Caribbean Island Movements: Culebra's Transinsularities 1783488379, 9781783488377

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of contents
Preface
Chapter One Transinsularism from a Caribbean Perspective
General Views of Caribbean Insularities and Mobilities
Plantation
Creole
Transnationalism
The Site
Chapter Two Militarisation and Culebra’s Transinsular Precedents
Colonisation of Passage Island
The Arrival of The U.S. Navy
U.s. Navy Claims Culebra
Culebrenses Claim Culebra
The Aftermath
Conclusion
Chapter Three Conflicted Visions of Land
Visions of Consumable Landscapes
Mobile Insularities
Litigation Over Coastal Access
The Coastal Gentrification Argument
Discrepant Networks in Culebra’s Landscape
Romero’s Rejection of The Noble Savage: Two Instances
Costa Bonita
Estudios Técnicos, Inc.
Binaries Nonetheless
Notes
Chapter Four Working the Ubiquitous Seas
Introduction: How is The Sea?
The Atlantic
The Ship
The Culebra Fishermen’s Association
The Fishing Reserve
Snapperfarm
Conclusion: The Ubiquity of The Sea
Notes
Chapter Five Musical Movements
Music and Place
The Spanish Caribbean: Salsa, From Transnationalism to Nationhood
The English Caribbean: The Steel Band Movement of Trinidad and Tobago
Musical Mobile Insularities
The Sounds of Culebra I: La Sonora Culebrense
The Sounds of Culebra II: Los Isleños
The Sounds of Culebra III: The Culebra Municipal Steel Band
The Sounds of Culebra IV: La Wiki Sound
Sounds of Culebra: Calypso
Mobile Insularities or Improvised Structures in Culebra’s Social Relations
Notes
Conclusion: An Eye on the Creative Tension
References
Index

Citation preview

Caribbean Island Movements

RETHINKING THE ISLAND The ‘Rethinking the Island’ series seeks to unsettle assumptions by comprehensively investigating the range of topological and topographical characteristics that lie at the heart of the idea of ‘islandness’. Series Editors Elaine Stratford, Professor and Director, Peter Underwood Centre for Educational Attainment, University of Tasmania. Godfrey Baldacchino, Professor of Sociology at the University of Malta, UNESCO Co-​Chair in Island Studies and Sustainability. Elizabeth McMahon, Associate Professor in the School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales, Australia. Titles in the Series Theorizing Literary Islands: The Island Trope in Contemporary Robinsonade Narratives, Ian Kinane Island Genres, Genre Islands: Conceptualization and Representation in Popular Fiction, Ralph Crane and Lisa Fletcher Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism: Reading Real and Imagined Spaces, Helen Kapstein Caribbean Island Movements: Culebra’s Trans​insularities, Carlo A. Cubero Islands of Poetry: Exploring Imagination and Materiality, Rajeev S. Patke (forthcoming)

Caribbean Island Movements Culebra’s Transinsularities

Carlo A. Cubero

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26–​34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2017 Carlo A. Cubero All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78348-835-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Is Available ISBN: 978-1-78348-835-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78348-837-7 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—​Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/​NISO Z39.48–​1992. Printed in the United States of America

For Anne

Contents

Preface

ix

1 Transinsularism from a Caribbean Perspective General Views of Caribbean Insularities and Mobilities Plantation Creole Transnationalism The Site

1 8 12 16 23 26

2 Militarisation and Culebra’s Transinsular Precedents Colonisation of Passage Island The Arrival of the U.S. Navy U.S. Navy Claims Culebra Culebrenses Claim Culebra The Aftermath Conclusion

31 34 40 46 48 59 61

3 Conflicted Visions of Land Visions of Consumable Landscapes Mobile Insularities Litigation over Coastal Access The Coastal Gentrification Argument Discrepant Networks in Culebra’s Landscape Romero’s Rejection of the Noble Savage: Two Instances Binaries Nonetheless

65 69 72 74 77 80 85 92

4 Working the Ubiquitous Seas Introduction: How Is the Sea?

97 97

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viii Contents

The Atlantic The Ship The Culebra Fishermen’s Association The Fishing Reserve Snapperfarm Conclusion: The Ubiquity of the Sea

106 107 109 114 117 122

5 Musical Movements Music and Place The Spanish Caribbean: Salsa, from Transnationalism to Nationhood The English Caribbean: The Steel Band Movement of Trinidad and Tobago Musical Mobile Insularities The Sounds of Culebra I: La Sonora Culebrense The Sounds of Culebra II: Los Isleños The Sounds of Culebra III: The Culebra Municipal Steel Band The Sounds of Culebra IV: La Wiki Sound Sounds of Culebra: Calypso Mobile Insularities or Improvised Structures in Culebra’s Social Relations

129 132

Conclusion: An Eye on the Creative Tension

159

References

169

Index

175

134 137 141 143 146 148 151 154 155

Preface

I have vivid memories of my first trip to Culebra. I was sixteen years old. My mother, brother and I woke up at 4 a.m. to drive from San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico and where we lived, to Fajardo, the biggest town on the east of Puerto Rico, to catch the 9 a.m. ferry to Culebra. Culebra is one of the islands that make up the archipelago of Puerto Rico, and it is one of the two offshore municipalities of Puerto Rico. My mother had told me that the island had been used by the U.S. Navy as a military practice range for decades, and that the Navy only left Culebra after a bitter and prolonged grass-​roots struggle where the islanders were successful in claiming their lands back from the military. The departure of the Navy liberated the beaches on the north coast of Culebra, which had a reputation of being among the most beautiful in the world. The only catch was that the Navy had not cleaned the areas where it bombed and a lot of the lands were still littered with unexploded ordinance and, possibly, contaminated with nuclear material. My mother and I thought it would be an interesting place to spend a weekend. I had an impression that Culebra was among the poorest communities in Puerto Rico. This impression was informed by my expectation that its size, 30 sq. km, small population (at the time it was around two thousand; it is closer to four thousand now) and detachment from the Puerto Rican mainland (27 km east of Puerto Rico) would contribute to an isolated experience with limited access to public resources and capital. My expectation was also informed by the stories I had heard of the Navy bombings and the fact that the military had not cleared the lands it polluted. In 1989, Culebra was featured prominently in the Puerto Rican media due to the devastation caused by Hurricane Hugo. I had experienced Hurricane Hugo in San Juan: one wall of our apartment was sucked out by the force of the winds. The electric power and water services were not back online ix

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for weeks after the storm. While San Juan only experienced the edges of the storm, Hurricane Hugo’s eye passed right over Culebra. The islanders experienced winds of up to 250 km per hour for over twenty hours, causing extensive damage to the entire infrastructure on the island. I remember sitting in my neighbour’s living room looking through the newspaper photos of Culebra as my neighbours commented how the island looked as if it had been bombed –​a black-​and-​brown landscape, nothing standing and debris scattered all over the ground. Electric power, water services and aid were slow to arrive in Culebra, accentuating the effects of the disaster. These images contributed to my impression of Culebra as a poor and isolated community, surrounded by a rough sea, still healing from the Navy bombings, administered by a Puerto Rican state insensitive to the island’s needs and living on the margins. I held this image, of a somewhat victimised Culebra, alongside an expectation of resilient islanders, who have experienced horrible natural disasters and who have developed a powerful political consciousness through their struggle against the world’s largest military. For our first visit, we stayed at a hotel on the edges of the main village that faced Ensenada Honda (Deep Cove), the inner bay of Culebra. I was struck by the amount of sailboats anchored in the bay. Where did they come from, where are they going, are they tourists or do people actually live on the boats? Thinking back on that image, I recall it must have been the first indicator for me that Culebra was not necessarily an entirely isolated island, but that, maybe, it was part of a network of sailing stops along the Leeward Islands. My first visit to Flamenco Beach, the most popular beach on the north coast of Culebra, was a powerful experience. The visitor approaches Flamenco Beach by descending a hill, which results in an effect where the beach’s white sand and crystal clear water irradiates with light and contrasts with the dark green of the foliage of the hills and the dark blue sky. Upon arrival to the beach, the brightness of the white sand is almost painful to the eyes and the water is so clear that, depending on the weather conditions, boats look as if they are floating in mid-​air rather than navigating through water. I had never associated this kind of landscape with Puerto Rico. The landscape of Flamenco Beach contrasts with the brown sand and dark blue water that is common of beaches in San Juan and along the north coast of Puerto Rico. It gave Flamenco a foreign feeling to it, as if I was not in Puerto Rico. This uncanny feeling was heightened by the presence of military tanks rusting along the shores of the beach. These rusting tanks, I later learned, are part of the extensive materiel that the U.S. Navy left in Culebra after its departure. The Navy’s presence is also felt by fences that cordon off sections of the area due to the danger posed by bombs, mines, grenades and other unexploded ordinance.

