Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism

Like all anthologies, this collection of essays emerges within a specific set of personal and social contexts. The immediate context is the encounter of three island Puerto Rican graduate students during the late 80s in Philadelphia, who shared a sense of intellectual and political isolation from both mainstream and left Puerto Rican cultural/political practices in the US and the island. Superficially we were undergoing what many middle-class intellectuals from the island already saw as routine-going up to el norte to buy a prestigious (or not so prestigious degree) en ingles and returning home to an always already present space in academia. But we knew that for different and complex reasons for each of us, we were not going back home. In fact, as Alberto Sandoval Sanchez points out in his essay Puerto Rican Identity Up in the Air: Air Migration, Its Cultural Representations, and Me Cruzando el Charco, home, from now on, was going to be right here. Or, more accurately, here and there. The motivation to produce this book stems from both an intellectual crisis of political orphanhood and a crisis for us as national intellectuals turned ethnics in the United States. We soon realized that this supposed demotion - so feared by many Puerto Rican intellectuals-was in fact one of the many effects of posing Puerto Rico's political struggles as a colonial/national dichotomy, a framing that only allows political agency in terms of the consolidation of a nation-state (that is, national liberation). It seemed evident that the apparent transparency of signification of the nationalist/colonialist dichotomy had to be reexamined in order to map more effective strategies of political participation. PART 1: Challenging Nationalism, PART 2: Thinking Textually, PART 3: The Puerto Rican-Archipelago: Contested Identities, PART 4: Culture Wars in Contemporary Puerto Rico.