The Incomplete Subject of Colonial Memory: Puerto Rico and the Post/Colonial Biopolitics of Congressional Recollection

Abstract

Congressional discourse on Puerto Rican self-determination is a memorial narrative that, although on its face an attempt at decolonization, constitutes Puerto Ricans as incomplete colonial subjects, reinscribes and normalizes the U.S.-Puerto Rico relationship along the axis of a flexible colonialism, and reveals the way in which Puerto Rico, as colony, is remembered in the “post/colony” envisioned by the United States.

Notes

1. The legislative history of the U.S.-Puerto Rico relationship is extensive. Various historical accounts exist in the form of chronologies, legal opinions, briefs, legislation, and jurisprudence all that seek to assert jurisdiction and sovereignty of the United States over Puerto Rico primarily under the territorial clause of the Constitution of the United States (Article IV, Section –2). Among others, statements of such official power have been rendered by the Supreme Court (Harris v. Rosario, 446 U.S. 651), and by the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit (U.S. v Sanchez, 992 F.2d 1143 (11th Cir. 1993).

2. As with many pieces of legislation, there are multiple versions of H.R. 856. The four versions listed under the THOMAS site of the Library of Congress are H.R.856.IH (as introduced in the House), H.R.856.RH (as reported in the House), H.R.856.EH (as engrossed, agreed, or passed by the House), and H.R.856.RFS (referred to Senate committee). I have used H.R.856.IH as introduced in the House of Representatives on February 27, 1997 as the primary and original text of the bill. Although basic changes to the text exist, the bill remains significantly the same. Nevertheless, my argument makes use of the originally introduced version of the bill precisely because it provides most completely and forcefully the arguments that shape subsequent discussion and iteration of the legislation.

3. Flexible colonialism follows David Harvey's coining of “flexible accumulation” as the new organizing principle for the globalizing tendencies of postmodernism: Harvey, D. (1990). The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Juan Flores also referred to this as “lite colonialism” during remarks at the Duke University Conference: Is the Caribbean Postcolonial? Is the Postcolonial Caribbean? Durham, North Carolina, February 1997. Ruben Berrios Martinez, President of the Puerto Rican Pro Independence Party (PIP) also uses the term “Coca-Colonization” in Berrios Martinez, R. (Nov/Dec. 1997). Puerto Rico's Decolonization. Foreign Affairs. 100–114.

4. As stated in Note 1, opinions, briefs, chronologies, and other jurisprudence abound regarding the U.S.-Puerto Rico relationship. Another recent historical summary of the relationship is Keith Bea's Congressional Research Service report for Congress, “Political Status of Puerto Rico: Background, Options, and Issues in the 109th Congress” (May 25, 2005).

5. Given that Puerto Rico is considered still by many to be a colony, a situation that recent U.S. assertions have reiterated, I prefer the term post-colony to bracket assumptions about post-colonialism as treating the aftermath of colonial rule, and keeping open the possibility that in the case of Puerto Rico, we are treating a gradual crossover that sees the island inhabit both a post-colonial and a colonial status.

6. Burke defines entelechy simply as such “use of symbolic resources that potentialities can be said to attain their perfect fulfillment;” Burke, K. (1972). Dramatism and Development. Barre, MA: Clark University Press.

7. As Elizabeth Mertz has put it, “we capture ideology in the making as we examine the language in which courts and legislators speak of history, land, and people” (p. 361). Mertz, E. (1995). The Uses of History: Language, Ideology, and Law in the United States and South Africa. In Richard Abel (Ed.), The Law and Society Reader. New York: New York University Press. A recent article about public memory that looks at legal memory and imperial narratives is Marouf Hasian (2002) Nostalgic Longings and Imaginary Indias: Postcolonial Analysis, Collective Memories, and the Impeachment Trial of Warren Hastings. Western Journal of Communication 66 (2), 229–255.

8. Miller, T. (1993). The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodern Subject. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Miller refers to a “determinate indeterminacy” which is an “ethical incompleteness.” Although the emphasis for Miller is on the individual, I am borrowing the concept as an incompleteness that is a feature of the constituted colonial subject.

9. After the annexation of Hawaii in 1898, and the acquisition of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines as a result of the Spanish-American War, the United States engaged in a debate about whether these territories were to be regarded as part of the United States, and how they would be treated pursuant to U.S. Constitutional law.

10. Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244 (1901).

11. The President of the United States retained the power to appoint and fill executive posts and judges, while the governor held veto power over all insular legislation.

12. Instead of quieting Puerto Ricans, the bill had the opposite effect. The next few years saw continued radicalization of the Nationalist Party, with multiple violent confrontations, and repression by the United States The 1940's saw a measure of economic recovery, significant changes in political leadership of the island, the election to the governorship of the first native Puerto Rican popularly elected, and the continued marginalization of issues of political status (Gatell, 1958).

