War and Modernity in 20th-Century Puerto Rico

Abstract

War and Modernity in 20th-Century Puerto Rico Silvia Álvarez Curbelo (bio) Harry Franqui-Rivera, Soldiers of the Nation: Military Service and Modern Puerto Rico, 1868–1952. University of Nebraska Press, 2018. xxix + 308pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. Harry Franqui-Rivera's book narrates how three wars of the twentieth century shaped Puerto Rico's modernization process and transformed the collective and individual horizon of expectations of Puerto Ricans. It is a book that I recommend not only to those interested in Puerto Rican history but also to global scholars who study wars as engines that disrupt and modify life landscapes in a geography that extends beyond the countries playing the "leading roles." I celebrate this publication for academic and autobiographical reasons. Since I was a child, war has been an essential part of a wealth of images and narratives often intertwined into family references. When my father was born in 1917, my grandmother, who had a special taste for controversy, named him Guillermo after the enemy Kaiser, to many a neighbor's discontent. On my mother's side of the family, my grandfather Eduardo traveled to Panama with the Puerto Rico Regiment to defend the newly built canal. He took great pride in being a veteran of a glorious war for "civilization." Since then, each and every war of the twentieth century was added to the family album. Drawing on these memory ties, I have devoted a great deal of my research as a scholar to the wars of the twentieth century. In honor of my grandparents, I entitled my inaugural speech at the Academia Puertorriqueña de la Historia, "Guerra y destino: Puerto Rico y la Primera Guerra Mundial" ["War and Destiny: Puerto Rico and World War I"]. As I gave my speech in 2014, the world celebrated the hundred-year anniversary of what many in 1914 called "the war to end all wars." The failed dream that lasted four years made the twentieth century a century of wars. It changed the history of the world and, undoubtedly, the history of Puerto Rico. There is a growing guild of historians, sociologists, economists, anthropologists and literary critics who study the repercussions of twentieth-century wars in Puerto Rico: its institutions, agents, symbolic productions, structures, and mindsets. Some venture into the wars of the twenty-first century, which [End Page 331] display a different profile. Following Jorge Rodríguez Beruff's seminal works that focus on Puerto Rico's strategic situation and colonial adjustments, Strategy as Politics (2007) and Island at War (2015, edited with José L. Bolívar Fresneda), and Héctor Negroni's account of Puerto Rican military history from the Spanish conquest, Historia militar de Puerto Rico (1992), the past two decades have produced various approaches ranging from the impact of wars in Puerto Rican economy in the twentieth century to the racism faced by Puerto Rican soldiers, especially in WWII and the Korean War.1 In Honor and Fidelity (2009), Gilberto N. Villahermosa delves into the history of the 65th Infantry, a unit of Puerto Rican soldiers that endured the glory and hell of the Korean War. Recent contributions, such as Manuel Avilés-Santiago's Puerto Rican Soldiers and Second-Class Citizenship (2014), expand the research scope to the wars in the Gulf and Iraq. Avilés-Santiago explores how interactive communication technologies modify the socializations and rites of death of Puerto Rican soldiers. Like Harry Franqui-Rivera, I cannot understand Puerto Rico without the signifier of war. His book, which is the result of rigorous archival research in Puerto Rico, Spain, and the United States, presents a new interpretation of the close relation between war and transformation in our island. While its title, Soldiers of the Nation, may suggest a history of the performance of Puerto Rican soldiers in Spanish and U.S. armies, the book affords us a more complex course of causalities and connections, as hinted in the subtitle Military Service and Modern Puerto Rico, 1868-1952. Franqui-Rivera explores the relations between war and modernization in a country that has been a colony—first of Spain and then of the United States—for over 500 years. ________ The author delimits the...