Converting Politics into History and History into Politics: La muerte no entrará en palacio by René Marqués

ABSTRACT

The connection between history and politics is eternal. This intertwining is seen in the efforts of the stage to understand governmental history and to question past political decisions, efforts that are explored in René Marqués's La muerte no entrará en palacio. The Puerto Rican Marqués, a fierce advocate for Puerto Rican independence from the United States, wrote this play in 1959 as a denunciation of the creation of Puerto Rico's commonwealth status in 1952. Events that have shaped the political and social climate of 2017 in Puerto Rico underline the timeliness of Marqués's criticisms and necessitate another look at the play to understand Puerto Rico in the past and today.

KEYWORDS:

• Commonwealth
• financial crisis
• government
• history
• Puerto Rico
• politics
• theater

Notes

1. Seymour Menton discusses the “Generación de los Cuarenta” in his article “La Generación Puertorriqueña del Cuarenta.”

2. Carlos Pabón presents a fascinating discussion of Puerto Rican national identity at the end of the twentieth century in light of the nationalism that resurges after the end of the Cold War. His analysis of the introduction and implications of a 1991 law that made Spanish the official language in Puerto Rico brings to light the many sides of the nationalistic debate and complement this article.

3. Richard Callan has an interesting analysis of the Greco-Roman elements of this play

4. Callan explains the significance of both Teresias and Casandra and will be referenced later in this essay

5. While this quote is supposed to be emblematic of the fight that don José, Teresias, and Alberto's father waged for the island, it is not found to be repeated throughout the text, but is only a memory of the past.

6. While the history I recount here is widely available, Arturo Morales Carrión's Puerto Rico: A Political and Cultural History has proved invaluable for this essay. Additionally, many articles on La muerte no entrará en palacio reference the historical allusions outlined here, such as those by Martínez Pérsico, Rodríguez, Vidal, Martin, and Dauster.

7. History is of central importance to almost any analysis of this play, and many of the articles written call attention to the parallels between actual events and those portrayed in this play (Vidal; Shaw; Martínez Pérsico; Rodríguez; Caballero Wangüemert; Pilditch).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katherine Ford

Katherine Ford is an associate professor of Hispanic Studies at East Carolina University. Her research interests lie in twentieth-century Latin American theater, women's studies, and Latino/a theater. She is the author of Politics and Violence in Cuban and Argentine Theater (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and the forthcoming The Theater of Revisions in the Hispanic Caribbean (Palgrave Macmillan).