When I was Puerto Rican Revisited

 

When I was Puerto Rican Revisited

by

Richard T. Beck

After three years of teaching the novel, When I was Puerto Rican, and based upon my student’s inquiries and comments, I have concluded that Esmeralda Santiago’s novel like Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath is an apocryphal bridge. Steinbeck’s was a bridge from Depression Era America to post-war Keynesian social enlightenment where the ghost of Tom Joad haunted the backrooms of social planners while Santiago’s is a bridge from 911-isolationist patriotism to a worldly cosmopolitan inclusivity that asks the question, Why do they hate us so much? or maybe even in Fanonian terms, Why do they hate themselves so much? Taking another look at Santiago’s novel is also timely for Puerto Rican students whose Borinquen faces another referendum in 2008. Where Steinbeck's novel awakened America’s awareness of economic injustice, Santiago’s novel awakens us to our nationalist hubris by providing a paradigm for investigating the effects of this hubris on global populations and the limiting effects it has on us. If the protagonist’s limits, Negi’s limites are set by the constructs of her community then certainly our student’s limites as Norte Americano readers are set by their community as well. The teaching moment arises when the teacher takes her students beyond those limites; not only to read literature with a greater clarity, but also to read situations in their communities and the world with a greater clarity that enable them to move beyond their desperate sense of insecurity that has plotted their lives’ timelines by the carnage of 911, Columbine, Virginia Tech, Iraq and shock and awe politics.

North American readers read from a worldview that explains the world in terms of their country’s hegemony and racial supremacy as if they themselves were the center of the universe and heirs to the world’s clock. But lately our students are reading and writing according to a timeline of Armageddon be that timeline real or concocted. Our students are not weaned on the historical bias of a colonizer. We have not lost an Algeria and taken the loss personally into our collective cultural consciousness like the French. We are not a colonized people. We are too far removed from the pain of the refugee loyalists who fled to Canada or back to the motherland after our revolution. Nor are we often invited into the third world worldview except to read with curiosity the chroniclers of Che, the artifacts of Fanon, or the pedagogy of Freire. Try getting those authors into the High School curriculum. Santiago’s literary legacy for Norte Americano readers, dwells in its prerequisite that North American readers critique the narrative from an unfamiliar worldview picking up shards of pottery like anthropologists as they read to reconstruct the jar that in its wholeness contains the plot.

Narrative constructs meaning by linking significant interrelated individual actions and events. Memory is the purest form of narrative and the first great achievement of abstraction (Gadamer, 63). Writers abstract events by using their imagination to embellish the language they use to describe these events. The embellishment of the events creates the space where they can plot the development of their identity, their persona, within the narrative. A plot constructs meaning by recording the relationships among our perceptions (Polkinghorne, 19); grammar subordinates, coordinates, or correlates the relationships depending on their significance to the narrative. There are four connotations of the word plot that are apropos in our discussion of When I Was Puerto Rican. First, plot is a place as in a plot of ground or a cemetery plot that pastorally can be a place to build our shelter or a place of rest. Second, it is a conspiratorial design as in to plot someone’s demise or in more passive terms to have someone plot against us. Third, it is an intentional act to achieve an objective as in to plot ones journey on a map before we embark so as not to lose our way. Fourth, it has a literary meaning as in a setting and sequence of events. Esmeralda Santiago’s or Negi’s narrative, in When I Was Puerto Rican, is a novel by an author in search of all four connotations of plot. In most cases, a book with a weak plotline would be a poor book. But, it is this very lack of a chronological timeline that gives the book its strength and calls us to look more critically at it. Like Pirandello’s Six Characters who demand to be given life, Santiago’s life demands to be given a story. 

There are a number of reasons why a jibara’s story has never been told from a jibara’s point-of-view. Jibaras do not write; they speak. Jibaras are not educated in the formal sense and do not have access to publishing houses. And if they ever do get educated and enjoy the social mobility of status they are more than likely to hide their jibara origins much the same way a Norte Americana from West Virginia might wish to hide her Daisy Mae barefoot Dogpatch origins. There is another more ominous reason that the jibara’s point-of-view is not heard. It reveals a cultural weakness whose denial is a symptom of colonial self-deprecation.

