Commemorations of July 25 and July 4 in Puerto Rico, 1899-1968
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María
M. Flores Collazo is a researcher in the Center for Historical Research
at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus, and a doctoral
student at the Graduate Program of History. Since 1992, she teaches courses
on Puerto Rican history in the History Department of the UPR. As a graduate
student, her major research interest is on cultural studies, such as the
public uses of the cultural patrimony, and the politics of the formation
of national identities. Among
her publications are “Cronología política y cultural de Puerto
Rico”, in Revista Iberoamericana of the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut,
Berlín, no. 67/68; “Vulnerabilidad económica y política
de la elite criolla de Puerto Rico del siglo XIX”, in Secuencia, revista
de historia y ciencias sociales of the Instituto José María
Mora, México, no. 29; “De la historia de las instituciones a las
instituciones en la historia”, “Expansión del poder estatal y militarización
del orden público en el Puerto Rico del siglo XIX”, y “La lucha
por definir la nación: el debate en torno a la creación del
Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña”, in Op. Cit. Boletín
del Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, nos. 4, 8 and 10,
respectively. Her forthcoming publication is her first book under the title:
Conmemorar, festejar, consumir: el 25 y el 4 de julio en Puerto Rico.
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Contents
IntroductionThe invention of a tradition of one’s own: July 25th
The study appearing in the following pages is based on my own reading of the commemorative practices that took place in Puerto Rico on and after the year 1898. The first of these celebrations was to mark the landing of the North American troops on the island on July 25, 1898. The next was to celebrate the establishment of the Commonwealth. The last was to celebrate Independence Day in the United States.
Partly
encouraged by Gervasio García’s words of advise: “Commemorations
always incite us to freeze memories and forget their past,”[1]
I plunge into the task of describing how the creation of a celebration
for July 25, and the reinvention of an alien tradition such as July 4,
served to redefine the past in terms of the wants of the present time.
Specifically, I intend to discuss how from 1899 to 1968, in the context
of colonial Puerto Rico, those commemorative events and the selective appropriation
of the common symbols surrounding them gave occasion to the gestation of
a collection of notions about a “we” different from the domineering “they”.
In consequence, a creative process was formed within which different manners
of self-interpretation (sometimes convergent, other times conflictive and
contradictory) gave intelligibility to a single idea of nationality for
the Puerto Rican society.
The
invention of a tradition of one’s own: July 25th
Even
before the invading troops of the United States had taken total control
over Puerto Rico, and even before anyone suspected that from October, 1898
to May, 1900 the Island would be under military rule, the date that marked
the troops’ landing at Guánica—July 25—triggered a formation of
social imaginaires both rooted in the immediate experience of the
rupture with the old order and at the same time centered on the hope that
they heralded a new era free of the evils of the past, or working toward
liberation from them.[2]
Once the specific act was accomplished, both the new “conquistadors” and
their subalterns who played a part in the “complicity of domination” were
compelled to invent a legitimacy that would draw the outlines of the new
relationships of power, deal with the conflicting social and political
effects produced by the events that followed the rupture, and attenuate
and channel the spirited hopes of the crowds that began to create imaginaires
that had, thus far, seemed too distant to achieve.[3]
From all this, one can deduce that at the beginning of the formal enthronement
of U.S. power on the Island, the plethora of social imaginaires
that came out of the invasion emerged spontaneously, contradictorily, and
conflictingly, while they all agreed in seeing the rupture as the sign
of the beginning of a future “under construction.”
Thus,
the partidas sediciosas, or seditious bands, that sprang up in the
mountainous coffee-growing regions of the Island between July of 1898 and
February of 1899, and the strategies designed by the U.S. military rulers
and the property-owning classes to counter the violence that these groups
unleashed, are eloquent examples of the way in which this unique event
gradually gained ground as a symbol of the disappearance of past misfortunes
and the beginning of social and political practices that were perceived
as redemptive.[4]
On the one hand, the dispossessed and economically exploited campesinos
who organized those groups that lashed out against the symbols of the overthrown
Spanish rule provided the energies for a social drama that led to the appearance
of “a horizon of expectations and recollections, fears and hopes”[5]
that threw light on the conflicted economic, social, political, and cultural
conditions that had operated in the past, and that were held up as the
raw materials for the reinvention of the space of a Puerto Rican nation.
On the other hand, the disturbing climate created by the campesino masses
just as the Island was experiencing that rupture with the past made plain
to the criollo elite the necessity of leading those masses down the path
of enlightened “education.”[6]
That is why in their desire to translate the rupture into an order in which
the criollo property-owners, professionals, and intellectuals might, to
their own benefit, exercise their ability to demarcate the limits of the
possible, these men allied themselves with the new colonizing forces, thereby
crystallizing a process of mutual legitimation.[7]
Within the space provided by the fact of the rupture, the criollo political
leadership would dynamite their own hopes, prefiguring in the present the
type of society to be installed in the future.
Meanwhile,
the U.S. rulers announced the “precious privilege of self-government,”
though they conditioned it on the criollos’ giving proof to the United
States of their worthiness to enjoy this gift. As the principal protagonists
in the act of rupture, the Americans strove to design a legitimation of
their policies that would guarantee that they ruled the Island: The two
years of military rule were justified, they said (and some members of the
criollo elite even agreed), by the need to contain the dangerous classes.[8]
Still, even after control of internal order was assured, the American authorities
decided to design an arrangement whereby civil power on the Island would
be exercised within the parameters of a colonial policy that gave the U.
