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The Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico (autonomous commonwealth), established in 1952, redefined the political relationship between the United States and its colony. The ambiguous political status - autonomy without sovereignty, self-government without self-determination - created new social, political, and cultural contradictions. The island's first elected governor, Luis Munoz Marin, was committed, to promoting an essentialized Puerto Rican culture centered around the idealization of traditional rural life, while simultaneously creating a new democratic citizenship, both of which would bolster the new government's legitimacy before its people. In this article, Puerto Rican scholar Cati Marsh Kennerley explores the collective work done by the Division de Educacion de la Comunidad (DivEdCo), the government educational agency charged with promulgating Munoz Marin's ideas about Puerto Rican culture and citizenship. Marsh Kennerley draws from a wide variety of sources to reconstruct an untold history, analyze its contradictions, obtain lessons from DivEdCo's negotiations, and point out its relevance for understanding contemporary Puerto Rican culture.
A New Beginning for Puerto Rico: The Institutionalization of Culture
It was the time of Munoz Marin. It was the time of hopes that still smelled like new.1
It was a time of magnificent projects, of a modernizing frenzy, when everything "smelled like new." At the dawn of Puerto Rico's contradictory political status in 1952 as an Estado Libre Asodado (ELA), or autonomous commonwealth, with U.S. Congressional approval, anything could be built from scratch - even culture.2 Luis Munoz Marin, whom many Puerto Ricans viewed as a patriarch par excellence, became Puerto Rico's first elected governor in 1948. The experience of democracia itself was new for Puerto Ricans, as were industrialization, modernity, and a multitude of new government institutions in charge of everything from hygiene to culture.
Under Munoz Marin's leadership, the new autonomous state was deeply committed to education beyond mere instruction, and the administration invested a great deal in developing a grand cultural-pedagogical discourse. The state's promotion of a veiled cultural nationalism was part of this discourse: Puerto Rican culture was to be preserved and strengthened, even as the island and its people remained subject to the will of the U.S. Congress and the profit-maximizing strategies of U.S.-based businesses. The island's government told its people that (institutionalized) culture was non-negotiable, even as it was,...