Revolution and Power in Puerto Rican Nonfiction

Abstract

It was always going to be a problem.As I drafted this essay, I kept returning to that sentence as an opening line. The problem I was grappling with was how to review two Puerto Rican books without providing an exhaustive political context, and a personal one. As I read Nelson Denis’ War Against All Puerto Ricans and Jaquira Diaz's Ordinary Girls, though, I saw that both authors had given me a blueprint: each opens their book by weaving lived experience with the fraught political histories. Before launching into an account of colonial injustices and exploitation of Puerto Rico by the United States, Nelson Denis recounts brutal memories of his Cuban father being deported during the Cold War. Jaquira Diaz opens her memoir with a scene from early childhood, when her father took her to view the body of poet and activist Juan Antonio Corretjer. These anecdotes ground each text in the vital truth that our lives, our memories, are inherently shaped by the politics of our birth.So I'll try to do the same.One of my earliest memories takes place in a damp, stone-walled room in El Morro, the iconic Spanish fortress in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Years later, my brother will have one of its elegant sentry boxes tattooed on his shoulder. We'll eventually scatter my grandfather's ashes here. But in this memory, my mother is carrying me on her hip when she points to a cannonball lodged in the wall. At four years old, I am struck by how small the cannonball is; in cartoons they look like black globes, but this is hardly the size of a grapefruit, with lightning bolt cracks in the stone where it struck.“The Americans did that to us,” she says.I have spent years unpacking that sentence. I exist because my Puerto Rican mother left the island to go to college in Vermont—she wanted to see snow—and married a Long Island boy whose family has been in New York since just after the Mayflower. What does it mean to have one half of your bloodline pointing cannons at the other? And what does it mean that whenever I meet other Puerto Ricans, I always ask the same questions, longing to find recognition and shared rituals: did you put scissors in the window so it wouldn't rain on your birthday? Did your mom have an altar to the Virgin? Does your family speak to the dead, too?But my questions of identity and belonging are familiar to any child of any diaspora. The political connotation of this tangled contradiction of a sentence—The Americans did that to us—is more specific to Puerto Rico. Because by “Americans,” my mother did not mean Puerto Ricans, who are indeed American citizens. And by “us,” she did mean Puerto Ricans, even though the United States was not attacking Puerto Ricans (that would come later), but the Spanish colonizers who controlled the island at the time. So the sentence illuminates both the marked distinction between mainland Americans and Puerto Ricans, and a national identity—“us”—that is inextricable with colonialism.Whenever I write about Puerto Rico, I think of writer and cartographer Judith Schalansky's introduction to Atlas of Remote Islands, where she presents this paradox: “An island is paradise. An island is hell.” To mainland Americans, Puerto Rico is either a tropical vacation destination—the Caribe Hilton claims to be the birthplace of the piña colada, after all—or a distant asterisk on the American flag, a land where an orange president throws a roll of paper towels at appalled hurricane survivors.According to a poll following Hurricane Maria, over half of mainland Americans do not know that Puerto Ricans are American citizens. We can assume that half of Americans do not know that their fellow citizens cannot vote in federal elections.There are many places to turn to study Puerto Rico's history, but no text in recent memory was as explosive as Nelson Denis's 2015 War Against All Puerto Ricans. Even the title was contested—in a three-part opinion piece, historian Luis A. Ferrao claims that Denis “fabricates evidence, exaggerates figures and distorts already well-documented events in order to construct a fictional story under the guise of historical analysis.” Referring to the book's title, Ferrao writes, “Denis attributes the phrase ‘There will be war to the death against all Puerto Ricans’ to Elisha F. Riggs . . . Yet when tracing the sources we find out that Riggs didn't say what Denis attributes to him.”In response, Denis published a scathing rebuttal titled “The Many Lies of Luis Ferrao.” In it, he points to over seventy pages of citations and footnotes, including the one that sources the quote from his title. What's more, Denis implies that Ferrao's criticism belies a grave political bias—Ferrao's Ph.D. thesis, Denis notes, claimed that Puerto Rican Nationalist Party leader Pedro Albizu Campos, a hero of the