Lillian Guerra

Popular Expression and National Identity in Puerto Rico: The Struggle for Self, Community, and Nation

In this bold social history, Lillian Guerra explores the nature of popular-class and elite political consciousness in Puerto Rico from 1989 to 1940, the period when North American colonialism was taking shape. Through the prisms of gender, race, and class she analyzes the folk sayings of subalterns in tandem with the literary production of the intelligentsia, producing a mosaic of debate, dissent, and affirmation regarding Puerto Rican identity.

The book focuses on two sources of intellectual and creative expression—a vast and largely unstudied collection of folk tales, songs, and riddles (the 1914 Mason collection) and the essayist movement (including writers such as Antonia Pedreira, Miguel Melendez Munoz, and Luis Munoz Marin), which appropriated the figure of the Puerto Rican peasant as a symbol of national identity. From these sources Guerra mines a spectrum of opinions and beliefs about the world of the popular classes and she demonstrates that their songs, word-play, and narrative expression formed the nexus for engagement with the elite. What results is an image of the Puerto Rican peasant that works both against and in collusion with elite society.

Guerra's conclusions about class struggle for identity under North American imperialism challenge readers to compare the historical case of Puerto Rico with other colonial cases, not just in the Caribbean but throughout the Americas.

"Attempting in a single book to treat the complexities of a social imaginary, Guerra has opened a new arena in which to debate colonialism and national identity that will stimulate ethnographic and historical investigations."
- Journal of American History

"Lillian Guerra's book, which brings the thorny topic of national identity to another level of discussion by incorporating the subalterns' voices to those of the elite sectors of society. In so doing, Guerra creates a more nuanced conception of national identity."
- American Historical Review

"The author has brought to light an interesting and valuable literature that very clearly buttresses many of her arguments on both the contradictions between the Puerto Rican and the American espousal of equality and what actually obtained in Puerto Rico. This book will be useful to those historians and others focusing on the Hispanic Caribbean as it adds new information on the folklore of Puerto Rico and its political context."
- Journal of Caribbean History

"Well-written and powerfully argued . . . . I know of no other work [on the subject] as comprehensive in its scope, extensive in its analysis, coherent in its internal argument, and consistent in its evaluated sources."
- Franklin W. Knight, Johns Hopkins University

University of Florida Press, 1998