![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
This paper explores the formation of a political order, a constituency, during the 1938–1940 senatorial campaign of the Partido Popular Democratico in Puerto Rico. In particular it examines the constitutive force of the Catecismo del Pueblo, a small booklet in the form of questions and answers regarding the party's basic assumptions and orientations. This booklet developed a political constituency by mediating a covenantal relationship through discourse in the form of a catechism. Burke's notion of constitutional dialectics is used to explore the Catecismo's nature as constitutive, as a catechism, and as the mediator of a political covenant between the Party and the jíbaros.
Keywords:
Notes
Nathaniel I. Cordova is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. Correspondence to: Rhetoric and Media Studies Department, Willamette University, Salem, OR 97301, U.S. Email: [email protected]. The author thanks Professor James F. Klumpp for his support, and the editor and reviewers for their helpful comments.
Quoted in Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 33.
Marcelino J. Canino Salgado, La obra literaria de Luis Muñoz Marín: poesía y prosa, 1915–1968, trans. Muna Lee (San Juan de P.R.: Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín, 1999), p. 878.
Cited in Surendra Bhana, The United States and the Development of the Puerto Rican Status Question: 1936–1968 (Lawrence, KS: The University Press of Kansas, 1975), 3.
The Foraker Law of 1900 ended military rule and provided for a civilian governor and other officials appointed by the President of the United States. See Alfredo Montalvo‐Barbot, Political Conflict and Constitutional Change in Puerto Rico: 1898–1952 (Lanham: University Press of America, 1997). The indecision over status eventually led to Supreme Court pronouncements in the 1901 Insular Cases about the nature of “incorporated territories,” or those territories that would eventually be admitted into the union as states, and “unincorporated territories,” or those territories not intended for statehood. See Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244 (1901).
Arturo Morales Carrión, Puerto Rico: A Political and Cultural History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1983), 132. The changes wrought did not find favor with Puerto Ricans who expected that U.S. intervention in the island would lead to increased self‐government and not more subservience. The requirement that all subjects be taught in English and the importation of teachers from the mainland were seen as attempts to “destroy the cultural heritage of the island.” In Montalvo‐Barbot, Political Conflict, 14. The Americanization process extended to religious life as Protestant functionaries were installed to head schools and other institutions. As part of this civilizing and Christianizing mission, scores of Protestant missionaries traversed and split the island in the “spirit of comity” as they attempted to fulfill what they saw as a manifest destiny. For a representative view of this kind of thinking, see Charles H. Sheen, “Porto Rico Under the Stars and Stripes,” African Methodist Episcopal Church Review 15 (1899): 711. For more information on comity arrangements, see Julian H. Steward et al., The People of Puerto Rico: A Study in Social Anthropology (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1956), 87. For a study detailing how the people living in the town of Comerío participated in religious activities and how they felt about the Protestant and Catholic churches, see Charles C. Rogler, Comerío: A Study of a Puerto Rican Town (Lawrence, Kansas: University of KS, 1940). For further information regarding how Protestant organizations decided on comity arrangements for the colonies gained as a result of the Spanish‐American war, see Arthur Judson Brown, One Hundred Years: A History of the Foreign Missionary Work of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (Chicago: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1936).
The ravages of hurricane San Felipe in 1928 were soon followed by the economic devastation caused by the Depression. By 1929 a Brookings Institution Report estimated the average salary of rural workers at $150 a year (Morales Carrión, 216). As reported by Henry Wells, by 1929, 36 percent of the population of working age males was unemployed, and by 1933, unemployment had risen to 65 percent of the work force. In Henry Wells, The Modernization of Puerto Rico: A Political Study of Changing Values and Institutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 114. Moreover, by 1930 four large corporations held control of 50 percent of arable land and 40 percent of sugar production in the island. See Gerardo Navas, “Surgimiento y Transformacion del Partido Popular Democrático,” in Cambio y Desarrollo en Puerto Rico: La Transformacion Ideologica del Partido Popular Democrático, ed. Gerardo Navas (Río Piedras: University of Puerto Rico Press, 1980), 54.
