ABSTRACT
In a conversation recorded in Vieques in 1998, Ismael Guadalupe, one of the historical leaders of the protest movement against the military presence of the US Navy on the island of Vieques, shared with a group of young activists from the island of Puerto Rico some remarkable episodes of the long struggle of the Viequenses against militarism. He recalled that in 1973 some Viequenses organized a protest to oppose the participation of the US Navy in the Fiestas Patronales (Patron Saint festivities) in Vieques. For Guadalupe, that moment of cultural resistance, led by the Movimiento Viequenses Pro Fiestas Patronales Sin Marina, represented a major victory because it was one of the first times the people of Vieques were able to successfully challenge the Navy presence on their island. After this incident, the Navy never again attempted to take part in the festivities.
For more than 60 years, the military facilities in Vieques, an island located near the eastern coast of Puerto Rico, were part of the US Navy's Atlantic Fleet Weapon Training Facility, which also included bases and target ranges in the island of Culebra and the town of Ceiba, in the eastern coast of Puerto Rico. In this militarized archipelago of Puerto Rico, the US Navy and the Marine Corps trained their military forces by simulating war situations that included amphibious landings, as well as naval gunfire, electronic warfare, air-to-ground, and air-to-air bombings, some of which were conducted with live explosives. After serving in the training of US military forces during the Second World War, Vieques served as a “theater of war” for many conflicts in which the United States or its NATO allies participated during the Cold War, including the Korean War in the 1950s, the Vietnam War in 1960s and 1970s, the invasions of Bay of Pigs in 1961, the Dominican Republic in 1965, Grenada in 1983, and the conflicts in Central American in the 1980s. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Vieques continued to be used as a training facility in the context of the Iraq War in 1992, and the ethnic conflicts in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The planetary expansion of US and NATO military forces in the Atlantic and the Global South cannot be understood if we do not take into consideration the role of Vieques in the globalization of military power and the role of its people in fighting against this global trend of destruction.
When I initially recorded Ismael Guadalupe's testimony, I thought I was dealing with a piece of oral history. This episode was later confirmed by another testimony I recorded in Vieques for a video documentary project on the struggle of Viequenses against the US Navy. While exploring the digital archive of the Archivo Histórico de Vieques, I discovered that the incident mentioned by Guadalupe was associated with the publication in 1973 of Revista Yabureibo, the first bulletin made by Viequenses for Viequenses that focused on Vieques's problems and the negative impact of the US Navy in the island. In this chapter, I would like to highlight the importance of mixing and matching materials from digital archives to discover the political, sociocultural, and literary networks that emerge from the popular struggles of the Global South. First, I describe two digital archives created recently that contain invaluable materials to tell the story of Vieques resistance against global militarization. Then, I briefly discuss my experience navigating these archives and the implications of correlating materials that were not originally linked together in these platforms. In the second part of the chapter, I analyze Revista Yabureibo as a cultural platform and literary discourse in the context of the Vieques struggle against the US Navy and in dialogue with the tensions created by the military presence of the United States in the Global South. To conclude, I will share some reflections about the tensions, challenges, and opportunities that emerge when working with digital archives in the context of Global South studies.