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It was the nature of Culebra that really fascinated me during my first visits. The eastern coast of Culebra has beautiful underwater life, big colourful reefs, a wide variety of fish species, turtles, dolphins, different species of shark, lobsters, conch and so on. As a snorkel and scuba aficionado, I was totally in awe of the marine life in Culebra. We continued to visit Culebra on a fairly regular basis and, eventually, I would start going alone or camping with friends. The first acquaintances that I had on the island were fellow tourists, hikers, scuba buddies and campers. During the mid-​1990s, when I was studying my undergraduate degree at the University of Puerto Rico, I noticed how, for many of my peers, Culebra was a metonym for excess and partying. For my peers, Culebra was one of the possible destinations to go on long weekends, particularly during Easter, which is a public holiday in Puerto Rico, and enjoy the beach while partying with drugs and alcohol. To this day, it is estimated that thirty thousand visitors come to Flamenco Beach during Easter. The majority of tourists who come to Culebra are Puerto Rican. However, since the late 1990s, there has been a steady rise in international tourists, coming from all continents. Upon completing my undergraduate, I was hired by Father Juan José Santiago, S.J., a San Juan-​based Jesuit priest, to coordinate a non-​governmental organisation that offered support services to the Catholic parish of Culebra. Father Santiago had been a regular visitor of Culebra for years and, like many others, was drawn by the serenity of Flamenco Beach and the pace of the island. In the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo, Catholic parishioners of Culebra approached Father Santiago to ask for assistance in rebuilding the church and the communal centre that had been destroyed during the storm. Father Santiago led a fundraising campaign to rebuild the church’s community centre. Upon completion of the building, I was hired to coordinate the activities of the centre. The main projects that we managed to complete were the establishment of a library and after-​school study programme. It was during these two years, 1999–​2001, that I began to visit Culebra on a more consistent basis –​almost every weekend –​and began meeting island residents. During these regular visits, I began to appreciate the cosmopolitan quality of Culebra life and started to be confronted with its complex identity politics. One of my first observations in Culebra was that most of the businesses in the main town of Culebra were not run by native-​born islanders, but by people who had immigrated to the island. None of these immigrants come from their place of birth, but had lived in multiple places before settling in Culebra and, my suspicion was, that it was a matter of time until they moved on. I also noticed an extensive European and North American population on the island. They own many businesses in Culebra and have a strong presence in daily life, but they did not seem to represent a significant political lobbying group.

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My biggest concern, at the time, was the difficulty and confusion I was experiencing of having to identify a group of people who could be categorised as culebrenses or genuine representatives of the island’s interests. I felt that I needed to develop a general understanding of the terms, needs, discourses and interests of the Culebra community in order to network properly and coordinate resources for the Catholic community centre. I found early on that the term culebrense is often used in Culebra in ways that connote a local or a native. It is a powerful marker of identity and exclusion. It is often evoked in contexts that speak towards the credibility of a person in Culebra and to ascertain the legitimacy of an individual’s stance on a given topic, in opposition to a Puerto Rican mainlander, an islander from Vieques (the other offshore municipality of Puerto Rico that lies 14 km south of Culebra), a tourist or an immigrant. However, I found that the terms of what is a culebrense to be inconsistent and I was not appreciating a pattern in the ways in which a person is classified to be culebrense or not. The way the term was used suggested that it describes an individual who was born on the island and, maybe, has had his or her umbilical cord buried on the island. However, the vast majority of people who are referred to as culebrense were born in the hospital in Fajardo, regardless of the fact that there is a professional midwife on the island who works in the public clinic of Culebra. I also considered the possibility that culebrense could be a term associated with certain practices or the development of reciprocal relationships in the community. I often asked myself, can someone become a culebrense by, say, fishing in the traditional way, learning to play music in a certain way or living on the island with enough time to show a commitment to its social relations? I found the answer to be consistently negative. Culebra has received a large amount of immigrants who have made the island their home and have made significant contributions to Culebra –​for example, social workers, medical doctors, teachers, artists, civil servants, environmental activists, fishermen and business people. And yet, there are certain social spaces that these individuals will not have access to, such as running for mayor, nor did it seem to me that these individuals’ voices will carry as much credibility when advocating for island-​wide Culebra policy. I found the permanence of this glass ceiling regardless of the amount of time these individuals have spent on the island, their charisma and reciprocity networks. My intuition at the time was to connect the idea of culebrense and Culebra identity to the geographical dimensions of the island itself. I figured that the idea of culebrense, while complex and inconsistent, may be based on a collective of individuals who maintain a generational connection to the island and are active in developing social networks among others whose parents and grandparents also had strong connections to the place. However, this biological-​ geographical determinism soon got complicated for me when

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I started to know more about islanders’ biographies and, particularly, where their families had lived. I found that many of the people referred to as culebrenses whom I had been interacting with had experienced a significant part of their lives outside of Culebra, primarily in Puerto Rico, United States, Virgin Islands and other islands of the Caribbean. I found this interesting on two grounds. First, it questioned the biological-​geographical determinism that would limit the Culebra experience to the island’s shores. It suggested the possibility of a transnational Culebra experience, of diasporic communities, and so posed a further complication to the idea that the notion of a Culebra community could be easily visualised or mapped, and questioned the idea of a singular Culebra experience. Second, I was surprised to learn about the island’s connection to the non-​Spanish Caribbean. While Puerto Rican scholarship and historiography acknowledges the transnational and mobile nature of the Puerto Rican experience, this mobility has been written as if it were routed through imperialist networks. For example, the normative narrative of the emergence of a Puerto Rican national consciousness in the nineteenth century emphasises on the contributions made by elites educated in Spain. This legacy is still present today among the conservative nationalist elements in Puerto Rico who look to Spanish nationalism for semiotic references. In the twentieth century, when Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States, the focus of attention shifted to the United States and the research concerning Puerto Rican identity was recast in relation and opposition to the U.S. imperialist project. Within the regional context, Puerto Rican identity has consistently been represented as a constitutive component of the Spanish Caribbean or Latin America. As a consequence of this kind of characterisation, Puerto Rico is discursively excluded from the broader Caribbean experience and vice versa. It results in the drafting of an isolated land-​based experience that reproduces imperial divisions of the Caribbean archipelago. Learning about the culebrense connection to the English and French Caribbean highlighted, for me, the way in which public and academic research on the Caribbean has not given much attention to the relationships between the islands and the archipelagic movements that transcend imperial markers of difference such as French, Spanish, English and Dutch Caribbean. I also learned that the relationship between Culebra and the English-​ speaking Caribbean is not limited to the islanders’ biographies, but it is a part of daily life. The bars and dance halls of Culebra often feature music and performers from the English-​speaking Virgin Islands. Most of my new friends were into Jamaican dance-​hall reggae, calypso and introduced me to roots reggae groups from St. Croix and other Virgin Islands. Radio broadcasts from St. Thomas can be received in Culebra and are often tuned into. Culebrenses make an effort to go to St. Thomas for its carnival on their own boats. I had

