La guaracha del Macho Camacho: The Novel as Dirge

Abstract

An examination of present-day literary production in Puerto Rico allows one to realize that the publication of La guaracha del Macho Camacho in 1976 was a significant turning point for Puerto Rican cultural production. We need only to confront Luis Rafael Sanchez's novel with earlier canonical works such as Antonio S. Pedreira's Insularismo, Luis Pales Matos's pronouncements on AfroAntillean culture or Rene Marques's crucial essay El puertorriqueno docil to establish the particular heterodoxy represented by this text. Even when compared to stylistically similar and almost coetaneous works like Figuraciones en el mes de marzo by Emilio Diaz Varcaircel, the idiosyncratic dimension of La guaracha del Macho Camacho can be readily appreciated. With its rambunctious portrayal of contemporary island reality as a form of entropy, the novel constituted a relentless dismantling of the ponderous and solemn meditations on the problematics of Puerto Rican cultural specificity that had characterized-indeed, become synonymous with-the country's intellectual and artistic endeavors. Spurred by the intractable and engulfing American hegemony over the island, Puerto Rican writers and intellectuals have periodically endeavored to produce formulations of cultural autochthony to counter that ominous presence. Sanchez's work represents an attempt to