13. Pursuant to Article 73(e) of the United Nations Charter, the United States stopped providing information about its “non-self governing territories” (its colonies), in this case Puerto Rico, to the same body in 1953.

14. See Note 1. Although this remains a controversial point, much U.S. jurisprudence affirms the jurisdiction of the Territorial Clause of the U.S. Constitution. In U.S. v Sanchez, 992 F.2d 1143 (11th Cir. 1993) the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in endnote Id at 1151–52 noted that: “Congress may unilaterally repeal the Puerto Rico Constitution or the Puerto Rico Federal Relations Act and replace them with any rules or regulations of its choice. Despite passage of the Federal Relations Act and the Puerto Rico Constitution, Puerto Rican courts continue to derive their authority from the United States Congress.”

15. Voting results for the 1967 status plebiscite were: Commonwealth 60.4%, Statehood 38.9%, and Independence .06%. The results for the plebiscite held in 1993 were: Commonwealth 48.6%, Statehood 46.3%, and Independence 4.4%.

16. The Young Act was introduced in the U.S. Congress House of Representatives on February 22, 1997 (105th Congress), by Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska). This bill had been previously introduced as H.R. 3024 in the 104th Congress, and H.R. 4281, and is commonly referred to as the Young Act.

17. The results were as follows: 50.3% for none of the above, 0.1% voting for “Territorial” Commonwealth, 0.3% for “Free Association,” 2.4% for Independence, and 46.5% for Statehood. The “Free Association” option corresponded to the “New Commonwealth” proposal that the PPD sought as a way to redefine the political relationship between the island and the United States by describing a status for Puerto Rico as “an autonomous political body, that is neither colonial nor territorial, in permanent union with the United States under a covenant that cannot be invalidated or altered unilaterally.” (Task Force, 5)

18. All plebiscitary and referendum results were obtained at the Comision Estatal de Elecciones de Puerto Rico website (Commonwealth's Elections Commission): http://www.ceepur.org/. The Commission is the official elections arm of the Puerto Rican government.

19. 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, p. 3.

20. These by no means exhaust the Young Act's claims to memory, but these three markers comprise the core of the Congressional negotiation of memory, and strike deep at the constitutive core of Puerto Rican national identity.

21. I am indebted to Mary Carruther's excellent analysis of memory, specifically her connection of memoria with character: “A person without a memory, if such a thing could be, would be a person without moral character, and, in a basic sense, without humanity. Memoria refers not to how something is communicated, but to what happens once one has received it, to the interactive process of familiarizing—or textualizing—which occurs between oneself and others' words inmemory” (p. 13). Carruthers, M. (1990). The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

22. Alonso, A. M. (1988). The effects of truth: Re-presentations of the past and the imagining of community. Journal of Historical Sociology 1; 1: 33–57; “Departicularization is the process whereby historical discourses and practices are emptied of the meanings which tie them to concrete contexts, to definite localities, to distinct groups, and universalized, made the property of all and of no one” (p. 45).

23. In his essay on Memory and Forgetting (1999) Paul Ricoeur highlights the necessity of “working through the past” by engaging in the work of remembrance, retelling, and mourning (similar to forgetting). This work of memory has the potential to serve as salve by making memory understandable and acceptable, rendering memory, and mourning as modes of reconciliation with a traumatic past. Ricouer cites Todorov's notion of exemplarity in opposition to the factuality of memories as a way in which we can extract a positive valence to memory thus giving them an exemplary or lesson imparting dimension. I recast this relationship by seeing that exemplarity is not always in the service of a positive goal. Indeed, the exemplarity of a memorial narrative might depend on just what, and how much, it calls us to forget, and how such lessons are imparted; Paul Ricoeur (1999). Memory and forgetting. In Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, eds. Richard Kearney & Mark Dooley. New York: Routledge, p. 9.

24. Burke tells us that this bureaucratization takes place, “when men try to translate some pure aim or vision into terms of its corresponding material embodiment” (p. iii), resulting in a “reduction to utilitarian routines” (p. v).

Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244 (1901) at 341–342.

The President's Task Force on Puerto Rico's Status. Report by The President's Task Force on Puerto Rico's Status. December 2005.

United States Congress House Committee on Resources. Puerto Rico status: hearing before the Committee on Resources, House of Representatives, One Hundred Fifth Congress, first session, on H.R. 856, a bill to provide a process leading to full self-government for Puerto Rico, March 19, 1997, Washington, DC. 105th Cong., Washington: G.P.O., 1997.