Carmelo Esterrich. Concrete and Countryside: The Urban and the Rural in 1950s Puerto Rican Culture. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 184 pp. $27.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8229-6539-8.
Reviewed by Alvita Akiboh (Northwestern University)
Published on H-LatAm (December, 2018)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
In the mid-twentieth century, Puerto Rico, like most of Latin America, was changing. Rapid modernization transformed rural, agricultural societies into urban, industrial countries. Puerto Rico, as a US territory, felt the brunt of these transformations under Operación Manos a la Obra (Operation Bootstrap) and Operación Estadio Libre Asociado (Operation Commonwealth). Carmelo Esterrich, in Concrete and Countryside, examines a third operation, Operación Serenidad (Operation Serenity): the commonwealth government’s attempt to use culture, specifically the formation of a coherent national culture, to help Puerto Ricans manage the immense upheavals that attended modernization. This national culture, however, was based on a binary between urban and rural, concrete and countryside—one that Esterrich, through his examination of midcentury cultural productions, seeks to unsettle.
Esterrich examines cultural production from artists in three specific areas: government films from the División de Educación de la Comunidad (Division of Community Education), commonly known as DIVEDCO; literary works; and the music of Cortijo y su combo, a popular dance music group. The first chapter introduces the reader to these three groups, then two subsequent chapters analyze their portrayals of the rural, then the urban. Drawing on the methods of cultural studies, through close readings of scripts, stage directions, poems, and lyrics, Esterrich shows how these artists all grappled with the contradictions of modernization, especially mass migration from the countryside to the city, through their depictions of the rural and the urban in this period.
Each group had different goals. The commonwealth government, through DIVEDCO, wanted to promote an idealized rural space as the core of a new national culture. Most literary giants of the period (many of whom, fascinatingly, wrote for DIVEDCO on the side), sought to challenge that official view of idyllic rural space and reveal the contradictions of modernization and urbanization. And Cortijo y su combo, well, they just wanted to write and play music about their lived experience in the city, in the Afro-Puerto Rican “slums” that the commonwealth government so desperately wanted to eradicate. What Esterrich shows is that, despite their best efforts, none of these groups could avoid slippage between the rural and the urban. In DIVEDCO films like La casa de un amigo (1963) that romanticized the countryside, the construction of concrete buildings loomed in the background. Writers like René Marqués who sought to challenge the commonwealth government in plays like La carreta (The oxcart, 1953) still idealized the rural through their condemnations of urban migration. And Cortijo y su combo, firmly established as an urban group, still celebrated country over city in “Yo soy del campo” (I am from the countryside).
The reader gets a sense, especially from moments like the extended critique of María Teresa Babín’s Fantasia Boricua (Puerto Rican fantasia, 1956), that Esterrich has his own opinions about which cultural productions were the most morally reprehensible—namely, those that idealized and romanticized the countryside. And Esterrich’s analysis of figures like Ernesto Juan Fonfrías, the head of the Autoridad sobre Hogares (Puerto Rico Housing Authority), demonstrates why. Fonfrías’s day job was marginalizing urban subjects in the slums, but in his spare time he dabbled in literature, writing about idyllic rural spaces. Here, the stakes of cultural representations of Puerto Rico become crystal clear: ahistorical romanticized depictions of the countryside were precisely what created the mindset that allowed officials like Fonfrías to implement harsh policies against urban Puerto Ricans. Those who did not fit the rural stereotype promoted in the official national culture could be discarded as undeserving citizens.
Through his close readings of these midcentury cultural works, Esterrich opens up a new set of questions for scholars: what did ordinary Puerto Rican people, both in the city and the countryside, think about these representations of their lives? Did Operation Serenity and DIVEDCO’s films make them feel more at peace with the upheavals of modernization? Did Cortijo y su combo’s insistence on singing about race and life in the city make Afro-Puerto Ricans feel seen? Did Marqués’s La carreta or José Luis González’s “Paisa” (1950) make them reconsider the costs of urban migration? Esterrich does a brilliant job of revealing how a number of Puerto Rican artists and writers responded to this transformative period in their work. It raises questions about how the meanings of these cultural works might shift and change as audiences interact with and respond to them. Given the recentness of the period under study, critical reviews and other responses to these cultural productions could likely illuminate more about these how representations were received by the general public.
We do get a sense of reception, however, in the epilogue, with Oscar Lewis’s 1966 book La Vida, which exposed how rapid modernization had created a “culture of poverty,” according to the subtitle, in Puerto Rico. Here, at the end of the book, Esterrich expertly places Lewis within a cultural world: we see how readers in Puerto Rico and the continental United States responded (most negatively, but some positively) to La Vida. We see how his work sparked a response in Puerto Rico: La Nueva Vida/The New Life (1966), a book that sought to counter Lewis’s view with positive depictions of midcentury Puerto Rico. And we get to hear Lewis’s own understanding of where his work fit within the cultural context of midcentury Puerto Rico, with his candid reflection that if his work had stayed within the safe realm of romanticizing the rural, it would not have received such harsh criticism. The content of the works produced by Puerto Ricans in this period receives careful examination from Esterrich throughout the book. And he does speculate about the motivations of many of the writers and artists. But it is with Lewis and La Vida in the epilogue that we get to see inside the mind of a creator, their cultural world, and the reactions of the audiences who engaged with their work.
Historians will perhaps, as always, crave more context and change over time—as Esterrich does promise in the introduction to show a shift from the beginning of Luis Muñoz Marín’s governorship in 1948 to its end in 1964. Nevertheless, this book remains a fantastic snapshot of midcentury Puerto Rican culture. It will be of interest to those who want to learn more about Puerto Rico in the Latin American context of twentieth-century modernization, and anyone more broadly interested in cultural responses to global trends of migration and urbanization.
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Citation:
Alvita Akiboh. Review of Esterrich, Carmelo, Concrete and Countryside: The Urban and the Rural in 1950s Puerto Rican Culture.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53164
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