An Archipelago of Letters (conclusion)

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A worker's house in Aguirre

The second half of PR3 Aguirre is called “las islas”, the islands, in reference to the Puerto Rican archipelago, because as most island nations in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico is not a single island.  The company town left a trail of documents that are mainly stored at the Archive of the School of Architecture of the University of Puerto Rico: photographs, blueprints, letters, reports, maps.  The company town of Aguirre was built as a self-sufficient enclave segregated both from its surroundings and segregated within. The housing sectors were rigidly segregated by race and function in the sugar planting harvesting, and manufacturing process. The large cottages with their separate little houses for servants were reserved for American managers; an intermediate sector with elegant houses and dwellings for servants was reserved for the Puerto Rican middle management; a third sector of small cottages built along a rectilinear grid was destined for skilled workers. Single men laborers were housed in barracones, or large collective bunkhouses.

Most workers, specially day laborers, did not live within the closed company town, but in the surrounding barrios. The localities of Jobos and El Coquí are older than the company town, and have a rich cultural presence as locations of vibrant communities. But memory, as opposed to written history, relies on word of mouth legacies. Fortunately research into their significance is being undertaken both in Puerto Rico and by scholars from the Puerto Rican diaspora and from other nationalities. A good part from that research is associated with musical expression.

Aguirre company town, map of segregated sectors,  c. 1930s

I will describe my own tentative and fragile search for a sense of place related to persons who grew under the influence of the company town, A main question was: how is it that a space associated with segregation and exploitation generates a sense of belonging, a sense of place? The question is not easily answered. It poses a dilemma that goes to the relationship between sense of place and identities, in an island that has been perpetually a colony, where the modes of resistance have ranged from direct confrontation to the struggle for everyday survival and ways of challenging, transforming and interpreting traditions. Another important factor is the early appearance of the local intermediary, a man born in the island who assumed managerial and repressive functions while representing the interests of the white American owners and protecting them from direct, everyday contacts with the miserable populace.

Going back to a sense of place, and to embodied archives, evidently the form of memories is related to popular artistic expression and invention. El Coquí, a community of workers, has been the home of artists and social activists. The story of their militant struggles dates back to the 1970s, when they succeeded in removing plans to construct a nuclear power plant, denounced the local petrochemical industry, and more recently, are involved in the fight against Monsanto, a company that controls fertile lands to create their seeds and is subsidized by the government. Most important is the struggle against the deposit of toxic ashes by a private power production company: Applied Energy Services. In Aguirre itself, a community based organization is planning to organize a housing trust to develop and preserve the sector.  We interviewed doña Rosita Ramos, who is known as the local historian, and whose house was badly damaged by the storm.

Another thriving field is the study of the many expressions of the bomba. In the last decade, “escuelas de bomba” have formed. They are popular initiatives for the study and transmission of traditions.  In Guayama, a group of bomba musicians, dancers and singers called Umoja (a Swahili word for unity) have undertaken a study of musical traditions and popular artists. Members of Umoja have conducted a series of interviews with older persons in Jobos and its surroundings. These persons spoke about the memories of their ancestors.

Another researcher who does field work and presentations both in the island and in the States is Melanie Maldonado Díaz. I attended several of her conferences. The one mentioned in PR3 Aguirre centered on the tradition of women bomberas. They are dancers and singers who were celebrated in the island and in diasporic communities; matriarchs who kept a memory and created memories, women artists who decorated their dancing clothes, were singers, and claimed a dominant role in the dancing ritual.

The bomba is a cultural archive of sorts an obscure book of notes in short hand, that researchers seek to decipher.  It has also been the subject of academic works by scholars such as Emanuel Dufrasne, Angel Quintero, and recently the composer Javier Peña Aguayo.  

The living archive is proof of the strength and continuous evolution of this musical form. Information needs to be compiled, collected and made available as part of a larger archive on Puerto Rican Afro descendant culture. A culture that is not fully recognized in its richness and span, which transcends both narrow ethnic enclaves and the efforts directed at making it invisible. This knowledge should form part of a wider network of archives, but material objects should stay close to the sites where they were created. An emerging project is the Casa Comunitaria de Medios, a community-based initiative in Aguirre. 

My work is only a stitch in a large carpet of collective, scattered efforts. It would seem that the fitting together of diverse fragments of a recovered and refurbished cultural history is almost inevitable in these times when the very fragmentation of information and its wide ranging dispersion leads to inevitable connections. I intend to follow another trail in a next volume of PR 3, extending to the neighboring Caribbean islands, close to the Eastern Coast of Puerto Rico. Islands that served as a refuge for political revolutionaries, such as the Haitian Antenor Firmin and the Puerto Rican Ramón Emeterio Betances, who collaborated  to develop the concept of a Confederación Antillana or Caribbean Federation comprising Cuba, Haiti, Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico while exiled in St. Thomas. Stepping stones for migrants from more remote islands, into the cane fields and in the economies of towns and cities, where they settled and formed families. Islands with ancient ties to the islands of Vieques and Culebra, islands such as St. Croix and Tortola and St. Kitts, and Anguilla.    