S. Congress full authority over the conquered land. Thus, the concession
of civil government in 1900, granted through an extension of the Foraker
Act, was far from a recognition and affirmation of insular politicians
as the legitimate administrators of the internal affairs of Puerto Rico
in full harmony with the postulates of self-government which the Puerto
Ricans had hoped for.[9]
Given
that under Spanish rule, July 25 had been dedicated to the celebration
of the Feast of Santiago Apóstol, St. James the Moor-Slayer, patron
saint of Spain, the date offered a pretext for praising or rejecting the
negative image that was offered of the Spanish nation. July 25—a holiday
for celebrating St. James’ Day; a holiday for commemorating the landing
of American troops—“two holidays with a crossed history”[10]:
it allowed one to formulate an analogy aimed at taking the past as a point
of departure for the struggles of the present. Thus, there was a reconstruction
of the epic deeds of St. James in his struggle against the armies of the
Arabs who had held the territory of Spain in their grip for eight hundred
years, and this reconstruction obeyed the express intention to present
“clear proof that peoples who want to have their own personalities shall
never be subjugated or absorbed.”[11]
This is, then, an allegorical construct which seeks to make intelligible
“the desire for the absolute domination that is gone” and the rejection
of the “oppressive domination that is arising.”[12]
By
order of acting governor William Hunt, on July 20, 1901, July 25 was made
a legal holiday to commemorate the landing of American troops in Puerto
Rico. This decree came in response to a legislative measure put together
by the member of the Republican Party elected to the House of Representatives
in the elections of 1900. The year following the enactment of the decree,
the city of Ponce announced with great fanfare the official program of
festivities that would take place there on the occasion of “the fourth
anniversary of the arrival of the American Forces of Liberation in the
town of Guánica.”
The
highest officialdom of colonial power hoped that the commemorative events
would give rise to an official functioning of the commemoration of July
25, and they worked toward that goal. That is, these commemorations would
be an instrument that would help to imbue the colonial subjects with forms
of civic loyalty and fidelity that would ensure the stability of internal
order and the consecration of the new instances of power. For several years
during the first four decades of this century, the urban space of Ponce
was the stage of preference on which representatives of the imperial government
and Island bureaucrats would address the “people” inspeeches
that celebrated the unique event of 1898. All this in an attempt to link
the people to the new political framework, to condition it to be a spectator
willing to ratify its membership in the established order via the consumption
of a historical event maintained as a reservoir of discourses which neutralized
the relationships of domination imposed by an act of war.
But
however supremely important the fact of the rupture with the old order
might be taken to be, the date that marked its commemoration as a legal
holiday did not necessarily lead to its celebration on a truly annual basis.[13]
Even so, its symbolic charge did soon produce one of the effects that had
been sought. On July 24, 1903, the Boletín Mercantil announced
that the Spaniards residing in Puerto Rico had decided to eliminate the
celebrations associated with St. James’ Day (el día de Santiago),
with the comment that “the notes of the official music that celebrates
the entry of the American forces into Guánica could not be mixed
with the music and fiestas and celebrations of Spain.”[14]
In addition, in 1904 an editorial in the newspaper La Democracia
bitterly commented on the loss of the tradition of celebrating St. James’
Day with the “joys of. . . yesteryear,” and reproached the “natives,” who
“by their express will” allowed “all the traits of the criollo personality”
to disappear.[15]
What the editorial writer described as a “servile submission,” we ourselves
might read as evidence of the emergence of a new political culture which
took into account the process of forging a new and desacralized public
space in which each social group sought to link its interests to the affairs
that fell within the purlieu of the State. The way the editoritial denounces
the fact that it supposedly describes points to the fear experienced by
one sector of the educated criollo elite in seeing themselves despoiled
of their presumptive function to manage and even fix the content of those
customs and traditions which were “adaptable to the progress of the times.”
On
the eve of July 25, 1909, an editorial published in La Correspondencia
de Puerto Rico addressed the controversy that arose when a group of
American teachers who, due to the budget stand-off that had occurred that
year between the Executive Council and the House of Representatives, had
returned to the United States, disparaging and denigrating the Island.[16]
This series of events served as a pretext for the editorial writer to aim
his pen at the hierarchy of values within which the Puerto Rican was seen
as an inferior:
.
. . [If] the bureaucrats, adventurers, carpet-baggers, tourists, missionaries
and other larvae who have passed through Puerto Rico had arrived on the
Island prepared to truly appreciate Latin culture, the civilization of
a centuries-old race, the moral and intellectual conditions of a people
with a tradition of honor, decorousness, courtliness, generosity, hospitality,
and greatness of spirit, they would have formed another opinion of our
Island.
We
have still not seen a single study of Puerto Rico whose author goes beyond
an extremely superficial observation of our customs, and almost always
of the lower social classes.
.
. . The United States has not yet sent a Humboldt to study us. . . . [17]
This
denunciation of one of the many images of the Island that the new colonizers
had forged for themselves reveals the desire on the part of the criollo
upper classes to rise above their state of political inferiority by constructing
a cultural difference vis-à-vis the outside “other” which gazes
in order to dominate.[18]
In the autonomist version of this process, there is a replication of the
authority of the dominant “other”’s thought, which relegates the colonial
subjects to an inferior place while at the same time maintaining the centrality
of that other in a recognition of its existence as a social body which
possesses a historically constituted culture. In parallel, there was an
attempt to make the current dominator take note of the high culture possessed
by the criollo elite, so that the dominator would take the criollo “educated
city” as the natural place from which political and cultural direction
might be imparted to Puerto Rican society.
In
spite of the support offered by the republicans to the hard-fought campaign
of Americanization undertaken during the first third of this century, it
would be a mistake to read annexationism as a position aimed at the self-alienating
adoption of the imaginaires of the outside “other.” One group of
annexationists conceived Puerto Rican culture as a regional culture,
for the broad, sure development of which, Puerto Rico needed to insert
itself into the currents of capitalist Western culture whose leader” was
the United States.[19]
From this point of view, the regional homeland within which the
“fact of being Puerto Rican” (which “is neither renounced, nor even declined”)
would be protected by “the gallant canopy erected over the Capitol dome
in Washington.”[20]
In 1918, one year after U.S. citizenship was extended to all Puerto Ricans,
the Republicans called on all those who felt “intensely the love for the
motherland” to celebrate the anniversary of the historic date on which
“the landing of the powerful forces of the United States gave birth in
Puerto Rico to firm hopes for regeneration and greatness.”[21]
The precious citizenship was a certificate of the dissoluble links between
the Puerto Rican homeland and the United States, under whose protection
Puerto Rico might enjoy “all the facilities for arriving at the highest
summits of culture, civilization, and progress.” From another perspective,
it was suggested that in being located geographically between the northern
and southern continents of the Americas, Puerto Ricans might harmoniously
and complementarily integrate “two races, moved by different customs and
traditions.”[22]
This idea would have it that beginning on July 25, 1898, the two races
had been guided by the principle “of making all of the New World one truly
free land, politically and economically.” This motivation would lead to
the fusion of the two races, and to the consequent emergence of a “new
kind of American man” who, “though without ceasing to dream of the chimeras
of Quixote, would act in accordance with the practicalities of Uncle Sam.”
