Centro Journal ISSN: 1538-6279 [email protected] The City University of New York Estados Unidos Negrón - Muntaner, Frances Sin pelos en la lengua : Rosario Ferré’s Last Interview Centro Journal, vol. XXIV, núm. 1, 2012, pp. 154-171 The City University of New York New York, Estados Unidos Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=37730307008 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative 154 CENTRO JOURNAL volume xxiv • number i • spring 2012 Sin pelos en la lengua: Rosario Ferré’s Last Interview frances negrón-muntaner abstract In this rare interview with Rosario Ferré, Frances Negrón-Muntaner engages with the iconic author on a host of issues that remain controversial for critics and readers alike: bilingualism in contemporary Puerto Rican society, cultural nationalism, and the reception of the author’s work in English. Negrón-Muntaner’s opening commentary contextualizes the interview’s central threads, including the politics of language in Puerto Rican society, the importance of Rosario Ferré in recent literary history, and the inherent complications in straddling the demands of various literary traditions and cultural markets. Recorded in 2002, the one-one-one exchange with Ferré poses sharp and challenging questions regarding her work’s racial politics, her sometimes tense relations with other Puerto Rican intellectuals, and the potential of literature to offer Puerto Ricans an enduring sense of self-worth in both political and cultural terms. [Key words: Rosario Ferré, Puerto Rico, Puerto Rican literature, Latino literature, bilingualism] The author ([email protected]) is a filmmaker, writer, and scholar as well as the director of Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. Among her books are: Boricua Pop (NYU Press, 2004)—winner of a CHOICE Award—, and Sovereign Acts (forthcoming, 2012). Her films include Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (Whitney Biennial, 1995), and the upcoming television show, War in Guam. In 2008, the United Nations’ Rapid Response Media Mechanism recognized her as a global expert in the areas of mass media and Latin/o American studies and in 2011 she received Columbia University’s Distinguished Faculty Award. Sin pelos en la lengua: Rosario Ferré’s Last Interview • Frances Negrón-Muntaner 155 writer rosario ferré and i sat down on her covered porch, but we were not alone. Her husband quietly came in and out of the room, and a dog barked behind the main door. While Ferré settled down, I immediately wrote the date, place and time of our encounter so I would not forget: El Condado, January 3, 2002, 1:00 PM. I was there to interview her as part of the research for my book-in-progress Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture, which was eventually published in 2004. Photograph courtesy of Rosario Ferré. I hoped that the conversation would inform a Reprinted by permission. chapter I planned to call “Rosario’s Tongue” (Negrón-Muntaner 2004: 175–209) in the book’s last section, “Boricua Anatomies.” Overall, I was interested in examining why and to what effects specific body parts like tongues, hips, buttocks and hair belonging to Puerto Rican cultural figures had come to signify larger tensions within the national body politic. Specifically, I was intrigued by the shifting place of English, the effects of commodification on Puerto Rican literary production, and the declining power of island Puerto Rican intellectuals in the process of authorizing national culture. The fact that I was in Ferré’s and not anyone else’s porch was then not arbitrary. Following more than two decades of writing for a Spanish-speaking public, in 1995 Ferré decided to start publishing primarily in English. Historically, this was a risky proposition. Among most intellectuals in Puerto Rico, the Spanish language, or simply, la lengua, had been a fundamental prosthesis of the national body politic since the 1898 U.S. invasion of the island and its politically disappointing outcome. As it has been broadly noted, once expectations of home rule withered away after the U.S. imposed colonial rule and took steps to require English as a language of instruction, a new politics of language emerged. Through it, a wide range of social actors seized upon their “Hispanic” heritage to symbolically encase their opposition to the English- speaking “Anglos,” who became major obstacles to their political project. In this context, Puerto Rican literature in Spanish was often called on to perform the role 156 CENTRO JOURNAL • VOLUME XXIV • NUMBER I • 2012 of a “national constitution”—undeniable proof of a distinct Puerto Rican nationality that compensated for the absence of a sovereign state. Not surprisingly, until relatively recently, most prominent Puerto Rican writers (including critics and essayists) tended