Designing cultural policy in a postcolonial colony: the case of Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States in 1898 with the end of the Spanish-American War. In 1952, the island became a ‘Commonwealth’ through the development and approval of a local constitution. While this political status allows Puerto Rico some degree of autonomy, it nevertheless continues to subject the island to United States federal authority. For the last 60 years, discussions on whether Puerto Rico’s Commonwealth status is a permanent or transitional status has fuelled much of the political debate and public policy of the region, and has been highly influenced by political status ideologies: to become a state of the United States, to maintain the current status, or to become independendent. Budgetary, legal, and commercial dependence on the United States causes constant conflicts in the design and implementation of Puerto Rican public policy in areas such as education, law, and economic development. Likewise, culture has not been exempt from these debates. In fact, cultural differences have caused conflict at all levels – from the theoretical conceptions of culture, to cultural policy and arts management. Moreover, the implementation of cultural policies has also been subject to political ideologies and the concept of culture has variably been seen as an obstacle or strength for specific political purposes. In the midst of a sustained economic crisis, the current Puerto Rican government has proposed the development of a comprehensive cultural policy through a participatory process. The objective of this paper is to present this process as a means of analyzing Puerto Rico’s experience through the challenges in designing and implementing cultural policy within a ‘postcolonial colony’ scenario. This paper will place emphasis on the government’s role, cultural public institutions, and cultural production.     

Our Own Monument: Landscape in the Linguistic Others of Quebec and Puerto Rico

ABSTRACT

It is common in discourse surrounding Québécois and Puerto Rican nationalism to discuss both regions in terms of their linguistic marginality to Anglo-majorities found in Canada and the USA, respectively. As two areas faced with the common American task of inventing a national identity in displaced settings in the New World, English becomes an easy “other” against which the French Quebecker and Spanish Puerto Rican may define themselves. However, language becomes a problematic means of definition when considered in relation to its intrinsically Old World origins. This paper reexamines Quebec and Puerto Rican nationalism from a larger New World perspective that focuses on the role of American landscapes and settings in conjunction with the traditional linguistic approach.     

Bone collagen preservation in the tropics: a case study from ancient Puerto Rico

Bone collagen is a well-characterized and generally robust protein that plays a key role in both radiometric dating and stable isotopic reconstruction of paleodiet. To be useful for such purposes, however, analyzed collagen must be relatively taphonomically unaltered. To date, little research has been conducted to document the taphonomic fate of bone collagen from archaeological sites in the tropics. In the present work, a large (n = 298) dataset of archaeological bone samples from sites on the island of Puerto Rico is examined by means of radiometric, chemical, and elemental analyses. The ultimate conclusion of this work is that while collagen loss may be accelerated in the tropics versus that seen in samples from higher latitudes, what collagen remains is typically sufficiently well-preserved and taphonomically unaltered as to make radiocarbon dating and/or stable isotopic analysis worthwhile.     

Sr/Sr variability in Puerto Rico: geological complexity and the study of paleomobility

The temptation to use biogeochemical techniques to resolve issues of paleomigration is evident and well intentioned. Knowledge of radiogenic strontium isotope baselines in a region of interest is a sine qua non of such archaeological studies of paleomobility. Here, we present the first detailed study of baseline ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr values for the island of Puerto Rico. The high degree of ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr variability present in this corpus of modern Puerto Rican bedrock and terrestrial malacological samples (0.70406–0.70909) is a testament to the complex geology of that island. This diversity of ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr values makes parsing issues of origin a difficult and highly contingent task. Given these complexities, regional studies seeking to assess paleomigration by such isotopic means should proceed with a great deal of caution.     

Preparing for the afterlife: death,dying, and religious practice in eighteenth-century Puerto Rico

Every society possesses deeply rooted attitudes about death, yet much of what we know about the religious practices of ordinary people in colonial Latin America overlooks the way(s) in which people prepared for death and the afterlife. Sacramental records from eighteenth-century Puerto Rican communities provide insights into both religious elements and social aspects of death. The time period selected is important because new sensibilities toward death emerged in the late eighteenth century, with a movement away from elaborate status-affirming funerals toward the embracing of interiorized piety. This article uses sacramental records to examine reception of the last rites, funerary practices, and burial customs in eighteenth-century Puerto Rico. Three questions guide my inquiry: first, did reception of the last rites (penance, Eucharist, and anointing of the sick) decline in Puerto Rico and, if so, was this related to religious factors or demographic and socioeconomic ones as well; second, how successful were religious authorities in reshaping religious practices manifesting ‘baroque piety’ with a ‘more inward looking piety’: in peripheral areas of the Americas; and third, in what ways did burial customs reflect growing concern with the fear of Hell and time spent in purgatory?     

Continuity and change in the evolution of religion and political organization on pre-Columbian Puerto Rico

Trajectories of cultural evolution are diverse, depending on unique blends of social, economic, and ideological factors. Assessing case-specific historical circumstances is crucial when identifying underlying processes of change. In this paper, I detail a model of cultural evolution based on the historical circumstances of the island cultures in the pre-Columbian Caribbean. We see continuity in key elements of cosmology and structural organization within a framework of evolving social complexity, leadership roles, and inequality. In the case of Puerto Rico, cosmology and ideology were intertwined over approximately 2000 years, spanning tribal to chiefdom sociopolitical formations.     

The coloniality of disaster: Race,empire, and the temporal logics of emergency in Puerto Rico,USA

This essay uses the case of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico to discuss “the coloniality of disaster”: how catastrophic events like hurricanes, earthquakes, but also other forms political and economic crisis deepen the fault lines of long-existing racial and colonial histories. It argues that disaster capitalism needs to be understood as a form of racio-colonial capitalism and that this in turn requires us to question our understandings of both “resilience” and “recovery.” The article focuses on the “wait of disaster” as a temporal logic of state subjugation and on how Puerto Ricans responded to state abandonment through modes of autogestión, or autonomous organizing. It concludes that while resiliency can be coopted in service of a neoliberal recovery, it can also be the site for gestating new forms of sovereignty and new visions of postcolonial recovery.     

To Make the Personal Political: The Use of Testimony as a Consciousness-Raising Tool Against Sexual Aggression in Puerto Rico

Four years ago, I was kidnapped, taken to an isolated sugarcanefield, and raped by a gang of three men. My intention in sharingthis information is not to make you feel sorry for me in a condescendingattitude that would only undermine the seriousness of such adevastating experience rather, I would like to change your wayof feeling and thinking about what that experience representsfor a woman. If ever you are forced to confront a person whohas survived such aggression, this may help you to understandwhat she has gone through and what still awaits her     

赋予时间意义——以历史意识为概念基础的普遍分类学

以下观点①来自对历史编纂学的比较研究。有一种原则把过去理解为历史。在这种原则或至少类似原则基础的化背景中,比较研究很容易就可以做到。以比较的方法对西方历史思维进行的基本研究和解释已经开展,但是从一种跨化的比较角度看待过去的方法(这种方法导致了历史思想的产生)进行比较就有更大的难度。