My own grandparents, whom I was to respect as well as love, were said to be jibaros. But I couldn’t be one, nor was I to call anyone a jibaro, lest they be offended. Even at the tender age when I didn’t know my real name, I was puzzled by the hypocrisy of celebrating a people everyone looked down on. (Santiago, 13)

Today, far from the tin and planked bohío, the author finds her metaphorical space, her plot, in the Norte Americano achievement of Harvard, PBS Masterpiece Theatre, a George Foster Peabody Award, Sports Illustrated, Latina, House & Garden, and Good Housekeeping. She has come far and she has won her jibara right to speak within the plot of her narrative. What amazes the reader is that she has lost herself along the journey but it is our task as her readers, especially Norte Americano readers, not to lose her again. This sounds counter-intuitive to describe an author as losing herself just as it sounds uncritical to praise a novel without a steady plotline. She is no Joyce. She cannot condense the history of a people into one day and that is not her fault because her people’s history ended in 1898 and needs jump-starting. It would seem that an author who loses self would present to us an inauthentic and contrived piece of writing. With Esmeralda Santiago, this is not the case because the moral of her story is that some things in life are worth losing everything for…including oneself

We, Norte Americanos, might metaphorize the author as a great example of Latina achievement, and we, teachers in search of minority role models, especially Hispanic women role models, dive into the metaphor and proclaim ourselves friendly to the voices from the other side. That’s easy. But, unfortunately, literature from the other side is not always good literature. It is not always universal or even come near the universality of books like Ellison’s Invisible Man. Esmeralda Santiago's, When I Was Puerto Rican, is a narrative of a young girl's coming-of-age in 1950s Puerto Rico, but it is more than a quaint novel of adolescent genre. It’s more than a book from a guidance counselor’s recommended reading list to illustrate good touch, bad touch. On the surface, linguistically, the subject of adolescent angst is universal to all coming-of-age novels. However, in When I Was Puerto Rican, it is in Negi’s attempts to adapt to the rural areas of Puerto Rico and urban area of New York City and free herself from her colonialized Puerto Rican cultural inheritance that makes Negi’s search for symbolic meaning unique in American literature. Is it a difficult read? You bet it is. For students to be comfortable reading it and avoid surface interpretations they first must become familiar with Negi’s worldview and it is from this deconstruction of worldviews that a plot emerges. Narrative schemes are an innate structure of consciousness but how the narrative is displayed is innate to the culture. Santiago’s narrative is displayed from an agrarian worldview where its structure comes from the community’s dependence upon natural occurrences to reliably predict and guide their actions. Where Santiago’s plot may seem unruly and disjointed to us Norte Americanos because of our preoccupation with set rules of time, Santiago’s plot mimics the natural world’s framework of weather, childbirth, death, menstruation, and emerging sexuality and all the superstitions, taboos, and rights of passage that go along with it.

Worldviews depend on constructs. A worldview helps us to make sense of the events and people that we encounter inside and outside our communities. Within the concept of worldview, there are five conceptualizations: an explanation of the world, a descriptive model of the world, where the greater community is heading, a futurology, values, and answers to ethical questions. A transformation to an unfamiliar worldview compels the reader, if the reader wants to read well, into a hermeneutical stance. The hermeneutical stance, a return to an aesthetic form of teaching, may be a way to get us out of our cultural quagmire that prevents us from coming to grips with our past and better understanding our present. It may also be an avenue or pursuit that might liberate us from the political correctness that chokes our discourse on so many important social issues that affect our everyday lives; our encounters with content and students; encounters with one another on a professional level; and even the future of our nation. Others have also suggested that hermeneutics might replace existing modes of inquiry (Slattery, 1996) while others like Peter Ashworth believe the biggest problem facing hermeneutics as an acceptable and legitimate pedagogy is that research specifically tackling learning as a hermeneutical enterprise is sparse. According to Ashworth, Gordon Taylor (1993) is one rather isolated voice who is trying to under the conditions for hermeneutical learning to take place:

He [Taylor] is specifically interested in the way in which a hermeneutical view of learning leads necessarily to an emphasis on the dynamic and social nature of learning – the student’s understanding is enriched and elaborated in dialogue. Taylor notes…that hermeneutics transcends the cognitive focus of most discussion of learning…the students must be seen as personally transformed in the process of learning. (Ashworth 150).

The significance of hermeneutics is to bring to light the hegemony of the dominant culture in order to engage it transformatively (Slattery 4). Therefore, to approach the novel When I was Puerto Rican, the reader must first deconstruct their Americanism. The jar must be caste down and the shards reassembled. For those who want to attempt the adventure, the risk, some time must be spent on schooling the students on how to approach the reading by transcending their 21st century techno-informational worldview and deconstructing the agrarian and industrial worldviews. This deconstruction unconceals the bias in Negi’s culture but students no longer look at bias in a negative connotation. They begin to look at bias as a starting point to understanding.