From this posture was derived the idea that making Puerto Rico a state
of the Union would not imply the absorption of its culture, since that
culture was protected by the boundaries of privacy. In addition, it would
grant Puerto Ricans the possibility of becoming historical subjects of
continental proportions.
The
Nationalist Party, however, interpreted the relationship between Puerto
Rico and the United States in a different way, characterizing it as a relationship
of economic exploitation and political oppression. This perspective made
possible another version of the project of cultural differentiation. In
the case of (Albizuist) radical nationalism, the definition of the Puerto
Rican nation was postulated on its contraposition with the “imperial other,”
which in turn was visualized as the “central agent of the denationalizing
conspiracy”[23]
that was set in motion the moment the rupture with Spain, the “madre
patria” that had given the Island its inheritance of “civilization
and genius,”[24]
had occurred. That is why the Albizuist discourse articulated the retrospective
projection of a nation joined to the need to legitimate and justify their
intentions to affirm that nation as a realizable historical fact. This
projection entailed a proposal for secular moralization that would guide
the bellicose nature of the heroes who leapt to vindicate the dispossessed
and despoiled nation.[25]
In large part, this explains the series of violent incidents which occurred
throughout the Island in the thirties. One of those which had the most
resonance both on the Island and in the United States was the armed attempt
on the life of governor Blanton Winship in 1938, when Winship, finishing
his speech, was standing on the dais that had been erected for the acts
that the city of Ponce had organized in commemoration of the fortieth anniversary
of the landing of the American troops.
From
1940 to 1949, the Popular Democratic Party (PDP) and its charismatic leader,
Luis Muñoz Marín, with the conditional support of the last
two American governors, Patrick Leahy and Rexford G. Tugwell, had, from
the Island Senate, promoted its program of social and economic justice.[26]
Meanwhile, the PDP managed to forge a broad popular base that allowed Muñoz
Marín, in the elections held in 1948, to become the first governor
elected by Puerto Ricans.[27]
Despite its
independentista origins, by 1945 the PDP had adopted
the formula of autonomy as the final solution to the problem of the Island’s
status, and this in turn led to the political arrangement which took the
name of “Estado Libre Asociado”—Free Associated State, or as it is generally
known in English, Commonwealth.
Significantly,
the Puerto Rican legislature chose the day marking the fifty-fourth anniversary
of the landing of the American troops—July 25, 1952—to inaugurate this
Commonwealth. That date, then, immediately came to symbolize another event
that signified another rupture:
.
. . [By] means of this covenant of union between the people
of Puerto Rico and the United States of American, all traces and vestiges
of the colonial system in Puerto Rico are ended. We are free of all
traces and vestiges of that system.[28]
July
25 became a “new zero-point,”[29]
from which the PDP began counting a new future directed toward liberty,
equality, and progress, all founded on the union of culture and democracy.
Thus emerged the urge to create new codes of identity—a confraternity of
citizens, the sovereignty of the people, a culture of work, justice, and
serenity—which, articulated one with another, would serve to condition
the practice of their addressees, so that these addressees or receivers
might converge in the legitimation of the future as imagined by the triumphant
autonomist project. And that project was the founding of a community with
a national culture whose existence had no need of a sovereign State.[30]
The judicial/political framework of Commonwealth was presented as the space
that would provide the “liberty, understanding, and gentleness” needed
for the construction of a “programmed affirmation” of the sense of Puerto
Rico as a society of a national culture.[31]
The
work that led to the “people”’s being able to recognize and affirm itself
in actions that underscored its collective identity, in concord with the
symbolic representativeness that the State asserted for itself, required
three elements, which had to work in conjunction with one another: First,
the establishment of a national memory by means of an ordered sequence
of dates, events, and actions that would attest to the continuous presence
of the past in the present while working toward the legitimation of the
future. In this respect, documenting the “historical kinship of the Commonwealth
with the autonomist movements of the past”[32]
constituted a practice of interpretation in which the imagined future was
guaranteed by the rhythm marked out by the battles that were fought in
the times of the criollo patricians.[33]
At this juncture, it was of supreme importance that the new rupture be
inserted into a continuity such that the son of the patriot might be presented
as the torch-bearer for the mystical continuity of that redemptive struggle:
“Muñoz Rivera forged the Soul of the Puerto Rican People; Muñoz
Marín, the Personality.”[34]
Second,
the construction of the physiognomy of a cohesive, and binding, nationality
had to be reinforced with the erection of symbols—the flag and anthem,
for example—which would emotionally appeal to the Island’s citizens, from
whom it was expected that when they venerated the symbols they certified
their allegiance to the image of nation (re)created from the heights of
power. Thus, July 25, 1952 was the day on which the flag, rescued from
the hands of those “who tried to reduce it to a division-level standard,”
was to be officially handed over to all Puerto Rican citizens; the flag
was offered as a symbol of “the unity which, in its free diversity of thought,
should preside over the life of every decent nation.”[35]
The obvious reference to radical nationalism, for which the flag was the
most precious standard, sought to cancel all expressions that might seek
to attack the policy of social consensus that the State was preaching.
It was time to de-radicalize nationalism, to forge an official discourse
that might inspire the formation of a nation and a national culture within
the framework of a State without political sovereignty.
Last,
the forging and maintenance of links able to formalize a social behavior
uniformly oriented toward the consecration of the sort of socio-cultural
and political representativeness that the State formulates, requires the
adoption of a cultural policy. That is, culture must be made an object
of politics. To that end, the PDP and its corps of intellectuals molded
the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, which, in accordance with the law
that created it, would begin to function officially on July 25, 1955. The
choice of this date served to emphasize the idea that Puerto Rico enjoyed
full autonomy to affirm itself as a society with a national culture, without
the need for a nation-State. This institute, which was given an autonomous
sort of nature, provided a prescriptive framework that ensured the preservation,
promotion, enrichment, and diffusion of “Puerto Rican values
as they truly are,” and that helped to moderate and suppress the “artificial
distances” that existed within the society.[36]
In the light of these objectives, there was an attempt to enforce the stabilizing
function of symbols and meanings that would serve to inquire into and fix
the boundaries of a national subjectivity in conformity with the ideological
precepts and programmatic goals of the Party-become-State.
