Pedro Albizu Campos

630 College English Colonial Memory and the Crime of Rhetoric: Pedro Albizu Campos Victor Villanueva The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary. —Gabriel García Márquez Memory (2003) His deathbed was an industrial hospital bed in a cold, ascetic, overly lit room in the hospice A wing of the giant VA hospital in Spokane, Washington. The thick, wavy black hair that he once had been so proud of was gone, some white wisps left, yet a fine-toothed comb still rested beside him. He had been in a coma. His wife, his children, his grandchildren spoke words of love to him, prayers to wing him along. A cough, a clenching of teeth, and a tightening of muscles that pulled him into a fetal position, and he was dead. Dad. Dead. So far from home. This is where the story starts. With Dad. Dad would speak of the young man who dated his sister. This young man had black wavy hair and a good physique (that mattered to Dad, a good physique), and the young man loved the Island. The U.S. government had finally figured out that the men who walked around wearing black guayaberas, the loose-fitting shirts of the tropics, were revolutionaries, members of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico, led by Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos, el Maestro, the Teacher. The young man who dated Dad’s sister, mi tía Margarita, had run into the tropical rainforest, el Yunque, where Dad, himself a boy, would bring him dry clothes and food. I don’t know the story beyond that. Dad would always go on to lament that his sister married someone else. Victor Villanueva is professor of English at Washington State University, where he is also the current director of the Program in American Studies. A version of this article appears as “Colonial Research: A Preamble to a Case Study” in Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, edited by Gesa Kirsch and Liz Rohan. Reprinted by permission of Southern Illinois University Press. College English, Volume 71, Number 6, July 2009 k630-638July09CE.indd 630 6/1/09 3:16 PM Colonial Memory 631 I N S EARCH OF R EMEMORY But I had to know. This might be the postcolonial era, but here remains the colony, no matter the convolutions and euphemisms. And here remains this man, this man who had a revolutionary force and no revolution, things I knew nothing about—apart from my father’s nostalgia about the man of el Yunque, mi tía’s boyfriend. And here were the politics of my father when I was a child; my father, who seemed to give up talking of politics, give up the idea that he would return to the Island, that the Island was there to return to, the permanence of exile, albeit an exile to a wife who did not desire a return to the homeland where her memories are of abandonment and being sold as chattel, an exile in the estrangement of his children from his culture. And Dad would introduce me as “my son, Fidel,” a matter I took as ridicule when I was twenty-five and when I was fifty came to wonder whether it was intended to be honorific. And there are my memories of Dad: “straight ahead, and get Castro!” Laughing at the obsession against Castro and its failure (Castro having now survived nine hostile U.S. presidents). Exile. Alienation. What does one do when one becomes fully conscious of the alienation that arises from exile, of being racialized, of knowing something ain’t right and there ain’t no puttin’ it right but can’t be no ignoring the wrong? Racism, its tie to colonialism, its tie to language and language-in-action, its corrosive effect, its leaving holes in memory, like empty pockets in the brain. Dad’s son had made it, a professor with minor notoriety, the middle class now, speaking and writing against racism, trying to understand what allows racism to continue when biologi- cal explanations fall apart, when stereotypes are stereotypically realized to be mere stereotypes, the son who looks at language, thinking nothing happens without the word, the son who nevertheless has to feel the irony of making a proudful claim—I am a Puerto Rican (but mis padres son de Puerto Rico when speaking in Spanish to a Spanish person)—spoken calmly, a simple assertion, a matter of fact, yet realizing that this is a Puerto Rican who knows nothing beyond Dad’s stories of Puerto Rico, a Nuyorican, but one whose time in New York preceded the word, the identity, “Nuyorican.” Exile and Alienation: like amnesia, lost memory. It was time to recover the culture, its past, its connection to who my father was and who our people were. S EREND I P I TY A student having to take a Spanish translation exam hands me the piece that she’s submitting for the translation. Its title is “Hostos, Martí y Albizu: Su Critica del Impe- rialismo.” Haltingly, I learn of Albizu, of his words, of his anti-imperialist discourse. I look to archives in English to find out more, to discoverlas criticas that come from my parents’ homeland rather than from “the Continent,” someone whose name k630-638July09CE.indd 631 6/1/09 3:16 PM 632 College English is more like mine than French. I find some biographies. A friend, Gail Okawa, has been to the National Archives in Washington, DC. She connects me to her contact there. Preparing to go, I search the Internet. What I find concerns the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a summary of past assassins and assassination attempts somehow attached to Albizu. But he had never assassinated nor taken part in an assassination. Surely Dad would have mentioned that. I knew of the Puerto Rican attempt on Tru- man, but had not heard of Albizu Campos’s involvement. The language of the FBI reports amounted to pointing to Albizu Campos as the inspiration of assassination. The U.S. likes, needs, ringleaders. Decide I’ll have to take a different tack. That tack has yet to develop fully. This is a preamble, fragments of imperfect memory. Another student, a Puerto Rican doctoral student (now a professor) of sociol- ogy hands me a manuscript, La Palabra Como Delito, The Word as Crime. And in my less-than-fluent Spanish I discover that the pictures contained therein were all taken by the FBI in its long surveillance of Albizu Campos. And I discover the basis of all that surveillance, the crimes for which he would spend the majority of his life in prison: speeches. Twelve speeches, in particular, and a law (Law 53 of a general gag order—la Ley de la Mordaza) that stipulated that the word was very literally the equivalent of weapons (Acosta 11)—the pen is the sword. But because I am English dominant, a postcolonial product, I try to find those twelve speeches in English. But I find only fragments of the speeches of Dr. Albizu Campos in English. This is the case study I would draw regarding rhetorics of sedition, this man called a ter- rorist, this man convicted to eighty years imprisonment for what he said—sedition. My need to recover something of ancestry becomes deeply tied to rhetoric. His is the crime of being an effective rhetor. Yet how effective was he really? It’s hard to see what his danger might have been. He was the hero followed by few. His was the voice heard by the many, but truly listened to only by the few; the voice whose rhetoric condemned him, whose rhetoric was a crime. He was called “el Maestro,” a powerful speaker, with thousands gathering to listen to his deliberative rhetoric for freedom. He urged the people to reclaim their cultural history and national symbols, like the national anthem and the monoestrella, the one-star flag. But though he spoke for the worker and the peasant, his appeal was limited to the middle class when time came for votes. For all his speaking, for all his attracting of audiences, ballots told of a remarkably small following. Research now takes a traditional turn. Books. Discover the history of Puerto Rico. Find what I can on Albizu Campos. Eventually, thanks to the Internet, I find the one book written in English that is about Albizu. It dates to 1971. One must wonder how that can be: nearly forty years and only one book in English about a man who spent so many years in American prisons, translation or its lack as a form of censorship, censoring the seditious, silencing the rhetoric. From here, I follow the trail. It’s still ahead. But this much I know: k630-638July09CE.indd 632 6/1/09 3:16 PM Colonial Memory 633 A LB I ZU ’ S C ONTEXT Pedro Albizu Campos was—is—seen as a revolutionary. But there was no revolution; there will be no revolution. Revolution requires unity. Unity means a clear understanding of one’s status. But Puerto Rico’s status, its identity, is a discursive whirlwind. A rhetorician reels at the obfuscation. Puerto Rico is a free nation: that’s the Spanish rendering of “a commonwealth.” It is a commonwealth, free, except that it’s a protectorate, under the protection of the U.S. state and military, the military that, until recently, used an inhabited island of Puerto Rico for target practice with fully armed heavy weaponry.

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