Essaying the Puerto Rican Nation: José Luis González, Luis Rafael Sánchez and Ana Lydia Vega ...

245 Pages·2012·0.81 MB·English

by  Patricia Rengel

Essaying the Puerto Rican Nation:
José Luis González, Luis Rafael Sánchez and Ana Lydia Vega

By
Patricia L. Rengel

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy
(Spanish)

at
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
2012

Date of final oral examination: 5/17/12

This dissertation is approved by the following members of the Final Oral Committee:
Rubén Medina, Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Guillermina De Ferrari, Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Glen Close, Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Francisco Scarano, Professor, History
Juan Egea, Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
© Copyright by Patricia L. Rengel 2012
All Rights Reserved
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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements p. ii

Abstract p. iv

Introduction p. 1

Chapter 1: Forbidden Subject(s) in “El país de cuatro pisos” p. 22

Chapter 2: Thresholds in “La guagua aérea”:
A Liminal and Popular Nation p. 75

Chapter 3: Essaying the Local: Ana Lydia Vega p. 140

Conclusion: Essaying the Nation at the Edge of the 21st Century p. 192

Epilogue p. 216

Works Cited p. 222
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This dissertation has been a journey, of intellectual, emotional and physical
dimensions. It is a process that took years of sustained support from many people who
believed in me. First, I would like to express a profound gratitude for the generosity of
my advisor, Rubén Medina. At an early stage in my academic career, he supported me
and did not waiver until this project was completed. Along the way he provided the
insight, imagination and guidance that inspired me.
Secondly, Guillermina De Ferrari provided an intellectual acuity that brought new
questions to the project and enabled me to reach beyond the confines of the Spanish-
speaking Caribbean. Not only did I learn the value of critical thinking but also the depth
of intellectual generosity.
Juan Egea also accompanied me early on in this project, especially when
investigating Spanish female essayists. The time he spent with me helped me learn to
read texts more closely with the “so what?” question ever present.
I extend a special thank you to Glen Close for his kindness during a difficult
personal moment and for his meticulous reading of my dissertation. Francisco Scarano
provided thorough bibliographic information about Caribbean history and inimitable
personal warmth. I am very grateful for this committee.
On a personal level, my loving parents kept me inspired with their encouragement
and admiration. The shadow of William Shakespeare, my mother’s passion, flickers
throughout this dissertation. My father’s love for Latin America, especially Mexico and
Puerto Rico, launched me into this field of study. My husband, Roberto, knows the inner
recesses of this journey and he provided me unfailing love and support. My children,
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Francisco and Antonio, grounded me with their relentless encouragement. Without this
love, this project would have been extremely difficult.
Finally, my friends Nancy Bird-Soto and Dinorah Cortés-Vélez, two exquisite
human beings, spent hours challenging me with ideas and cultural references about
Puerto Rico. We share a passion for this small Caribbean nation and each other, two
necessary ingredients that kept me on track. Many other friendships sustained me, but
especially Bretton White who ventured into the Wisconsin woods with me to recreate the
Caribbean, Dr. Darald Hanusa for his humor, Dr. Frank Kilpatrick for his kindness,
Arsenio Ciceros for his laughter, and Saylin Alvarez for all of the above and beyond.
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ESSAYING THE PUERTO RICAN NATION:
JOSÉ LUIS GONZÁLEZ, LUIS RAFAEL SÁNCHEZ AND ANA LYDIA VEGA

