US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature and Culture [REVIEW]
Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature and Culture (UP Mississippi, 2021) by Marilisa Jiménez García is a timely monograph on the pervasiveness of US coloniality in Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican diaspora. Through a focus on youth literature and culture, Jiménez García critically centers Afro-Boricua pedagogy to trace the roots of what is presently understood as youth literature and culture in the United States and “speaks to a movement back to community-based education and public projects of critical literacy” (5). In the introduction, Jiménez García writes, “I use the phrase ‘side by side’ to refer to the dynamics of the US and Puerto Rico colonial relationship as one that is functionally dysfunctional, inherently close, and awkwardly ambiguous” (3). Subsequently, the “side by side” dynamic is examined throughout the book with figures like Ángeles Pastor, Isabel Freire de Matos, Pura Belpré, Arturo Schomburg, Nicholasa Mohr, Sonia Manzano, Eric Velasquez, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez, to name a few.
In her careful analysis of youth literature, Jiménez García asks poignant questions that force the reader to reflect with her. One such question which echoes throughout the monograph comes in her introduction: “How would our study of US literature change if we approached the US as a conglomeration of competing settler colonial projects—on Indigenous land—through race, class, gender, and language?” (19). For Jiménez García, the study of youth literature and culture does not occur in a void because these studies do not exist in their own ahistorical space. In fact, studying youth literature and culture means studying US literature and the study of US literature requires an examination of the US as an empire. In Jiménez García’s understanding:
[...] there has been a hesitancy to view the US as an empire, preferring an immigrant paradigm in locating difference rather than a settler colonial model regarding past and present land acquisition, occupation, removal, and continuous displacement of Indigenous populations. Particularly in the case of Latinxs, the dominant discourse lingers on issues of immigration and the border rather than seeing the Latinx presence in the US as a ‘harvest of empire’ (Gonzalez 2000). (14)
In other words, the experiences of Latinxs in the US cannot be separated from the US’s history as an empire, and in turn, the study of US literature—and by extension youth literature—must also include an examination of US imperialism.
Through her extensive interdisciplinary research, Jiménez García traces the foundations of youth literature to the acquisition of Puerto Rico as a US colony and to the waves of migrations from the island to the states at the turn of the twentieth century. Jiménez García demonstrates that the primers for school aged children which were intended to serve as guides for white children to their new Puerto Rican “cousins” or “brothers,” instead serve as the bedrock of US children’s literature. In contrast, Jiménez García examines the development of textbooks and picture books on the island. Additionally, by centering figures like Pura Belpré and Arturo Schomburg, two Afro-Boricua librarians in New York during the Harlem Renaissance, Jiménez García cements Blackness as the foundation for Puerto Rican literature in the US. In her analysis of the great Nicholasa Mohr, Jiménez García examines Mohr’s rejection of an idyllic, romantic Puerto Rico by creating stories which centered Puerto Rican diaspora in the realities of New York life. Furthermore, by examining the role of Spanish in Sesame Street as represented by the character “Maria,” played, and later curated, by Sonia Manzano, Jiménez García explores the role of the Puerto Rican child in children’s television. Finally, Jiménez García closes by paying particular attention to the devastation of hurricanes Maria and Irma by investigating the impact of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton and Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez’s La Borinqueña.
Sonia Nieto, scholar and one of the pillars of the study of Latinx children’s literature, writes in the foreword that Side by Side “serves as confirmation that the future of Puerto Rican and Latinx children’s literature is in good hands” (xi). Indeed, Jiménez García has crafted a book that will impact the study of youth literature and culture for years to come. Very few monographs are presently available on the study of Latinx children’s literature. Side by Side is likely the first, and only one, with a focus on Puerto Rican youth literature and culture, both from the island and its diaspora.
In chapter one, “Indescribable Beings: Reframing a History of Empire and Priming the Public in Illustrated Youth Texts” Jiménez García parallels the creation of illustrated primers and texts in the US by white writers with Puerto Rican writers and educators creating “feminist re-imagining of Afro-Boricua and Taino strategies of resistance and survival” (31). In the first part of the chapter, Jiménez García’s examination of illustrated primers and texts for children after the US invasion of Puerto Rico is a significant aspect of understanding the roots of American youth literature and culture. In close reading Hazelton Wade’s Our Little Porto Rican Cousin (1902), for example, Jiménez García reveals the stereotypes of Puerto Ricans as docile and the island as ahistorical used to quelch anxieties, in particular, about Puerto Ricans and US citizenship. In the second part of the chapter, Jiménez García highlights Puerto Rican educators and writers like Lola Rodríguez de Tío, Eugenio Maria de Hostos, and Manuel Fernandez Juncos, and more, to mark the resistance against US colonial pedagogy and instead bring to the forefront a pedagogy that centered blackness and indigeneity.
