By Laura Valle-Gutierrez a Senior Honors Thesis Submitted in Partial
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FROM EL BARRIO TO LA BANLIEUE: FICTIONS OF IDENTITY IN NUYORICAN AND BEUR LITERATURE By Laura Valle-Gutierrez A Senior Honors Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Comparative Literature Brown University May 2017 Thesis Director: Professor Emily Drumsta Second Reader: Professor Leticia Alvarado Valle-Gutierrez 2 Abstract This thesis explores two distinct literary bodies, Nuyorican and Beur literature, as characterized in four foundational novels in the genre: Down These Mean Streets, Le Gône du Chaâba, When the Spirits Dance Mambo and La Seine était rouge. I pair literary criticism with sociological and geographical frameworks, to examine the way that second-generation migrants try to construct cohesive subjectivities in these texts. Constantly negotiating the unifying and discriminatory forces of language, race, and space, these texts nuance the reader’s understanding of a need for strategic essentialism. Valle-Gutierrez 3 Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... 2 Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... 3 Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 4 Defining ‘Beur’ and ‘Nuyorican’ .........................................................................................................11 Historical Contexts ................................................................................................................................13 Critical Frameworks .............................................................................................................................19 Chapter 1: Outward Bound ....................................................................................................... 24 Introduction ...........................................................................................................................................24 The Politics of Language .......................................................................................................................28 Street Theater ........................................................................................................................................38 Race and Space ......................................................................................................................................49 Gender and Genre .................................................................................................................................54 Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................................58 Chapter 2: Journeys of Remembrance ..................................................................................... 60 Introduction ...........................................................................................................................................60 Territorializing the Female Body .........................................................................................................63 Language Borders .................................................................................................................................72 Truth and Knowledge ...........................................................................................................................75 Forming Memory ...................................................................................................................................83 Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................................90 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 92 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 96 Valle-Gutierrez 4 Introduction Since 1993 Puerto Rico’s Banco Popular, a prominent bank on the island, has produced an annual televised Christmas Special that highlights the culture and spirit of the island through a medium that is central to Puerto Rican life and culture: music and dance (Arroyo 196). Often, these specials bring primarily Puerto Rican celebrities – well-known stars like Marc Anthony, Danny Rivera, Ricky Martin, and most recently Flaco Navaja – to celebrate the quotidian lives of Puerto Ricans. The specials venerate idealized figures like el jíbaro, the hard-working farmer who lives off the land, and focus on the roots of Puerto Rico, often using the rhetoric of Puerto Rico as a village, un pueblo, that is united by tradition, diversity, and most of all, music. The especiales de navidad celebrate Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans, with nationalistic themes every year. This past year, the Christmas Special centered on Puerto Ricans who live off the island, focusing on the diaspora of Puerto Rico, as almost twice as many Puerto Ricans live on the mainland United States, relative to the island (Krogstad 2015).1 The special, like those in the past, used music and dance to illustrate that Puerto Ricans, and their spirit, thrive everywhere – from well-documented sites of migration like New York City and Chicago, to less thought-of places, such as Hawaii. The special chose not to emphasize how so many Puerto Ricans ended up in places like Hawaii (in part, the result of a formal request by the first U.S. appointed governor of Puerto Rico, to work the Hawaiian sugar fields) (Gonzalez 58). Instead, like the texts dealt with in this thesis, the Christmas special emphasized the way that what I am calling “second-generation” Puerto Ricans, individuals who are Puerto Rican but were born and raised on the mainland, recognize that music, community, and language, are what define their spaces and identity as 1 “As of 2013, there were more Puerto Ricans living in the U.S. mainland (5.1 million) than on the island itself (3.5 million)” (Krogstad 2015). Valle-Gutierrez 5 “Puerto Rican.” The special thus continues the tradition started by these novels, an effort to create a cohesive sense of self that recognizes past, present, and future. In a completely different context, across the Atlantic Ocean, following the Paris attacks in November 2015,2 some journalists called attention to the persistent erasure of French-Algerian history in the reporting of the attacks.3 Robert Fisk, writing for The Independent, wrote: Whenever the West is attacked and our innocents are killed, we usually wipe the memory bank. Thus, when reporters told us that the 129 dead in Paris represented the worst atrocity in France since the Second World War, they failed to mention the 1961 Paris massacre of up to 200 Algerians participating in an illegal march against France’s savage colonial war in Algeria. Most were murdered by the French police, many were tortured in the Palais des Sports and their bodies thrown into the Seine. The French only admit 40 dead. (Independent.co.uk) Current events are thus problematically construed in a way that erases the history of a critical, and growing, portion of the French population – French citizens of Algerian descent. While Puerto Ricans contend with defining self and national identity, in light of a growing diaspora, French citizens of Algerian descent continue to be marginalized in French cities, through such instances of erasure. While some French-Algerians have turned to music (the genres of raï and rap in particular) to centralize their narratives and liminal positions (Swedenburg 120), these identities remain largely ignored or misunderstood. The texts in this thesis offer the first steps towards understanding the lives of second-generation migrants, who grew up outside the direct experience of colonial violence, that their parents or first-generation migrants may have experienced, but who are still impacted by reverberations of colonialism in their daily lives. 2 The series of attacks, for which ISIS claimed responsibility, left 130 dead, and hundreds of more wounded. The sites of attacks included a music venue where a band was performing, and the French soccer arena, Le Stade de France, during a soccer match (BBC News). 3 In 2012, President François Hollande acknowledged the suffering that Algerians were subjected to by French colonization (Le Monde). Valle-Gutierrez 6 In this thesis, I look at two Nuyorican novels as foundational texts for understanding the experiences of second-generation Puerto Ricans in the United States: Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas and When the Spirits Dance Mambo by Marta Moreno Vega,4 and compare them with two texts by Beur writers: Azouz Begag’s Le Gone du Chaâba and Leïla Sebbar’s La Seine était rouge. I compare these four texts in two chapters, along gendered lines, to analyze how language, race, and space all inform the way that identity is constructed for these different groups. These juxtapositions illustrate the recurrence of certain second-generation migratory experiences such as linguistic alterity, which evidently transcends one historical or geographical situation. However, these frameworks of comparison also allow for different experiences of race and religion, which don’t translate