to imagine themselves as virtual heads of state and protectors of the nation’s integrity against foreign linguistic “penetration.” The symbolic importance of Spanish as a form of cultural defense, however, is not a historical echo from long ago. It is also linked to the undeniable and increasing weight of English in Puerto Rican lives as a result of globalization and mass migration. After hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans migrated to the U.S. in the post World War II period, English stopped being foreign; in fact, it became the mother tongue and/or the primary language of millions of Puerto Ricans residing in the U.S. and elsewhere. In addition, to the extent that Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rico became more incorporated into global circuits of capital, an increasing number of English-language cultural commodities such as movies, television shows and musical recordings made their way to the island. Seeing a new threat to their hegemony, some (bilingual) sectors of the elites re-erected Spanish as a figurative border to stem contamination from both the new U.S.-Puerto Rican cultural formations that necessarily spoke in tongues and from English-language products that began to clutter the local marketplace. Yet it was not only in what language she wrote but also who she was and what she said that made Ferré’s choice seem more like Sophie’s for some. Her parents, however, were not just wealthy; they also constituted a foundational marriage—a rising businessman and a heiress to a patrician hacendado family from Ponce, the other bastion city of the island’s creole elite. Named the “grande dame of Puerto Rican letters” and still one of the island’s few literary celebrities, Rosario Josefina Ferré Ramírez de Arellano was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico on September 28, 1938, to a well-off family. Her parents, however, were not just wealthy; they also constituted a foundational marriage—a rising businessman and a heiress to a patrician hacendado family from Ponce, the other bastion city of the island’s creole elite. In this regard, Ferré was a product of the old and the new; a symbol of a country in transition from what she herself called an “agrarian society of feudal immobility” to “an industrial order linked…to constant transformation.” While Ferré’s class background would have already made her unusual, the family context grew to be more defining as a result of two subsequent events: In 1968, Rosario Ferré’s father, Luis A. Ferré, became the first pro-statehood elected governor in Puerto Sin pelos en la lengua: Rosario Ferré’s Last Interview • Frances Negrón-Muntaner 157 Rico’s history. Then, in 1970, her mother Lorencita died while her father was still in office. At this point, Rosario Ferré came into public view as the nation’s first lady to a man whose decency was widely acknowledged but under whose administration police brutalized students at the University of Puerto Rico during a bloody strike. Even more importantly, as co-founder of the island’s new pro-statehood political party, Luis A. Ferré embodied what both nationalists and socialists dreaded: the slow, if steady, rise of the statehood movement in Puerto Rico. But it was Ferré’s next act that turned her into an iconic figure, even a heroine to an entire generation and those who identified with it. Only two years after stepping down as first lady, Ferré burst into the cultural scene as a supporter of independence and the co-founder of Zona de carga y descarga (“Loading and Unloading Zone”; 1972–1975), a literary journal that radically modernized Puerto Rican letters. Over the course of its nine issues, the journal declared itself as a space for freedom, confrontation, poetry, complexity, and búsqueda, launching a new cohort of writers, whose works came to culturally define this era. Moreover, Zona brought on the professionalization of the Puerto Rican writer, one that was attentive to aesthetic form, stylistic innovation and world literary trends, feeling at home virtually anywhere. Even further, through the journal’s defense of the writer’s autonomy from both the calcified left and the academic elites who they believed were out of touch with Puerto Rican reality, Zona expanded the definition of the political itself. The editors accomplished this by creatively engaging with the very process of subject construction and taking on not only class and race conflict but also gender subordination and homosexual desire as fundamental matters for public and literary discourse. In all these ways, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Zona became a sort of a liberated zone which shifted the very ideological and aesthetic grounds upon which Puerto Rican culture rested in the thick of the Cold War and the radical seventies.