6 — Anti-Politics, Paralysis and Unfreedom
We rummage at times in the past, without living it, looking for usable tangencies in those projections of its spirit that, by their virtue of vital permanence, touch the spirit of the present.
Antonio S. Pedreira (1929)
Like the rest of the population, politicians are part of the culture in which they are born and raised. While owning the ideas and worldviews of their culture, politicians acquire a thorough familiarity with the society in which they are located. They also internalize organically such “inside information,” using it for their viability and benefit. That familiarity also tells them what their possibilities are, as well as the limits to their scope of action.
Puerto Rican politicians have deemed as insurmountable the limits that have been imposed, or caused, by the colonial regime, including imperial exploitation, contempt and indifference. For the most part, the reaction to what they perceive as their powerlessness has been looking out for themselves, while resorting to recycled discourses that have been repeated since 1900.
For generations, our politicians have been operating from the premise that their political viability requires tempering their aspirations and actions, in order to avoid offending an electorate that has been conditioned to feature an aversion to change. Those from the “autonomist” faction, mostly the dead ones, would very well say that such fear denied them the possibility of extorting U.S. authorities in order to obtain additional powers. Attempts at extortion –telling U.S. officials them that if there is no reform to the colonial regime, we will opt for independence– mostly took place before World War II. Such tricks never worked. The reforms to the colonial state, always modest and superficial, have been the product of the initiative and interests of the U.S. government, calculated for its benefit and convenience.
Meanwhile, for more than a century the “pro-statehood” faction has been selling fear for electoral purposes, accusing the autonomist sector of being closet separatists, another fruitless tactic. We must not lose sight of the fact that pro-statehood politicians have contributed to maintaining the colonial status quo. That is the balance of their more than one-century-old practices and rhetoric, whose futility is shared with the tactics of the autonomists, today called “pro-commonwealth” (estadolibristas).
Our adulation of “local” politicians has always been qualified, because it has never translated into us yearning for them to wield sweeping powers. We have been conditioned so that our electoral support is directed to politicians who advocate maintaining the colonial state of affairs. It has been difficult to say conclusively that this is due to self-loathing, associated with colonial societies or societies with colonial histories, which express behaviors and attitudes similar to those of individuals with deep insecurities.
It has been argued that much of the explanation lies in the fossilization of class resentments that were generated in the 19th century. In any event, I argue hereinafter, our seemingly perennial conditioning to acquiesce to colonial subordination is another manifestation of the fact that the circumstances of our history did not, could not, give way to us yearning for a place among the sovereign nations of the planet. I explore these matters in the current and the next chapter.
The ambitions of the “autonomist” partisan elite have come from no other place than weakness. From Luis Muñoz Rivera (1859–1916) to Rafael Hernández Colón (1936–2019), attempts to gain more “self-government” powers have crashed against the wall of imperial refusal. Indeed, the current PPD directors do not even bother, as they have ceased altogether those efforts (which were never effective, of course). Since Luis Muñoz Marín (1898–1980), the rickets of this sector has featured as its central factor the idea or motto of “permanent union”, which is tied to, or is a product and reflection of, the aversion to the idea of breaking with the imperial power. The paralysis of politicians and the electorate has been reinforced through a negative feedback loop.
The pro-statehood faction of the Puerto Rican partisan elite has fared no better, not only due to the aforementioned factors, but because their weakness manifests itself as adulation of the nation that they consider their own, the United States. What is worshipped is not criticized or questioned. No wonder, then, that during more than 125 years that sector has not come one iota closer in getting the U.S. government to at least consider statehood as a viable option. Nor is it surprising that, after all that time, that faction is still waiting for, and keeps announcing, the promised land of the “51st state.”
Simulacrum of politics
Is there a flip side to the fact that the Puerto Rican people have contributed, for generations, to prevent their compatriots qua politicians from having significant powers? Is there another side to the coin that integration as a state of the United States has not materialized either? I sustain that the flip side of the coin has included that the members of our “ruling” class have limited themselves to being mere political careerists, with all that it entails in moral depravity, corruption, and stagnation. Their very narrow field of action to make an impact in the so-called political status, their more than century-old inability –or disinterest– in altering the colonial equation, has led them to the cynicism of using politics to their advantage, while life in the archipelago has kept deteriorating. That is to say, it is not only absolute power that corrupts in a superlative way. Lack of power also has deleterious effects on the ethics and practices of a “ruling class.”
This is not new. The present incarnation of selfish, callous, and even charlatan political leaders is not unusual or novel. For example, in the 1930s, most of the country’s politicians showed no interest in dealing with the social and economic deterioration that had plunged the vast majority of the population into appalling misery, while only caring about their survival as a ruling class. [1] They mainly addressed the admittedly fundamental problem of the political status but, again, with no ability or willingness to do something about it, as shown by their pointless and recycled tactics. Their tricks of the weak have never been up to the task. The country’s partisan elite has continued to operate from weakness and the consequent futility, but always looking out for their bellies.
Ten Constants
Luis Muñoz Rivera’s tenure as Resident Commissioner in Washington illustrates the uselessness that still characterizes Puerto Rico’s political class. An article by Professor Gatell, published in 1960, identifies many of the forms that this pointlessness takes, without the author realizing that he found several constants in the history of the political paralysis of the archipelago.[2]
First constant: Ever since he arrived in Washington, D.C., in 1911, Muñoz Rivera encountered the sense of superiority of U.S. congressmen, and their condescending treatment of resident commissioners, and of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans in general. Second, that and other factors led Muñoz not to develop many illusions about the influence he or any other Puerto Rican could exert on U.S. lawmakers. These constants have more recently contributed to making the post of resident commissioner a good investment for incumbents; a springboard from which to advance their personal agendas of wealth, connections, and influence. Powerlessness also corrupts.
The third constant is American racism, which Gatell personifies in federal judge Peter J. Hamilton, appointed to serve in Puerto Rico by his friend, also a racist, President Woodrow Wilson. That racism leads to a contempt for Puerto Ricans and everything that concerns them. The fourth is imperial stinginess, rationalized by the maxim that Puerto Ricans are not prepared to exercise broad powers of self-government, and accepted with resignation by our “pro-American” political actors.
The fifth is another trick of the weak: begging U.S. authorities to desist from attempts to modify legislation or practices that may have an impact on Puerto Rico’s economy. Events from the 1910s described by Gatell remind us of the fruitless efforts that took place in the 1990s to keep intact the tax scheme of the so-called Section 936 of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code.
Gatell describes a sixth constant: the internecine struggles in the sector or party “of autonomism” between the “conservative” faction and the one that flirts with independence. The seventh constant: from these struggles the conservative sector always emerges victorious, to the detriment of the group that leans towards independence or, more recently, “free association.”
An eighth constant consists of extortion attempts, always unsuccessful largely due to the presence of the previous two constants. Muñoz Rivera made his share of aborted extortion attempts, using the supposed latent pro-independence sentiment. There stands out the perennial contradiction, and nonsense, of wanting to use pro-independence sentiment as a source of extortion, while suppressing the “liberal wing” of the autonomist faction, and even persecuting the independence movement. This constant faded after the Second World War, when the autonomy party (then and until today the PPD, founded in 1938) moved towards the installation of the Commonwealth, and treated it as a “novel” status, with signs of permanence, instead of conceiving it as it really is: another permutation of the same colonial subordination status that has existed since the Foraker Act of 1900.
The paradox is that those extortion attempts by Muñoz Rivera were contemporaneous to his own efforts to marginalize the pro-independence sector of the Union Party, a sector led by José de Diego (1866–1918). Muñoz Rivera neutralized the group of the lawyer from Aguadilla, but it is worth asking the political price then, and later with the episode involving his son Luis Muñoz Marín, the PDP and the Pro Independence Congress –precursor of the Puerto Rico Independence Party (PIP), founded in 1946– and so many instances in which the party of “autonomy” suppressed the pro-independence or “pro-sovereignty” voices. Trying to use extortion or threaten independence without being pro-independence, and suppressing the sector of autonomism that flirts with separatism, has been another historical contradiction of many eulogized Puerto Rican “statesmen.”
Congressional ignorance and indifference to Puerto Rico is a ninth constant. The effects of the ignorance about Puerto Rico shown by the legislative body to which the Treaty of Paris assigned the exercise of authority over the archipelago are on display. Members of Congress have always been ignorant about, and indifferent to, Puerto Rico.
As a tenth constant are those, like Martín Travieso in Gatell’s article, who have aspired for Puerto Rico to be a state of the United States of America. Mr. Travieso even became a U.S. citizen before the passage of the Jones Act in 1917, when he was working as a lawyer for a corporate law firm in New York City. Travieso, who was born in 1882 and died in 1971, never saw Puerto Rico become a state. The futility of the dream to be “a state of the Union” is another constant.
There they are. Ten constants, among many, of futility and inertia; more than 125 years of stagnation. Nothing new under the Puerto Rican sun. The notions that politics is nothing but action; and that paralysis dressed up as partisanship and hollow claims is an imitation, a grotesque facsimile of politics, have never lodged themselves in us or in our partisan elites.
Puerto Rican Time
Perhaps it is a truism to affirm that the first centuries of the formation of a people will be particularly determinant of its culture. My thesis is that, since 1898 itself, the new dominant nation benefited from a pre-existing socio-cultural order, which ensured American enduring imperial and capitalist domination –or, at least, ended up facilitating it. That order had been forged for hundreds of years in the subordinate nation, so it has been –was, and still is– stable enough.
The stability of a social order is transmitted and reproduced in myriad ways, not least through the ideas and assumptions that become part of the “common sense” of a given society. Humans tend to conform to the worldview that we acquire and internalize in the process of socialization and acculturation, which in turn ends up reproduced from different points of view and personal and occupational circumstances. This tendency to conformity is also rooted in the perception that our social viability and material well-being are advanced by adapting to certain realities, so that we rarely swim against the tide.
What are the explanations for the duration of the long colonial night? The argument of economic determinism articulates that the underdevelopment under Spain did not give way to a propertied class strong enough to strive for separation. In addition, this class was weakened by the policies of the U.S. empire, which sought to facilitate the exploitation and extraction of wealth for the benefit of its capitalists. Those policies decimated the coffee landowner class of the mountains, while it subordinated the local sugar producers to the absentee and monopolistic American, corporate Sugar Trust. The economic factor tells us that such a “petty-bourgeois” class, thus weakened, could not be the spearhead of a separatism that would confront the new American regime.
From this point on, I explain why I argue that the material-economic factor –underdevelopment at all levels under the Spanish empire– produced much more than an apathy to, or rejection of, independence: During more than 125 years of colonial ignominy under the United States, we have displayed a visceral, pre-existing “preference” for paralysis.
The stagnation is evident, and it is related to, or produces, an apolitical, demobilized way of life, characterized by an individualism that does not aspire to collective and concerted action. The same impacts everything, not just the “political status problem”; it is reflected in almost every aspect of our collective lives. Its roots are to be found in the colonial period under the Spanish empire. Therein also lies one of the keys that explain the fragmentation of our “nationalism”, which is cultural but not political –it has not included ambitions of national sovereignty.
The paralysis, which is evident in the enduring colonial condition, stems from a set of ways of being, of doing –and of not doing– rooted in our culture, which are subterranean, almost imperceptible, but determinant of our “collective personality.” Yes, being colonized has had a lot to do with the crystallization of many traits of such “personality.” Like capitalism, colonialism produces societies with traits that make it difficult for the colonized to wake up from their morass. But we have to go further, in order to examine the characteristics of the colonial condition that are unique to Puerto Rico’s history, and that can be summed up in the helplessness, the abandonment by Spain of the island originally called San Juan Bautista (Saint John the Baptist).
That is, in the case of Puerto Rico, the picture gets complicated: Spanish domination was characterized by the abandonment of colonial society to its fate, followed by economic reforms that allowed newcomers to capitalize precisely on that forsaking of more than three centuries. These reforms produced what José Luis González called “a second colonization,” [3] that of the jíbaro population of the mountains. Of course, since the coming of the U.S. presence and domination, we live under capitalist imperialism, entailing two types of domination –economic and political– which reinforce each other. That regime, still in place, has been nothing less than a third colonization.
Static Time and Forgetfulness.
At the dawn of the 1970s, Carlos Fuentes offered his vision of Mexican history and culture.[4] According to Fuentes, time in Mexico has never been linear, transversing from one stage to another; Mexican time is characterized by simultaneity: “all times are alive, all pasts are present.” [5] That all times are preserved responds to the fact that “no Mexican time has yet been fulfilled.” [6]
Fuentes stressed that in Mexico there is a “paradox of promises,” because when they are fulfilled, promises “are destroyed and, when they remain unfulfilled, they live eternally.” [7] In his country there is an abundance of “the ruins of beginnings, of vital projects promised and then abandoned or destroyed by other projects, natural or human.” [8] One of those unfulfilled promises is the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917), abandoned by an emerging bourgeois class, the state governments, and the centralist state based in Mexico City, dominated for eighty years by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
Post-Columbian Mexican history begins in 1519 with the fulfillment of the promised return of Quetzalcoatl, embodied in Hernán Cortés. That fulfilled pledge destroyed the Mexica (Aztec) civilization and meant the subjugation of all the indigenous nations of pre-Columbian Mexico. So “in the [Spanish] conquest, the time of ancient Mexico fulfilled its promise only to meet its death.”[9]
What characterizes the “Puerto Rican time”? Time in Puerto Rico is static, with no past or future, dispensing with stories of origins and utopias, without memories or promises. It so happens that Puerto Ricans are characterized by a lack of ambition and the absence of memory. About the former, it is not that as individuals we lack ambitions or dreams. Rather, it is that we lack ambitions requiring collective projects. When it comes to Puerto Rico, we are resigned, indifferent: we subject ourselves “to God’s good grace.” Individualism and a modality of concrete thought dominate us, in which the abstraction we call “the people of Puerto Rico” does not produce feelings of commitment and urgency that in turn would propel us to action. Would it be that such abstraction fails to produce in us the emotions that would urge us to seek a separate station among the nation-states of the planet? And if so, why the imagined community we call Puerto Rico has not yielded those emotions?
Our collective resignation presents us to the world as passive beings, waiting for better times –to come down like manna from heaven– without bothering to act. In Puerto Rico, neither the population nor the political-bourgeois elite has bothered to consider the desirability of action, which by necessity means aspiring to a significant degree of control over our collective destiny. This, in turn, requires daring to make mistakes, instead of suffering the mistakes and humiliations of the imperial “other”, which derive from the implementation of its agenda, designed for its benefit. The bulk of the action has emanated from United States capitalists, while the so-called federal government –with the alliance of the “local government”– has made it easier for them to exercise their rapacity.
Our passivity has ensured that transformations are planned by others based on their interests, not the interests and well-being of Puerto Ricans. The changes that occur are mostly the product of the designs of the empire and its capitalists, although always with a relevant participation of what Pedro Cabán has called the “colonial state” (which has had three incarnations, under the Foraker and Jones Laws between 1900 and 1952, and under Law 600 until today). [10] That the projects of others benefit us to some extent is less important than the fact that they are not our projects; [11] and that, as has happened, in the short or long run the so-called “benefits” disappear, and yield new disasters.
Why do we lack origin stories? Why are the important? Unlike in Mexico, in Puerto Rico the indigenous people left few traces: hints in genetics, in toponymy, in the occasional utensil or percussive instrument. They are not enough to remind us that there was a Taíno and pre-Columbian past; they were not enough to insert themselves into the imaginary and worldview of Puerto Ricans. While the indigenous Mexicans, Guatemalans, Peruvians, Bolivians, did not disappear or assimilate much, those of the Antilles vanished. Apart from not producing myths about origins, necessary to sustain and feed political nationalism, perhaps these circumstances also contributed to yield our presentism without a past, to the oblivion of people who never recorded memories. [12] It’s easy to “forget” what never had a place in the collective memory. Without this memory, composed largely of myths of origins and heroic pasts, it is difficult or impossible for the emotions that sustain nationalism in its political modality to emerge.
In addition to disappearing, the Taínos left no monumental ruins. Their constructions were perishable, except for a few stones that they engraved with drawings, which we found in some concentration in two ceremonial grounds, in Ponce and Utuado. There is no monumental pre-Columbian past to admire. There were no splendid cities in Borikén, no pyramids or other impressive constructions. There was no Chichen Itza, no Teotihuacan or Machu Pichu. Given this, it is not surprising that we do not appreciate the pre-Columbian past, which in any case seems modest, secondary, perhaps typical of islands. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Puerto Rican authors, intellectuals, and politicians did not create a mythology of heroism out of the Tainos; or that the attempts to create it never came to fruition, never inspired a sense of pride based on epic and gallant origins.
“It is on the continents that great civilizations are forged”: Under this and other erroneous conceptualizations, and with a modest historical heritage, which we perceive as lacking heroic deeds and indigenous architecture and engineering, we have not embarked on the alternative path of seeing ourselves, and becoming, great based on the will to build. The disappearance of the in any case “modest” Taino culture deprived us of an important source on which to forge a sense of national identity that puffs up our breasts. Moreover, the living conditions of the archipelago under Spain also help explain why we have not imagined an island civilization that we consider worthy of us fighting, living, and dying in, and even for. That’s how heavy the burden of culture is, which is forged in the past –whether we remember it or not, whether or not we know where our attitudes come from.
It should not be a mystery that Puerto Rican culture has been determined to a significant degree by the circumstances generated by the long Spanish colonial regime, and their psychological, economic, social, and political effects. Fuentes stated that “the history of Mexico is a series of ‘subverted Edens’ that we would like to return to and forget at the same time.” [13] The only Eden there was in Puerto Rico was the solitude of isolation, with no past or future. For three and a half centuries –16th, 17th, 18th, and even into the 19th– the sparse population of “the Island” was, precisely, isolated. That isolation was not only from the outside world, but from the military citadel of San Juan Bautista. Thusly left to their own devices, the proto-jíbaros and jíbaros survived through smuggling and subsistence agriculture, apart from the activity of the fortified city and the court of Madrid: forgotten by the captains-general and by the Spanish monarchy, which was no more distant than the former. Meanwhile, slaves lived in isolation on the few sugar plantations that existed in that period.
In that isolation of the formative centuries, change was unknown; nothing happened; no one visited, no one arrived with new ways of seeing and doing, much less with books and ideas. [14] Frozen time does not give way to community organization and action, which is only required when there is a desire or need for action. In the timeless time in which this mostly illiterate population lived, there was no room for politics. Illiteracy as an obstacle for concerted action is another factor to be studied.
The modest idyll of mountainous isolation crumbles in the 19th century, more or less suddenly and violently. Most of the inhabitants of the hills and mountains had not registered their land tenure –which was recent, since private property was not allowed until the end of the 18th century– and lost their land, becoming day laborers –quasi-slaves of foreign planters, who took over the land and devoted themselves mostly to the cultivation of coffee. If the new situation generated individual gestures of resistance, there was no attempt to collectivize the grievance and turn it into an engine for action.
That is to say, the jíbaros of the 19th century lacked power and means to confront the royal designs and the new foreign landowners –mostly Corsicans, Mallorcans, and Catalans. Without a tradition of organization, deliberation, and community action, they were also unable to reinvent themselves to face the new circumstances. On the other hand, the slaves, located in the coastal area (where sugar boomed in that same 19th century) already knew violence, to which was always added the isolation and impotence that comes with the condition of slaves.
I suspect that such life in the mountains produced a barely concealed demand, which continues to this day, that no one should stand out, and that no one is allowed to organize the community in order to take action. With few exceptions such as Lares in 1868, the norm was that there was no community opting for organization or rebellion. In addition, in the face of the trauma of the libreta (“notebook”) regime — which was a quasi-slavery in the coffee plantations of the newly arrived landowners– the individualism of the jíbaros translated into a deep distrust of the public powers and their reform projects. It has also served to accentuate their notion that everyone must seek their own benefit, or consolation. [15]
I propose that those circumstances help to explain why Puerto Ricans display a particular individualism, the extreme manifestation of which is to be found in the individual who is a jaiba –whose definition is a clever, cunning, sometimes ruthless person. (Today, globalized neoliberalism is the full embodiment of that ruthlessness, oblivious to and in direct collision with the wellbeing of most of the inhabitants of the planet). Those who display little communal awareness do not stop to take into account the impact on others of the antisocial act of getting ahead through cheating, indolence, or mockery of the written and unwritten rules that pretend to govern coexistence. It is, I propose, an unfortunate and pernicious feedback: Individualism has not given way to concerted action; the absence of political life has reinforced individualism.
Perhaps the primary source of Puerto Rican jaibería is the absence of concerted action, which in turn is a product of the lack of ambitions for a better life for the collective. That lack could very well be tied to the little or no emotion generated by the idea of “national” independence.
Since Puerto Rican time is also characterized by oblivion, by not remembering the past, a future is not conceivable. Since passivity is the consequence and cause of nothing changing, of everything remaining as it is, there is no reason to remember –for time is conceived as static and passivity is the product of the desire to cling to that paralyzed time. The dread we feel at the mere possibility of change unveils that undercurrent: our comfort with, and preference for, comforting stagnation. Hence the title of Manuel Zeno Gandía’s nineteenth-century novel: La charca (“The Puddle”).
Used to living in the present without qualifying it with the past, without resorting to the past to understand the how and why of the present, “the Americans” were welcomed, while the aversion to the Spaniards and foreigners who had exploited us, or to the other Puerto Ricans who had also humiliated us, was paralyzed in time. And the fact is that “the Americans” had not been the victimizers of the pale-faced dwellers of the mountains or of the slaves and descendants of slaves. As for the new master, there wasn’t even a need to wipe the slate clean. In the face of all that, we never bothered –then or now– to become familiar with the history of the United States. We have never inquired about who these people we call “the Americans” are — what has always motivated them; what characterizes them. To the indifference toward our history, we added disinterest in the history of the imperial invader from the north. We are doubly ahistorical.
From the second half of the 20th century, the capitalist-advertising complex added new promoters of amnesia: since everything can be bought, and comfort and entertainment are luxuries within the reach of the rich and the much less rich, we could forget the vast artisanal, agricultural, musical and poetic knowledge that for centuries was forged in the mountains and on the coast. We became dependent on the market, consuming a popular culture manufactured in television studios, record labels, and advertising agencies. Since the middle of the 20th century, we have lived in isolation in homes and automobiles, which provide all the self-sufficiency we were conditioned to expect or desire.
Without memory and without the survival skills of our ancestors, the consumerist way of life has reduced us to narcissists, hypnotized by our navels; to eternal infants, uncultured and with no compass –mirroring American society in that sense. Everything that conditions us is capable of transforming us, of shaping us, of determining our way of seeing life and acting. Isn’t the socioeconomic regime under we live, be it feudalism or capitalism, the most powerful conditioning factor?
Capitalism, consumerism, mass culture, the entertainment industry, and the technologies that capture and disseminate images have given way to a sociocultural narcissism. One of the ways in which we have been conditioned to construct narcissistic societies concerns the ease with which we record our images. In view of this, it is worth asking: How have we experienced time and the idea of the future since the invention and development of the technologies that record images? The previous question gives way to other questions, including: How do humans in the 20th and 21st centuries differ from those of the 19th century and of earlier times? To illustrate, until a while ago film and television stars were particularly conditioned to be narcissistic; now, we all are. Today, everyone’s image is captured and disseminated. We are now “film directors”, but the actors are ourselves. Hence, almost nothing is private anymore. [16]
We resigned ourselves and settled for little. [17] The crowd without cohesion or action became an army of consumers without socialization, even more demobilized than their ancestors. The transformations that have taken place in Puerto Rico, always imposed by economic forces and political actors whose interests we ignore and whose tactics we do not identify or understand, have been of form, never of content; superficial, never profound; cosmetic, never substantial. The continuation of the colonial regime under the so-called Commonwealth has fully embodied this phenomenon.
In the Puerto Rico under Spain there were no broken pledges, for nothing was promised. During the 400 years of Spanish domination, we lived dispensing of promises; we did not demand or expect them. The absence of promises does not give way to disappointment. Living without expectations leads to living with no demands, to settling for the bare minimum –which is the most you can aspire to when, collectively speaking, you aspire to nothing. We see it today, when we settle for the little that neoliberal capitalism and our corrupt politicians have to offer in hopelessness and a dismal quality of life. We hide that conformity behind rationalizations based on fear: dread of the unknown, of “socialism”, of “communism”, or of “starving to death”.
In the early days of U.S. domination, we did not ask for or demand the promises that some representatives of the new empire made, notably those of General Nelson A. Miles. Of course, they were not fulfilled at all, while the broken pledges were followed by no effective protest or disappointment accompanied by action. We resigned ourselves, hoping that there would be future occasions for extracting from the new empire the concession of some degree of self-government — or supposed material advantages. What followed was fifty years of utter misery and exploitation in the sugar plantations and mills, the outcome of an economy tailored for the interests of the new, American exploiters.
Anti-Politics: Inaction as Ethos
Throughout our history, Puerto Ricans have not exercised power. Since we are not given to concerted action, we continue to deny ourselves the possibility of having any significant degree of power. We have shied away from the kind of action that is capable of generating and reinforcing power. Our narrow-minded and short-sighted individualism is the only thing we have left to deal with life, which has facilitated the current state, in which the country is bought by the friends of the Fortuños and Pierluisis of this life, as the latter keep using the governorship to act as brokers –yielding them handsome rewards– of those who are literally capitalizing on the disasters caused by mismanagement and lack of economic and social development.
The Puerto Rican population has been bombarded by knowledge imposed by those who do exercise power, [18] which has included, of course, the supposed democratic and moral benefits of the United States, and the need for a stage of tutelage before considering, at the very least, making us co-rulers. That stage of tutelage has never ended. We are still ruled by the imperial other, and dominated by a corporate capitalism that is blind to humans, whose lives it destroys in multiple ways.
We lack power, which is acquired through action
Lukes includes in the concept of power “agents’ abilities to bring about significant effects, specifically by furthering their own interests and/or affecting the interests of others.”[19] This implies that power is a concept linked to that of capacity, since those who possess power may or may not use it, may or may not carry out actions to use it. Power is the ability to act, whether it is used or not, whether it is acted upon or not. [20]
In applying this vision of power, we speak of the capacities or abilities of social agents,[21] whether they are individuals or collectivities of various kinds. Lukes refers, therefore, to human faculties whose activation depends on the will of those who possess them; through those capabilities, the agent produces change rather than passively experiencing change. [22] The same applies to collective agents, be they states, institutions, associations, alliances, or social movements and groups. When the collectivity is able to act, it is said to have power, which may or may not be activated. [23] Power, thus defined, is not necessarily the ability to exert domination over others. [24]
This conception of power is tied to the truism that collective projects require action: they can only be managed and achieved through activity. I am referring, therefore, to the kind of action that is consubstantial with the activity we call “politics.” Exercising power, doing politics, requires “organizing and acting together for a common purpose.” [25] The political is concerted action, which manifests and also generates power; and the activities that generate power include association, communication, meetings, deliberations, resolutions, plans, and implementation of plans.
In Puerto Rico we have not be prone to taking collective action, because that kind of action is only possible among many, among several at least. [26] Such action should feature a substantial dimension, because politics is not about staying in the same place, nor about allowing that the few who engage in [some sort] of politics limit themselves to the recycling of fruitless tactics, over and over. Note, therefore, that I have not been referring to the collective action of interest groups, associations or labor unions, important as that kind of action can be. I am referring to the kind of collective action that aims to take power from the state, or to create a state, with a view to implementing a national project.
By “not taking action” –by staying away from political activity– we have denied ourselves a kind of happiness, the same kind that John Jay, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the leaders of the French Revolution spoke of when they discovered the effects on them of the exercise of politics –of thinking, debating, persuading, and acting toward the achievement of collective goals. This activity produced a particular sensation of ecstasy –which, I observe, seems to be connected to the effects on the human brain of the neurotransmitter known as dopamine. [27] Today, we obtain these effects with the likes we get when we post on the so-called social media, which is not an adequate substitute, either practical or psychological, for political action.
As it’s often the case in all latitudes, our political parties have been the creation of a group that both controls them and dictates “to those at the bottom” what will be done; and these parties in turn have been characterized by their inability to, or lack of interest in, bringing about change. Organized into parties, Puerto Rican leaders have exhibited a consistent tendency toward rhetoric and beggary. We have not wielded any significant power for centuries.
As far as I know, the causes and the effects of our age-old aversion to joint action, to not exercising politics as action, experimentation and innovation, have not been studied. Puerto Ricans seek to accommodate themselves in the best possible way to the circumstances under which they have had to live, with a view to improving their individual and family conditions; but there is no perceived need to do anything to change these circumstances, with the aim of improving the collective life of Puerto Ricans as a whole. We have confined ourselves to what we know how to do, and we have conceived ourselves incapable of, or uninterested in, undertaking tasks that we have never attempted. Faced with this, we have chosen not to attempt them.
The asymmetry of power, first with respect to Spain, and for more than 125 years with respect to the United States, is a product of the fact that the dominator has and retains power, while the power of the dominated is almost nil, while this particular dominated opts mostly for inaction, or for sporadic and ineffective gestures. We have hidden the absence of action behind supplication, but asking is not a type of action; neither is demanding. [28] Without power, without action, there are no collective transformations.
Since without action there is no politics, our so-called “leaders” have had to adopt some version of the vita activa (active life). The one they have exercised is that of rhetoric, to the exclusion of real action (except plunder). They have been limited to the claim, the demand, the supplication — and the robbery. Therefore, they have always started from weakness, subordination, corruption. Gods rule; supplicants ask, but they abide by what is granted to them, or what is denied to them.
Those who limit themselves to prayer and supplication are limited to resigning themselves to the designs of the divine will. In the face of imperial powers, Puerto Rican politicians have limited themselves to pleading with them, and then waiting for their responses. [29] When they have responded to the pleas, almost 100 percent of the time it has been with a NO, albeit sometimes veiled, a “maybe” or a “no” which seems like a “yes” — or that the beggar wants to perceive as a yes. With the mediation of our second-rate politicians, we have resigned ourselves again and again to the designs of the imperial will. That is the pathetic fate of the supplicant.
A regime of unfreedom that dispenses with political nationalism
Faced with how isolated we have been from ourselves, we Puerto Ricans have remained in the helplessness of “the struggle” (la brega), which consists mostly of individual efforts to stay afloat.[30] In addition to “struggling” as best we can, we Puerto Ricans have a saying, which although horrible, seems to fit us well: “better the bad but known than the good to know.” Faced with our difficulty in making sense of reality –from which we prefer to escape– our perplexity produces, in addition to the aforementioned conformity or resignation, fear of change; dread of the uncertain future. This includes fearing more the tyranny of Puerto Rican rulers than the excesses of the “Americans.” [31] It also entails preferring the current debacle to the uncertain future, without the current capitalist-imperial regime at its head. Along these lines, one author tried to explain this apparent predisposition of ours to be governed “from outside”:
Luis Muñoz Marín believed that historically, Puerto Ricans have always preferred a distant and benevolent foreign tutelage to any local authoritarianism. Our long history as an isolated people with no national state, has made us so anarchic that we have never been seduced by the siren song of formal independence. The latter is one of the fundamental assurances of our ethnocentric nationality.[32]
He added: “We have never been very inclined to make sacrifices for political ideologies. Our political skepticism in this regard is ancestral, ancient, cultivated during five hundred years of colonialism, perhaps a somewhat cynical consolation in the face of the fact that we have always been a small, poor and marginal country.” [33] Rodríguez Juliá suggested other factors that may explain Puerto Rico’s colonial dead end. These include economic dependence, which brings us closer to “statehood” or annexation, while our strong “cultural self” moves us “away from statehood; but it does not bring us closer to independence, returning us, again and again, to the colonial swamp of the E.L.A.” [34]
Some of the factors mentioned by Rodríguez Juliá are consequences of the fact that our nationalism has been limited to the cultural dimension; that we have not developed a political nationalism. Others help explain the absence of such nationalism. If we turn to Anderson, [35] other factors would include: Low literacy, something that lasted until the mid-20th century. It was particularly low in Spanish times; the delay of the printing press, which arrived in 1806, originally for official publications; then, well into the century, few non-official newspapers would be published with very few readers; and the disconnection between elites and population, the latter mainly composed of the impoverished inhabitants of the mountains and the slaves of the coast (until abolition, in 1873).
That disconnection was in turn mediated by illiteracy, by the perennial exploitation that slavery means, and by the recent exploitation of the jíbaros of the interior, which began in the 1840s. If there were coffee landowners, sugar planters and refiners, and professionals with separatist tendencies, they did not count on that population to disseminate their ideas, nor to arm it or otherwise obtain its support.
The illiteracy would have prevented the crystallization of a particular perception of the temporal dimension, in which time passes simultaneously for all those belonging to the “imagined community.” [36]A critical mass of newspaper readers would have contributed to that perception. At the same time, the underdevelopment of the Spanish colony of Puerto Rico, its sparse population, the isolation and neglect in which it lived for nearly four centuries, and the way it began to develop in the mid-19th century –for the exclusive benefit of a small group composed mostly of foreigners– could not give way to the self-confidence that is implicit in political nationalism.
These factors would have contributed to the emergence of a skepticism toward political sovereignty that has been frozen, which continues to this day despite the transformations that have taken place in the 20th and 21st centuries. In the psyche of Puerto Ricans, we are still an island of 200,000 inhabitants, isolated from each other physically and psychologically –isolated to the point of not having developed a sense of community embedded in the abstraction of the nation.
In Mexico, Carlos Fuentes pointed out, the Revolution was institutionalized; that is, it was defeated to enthrone another project: that of the PRI regime and the Mexican oligarchy, on the one hand, and that of the economic imperialism of the United States, on the other. Beginning in the 1940s, a so-called “peaceful revolution” took place in Puerto Rico, an extremely pathetic term that tried to hide the hard truth that the capitalist and imperial domination of the United States was consolidated under the new incarnation of the colonial regime, known as “commonwealth status.”
In the 1940s, still under the Jones Act (1917–1952), the second stage of capitalist imperialism had already been inaugurated: the phase of industrialization by invitation, through tax exemptions, low costs and low wages. [37] (The first stage was the sugar monoculture.) Then came the third stage –financial penetration through the purchase of bonds from the commonwealth’s government and public corporations, whose dividends were exempt from federal taxes. That third exploitative stage began when there were still American industries in Puerto Rico (particularly those established under Section 936 of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code).
Contrary to what the PPD has claimed, none of these capitalist projects required the E.L.A., because the E.L.A. meant no additional powers for the colonial state and did not diminish the powers of the U.S. government; it did not change the extent of the U.S. government’s bureaucratic, legislative, and judicial hegemony in Puerto Rico. Indeed, that lie that the commonwealth stage of the colonial state made possible “progress” through industrialization, and other lies imposed on us, have been adopted and adapted by Puerto Rican actors, always as their main disseminators.
Without a tradition of community organization or of deliberation and political action, we have lacked the tools that would allow us to resist the imposition of this official knowledge (lies) and oppose it with knowledge (truths) of our own. We Puerto Ricans have been powerless, and we have not been free. Here I would like to refer again to Hannah Arendt’s definition of freedom: Freedom is nothing other than self-government. [38] To govern oneself, of course, is to exercise the kind of action we call politics. That is to say, freedom is to participate in the task of governing. From that point of view, there has never been anything resembling a regime of freedom in Puerto Rico.
Coda: The Current Moment and the Urgency of Action
The first three centuries of the Spanish colony that would come to be called Puerto Rico were characterized by sparse population, very limited economic development, and the abandonment by the Spanish Crown of the majority of the population. The imperial government only attended to the needs of the citadel of San Juan, given its role in the defense of colonial Spanish America. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that there were no intellectual, economic and political developments leading the population or its elite to join the demand for independence that took place in Cuba, Santo Domingo and, before that, in the continent.
The psychological, social, cultural, and political effects of the particular colonial experience under Spain facilitated not only the longevity of Spanish rule, but the enduring subordination to the United States. I will elaborate on that in the next chapter.
Now, we are at a crossroads. Puerto Rico’s social, economic, and political crisis is deeper than we dare to conceive, admit, or internalize. By removing the flimsy ground on which we stood, the prevailing paradigms ceased to apply or became useless. If it was ever adequate, the map no longer describes the terrain. It is difficult to adapt to a new reality, and we lack sufficient clarity of thought to understand what is happening and why.
This particular storm has brought, and will continue to produce, misery, desolation and despair. In addition, we are under the domination of a country that is going through its own crisis, which disfigures and disintegrates it, on the verge of succumbing to a fully neoliberal, plutocratic and neo-fascist authoritarianism. When nihilists administer the political system in the name of the greed of the few, everything we learned since we were infants ceases to apply. What already happened in the United States between 2017 and 2021, under the presidency of a destructive narcissist and his enablers, is a clear illustration of that.
In the United States of 2020, tens of millions were left to fend for themselves, unemployed and without institutional or social support, in constant danger of contagion by a new virus. Hundreds of thousands perished as President Trump recommended the injection of industrial cleaning fluids. And this is a productive and wealthy country –albeit with notable structural ills, including an abysmal inequality of its wealth, concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. By then, many of us in Puerto Rico were already in crisis, without work, without income or with insufficient income, trying to settle or reinstall ourselves in a labor market that is a ghost. Reinventing yourself takes time; and time is what we lack. At the same time, mass emigration and corruption deepened the desolation.
The amorality of the Puerto Rican political class seems to know no bottom. Like that of her nitwit immediate predecessor, Governor Wanda Vázquez’s administration (2019–2021) displayed lack of empathy, of expertise, and of intellect. Its actions in the face of the crises of 2020, from earthquakes to the pandemic, were atrocious. There was no hint of compassion, no interest in alleviating the rampant suffering. Governor Pedro Pierluisi (2021–2025?) was cut from the same cloth. Our lack of freedom takes place in two dimensions: horizontal –at the mercy of other Puerto Ricans qua politicians, who have administered the colonial state since 1953– and vertical –as we are subordinated together with those politicians to American capitalism and imperialism. Meanwhile, the chronic crisis of Puerto Rico’s socio-political model has gone unaddressed for more than 50 years.
On the subject of morals, I find it appalling that many point to dependency in order to argue that it is pointless to expect us to break with the United States. Using dependency (which has never been a one-way street) as an excuse or justification for maintaining the colony is a psychological crutch that contributed to the present moral precipice, so it’s not fit for getting out of the hole. Moreover, pointing the finger at dependency is not being realistic; it’s being escapist, it’s looking for the easy way out. The easy way leads to the abyss.
The so-called federal transfers ensure the consumption of American goods and services, as they are largely a subsidy to American capitalism, and are indicative of the malignancy of a model that serves that capital, while continuing to destroy what remains of our moral fiber. There are indications that these palliatives will disappear sooner rather than later. When that happens, the misery –moral, ecological, and economic– will then be almost absolute; unless by then we have discarded the practices that produce the present paralysis, which even have the effect of neutralizing each other, given our divisions and bad attitudes.
Any pessimistic –fatalistic– discourse that accepts the inevitability of dependence, and its psychological and moral consequences, is another example of the temerity of sustaining a social order on such bases. Such a discourse is also another sign that the post-war project failed. That failure, it should be noted, is connected not only to its imperialist and capitalist character –always for the benefit of the wealthy Americans and the unscrupulous “local” elite– but also to its stagnation, to its perpetuation, even when it became clear that it was deficient and that it had to be discarded.
A society cannot be built or developed from ignorance and passivity. Nor from fantasy, from the attitude of refusing to confront the human reality –political, cultural, historical– of the domination of one nation by another, nor that of the evils of being an intervened and static nation. Material and moral progress is impossible from stagnation. Such progress requires action, profound reforms, radical changes, incessant struggles. The opposite –conformism, inaction– is by definition a source of backwardness and moral turpitude. The primary and most urgent task, therefore, is a radical change of mentality –which would not be enough unless we attain freedom.
After more than a century of U.S. colonial domination, the central characteristic of Puerto Rican culture is, still, its tendency –powerful, overwhelming– toward paralysis. We carry the ethos of stasis into all aspects of our collective lives. The pessimism of stasis should be replaced by the optimism of understanding that problems are inevitable, but that they have solutions, with action, creativity, knowledge, and a critical and experimental attitude. That is, we would have to implement and exercise freedom. Moreover, it should be borne in mind that politics as a power struggle between partisan factions is an obstacle to concerted, effective, experimental and optimistic action. And the fact is that this type of politics that has prevailed does not exist to address human problems, but to elucidate who exercises power, which in turn serves to distribute the benefits produced by the surpluses, characteristic of any post-Paleolithic society. Politics as an exercise of the few is incompatible with freedom.
The importance of education as an ideal and indispensable means of social transformation is mentioned ad nauseam, to the point of being a cliché. What does not get mentioned is the questions it raises, such as: Who will educate? With what skills and tools? With what social and governmental support? With what mindsets? Are those in power interested in the existence of a true citizenry, one made up of critical and creative thinkers? Or do they think that their interests are best safeguarded if the masses are kept like sheep, with no confidence in our ability to dispense with being told how to think and what to do?
It is not with publicity slogans or platitudes that a nation is transformed; much less on the basis of pronouncements that are never accompanied by action or preceded by a minimally adequate strategic plan. We must also reflect on the naivety of believing that “education” is the key, when what happens outside the classroom keeps determining to a greater extent the type of human being that is forged than what takes place in schools and university campuses.
As we can see across the globe, a colonial context is not the only one that gives rise to societies made up of fearful sheep. Moreover, in every static and fearful society, teachers, parents, and other authority figures transmit ideas and practices that reproduce paralysis and pessimism. Therefore, it would seem that we are talking about an insoluble problem. I do not pretend to have the answer as to how cultural transformations can be achieved which gradually turn a static and pessimistic society into a dynamic, courageous and optimistic one. But I emphasize its urgency.
Being a colony would be less of a hindrance if we lived in a more dynamic society. On the other hand, one would expect a respectable dose of dynamism to be antithetical to political and economic subordination, and to the ignominy of colonialism. The current dead end, which is moral, political, ecological, social, economic, demographic, of viability deficit, is the high price to pay for paralysis and unfreedom.
[1] See Pedro A. Cabán, Constructing a Colonial People: Puerto Rico and the United States 218–219 (1999). Regarding the history of futility and lack of generosity of our partisan class, Cox Alomar states that, “from 1900 onwards, our political elites, most of the time in marriage and collusion with the War Department (from 1934 onwards with the Department of the Interior) and with the absent barons of the sugar industry, dedicated themselves to devouring the island’s dwindling budget and dividing up the few public posts then available. Neither corruption, nor clientelism, nor political patronage are new plagues in our political ecosystem. Quite the opposite. They enjoy a great pedigree in the historical trajectory of national life. In those days, similar to today, the ideological and programmatic turmoil muddied the Puerto Rican scene.” Rafael Cox Alomar, La nación en la encrucijada, 84 Rev. Jur. U.P.R. 1239, 1242 (2015) (my translation).
[2] Frank Otto Gatell, The Art of the Possible: Luis Muñoz Rivera and the Puerto Rican Jones Bill, 17 The Americas 1 (1960).
[3] José Luis González, El país de cuatro pisos y otros ensayos 22 (1980; 13th rev. ed. 2018).
[4] Carlos Fuentes, Tiempo mexicano (1971; 2021).
[5] Fuentes, supra note 4, at 12. Another author states: “Mexico is now, in the moment, but it is also in the past. … [H]istory and the moment. To think of Mexico only in one epoch or another is to lose sight of it entirely.” Earl Shorris, The Life and Times of Mexico 12 (2004). Paz put it this way: “[In Mexico] several epochs confront each other, ignore each other, or devour each other on the same land or separated by only a few kilometers. … Old times never disappear completely, and all wounds, even the oldest, still flow with blood. Sometimes, like the pre-Cortesian pyramids that almost always conceal others, in a single city or in a single soul, enemy or distant notions and sensibilities are mixed and superimposed.” Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad 1 (1950).
[6] Fuentes, at 12.
[7] Fuentes, at 13.
[8] Id.
[9] Id.
[10] Cabán stresses that, “although it is formally nothing more than a bureaucratic extension of the metropolitan government, the colonial state has not simply been a regulatory and enforcement agency. Over time its functions have changed as the colonial state has gained relative autonomy to mediate the content and direction of social and economic change. It is also a dynamic actor that promotes fundamental changes in the economy.” Cabán, supra note 1, at 8. That role of the colonial state has diminished considerably since Cabán published his book (in 1999), especially since 2016, with the death of the already diminished autonomy of the Commonwealth government. That death was caused by the passage and implementation of the federal law known as PROMESA. It should be said that the E.L.A. lasted from 1952 to 2016, and that from then the colonial state was transformed, with the Fiscal Control Board created by PROMESA at the helm, facilitating the current stage of capitalist and financial exploitation, which includes gentrification and displacement.
