Abstract
Gertrude Stein’s last opera featured an iconic virgin “mother” who voiced skepticism about voting as a reliable device for determining what’s right—or anyone’s rights. In similar spirit, Puerto Rican feminists in New York City endorsed equal political rights for women but also critiqued the trappings and rituals of liberal citizenship. The monthly magazine Artes y Letras, published in Spanish between 1933 and 1939 by Josefina Silva de Cintrón (1884–1988), conveys the rich landscape of their thinking and activism.1 In Stein’s opera, “mother” was literally a fabulous metaphor. So, too, was Artes y Letras rife with maternal iconography, though the journal also documented the everyday loves and labors of living mothers with very real children. Its editors focused on flags rather than statuary. As Stein so keenly grasped, the expression of modern nationalism involved public performances and stagings in which control over images is essential. Artes y Letras focused on just such fields of activity, placed Puerto Rican women’s mothering at the center of its perspective, and labeled it all feminismo.
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Notes
Walter D. Mignolo, “Citizenship, Knowledge, and the Limits of Humanity,” American Literary History 18 (2006) 2: 312–331. Though Mignolo refers to a “decolonial idea of humanity,” his article does not cite Pérez’s work or touch on gender. Sonia Dmitrowna, “Nuestro América Ante el Futuro,” Artes y Letras [hereafter AL] (June 1939): 4.
Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 33. See also Irene Lara, “Goddess of the Americas in the Decolonial Imaginary: Beyond the Virtuous Virgin/Pagan Puta Dichotomy,” Feminist Studies 34 (2008) 1: 99–127, and Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, “Chicana! Rican? No, Chicana Riqueña! Refashioning the Transnational Connection,” in Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. Caren Kaplan, et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 264–295. See also Jorge Duany, “The Rough Edges of Puerto Rican Identities: Race, Gender, and Transnationalism,” Latin American Research Review 40 (2005) 3: 177–190 and Gervasio Luis Garcia, “I Am the Other: Puerto Rico in the Eyes of North Americans, 1898,” Journal of American History 87 (June 2000) 1: 39–64.
Breny Mendoza, “Unthinking State-Centric Feminisms,” in Rethinking Feminisms in the Americas, ed. Mendoza (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 6–18.
G. Parkhurst, “Is Feminism Dead?” Harper’s Magazine 170 (May 1935): 725–745. Scholars apply the word “doldrums” to the period of strategic flux for the organized suffrage movement around the turn of the twentieth century or to the period following World War II, a period of feminist backlash. Lisa Tetrault, “The Incorporation of American Feminism: Suffragists and the Postbellum Lyceum,” Journal of American History 96 (March 2010), and Leila J Rupp, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Lorrin Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 132. Thomas’s study neglects Artes y Letras, though her introduction describes “cultural citizenship” and “diasporic citizenship,” concepts which resonate with the idea of a third space or decolonial approach to rights. See also Lorrin Thomas, “Resisting the Racial Binary? Puerto Rican’s Encounter with Race in Depression-Era New York City,” Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 21(Spring 2009) 1: 5–35.
Megan Threlkeld, “How to ‘Make This Pan American Thing Go?’ Interwar Debates on U.S. Women’s Activism in the Western Hemisphere,” in Women and Transnational Activism in Historical Perspective, ed. Kimberly Jensen and Erika Kuhlman (St. Louis, MO: Republic of Letters Publishing, 2010), 173–192 and K. Lynn Stoner, “In Four Languages but with One Voice: Division and Solidarity within Pan American Feminism, 1923–1933,” in Beyond the Ideal: Pan Americanism in Inter-American Affairs, ed. David Sheinin (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 79–94. See also Ellen DuBois and Lauren Derby, “The Strange Case of Minerva Bernardino: Pan American and United Nations Women’s Rights Activist,” Women’s Studies International Forum 32 (2009) 1: 43–50 and Donna J. Guy, “The Politics of Pan-American Cooperation: Maternalist Feminism and the Child Rights Movement, 1913–1960,” Gender & History 10 (1998) 3: 449–469. A foundational essay is Leila J. Rupp, “Constructing Internationalism: The Case of Transnational Women’s Organizations, 1888–1945,” American Historical Review 99 (1994) 5: 1571–1600.
Sarah A. Buck, “The Meaning of the Women’s Vote in Mexico, 1917–1953” in The Women’s Revolution in Mexico 1910–1953, ed. S. E. Mitchell and Patience A. Schell (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 84. Anna Macías, Against All Odds: The Feminist Movement in Mexico to 1940 (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), chapter 6, and Shirlene Soto, Emergence of the Modern Mexican Woman: Her Participation in Revolution and Struggle for Equality, 1910–1940 (Denver CO: Arden Press, 1990), 103–105.
Robert Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), chapters 3 and 6; Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), chapters 5–8.
