ABSTRACT
In 1938, Emilio Belaval, at that time president of the Ateneo Puertorriqueño, delivered his famous manifesto entitled “Lo que podría ser un teatro puertorriqueño.’’ 1 He began: “One of these days we shall come together in order to create a great theater, where everything shall be our own: the theme, the actor, the stage-set, the ideas, the aesthetics. In every people there exists an unimpeachable theatricality that must be recreated by its own artists.” 2 By the decade of the 1930s, the situation of a traditionally Hispanic region controlled by a strong Anglo-Saxon nation had become a source of preoccupation for the island’s intellectuals and led to the publication of Pedreira’s Insularismo and to Albizu Campos’s Nationalist Rebellion, both of whom called for the people of the island to acknowledge their Puerto Ricanness. According to Frank Dauster: “This eagerness to get to know themselves has been of prime importance in all sectors of Puerto Rican life; under the stimulus of a group of historians searching for the true character of the island, the movement became a wide-ranging probe of national reality. In the theatre, it lead to an attempt to establish a theatre which would reflect the island’s reality.” 3 Since the nationalist movement of the 1930s, artists and authors have become ever more concerned with the question of Puerto Rican identity, known as puertorriqueñidad. Through the years this concept has developed from a mere awareness of cultural differences and social and political injustices, to an overt expression of the anguish of so many years of exploitation, and finally, to a deeper probing of the validity of the ideals of liberty which often seem to lead nowhere.