Patricia L. Rengel

Under the supervision of Professor Rubén Medina

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Identity – national and cultural – forms the thematic backbone of the Puerto Rican
essay canon. When reading this canon it seems that this island “nation” suffers from
insularism and docility, to cite its most famous essayists. Yet a new zeitgeist arrives on
the essay scene in the 1980s that contests this narrative. This dissertation examines how
José Luis González, Luis Rafael Sánchez and Ana Lydia Vega “talk back” to the essay
canon. They restore overlooked members of the nation who are linked to popular
culture(s) in this study: Afro-Puerto Ricans, circular migrants and women. With this
inclusivity, the essay form changes, especially with Sánchez and Vega. Therefore, I am
attentive to both politics and aesthetics as these essayists challenge racist, elitist and
sexist ideas. This intervention, associated with postmodernism with two essayists, allows
for new subjectivities to emerge.
In Chapter One, José Luis González initiates this aperture with “El país de cuatro
pisos” as he denounces what Michel Foucault calls “sources of power” in order to
incorporate the Afro-Puerto Rican. Read from a perspective of power and representation
this essay succeeds at challenging racism but falls short in representing the popular Afro-
Puerto Rican. The second chapter examines how Luis Rafael Sánchez’s essay “La
guagua aérea” disrupts the tenor of previous essayists with an image of a working class
and diasporic nation. Interpreted as a theatrical text, I explore how Sánchez undoes
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“Puerto Rican docility” and the authoritarian voices of previous essayists. Concepts of
détour, retour and oraliture inform the analysis of the “thresholds” in this essay. The
final chapter examines how Ana Lydia Vega shuns the metaphors of González and
Sánchez and brings the essay back to a local front. With two essays “Vegetal” and “De
bípeda desplumada a Escritora Puertorriqueña (con E y P machúsculas)” I examine how
she questions patriarchal and hegemonic discourses. Vega effectively unravels
traditional essayistic forms and voices with “polyrhythmic” essays that imitate popular
musical structures. I conclude with recent essayists Carlos Pabón and Rubén Ríos Ávila
demonstrating how the metanarrative of nationhood continues to disintegrate, but without
popular culture as a creative or symbolic force.
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Introduction
The essay suffers from a chronic identity crisis. Fraught by critical hostility and
elusive definitions, the essay sits uneasily on the edge of literary studies. Opinions
towards the essay range from outright hostility because it allows for “intellectual
posturing” (Pío Baroja 1108) to condescension with claims of lacking “independence”
when compared to its “sister,” poetry (Georg Lukács 13). In Latin America, one critic
fears that the “magic and exoticism” of fiction eclipses the essay (Ilan Stavans 3).
Further beleaguered, critic Peter Earle declared in 1978 that the Latin American essay
was in a state of “hibernation” due to the rise of structuralism and absorption of the essay
into fiction, criticism and journalism. Following these assessments the fate of the Latin
American essay appears destined to continue to live in literary shadows.
The Puerto Rican essay disproves this scenario, both past and present. This
dissertation examines a moment of essayism in Puerto Rico during the 1980s when José
Luis González, Luis Rafael Sánchez and Ana Lydia Vega wrote indelible essays that
posed new ways to imagine national identity. This reading of “El país de cuatro pisos”
(1980), “La guagua aérea” (1983) and “De bípeda desplumada a Escritora Puertorriqueña
(con E y P machúsculas)” (1985), among others, investigates how these texts innovate
essayistic and national discourses. Specifically, these essays probe the limits of national
identity by including marginalized subjects: Afro-Puerto Ricans, the diaspora, local
culture and women. In the process of re-imagining the nation they infuse the essay with a
new poetics that “talks back” to canonical essayists.
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Key to this reading is the question of what happens when “the socially peripheral
becomes symbolically central” (Stallybrass 5).1 Answered holistically, the concept of the
nation diversifies with the ideas and enunciations of new subjects. Specifically, the Afro-
Caribbean serves as the nation’s cultural and political “foundation” for González while
working class migrants and women emerge in Sánchez and Vega’s essays as “voices”
that can no longer be silenced. With these new protagonists come popular cultural
practices such as jaibería, détour and guachafita that defy insularismo and docilidad,
reigning concepts of previous essayists.
In the wake of this new inclusivity, the essay form changes. González initiates
this shift by contesting the subjectivity of previous essayists from the 1930s and 1950s
with Marxist ideas. Sánchez and Vega further imbed the “socially peripheral” into their
essays with plain language, humor and popular cultural practices. As a result, their
essays challenge the elitist and pessimistic tenor of previous essayists. In the process
these texts become “promiscuous” (Stavans 14) as other disciplines, such as theater,
music and orality reconfigure traditional essay forms.2 Far from a state of “hibernation”
or intellectual laissez faire, these texts demonstrate that the contemporary Latin American
essay is alive and well.
These three writers uphold a Latin American literary tradition: to write about
national identity and culture in the essay. Ever since the 19th century, Latin American
essayists beginning with Simón Bolivar’s essay letter “Carta de Jamaica” (1815) wrote

1 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White examine high-low oppositions in literary and cultural texts from the
17th to the 20th century identifying the impact of transgressions of these hierarchies. They argue that: “It is
for this reason [dependence and desire] that what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central
(like long hair in the 1960s)” (The Politics and Poetics of Transgression 5).
2 Stavans describes essays that mix with other literary genres as “promiscuous,” especially those written by
Julio Cortázar, Carlos Monsiváis, Elena Poniatowska and Subcomandante Marcos. (14-15)
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criollo identity essays. Puerto Rican writers participated in this essayism with Eugenio
Maria de Hostos’ (1839-1903) Madre Isla and continue today with essays such as Rubén
Ríos Ávila’s “Final Inqueery” (2002). In Puerto Rico the theme persists as writers
“assay” a nation in spite of the fact that Puerto Rico has never been free of colonial rule,
initially with the Spanish for four centuries and now under U.S. control since 1898.
Writing about national identity and culture becomes the avowed purpose for
serious Puerto Rican writers. Hailed as medular by José Luis González in “Sobre la
literatura puertorriqueña de los años cincuenta” (145) or an unavoidable Valor Nacional
for Ana Lydia Vega (“Sálvese quien pueda la censura tiene auto” 85), this theme recurs
frequently in the essay. For this reason Juan Gelpí finds that the literary canon serves,
especially during the 1930s, as a substitute national constitution compensating for the
inexistence of an independent national state (Literatura y paternalismo en Puerto Rico
26). In this “national design” marked by “perpetual gestation and collapse” according to
Ríos Ávila (“Queer Nation” 299), Puerto Rican writers continue to “found” the nation
with the essay.
This dissertation pursues this literary obsession and intervention in the Puerto
Rican na(rra)tion through three contemporary essayists. González, Sánchez and Vega
adopt a “high” culture literary genre, the essay, and introduce a disruptive force, popular
culture associated with postmodernism. Two ideas come together in this encounter:
popular culture and the nation. Each essayist teases out a strain of popular culture in
order to restore overlooked members of the nation. In the process they lay bare structures
of exclusion and a hierarchy of values promoted by the essay canon. Ideology and race
propel González in “El país de cuatro pisos” who imagines the nation to be Afro-Puerto