Appropriation of culture and the quest for a voice in the works of Luisa Capetillo

ASBTRACT

With the end of Spanish colonialism, the working class and other marginalized groups in Puerto Rican society hoped the new era of nationhood would allow them to improve their living and working conditions and contribute to the various levels of decision making in society. Luisa Capetillo's texts critiqued bourgeois culture as one that did nothing to promote social change, as Puerto Rico went from a colonial society to one that thrived off of the exploitation of the worker. In an effort to find compromise, she appropriated the themes and structure of the very literature that she excoriated to give a voice to those groups who wanted to contribute on a greater scale in the new Puerto Rican society. This essay demonstrates how Capetillo reconciled the anarchist tendencies in her texts while calling for a complete rupture from neocolonial society, even though she imitated bourgeois cultural production.

Keywords:

• Anarchism
• appropriation
• bourgeois
• Luisa Capetillo
• compromise
• neocolonialism
• Puerto Rico
• worker movement

Notes

1. Her first book, Ensayos libertarios, was published in 1907; La humanidad en el futuro was published in 1910 and Mi opinión: Sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer como compañera, madre y ser independiente was published in 1911. These texts are mainly written in essay form. Influencias de las ideas modernas (1916) is composed of a variety of literary genres.

2. See Ramos 43 for commentary on her sentence structure. In her piece “Impresiones de viaje Julio 1909” from Mi opinión, there is a clear example of this orality in her work. “No he podido volvor á esa población. Iré á sostener enérgicamente mi propaganda anterior; es decir, á exponer la síntesis de la única y verdadera religión: >>Amáos los unos á los otros,>> bendecid á vuestros enemigos, orad por los que os calumnian y os persiguen” (308–09, all grammar and syntax presented as they appear in the original). She continues on in the manner of the Ten Commandments, but switching from the vosotros form to the singular tú form.

3. I have not changed any orthographic or grammatical errors when citing the original texts. I would like to thank the Centro para Estudios Puertorriqueños for initially helping me secure selections from Capetillo's last book, Influencias de las ideas modernas.

4. Interestingly enough, she refers to this essay as a “relato utópico.”

5. Lisa Sánchez González notes that during the “Cruzada del ideal,” one of the goals was to “agitate and educate other workers on the concepts of a new, socialist world order where, in the words of a writer well-circulated among Puerto Rican anarchists, ‘each individual is a producer of both manual and intellectual work’” (“Luisa Capetillo” 156). That writer was Peter Kropotkin, whom Capetillo had read in her youth, from his book Fields, Factories and Workshops.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James C. Courtad

James C. Courtad graduated in 2001 with a PhD in Hispanic Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. He specializes in eighteenth- to twentieth-century Spanish literature and culture. He has taught at Central Michigan University and Illinois Wesleyan University and is currently an assistant professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Bradley University. Jim has published articles on Spanish novelists Juan Valera and Benito Pérez Galdós, as well as on Puerto Rican author Lourdes Vázquez.