Abstract
This essay examines the symbolic elevation of Puerto Rican personhood through the writing into being of the allegorical figure of the jíbaro. I argue that this symbolic elevation informed a libidinal economic framework that continues to inscribe Puerto Rican socio-political culture within the racialized domain of what I term as peasant ontology. By illustrating the ontological structure of the emergence of the peasant in the twentieth century, this essay first uncovers the desire to neutralize the supposed deviancy of Puerto Rican subjectivity by liberal creole elites. I then invoke the gendered Blackness underlying the writing into being of this ethnonational unconscious. In other words, one can read the ennegrecida(Blackened) jíbara(femme peasant) manipulating the ethnonational colonial psyche. This essay constructs an analytic capable of disintegrating our paternalistic and antiblack peasant ontology by centering the ennegrecidajibara—a form of being that announces what Figueroa Vásquez names as Afro/Latina decolonial feminisms.
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