“Gente blanca de calidad” Transformations in Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Philippine Anti-colonial Writing on Immigration

• In Event: Trans-Pacific borderlands: issues of mestizaje between Our America and the Philippines

Abstract

This paper unpacks the relationship between discourses on immigration, liberalism, and anti-colonial politics in the writings of three intellectuals of the colonies suspended between Spanish and US empires in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries: Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. Between 1865 and 1914, José Julián Acosta of Puerto Rico, José Martí of Cuba, and Trinidad Pardo de Tavera of the Philippines fixate on immigration, revealing a slow, convoluted, and beguiling shift from thinking of their countries as recipients of immigration to thinking about themselves and their compatriots as immigrants. The three writers generally represent immigration as a force of progress tied to processes of social transformation that are rooted in miscegenation. However, these writers disagree with regards to the directions and purposes of these transformations, underlining a divergence in these writings with regards to their understandings of race, modernity, and anti-colonial politics. In the process of teasing out the proximities and departures of these writers’ discourses on immigration, this presentation calls into question the biopolitics of miscegenation; the relationship between the concepts of the native and the foreign; the debates in border studies on whether assimilation represents hybridity or cultural erasure; as well as the notion of an “intercolonial alliance” between anti-colonial agents of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines.

Author

• Ernest R Hartwell, College of the Holy Cross