By Manuel-de-J-Gonzalez on February 23, 2021
“Puerto Rico has no other path than to be a Free Associated State/Commonwealth. The forces of economy, of geography, of geopolitics, of history and demographics, are more powerful than the laws of man.” Antonio Fernós Isern, El Mundo, June 29, 1967.
In a recent article, Eduardo Lalo discusses the dominant norm in Puerto Rican literature in the first half of the Twentieth Century, which recreated this sickly, timid view of the Puerto Rican people. Lalo cites as examples the collection of novels of Zeno Gandía (La Charca) and the isolationism of Antonio Pedreira, to which I’d add El Puertorriqueño Dócil by Rene Marques, as perhaps the culmination of this tendency. (Without omitting the fact that isolationism also carries with it the ugly face of racism, always present but rarely remarked upon, except by the active pen of Tomas Blanco.)
What Lalo denounces in the Puerto Rican reality, which continues to drag on into the 21st Century, is similar to what Albert Memmi and Franz Fanon exposed many decades ago in their studies of the colonized, using the African experience as a source. This feeble view was always promoted by the colonizer, seeking to ensure that the victims of colonialism would internalize it and make it their own. With this, they managed to maintain a productive colonial system for more than a century, and one which, in many cases, continues to be profitable even after its formal conclusion.
But in all places where colonialism was active, in distant Africa and the nearby Caribbean as well, the colonizer always depended on an official caste, initially brought from the colonizing country and later of local birth, who were in charge of creating and reproducing the political conditions of exploitation. These, more than any other group, were the ones in charge of imposing the cultural hegemony of the colonial system, to use the term created by Gramsci. If the local officials carried out their function well, the iron fist of the colonizer never was displayed.
In Puerto Rico, we have still not yet assessed, with the depth and breadth this topic deserves, the fundamental role played by our literature in sustaining and maintaining the colonial system, just when it began to be banished in the rest of the world. Toward the middle of the 20th Century, colonialism no longer had any defenders in the world, although since the end of World War II, its days seemed to be numbered. The independence of India in 1946 – imposed by the non-violent struggle of Gandhi – and the armed victory of the Vietnamese over the French in 1854 opened the gates of the radical movement of reclamation. Ten years later, the list of recently liberated countries was already long. The Philippines, the largest U.S. colony, also was enrolled in this list in 1946. By the end of the 1960s, colonies were the exception rather than the rule.
Puerto Rico, the second largest colony of the United States, did not follow the example of the Philippines. In 1940 a political force had arisen, the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), which soon became the majority, and whose leaders saw independence as their goal. But all growth requires sacrifice, and even the colonies of a colonial power that calls itself “democratic” have to be ready to confront that power, as they did in the case of the Philippines. The leadership of what was then the main political force in the colony of Puerto Rico refused to take on the challenges and chose the line of least effort.
We are still living with the consequences of the actions of that generation of politicians who not only refused to engage in the battles that they should have waged, but also went to incredible manipulative lengths to justify their inadequacies. In the process, they re-enforced and acclaimed this feeble and timid vision of the Puerto Rican, as Lalo describes in the article cited above. In fact, they went further: they added the myth of geographic and economic determinism or fate.
The quote by Fernós Isern that begins this article sums up very well the extremes to which that group of politicians were willing to go in order to try to justify colonialism by another name and attempt to defend it. What is stated there is a very good summing up of the myths that they glorified and that they still, in great measure, defend. Due to a geographical, economic, and even demographic mandate, we should be satisfied with the minimal reforms that they pompously and, in a cover-up process, call “ELA.”
The Generation of “ELA” – Free Associated State or Commonwealth status – which is my generation grew up hearing these myths to the point of nausea. We are a very small island, poor and over-populated – the geography, demographics and economy that Fernos is talking about – and we have no other option except to be under the guardianship of the United States in perpetuity. These “realities” conditioned us to a fatalistic view that we could never free ourselves from.
The article of Fernos was part of the campaign of the “Fathers of ELA” before the occasion of the first plebiscite, which the PPD made happen on July 23 1967. They were looking for a mandate for the “growth” of their formula, which they are still seeking more than half a century later. Refuting this fatalistic determinism at the time, Juan Mari Bras wrote, in Claridad on July 7 1967, “According to the ideologues of perpetual colonialism called Free Associated State/Commonwealth, Puerto Rico has no other choice but to live forever as a dangling tail of the United States…” The reality is just the opposite. Liberty consists precisely in coming to a complete comprehension of the reality (geographical, economic, political, historical, and demographic) in order to transform it and shape it to be consistent with human aspirations toward progress.
Source: Claridad, translation, Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau