos del Caribe en el siglo veinte puede aplicarse una etiqueta de especie: Destino Manifiesto. No,sé si la corona española o la inglesa infestaron el mundo con su codicia desde la creencia en que era ese el papel que Dios les reservaba, o si les bastó el placer de la crueldad. Merece estudio el origen de esa certeza. Acompañar el poder político asumiéndolo como deber moral, y saber que ese deber moral requiere las labores del investigador, del catalogador, del taxonomista. 

Desde el deseo de saberlo todo de los territorios apropiados se concibió y se emprendió, durante décadas, el Scientific Survey. En palabras de Nathaniel Lord Britton, uno de sus fundadores: “The completion of the work will make the geology and natural history of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, insular possessions of the US, the key to the natural knowledge of the West Indies.” En el tono se reconoce la aspiración de contener el mundo en una nuez, y tragarse la llave, como si, en efecto, las posesiones insulares no hubieran sido  ya territorios asimilados por archivos  y bibliotecas.

Nathaniel Lord Britton fue el más destacado de los fundadores del New York Botanical Garden. Era neoyorquino de vieja estirpe, descendiente de moravianos de Pennsylvania que antes del siglo 19 se habían establecido en Staten Island. Esa islacercana a Manhattan sería entonces un remanso para naturalistas. En su zona más antigua ubica el cementerio de los moravianos, donde están enterrados Britton y Elizabeth, su esposa y colaboradora por mérito propio. A veces se descubre justamente lo que ni se buscaba ni se anticipaba. Dejo aquí una pista para otras lectoras. La iglesia moraviana se distinguió en los procesos de cristianización y educación de los pobladores de las Islas Vírgenes cuando eran colonias danesas. 

Espionaje, propiedad, acceso controlado. Llave y antesala. Puentes.

La empresa de Britton, como la empresa de los reyes católicos y la empresa de los demás imperios aventureros en los primeros años de la ocupación europea del Caribe, fue auspiciada por capitales privados. Es cierto que el discurso de la conquista, de “our new possessions” fue sostenido por la ocupación militar y por nativos como mi padre pero, desde los primeros años del contacto, la participación de fundaciones (y antes de compañías privadas de inversionistas) fue parte de la alianza entre gobierno y poder económico.

Between St. Thomas, USVI, and Cayey

 

           La erección de torres de telecomunicaciones en el interior montañoso de la isla grande del archipiélago boricua fue uno de los giros transformadores ocurridos en 1917. Aquel fue el año de la entrada de Estados Unidos en la Primera Guerra Mundial y, sin el beneplácito de los jefes políticos representantes de los indígenas, de la imposición de una citizenship, (esa cuyo deseo abarrota las filas en las fronteras). Fue, además, el año de la compra al gobierno de Dinamarca, por 20 millones de dólares, de tres de las islas vírgenes −St. Thomas, St. Croix y St. John− además de cayos e islotes adyacentes. Al integrarse bajo un solo propietario pudieron haberse estrechado aún más las relaciones entre las islas de Puerto Rico y las Islas Vírgenes. Pero la integración distendida no figura en los paranoicos protocolos militares.

Volviendo a la estación de telecomunicaciones, descubro que como buena máquina de guerra fue objeto de una personificación sentimental. La nostalgia de los soldados de mar (un tanto solitarios en el destierro, como otros oficiantes marinos) les incita a la humanización de sus barcos, e incluso a la humanización heroica de aparatos como las torres, que funcionaron hasta 1932:

However, it remained to equip Puerto Rico with a high power radio station. In 1916, the Department of the Navy submitted a preliminary budget for its construction in the town of Cayey, “mainly to be used in naval operations.” The following year, the Naval Funds Act allocated the amount of $40,000 for this project. By 1918 the construction of Cayey´s naval radio station was being completed “which would not only guarantee communication with North American possessions in the West Indies, but would also provide a transatlantic service. This station was one of the 67 constructed by the Department of the Navy during the course of the war and one of the 5 transoceanic wireless stations in the United States. Puerto Rico had become part of a vast communications network that spanned the globe. (NAVCOMMSTA Puerto Rico – NAU).