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to acknowledge these facts to realise that Culebra is physically closer to St. Thomas than to Puerto Rico –​27 km east of Puerto Rico and 19 km west of St. Thomas –​and plainly visible from the north-​western parts of Culebra. When I finally got to visit the Virgin Islands, I could not help noticing the similarities between the Virgin Islands and Culebra in terms of the vegetation and general aesthetic of the landscape. After a few months of visiting Culebra on a regular basis, I visited Prof. Carlos Buitrago at the University of Puerto Rico. Prof. Buitrago was my anthropology professor during my undergraduate and we had developed a friendship towards my last semesters at the University of Puerto Rico. I showed up at his office without an appointment, as it was customary with Buitrago, and I started talking about my observations and confusions in Culebra. I asked something to the effect of ‘how can one account for the reproduction of such an exclusionary and insular identity category such as culebrense in a place that is constituted by transients?’ I also shared with him my frustration at the ways in which Puerto Rican ethnography has tended to focus on the insular and colonial aspects of Puerto Rican culture and has bypassed the Antillean context. I remember going on tangents and railing against academics, politicians, journalists and artists who imagine the Puerto Rican experience as a binary opposition between the United States and Puerto Rico. Ultimately, my confusion revolved around the theme that I was getting frustrated that I was not able to come to terms with the idea of a ‘Culebra community’ when the concepts that I had learned in my anthropology courses –​ethnicity, language, class, country of origin, reciprocity, ties to land, practices, etc. –​were not consistent on the island. I felt this question was important at the time because I was trying to build up a productive network with the islanders and coordinate programmes that would be sensitive and interesting for the islanders. After some thirty minutes of me talking and pacing around his office, Buitrago’s responded with ‘Culebra is not an island’. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Culebra is a node. Imagine it a knot in a fishing net and people are coming and going in different directions for different reasons or maybe no reason at all. People move because they move. You are presuming that Culebra is an isolated location.’ During the rest of the conversation, he kept confronting me with assumptions and expectations I had been carrying such as, Culebra’s homogeneity, its stable population, my concern that the islanders were inward looking and exclusionary and that culebrense was something to worry about when it came to designing programmes for the community centre. As I left the office a few hours later, Buitrago repeated the phrase: ‘Remember, Culebra is not an island’. I have held on to that phrase since then. It feels right and convincing to me. But it is an odd phrase and it has been a challenge for me to explain

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what I mean to friends and colleagues. If it’s not an island, then what is it? How do you design policy for an island that is not an island? What kind of programmes should be organised at a community centre when there is no stable community? I would not try to answer these questions definitively, but I would not ignore them either. I kept them in the back of my mind as I continued to organise books for the community centre’s library, make arrangements for the leaky roof to be fixed, identify a computer programmer who would install a server so that the desktop computers would have Internet, promote the centre in town, plan for the opening of a dental clinic that never materialised, contribute to cultural events and broaden my network on the island. It was during these months that I met the people who would become key informants for this study and my closest friends in Culebra. My first experiences in Culebra were informed by the views of Rubén Vargas, Alexis Bermúdez, Father Hilario Rivera, Jorge Acevedo, Wiki Munet, Rubén Munet, Larry Creque, Nestor Romero, Digna Feliciano, Mario Albert, Benjamín Pérez and most significantly Dolly Camareno. During my tenure at the community centre, Dolly worked at the mayor’s office, and I collaborated with her in the project of reprinting the first history book of Culebra, written by ex-​mayor Claro Feliciano. We have stayed in touch since. Dolly’s passion for Culebra, her creativity, generosity, vision, temperament, consistency, will, wisdom and self-​sacrifice have been incredibly inspiring for me. I am very grateful to have met such an extraordinary person to share my views of Culebra with and get feedback. If it were not for her, this book would be much thinner. By the end of my two-​year contract with the community centre, I had developed enough knowledge on Culebra to put together a proposal for graduate research at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester. I have had an interest in cinema since I was a child, and I wanted to explore the possibility of making a documentary about Culebra that would show the different ways in which Culebra is not an island. My first ethnographic project in Culebra was a short film, shot over Easter. I wanted to show two contrasting perspectives on Easter in Culebra. I filmed Father Hilario Rivera and his team making preparations and carrying out the activities for Easter and I filmed tourists enjoying and partying at Flamenco Beach. The exercise was my favourite exercise of the film course and I became confident of the possibility of making more films in Culebra. The next film I made in Culebra was my MA graduation film, Working the Restless Seas. The film was an attempt to show how the Culebra experience is linked to the sea. The intention of this film was to interrogate the land-​centred bias of representations of islands, which leads to imagining them as isolated units. By focusing on the maritime orientations of Culebra, I figured I would be contributing to a discourse that expanded the space that constitute islands and provoke viewers

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to consider that the sea is not the limit of the island experience but one of its constitutive components. This film was made thanks to the collaboration of the Culebra Fishermen’s Association, Mary Soto, Annie Solís, Arquelio Feliciano, Flores Soto, Teresa Tallevast, Anastacio Soto and Brian O’Hanlon. The film was funded by Sea Grant and I am grateful to Manuel Valdés Pizzini for his support in this production. After completing my MA, I stayed in Manchester and enrolled to the PhD programme in Social Anthropology using Visual Media at the University of Manchester. In my PhD proposal, I contextualised my questions on Culebra identity within Caribbeanist research. I argued that the contradictions I was observing regarding Culebra island identity were illustrative of a broader tension within Caribbeanist research. On the one hand, the Caribbean is written about as a global example of creolisation, miscegenation and at the forefront of modernity and globalisation. These characterisations point to the region’s postmodern condition and its open-​ended quality, carry the potential to transcend the confining consequences of identity politics and place it at the vanguard of global trends. On the other hand, the Caribbean is also described as a marginalised location, on the fringes of capitalist development, the Third World, a late entry into anthropological discourse and as a region characterised by internal fragmentations and inconsistent democratic institutions. These characterisations suggest the continuation of colonial relations, accompanied by the reproduction of race-​based identity markers of difference, and fragment the archipelago into discreet imperial spaces such as Spanish, English, French and Dutch Caribbean regions. These characterisations point to the region’s inward perspective, its isolation, alienation and static character. I was concerned that these conflicting visions of the Caribbean reproduced an alternating cycle that oscillated between victimising and romanticising the region. My expectation was that the process of fieldwork would provide materials and experiences that would allow me to present an alternative to this cycle. In my research proposal, I described how I intended to explore ways in which I could take these two discourses seriously and consider the possibility that they operate in tandem. Island identities, I proposed, are not exclusive singularities that look onto themselves. They are necessarily networked, open, ongoing and practice-​based. At the same time, markers of island difference are central to the Culebra experience and to the islanders’ empowerment strategies. I wondered if there could be a way of understanding culebrense identity as a democratic project, an open-​ended and cosmopolitan process, while retaining its specificity, activism and exclusivity. I wished to be able to come across an alternative approach and representation of identity that would account for its fluidity, inconsistency and practice-​based character, while at the same time take seriously its exclusionary effects and conceptual underpinnings.

