Boricua: Three Generations of Puerto Rican Identities - Afterthoughts

With this project, I hoped to bring the center of the discussion on Puerto Rican identities the voices that matter the most: Puerto Rican voices. Before I interviewed Ana, Joe, and Liam, I wasn’t where this project would lead me, only that I wanted to hear perspectives on identity, nation, and ethnicity. However, what came out of these interviews was a complex, interweaving narrative about identity, memory, nationhood, and storytelling. Each interviewee brought their own perspective on what it meant to them to be Puerto Rican, influenced by age, experience, and personal beliefs. Ana spoke of the alienation she felt returning to the Island as a New-York born Puerto Rican, and how she was influenced by growing up in such a culturally diverse area. Joe spoke of the racism he experienced as a young man that caused him to push down a part of himself that he later accepted and learned to appreciate. Liam spoke of the importance of re-telling the stories of your heritage so that they are not lost or erased by oppressive forces. Ultimately, what connected all three was the way that remembering and re-remembering became key to their understanding of identity and nation-building. By interviewing them in this podcast, I realized that this form of a sort of oral storytelling was a space for them to work through this remembering and identity-shaping.

There were a few things that struck me when speaking to Ana regarding memory and identity. The first was the way that she located so many of her memories in place. Her memories of the homes she lived in throughout the years (apartments, streets, etc.) were what she turned to to recall her childhood. Her memories of returning to Puerto Rico were located in the home that her parents and sister bought, the home of her beloved brother-in-law. Her memories of alienation on the Island were located in scenes in a restaurant, a plaza, and a hotel. Although there’s no way to know when listening to the podcast, as Ana told her story she had a sheet of paper and a pen in front of her. At different points, she would take to drawing on the paper representations of what was happening. This was most clear when she told me about her flight to Puerto Rico, the first time she visited the Island. As she told me about the touch-down she gave a vivid picture of what she saw out her window: palm trees, hotels, and flags - American and Puerto Rican. While she gave this picture, she drew images of what it looked like on the paper. This turning point in her life, in her identity, lives vividly in her mind, filled with images of island life and images of national identity.

Ana told me about the experience of being Othered by those she hoped to make a connection with when she visited PR. There was a sense of judgment and exclusion from the Islanders because she was from the mainland and did not speak Spanish fluently. There is almost the sense that she is not a member of the Puerto Rican nation because her identity does not share geographical or perhaps even linguistic borders with those who live on the Island. The Puerto Rican national identity is one that is still under debate to this day. Many have noticed a need to redefine ‘nation’ because of the unique history and situation of the Puerto Rican people. For example, one scholar noted that “younger generations within many ethnic groups are not learning their ancestral language. This creates a problem for the older generations. Do they insist that membership in the group requires learning the language or choose not to resist the changes? As a result, ethnic language is becoming less important as an identity marker” (4). In other words, even outside the Puerto Rican situation, language as a marker of national identity has become less and less viable as younger generations are assimilated into a larger culture or linguistic tendency.

Language is not the only element of nation-building currently under review in the Puerto Rican discourse. Ethnographer Jorge Duany posits that “reconsidering the Puerto Rican situation can add much to contemporary scholarly debates on nationalism and colonialism. At this juncture, Island intellectuals are sharply divided between those who believe that Puerto Ricans should struggle for independence to preserve their cultural identity and those who believe that this struggle necessarily invokes a homogenizing, essentialist, and totalitarian fiction called ‘the nation’” (6). As mentioned above, Puerto Ricans bring up anomalous conversations when it comes to national and ethnic identity, not least because more than 70% of Puerto Ricans today live stateside as opposed to around 30% on the Island. Essentially, the Puerto Rican identity is “one that must include the diaspora” or lose its majority (7). In fact, Duany argues that the Puerto Rican situation “has undermined conventional definitions of the nation based exclusively on territorial, linguistic, or juridical criteria—and offers fresh possibilities for a nonterritorial view of identity” (7). Ana, Joe, and Liam all consider themselves proudly Puerto Rican. None were born within the geographical limits of Puerto Rico, none were raised in a primarily Spanish-speaking household, though Ana was exposed to the language regularly. When it comes to matters of state, all three have lived under United States law their whole lives - as have all Puerto Ricans, members of a stateless nation. Yet for all three, “Puerto Rican” is an important marker of who they are as people and as a group.

Perhaps, for Joe and Liam, it’s partially a matter of resistance. This was more explicit with Liam’s story than Joe’s, yet the message was still transmitted. Joe expressed the difficulty of growing up mixed in the 80s Northeast. He felt as if he was pulled between two cultures, two forms of existence, and he felt pressured to push down the part of himself that did not match the common identity of his schoolmates and friends. It wasn’t until much later in his life that he chose to express pride in his Puerto Rican identity, not least because he didn’t want his own children growing up with the sort of shame that was forced onto him as a child. For Joe, self-identification as a Puerto Rican man is an act of resistance against the shame that assimilation tries to teach its subjects. He wanted his children to grow up proud of who they were and who their ancestors came from, so he incorporated Puerto Rican tradition, language, and pride back into his life.