During
the course of its hegemony over the Island—from 1952 to 1968—the PDP did
manage to institutionalize the commemorative tradition it had invented
to give luster to the date that symbolized the act on which its power was
grounded. Activities such as passing out little Puerto Rican flags, civic
and military parades, a parade of floats allegorizing the “agreement” formalized
between Puerto Rico and the United States, the coronation of queens of
the Constitution, and fireworks displays were some of the elements incorporated
into the public spectacles presented for the consumption of the popular
classes both in San Juan and the other towns and cities of the Island.[37]
Thus, the public space became a stage on which the masses could exhibit
and display themselves as members of a community free of disruptive fissures,
a community attuned to the value of “regeneration in fraternity.”[38]
Nevertheless,
the exuberance of symbols that was employed in attempts to awaken and maintain
allegiance to the established order of things was inserted into a space
in which other motivations were also at work—motivations that had
little or nothing to do with the liberating demonstrations that the Establishment
was attempting to activate. This is illustrated in a survey which the newspaper
El Mundo took on July 25, 1961 among those attending the acts commemorating
the founding of the Commonwealth. The persons interviewed manifested their
ignorance of the meaning of the insular Constitution, or simply their lack
of interest in it. Among these last was the case of the dietitian who just
wanted “some exercise to lose some fat”; the young man who didn’t think
he was going to wait around to watch the parade but was taking advantage
of the day off work to go to the beach; and the lady who had only come
because she “liked to see parades.”[39]
In
addition, the symbolic panoply by means of which the Establishment attempted
to render homage to itself so as to recreate the illusion of a transparent
social order was more than once subjected to transgressions. Reality showed
itself to be stronger than the image designed by and for power. That imaginaire
was constantly vulnerable, because it was pregnant with conflicts and tensions;
because it never managed to cancel either the other imaginaires
attuned to the reconquest of the past or those symbols that the State confiscated
for its self-consecration; because it always had to deal with a myriad
of imaginaires which held on to that part of the past which served
to keep alive another, different plan for the social space and which even
when they wielded the same symbols that the State had officialized, did
so in the service of the dramatization of the existence of other continuities.
Thus, for example, independentistas and nationalists conceived the
nation in the light of the reconstruction of a memory that affirmed the
ongoing presence of its calls for self-determination.[40]
The town of Guánica, where the American troops had landed in ’98,
revealed itself more and more to be an important symbolic space, and July
25 was more and more made a pretext for proving the “reality” of the Nation
as it was imagined by those who wished to express another memory, one which
would legitimate the recognition of a Nation with a will toward independence.[41]
Meanwhile, annexationists (statehooders) located the continuity of their
dreams and desires in the rupture that had occurred in 1898. As Luis A.
Ferré said: “The full recognition of freedom as the basis of society
arrived upon our tropical shores on July 25, 1898.”[42]
Those
are words which, when spoken on another date—July 4—that had long since
been invested with the symbolic function of dramatizing the perpetuity
of the nation of the United States, would bring into clear relief the reinvention
of a commemorative tradition that articulated symbolic ties of irreducible
continuity between the colonial demands and the principles contained in
the Declaration of Independence that was being celebrated. This was a commemoration,
a day, which, when dedicated to the celebration of the long arm of national
sovereignty of the United States, also helped or enabled those who had
other visions of Puerto Rico’s future to reaffirm their struggles for the
establishment of a Puerto Rican national State.
The
reinvention of a foreign tradition: July 4th
As
early as 1899, La Correspondencia de Puerto Rico announced plans
for a commemoration that had been drawn up by a committee charged with
organizing the July 4 festivities. The following paragraph details the
effects that the committee sought to achieve:
With
the object of celebrating in an appropriate manner the anniversary of one
of the greatest and most beautiful events in the history of humankind,
the signing of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of
America, in order to bring to the knowledge of the people of Puerto Rico
the blessings which have arisen out of that Declaration, blessings which
Puerto Rico shall now freely enjoy, this Committee respectfully suggests
that the celebrations be as widespread as possible, in order to awaken
the general interest and thus contribute to enabling all social classes
to participate in the fiestas.[43]
Taking
as a given the worldwide recognition and acceptance of the importance of
United States’ struggle for, and winning of, independence, a triumph from
which the United States had evolved as the prototype of order, liberty,
and democracy, the members of the committee wished to (re)create an illusion
that would serve to “confirm” the irreducible singularity of the joining
together of the elements that constituted the American nation and the dreams
of freedom of Puerto Rican society for which the committee members appointed
themselves the spokesmen. Through systematic and calculated communication,
they attempted to give life to that illusion in the social consciousness.
They also sought to gloss over the uncertainties that the “unique event”
(the event of July 25) had created; they did this by accentuating the continuity
between the democratic principles of the United States and Puerto Rico’s
own yearning for freedom, and by prefiguring an order that would realize
the promise of a future rich in freedoms. The complex of effects they sought
for, however, was constantly intercepted by the attempts—spontaneous but
also sometimes programmed—by diverse political and social sectors to manifest
their own versions of that same illusion (re)created by the Establishment.
La
Correspondencia de Puerto Rico published accounts of the first Fourth
of July celebration on the Island; it reported the ways by which various
towns around the Island celebrated the occasion.[44]
It reported, for instance, that in Arecibo “500 charitable gifts” had been
distributed and that there had been a parade with a float on which there
rode “three beautiful señoritas, the center one representing the
United States, the young lady on the right, Puerto Rico, and the lovely
young woman on the left, Cuba, each with her respective flag.” The reporter
did not hide his pride in detailing the musical concert given in the City
Hall of Carolina: “The program went off merveilleusement. Classical.”