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In this book, I will be arguing that insularising discourses produce mobile practices and vice versa. That is, rather than representing a region that oscillates between victimhood and romanticisation or a site that is constituted by two significations operating in tandem, I will propose a relation where mobility informs insularity and insularity informs mobility. In the following chapters, I intend to demonstrate how culebrense claims for uniqueness reference a specific network of relations and spaces that construct the island experience as mobile. Concomitantly, the practice of moving, referencing different sites and travelling produces a unique island experience. I call this mutually informing process ‘transinsular’. The term transinsular is my attempt to address a unique island experience that is in relation across multiple island spaces, goes beyond colonial geographies, is constituted through other spaces, incorporates and transverses the archipelago and presents the possibility of rethinking island on its own terms, rather than subjecting islands to a continental perspective. I also proposed to make a documentary film for my PhD, which would illustrate as well as contribute to the understandings of culebrense complex identity politics. Making a film, my reasoning went, would put me in a position where the conceptual and methodological aspects of identity discourse would be secondary to the phenomenal, practice-​based and performative aspects of constructing a sense of self on the island. My PhD film, entitled Mangrove Music, is edited as a parallel narrative between two music groups in Culebra. The parallel narrative was intended to highlight similarities between the two groups, mainly the fact that their creative process is informed by travel. I placed the film three-​quarters through my dissertation, expecting it to function as a chapter of the thesis and as one more way in which my argument on Culebra’s identity politics plays out. While placing the film as a chapter of my PhD may suggest that the film is dependent on the dissertation’s discursive contextualisation in order to make sense, the film was accepted to numerous international film festivals and was awarded the 2008 Rollins Documentary Award by the National Popular Culture & American Culture Associations. The film, and other materials on Culebra that I have not included in this book, can be accessed online at www.transinsular.org. After submitting my research proposal, I returned to Culebra where I lived for twelve months participating and observing everyday life on the island. During this time, I reconnected with the network that I had developed during my time as coordinator of the Catholic community centre and expanded it. This period was the most insightful experience I had in Culebra and the bulk of the material for this book is drawn from my experiences during those twelve months. I am particularly grateful for the insights that were shared to me by Khalil Thomas, Larry Creque, Flores Soto, the Munet family, Benjamín Pérez, José Peñalbert, José Gómez, Noramid Peña, José Pérez

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Acosta, Anabelle Havrilla, Nicolás Gómez, Lisette Gómez, Edgardo Romero, Nestor Romero, Rosarito Morales, the Ayala family, the Vargas family, Monchín Feliciano, Lourdes Feliciano, Luisita Feliciano, Thomas Tangvald, Paul Franklyn, Mary Anne Lucking, Abbie White, Jacques Chappuis, Luis Ayala, Diane Simard, Vladimir Pérez with whom I must have spent countless hours arguing about Culebra politics over rum and juice and Jaime Rivera, with whom I spent hours listening to Culebra poems while drinking beer, among many, many others. Upon completing my prescribed period of fieldwork, I returned to Manchester where I wrote what became the first draft of this book. That draft was informed by my regular meetings with Prof. Peter Wade, who provided consistent support and valuable insight into the ideas that I present here. In fact, it was Prof. Wade who suggested the word transinsular during one of our brainstorm meetings. If it were not for Prof. Wade’s diligence, example, confidence and enthusiasm I am sure that I would not have completed my draft on time. It was during my time in Manchester that I edited Mangrove Music. I am very grateful to the team at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, particularly Prof. Paul Henley who was very generous with his time. He would be consistently available to visit me at the edit suite to offer suggestions on possible narrative strategies. His optimism and positive approach towards deadlocks and editing problems were profoundly helpful and inspiring to me. Prof. Wade’s and Prof. Henley’s influence has gone beyond the scope of this project. Their approach towards anthropology and their way of managing resources and people have been a source of inspiration for me since completing my degree and leaving Manchester. A few years after completing my PhD project, I took a position at Tallinn University. During my time in Estonia, I directed more attention to continuing my curiosity in audiovisual ethnography and collaborated in projects that looked into other formats such as museum collections, street festivals, art installations and sound works, as a means to understand and convey a social experience. However, I still had an opportunity to discuss my Caribbeanist interests with colleagues from the Centre for Landscape and Culture, chaired by Prof. Hannes Palang. The opportunity to write this book was presented to me by Dr. Tauri Tuvikene, a member of the Centre for Landscape and Culture, who forwarded me the link that announced the call for book proposals for this series. I would also like to acknowledge Dr. Franz Krause who offered me valuable feedback on my book proposal and was very generous in allowing me to continue on his research grant after his tenure at Tallinn was completed. Franz’s grant ‘Volatile waters, local lives, and global change: negotiating hydrosocial processes in the anthropocene’ (PUT690) provided financial support for me to carry out fieldwork in 2016 and offer Dr. Joe Hayns-​Worthington remuneration for proofreading the manuscript.

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The academic and administrative staff of the School of Humanities, specifically Kristel Toom and Denis Kuzmin, provided me with a lot of encouraging support that allowed me to complete this project. I am particularly grateful for the sabbatical leave that was granted to me in order for me to carry out additional fieldwork and time to write my chapters. I am also grateful to the editorial board of Suomen Antropologi and Tourism, Culture, and Communication who extended permission to use material that I published in their journal to be included in chapters 2 and 3, respectively. My deepest gratitude and source of inspiration is the staff, graduate researchers and undergraduate students of the Social Anthropology curriculum at Tallinn University. For the past years, I felt very fortunate to be able to work in an environment surrounded by people with an insatiable curiosity, creativity and intellectual bravery. It is probable that they are not consciously aware of it, but I have found my motivation and inspiration from my conversations with them, their seminar sessions and, most significantly, from the dissertations that I have had the privilege to supervise. The list would be too long to be complete, but I would specifically like to mention Piibe Kolka, Polina Tšerkassova, Jonathan Miles-​Watson, Hugo Reinert, Aet Annist, Joonas Plaan, Eeva Kesküla, Lorenzo Cañás-​Bottos, Liis Tuulberg, Helelyn Tammsaar, Kätlin Kaganovitš, Mikhail Fiadotau, Main Uddin, Madara Bunkše, Pinqing Wu, Kirsika Olev, Helina Savi, Jaak Sova, Marianne Kaarma, Karmen Tornius, Marianna Lepasson, Kristiina Pilvet, Mariliis Rannama, Agaate Antson and Liis Serk. I am grateful to Amaranta Heredia (Ülase 12), Silva Suhaņenkova (National Library of Latvia) and Roger Canals (University of Barcelona) who invited me to present draft sections of this book at their institutions. Preparing and presenting these lectures were very useful for me to test out the general ideas and concepts of this book. They also kick-​started my writing. My conversations with Klāvs Sedlenieks at Rīga Stradiņš University have informed many ideas and phrases in these chapters. His enthusiasm and commitment to anthropology was something I held on to in my moments of doubt. Finally, and most important, I would especially like to acknowledge Triinu Mets, Enrico Barone, Ivo Tšetõrkin and Marje Ermel whose world view, approach to life, positivity and wisdom have served as models for me. I found my sense of home in Estonia through their friendship.

Chapter One

Transinsularism from a Caribbean Perspective

This study is the result of a long-​term interest in insularising identity discourses and practices in contexts that are self-​conscious of their experience of interconnection and mobility (Cubero 2008, 2010, 2013, 2015a, 2015b). In this book, I examine the relationship between insularising and mobile discourses and practices as it plays out on the Caribbean island of Culebra, located on the western end of the Virgin Island archipelago. I was initially drawn to Culebra because of the significance associated with its location. The thirty-​square-​kilometre island is located amid different Caribbean discursive spaces that are normatively understood to operate independently of each other, that is, the Spanish Caribbean (Puerto Rico and Vieques), Danish Caribbean (U.S. Virgin Islands) and the British Caribbean (British Virgin Islands). While Culebra is administratively part of the Puerto Rican archipelago, which in turn is a colony of the United States, Culebra islanders challenge Puerto Ricanness by engaging in meaningful relations with Caribbean spaces that do not form part of its normative colonial regime. I became interested in the significance of the relationship of Culebra with other Caribbean spaces on two grounds. In one instance, I wanted to explore Culebra islanders’ transcolonial engagements as a possibility to contribute to research that takes seriously the connections between the islands (Fog Olwig 2007; Puri 2003) and to a vision that imagines the Caribbean archipelago as an amorphous, always shifting and chaotic space (Benítez-​Rojo 1989), in opposition to the view that imagines an archipelago divided into discreet imperial units –​English, Spanish, Dutch, French and Danish. In the second instance, I wished to explore the idea of a social life that is constituted in movement –​a life that continuously traverses and transgresses colonial markers of difference. I wondered about the relationship between a life in movement and the fashioning of an emancipatory political programme, the 1