Morales Carrión, Puerto Rico, 236. As a measure of the degree of dislocation felt from 1936 to 1940, sociologist Juan Jose Baldrich in his study, “Class and State: The Origins of Populism in Puerto Rico, 1934–1952” (Master's thesis, Yale University, 1981), indicates that more than 20 percent of the legislators elected in 1936 changed party allegiance before completing their terms, with the social classes that supported the existing parties also withdrawing their allegiance (144). In addition, the leaders of the three major parties in Puerto Rico all died within a year after the PPD was established.
Earl Parker Hanson, Transformation: The Story of Modern Puerto Rico (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), 174.
For instance, see Manuel Alvarez Nazario, El Habla Campesina del pais: Origenes y Desarrollo del Español en Puerto Rico (Rio Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1990), 19–20.
Ultimately represented as the white male embodiment of the three main heritages of the island, African, indigenous, and Spaniard, jíbaros were the core of the national identity discourse of this period. Responding to the totalizing power of the new colonial master (the U.S. had dismissed the people as incapable of self‐government), the island's cultural elite responded by fabricating an idealized vision of their own identity, one that would safeguard their own class interests. The idealized vision thus constructed reached into the margins of Puerto Rican society for those traits that marked an authentic way of being Puerto Rican. The elite's project sought to recover the jíbaro as authentic to Puerto Rican national identity and to position this identity as a bulwark against the turbulent tide of U.S. colonial power. Hence, as Antonio Pedreira noted, the early twentieth century saw the jíbaro posited as the “strongest, most definitive branch of our own distinctiveness.” In Antonio S. Pedreira, “La actualidad del Jíbaro,” in El Jíbaro de Puerto Rico: Simbolo y Figura, ed. Enrique Laguerre and Esther M. Melón (Sharon, CT: Troutman Press, 1968), 10.
Lillian Guerra, Popular Expression and National Identity in Puerto Rico: The Struggle for Self, Community, and Nation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 67.
Of the four political parties on the island in 1936, the two that wielded the most control in the island's legislature were the Union Republican Party and the Socialist Party. These two parties had formed a coalition in 1924 agreeing to share electoral gains and were commonly referred to as la Coalicion (the coalition). The third party, the Liberal party, traced its roots to the Union party founded in 1904 by Luis Muñoz Rivera, Luis Muñoz Marín's father. The fourth party in Puerto Rico was the Nationalist party, founded in 1922, and after 1930 led by Pedro Albizu Campos. In Bhana, The United States, 7–8.
Michael Huspek and Kathleen E. Kendall, “On Withholding Political Voice: An Analysis of the Political Vocabulary of a ‘Nonpolitical’ Speech Community,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (February 1991): 1.
Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice Hall, 1945).
Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 174.
Muñoz Marín had been associated with the Christian trinity; see Gordon K. Lewis, Freedom and Power in the Caribbean (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1963), 147; Lewis notes that a lieutenant of the PPD would say, “God in his heaven, Roosevelt in the United States, and Muñoz Marín in Puerto Rico.” Sidney W. Mintz tells of a member of the PPD who was asked if he had a picture of a saint in his house, to which the man, pointing to a photograph of Muñoz Marín, responded, “There is my saint, he lives in San Juan.” In Sidney W. Mintz Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History (New York: Norton 1974), 394. Allusions to this Trinitarian relationship did not surface only during the campaign. Silvia Álvarez Curbelo also notes that the January 23, 1934, issue of La Democracia, describes a sign that read: “Glory to the father, Luis Muñoz Rivera, glory to the son, Luis Muñoz Marín; glory to the holy spirit: Antonio R. Barceló.” See note 38 in Silvia Álvarez Curbelo, “La Casa de Cristal: El Ejercício Senatorial de Luis Muñoz Marín: 1932–1936.” In Senado de Puerto Rico 1917–1992: Ensayos de Historia Institucional, ed. Silvia Álvarez Curbelo, Carmen I. Raffucci, and Fernando Picó (Rio Piedras: Ediciones Huracán, 1992), 118.
This line is a variation of a campaign slogan, “He who sells his vote sells his children,” and is prevalent throughout the various campaign artifacts. “Religion y Justicia: Posición clara del Partido Popular en defensa de ambas,” El Batey 10 (January 1940).
