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Popular Expression and National Identity in Puerto Rico: The Struggle for Self, Community, and Nation. Lillian Guerra. Gainesville: The University of Florida Press, 1998. 332 pp.
Lillian Guerra's Popular Expression and National Identity in Puerto Rico constitutes a significant contribution to Puerto Rican Studies. It examines the figure of the jíbaro as a social construction, tracing its discursive articulations in the elite writings of intellectuals and in popular oral traditions. Guerra posits that the representation of the jíbaro was both a rhetorical mechanism by which the criollo elite could appropriate and thus, contain, the rising power of the popular classes after 1898 and, simultaneously, a discourse by which the peasants themselves could express an emerging class consciousness in the wake of U.S. colonialism and Americanization practices. Through a detailed analysis of the collection of décimas, coplas, bombas, folktales and riddles collected in 1914 and 1915 by J. Alden Mason, coupled with references to a series of interviews with rural dwellers conducted by José Colombán Rosario and Justina Carrión in 1934, Guerra offers her readers a comprehensive and detailed portrayal of how Puerto Rican peasants, through oral tradition, negotiated a sense of identity and agency vis a vis the hegemonic forces of the Puerto Rican criollo elite as well as of U.S. colonialism. Indeed, by focusing on the first decades of the twentieth-century and by framing this study in terms of hegemony as a process of negotiation of power and identity, the author foregrounds how the image of the jíbaro served as a cultural icon through which Puerto Ricans of various social sectors negotiated the changes brought forth by a new form of colonial regime and by U.S. absentee capitalism. Guerra argues that the jíbaro myth was both liberating and confining, thus recognizing the paradoxes behind the social construction of this icon of cultural identity.
For elite intellectuals like Salvador Brau and Manuel Zeno Gandía, whose work was embedded in the Positivism of the late 1800s, the jíbaro and the jíbara were subjects discursively constructed by them as deficient, uneducated, physically ill and anemic. This social construction reinforced the power and superior role of the criollo intellectual in educating and civilizing the Puerto Rican peasant. After the critical shift from the Spanish to U.S. colonial regime,...