2

Chapter One

development of a cosmopolitan ethic and its implications for creative practices like music, cinema and art. As my fieldwork progressed in Culebra from 1998 until the present, I found that the stories of the islanders go beyond the regional dynamics of the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. They are stories that reference the entire Caribbean archipelago and numerous continental locations. I became excited, for example, by the opportunity of living and working among people whose musical practices do not correspond with colonialist conflations that fix music to specific islands and their colonial history, as in the isomorphism suggested between calypso and the English Caribbean or salsa and the Spanish Caribbean. I also became intrigued by what I observed to be a political awareness that bypasses the United States versus Puerto Rico divide and referenced spaces that lie outside of the normative field of colonial relations. Most significantly, I was struck by the high level of mobility of Culebra islanders, the variety of people moving through the island, its internal differences and the effect this pluralism had on daily life and historical narratives. These initial experiences contrasted with views of the Caribbean that imagined islands as isolated units, separated from each other physically by the alienating effects of the sea and imperialist policy. The movements that I became interested in constitute various networks of people, ideas and goods that traverse discursively discrepant sites and, in doing so, inform the contours of the island experience. These movements operate outside prescribed notions of colonial history, language, ethnicity, landed narratives and musical identities. When taken seriously, these networks have the capability to deconstruct the notion of an ‘island’ as an insular or isolated space. I saw in the story of Culebra the possibility of an island place that is open, goes beyond its physical and discursive confines and functions more as a connector than an isolator of social experiences. These movements ultimately serve to inform a sense of unique island identity. During my research, I found that the discourses that produce and reproduce located island identities are inescapable in the construction of a Caribbean identity. Colonial legacies, such as language, ethnicity and landed narratives, are fundamental building blocks in the imaginings of Caribbean islanders’ sense of place and political awareness. The island nation state, and its concomitant ideas, continues to be an important resource for Caribbeans’ sense of self-​determination and a tool for political action in a globalised world (Payne 1978; Price and Price 1997). In the specific context of Culebra, the rhetoric of islandness and island uniqueness is selectively deployed to override transnationalisms and contest homogenising global initiatives that go against local understandings of what does it mean to live and belong to the island.



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3

A way in which movement is restrained in the construction of Caribbean island experience is through representations of the Caribbean that cluster islands according to their colonial histories and conflate these histories with cultural identities. Caribbeanist research and discourse tends to unproblematically fragment the archipelago into linguistic regions, which corresponds to their colonial past, that is, Spanish, English, French, Danish and Dutch. These regionalisations classify Caribbean islands according to their linguistic practices and construct a history and an ethnographic present which does not attend to the relationships that occur between island groups that do not share linguistic affinities. In this way, Caribbean islands are constructed as disconnected from each other, developing a discourse of island identity independent of other islands while maintaining connections to their colonial metropolis (Puri 2003). These approaches to the Caribbean reproduce discourses of empire by constructing islands as operating exclusively within their linguistic and former colonial space. While the partition of the Caribbean corresponds to its colonial past, the insularisation of the islands was reproduced and reified in the nation-​building processes that ensued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, giving rise, for instance, to the notion of a national subject presupposed to have provenance from a specific island and identified with a specific island-​ethnic discourse, such as Jamaican, Martiniquan, Puerto Rican or Haitian. Meanwhile, the wealth of research dedicated to Caribbean migration out of the region and its global role has not been matched by research projects that look into the interregional migrations or other movements that do not correspond to the centre-​periphery or empire-​colony binary of movement, regardless of data which demonstrate regional migrations as prevalent (Puri 2003: 2). ‘Movement’ –​global as well as intraregional –​has been constitutive of Caribbean social life. However, mobility accounts for only half the story of Caribbean islandness. Narratives of Caribbean cultural identity create insular spaces and cluster the islands into colonial histories at the same time as constructing the region as a global example for creolisation, diversity and transculturalism. Concomitantly, the notion of a Creole society, born out of a process of global movements and travel, is empirically capable of reproducing discourses of island uniqueness and suggests a series of distinct nations. I will argue that the Culebra island experience is shaped and expressed through a double condition of being simultaneously isolated and connected, mobile and insular. It is a condition that acknowledges the peculiarity of island narratives, understands that they are shaped in movement, in contact with otherness, and relies on these multiple references and travel to constitute an insular world view. I call this double condition transinsular. My take on transinsularism is methodologically inspired by transnationalist discourse

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in the sense that it recognises the reciprocal relations that inform multiple locations (Glick-​Schiller et al. 2005). Transinsularism also acknowledges the ways in which islands retain and develop their specificity in relation to other sites, rather than assimilate, collapse or otherwise fold into a single entity with its relational locations. Transinsularism is an attempt to make a positive case for the creative potential of Caribbean island experiences on their own terms. Transinsularism is a critique of the terms used to describe the Caribbean experience. I would argue that concepts such as creolisation and the slave plantation have tended to present an inconsistent picture of the Caribbean, which alternates between the romantic and victimised or the attractive and repulsive (Lowenthal 2007; Sheller 2003). For example, the way the concept of Caribbean creolisation has historically been used in Caribbeanist research suggests a move towards archipelagic homogenisation and yet it is also used to describe island specificities. To what degree, then, can a singular concept of creolisation account for a homogenising, conservative and traditionalist view of pan-​Caribbean culture at the same time as for a revolutionary, island-​ specific and new plural voice of the archipelago? In a similar vein, was the slave plantation a site of imperialist insularisation, the laboratory where racial imaginaries were invented and enacted, or was it an open site of creolisation, resistance and creativity? On what grounds could Caribbeanist researchers make the case for island specificity and argue for pan-​Caribbean creolisation, argue for pan-​Caribbean solidarity and maintain markers of regional difference based on imperial legacies and make the case for racial democracy on racial terms? I suggest that at the heart of this paradox, and its consequent confusion, is a logic that understands mobility and insularity as opposing forces in the constitution of a place-​based political programme. As an alternative, I propose a narrative that understands the tension generated by mobility and insularity as constitutive of Caribbean island life. In this chapter, I will review the ways in which some strands of scholarship on the Caribbean describe social life with categories suggestive of marginality, peripherality, provincialism, isolation, the pristine and the conservative. I will then contrast these characterisations with another set of representations that stress the West Indies’ mobile quality, which I connect to cosmopolitanism, the hybrid, migratory, the postmodern and the improvisational. From the transinsularist perspective, the double condition of concepts like plantation system and creolisation discourse does not represent a paradox or a negative contradiction that renders the Caribbean into a schizophrenic state of confusion. Rather, I will argue that this double condition represents a creative tension from where Caribbean islanders draft their awareness of place, political narratives and develop creative practices.



Transinsularism from a Caribbean Perspective

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A goal of this book is to show how the tensions suggested by Caribbeanist identity discourses present themselves as a creative contradiction when appreciated in their respective contexts. My findings are based on multiple periods of participant observation in Culebra from 1998 to 2016 and through the development of close relationships with specific individuals on the island. An important component of my findings, and central to the transinsularist approach, is that Culebrenses continuously exercise their own agency in the crafting of their experience of the island. The idea of an island identity, I will argue, is not determined by historically defined structural features, such as colonialism, race and language. Nor is it geographically determined (‘you are Culebrense because you are born and bred in Culebra’). Identity, I learned in Culebra, is not an objective structure that dictates individuals’ subjectivities (Rapport 2004). Rather, I found that the people whom I had the pleasure of interacting with and who graciously offered me their time and space were conscious participants in the construction of creative practices that give shape to the island’s discourse. The island experience, from this point of view, is not a predetermined given that can be easily identified and measured. The island experience that I found was constituted by individuals who, through the exercise of their individual capabilities, generated a unique place for themselves in relation to other locations. Culebrense, from a transinsular point of view, is a product of islanders’ agency, a political rhetoric, a creative practice and, as such, it is an inconsistent signifier. There is no consensus in Culebra of what are the defining features of a culebrense. The population is too mobile, too heterogeneous –​social relations too ephemeral –​and there is little consistency among the habitual structural markers of difference, such as ethnicity, place of birth, language and kinship, to ascertain with confidence that the collection of individuals who live in Culebra are beholden to a unified definition called Culebra identity. In the chapters that follow, I will be making the case that the events, contests and practices that have become part of Culebra’s story are the result of individuals who struggle, or otherwise make effort, to bring about a life project and materialise a world view for themselves and for their fellow islanders. The efforts of Culebra islanders are continuous, restless and entail different degrees of risk. These struggles include, for example, efforts against imperial militarism and homogenising nationalist policies to contest development programmes on the islanders’ terms, to create distinctive music in a context of increasing commodification, to organise festive events and to fish in the ways individuals see fit regardless of the health hazards involved. The efforts and struggles I am thinking of are efforts associated to a practice-​based identity, to dwelling and to the process of building, cultivating and crafting a life on the island.

