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Remembering Abuela: Memory, authenticity and place in Puerto Rican Orlando

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Abstract

This article is one piece of a larger work that looks through the case of Puerto Ricans in Orlando, Florida, to examine heterogeneity and political presence in an emerging Latino diaspora community in the US Sunbelt. At issue is the tension between the political appeal to “sameness” as a basis for collective action and the reality of difference. Through an examination of a series of Puerto Rican cultural representations, the article looks at Puerto Rican and Latino political community formation in the Orlando area, and in particular, at the challenges posed by: (i) the racial and class-based lines of exclusion implied in the distinction between island-born and diaspora-born Puerto Ricans, and (ii) the pressure to adopt a whitewashed, middle-class version of Hispanidad, which emerges from Orlando’s post-civil rights era neoliberal multiculturalism.

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Notes

  1. For further scholarship on reading/constructing race and ethnicity through place and history, see especially Brown (2005), Dávila (2004), Godreau (2002), Gregory (1998), Hartigan (1999), and Hoelscher (2003).

  2. I use the term identification in the sense that it provides a more precise, active concept to social analysis (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000). For a cogent explanation of Chandra Mohanty’s (1987) critique of identification, see Weir (2008).

  3. For a succinct review of literature on pan-ethnicity and a re-examination of DeSipio’s (1996) theoretical position on Latino pan-ethnicity, based on data from the Latino National Survey, see Lavariega Monforti (2014).

  4. The story of Puerto Rican post-war migration to the US states is of course far more complex than this implies, both in terms of the dynamics in Puerto Rico and in New York, Chicago, and the other US state communities where the migrants went. For more informative overview and nuanced analyses, see Acosta-Belén and Santiago (2006), Ayala and Bernabe (2007), García Colón (2009), and Whalen and Vázquez-Hernández (2005).

  5. For more on the history of Puerto Rican migration to the Orlando area, see Silver (2010) and Duany and Silver (2010). For analysis of the racial dynamics for Puerto Ricans in Orlando, see Delerme (2013) and Silver (2013).

  6. Disney’s impact on the formation of contemporary Orlando has been examined by various scholars (cf. Foglesong, 2001; Mormino, 2005). Evidence of Orlando’s southern past in the present, and the comparative value of this site with other “new destinations,” is less often addressed.

  7. See also the 2012 special issue of Latino Studies 10(1–2) “Latino/as in the South.”

  8. Data are from ACS, three-year 2011–2013.

  9. For a useful exposition on neoliberalism and its social consequences, see Harvey (2005) and Collins et al (2008). See especially Martinez (2010) and Dávila (2004) for analyses of localized efforts to claim space in neoliberal New York.

  10. Data in this paragraph are from ACS, three-year 2011–2013.

  11. The Institute for Puerto Rican Culture, founded in 1953, has the particular task of codifying what constitutes the “authentic” in Puerto Rican cultural expression (Dávila, 1997).

  12. This use of the casita to mark a presence of those without power points to Sassen’s (2002, 2005) and Zukin’s (1991, 1995) frameworks for the city.

  13. For discussion of these issues in other museum-based representations, see Dávila (2001), Lassalle and Pérez (1997), and Torres (2011).

  14. Details on Amaury Díaz’ life are from his oral history interview in “Puerto Ricans in Central Florida from 1940s to 1980s: A History” (2009), housed at the Library and Archives of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies in New York and at the Orange County Regional History Center in Orlando.

  15. In Puerto Rico every 23 June, it is popular to celebrate the Noche de San Juan by throwing oneself backward into the water. This is to wash away evil and bring good things into life for the following year.

  16. Translated from Spanish by the author.

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Acknowledgements

This article was originally inspired by many hours of conversation with Arlene Torres. I am grateful to her for introducing me to the work of John Jackson, Jr., on racial authenticity and sincerity, as well as for her insights into Vizcarrondo’s poem. My former colleagues at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies gave important feedback during an early presentation of this article. Simone Delerme, in particular, provided invaluable feedback on early versions and introduced me to the new-destinations literature. I am grateful to her and to the anonymous reviewers for their insights and improvements. I also want to thank Luis Martínez Fernández for introducing me to artist Alberto Gómez. Most of all, I am indebted to those in Central Florida who have given so much of their time and insight to my efforts to see the world through their eyes. In particular, I thank artists Amaury Díaz and Alberto Gómez for sharing their work and their perspectives on their work with me. Any errors are of course my own.

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    Patricia Silver

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Silver, P. Remembering Abuela: Memory, authenticity and place in Puerto Rican Orlando. Lat Stud 13, 376–401 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2015.29

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