The second aspect of the novel that needs to be clarified for students is that the novel cannot be read as a series of sequenced events that lead to a climax and denouement. As of yet, after three years of teaching the novel to high school students, no student intervention has been able to construct a traditional plot line for the novel. Nor have I been able to capture theoretically any student idea that would allow me as the teacher the window to afford my students the opportunity to explore a critical analysis that might lead to the discovery of a traditional plot line. Since the novel posits no plot in the literary narrative, the plot must be created outside of the narrative itself. The key to understanding Negi’s metaphor is for the reader, herself, to find a metaphor in the text by asking what does it represent beyond what the author offers us.

When I Was Puerto Rican must be read from a dialectical point-of-view where there is no synthesis of events that lead to the next logical consequence but only an extinction of events that lead to the next cognitive analysis by the author.

          Not every plot can order a set of events. An appropriate configuration emerges only after moving back and forth…compare[ing] proposed plot structures with the events and then revis[ing] the plot structure according to the principle of best fit. Thus, emplotment is not the imposition of a ready-made plot structure on an independent set of events; instead, it is a dialectic process that takes place between the events themselves and a theme which discloses their significance and allows them to be grasped together as parts of one story. In addition, the construction of plots is not a completely rule-governed activity. It can generate unique and novel configurations. (Polkinghorne, 19-20)

The third aspect of the novel that students need to understand is the psychology and coping mechanisms of a colonized people. Even before the protagonist, Negi, arrives in New York, she struggles to find meaning and her identity in Puerto Rico. She strives to deconstruct the Puerto Rican way of life and escape her predetermined destiny to follow in her mother’s footsteps. Negi’s struggle is Puerto Rico’s struggle. There can be no synthesis for Negi as Puerto Rican and Negi as Norte Americana. To avoid schizophrenia, one must be rendered extinct.

For me the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created. The Puerto Rican jibara who longed for the green quiet of a tropical afternoon was to become a hybrid who would never forgive the uprooting. (Santiago, 209)

Contrary to Ellen Moyock’s opinion, the imposed values of a gender biased culture cannot survive with well-earned identity (Mayock, 224), but then Mayock in her article is speaking of three distinct authors from three distinct cultures: Mexican, Dominican, and Puerto Rican. Negi, like her isla verde, her isla encanta is an abstraction. It is not. Mexico and the Dominican Republic have been sovereign nations while Puerto Rico has been in a state of limbo since 1898. Puerto Rico has remained an adolescent in the political world. It has its driver’s license but must be home before midnight. It no longer struts on the world’s stage that would have led it to the overwhelming question; To be or not to be? Puerto Rico’s moment of greatness flickered, dimmed, and was extinguished not from the balcony of the chambers of congress or on the slopes of Cerro Maravilla but in the legislative pen of Operation Bootstrap policy makers who made sure it would not launch into full adulthood.

When I Was Puerto Rican is a more important novel than to be labeled an ethnic piece of literature just as it would be difficult to label Invisible Man, Black Literature, just because the author is not white. Santiago is no propagandist and this is why perhaps there have been so few critiques of the book. She tells the truth and leaves her readers to interpret that truth. She does not overly criticize the Puerto Rican agrarian hombrecidad that still oppresses women and still stultifies men in perpetual adolescence. She nostalgically looks at the past as I might look at the past who grew up in a steel town in Pennsylvania and remember when everybody who wanted to work…could. She looks at the past the same way I do when I drive the countryside where I hunted in my youth where hedgerows, now leveled by urban sprawl, once made good neighbors. I opine the loss in a mood of romantic nostalgia and easily drown in dormant memory my anger at the guy who shot the family cat.

Negi is in a constant state of disequilibrium because she has to renegotiate, compensate, and reconcile meaning from an agrarian, fatalistic, and deterministic worldview. She awakes too early before the dawn of her adulthood and sovereignty. As Santiago says in the prologue, “At night, your mother makes you drink castor oil, which she says tastes better than green guava. That’s when you know for sure that you’re a child and she has stopped being one” (Santiago, 4). On a personal level, it is the time that Negi knows that she too has stopped being a child and that both she and her mother engage in a partnership. In like partnership, The United States at night made Puerto Rico drink its Castor Oil derived from the toxic Castor bean as a purgative.

