Empire's Remains

2010-05-11T17:54:00.001-07:00

The manuscript studies how the discourses of independence, colonialism, and science clashed in Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American War of 1898 and inaugurated truncated forms of state affiliation that preempted both political and cultural independence. I analyze how the Puerto Rican Nationalists’ insistence on hispanophilic “cultural independence,” as the requisite to political autonomy, substituted culture for the state and confused culture with the politics of the state. In the process, I trace how truncated Puerto Rican citizenship (protected by an act of Congress but not the Constitution) created the conditions that allowed the rise of economic, scientific and biological experiments on the island. Foremost among these experiments was the U.S. supported contraceptive pill trials of the 1950s that eventually posited reproductive “choice” as one of the foundational pillars of Anglo-American feminisms. Through the analysis of primary historical documents (U.S. colonial law, pharmaceutical protocol records, etc.), literature, interviews, photographs, as well as documentary film histories, this book tells the story of how the discourses of science and colonial law created the first territory in the Americas to achieve a middle class without a revolution, and the costs associated with this social experiment in empire building and population management.