Father Rivera's letter appears in “Lea esta Carta del Reverendo Padre Rivera a Muñoz Marín: Denuncia la Mentira de los que Dicen que Muñoz Marín es Comunista,” El Batey 16 (October 1940); emphasis in original.
Luis Muñoz Marín, “Palabras Ante la Tumba de su Padre en Barranquitas: 1938, 17 de Julio,” in Luis Muñoz Marín: Discursos 1934–1948, Volumen I, ed. Fernando Picó (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín, 1999).
Ironically, Muñoz Marín was laying down a theology of liberation that ineluctably linked faith to social justice concerns and gave primacy to political community over the Church. As he put it in a radio address during the last days of the campaign: “The word of the Partido Popular Democratico is but your own faith in yourselves! Believe in yourselves!” Luis Muñoz Marín, La Historia del Partido Popular Democratico (San Juan: Editorial Batey, 1984), 105. Muñoz Marín was re‐elected to a fourth term as governor in 1960 despite strong opposition from the Catholic Church.
A key concept in Western theistic discourse, the notion of covenant is implied in the etymology of the word religion itself. For more information on the connection, see David Tukey, “The Rhetorical Exigence of Covenant,” Journal of Communication and Religion 19 (September 1996): 8. Defined as an accord marked by the moral obligations incurred by the involved parties and witnessed by a higher authority, the covenantal language used by Muñoz Marín meshed well with his prophetic persona. By virtue of his prophetic foresight, Muñoz Marín could deliver the masses from potential chaos as long as they were willing to participate in the covenant he espoused. For an account of how modern constitutionalism emerges out of the tradition of covenant, see Daniel J. Elazar, Covenant and Civil Society: The Constitutional Matrix of Modern Democracy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998), 197.
Discourse that blends the language of religion and politics, that presupposes a moral role of governance of self and nation, and that relies on a rhetoric of redemption through a covenant, I call theo‐political. I do not claim that the features outlined exhaust what can be deemed theo‐political. Communication scholar Ron Arnett, citing Martin Buber, offers what is perhaps the best definition for my purposes. On his way to describing Buber's rhetoric as characterized by a religious socialism, Arnett tells us that Buber coins the term “theopolitical hour” when referring to Biblical Israel as both a religious and political entity in his book, The Prophetic Faith. This blending of religion and politics leads Buber to use the phrase “theopolitical hour” to “describe the moment of political decision that is grounded in an understanding of Judaism. ‘Theopolitical’ decision‐making is the way of the prophet and the King when he is loyally following the way of YHVH” (13). See Ron Arnett, “Martin Buber's Theopolitical Rhetoric of Religious Socialism,” Journal of Communication and Religion 10 (September 1987): 13; Martin Buber, The Prophetic Faith (New York: MacMillan Book Co., 1949); Steve Goldzwig, “Theo‐Political Conspiracy Rhetoric in The Wanderer,” Journal of Communication and Religion 14 (September 1991): 15–33; Bradford T. Stull, Religious Dialectics of Pain and Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994).
Luis Muñoz Marín, “En El Batey,” El Batey 1 (March 1939): 1.
“Lo que Significa la Semana Santa para el Pueblo,” El Batey 1 (April 1939).
Perhaps the most striking example as I write these words was the September 11, 2001, attack that demolished the World Trade Center in New York City, which led to massive loss of civilian life. By all accounts, the terrorists who occasioned such a tragedy were motivated by a radical religious belief that unified them into a collective willing to sacrifice their lives in order to achieve the salvation promised for their actions. Equally powerful in illustrating my point has been the reaction of the U.S. population to the tragedy. Responding to a national public religious discourse led by President Bush, many members of the nation have asked for retribution under a military operation called “Infinite Justice.” As polls indicate, most Americans initially united behind their government in condemning the attacks and in pursuing what amounts to a holy war against the infidels.
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York; Harper & Brothers, 1957), 12.
James Jasinski, “A Constitutional Framework for Rhetorical Historiography: Toward an Understanding of the Discursive (Re)constitution of ‘Constitution’ in The Federalist Papers,” in Doing Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases, ed. Kathleen J. Turner (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1998), 75.
