Race, Empire, and Puerto Rico in the Re-Imagining of Area Studies

• In Event: New Approaches to Race and Migration in Puerto Rico: Rethinking the Mountains, the City, and the Circulation of People in the Insular Caribbean

Abstract

A growing body of critical work—especially from the last two decades and which we today may situate in the overlapping fields of Post/Colonial, Transnational, Globalization, Cultural, and Borderland Studies—has seriously eroded the theoretical and methodological approaches that have defined the institutional form of Area Studies in US academic centers. Among their many contributions, one is particularly salient: they have prompted us to think critically about the assumptions underlying the mapping of the “area(s)” in Area Studies. This essay seeks to contribute to this conversation by proposing an analytical device, the house of mirror, to explore the ways in which people imagine and map their sense of place and region. To do so, I analyze primarily a set of exchanges in the public press among Puerto Rican political leaders sparked by the ongoing Cuban Revolt of 1912. The ultimate goal of this exercise is to unearth how the shifting but ongoing realities of racialized domination and colonialism shaped these politicians’ sense of what constitute their region of belonging and their place in it. The mapping of place and region, then, is not a given one but one constantly changing, challenging the governmental and academic prescriptions and conventions that seek to guide our work. In a current world so heavily dominated by regional-transnational economic projects of so-called development and free trade, it is useful to be reminded of how the logics governing such efforts are seriously disassociated from the socio-cultural geographies forged by the communities these projects claim to serve.

Author

• Ileana M Rodríguez-Silva, University of Washington