My Beloved World (22 page)

THERE ARE FEW PLACES
in this country where institutional history overlaps the national narrative as self-consciously as it does at Princeton. The cannon in the center of the green saw action in the Revolutionary War. Among the über-alumni: James Madison, class of 1771, author of the Constitution. The Continental Congress of 1783 sat in Nassau Hall to receive news of the Treaty of Paris. Those self-assured people surrounding me, who had traveled the world confident of having an influential role in it one day, were no less certain of themselves as the rightful inheritors of this history. It was not something on which I could ever hope to have the same purchase. I needed a history in which I could anchor my own sense of self. I found it when I began to explore the history of Puerto Rico.

I had studied American, European, Soviet, and Chinese history and politics, but I knew next to nothing about the history of my own people. Every people has a past, but the dignity of a history comes when a community of scholars devotes itself to chronicling and studying that past.
In the course offerings in Latin American history and politics, however, Puerto Rico was barely mentioned. Fortunately, it was possible for students to initiate courses. Years before, I discovered, a Princeton student had put together a course on Puerto Rican history, and now, under the guidance of Professor Winn, I set out to revive it, bringing the syllabus up to date and recruiting the necessary quorum of students. I didn’t make it easy on those who might be interested: my reading list was ambitious, to say the least.

The history that emerged from our reading was not a happy one. Under Spain, Puerto Rico suffered colonial neglect and the burden of policies designed to enrich distant parties at heavy cost to the island. Little effort was made to develop the natural resources or agriculture beyond what was needed to provision and mount the conquistadores on their way to Mexico and South America. Poor governance was compounded by bad luck—hurricanes and epidemics—as well as state-sponsored piracy by the British, French, and Dutch. For the Spanish settlers, as for the enslaved indigenous tribes and those from elsewhere in the Caribbean who took refuge on the island, it was a precarious existence that would not begin to improve until well into the nineteenth century. There was negligible civic life and minimal economic activity beyond smuggling. Any liberties the Spanish crown granted were often quickly revoked.

When Spain ceded Puerto Rico to the United States in 1898, along with Cuba and the Philippines as the spoils of the Spanish-American War, Puerto Ricans held an optimistic faith in American ideals of liberty, democracy, and justice. But that optimism would yield to a sense of betrayal for many. Governed without representation, exploited economically, some islanders came to feel they had merely exchanged one colonial master for another.

It was clear that the idea of Puerto Rico as the “rich port” was never anything but a fantasy. The island had always been poor. At the same time, it was tied to an old culture and several continents. One didn’t have to romanticize the past or succumb to mythology to appreciate its thread in the fabric of history.

One of the books on our reading list to make a profound impression on me was Oscar Lewis’s
La Vida
. It was a contentious inclusion,
an anthropological study of one family that stretched from the slums of San Juan to those of New York. Many Puerto Ricans have been offended by its airing of dirty laundry: the granular view of prostitution and a culture that seems preoccupied with sex. But there was much else going on in the lives Lewis described and in his argument about how the culture of poverty persists by virtue of being adaptive, a set of strategies to cope with difficult circumstances. I couldn’t deny that the book triggered powerful moments of recognition, often painful but nonetheless fascinating, as I saw my own family reflected in its pages. I was beginning to understand my family lore in a cultural framework, to spot sociological patterns in what had seemed mere idiosyncrasies, and dark ones at that.

What
La Vida
was lacking, I realized, was an appreciation of the good, the richness of our culture, however long overshadowed by poverty. There are strengths in our collective psyche that account for our resilience and that equally hold the potential for our renewal, if properly nourished and cultivated. I could see it in my own mother’s reverence for education, her faith in community, her infinite capacity for hard work and perseverance; in Abuelita’s joyful generosity, her passion for life and poetry, her power to heal. Such strong women are no rarity in our culture. I could see resilient strength, too, in the way that Spiritism and the Catholic faith have accommodated each other rather than clashing.