In chapter two, “From the Ground Up: Pura Belpré, Arturo Schomburg, and Afro-Boricua Pedagogies of Literacy and Resistance” Jiménez García focuses on the lives and contributions of two Afro-Boricua librarians in New York City. In this chapter, Jiménez García argues, “[...] youth literature, perhaps more than any other kind of literature, is inseparable from Afro-Latinx foundations, specifically Afro-Boricua, through the work of Pura Belpré and Arturo Schomburg” (71). Pura Belpré’s and Arturo Schomburg’s work as librarians in predominantly Black and Spanish-speaking communities serves as an example of using Black pedagogies like Sankofa to “decolonize imagination” to dismantle US coloniality. Jiménez García pays special attention to Eric Velasquez’s illustrations in Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library (2017) and Belpré’s published and unpublished manuscripts to further locate both figures in the making of US and Puerto Rican youth literature and culture.
In chapter three, “Nicholasa Mohr Writes Back: Imagining a Diaspora Child in a Garden of Multiculturalism” Jiménez García presents Mohr as the writer for Puerto Rican children of the diaspora. Mohr challenged existing tropes which idealized the Puerto Rican experience on the island through and as folklore and challenged entirely the erasure of Puerto Rican children from US children’s literature. In this chapter, Jiménez García writes “Youth literature is a political medium that has shaped how dominant and minority cultures imagine childhood and how these cultures imagine the development of their narrative histories” (114). Although, Mohr may not have necessarily seen herself as a writer for children, her foundational works like Nilda (1973) and El Bronx Remembered (1975) shone a light on the experiences of the Puerto Rican children in New York City which served to expand popular imagining of Puerto Rican culture and life. Through Mohr’s literary contributions, Jiménez García raises the “side by side” realities of Puerto Rican belonging in the US.
In chapter four, “The Letter of the Day is Ñ: Sesame Street, a Girl Names Maria, and Performing Multilingualism in Children’s Television” Jiménez García examines the role of Spanish and of Sonia Manzano’s character in the popular TV show, Sesame Street. The attention to language in the constructions of Puerto Rican identity in the US is an important aspect of this chapter. Jiménez García states, “While Sesame Street’s pedagogy of language, as per the show’s mission for equality, ultimately leads to a peaceful coexistence between languages, this coexistence requires a compromise between rivals” (156). Almost from the introduction of “Maria” to Sesame Street, Sonia Manzano had a hand in tailoring her character’s scripts and, with time, was influential in the curation of Puerto Rican culture in the show. However, at the end, Jiménez García reminds readers that Sesame Street nonetheless is a site of “side by side” tensions between the US and Puerto Rico, as represented by the English and Spanish languages.
In chapter five, “How to Survive the End of the World: Founding Fathers, Super Heroines, and Writing and Performing Stories When the Lights Go Out” Jiménez García pays close attention to Hurricanes Maria and Irma and their aftermath in Puerto Rico through the lens of youth literature and culture. In this chapter, Jiménez García parallels Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton on the island with Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez’s La Borinqueña wherein Hamilton is a US capitalist and imperialist project and La Borinqueña serves as an example of Afro-Boricua pedagogy. The chapter closes by shifting to the ways Puerto Rican writers on the island like Georgina Lázaro, Antonio Martorell, Tere Marichal, and Wanda de Jesus have centered Black and Indigenous ways of knowing and being to “create stories which seemingly can survive the end of the world” and share with children modes of resistance and survival that, once again, challenges US imperialism (215).
Side by Side: US Empire, Puerto Rico, and the Roots of American Youth Literature and Culture
by Marilisa Jiménez García
260pgs. University Press of Mississippi. $30.00
Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez is an Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College (CUNY) where she teaches composition, literature, and creative writing. She specializes in US Latinx literature, Latinx children’s and young adult literature, and gender studies. Rodríguez is a current recipient of the 2021 Mellon/ACLS Community College Fellowship. Her research has been published in Children’s Literature and Children’s Literature in Education and in several edited collections.