With this last word, the reporter was referring to the musical pieces performed
at the concert, among them the March of the Prophet and the Carnival in
Venice. In addition, the repertoire was filled out with a seis chorrea’o
and “the immortal anthem La Borinqueña [the anthem of Puerto
Rico], which, as for the other pieces, merited the honor of being played
a second time.” These, then, are revealing details of the conjunction of
cultures that occurs in all situations of domination and interchange, as
they are of the differentiating functions of culture.[45]
These
impressions contrast markedly with those set down in the pages of the workers’
newspaper El porvenir social. There, one of the leaders of the Puerto
Rican labor movement at the turn of the century, the typographer Ramón
Romero Rosa, filed a report. With satiric delight, Romero Rosa offered
another view of the façade erected on the occasion of that first
commemoration of July 4. Here are some excerpts from that report:
When
the immense throng had crowded around the stage, an impolitic citizen
opened the book of Truths, and read aloud:
Working
men and women of Puerto Rico: you who are weak and paralytic, whose body
has been wracked by anemia and malnutrition; the last drop of whose blood
is being sucked by bloodsuckers and parasites, and whose neck is in the
grip of politicians—hark to the voice of Independence, which speaks to
you out of the mouth of this book:
Tell
me, do you wish to be free? . . . Do you wish to be healthy and your blood
pure? Do you wish to gain back the weight that you have lost? . . . Do
you wish your welfare no longer stolen from you by these thieves and robbers?
. . . Do you wish to be respected by the bourgeois spongers, to be taken
for the grand and useful person that you are?
Well,
hear me—Declare your independence! And flee bourgeois politics, as you
would flee cholera or the plague. . . .[46]
In
this parody of a Fourth of July speech, Romero Rosa articulated a project
of self-worth and pride for the working class in opposition to the economic
exploitation to which they were subjected and the self-satisfaction of
the Island’s political leaders as they participated in the play of power
that he called “bourgeois politics.” The desacralizing reading he presents
of the much-revered Declaration of Independence of the United States allows
him to reveal the dreadful conditions of life and work suffered by the
laboring classes and thereby to give validity to his project. But through
his ironic deconstruction of the famous text, he also positively
asserts the supreme importance of the principles contained in it, the importance
of the liberation of the working class. In the final analysis, Romero Rosa
was part of a labor movement that defended its autonomy vis-à-vis
the bourgeois political parties at the same time as in organizational and
ideological terms it was turning toward the United States.[47]
The
original initiative aimed at giving shape to the Fourth of July celebration
on the Island was soon picked up by the central power. Seeing this as an
opportune moment for the people of Puerto Rico to join in expressing their
patriotism and their loyalty to the United States, in 1900 Governor Charles
H. Allen declared the Fourth of July a holiday to be observed with all
the “appropriate” ceremonies. In addition, he ordered all government departments,
offices, and public schools closed, and instructed that the national colors
be displayed on all public edifices.[48]
It seems safe to assume that the new colonizers wished to ensure the solemnity
of the tradition which they had created as a consecration of their power
within the territory of their own nation. But it was unavoidable that they
also attempt to put it to the service of the direct transmission of their
ideology to the recently acquired colony. It is in this way that the day
set aside to commemorate the Fourth of July evolved into an important instrument
of the system of public education, which had been made into one of the
most valuable resources for creating and molding the ideals of a “great
mass of Puerto Ricans. . . still passive and malleable.”[49]
Thus, for example, the annual report of the Commissioner of Education,
Edwin G. Dexter (1907-1912), stated that despite the fact that the Fourth
of July was not part of the school calendar, schoolchildren took part in
the commemorative acts organized for that day in 1908.[50]
Following
the lead set by Governor Allen, in July of 1903 the Acting Attorney General
requested that the people of Puerto Rico abstain from their habitual occupations
and join in the commemoration of the founding of the American nation, “to
whose honor and glory Puerto Rico is indissolubly linked forever.”[51]
About the celebrations that were held on the eve of the anniversary of
independence that year in the capital, the San Juan News reported
on the decorations in the streets and on the buildings, the fireworks,
the people’s launching of explosive artifacts, and the dance that was held
in the municipal theater.
All
of this shows the efforts undertaken by the central and insular authorities
to use the celebration of the Fourth of July to instill a sense of unity,
of cohesion among the popular masses; this sense was obviously intended
to encourage people to identify with the value system of the new center
of empire. But these efforts also reflect that the significance with which
it was hoped the people would understand and celebrate the Fourth of July
was managed by the people themselves in another way. That is, the commemorative
acts were not seen by some classes as the chance to nourish the patriotism
they were supposed to be infused with, but instead to occupy public spaces
in a festive spirit that would enliven the dullness of their daily lives,
and that would even serve to mock the behaviors that were prescribed “from
above.” It was a moment in which the “kids and those who were no longer
kids” could “try to have fun in the noisiest way possible,” to upset the
normal order of things. I would point out that in writing this last sentence
I have used the expressions of a reporter for whom the festivities on the
eve of the Fourth of July revealed a “brilliant beginning.” But I wish
to stress another idea. Paraphrasing Georges Balandier, the turbulent celebration
and transgressive mockery of established order were being processed ceremonially,
and therefore their effects were muted.[52]
In the final analysis, the festive movement was part of the strategies
designed to persuade the “people” to pledge their allegiance to the new
political and ideological format which the power relations between the
Island and the center of empire had taken. In keeping with this, Juan Hernández
López, republican member of the House of Representatives, said that
“the celebration of the Fourth of July should be solemnized not only with
the sound of firecrackers and other racket, it should be solemnized with
all our hearts.”[53]
The
acts of violence carried out by the republican gangs between 1900 and 1904
served as a spur to both republicans and Federal authorities to compete
against one another in their respective celebrations of the Fourth of July.[54]
The American and criollo Establishment, centered in San Juan (whose municipal
seat in the House of Delegates had been dominated by the republicans until
the elections of 1920) organized diverse kinds of festivities, including
military and civilian parades, that would be a vital part of the commemorative
activities during the following years. In 1901, the members of the Federal
Party took part in a civic procession organized in Mayagüez to celebrate
Independence Day. Nourished by the dream that “Puerto Rico will celebrate
the next Fourth of July not as a colony but as a true territory,” they
paraded through the streets of the city, led by the president of the party,
José de Diego, “on horseback, waving a sumptuous American flag.”[55]
In its description of the activity, La Democracia (the organ of
the Federal Party) boasted of the “imposing” demonstration, stressing that
it had “convinced the entire town” that the federals were “an invincible
colossus within the sphere of law and order.”