Joe has a hat with the Taino flag on it, a symbolic act to express his pride in the indigenous heritage of the Island. His connection with the Island itself is largely a spiritual one, evoking images of ancestral spirits and spirituality as an identity-maker. Joe recounted his life-changing experience that forever marked and influenced how he saw himself when he visited PR for the first time. This event, in which he visited an ancestral cave where the indigenous people would perform rituals and he experienced what he called a ‘parting of the veil,’ was distinctly situated in place and in a spiritual connection to ancestors which functions almost as a form of collective memory. Joe has had visions of things that he would never have experienced himself, hinting at what could be reviewed as a sort of phenomenon of shared memory and experience that is passed on through generations from one’s ancestors. He and Ana are both profoundly superstitious people, who believe in the power of memory, of words, and of dreams. For Joe, this spiritual experience is fundamentally tied to his identity, particularly his identity as a Puerto Rican man.

Where Joe implicitly located his pride in his Puerto Rican identity as a way to resist assimilation and shame, Liam explicitly marked his Puerto Rican identity as a form of resistance against colonialist agendas. For Liam, it’s important to self-identify as Puerto Rican because it works as a tool of re-remembering and re-telling a collective story of nationhood and identity. The identifier in itself works to remind himself and others that this group and this nation have not been and will not be removed from the global discourse and the global mind. This is particularly important because of the precarious position Puerto Rico holds in global politics. Today, PR functions as a stateless nation because in all elements but representation it maintains its own national identity. However, as a commonwealth of the USA it remains unrepresented by its own government. Additionally, as I mentioned above, the majority of Puerto Ricans today live stateside, raising issues of geography and shared history as further complications of ethnic and national identity. The Puerto Rican people are a scattered people, and Liam wants to in part resist the cultural assimilation that America so often demands by telling stories and re-creating/re-remembering collective histories and narratives.

In fact, Liam is interested in storytelling itself as nation-building and identity-building. His ethnic identity is located in the way we tell stories about ourselves and about our history, and telling the story of Puerto Rican history and culture is a way for him to affirm not only his own identity but the identities of those who came before him and those who will come after. Storytelling is a project of time travel; of connecting the past, the present, and the future with common threads of remembrance and emotion. This is why Liam makes a point to come up with new and interesting ways of re-telling stories for a new generation, ways that take advantage of technology and its potential for a wider audience and a more equitable storytelling experience. Today more than ever we have an opportunity to share the stories of those who may have never been heard before, and fully in their own words. This is in part what I hoped to do with this project.

Several scholars in the past few years have begun to bring attention to the sort of crises of identity for Puerto Ricans that I have in part located here with this project. New research from such scholars has brought to the forefront the need for a re-consideration of the Puerto Rican nation and identity. Author Felicia Fahey points out the ways in which Puerto Ricans as a whole embody a unique position in global politics and the concept of national identity, and she sheds light on the hypocrisy of excluding ‘Nuyoricans’ like Ana and Joe from the Puerto Rican discourse: “Just as the diasporic population of Puerto Rico has been negated in narratives of national identity, by the same token New York, where much of Puerto Rico's population now lives, has been excluded as a significant place in the Puerto Rican imaginary” (Fahey). Duany approached similar subjects in his survey of Puerto Rican nationhood as well.

Other projects have endeavored to bring to the conversation similar research to mine, such as Luis A. Ferré Sadurní’s “Puerto Rican Diaspora: The Identity Limbo” which brings to the forefront the voices of Puerto Ricans in the continental US and how they self-identify. Sadurní identifies the conflict in his opening paragraph as a conflict of ethnic and national identity: “It is interesting to expand upon the aspect of identity amongst the Puerto Rican diaspora, since Puerto Ricans face a unique situation in terms of identification. All Puerto Ricans are born United States citizens, yet many refuse to acknowledge that they are American. Within the U.S., they are not immigrants, yet they share many of the cultural, economic, and social struggles that immigrant groups face in the U.S. They are American, Latino, Hispanic, white, black, a minority, but above all, they are Puerto Rican” (Introduction). I hope in the future to expand on this project and continue bringing new perspectives to this conversation from the people who are affected most by it: Puerto Ricans. I also hope to address more issues and intersectional identifiers such as gender, race, and sexuality as well as develop existing ideas about nation, technology, and ethnicity.

Works Cited

Dominguez-Rosado, Brenda. The Unlinking of Language and Puerto Rican Identity: New Trends in Sight. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ku/reader.action?docID=4534749&ppg=1.

Duany, Jorge. “Nation on the move: the construction of cultural identities in Puerto Rico and the diaspora.” American Ethnologist, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 5-30. AnthroSource, https://doi-org.www2.lib.ku.edu/10.1525/ae.2000.27.1.5.

Fahey, Felicia. “Beyond the Island: Puerto Rican Diaspora in ‘America’ and ‘América’.” Post Identity, vol. 3, no. 1. MPublishing, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/postid/pid9999.0003.103/--beyond-the-island-puerto-rican-diaspora-in-america?rgn=main;view=fulltext.

Sadurní, Luis A. Ferré. “Puerto Rican Diaspora: The Identity Limbo.” Investigative Reflections, 2014. https://medium.com/investigative-reflections/7635834c518b.