THE CLASSROOM DISCUSSIONS
were heated and often loud. We hadn’t resisted our colonial masters in any meaningful way, some would claim. Others responded: El Grito de Lares had rallied rebels against Spain. And in the 1950s members of the militant Puerto Rico Nationalist movement, who pursued armed revolution against the United States, went as far as an attempt on the life of President Truman and a deadly shoot-out in the U.S. Congress. And yet others retorted: These moments of resistance were fleeting and never led to the kind of sustained struggle that had won independence for Cuba or the Philippines. If identity arises from struggle, and trauma spurs growth and change, did not the frailty of our opposition threaten to define us historically?
Cuba’s revolution, like the wars of independence fought in the Philippines, had forged those national identities in a crucible of violence. Many in the class would ask what it was in our character that had led us to a more peaceable accommodation with colonial power.

Again and again, the conversation returned to the island’s political status. Did we want to remain a commonwealth, with some self-rule and a preferential trade relationship with the mainland? Half the class believed that was no better than being a colony of the United States, living as second-class citizens. But if we should aspire to statehood, the full rights of citizenship would come at the price of the full obligations, including a tax burden that, arguably, might have crippled our economy at the time. Some proposed, with passionate conviction, that full independence was the only way to preserve our culture and the proper dignity of self-determination. The economic repercussions of each position were as inscrutably complex as they were critical to the arguments. And for those who are eager to discern my own present views on the status question, I can only advise not to give too much weight to whatever ideas vied for prominence in a young student’s mind.

WHEN MY MOTHER
made good on our wager of a plane ticket and I found myself in Puerto Rico for two weeks, I had my first chance to view the island through adult eyes and with an evolving new consciousness of my identity. Some things hadn’t changed since childhood visits. We still made the ritual stop for a coconut on the road from the airport, but now the vendor would add a bit of rum to my libation from a bottle he kept out of sight. I still began the trip with a round of visits to every family member in order of seniority, still feasted on mangoes fresh off the tree. But instead of playing the Three Stooges, my cousins and I enjoyed dominoes, dancing, and the ubiquitous bottle of rum. The kindness of strangers was still striking: a flat tire fixed, cups of coffee offered while we waited.

Much of what I saw was familiar but now made more sense. The poverty documented in
La Vida
was visible to me now in the slums of San Juan. Compared with my family in New York, my family in Puerto Rico was modestly prosperous; they had shielded me as a child from
realities that I could now reckon with, though certain aspects of the island’s social stratification would remain hidden from me until very recently. San Juan also has its gracious homes, its old money, and its high culture.

The stunning natural beauty of the island, which I had barely registered as a child, also made a deep impression on that trip as I played tourist. In the rain forest at El Yunque, waterfalls trick the eye, holding movement suspended in lacy veils. Wet stone gleams, fog tumbles from peaks to valleys, mists filter the forest in pale layers receding into mystery. On the beach at Luquillo, when the sun appears under clouds massed offshore and catches the coconut palms at a low angle, the leafy crowns explode like fireworks of silver light. At night there is liquid stardust swirling in the dark waters of the phosphorescent bay. Almost every evening there are sunsets of white gold where the sky meets the sea.

At Cabo Rojo, a little motorboat came puttering to shore after a long wait and ferried a handful of people across the lagoon to La Isla de los Ratones. There was nothing there—no food stalls, no vendors, no “amenities”—nothing but the skirt of pure white sand and a coral shelf that let you walk chest-deep in crystal translucence for what seemed like miles before the floor dropped into the ocean. I looked down into water so clear that it was invisible, except for the rocks and sand and sea fronds rippling on the floor as at the beginning of a dream sequence in a movie.

As a New Yorker of profoundly urban sensibilities, I was never very attuned to nature. During my first week on campus, a cricket had me tearing the dorm room apart, searching for the source of the chirp until Kevin explained that it lived in the tree outside my window. I’ve been known to confuse cows for horses. The ocean was always the one grand exception. Even in the chaos of Orchard Beach, the circus of family picnics, crowded surf, and traffic jams, I could find in the rhythm of the waves a transcendent serenity. And anyone who could find peace in the beaches of the Bronx would find heaven in Puerto Rico.

