Rubén Nazario Velasco's “history of the defeated” (La historia de los derrotados) uncovers the early twentieth-century roots of Puerto Rico's cultural nationalism. The Spanish-language book's legal-historical argument rests on what Nazario describes as foundational and incompatible United States citizenship myths. The “liberal myth” (mito liberal, 276) recounts free and equal United States citizens united by common commitments to democratic governance. The “nativist myth” (mito nativista, 276) depicts a white nation defined by racial exclusions.
La historia de los derrotados is a history of rupture. On one side lies the dozen-plus years after the 1899 United States annexation of Puerto Rico when leading islanders focused on the liberal myth of United States citizenship. They argued that Puerto Ricans deserved political power as Americans, regardless of their race or ethnicity. As they did so, Supreme Court decisions and federal policies consistent with the nativist myth accumulated. Eventually, key Puerto Ricans broke with liberalism to argue that Puerto Ricans so differed from other Americans that Puerto Rico should be independent. Modern Puerto Rican nationalism was born.
The book's broader method might be termed legal-political history and literature. It finds fertile ground in Puerto Rico, where law, politics, and Iiterature have long intermixed. Nazario lucidly synthesizes extant scholarship on the legal-political history of annexation and its aftermath. His footnotes are a veritable guidebook to histories of early twentieth-century Puerto Rico. Through close, subtle readings, he then reveals how legal-political history shaped and was shaped by literary production. Wordsmiths’ pens were cause and consequence of law and politics.
Nazario's account begins during nineteenth-century Spanish rule with Puerto Rican liberals. Like many elites in settler colonies, they aspired to lead their homeland through a transformation toward civilization and modernity. They sought to educate workers, institute liberal democracy, and modernize their economy. Doing so would cast off their island's distinctive manifestations of backwardness and underachievement. They were “optimistic” (optimista, 87) that United States annexation had brought them a powerful partner in the North. They were also wrong. United States judges, lawmakers, presidents, and bureaucrats instead denied Puerto Ricans liberal citizenship and its trappings
Leading islanders responded to United States illiberalism in ways that became building blocks of Puerto Rican nationalism. Island politicians who despaired of achieving statehood or self-government within United States sovereignty pressed for independence, either as an acceptable or preferred alternative to home rule within U.S. sovereignty. They still employed liberal cadences of politics and economy; the more nativist language of customs and racial character lay in the future. Conversely, professional islanders emphasized Puerto Rican distinctiveness in seeking to monopolize teaching, law, and government service against mainland incursion. The aim was “employment protection” (protección del empleo, 175), not a cultural stand. But the logic was nationalistic: Spanish and knowledge of the island's unique laws and legal culture were job qualifications. Influential Puerto Rican writers made sense of United States dominance through engagement with influential early twentieth-century Spanish and Latin American literary schools. These artistic movements resisted United States dominance by depicting a praiseworthy yet politically defeated Latin race that was culturally incompatible with United States mores.
A catalyst for Puerto Rican nationalism came in 1913 after Democrats took control of Washington for the first time since Puerto Rico's annexation. They continued their predecessors’ colonial policies, revealing that the Supreme Court and both United States political parties supported governing Puerto Rico consistent with the nativist approach to United States citizenship. An influential minority of island intellectuals then rejected liberal strategies and embraced romantic, pro-independence accounts of Puerto Rico's distinct history, customs, language, and racial character. The island's masses transformed from being a problem to be solved into the “image of an authentic and ideal Puerto Ricanness” rooted in “utopian accounts of peasant life” (imagen de un puertorriqueño auténtico e ideal; versiones utópicas de la sociedad campesina, 217). The invention of this heroic Puerto Rican past recast United States annexation as defeat, while claiming island distinctiveness as an immutable and natural fact supporting independence.
For Nazario, this origin story has a moral: by claiming to be defeated, nationalists became (and remain) too defeatist. A framework in which all power is “attributed to the Yankee” (se atribuyen al yanqui, 271) renders any island politics a fool's errand. Nazario sees greater possibilities. Globalization and migration have shattered any monopoly colonialism once held over historical and cultural change, and Puerto Ricans have won political gains. Spanish is their language of public life. They enjoy self-government, perhaps more than was sought by turn-of-the-last-century elites. Nazario may go too far in suggesting that colonialism is mere historical “foam,” “alibi,” and “incantation” (espuma; coartada; conjuro, 274, 277, 277). But the volume's final line nonetheless bears emphasis: Puerto Rico “is no defeated country” (no es un país derrotado, 280).
Indeed, this volume exemplifies Puerto Rican resilience. Prior to Hurricane María and the fiscal crisis, the University of Puerto Rico's press regularly issued first-rate, locally produced historical monographs. They are doing this no longer. Too much of such work now goes unpublished. Fortunately, smaller independent island presses sometimes step forward, as Ediciones Laberinto has done here with commendable art. The result is this handsome, well-produced contribution to our understanding of Puerto Ricans’ responses to the law and politics of United States empire.