In short it will be a book locating Puerto Rico in the Caribbean as PR 3 Aguirre sought to establish the Bostonian connections. By the way, writing the Bostonian connection was not a case of appropriating or daring to represent the voice of the victim, but rather the opposite. The driving force was based on the impossibility of being fairly imagined by the imperial gaze and the fact that we, the colonial subjects, are capable of seeing them. We are not invisible, mind you. We are, rather, like a misplaced book in an unknown language. We can be seen but not read, we are unreadable, and somehow impure and obscene. But we rely on our curiosity and our right to engage in more than one language. In any case, the new book should be a modest example of a tireless collective curiosity. An archipelago of letters, emerging where material islands are losing terrain. A lettered and remembered and tense and living Caribbean.

As a footnote let me add that I have also been thinking about a vast collective project:  a literary Atlas containing stories and chronicles proceeding from each one of the 78 island municipalities, written by residents or exiles, but in any case by persons closely linked to specific places. The Atlas of Puerto Rican places should be visible and forceful.  The work of a people who are not victims to be pitied or scorned.

An Archipelago of Letters (second part)

View from la Casa Grande, Aguirre, c. 1916, Samuel Kirkland Lothrop collection, Harvard University

PR 3 Aguirre has two main sections: Boston and The islands. The first one is a sketch of the foundational core of a city. The second alludes to the dispersion and recovery of collective memories in a colonial setting. The two sections are two different archives. The book joins two different archives. Let´s look at the meaning and function of archives.

               The purpose of binding a multiple memory relates to modern archives. By preserving not only the exploits of the ruling classes but also the records of social transactions, modern archives sustain political power and the identity of a community.

               The importance of the archive in the construction

 of a national

or regional consciousness is quite evident 

 in the Puerto Rican 19th century. 

In 1876, three years after 

the abolition of slavery, the Ateneo Puertorriqueño, 

(the Puerto Rican Athenaeum) 

was founded. 

 Its first president, Manuel Elzaburu, was very aware 

of the role of

 scholarly work in the construction of archives, 

as the basis of: 

“an embryonic memory… with which to lay 

the foundations

 of the future literary

 history of the country, the basis for the solid 

construction of our provincial history”.

 (“una memoria embrionaria… con la cual echar 

los cimientos de la futura historia

 literaria del país, base para la sólida edificación 

de nuestra historia provincial”.)

The Ateneo Puertorriqueño was mainly an institution of members of the intermediary Puerto Rican professional class with artistic and intellectual inclinations. The perspectives of the majority of the population did not enter into the picture, except as pitiful, exploited, and non educated victims, prone to illness and to vice. So the vision of the working classes, peasants and ex slaves, with notable exceptions, did not include their subjective and active occupation of the public intellectual space.  Instead, they were meant to be impacted, redeemed and transformed by a civilizing culture. 

Ateneo Puertorriqueño

There is, of course, always, a force that defies such blindness. In this case, it sparked a resistance that still has global repercussions.  A black man born in Puerto Rico in 1874, attended a school called Instituto Libre de Enseñanza Popular, which had been established in 1888 for working class pupils. The young man expressed a desire to know the history of blacks. His professor told him that black people did not have any history or culture. The insult was so painful that it ignited a vocation. The young man emigrated in the 1890s to New York City and while holding the most menial jobs, began to research and collect documents and artifacts about black history and culture, an archive that in time grew to include "over 5,000 volume[s], 3,000 manuscripts, 2,000 etchings and portraits and several thousand pamphlets". The core of his collection was the basis for a research center named in his honor, the Arthur Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

The history of the island society is a prolonged tale of colonialism, since Columbus wrote the fiction of discovery and redemption to justify the right of conquest.  Later, against the growing threat of the American frontier wars and penetration of Mexico and Central America, the concepts of “latinidad” and “la raza” became forms of cultural resistance. These concepts where then more related to cultural and national identities built to resist American expansionism.

The right of conquest holds together the present fabric of colonial control, as it did following the Hispanic, American, Cuban, Puerto Rican and Philippines war of 1898. The conquering army and the American ruling elites had a clear sense of their need for a global economic and military presence. They were globalists.