independence movement, was a “fascist,” and Ferrao's argumentation against Denis’ account denies the indisputable fact of the United States having bombed its own citizens during Puerto Rico's independence uprisings of 1950. Denis writes, “The P-47 fighter planes that bombed Utuado and Jayuya were built in the US, hangared in US airfields, maintained with US equipment, flown by US-trained pilots who dropped US-made bombs, and all of it—the planes, the airfield, the pilots, the bombs—were financed by the US. Yet Ferrao would have us believe that a decal saying “Air National Guard” means that Puerto Rico bombed itself.”This indignation, this battle cry in defense of the island, is pervasive in War Against All Puerto Ricans, a visceral, no-holds-barred account of the United States’ efforts to suppress Puerto Rican independence. Denis divides the text into three sections—Facts, People, and Events—but the legacy of Pedro Albizu Campos is woven through the entire book, culminating with Denis’ compelling evidence that the United States covertly mandated torture by radiation against the father of the independence movement. Pedro Albizu Campos was the first Puerto Rican valedictorian of Harvard Law, a brilliant academic and activist who led the Nationalist Party's struggle for Puerto Rican independence. He died shortly after being released from twenty-six years in prison.Denis was accused of sensationalizing a history that, to many, doesn't need any hyperbole to reveal its brute injustices. And it's valid to say that he brings cinematic flourishes to his depiction of, for example, the 1937 Ponce Massacre, when, during a peaceful Palm Sunday parade commemorating the abolition of slavery, police murdered over twenty civilians. The actual images from that day need no enhancement: Google “Ponce Massacre” and you'll see a man face down on a curb, dying after he's written “Viva la Republica” on a stone wall in his own blood. You'll see four young women carrying a tiny casket that holds the body of a young girl gunned down by police. Denis turns the scene into something out of a Tarantino film, cutting from one horror to another: One could hear the dense, vibratory whap as the bullets tore into human flesh. The police climbed onto cars and running boards and chased people down side streets, shooting and clubbing anyone they could find. They shot a young girl in the back as she ran to a nearby church. They shot a man on his way home, as he yelled, “But I am a National Guardsman.” They split a fruit vendor's head in two with a riot club. They beat a man to death on his own doorstep. They clubbed fifty-three-year-old Maria Hernandez del Rosario on the head so hard that her grey matter slipped out onto the street, and people kept slipping on it. They shot men, women, and children in the back as they tried to escape. . . . By the time they finished, nineteen men, one woman, and a seven-year-old girl lay dead; over two hundred more were gravely wounded—moaning, crawling, bleeding, and begging for mercy in the street. The air seethed with gun smoke. Everyone moved in a fog of disbelief as policemen swaggered about and blood ran in the gutter.To readers who learned of the Ponce Massacre in school, who have seen the statues or visited the Ponce Massacre museum, these details might indeed feel gratuitous, but to those unfamiliar with the event, Denis shines a light that is impossible to ignore. He shakes off the dust of history, brings color to those grainy images, and when he details the aftermath of the massacre—when Puerto Rico's chief of police staged a photoshoot to make it appear that his officers were acting in defense against a fictional sniper—the reader is confronted with a wrenching injustice.Another noteworthy scene—one which exemplifies what can be gained by narrative risks—is Denis’ depiction of a shoot-out at Salon Boricua, a barbershop where Nationalists congregated and where Albizu Campos planned a series of independence uprisings. All his customers jailed or in hiding, barber Vidal Santiago Diaz took on forty soldiers and police offers with the weapons he had been storing for the Nationalists. At the time, reporters estimated 30 Nationalists were in the building, when it was just one man, who had already been tortured for his association with supporters of the independence movement. In a controversial flourish, Denis transposes a speech by Pedro Albizu Campos onto the scene: Sniper shots bounded off the floor and ricocheted off the walls. The machine guns blasted chunks of cement, glass, and jagged wood through the air; something sliced Vidal's cheek like a razor. He threw himself down, rolled across the floor, grabbed a shotgun by the center window, and fired straight at a police car as a photographer snapped a picture from across the streetFor the past fifty years, the United States has been at war