Mediacion de espacios identitarios en las escrituras puertorriquenas de las primeras decadas del siglo XX.

摘要

This dissertation analyzes important strategies of socio-political mediation by early-twentieth century Puerto Rican authors who reacted to the displacement, redefinition and homogenization of spaces brought by United States territorial rule established in 1898. The strictly regulated mercantilist regime with semi-feudal features imposed by Spanish colonialism was displaced by free-market capitalism brought with U.S. sovereignty over the island. There was a sense of urgency among the island's intellectual elite (letrados ) to resolve what they saw as a crisis of modernity in Puerto Rico, brought to the fore by the change of sovereignty that ensued after Spain lost the Spanish American war. Many of them saw the U.S invasion of 1898 as an opportunity to reconfigure their cultural roles vis-a-vis the new sovereign power. Turn-of-the-century intellectuals, such as Melendez Munoz (1884-1966), Jose Elias Levis (1871-1942), Ramon Julia Marin (1878-1917) and Luisa Capetillo (1879-1922)1, became key actors in the transition from Spanish to American sovereignty, taking on a new role as socio-cultural mediators between a multi-ethnic popular culture developed during Spanish colonialism, and the territorial rule set up by a new power of Anglo-Saxon provenance that assumed many of the features of a colonial regime. This study provides an insight into how these intellectuals articulated a particular discourse of mediation in which they reacted to the geo-social reconfiguration of space in Puerto Rico (the emergence of new rural/urban dynamics, monoculture agribusiness, poor urban neighborhoods and, especially a dense road system) by elaborating a geo-poetics of space with conflictive elements and variants. I argue that these discursive elaborations evidenced new practices of cultural differentiation and subordination, which reproduced coloniality along racial, social and gender lines, with the sole exception of Luisa Capetillo.;1 My literary corpus comprises: Melendez Munoz' Cuentos de la carretera central (1941); Elias Levis' Mancha de lodo (1903); Julia Marin's Tierra adentro (1911) and La Gleba (1912); and Luisa Capetillo's Ensayos libertarios (1907), La humanidad en el futuro (1910), Mi opinion sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer (1911) and Influencias de las ideas modernas (1916).