ABSTRACT
This chapter approaches the long history of narrative Black profiling as a central part of the construction of a White creole (Criollo Blanco) national identity in Puerto Rico during the second half of the nineteenth and the first four decades of the twentieth centuries. First, the analysis of the homegrown literature shows how its discourse typified European characteristics in a poetic narrative using metaphors related to spiritual and mental attitudes and skills. Whereas, telling, describing, and explaining the presence of people from Africa or of African Descent were referred to their physicality: the presence of their bodies. Second, in Puerto Rico, the colonial state acted as the guarantor of the economic and social-based interests in slavery-related institutions and laws. This chapter will discuss how the State's actions intended to curtail their individual and collective agency, and how these views were recast in a new Puerto Rican identity ideology during the first decades of the twentieth century. In consequence, it will be argued that the new narrative about Puerto Rican identity was based on a gaze of power that looked and constructed de-Africanization of the Island's social culture, in general, and the musical culture, in particular, as a problem of bodily presence and embodied sound.
