Abstract
Gertrude Stein’s last opera featured an iconic virgin “mother” who voiced skepticism about voting as a reliable device for determining what’s right—or anyone’s rights. In similar spirit, Puerto Rican feminists in New York City endorsed equal political rights for women but also critiqued the trappings and rituals of liberal citizenship. The monthly magazine Artes y Letras, published in Spanish between 1933 and 1939 by Josefina Silva de Cintrón (1884–1988), conveys the rich landscape of their thinking and activism.1 In Stein’s opera, “mother” was literally a fabulous metaphor. So, too, was Artes y Letras rife with maternal iconography, though the journal also documented the everyday loves and labors of living mothers with very real children. Its editors focused on flags rather than statuary. As Stein so keenly grasped, the expression of modern nationalism involved public performances and stagings in which control over images is essential. Artes y Letras focused on just such fields of activity, placed Puerto Rican women’s mothering at the center of its perspective, and labeled it all feminismo.
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Notes
Walter D. Mignolo, “Citizenship, Knowledge, and the Limits of Humanity,” American Literary History 18 (2006) 2: 312–331. Though Mignolo refers to a “decolonial idea of humanity,” his article does not cite Pérez’s work or touch on gender. Sonia Dmitrowna, “Nuestro América Ante el Futuro,” Artes y Letras [hereafter AL] (June 1939): 4.
Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 33. See also Irene Lara, “Goddess of the Americas in the Decolonial Imaginary: Beyond the Virtuous Virgin/Pagan Puta Dichotomy,” Feminist Studies 34 (2008) 1: 99–127, and Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, “Chicana! Rican? No, Chicana Riqueña! Refashioning the Transnational Connection,” in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. Caren Kaplan, et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 264–295. See also Jorge Duany, “The Rough Edges of Puerto Rican Identities: Race, Gender, and Transnationalism,” Latin American Research Review 40 (2005) 3: 177–190 and Gervasio Luis Garcia, “I Am the Other: Puerto Rico in the Eyes of North Americans, 1898,” Journal of American History 87 (June 2000) 1: 39–64.
Breny Mendoza, “Unthinking State-Centric Feminisms,” in Rethinking Feminisms in the Americas, ed. Mendoza (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 6–18.
G. Parkhurst, “Is Feminism Dead?” Harper’s Magazine 170 (May 1935): 725–745. Scholars apply the word “doldrums” to the period of strategic flux for the organized suffrage movement around the turn of the twentieth century or to the period following World War II, a period of feminist backlash. Lisa Tetrault, “The Incorporation of American Feminism: Suffragists and the Postbellum Lyceum,” Journal of American History 96 (March 2010), and Leila J Rupp, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Lorrin Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 132. Thomas’s study neglects Artes y Letras, though her introduction describes “cultural citizenship” and “diasporic citizenship,” concepts which resonate with the idea of a third space or decolonial approach to rights. See also Lorrin Thomas, “Resisting the Racial Binary? Puerto Rican’s Encounter with Race in Depression-Era New York City,” Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 21(Spring 2009) 1: 5–35.
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Henry Wells, The Modernization of Puerto Rico: A Political Study of Changing Values and Institutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 108–111. Truman R. Clark, “‘Educating the Natives in Self-Government’: Puerto Rico and the United States, 1900–1933,” The Pacific Historical Review 42 (1973) 2: 220–233.
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Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), and Richard Graham, The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).
Karl Meyer, Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and Race for Empire in Central Asia (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1999), 451. See also Jacqueline Decter and Nikolai Rerikh Museum, Nicholas Roerich: The Life and Art of a Russian Master (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1989).
Ricardo D. Salvatore, “The Enterprise of Knowledge: Representational Machines of Informal Empire,” in Close Encounters of Empire, 69–105 Pike, FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy, especially chapters 7 and 8 takes a much more benign view of intercultural activities, and assigns them less historical weight and value as well.
Victor S. Clark, “A Word to Porto Rican Readers,” in Porto Rico and its Problems. (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1930), ix.
John Barrett, The Pan American Union: Peace Friendship Commerce (Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1911), 14. Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), chapter 2.
Michael L. Gillette, “Huey Long and the Chaco War,” Louisiana History 11 (1970) 4: 293–311. See also William R Garner, The Chaco Dispute: A Study of Prestige Diplomacy (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1966), 92–94, and Leslie B. Rout, Politics of the Chaco Peace Conference, 1935–39 (Austin: Published for the Institute of Latin American Studies by University of Texas Press, 1970), 89–91. Rout is highly dismissive of an oil-driven interpretation of the Chaco conflict (48). Bryce Wood concludes that Bolivia’s charges against Standard Oil were nothing if not self-interested, since in 1937, the government confiscated the properties of the company. Bryce Wood, The United States and Latin American Wars, 1932–1942 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 65–67.
Harriet Hyman Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 124.
Frank Otto Gatell, “Independence Rejected: Puerto Rico and the Tydings Bill of 1936,” Hispanic American Historical Review 38 (1958): 43–44. Gattell describes the Tydings Bill as “the act of an angry man; there was no statesmanship about it.” Robert David Johnson, “Anti-Imperialism and the Good Neighbor Policy: Ernest Gruening and Puerto Rican Affairs, 1934–1939,” Journal of Latin American Studies 29 (February 1997) 1: 89–110.
Eric M. Matsner and William Laidlaw, “Puerto Rico: Old Woman in a Shoe,” North American Review 242 (Winter 1936–37): 277–278; 280–281. More generous appraisals in Paddack, “Puerto Rico’s Plight,” William H. Haas, “The Jibaro, An American Citizen,” The Scientific Monthly 43 (July 1936)1: 33–46; Harwood Hull, “Better Times for Puerto Rico,” Current History 43 (January 1936) 4: 367–372.
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© 2012 Patricia A. Schechter
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Schechter, P.A. (2012). ¡Adelante Hermanas de La Raza!. In: Exploring the Decolonial Imaginary. Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137012845_4
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