ABSTRACT
The nineteenth century saw the emergence of both Puerto Rican politics and Puerto Rican literature but not, as elsewhere in Latin America, of a decisive independence movement. Multiple factors related to migration, economics, and race relations contributed to a situation in which both peninsulars and creoles benefited from continued symbiosis. The territory long remained closer to Mary Louise Pratt’s description of a contact zone than to Benedict Anderson’s conception of an imagined community, and despite the existence of an embryonic separatism, local civic and ethnic identity crystallized around a pervasive insistence on hispanidad or Spanishness. Both conservative and liberal island elites embraced self-conceptions as españoles americanos or hispanorriqueños that took shape through political as well as literary discourse. The strength of this cultural construct enabled the survival of the colonial relationship with Spain and in fact survived the 1898 transfer of sovereignty to the United States, after which Spanishness became a mark of Puerto Rican identity repeatedly deployed against the new imperial power.