with Puerto Rico. They steal our land, sterilize our women, inject us with cancer and tuberculosis, they find traitors to rule over us, parasites who live by robbing their own people . . .A hail of bullets split a wall as a cloud of concrete dust engulfed the shopEmpires are devils disguised as guardian angels. The American flag is a skull and crossbones over two bunches of bananas. Democracy is a lady who presents herself with a machine gun between her legs, tear gas at her breast and her hat adorned with pistoles and .45 revolvers.The Salon Boricua was crumbling. Shrapnel flew everywhere. Flying glass and concrete hit Vidal again and again.Our country is past speeches. Puerto Ricans have to fight for their liberty with all arms at their disposal. We must fight for our own sanity . . . because their propaganda is so complete, that the only reality anymore is the one we create for ourselves.To some historians, the effect may seem irresponsible or dramatic, but by linking Albizu Campos’ speech with the shoot-out, Denis is making it clear that his concern is in foregrounding the hypocrisies and injustices of the United States’ control over Puerto Rico, linking centuries of colonialism to the events of a single afternoon. Denis does make some conjectures into the inner minds of historical figures, but his rhetoric is indeed backed by facts: Albizu Campos did say these words; the United States did mandate the sterilization of Puerto Rican women without their knowledge or consent; Vidal Santiago Diaz did use dozens of smuggled weapons to protest the torture of his friends; and at the time of the Salon Boricua shoot-out, the governor had declared martial law and had over 400 suspected Nationalists arrested, with 1000 more arrests expected.Denis’ text is inflammatory, but that's the point: he seeks to both inform and inspire resistance. This spirit is evident in the opening pages of Jaquira Diaz's 2019 memoir, Ordinary Girls. On its surface, Ordinary Girls is a love letter to reckless girls, girls whose parents choose drugs over daughters, girls who fight and spit and swagger, girls who are fearless and furious and want to be loved. But deeper, Diaz is telling a story about personal and political freedoms.In its first full chapter, notably titled “Origin Story,” Diaz begins by describing an early memory where her father took her to view the body of poet and activist Juan Antonio Corretjer. Almost immediately, we're placed in a political context: During the drive from Humacao to Ciales, I'd listened from the backseat while Papi told the story: how Corretjer had been raised in a family of independentistas, how he'd spent his entire life fighting for el pueblo, for the working class, for Puerto Rico's freedom. How he'd been a friend of Pedro Albizu Campos, “El Maestro,” who my father adored, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party Leader who'd spent more than twenty-six years in prison for attempting to overthrow the US government. How he had spent a year in “La Princesa,” the prison where Albizu Campos was tortured with radiation.At this last line, I wondered if Diaz had read War Against All Puerto Ricans—the radiation torture of Albizu Campos is contested, but Denis provided strong evidence to support it. And indeed, Denis’ book is one of four citations in her notes. Diaz continues the scene, introduced a chain-smoking mother and a father whom she worshipped; as they approach Corretjer's body, she writes, “. . . I was sure of one thing: that I wanted everything my father wanted, and if loved this man, then I would love him too.”Later in the chapter, Diaz recounts her first encounter with sexual violence, when a man in her neighborhood exposes himself to her. And we also begin to see her family's violence take shape: “But Mami, she didn't take no shit. She'd pull me by the arm, the half-moons of her sharp fingernails biting into my skin, and shut me right up. She'd leave me sobbing, longing for something to lift this burden of girlhood.”Diaz's origin story, then, is inextricable from violence, poetry, activism, family. Much of the memoir chronicles Diaz's youth and adolescence on the island later Miami, a childhood marked by anger and addiction. It is a case study in how the fear of a child curdles to fury, an irrepressible rage first pointed at her brother, at other girls, at the people who failed to protect her, and later at the systems that allowed these injustices to flourish. Diaz is an artful writer, playing with chronology to present a narrative that skips forward and backward, that lingers in some scenes and glosses over others. Her queerness runs under the surface in the form of childhood crushes, in brief but compelling account of her time in the military, where she was nicknamed ‘Don't Ask Don't Tell’ after rumors of her sexuality spread amongst her colleagues.A major preoccupation