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Chapter One

These efforts acknowledge that to choose to live and stay in Culebra is to accept the challenge to live in a cosmopolitan environment, engage with contesting visions of the same place, accept conflict as a norm and understand when is it that individual trajectories align and when they do not. Identity does not take the shape of a structural entity that imposes itself on individuals. For me, identity has been a methodology that allows me to focus my gaze on commensality, relationships and practice-​based politics. What follows is the idea of a culebrense identity that is a product of individual agencies and not the cause for people’s actions on the island. That is, Culebra islanders do what they do in order to dwell their culebrenseness rather than because of a preexisting culebrense structure (Rapport 2004). To give attention to the capability of individuals to substantiate their sense of place in Culebra is also a recognition of the plurality that manifests itself in Culebra. In the chapters that follow, I will be showing ways in which individuals living in Culebra make multiple and discrepant claims on the island. During the early stages of my fieldwork, I would envision Culebra as a site where a series of circles, networks or paths converge as they continue on to other locales. The image I drew on the sand was similar to the logo of the Olympic Games with each circle representing different values that individuals ascribe to Culebra. As I looked at the drawing and pondered on those circles and paths, it dawned on me that many of the ideas represented in those circles were couched on the idea that Culebra was a fixed location, an easily definable insular island space. While these networks of individuals carrying specific images and intentions physically met in Culebra, they not always engaged in tolerant dialogue with each other –​if they did at all. Perhaps, I wondered, Culebra’s cosmopolitanism is another way to discuss the mobile insularities, the different creative synergies that come together on the island and its necessary conflicts. In each of the chapters that follow, I will be addressing the variety of images and futures for Culebra that are produced and fought for by its approximate population of 3500. As I held on to the image of the Olympic circles converging in Culebra, I was reminded of what Walter Benjamin referred to as the ‘dialectical image’ (Benjamin 1999). Walter Benjamin relies on the idea of a dialectical image as an indication of the complexities of modernity –​a surreal object, a dynamic commodity, shape-​changing and yet of such cultural influence that it invokes mimetic strategies and claims of ownership. The irony here is that the power of islands lies in their capacity to attract people who do not settle on them. The island of Culebra exists and is constituted through its transients. In the following chapter, I will be describing how transients have left behind traces of their claims on Culebra, resulting in a montaged landscape. For Michael Taussig, the overlays and montages that play out in coastal areas are reminiscent of Freud’s depiction of fantasy as a play of contradictory memories



Transinsularism from a Caribbean Perspective

7

where the real and fictional, past and present and the archaic and the relevant coexist (Taussig 2000). As a site of such fantasy production, the beach’s job is not to conceal but reveal and revel in revealing just such play, announcing itself as playground and transgressive space par excellence, displacing by far all previous rituals of reversal and pleasure. The beach, then, is the ultimate fantasy space where nature and carnival blend as prehistory in the dialectical image of modernity. (Taussig 2000: 258)

My goal in this book is to place these discrepant imageries, discourses and practices in conversation with each other and show how they are constitutive of the island experience. The result of this conversation, I hope, is an image that transcends the binary opposition suggested by the distinction between land and sea, between locating the island at the periphery of globalisation and at its vanguard, between the traditional and the progressive and between being mobile and insular. The image that I wish to convey from this conversation is an approach that describes the world in archipelagic terms (Benítez-​Rojo 1989; DeLoughrey 2001; Hau’ofa 1998; Pugh 2013; Stratford et al. 2011). An archipelagic perspective sees the planet as an ocean dotted by islands, island chains, in mutual relation and difference with each other. The ocean, from this paradigm, is a unifying feature of human experience, a symbolic and empirical constitutive element of the forces that drive history (Hau’ofa 1998). DeLoughrey (2007) has called this map archipelagraphy: A re-​presentation of identity, interaction, space and place that comes across in different combinations of affect, materiality, performance, things. Such counter-​ mapping requires a double-​destabilization: dislocating and de-​territorializing the objects of study –​the fixity of island difference and particularity –​and constituting in their place a site or viewing platform by which they are perceived and analysed afresh and anew. (Stratford et al. 2011: 114)

Archipelagraphy is how the world looks like from an island point of view. It stands in opposition to the perspective of the continent that prioritises landed narratives, methodological nationalism, its consequent conflation between land and identity and the binary logic associated with the Enlightenment (Benítez-​Rojo 1989). It suggests a refocused gaze of the global map so that the ocean is in the foreground. The sea is then rendered as multilayered, rather than as a homogenous expanse of blue. This gaze would appreciate the traces of movements that create history and appreciate that lands are tips of earth that emerge from the sea momentarily before they descend back into the ocean, and the planet would be seen as an archipelago, each unit in a mimetic and altering relation to each other. The cement that bonds these

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elements together, that connects and insulates them, is the ocean. History, in this regard, is not a progressive linear process but rather a discontinuous conjunction (of what?): unstable condensations, turbulences, whirlpools, clumps of bubbles, frayed seaweed, sunken galleons, crashing breakers, flying fish, seagull squawks, downpours, night-​ time phosphorescences, eddies and pools, uncertain voyages of signification; in short, a field of observation quite in tune with the objectives of Chaos . . . Chaos looks toward everything that repeats, reproduces, grows, decays, unfolds, flows, spins, vibrates, seethes . . . Chaos provides a space in which the pure sciences connect with the social sciences, and both of them connect with art and the cultural tradition. (Benítez-​Rojo, 1996: 2–​3; parentheses in original quoted in Stratford et al. 2011: 115–​116)

In the sections that follow, I will be focusing on the different ways in which mobility and insularity are present in the grand narratives of Caribbean identity. By and large, Caribbeanist research takes colonial partitions as a matter of fact, which results in generating insular spaces that conflate linguistic categorisations with ethnic and island identities. And yet, the same body of work represents Caribbean islanders as travellers and engaging in meaningful relationships with different islands and locations. However, markers for movements have a tendency to be written as separate from insular discourses and practices. In doing so, Caribbeanist research can reproduce an inconsistency that threatens the categories that sustain its discourse. The subsequent sections will look at this discrepancy in three specific historical concepts that have been consistently deployed to address the historical and sociological development of Caribbean society –​‘plantation’, ‘creolisation’ and ‘transnationalism’. The contradictions embedded in how Caribbeanists have treated these concepts suggest an inconsistency that can be critiqued as potentially cancelling their analytical use or as confusing the experience they are trying to explain. I will argue that the inconsistency arises from thinking of the effects of mobility and insularity as separate constituents instead of mutually informing each other in a positive tension. My intention is to place representations of insularity in relation to markers of mobility and to argue that mobility and insularity create a positive tension through which Caribbean islanders experience continuities and change. GENERAL VIEWS OF CARIBBEAN INSULARITIES AND MOBILITIES A trend in Caribbeanist research is to relate cultural patterns such as language, politics and race relations of specific Caribbean islands to the historical