La estación de telecomunicaciones construida en el pueblo de mi padre y de mi abuelo, pertenecía al mismo complejo militar que gobernaba en las Islas Vírgenes. El título oficial de la sede del gobierno era St. Thomas US Naval Station. Los pormenores que comparto forman parte de un cartapacio que, según recuerdo, subió a archive.org una sociedad genealógica de las Islas Vírgenes. Cuando intenté recuperar otros archivos que, me parece, formaban parte de esa fuente documental, no pude localizarlos. De modo que los datos siguientes, en una lista o inventario, quedarán como piezas desconectadas de otros documentos de la serie. El nombre del cartapacio comprende la década del gobierno militar en las Islas Vírgenes: Indexof Files Jackets for the years 1917, 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1928. En las páginas que siguen anoto una lista de archivos y temas, con algún comentario.

Para no perder el hilo entre las torres que impresionaron a mi padre y a mi abuelo, parto de una mención del pueblo de Cayey en el índice del expediente, a propósito de una pelea entre borrachos. En la reyerta de cafetín participaron varios soldados, allá por el año de 1922. De hecho, en el índice se anotan varias muertes relacionadas con borracheras (“alcohol investigation”). Pienso que tras dar con este expediente, el único de la serie que pude copiar antes de perder el acceso, no procede volver a desterrarlo en la nube. Me parece más respetuoso copiar los nombres de los muertos a casi un siglo de su mala conducta. Es un homenaje a hombres y nombres irrecuperables, fuera de la memoria de algún descendiente tan desconocido como ellos, anzuelos lanzados al azar en un mar sin referencias, a ver si este libro les llega:

W S Hand, Corporal, USMC, 1922 (muerto)

Matt Colby, Private, USMC, 1924 (herido)

Foster Cohen Cook, no se indica rango, 1926, (muerto)

Kenneth Ivan Curtis Private USMC, 1926 (muerto)

Frank E. Warner, Captain USMV, 1926 (muerto)

Wallace, C.V., Cox  USN (herido por civiles en la estación de St. Thomas)

Wander New, atropellado por el camión USN 2819, 1929

Además se menciona un incidente de “disorderly conduct” (¿conducta impropia, o ese calificativo es privilegio de la élite militar?) de militares en Charlotte Amalie en 1919. Nada vi sobre esas muertes en los expedientes, pero encontré detalles sobre una máquina naval. Si es cierto que los hombres de infantería cuidan a sus caballos para que luzcan la gallardía que raras veces caracteriza a los humanos que los montan, los de las fuerzas navales (“marines and navy”) también se dejan seducir por sus embarcaciones.

En el expediente que contiene el índice de documentos que no pude consultar, se cuentan detalles de la aventura caribeña de un barco. Debe haber más de un libro dedicado al amor de los hombres a los objetos mecánicos. En ese libro cabría la maquinografía de la USS Grebe. El barquito fue, en principio, un barreminas. Durante los años veinte del siglo veinte, y mientras duró su misión en las Islas Vírgenes, desempeñó la labor de ferry que cada semana transportaba viajeros no identificados entre St. Thomas y St. Croix, ida y vuelta.

Esa labor de obrera contrasta con el uso de la Grebe como yate de ociosos. El 15 de abril de 1929, se la comisionó para transportar a maestras estadounidenses residentes en la isla grande, como invitadas a un baile de soldados en St. Thomas:

The Grebe will make trips to Fajardo on Wednesday and Saturday this week, leaving here (St. Thomas) at 0800, leaving Fajardo at 1300 hours. On the Saturday trip she will bring back some American school teachers to attend the dance of the Enlisted Men´s Club Saturday night. These teachers will probably be sent back to Fajardo by the Grebe the next day, Sunday, leaving here at 0900. 

La investigadora se acerca a este documento y su riqueza con curiosidad. ¿Acaso se ha escrito una historia abarcadora, general, sobre las maestras y los maestros “importados” de Estados Unidos? El documento citado sugiere que los hombres de mar blancos, para no desorientarse en tierra de pieles negras, necesitaban acercarse a mujeres de pieles blancas. Salta a la vista una curiosa interpretación de géneros. La Grebe se humaniza con pronombre femenino, es una “she”. Las maestras, se deshumanizan como paquetes o artículos prestados que como tales se devuelven en ese “sentback”.