Another revelation of my adult trips to the island was how much the political questions broached in my course, especially about the island’s status, infused everyday life. You’d see party symbols everywhere,
the straw hat for the faction supporting commonwealth, the palm tree for those supporting statehood, the green flag with the white cross for those who favored independence. Everyone pored over the newspapers, dissected the candidates’ positions on economic development, education, health care, corruption … During one election season, in the plaza of Mayagüez—and in many other towns too, I’m sure—traffic jams proliferated as cars honking horns and flying one party’s flags refused to give way to other cars honking horns and flying the other party’s flags. It was chaos, but at least people cared. I learned that 85 percent of the island’s population had gone to the polls in recent elections.

This manic enthusiasm that gripped the island in election years, and still does, was a marked contrast to the political despondency felt by Puerto Ricans on the mainland in those years. The summer that I won the bet with my mother, I worked as usual in the business office at Prospect Hospital before going to Puerto Rico. For a couple of weeks, however, Dr. Freedman, as part of his community outreach efforts, lent me out as an intern to Herman Badillo’s ultimately unsuccessful campaign for mayor of New York City. Badillo was our congressman, the first Puerto Rican ever elected to the House of Representatives. It was then I first saw how difficult it was to energize a community that felt marginal and voiceless in the larger discourse of a democracy.

Puerto Ricans in New York then felt their votes didn’t count. And so why should they take the trouble even to register? Having experienced discrimination intimately, they knew they were seen as second-class citizens, as people who didn’t belong, with no path to success in mainland society. Their chances of escaping from the underclass, from the vicious cycle of poverty, were no better than those of their similarly alienated black neighbors and probably worse for those who didn’t speak English.

Puerto Ricans on the island, by contrast, didn’t have full consciousness of being a minority because they’d never had to live as one. There were inequalities in their world, but no one’s dignity suffered merely on account of his being Puerto Rican. Whether content with commonwealth status or aspiring to statehood, or even independence, they took it for granted that they were fully American: American citizens
born to American parents on American territory. To be mistaken for foreigners—aliens, legal or otherwise—would have been a shock.

It was dawning on me that if the Puerto Rican community in New York ever hoped to escape poverty and recover its self-respect, there were lessons to be learned from the island. The two communities—islanders and those on the mainland—needed to work together for their mutual benefit.

FOR THE FINAL PAPER
in the Puerto Rican history course, Peter Winn suggested a marvelous project, a family oral history. It was a challenge befitting any serious student of history: going mano a mano with primary sources, my cassette recorder planted on the kitchen table. Not everyone warmed to it: “You’re wasting your time! Nothing interesting ever happened to me.” For some, it was a grudging surrender to interrogation, slow and halting; others, the natural storytellers, proved surprisingly eager and voluble.

I was amazed by how many of these stories I’d never heard before. People had left their past behind when they came to New York. Memories of hardship and extreme poverty were of no use starting a new life on the mainland. With so much to deal with in the present, who had the luxury of dwelling on the past? My mother had told me very little about her childhood. Now it unfolded, hesitantly at first—her mother’s death, her orphan loneliness—and then, with more confidence, she recounted joining the army, coming to New York, falling into a new family at Abuelita’s. She said very little about my father. Those stories, as I’ve said, came out only recently.

The experience of hearing my Princeton reading echoed in family recollections had the effect of both making the history more vivid and endowing life as lived with the dignity of something worth studying. When, for instance, I had read that “a woman who takes ten hours to finish two dozen handkerchiefs earns 24 cents for them,” I could picture Titi Aurora holding the needle, my mother leaning over the iron. Nor were these lives lived beyond a broader scheme of historical cause and effect. It was America’s wars that would transform us into real Americans,
not only by reason of my mother’s decision to enlist, but even earlier, with the granting of American citizenship to Puerto Ricans in 1917—after two decades of limbo—just in time for Abuelita’s first husband, my grandfather, to be drafted into World War I with a wave of young Puerto Rican men. After the war, that same grandfather rolled tobacco in a factory in Manatí, listening all day as a reader read from novels and newspaper stories to keep the rollers entertained. From my reading I knew that a tobacco factory worker made between forty cents and a dollar a day and that tuberculosis, from which my grandfather died, was the most common cause of death on the island, and particularly lethal to those who worked long hours in air heavy with tobacco dust.