During
World War I, and particularly from the time of the U.S. entrance into the
conflict, there was a broadening of the ways that the Island was incorporated
into U.S. military-strategic plans. One of these was the recruitment of
Puerto Ricans to serve in the U.S. armed forces.[56]
In a speech on June 27, 1917, President Wilson called upon all males between
21 and 31 years of age to sign up for military service. This call was published
in the vast majority of Island newspapers, which also announced that the
day for signing up would be July 5, 1917. Afterward, the “success” of the
inscription process was reported.[57]
For the commemoration of July 4 that year, the republican mayor of San
Juan, Roberto H. Todd, issued a proclamation urging Puerto Rican youths
to join in the parade to be held that day. Meanwhile, newspapers such as
La Democracia and La Correspondencia de Puerto Rico (a unionist
publication) announced their allegiance to the cause of the Allies, and
called upon Puerto Ricans to take part in the Fourth of July parades so
as to recognize the historical value of the Declaration of Independence.
The
Fourth of July festivities the following year (1918) included among its
celebrants the first Puerto Rican soldiers trained to serve in combat on
the distant seas and in the distant lands of Europe. The columns of La
Democracia, El Aguila de Puerto Rico, and La Victoria,
to name but three, joined in the construction of a new image to be included
in the repertoire of models worthy of emulation by Puerto Ricans. This
was the image of the Puerto Rican recruit. Here are some examples that
show this image:
.
. . These, our BORICUAS, those who at any moment shall go off to fight
for Right and for Democracy, celebrated. . . gloriously this FOURTH OF
JULY, ‘the first Fourth of July dedicated to the declaration of liberty
of all the peoples of the earth’ giving, with overwhelming enthusiasm in
the ranks, a high example of supreme civic spirit.[58]
And
with the gravity befitting men more accustomed to serious situations, that
recruit is serenely ready to receive the instructions soon to come, and
to go wherever it may be necessary, and to struggle valiantly, stinting
neither his blood nor his efforts in the fight for the highest principles
of humanity.[59]
Puerto
Rico, the symbolic lamb of the Americas, transforms its traditional character,
and with the lance of its native pennant[60]
defies the wrath of the attacker, dressing its sons in the American military
uniform, the pride of free nations.[61]
Parallel
to these high-sounding expressions, newspapers such as Pica-pica
and El Diluvio published more biting criticism on the obligatory
nature of military recruitment, especially as occurring in a context of
ignored political demands and impoverished conditions of life for most
of the population. While Pica-pica emphasized the image of the forced
recruit, El Diluvio ran a cartoon of a dying recruit; referring
back to the parade of new soldiers on July 4, 1918, the article read as
follows:
More
than soldiers, they looked like residents of a Clinic, sick men with the
emaciation and weariness of a pre-mortal agony; bodies rendered flaccid
by the absence of vitality; cheeks with the matte yellow of a mummy’s;
eyes with the somnolence and sunkenness of anemia; waxen lips, trembling
at the icy kiss of anemia and malnutrition; faces with premature lines
and wrinkles imparted by tedium.
As
the center of operations of the colonial government, the old walled city
of San Juan had become the stage for supremely pomp-filled ceremonies.[62]
Streets, plazas, public buildings, and the balconies of private homes offered
the setting, decorated with the red, white, and blue of the United States,
for the public parade. First came a large military group, which would be
followed by the procession of high officials of the insular government,
then bands and school and civic organizations, and then private citizens.[63]
The civil part of the parade might vary, but the military component always
came foremost. It was obvious that thus it had to be, given that the stage
was designed for the exhibition of the imperial power of the United States.
This same stage, the walled city of San Juan, had been the point attacked
by the bombardment carried out by the ships of Admiral Sampson in May,
1898; it was here that the criollo artillery captain Angel Rivero surrendered
the city to the American military authories on October 18, 1898.[64]
And it was also here that Puerto Rican and Spanish veterans of the Spanish-American
War would soon be marched past[65]—this,
a sight that would serve to dramatize and confirm the imposing power of
the conquerors, a dramatic spectacle that would allow Puerto Rico to continue
to consider itself a broad and vital stage for the world’s dramas.
In
the last five years of the thirties, the Island’s political and social
unrest led to a reading of the celebration of the Fourth of July as an
event appropriate for staging a show of power in the negative. The speech
given by Rafael Arjona Siaca, Chief Justice of the Puerto Rico Supreme
Court, on July 4, 1935, would help to raise spirits. In his widely discussed
speech, Arjona Siacamade a lengthy
comparison between the situation in the United States prior to its constitution
as an independent nation, and the situation then obtaining in Puerto Rico.
To that effect, he called upon the Congress and President of the United
States to take action to eliminate conditions similar to those of the American
colonies and do away with them forever. Seeing Puerto Rico as a possession
caught in the nets of colonial subjugation, Arjona Siaca found in the past
of that outside “other” the legitimate referent for the construction of
a present reality, and for a justification of the calls for reforms. In
addition, he pointed out that the political situation imposed on the Island,
and the concomitant economic and social results, had generated an anguished
dissatisfaction among the Island’s “true patriots.”[66]
Arjona
Siaca clearly recognized and demonstrated the theatricality of political
power reduced to show. Still, his critique did not deny the necessity of
commemorative ceremony. In his view, the referent of the Fourth of July
was indispensable for planting among all the Island’s social classes the
historic sense of the experience of attaching themselves, with full political,
social, and material display, to the postulates of the “immortal decree”
that had given the United States a “redemptive verb.” But to truly achieve
that effect, Arjona Siaca believed that it was urgent that the U.S. government
attend to the need expressed by the people of Puerto Rico to live in keeping
with the “basic principles of Equality and Freedom that are. . . consubstantial
with the people of the United States.” In the light of the definitive and
just concretion of that need, it was Arjona’s view that the Fourth of July
could be made “the most eloquent exaltation of patriotism and the warmest
and most cordial enthusiasm” of Puerto Rican society.