[11] See, e.g., Ronald Fernandez, The Disenchanted Island: Puerto Rico and the United States in the
Twentieth Century (1992).
[12]About the indigenous people of Mexico, Fuentes asked: “Are we going to take away from all those wonderful people their real community and culture, a culture that is not in museums, but in the bodies, in the way they walk, in the way they greet, dance, imagine, to impose on them the fetishes of rationalism and progress that come to us from the eighteenth century?” Fuentes, supra note 4, at 43. For this author, “the great challenge of the indigenous world is to force us to doubt the perfection, the permanence and the intelligence of that progress which, as Pascal said, always ends up devouring everything it creates.” Fuentes, at 44.
[13] Fuentes, supra note 4, at 12.
[14] Books didn’t even reach the fortified citadel of San Juan. See Silvia Álvarez Curbelo, Un país del porvenir: El afán de modernidad en Puerto Rico (siglo xix) 11–12; 59 (2001). Tapia called that stage “three centuries of lethargic and routine ignorance” Alejandro Tapia y Rivera, Mis memorias 66 (1967), quoted in González, supra note 3, at 67.
[15] For details on the notebook quasi slavery system, see James L. Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico 67–78 (2nd ed. 2018).
[16] See Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979). Photography began to develop in the 19th century; then came the motion picture (cinema, at the beginning of the 20th century); then, television; then, the internet; Then, social networks, powered by smartphones, which even fall into the hands of children. Through Instagram, Twitter and OnlyFans, we record and spread our obsession with ourselves, with our bodies, with our nakedness. What have been the social and political consequences of the culture of narcissism; of the end of intimacy, privacy and modesty; of the triumph of image over substance; of the primacy of the body over the intellect? Isn’t the music genre known as reggaeton the perfect soundtrack for this narcissistic culture? In the lyrics of reggaeton, the sexual act prevails as the only activity worth depicting, as the only “achievement” that deserves description, while the depiction is as graphic as possible –besides the absence of poetry in its lyrics, “the genre” is wanting in musicality and artistic merits. This narcissistic culture manifests itself, among other things, in the freezing of the present; in that we are unaware that time passes, that bodies deteriorate, that the only life worth living is the one lived for the sake of others and future generations. With no room for the future, in this culture the current demographic debacle will worsen. See also Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009); Jean M. Twenge & W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (2009).
[17] Mexico, another society that has been distorted by capitalism and exploitation, has also shown signs of resignation: “To resign oneself to everything or to settle for little: are these the signs of the time of Our Lady of Pepsicoátl for the millions of transhumant human beings who live on the margins of our cities? The modern development of Mexico has been understood as a sufficient fact, good in itself, alien to any cultural qualifier. That’s why, in the end, it’s been a failure.” Fuentes, supra note 4, at 41.
[18] See Michel Foucault, Power (James D. Faubion, ed. 2000).
[19] Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View 65 (2nd ed. 2005).
[20] Id.
[21] Lukes, supra note 19, at 71.
[22] Id.
[23] Lukes, at 72.
[24] Lukes, at 73.
[25] Hannah Arendt, On Revolution 116 (1963).
[26] Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic 6 (1972) (“action is of course the very stuff politics are made of”).
[27] Arendt, supra nota 25, at 203: “Acting is fun. [What those eighteenth-century men called] “public happiness” … means that when humans take part in public life, they open up for themselves a dimension of human experience that otherwise remains closed to them and that in some ways constitutes a part of complete ‘happiness’.”
[28] Arendt, supra note 25, at 116; 174: “Even where the loss of authority is quite manifest, revolutions can break out and succeed only if there exists a sufficient number of men who are prepared for its collapse and, at the same time, willing to assume power, eager to organize and to act together for a common purpose. The number of such men need not be great; ten men acting together, as Mirabeau once said, can make a hundred thousand tremble apart from each other [;] the specifically American experience had taught the men of the Revolution that action, though it may be started in isolation and decided upon by single individuals for very different motives, can be accomplished only by some joint effort.”
[29] González tells us that, in founding the League of Patriots in 1898, Hostos “made it clear that whoever was in … the state of prostration was not only the popular masses, but also the intellectual elite from which so much could be demanded at that time [of the so-called change of sovereignty]: ‘By dint of being addicted by colonialism, not even the most cultured men in Puerto Rico decide to have initiative for anything, nor to count entirely on themselves, nor to cease to expect everything from the representatives of power.’” Gonzalez, supra note 3, at 70 (quoting Eugenio María de Hostos, El propósito político de la Liga de Patriotas, in 5 Obras Completas 26–27 (1939)).
[30] See Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, El arte de bregar 20 (2000): “Bregar is, one might say, another order of knowledge, a diffuse method without fanfare to navigate everyday life, where everything is extremely precarious, changing or violent, as it has been throughout the 20th century for Puerto Rican emigrants and is today throughout the island’s territory.”
[31] Raymond Carr, Puerto Rico: A Colonial Experiment 242 (1984).
[32] Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, Musarañas de domingo 221 (2004).
[33] Rodríguez Juliá, supra note 32, at 222. Another author discusses in detail the deficit of radical activism or social change, even in sectors that would be expected to promote change or be its catalytic agents, such as workers or students. Carr, supra note 31, at 245–266.
[34] Rodríguez Juliá, supra note 32, at 225. On this, he adds: “The eternal troubles of statehood are these: No matter how much we crow about our citizenship and protest against history, we are a country apart, we are not Americans! The contradictions facing statehood are enormous, perhaps insurmountable. It is the political heritage of the Commonwealth. It is quite possible that this mixture of the art of the possible and the colonial insufficiency that is the E.L.A. will prevail, at least for another generation. Perhaps the only permanent thing about our colonial situation is its eternal transitoriness.” Rodríguez Juliá, at 227.
[35] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983; rev. ed. 2006).
[36] Anderson offers the following definition of “nation”: “it is an imagined community –and imagined both as inherently limited and sovereign.” Anderson, supra note 35, at 6.
[37] Dietz, supra note 15, at 315.
[38] Arendt, supra nota 25, at 32 (freedom … is participation in public affairs, or admission to the public realm); at 33 (freedom [is] the political way of life); at 119 (freedom consists in having a share in public business).