Transinsularism from a Caribbean Perspective

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relationship with their respective European metropolis. In general terms, the islands of the Caribbean are discursively divided into the Anglophone Caribbean, with ties to the United States and England, the Francophone Caribbean, which is incorporated into France as overseas departments, the Dutch dependencies and the Hispanic Caribbean, which is discursively linked to Latin America (Burac 1995; Henessy 2000). The immobility suggested by colonial continuities –​where the islands are seen as unrelated to each other –​is compounded by understandings of ‘island’ as an insular space, and presupposed in Caribbeanist research. In the concluding chapter of Caribbean Contours (1985), Gordon Lewis writes, these societies have been, and for the most part still are small island societies marked by psychological insularity; an inward-​turned communal life in which everybody seems to know everybody else. That is obvious, of course, in small island capital towns such as Bridgetown, Barbados, or Castries, St. Lucia, but surprisingly is also a marked feature even of larger cities such as Havana, or San Juan, Puerto Rico. Whereas North American life is continental, Caribbean life is island oriented. (Lewis 1985: 219)

Insular attitudes or mindsets of Caribbeans have been elicited to account for the failure of political and economic integrationist initiatives, such as the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). Anthony Payne shows how CARICOM was fraught with difficulties and contradictions, many of them based on the economic differences between the island units. However, for Payne, the most salient feature in CARICOM’s political culture ‘is, and always has been, the intensity of insular self-​regard. . . . the lengths to which this tendency is taken seem to reach absurd proportions’ (Payne 1978: 33). Sidney Mintz (1996) attributes political fragmentations to the constellation of circumstances brought about by geology, the region’s colonial history and its current postcolonial condition where the persisting influence of the metropolitan powers is still being felt (Mintz 1996: 43). From these perspectives, the political fragmentation of the Caribbean is written as having an unavoidable, inevitable and almost naturalised quality to it. The implicit claim is that this inherent and unbreachable distance between the islands does not enable islanders to engage in a coherent regional political project. Academic institutions and social science research agendas also reproduce Caribbean fragmentation along colonial lines. The trend can be appreciated in volumes that organise their discussions according to linguistic expressions of the islands, such as Hispanic, Francophone, Anglo or Dutch Caribbean. Trouillot (1992) and Henessy (2000) have addressed, in separate essays, the predominance of Anglophone Caribbean studies among British and North American research institutions. These institutional practices have the capacity

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Chapter One

to leave the Hispanic Caribbean outside the Caribbean research agenda by linking Spanish-​speaking islands to the historical and discursive space of Latin America. The Spanish-​speaking Caribbean is then constructed in relation to continental processes rather than to the Caribbean (Henessy 2000). In the same way, academic research that corresponds to colonial narratives of the region does not address the relationships between other islands of the Caribbean and the site being researched and enhances the distance between the islands. Puri (2003) argues that a lack of attention to intraregional migration can be understood as the result of ‘a configuration of power in which the funding, research, and development priorities of metropolitan universities continue to set the agenda’ (Puri 2003: 4). I would add that these types of research projects suggest an understanding of culture, identity and social experience that is spatially and temporally stable, where culture and the ethnographic object are bound to a specific location and to a specific history (Gupta and Ferguson [eds.] 1997). In the case of the Caribbean, the ethnographic subjects are pinned to colonial histories and island nation states, or nation states, as in distinctions between Spanish-​speaking Dominicans and Francophone Haitians who share the same island. However, Caribbeanist literature and research acknowledge the mobile condition of Caribbean society. However, either these movements are relegated to a secondary status and are not followed up as a focus of study or they are treated as a separate domain of Caribbean life, independently from discourses and practices of insularity. The most prominent marker of movement of the Caribbean lies in the foundational narrative of the region. The contemporary Caribbean is the product of oceanic movements and interactions of a global scale that have come together in an unfinished process of becoming (Benítez-​Rojo 1989; Glissant and Dash 1989; Mintz 1974). This approach represents the Caribbean as a place of interaction of histories, narratives and identities from all over the world, eliciting metaphors of networks and flows rather than clusters of islands on the margins of global experiences. It is constructed as a major node in a rhizome-​like network that interlaces experiences, desires and imaginaries on a global scale (Benítez-​Rojo 1989). The scope of global interlacings that the Caribbean process suggests is capable of eluding explanation or rational containment. I start from the belief that ‘Caribbeanness’ is a system full of noise and opacity, a nonlinear system, an unpredictable system –​in short, a chaotic system beyond the total reach of any specific kind of knowledge or interpretation of the world. To my way of thinking, no perspective or human thought –​whether premodern, modern, or postmodern  –​ can by itself define the Caribbean’s complex socio-​ cultural interplay. We need all of them at the same time. (Benítez-​Rojo 1995: 255)



Transinsularism from a Caribbean Perspective

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By placing islanders in relation to a variety of island spaces and colonial histories, these movements present an image of the Caribbean as a place of movement and flow rather than a mosaic of clustered islands. They locate Caribbeans outside of colonial movements and categorisations of the region. These movements are written alongside insularist observations, but are nonetheless treated as a separate discourse from insularism. Gordon Lewis, referenced earlier as writing that the Caribbean is composed of ‘small island societies marked by psychological insularity; an inward communal life’, writes later in the same essay: Intraregional migration has been the order of the day, especially in the eastern Caribbean where, for example, labourers go south to work in the oil refineries of Aruba and Trinidad and others go north to seek jobs in the tourist industry of the US Virgin Islands. Whole settlements of contract workers, both bonded and illegal, become parts of their adopted homes: Grenadians in Trinidad, Antiguans in the Virgin Islands, Jamaicans in Panama, and Dominicans in Puerto Rico. (Lewis 1985: 221)

The scope of these movements can be appreciated to such a scale that they can be understood as a characteristic feature of Caribbean life. Describing the twentieth-​century Caribbean migrations, Hoetink (1985) writes about Curaçaoans working in Suriname, Barbadians in Peru and tens of thousands of Jamaicans and British Virgin Islanders working in Panama and along the coast of Central America. Even more recently, around 1985, many Dominicans moved to Puerto Rico, hundreds of British Windward Islanders worked in the refineries of Aruba and Curaçao, some forty thousand Guyanese are in Suriname, there is a significant Haitian presence in St. Marteen, the French Antilles and French Guiana and Trinidad has absorbed thousands of migrants from the Commonwealth’s smaller Caribbean islands. Hoetink concludes: Such movements attest to the connections between all parts of the Caribbean that we have so artificially separated; they make the social fabric of the region more complicated and in some ways more unified; and they have in some instances profound influence on power, and hence racial relations. Islands such as those in the Caribbean never have been entirely isolated but have continuously invented migration; their Robinson Crusoes have always had a chance to sight a ship. (Hoetink 1985: 76)

It is as if there were two antagonistic paradigms used to address the Caribbean: one prioritising the open-​ ended, processual, mobile and the uncontained, and another the colonial, racialised and finite. It reads like a convenient choice between two available discourses that researchers can rely on to address different aspects of Caribbean life. Rather than seeing these

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two paradigms as locked against each other, or as a narrative choice, I would argue that they are not antagonistic but feed into the same process. PLANTATION The plantation is the space that contains the foundation narratives from which the Caribbean emerges. Representations of the plantation characterise it as a confined and insularising place, from which modern Caribbean racial typologies were produced, stabilised and put into practice. At the same time, the plantation is written up as the place of creative encounter –​as a location full of crevices and liminal spaces from where creative experiences, suggestive of mobility, question and destabilise racial and ethnic continuities. The historical narrative of modernity in the Caribbean begins with Europe’s expansionist project to the Americas in the late fifteenth century. The first Europeans to establish themselves in the Caribbean were representatives of the Spanish crown. Spanish colonists successfully transplanted sugar to the Caribbean and initiated plantations as a proto-​industrial mode of production that would last over four hundred years. The Spanish relied on indigenous slave labour during the first years of colonisation. However, indigenous labour was not reliable due to organised resistance on behalf of the indigenous people, high death rate and legal challenges to indigenous enslavement brought forth by Spanish missionaries. The colonists turned to Dutch and Portuguese slave traders, who acquired their slaves from the western regions of Africa, for a steady supply of slaves to work in their plantations. The success of the plantation system, which included coffee, tobacco and sugar for European consumption, led other European powers to follow suit. Within one hundred years of the Spanish arrival in the Antilles, England, France and the Netherlands had successfully consolidated their own slave labour-​based plantation systems on the smaller islands of the Caribbean, Jamaica and the western half of Hispaniola. The constant need for slave labour, made more acute during the nineteenth-​century’s process of emancipation, motivated Europeans to import workers from India, China, Java, the Levant and the more impoverished parts of Europe (Mintz 1974). Nigel Bolland’s analysis of the concept of plantation societies addresses the plantation as the primary location for the foundational discourse of the Caribbean’s contemporary political economy (Bolland 1998). He describes the plantation representations of the plantation space as: The social organisation and culture associated with plantation production is seen as a microcosm of the whole society. The distinguishing features of the plantation –​which include mono-​crop production for export, strong monopolistic