But
the central government in Washington and San Juan was far from reformulating
the visual spectacle through which it displayed its power. It was intoxicating
to celebrate oneself endlessly with the idea of total, imposing, and indomitable
self-representation. One example of this was the high-sounding festivities
planned by the administration of Governor Blanton Winship for the Fourth
of July celebration in 1936.[67]
The parade that was organized was characterized by an extraordinary panoply
of officialdom from the army, the navy, and insular and municipal government.
General Blanton Winship was the principal actor in the political drama.
Dressed in white and wearing a straw hat, he saluted the units that passed
in review, removing his hat and holding it over his heart.[68]
As he walked toward the dais with his delegation, he was escorted by a
contingent of officers, detectives, and police. When he was introduced
to the crowd that had gathered in front of the stage, Dr. Juan B. Soto
proclaimed him a symbol “not [of] despotism, not [of] tyranny, but [of]
the broadest views of freedom that the people of Puerto Rico has ever in
its history contemplated.”[69]
Introduced to the crowd in this way, Winship needed only to manifest his
competence at translating the event that was being celebrated into an ideology
able to uphold the established order. Throughout his speech, Winship portrayed
himself to the gathered multitude as the supreme guardian of the best interests
of society, equating and linking himself to that society as a disinterested
tutor, or “governor” in the child-raising sense of the word.[70]
For one moment his dramatization took on the note of tragedy, “since the
key to the drama” was to ensure the maintenance of order as a value alien
to fissures or internal clots that might disturb it.[71]
That is how Winship could state that “the strident adherents of perturbation
and disorder should be repudiated and persuaded to abandon the error of
their ways.”
But
the seeds of disorder had been planted; the word became flesh: “Today there
will be 600 police officers and 900 members of the National Guard in San
Juan”; “For two days, San Juan gave the impression of a city under siege”;
“While many police reinforcements were posted before the Governor’s Palace,
many more were seen before and on the stairs leading to the Island’s Capitol
Building.”[72]
The counter-spectacle was the following: the National Association of Drivers
and Owners of Public Cars had called a 48-hour general strike to begin
on July 3, 1936. The former university professor and nationalist leader
Clemente Pereda announced on July 1 that he would go on a hunger strike
for five days to protest the announced Fourth of July festivities. In Bayamón,
400 workers joined their fellow tobacco-processors in a strike to begin
July 2. On July 6, a huge crowd, which had come from several towns across
the Island, occupied the streets of Old San Juan and the area around the
Capitol, calling for social and economic justice. On July 8, the press
reported on a bomb found at Plaza Provision Company, and noted that it
was the fourth attempted dynamite attack in recent days. . . .
In
the midst of the uncertainties brought on by the outbreak of World War
II and the winds of reform set in motion by the Popular Democratic Party,
Fourth of July festivities began to make a special attempt to portray war
as the struggle of democracy against tyranny, as a necessary evil, as the
means of opening the path for the expansion of the democracy that Puerto
Rico yearned for.The war efforts
would once again require Puerto Ricans ready to defend a foreign cause
which, in a not very distant future, would translate into the full concretion
of their own cause.[73]
July
4, 1948, was considered by Luis Muñoz Marín a “moment entirely
appropriate” for justifying his position on the Island’s status and for
persuading the populace to vote to establish “to the maximum degree possible”
its own government.[74]
Muñoz’s speech blew new life into the image and guiding words of
Muñoz Marín. It was seen as the product of a reflection on
the difficult problems of the Island, an attempt to solve them with redemptive
efficacy.The voice of the Father-figure
was perceived as that of the conscience of the people, a light for “those
of little faith,” a call to the “confused,” a voice of moderation for the
“impatient,” and an unsurpassable model of “disinterested and edifying
patriotism.”[75]
That year, Muñoz Marín became the first Puerto Rican governor
elected by Puerto Ricans.
In
the hot years of the Korean War, President Truman signed into law a measure
giving the people of Puerto Rico the right to draft their own Constitution
(July 3, 1950).[76]
From that land, Muñoz would say, the freedom of Puerto Rico had
been fought for. The parade on July 4, 1950 could not have been celebrated
with more symbolic exuberance. A Muñoz with a face that was “rested
and happy” from the victory that he had achieved reviewed the armed forces
that passed, followed by the twenty-five floats that allegorized the coming
of a new order that derived from the just-renewed bonds with the United
States. To mention just two or three of the floats, there were the Float
of the Constitution, which carried a “heroic-sized” portrait of Muñoz,
and another that represented the Liberty Bell whose ringing proclaimed
the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
But
behind the façade of a stable political consensus, differences of
opinion were still at work. The Commonwealth would not go into effect for
two more years yet, and the piles of its future foundation were to be fiercely
attacked—but also fiercely defended. During the time of the “muzzle law,”
the nationalist uprising of 1950 occurred as a combative reply to the colonialism-by-consent
that Law 600 represented.[77]
This armed uprising took place in various towns on the Island (touching
Fortaleza, the governor’s palace) and even reaching Blair House in Washington.[78]
There were deaths and injuries to both police and nationalists, and many
members of the Nationalist Party (and others never identified with that
party) were tried and imprisoned. Among the Nationalists sentenced to prison
terms were Pedro Albizu Campos and his closest followers.[79]
The Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), in turn, initiated an active
campaign to denounce Law 600, attempting to prevent its passage, and it
refused to take part in the Constitutional Convention. Its political agenda
of peaceful protest was the key to fact that in the elections of 1952,
the PIP became the main opposition party, obtaining almost twenty percent
of the votes.[80]
Nevertheless, the legitimacy of the foundations of the future Commonwealth
(economic growth via industrialization by invitation, the designation of
the territory of Puerto Rico as one of “non-dependent autonomy,” and Puerto
Ricanist rhetoric) foiled the PIP’s electoralexpansion.
And to this we should also add the anti-independentista campaign
orchestrated from the structures of power of the new colonial State that
had been sheltered under the “muzzle law” since 1957.