PR 3 Aguirre proposes that physical geography is only one dimension, a complex one to be sure, in a conceptual network of interconnected variables as important in the formation of a locality as its climate, soil, geology and zoology. Even the most isolated of communities relates and is affected by things happening in remote parts of the Planet or by events that happened long ago and far away. In the book I explained it thus: It is possible to tear the local map of the road out of its context and make it part of a set of  transparencies, including a park in Boston, or an image of Tierra del Fuego, or of the Central American Pacific coast. All these places have to do with lives that passed through a section of the PR 3 road, between Guayama and Pedro Albizu Campos Avenue, in Salinas; But that is not known by its lonely inhabitants.

Eventually, the second part of the book came to engage two locations along the road. The sector known as Aguirre and its surroundings, and the communities known as Jobos and El Coquí. Aguirre was a sugar cane plantation since at least the boom of the plantation economy in the 19^th century.  Jobos and El Coquí have been settled by descendants of African slaves and non slaves.

Baile de bomba, Grupo Umoja, 

Under American rule, the sector known as Aguirre was purchased by a syndicate of four men associated with the city of Boston. To me Boston is a lettered city, “una ciudad letrada, una ciudad de letras”, related to the classics of New England literature. Two of the four capitalists were descendant of Boston blue bloods. The others were also members of a New England upper class. The internet is loaded with materials about their families and their deeds: biographies, family histories, manuscripts, travel journals, university year books, paintings, collections of memorabilia. I traveled to Boston and visited the Boston Athenaeum, a showcase of the intimate connection between literary culture, history, and economic power. Its founders were adventurers, businessmen, pirates, slave owners and merchants, collectors and patrons of the arts. One of the four Bostonians actually owned a famous painting by William Turner: Slave Ship, a depiction of the massacre of the Zong. The killing of enslaved persons to turn a profit has been the subject of literary works such as the epic poem Zong, by Marlene Nourbese Phillips. Hooper Lothrop, the owner, sold it to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and probably invested part of the revenues in the establishment of the company town of Aguirre, an enterprise that relied on a new form of labor exploitation.

Slave Shio, by Turner

In Boston, a network of archives documenting what one of their chroniclers called the “proper bostonians” was created and sealed by the first years of the twentieth century. Only recently have activists begun to crack the codes, such as those who have denounced the relationship between Harvard University and the slave economy. In all fairness it should be said that Boston was also a city of abolitionists and feminists, utopian thinkers and even anti-imperialist organizations.

There are references in my book to social and economic activities related specifically to the place of women in both social systems: that of the Bostonians and the complex local society. A case in point was the art of needlework, practiced by Puerto Rican women across social and color lines, and its commercialization under the guise of a philanthropic enterprise by Bostonian upper class women. In considering the relative agency of women in such unequal circumstances, the world of magic and dance are alluded to as sources of a mysterious balance of powers.

Sambolín o la estética de la felicidad

Golpear una pelota con un palo, correr, saltar para atraparla en el aire; alguien habrá visto en la monótona geometría del béisbol el deseo de que el cuerpo anclado en tierra se desprenda del polvo. El sueño de Nelson Sambolín fue llegar a  primera base de grandes ligas. No se pierde el rumbo aunque el campo de juego, la superficie de la danza, mude en papel, muro o tablón.

Con Sambolín comparto un desayuno frugal y los relatos de su infancia en El Coquí, que fue desde tiempos de España un suburbio de la hacienda Aguirre y  hoy se relaciona con la decrépita central a la inversa, como si fuera un modesto centro vital y Aguirre su periferia empobrecida. El Coquí era otro cuando los padres de Sambolín emigraron de Yauco, una familia de jíbaros de tez clara que encontraron otra patria chica en el barrio ancestral de negros libres, descendientes de esclavos de la isla y de las islas, pues a Aguirre llegaban jornaleros de las Antillas menores. Les atraía la fama de la central necesitada de mano de obra. El padre consiguió trabajo en los campos y en la fase de los tachos. Era un hombre silencioso. La madre tenía un negocio de quincallera ambulante. La venta a domicilio era empresa reñida y dura en aquella época de pequeños comerciantes que recorrían las calles de los pueblos y los caminos de los campos llevando su mercancía a las plazas y de puerta en puerta. Tanto el padre como la madre eran analfabetos. La madre se defendía en su negocio de vender a crédito porque, según Sambolín, que la acompañaba en sus rutas de venta, tenía una inteligencia fuera de liga.

El niño Sambolín la seguía los sábados desde El Coquí hasta Aguirre. La señora cargaba su mercancía en maletas: cortes de tela, zippers, botones, ropa de hombre y de mujer. Ella también cosía. Iba a las casas e incluso a las piezas de caña. Llevaba sus cuentas de memoria. La competencia era otra vendedora, doña Queta, la madre del comediante Víctor Santos. La señora Sambolín objetaba que siendo doña Queta de Guayama le invadiera su territorio. Con el tiempo la quincalla ambulante se centró en la misma casa, en una tienda de dulces y misceláneos.