Mami didn’t know any better, and I had yet to learn not everything I heard was true, so we reacted in what was to become a pattern for us: what frightened her I became curious about, and what she found exciting terrified me. (Santiago, 7)

While Puerto Rico remained ensconced from the political turmoil of Latin America, she could only be curious about what frightened her the most, autonomy. Negi like Puerto Rico has two sets of parents. One set inherited from birth and one set inherited politically from Luis Munoz Marin’s conversion to modernization and the melting pot. Ellen C. Mayock describes this in her article entitled The Bicultural Construction of Self:

[Negi] struggle[s] with how best to interpret the words of others and how to incorporate new language into [her] evolving sense of expression, we also see [her] analyzing [herself] and finding [her] own path[]out of [her] bicultural confusion. (Mayock, 228)

Negi’s development covers approximately a ten-year period, a period between the heroes of the 25th Infantry and the debut of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. Esmeralda Santiago transforms her character’s persona back and fourth between an agrarian worldview and a modern industrial worldview. Santiago illustrates the sociological and psychological schizophrenia experienced when people walk the tight rope between acculturation or assimilation. She loses her balance, slips, but she never falls. Negi “is deeply affected by her geographical past and present, by the cultural implications of that geography by the constantly evolving mosaic of the combination of two distinctly different cultures, and, to complicate matters, by the changing locations of her developing adolescent self” (Mayock, 223). The obstacles she encounters break her down and then build her up in a form of psychological deconstruction that ultimately results in the birth of the author herself, Esmeralda Santiago. Santiago is no Puerto Rican apologist. She does not blame her struggle on American hegemony. She does not interpret her plight in terms of the victimization model. Her narrative is episodic, written in the same style as Homer’s Iliad and Chaucer’s Tales. Each chapter is a short story.

Both the agrarian and industrial ages have constructs that govern the habits and render a sense of security to the communities in them. “Her ability to separate into two selves,”(Mayock, 227) one is buried in an agrarian society and one being developed in an industrial society provide a safety net while she walks the tightrope that encourages her to transform herself into the sophisticated and educated author Esmeralda Santiago.  Santiago tells Negi’s story by painfully revisiting the episodes of gender bias in her childhood that set profound psychological obstacles in her way to becoming an autonomous individual. However, it is here as readers we need to be careful. What is gender bias in one age is a port-of-call in another.

Intrinsic to the evolution of the bicultural female protagonist are her family relationships the examples set for her by her female peers and older role models, her struggles to understand and liberate herself from gender bias norms, and her efforts to create a realm where imposed values can survive with well earned identity. (Mayock 224)

In an agrarian worldview, ones choices are governed by nature. Nature is the jibaro’s teacher.

Some years, when the rains have been plentiful and the nights cool, you can bite into a guava and not find any seeds…These guavas are juicy, almost seedless, their roundness enticing you to have one more, just one more, because next year the rains may not come. (Santiago, 3)

Santiago has her last guava the day she leaves Puerto Rico (Santiago, 4) and from that day on, she is determined to leave her jibara agrarian culture behind.

The transposition of values between an agrarian worldview and an industrial worldview can be seen when Negi is kept from school in order to serve the greater good of the family.

“Tomorrow,” Mami said, “you’re not going to school. I need you to come with me to the welfare office.” (Santiago, 248)

Another is when she times her start of school by nature. Negi may as well go to school during the hurricane season because there would be much rain. Not fit weather for working outside.

“I started school in the middle of hurricane season and the world grew suddenly bigger, a vast place of other adults and children whose lives were similar.” (Santiago, 30)

Here we see a remnant of the agrarian worldview superimposed upon Puerto Rican students in our present educational system. How many of us teachers complain that when the weather is bad our Puerto Rican students are absent? Moreover, how many of us have complained that our Puerto Rican girls are absent so much because they have to stay home to care for younger siblings?

“Let me tell you another story, then,” she said. “The first day of your first year, you were absent. We called your house. You said you couldn’t come to school…I asked to speak to your mother…She needed you…”

“I’m glad you made that phone call,” I said. (Santiago, 270)

Negi develops her casi senorita identity from her Mother’s reactions towards her father’s infidelity; the reactions that the putas receive from those around them; and the negative manner in which jamona are viewed. These situations help construct and deconstruct for Negi how women should behave within their narrowly defined roles in the agrarian Puerto Rican society of the Operation Bootstrap era. Negi is a girl who is about to enter into the transitional period to womanhood. She has “yet to learn not everything [she hears] is true (Santiago, 7). Negi cannot ask any questions because it would be considered disrespectful. What she does not know is to be feared. All that she can do is observe the bias around her as the conceptual starting point of her own construction of self. Negi’s experiences with those around her help her construct her ideas of how women should conduct themselves and what opportunities are available to them.

