Three Books About Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico has been called the oldest colony in the world. While some people contest that statement, Puerto Rico's history is marked by five centuries of colonialism, stretching from 1493 to the present day. Colonialism has shaped the ways that Puerto Ricans conceptualize themselves, their politics, and their ideas of the nation. This book argues that we cannot understand Puerto Rico's current fiscal, political, and social crises without recognizing its colonial reality.

I took three books with me on my recent trip to Puerto Rico. The first was Jorell Melendez-Badillo's Puerto Rico: A National History, a general history of the island from the days of the Taino to the present. For "the world's oldest colony," such a history holds few surprises: the island was colonized by the Spanish beginning with Columbus, and its position made it a key stronghold in the Caribbean as well as a producer of, at various times, sugar cane and coffee. Despite a few skirmishes, the Spanish held the island without interruption until the Spanish-American War, when it was seized by the United States, who have never let it go. This history has put Puerto Rico in a strange place: though it's developed its own national identity, part of that identity is that it never really has had any kind of self-determination.

One thing Melendez-Badillo makes clear is that one of the primary fault lines, if not the primary fault line, in Puerto Rican society is the question of its status. Are you for continuing with the commonwealth status quo? Are you for statehood, or for independence? Melendez-Badillo makes it clear where he stands on the issue by focusing largely on the history of the Puerto Rican labor movement and independentista activism. Far be it from me to label something "too woke," but this is, in the end, a book that counts a twerking protest on the steps of the capitolio as a historical watershed of the same order as the American invasion. I thought it also did a good job of capturing the fact of "circular migration," by which the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States cycles back to the island, and how that affects ideals of a national identity. But for the most part, I found that the book was heavy on the this-then-that of history and struggled to articulate larger patterns or themes, including the five hundred year impact of colonialism that is the center of its thesis.

There was a Sears catalogue in every middle-class home in Ponce at that time. Like most families on the island, ours was divided politically. Carmita and Carlos were for statehood, whereas Abby was defiantly Independentista. But we all liked to browse through the Sears catalogue. Having it at hand was reassuring--proof that Puerto Rico was an inseparable part of the United States. We weren't like Haiti or the Dominican Republic, where people still hadn't heard of the telephone and kept food fresh in wooden crates with blocks of ice instead of in General Electric refrigerators. Thanks to the Sears catalogue we had the same access as the people of Kansas and Louisiana to the latest inventions and home appliances, and we could import them to the States without paying taxes. The cardboard boxes and crates came by ship from "el Norte" and took months to get to the island, but when you opened them up, you felt the invigorating cool air of the United States trapped inside like a breath of fresh air against your face.

But maybe I'm just a fiction guy. Much more informative and illustrative of Puerto Rican history was, I thought, Rosario Ferre's novel The House on the Lagoon. It's a familiar kind of book these days: a multigenerational history of a single family in a slightly "exotic" locale. But I thought it introduced a few interesting touches to this paradigm: The House on the Lagoon takes the shape of a book written by Isabel Monfort Mendizabal about the history of her family and that of her husband, Quintin Mendizabal. The Mendizabals, we're told, are an upper class Puerto Rican family whose paterfamilias, Buenaventura, is proud of his (spurious) Spanish nobility. Buenaventura lives through the passage of Puerto Rico's Spanish era to its American one, and is always ready to use it to his commercial advantage. The "House on the Lagoon" is a mid-century modernist construction that is emblematic of Buenaventura's wealth and power.

The question of statehood vs. independence looms. Quintin is an inveterate statehood supporter, while Isabel tends toward independence. Although Ferre shows how different attitudes exist even within families, there's a clear sense that statehood is the choice of the upper-class, whose relationship with the United States, like their relationship with Spain beforehand, is to their commercial advantage. But Ferre is skeptical, too, of the violence embraced by some independentistas: Quintin and Isabel's sons become mixed up in a terroristic nationalistic cell that threatens to bring down the Mendizabal family fortune. What makes the novel most interesting is that Ferre includes interstitial scenes in which Quintin, having discovered Isabel's novel, can't help writing his own version in the margins that flatters his own sense of how history has unfolded. Quintin is allowed to "talk back" to Isabel, but the novel is far from treating the two attitudes as balanced; in fact, we come to understand that the novel itself is Isabel's way of finding a voice that the domineering Quintin has never let her have. Beyond this there's little in the way of metafictional tricks or even stirring prose, but I thought The House on the Lagoon captured something fundamental about the history Melendez-Badillo writes about it in a gripping and specific way.

I also consider that these messages, which seem to arrive on sunbeams or on the wind, could surely only happen here, that they're a form that life takes on in San Juan. Like this, like writing at this table with a tangle of feelings lashing out against the ocean that separates us from everything and everybody, even our friends, such as Diego. For some reason we've chosen to talk without looking at ourselves, without knowing for sure who we are, without any real contact. The routine of the city: solitude drives down the highways, making pit stops at twenty-four hour gas stations.

Eduardo Lalo's Simone takes the trio of novels up to modern-day San Juan, and it's certainly the most literary and accomplished of the three. Lalo's narrator is a Puerto Rican writer who struggles with feelings of anomie and disconnection: the first quarter or so of the novel, which are little more than single-paragraph vignettes of a drifting life in San Juan, is a real high point. The writer begins to receive messages from a mysterious stranger, each one consisting of a quotation from some other text. The quotations reinvigorate him, giving him something to search for. Eventually he discovers that they are written by a Li, a worker at a Chinese restaurant. They begin a strange and not-quite-satisfying affair--Li insists she is a lesbian--that forces the writer to confront his understanding of himself.

Simone--named for Simone Weil, one of the personas Li adopts in her messages--draws a parallel between the life of a Puerto Rican and an immigrant like Li. Li may feel isolated and atomized by being an extreme minority in Puerto Rico, but to be Puerto Rican is itself a kind if isolating, atomizing position, a nowherehood. Lalo makes his interests clear in a long passage where the writer and his colleague get into a passionate argument with a smug writer from Spain. I thought this was all very interesting, and captured a psychological side of the same historical processes that interest both Melendez-Badillo and Ferre. But neither does Lalo sacrifice the specificity of the protagonist and his relationship with Li, which I found to be affectingly and tenderly drawn, even as it unfolds toward what we expect is its doom. As the novel brings the narrator and Li together, and then tears them apart again, it becomes slightly more conventional, but still effective and touching.