El Coquí es y era barrio de gente pobre. Se es pobre cuando se levanta una casa frágil y con ella una manera de convivir que no tolera simulaciones. En un barrio de pobres la gente se conoce las debilidades. En un barrio de pobres la crueldad y las luchas de poder se expresan en los implacables apodos que se regalan a los habitantes y que jamás se despegan. Los siquiatras venden etiquetas del manual de la APA: bipolar, esquizofrénico, paranoico, border line personality. Los apodos se hacían más a la medida: el mudo, el negro, el chino, el sapo. En un barrio de pobres la violencia tiene un freno y una respuesta en el reconocimiento del otro, porque nadie es invisible. En aquel tiempo, además, animaba el barrio una cultura de la marginalidad ligada a la cercanía de una base militar y a la trashumancia de las poblaciones de obreros migrantes que trabajaban por temporadas en Aguirre. Había cafetines, había prostitución, había mucha vida de calle. Incluso había un teatro que se ha mantenido con dificultad y actividades esporádicas hasta el presente. El teatro se desdoblaba en cine, escenario de espectáculos y peleas de boxeo. Sambolín recuerda a un boxeador legendario, Pedro Mangual, que además fue líder sindicalista y tío de Cheo Espada, otro boxeador campeón mundial.

Un núcleo de vida sabrosa era la plaza del poblado. En la infancia de Sambolín se conocía con el nombre de plaza de las cabras. Entre 1952 y 1953 llegó la luz eléctrica. Se reunían a jugar bajo el poste de luz, atraídos por una fascinación invariable, dice Sambolín, desde que las comunidades prehistóricas se reunían alrededor de las fogatas. Bajo el chorro de luz jugaban hasta que los padres decían ya basta, centella, si por ti fuera pasarías el día brincando, ensuciando el único pantalón limpio que tienes. El pantalón del uniforme escolar, ese sí tenía filo. Los niños y las niñas de El Coquí asistían a la Segunda Unidad Rural.

Cuenta Sambolín que en 2009 se celebró el centenario del barrio. Cree recordar que antes el sector se conocía como La Zanja o Los Zanjones. Yo he visto en un mapa militar de 1884 que ya existía un caserío en el lugar. Se identificaba como Barrio Aguirre, con nueve casitas situadas a ambos lados del llamado camino real.

Para el artista Sambolín, Aguirre era segregación y El Coquí, calle. En ambos espacios y en el pueblo de Salinas ocurrió su formación. Se da cuenta de que ha hecho el trabajo de un artista desde niño sin saberlo. Se pregunta por qué y cómo llegaban a su casa los periódicos donde descubrió el laberinto de las letras, de tamaños y formas diversas, que además de indicar fonemas establecían jerarquías, navegando entre las fotografías y los trazos ágiles de los muñequitos. Observar esas imágenes fue su primera escuela; la dureza de los titulares escandalosos, la pequeñez de los calces de las fotografías, el arte publicitario con sus viñetas correspondientes a las temporadas comerciales. En Sambolín queda mucho del niño que decoraba los bordes de las pizarras – en la escuela J. D. H. Luce, diseñada por el arquitecto criollo Rafael Carmoega, dice - con imágenes correspondientes a las fechas conmemorativas del año escolar. El arte se hizo negocio a petición de los compañeros de clase, que le pagaban centavos para que les adornara las carpetas de los proyectos asignados. De las letras le llegó su primera profesión: rotulista. En Guayama compraba tintas Pelikan: verdes, azules, rojas, amarillas, negras. Pintaba, por encargo de los pequeños propietarios de El Coquí, los letreros de los comercios. Mientras estudiaba en la escuela superior consiguió un trabajo diseñando letras para anuncios de neón. También hacía las letras de los paños verdes que se usan en las picas durante las fiestas patronales. 

De algún modo su trabajo artístico responde, piensa, al desarrollo social y político contemporáneo, vinculado al desarrollo del capitalismo en Puerto Rico. En su trabajo y en su persona la huella de los años formativos en su barrio y en el batey de Aguirre se ha extendido sin desvanecerse. El arte que le salía de la práctica y los estudios en la Universidad de Puerto Rico, a la que debe, dice, las largas horas empeñadas en producir cientos de trabajos como cartelista del Programa de Actividades Culturales, no se desprende de sus escuelas y lugares. Pratt, Nueva York, San Juan, el Coquí, Salinas. La defensa del lugar se fortalecía ante el prejuicio que en contra de los habitantes de El Coquí mostraban algunos salinenses hacia aquel “barrio de títeres”. Del trauma del menosprecio salió un hombre con suerte de haber nacido en esa comunidad donde la gente “vivían juntos de verdad”, con sus calles animadas por toda una galería de pregoneros y marchantes, escenas como las que después vio en Puerto Príncipe, Haití.

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