I'll Be Back": the U.S Occupation of Puerto Rico and the Gothic Genre

• In Event: Narrativa y política en el Caribe II

Abstract

In this presentation, I study two recent Puerto Rican fictions: José E. Santos’ short story “El ‘terminator’ boricua” (“The Boricua Terminator”) from 2007 and Roberto Busó García’s 2012 film Los condenados (The condemned). Both narratives describe two episodes in Puerto Rican colonial history: the U.S. military invasion in 1898 and the use of Puerto Ricans as human medical test subjects during the 20th century. In Santos’s futuristic short story, the Boricua Terminator returns to 19th century Puerto Rico to sabotage the U.S. invasion of the island. In Busó-García´s film, a family mansion is haunted by the spirits of the local children that had been subjected to torture as part of the medical experimentation performed during the 1960s by an American doctor.
In these narratives, therefore, both Santos and Busó García turn to Gothic tropes such as mystery and terror in order to reveal some of the immediate and long term consequences of colonization in the population. In my analysis, I argue that these fictions redifine notions of utopia and dystopia as well as notions of temporality. I also argue that, after more than one hundred years of U.S. occupation, contemporary Puerto Rican popular fiction fiction is still looking for ways to rethink the island’s colonial history. Therefore, the use of the Gothic in Busó-García’s film and the Techno-Gothic in Santos’ short story provide a critical and aesthetic language with which to represent the specters of Puerto Rico’s sociopolitical past that still haunt the present.

Author

• Sandra M Casanova Vizcaíno, Binghamton University