Conclusion: The Heavy Weight of Silence

Abstract

By Early 1930s, The Puerto Rican Poet Luis Pales Matos, as well as a few other island writers, had already published some of his “black verses.” Pales was not unique in placing Caribbean blackness (i.e., lo negro and the wide spectrum of black/white racial mixing) at the center of his artistic expression. The writer participated in the broader 1920s and 1930s cultural and political movements in the Americas and beyond that sought to explore and, at times, anchor the sociocul-tural making of their populations in blackness and African heritage.1 Pales’ work was not a call to embrace Africa in the Americas or to encourage Puerto Ricans to embrace a black identity as a form of political mobilization. In the verses, he placed the mulatto at its center, not lo negro, because for Pales Africa was in the past. Pales identified African heritage as a constitutive force of island history, but he also represented blackness as something quite exotic and folkloric. In so doing, the poet reproduced stereotypes about mulatto women’s hypersexuality and eroticism. His emphasis on the musicality, rhythm, and festive attitudes of people of African descent evoked images of the noble savage, emphasizing their primitive and uncivilized state. Pales’ portrayal of the mulattos’ contentment while working in the plantations tended to obscure the realities of exploitation, impoverishment, and social marginalization of the laboring majority. The pro-independence intellectual, however, constructed an alternative cultural paradigm, one that placed Puerto Rico in close contact not with the United States, Latin America, or the Iberian Peninsula (like raza iberoamericana) but rather with its Caribbean neighbors. The center of Puerto Ricanness was coastal culture, not the mountainous interior (and its jibaro). With his verses, Pales rejected the cultural models operating on the island in the previous decades— the colonial administration’s Americanization projects and the growing hispanophilia with which many Puerto Rican nationalist elites responded. In his case, Pales’ black poetry was a means to cultivate the links between Puerto Rico and the rest of the Caribbean.