ABSTRACT
The allure of exotic maidens is one of the oldest tropes of the Western colonizer's masculinist imaginary in the metropole or overseas. US travel books and business journalism portraying turn-of-the-century "Porto Rico" were particularly fond of capturing such maidens - photographically, as may be seen by the profusion of this type of photograph within the mentioned literature. Within this context, it seems that "Porto Rico" became a racially feminized site/sight in the hegemonic, cultural, and literal maps generated in the North American republic, but only insofar as these "native" lands and bodies were simultaneously read through the emerging US heteronormative codification of whiteness. These were some of the fractures that shot through the emerging literary production of US businessmen-voyagers, officials, missionaries, and economic journalists in Puerto Rico as they attempted to address "the closing of the American frontier". Within these master texts, exotic tropical islands such as "Porto Rico" were to be imagined simply as one of those new feminized.
