La historia de los derrotados: americanización y romanticismo en Puerto Rico, 1898-1917. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Laberinto, 2019. Pp. 295. $20.85 paper (ISBN 9781950414024 ).

Rubén Nazario Velasco, La historia de los derrotados: americanización y romanticismo en Puerto Rico, 1898-1917. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Laberinto, 2019. Pp. 295. $20.85 paper (ISBN 9781950414024).

Rubén Nazario Velasco's “history of the defeated” (La historia de los derrotados) uncovers the early twentieth-century roots of Puerto Rico's cultural nationalism. The Spanish-language book's legal-historical argument rests on what Nazario describes as foundational and incompatible United States citizenship myths. The “liberal myth” (mito liberal, 276) recounts free and equal United States citizens united by common commitments to democratic governance. The “nativist myth” (mito nativista, 276) depicts a white nation defined by racial exclusions.

La historia de los derrotados is a history of rupture. On one side lies the dozen-plus years after the 1899 United States annexation of Puerto Rico when leading islanders focused on the liberal myth of United States citizenship. They argued that Puerto Ricans deserved political power as Americans, regardless of their race or ethnicity. As they did so, Supreme Court decisions and federal policies consistent with the nativist myth accumulated. Eventually, key Puerto Ricans broke with liberalism to argue that Puerto Ricans so differed from other Americans that Puerto Rico should be independent. Modern Puerto Rican nationalism was born.

The book's broader method might be termed legal-political history and literature. It finds fertile ground in Puerto...