In
the years of the PDP hegemony, the commemoration of the Fourth of July
never managed to solidify as a symbolic moment able to capture with any
degree of strength the attention of those who were oriented toward impugning
the bases of the new regime from an independentista point of view.
Nevertheless, sporadic demonstrations did occur; these demonstrations,
which were held within the same space as that provided for the Fourth of
July celebrations, tended to dramatize the differences of opinion. Thus,
for example, on July 4, 1960, a group of independentistas interrupted
the speech given by Víctor Gutiérrez Franqui by singing La
Borinqueña and waving pro-independence placards. Another example
is provided by the incidents that occurred with the police force when independentistas
set up a picket line, with independentista slogans, during the celebration
of the Fourth of July in 1965.
For
their part, the principal ideologues of the statehood movement continued
to seek a consensus among their ranks in an attempt to hasten annexation
by demonstrating a broad base of support among the population. During the
years of the PDP hegemony, the statehooders abstained from celebrating
the Fourth of July alongside the representatives of the PDP (i.e., Commonwealth)
leaders, with the exception of the festivities in 1968 when Luis A. Ferré,
founder of the New Progressive Party that was the precursor of estadidad
jíbara in the sixties, took part for the first time in the activities
organized by the party in power. During the activities that year, the Association
of Pro-Statehood Members of the University Community (the Asociación
de Universitarios Pro Estadidad, or AUPE) unfurled a sign that read: “Present
in Body, Absent in Spirit. Statehood Now.” (The “statehood now”
slogan was in English.) Other non-party statehood organizations preferred
to celebrate the Fourth of July with activities outside the official program.
One example of this is found in the organization Pro Estado 51 (“For State
Number 51”), which on July 4, 1961 had held a banquet in the Reserve Officers’
Club in San Juan.
From
1952 to 1968, the Fourth of July commemorations were used by the new colonial
State to try to transmit the language of the Declaration of Independence
in concord with the “flexibility” of the “try-out of institutional innovation,”
as its creators called the Commonwealth. That is, the statements in the
Declaration of Independence referring to the institution of governments
“deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and to “the
right of the people to alter or abolish it [the government], and to institute
new government” when they believe that the principles of equality, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness have been violated, had been concretized in
the judicial and political system of the Commonwealth, which provided for
a future change in the bases of the agreement.[81]
But the feverish search for that dreamed-of space in which the U.S. Congress
and the Puerto Rican “people” might come together in the vision of a bright
future for the citizens of Puerto Rico, and in which the people might be
able to see themselves “in law and in deed part of the independence of
the United States,”[82]
led to a kind of relationship in which the United States retained sovereign
powers over Puerto Rico “in law and in deed.”[83]
More
and more aware of the economic and social cracks in the structure of Commonwealth—those
cracks had become increasingly clear throughout the sixties—in 1968 the
“people” decided to experiment with another program of “redemption,” this
time backed by the annexationist NPP administration that had won the elections
in 1968.[84]
During its time in power, publicity gave birth to “drawings of a shower
of little stars and rockets in a cheery lie” that invited people to participate
in the Fourth of July parade in San Juan, which was announced as the celebration
of the “Independence Day of our Nation.”[85]
The American nation, of course, which Ferré and his old and
new followers intended to join with what, for most U.S. legislators, constituted
an indisputable version of estadidad jíbara.
And
although those “drawings of a shower of little stars and rockets in a cheery
lie” did not draw huge crowds to enjoy the celebration of the Fourth of
July in San Juan, the annexationism that imagined statehood with school
textbooks in Spanish, sports sovereignty (an Olympic team, for instance),
a Puerto Rican Miss Universe, and more federal funds to the Island, strained
the credulity of an increasing number of adherents of estadidad jíbara.[86]
This posture reflected what the Commonwealth had already made part of its
credo: that it was possible, without having to establish a national State,
to guarantee the continuance of a society with its own culture; that it
was possible to celebrate the recognition by the outside “other” of the
will to become a State without inevitably compromising Puerto Rican nationality
in order to become a state of the United States, which is a nation that
for a hundred years had seen us as its classic colony, never quite facing
the fact that its Lilliputian territory has always stubbornly clung to
a fierce sense of nationality. This imaginaire has also gradually
coalesced outside the narrow limits of an essentialist notion of Puerto
Rican identity whose real content is its burgeoning hybridity.
Closely
following Baczko, I conclude that commemorations exert an “almost magical
attraction” on those in charge of orchestrate the perpetual scene of the
establishment, as well as on those who turn toward basting other forms
of political, social, or cultural action.[87]
Commemorative events contribute to create, modify or sanction the public
consumption of rituals that attempt to turn a unique public event, registered
in the past, into the fact that validates the intentions of articulating
at the present time a national unifying discourse. The latest, rather to
the advantage of the establishment, or to the advantage of the formation
of common causes that manifest oppositely to the government’s political
operations that try to enunciate the sealing of the nation form and of
the identity proclaimed as intrinsic. Thus, imagining the nation sets up
a practice that demonstrates “the solid, the fragile, the eternal and the
contingent” concealed by each national unifying discourse, and that leads
“to crystallize it, capture it, and immobilize it in notions of hegemony.”[88]
Therefore,
commemorations substantiate the “temporary condition” of the fancied constructions
of a nation.[89]
This temporality is given, on one hand, by the forms of authority that
promulgate the power, validate its dominance, shape a policy of silence
and oblivion, censures the disturber and localize him or her out of the
social corps. On the other hand, the temporary nature of every form of
imagining the nation is given by the deployment of forces that choose to
embark in the adventure of driving different social, political, and cultural
demands. In short, commemorative events pave the way for societies to express
the powerful and intense compulsions to delimit or strengthen memory contents,
identity, and collective actions.
Aguila
de Puerto Rico
Boletín
Mercantil de Puerto Rico
Diario
del Oeste
El
Día
El
Imparcial
El
Mundo
El
nacionalista de Ponce.
El
nacionalista de Puerto Rico
El
Nuevo Día
Florete
La
Correspondencia de Puerto Rico
La
Democracia
La
Victoria
Pica-pica
San
Juan News
The
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