throughout Ordinary Girls is the case of Lazaro Figueroa, dubbed ‘Baby Lollipops’ by the media, whose body was found near Diaz's apartment when she was a child. At first, the story is presented as a fascination, a young girl's thrill at being in proximity to a national news event. Soon, Diaz begins establishing a parallel between the case—a baby's body, wearing a shirt with a lollipop design, found with injuries and burn marks, a mother on trial for the murder—and her own family: “We're supposed to love our mothers. We're supposed to trust them and need them and miss them when they're gone. But what if that same person, the one who's supposed to love you more than anyone else in the world, the one who's supposed to protect you, is also the one who hurts you the most?” Diaz's mother appears in the memoir as a vibrant young woman with her own dreams, whose wrenching slide into addiction drags her daughters to hell.As an adult, Diaz followed the case of Ana Maria Cardona, Lazaro's mother who was raising the child with her girlfriend. The public vilification of Cardona wasn't lost on Diaz: “People on TV sometimes called her the “the lesbian mother,” or talked about her “lesbian lover.” I heard this so often, in so many different ways, sometimes implied, sometimes deliberate, that after a while it seemed as though being a lesbian was part of the crime, something a mother could also be charged with.” Diaz trusts the reader to connect the dots between her own mother, her own queerness, and her decision to begin writing letters to Cardona.Cardona's response serves as a perfect thesis statement for the book as a whole. Ordinary Girls is an artfully told story, to be sure, but one of its most impressive accomplishments is how Diaz's care and craft evoke life as it really is lived: there are lulls, a litany of scenes detailing teenage girl bravado, stints in jail, a series of injustices, bad choices driven by pain, hours spent staring at chipped paint. The book becomes claustrophobic at points, but so does a life driven by fear and longing.A trope in Puerto Rican literature is to begin a story on the island, travel to the mainland, and eventually have characters return to the island in either victory or defeat. Diaz follows this classic trajectory, with a last section titled “Regresando,” or Returning. The chapter is divided into short sections, with temporal and geographic leaps ranging from Miami Beach in 1995 to Puerto Rico in 1950, to Diaz's return to the island during the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Driving with a friend, she rages at “the traffic, at the news, at people's performative allyship while the island is in crisis, at the cryptocurrency fuckers and their money, at the vendepatria governor, at Trump, who keeps denying the thousands of Puerto Ricans who died, everyone pretending things are going back to normal when black Puerto Ricans have always been in crisis. One year later, and I'm still in a constant state of rage.”One of many journeys and evolutions of the memoir is the transformation of a personal anger into a political one, a shift from one individual's suffering to a communion with the collective. Diaz concludes with tenderness towards her community: “. . . I was lucky to find them. The kind of friends who bring you halfway around the world, who fly with you to Puerto Rico, who hold you at your grandmother's funeral, who invite you into their home, invite you into their families, take care of you check in on you, fight for you, . . . who see you, who hear you calling from hundreds of miles away, and slowly, slowly, love you back to life.”When I began researching this essay, I consulted a friend, the scholar and author Claire Jimenez. I didn't tell her how I would be comparing these two texts, or that my hope was to write an essay that showed that these authors bridge the personal and political because, for Puerto Ricans, there is no other choice. Asked what these two books meant to her, Claire said in just a few sentences what I have been hoping to illuminate in these pages: “What I think Denis and Diaz do so powerfully is contextualize history next to their own personal stories, for example in that preface when Denis speaks of the FBI banging on his door and abducting his father, or when Diaz begins her memoir with the death of Juan Antonio Corretjer. This is part of a larger tradition of Puerto Rican literature anchored by historical events. For many of us, these histories are not just dead facts inside a textbook. They directly impact or are still shaping our lives.”These books are a balm for my questions of identity and belonging. They soothe the need to ask for shared rituals, to ask to be received. The question is not, ultimately, when will we find ourselves, but where. And the answer is here: in history, in the future, right now, with each other.