Discussion of the assimilation of Puerto Ricans in
the United States has focused on two factors: social standing and the loss of
national culture. In general, excessive stress is placed on one factor or the
other, depending on whether the commentator is North American or Puerto Rican.
Many North American social scientists, such as Oscar Handlin, Joseph
Fitzpatrick, and Oscar Lewis, consider Puerto Ricans the most recent in a long
line of ethnic entrants to occupy the lowest rung on the social ladder. Such a
"sociodemographic" approach tends to regard assimilation as a benign process,
taking for granted increased economic advantage and inevitable cultural
integration, in a supposedly egalitarian context. However, this approach fails
to take into account the colonial nature of the Puerto Rican case, with this
group, unlike their European predecessors, coming from a nation politically
subordinated to the United States. Even the "radical" critiques of this
mainstream research model, such as the critique developed in Divided Society,
attach the issue of ethnic assimilation too mechanically to factors of economic
and social mobility and are thus unable to illustrate the cultural subordination
if Puerto Ricans as a colonial minority.
In contrast, the
"colonialist" approach of island-based writers such as Eduardo SedaBonilla,
Manuel Maldonado-Denis, and Luis Nieves-Falcon tends to view assimilation as the
forced loss of national culture in an unequal contest with imposed foreign
values. There is, of course, a strong tradition of cultural accommodation among
other Puerto Rican thinkers. The writings of Eugenio Fernandez Mendez clearly
exemplify this tradition, and many supporters of Puerto Rico’s commonwealth
status share the same universalizing orientation. But the Puerto Rican
intellectuals who have written most about the assimilation process in the United
States all advance cultural nationalist views, advocating the preservation of
minority cultural distinctions and rejecting what they see as the subjugation of
colonial nationalities.
This cultural and political emphasis is
appropriate, but the colonialist thinkers misdirect it, overlooking the class
relations at work in both Puerto Rican and North American history. They pose the
clash of national culture as an absolute polarity, with each culture understood
as static and undifferentiated. Yet both the Puerto Rican and North American
traditions have been subject to constant challenge from cultural forces within
their own societies, forces that may move toward each other in ways that cannot
be written off as mere "assimilation". Consider, for example, the indigenous and
AfroCaribbean traditions in Puerto Rican culture and how they influence and are
influenced by other Caribbean cultures and Black cultures in the United States.
The elements of coercion and inequality, so central to cultural contact
according to the colonialist framework, play no role in this kind of convergence
of racially and ethnically different elements of the same social
class. |