During the period of Operation Bootstrap and Puerto Rican Immigration to the mainland, the Puerto Rico of When I was Puerto Rican is an agrarian society and the United States, is an industrial society. “Female role models [in When I was Puerto Rican] represent the cultural boundaries (in the sense of limites) that have served to lock in many real-life Latina women” (Mayock, 3). The roles of men, women, and children in agrarian communities are different then the roles of the men, women, and children in the United States today. The relationship between men and women in Puerto Rico, an agrarian culture, affects how Negi views men and women in her own worldview. The males and females have different roles and duties. However, the men and women in each of these countries also have different opportunities. Diminished opportunity leads to gender bias. From Negi’s experience, she is put at a disadvantage but it is from the incidents of disadvantage that are catalysts for Negi’s transformation. These incidents transform Negi as she moves between the Agrarian Worldview of her childhood to the Industrial Worldview of her developing young adulthood. 

Negi finds her identity by overcoming many cultural obstacles in her life. The only way for Negi to advance beyond the cultural barriers of her society is to transcend the gender role boundaries set by her culture. She does this by forming a dialectical relationship between her own perceptions and the dictates of her community. Often, she renders the prescribed constructs of the community extinct with a childlike naiveté. In the book When I was Puerto Rican, the men and women of Puerto Rico have well defined roles and duties. An agrarian society has very different views on gender roles than a modern industrial society. Puerto Rico was an agrarian society and America was an industrial society. In order to advance, Negi had to be deconstruct these gender roles in order to construct her identity as a hybrid. According to Polkinghorne, “In the narrative schema for organizing information, an event is understood to have been explained when its role and significance in relation to a human project is identified” (Polkinghorne, 21). I have identified thirteen events presented by the author as the crucial events in her plot to reconstruct self. The process by which the author dialectically renders extinct each Negi along the way toward self-realization is the process or apocryphal bridge that links the readers to the process of deconstruction and hermeneutical understanding. The author is lost and restored in each episode.

Episode	Plot
I. Negi’s relationship with Mami and Papi	Emergent meaning based on worldview
II. Negi’s recognition that she has a stepsister	Emergent meaning based on natural occurrences
III. Negi’s understanding of puta	Emergent meaning based on worldview
IV. Negi’s understanding of jamona	Emergent meaning based on worldview
V. Negi’s beating from mother after the incident with Tato.	Emergent meaning based on natural occurrences
VI. Negi’s changed perception of Mami after she gets a job	Emergent meaning based on worldview
VII. Negi’s encounter with Don Luis	Emergent meaning based on natural occurrences
VIII. Negi’s changed perception of Mami upon her second return from New York	Emergent meaning based on worldview
IX. Negi’s changed perception of Mami while in New York.	Emergent meaning based on worldview
X. Negi’s assertive behavior with Mr. Grant regarding her grade placement.	Emergent meaning based on worldview
XI. Negi’s precocious behavior with the exhibitionist	Emergent meaning based on natural occurrences
XII. Negi’s attitude toward Tio Chico’s touching.	Emergent meaning based on natural occurrences
XIII. Negi’s audition for the academy of music.	Emergent meaning based on worldview

Ashworth, Peter. (2004). Understanding as the transformation of what is already known. Teaching in Higher Education, Vol. 9, No. 2, 147-158.

Bingham, C., & Sidorkin, A. (2001). Aesthetics and the Paradox of Educational Relation. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 35(1), 21-30.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Edit. and trans. by David E. Linge. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1976.

Mayock, Ellen C. “The Bicultural Construction of Self in Cisneros, Alvarez, and Santiago.” Bilingual Review 23.3 (Sept. 1998). Professional Development Collection. EBSCO. 28 Nov. 2007 <http://web.ebscohost.com/‌ehost/‌detail?vid=3&hid=105&sid=ae1f9d67-0687-4ad1-8e09-cf619c5bf321%40sessionmgr109>.

Polkinghorne, Donald E. Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988.

Santiago, Esmeralda. When I Was Puerto Rican. New York: Vintage, 1993

Slattery, Peter. (1996). Hermeneutics: A Phenomenological Aesthetic Reflection. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (New York, April 8-14, 1996), 1-54.