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Allison L Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870–1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), especially chapter 5; Norma Valle Ferrer, “Feminism and Its Influence on Women’s Organizations in Puerto Rico,” in The Puerto Rican Woman: Perspectives on Culture, History, and Society, ed. Edna Acosta-Belén (New York: Praeger, 1986), 75–87; Yamila Azize-Vargas, “The Emergence of Feminism in Puerto Rico, 1870–1930,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois (New York: Routledge, 2000): 268–277; María de Fátima Barceló-Miller, “Half-Hearted Solidarity: Women Workers and the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Puerto Rico During the 1920s” (126–142), and Gladys M. Jiménez-Muñoz, “Literacy, Class, and Sexuality in the Debate on Women’s Suffrage in Puerto Rico During the 1920s” (143–170), in Puerto Rican Women’s History: New Perspectives, ed. Félix A. Matos Rodríguez and Linda C. Delgado (Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, 1998). Gladys Jiménez-Muñoz, “Deconstructing Colonialist Discourse: Links between the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the United States and Puerto Rico,” Phoebe: An International Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Theory, and Aesthetics 5 (1993): 9–34, and Jiménez-Muñoz, “Carmen Maria Colon Pellot: On ‘Womanhood’ and ‘Race’ in Puerto Rico during the Interwar Period,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (2003): 71–91. See also Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Enfranchising Women of Color: Woman Suffragists as Agents of Empire,” in Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race, ed. Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 41–56.
Henry Wells, The Modernization of Puerto Rico: A Political Study of Changing Values and Institutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 108–111. Truman R. Clark, “‘Educating the Natives in Self-Government’: Puerto Rico and the United States, 1900–1933,” The Pacific Historical Review 42 (1973) 2: 220–233.
Nicole Rafter, “Apes, Men and Teeth: Earnest A. Hoonton and Eugenic Decay” in Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s, ed. Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell (Ohio University Press, 2006), 248–268. See also Vicki L. Ruiz, “Star Struck: Acculturation, Adolescence, and Mexican American Women, 1920–1950,” (343–361), and Kathy Peiss “Making Faces: Cosmetic Industry and the Cultural Construction of Gender,” (324–345) in Unequal Sisters, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 343–361. For an earlier intervention, see Martin R. Delany, Principia of Ethnology (Philadelphia, PA: Harper & Brother, Publishers, 1879).
Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), and Richard Graham, The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).
Karl Meyer, Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and Race for Empire in Central Asia (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1999), 451. See also Jacqueline Decter and Nikolai Rerikh Museum, Nicholas Roerich: The Life and Art of a Russian Master (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1989).
Ricardo D. Salvatore, “The Enterprise of Knowledge: Representational Machines of Informal Empire,” in Close Encounters of Empire, 69–105 Pike, FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy, especially chapters 7 and 8 takes a much more benign view of intercultural activities, and assigns them less historical weight and value as well.
Victor S. Clark, “A Word to Porto Rican Readers,” in Porto Rico and its Problems. (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1930), ix.
John Barrett, The Pan American Union: Peace Friendship Commerce (Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1911), 14. Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), chapter 2.
Michael L. Gillette, “Huey Long and the Chaco War,” Louisiana History 11 (1970) 4: 293–311. See also William R Garner, The Chaco Dispute: A Study of Prestige Diplomacy (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1966), 92–94, and Leslie B. Rout, Politics of the Chaco Peace Conference, 1935–39 (Austin: Published for the Institute of Latin American Studies by University of Texas Press, 1970), 89–91. Rout is highly dismissive of an oil-driven interpretation of the Chaco conflict (48). Bryce Wood concludes that Bolivia’s charges against Standard Oil were nothing if not self-interested, since in 1937, the government confiscated the properties of the company. Bryce Wood, The United States and Latin American Wars, 1932–1942 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 65–67.
Harriet Hyman Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 124.
Frank Otto Gatell, “Independence Rejected: Puerto Rico and the Tydings Bill of 1936,” Hispanic American Historical Review 38 (1958): 43–44. Gattell describes the Tydings Bill as “the act of an angry man; there was no statesmanship about it.” Robert David Johnson, “Anti-Imperialism and the Good Neighbor Policy: Ernest Gruening and Puerto Rican Affairs, 1934–1939,” Journal of Latin American Studies 29 (February 1997) 1: 89–110.
Eric M. Matsner and William Laidlaw, “Puerto Rico: Old Woman in a Shoe,” North American Review 242 (Winter 1936–37): 277–278; 280–281. More generous appraisals in Paddack, “Puerto Rico’s Plight,” William H. Haas, “The Jibaro, An American Citizen,” The Scientific Monthly 43 (July 1936)1: 33–46; Harwood Hull, “Better Times for Puerto Rico,” Current History 43 (January 1936) 4: 367–372.
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© 2012 Patricia A. Schechter
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Schechter, P.A. (2012). ¡Adelante Hermanas de La Raza!. In: Exploring the Decolonial Imaginary. Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137012845_4
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