Michael C. McGee, “In Search of ‘The People’: A Rhetorical Alternative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 235–249.
Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary,” in Studies in Culture: An Introductory Reader, ed. Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan (London: Arnold, 1997), 5–14.
McGee, 239.
Rosario Natal, Luis Muñoz Marín y la Independencia de Puerto Rico, 1907–1946 (San Juan, PR: Producciones Históricas, 1994), 122; Luis Muñoz Marín, La Historia, 81–82.
Catecismo del Pueblo, front cover. All subsequent Catecismo quotations are followed by page numbers in parentheses.
Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 10th ed., s.v. “catechism.”
I am indebted to my colleague Dr. Robert Sullivan (Ithaca College) for this definition. See, for instance, the variety of secular catechisms in existence designed to convey basic organizational principles. The modern day frequently‐asked‐questions document (FAQ) used throughout the Internet follows catechetical form. Perhaps more related to my disciplinary home, Cicero's De Partitione Oratoria, a brief rhetorical manual prepared for his son Marcus Tullius, also follows what we know as the catechetical form of dogmatic answers to natural questions, and St. Augustine's Liber de Catechizandis Rudibus (On the Instruction of the Unlearned) is a rhetorical treatise on catechetical education.
Luis Muñoz Marín, La historia, 100.
On qualification, see Goran Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (London: Verso, 1980).
Catechetical form was quite popular in Latin America as a form to instruct the masses on political issues. Written in a simple and straightforward manner in order to enhance retention of its contents, these political catechisms followed the traditional form of a dialogue between a person in need of instruction and another with knowledge to impart and vested with authority that commanded obedience. Political catechisms were published by various sources, some originating with the Spanish Crown, in order to combat the dissemination of “incorrect” political information among the masses. See Nydia M. Ruiz, “Los Catecismos Políticos Liberales en la Creación de la Cultura Política Republicana,” Politeia 20 (1997): 143–158; Javier Ocampo López, Los Catecismos Políticos en la Independencia de Hispanoamérica: de la Monarquía a la República (Tunja, Colombia: Publicaciones del Magister en Historia, Escuela de Posgrado de la Facultad de Educación, University Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia, 1988). For an example of a political catechism in the U.S., see Maria Henrietta Pinckney, “The Quintessence of Long Speeches Arranged as a Political Catechism,” in Southern Pamphlets on Secession: November 1860–April 1861, ed. Jon L. Wakelyn (University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Jasinski, 75.
Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 178–179.
McGee, 15.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 31.
Jasinski, 75.
Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 133–150.
Luis Muñoz Marín, El Batey 10 (January 1940).
Burke, A Grammar, 77. Circumference relates to demarcation of boundaries through discourse, boundaries that in turn allow us to locate meaning in particular contexts. As Burke notes, “The word reminds us that when ‘defining by location,’ one may place the object of one's definition in contexts of varying scope.” Hence, voting became the notion by which the Catecismo's auditors would filter the call to understand their acting in concert with Christian moral duty.
Ian Green, The Christian's ABC: Catechism and Catechizing in England, 1530–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 26.
Luis Muñoz Marín, Memorias: Autobiografía Pública (San Juan: Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico, 1982), 178.
Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Performing Civic Identity: The Iconic Photograph of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 367.
In addition, the concept of catechism relies on a fundamental understanding of catechism as a longstanding conversation between God and his people. This conversation is exemplified in catechisms by a dynamic interplay between the pedagogical aims of conveying the truths of God and the form used to convey those same truths. This longstanding conversation is also the covenantal relationship that catechism mediates and that Muñoz Marín sought to instantiate between the jíbaro and the PPD.
Kenneth Burke, Counter‐Statement (Los Altos, CA: Hermes Publications, 1953), 125.
Burke, Counter‐Statement, 138.
Burke, Counter‐Statement, 143.
As John Hammerback points out, this merging of the personae of the rhetor and the audience with the message has powerful constitutive potential for enhancing identification and altering identity. In John Hammerback, “Creating the ‘New Person’: The Rhetoric of Reconstitutive Discourse,” Rhetoric Review 20 (Spring 2001): 18–22.
Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 74.
Green, 5.
Morales Carrión, 246–247.
Morales Carrión, 246–247.