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tendencies, a rigid system of social stratification that includes a high correlation between racial and class hierarchies, a weak community structure, the marginality of peasants who engage in subsistence production as well as periodic work on the plantations –​make it the nexus of cultural and political, as well as economical, activities. (Bolland 1998: 5)

Bolland continues to show how contemporary authors argue that the Caribbean’s current state of poverty and marginalisation in the global economic and political sphere has a precedent in the plantation mode of production. Among other reasons, the plantation is dependent on the ‘inputs and markets of the metropolis, which leads to underdevelopment and so to persistent powerlessness and poverty of the majority of the population’ (Bolland 1998: 6). This link to the metropolis is sustained by the isolation and confinement of the plantation in relation to spaces immediately outside of it, such as other plantations or other islands. Jamaican slave society was loosely integrated; so much so, that one hesitates to call it a society since all that it amounted to was an ill-​organised system of exploitation (. . .) Jamaica is best seen more as a collection of autonomous plantations, each a self-​contained community with its internal mechanisms of power, than as a total social system. (Patterson 1967: 70 cited in Bolland 1998: 5)

The plantation is also understood as a place that precedes contemporary Caribbean social relations (Bolland 1998; Giovannetti 2006). These representations emphasise the role that the plantation played in the creation of racial types that set the scene for contemporary race relations in the Caribbean (Giovannetti 2006; Oostindie 1996). It is the location where knowledge of races was developed as ‘a useful, maybe necessary, principle of control’ (Thompson 1975: 17 cited in Giovannetti 2006: 16). This system of control was reproduced through a systemic organisational structure that maintained Africans and their descendants in a subordinate position of power in relation to European settlers and their descendants (Giovannetti 2006: 16). The plantation constitutes a ‘total institution’ where a new identity is imposed on its inmates (Bolland 1998). Mintz (1990: 39) and Manuel Moreno-​ Fraginals (2001: 264) have also stressed the plantation’s ‘semi-​military’ and ‘prison-​like character’ (Giovannetti 2006). The internal politics of the plantation required fixing the subject as a moral being (Allen 1998) and racialised into a specific location within Caribbean society (Giovannetti 2006). The slave society of the Leeward Islands at the end of the eighteenth century was divided into separate groups, clearly marked off from each other by the differences of local and social status, of political rights and economic opportunity,

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and of racial origin and culture. The existence of these separate groups is so striking that it tends to obscure the existence of the community of which they were all part. But this community did exist, and its fundamental principles of inequality and subordination based on race and status were firmly impressed upon the lives of all its members. It was these basic principles, embodying the necessities of the West Indian slave system which determined the ordering of separate groups as part of a community and held them all together within a single social structure. (Goveia 1965 cited in Bolland 1998: 10)

Aside from creating a fixed subject and a fixed social structure, the plantation also functions as the foundation for discussing island differences within the region. Each island is constructed as having its own particular plantation politics, which have led to contemporary differences among the islands. Sidney Mintz (1974) points to the fact that the degree of plantation exploitation was not homogenous throughout the region, but subject to the different intentions that each European power had towards the Antilles. Mintz shows how the politics of colonisation and the degree of plantation exploitation varied from one European power to the next and relates these plantation politics to contemporary sociocultural and ethnic constructions of Caribbean islands. The Spanish crown was actively involved in the process of colonisation, expecting its subjects to establish themselves on the islands on a long-​term basis and contribute to the reproduction of Spain abroad. For Mintz, this resulted in an early process of creolisation and miscegenation between the indigenous population and the Spaniards and a strong presence of Spanish institutions, such as language, the Catholic Church and architecture (Mintz 1996). Mintz contrasts Spain’s policy towards the Caribbean with the British and the Dutch, whom he constructs as having a more entrepreneurial approach to their exploitation of the Caribbean. The non-​Hispanic colonisation of the Caribbean was represented by individuals who established themselves in the Caribbean for the sole purpose of investing in a plantation scheme that would generate profits, followed by a return to their homeland. The different politics of colonisation by each European power meant that each island experienced different relationships with their respective coloniser. For Mintz and Lewis, each imperial policy resulted in a distinct process of creolisation which relates to the consolidation of island identities, national identities and results in each island developing a unique ethnic composition and language use (Lewis 1983; Mintz 1974: 314; Mintz 1996). This type of research suggests that plantation politics represent the founding paradigm for the creation of the Caribbean subject as being subject to global economics and politics, marginalised, racialised and insularised through an island nation state that was forged in a colonial relationship. From this



Transinsularism from a Caribbean Perspective

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gaze, the plantation represents a fixed location, a globally isolated institution that produces knowledge and practices which construct subjects and places as inexorably located under its own discourse. These models, while relevant in addressing historical events that shape the Caribbean, simplify the complexities of the Caribbean process. Plantation-​society models conflate the predominant institutional and economic feature of the Caribbean with social and cultural systems (Bolland 1998: 6–​7). Research that considers the social and cultural aspects of plantation societies suggests that the plantation system, while leaving a distinctive and influential legacy to the region, did not achieve cultural hegemony over the plantation owners or the workers. Following such a premise, then, the binaries and insularisations supposed to have been the result of the plantation are questioned and a more complicated and mobile picture of plantation society emerges. The most mobile aspect of plantation society is the notion of the plantation as a place of encounter, where a variety of histories and narratives converge in a continuous process of relation (Glissant 1989). The Caribbean became a meeting place of peoples who represented regions from all over the world. The assumed continuity between racial and social conditions that are dominant in the insular plantation model is problematised because the European/​ African dichotomy gets complicated with the added elements of Chinese, East Indians, Javanese, mainland indigenes and Levantines who also came to the Caribbean throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This melange of experiences, languages, religions, institutions and histories were forged together in a relationship of violence and slavery to create a distinct and unique Creole culture (Glissant 1989; Lewis 1983). In her analysis of the Caribbean Creole, Carolyn Allen (1998) discusses how the category of the Creole, the product of Caribbean processes of relation, was constructed in ways that highlighted the contradictions behind the unitary language, place or race within the Caribbean plantation space. While the term Creole carries wide-​ranging connotations, it fundamentally refers to the person who emerges from the Caribbean context. This emergence is linked to the idea of mixture and difference. It can refer to having blood relations with any of the ethnic groups that converged in the Caribbean, in which case it also carries a reference to a place outside the Caribbean. It can refer to language and to moral attitudes (Allen 1998). In this case, distinctions will be made between the Caribbean-​born European and the European-​born European or between the African-​born and the Caribbean-​born African. But differences are complicated when the Creole is the product of mixed race unions or speaks languages that do not correspond exclusively to any from Africa, Europe, China, the Pacific, the East Indies or the Levant, but are the product of contact and interactions with different languages and peoples. Benítez-​Rojo theorises that these processes of mixtures and relations

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Chapter One

reproduce themselves in perpetuity, in a rhizome-​ like sequence that is mediated by plantation systems (Benítez-​Rojo 1989). Creolisation does not necessarily suggest a process towards reconciliation of Caribbean narratives, because each plantation carries within it discrete elements and qualities that develop its own character (Allen 1998: 45). Looking at these processes as separate or contradictory results in narratives that tend to prioritise either the insular and oppressive effects of the plantation in Caribbean history and contemporary politics or construct the plantation as a place of creativity, subversiveness and movement where the ironic and the irreverent are expressed through processes of encounters. These narratives emphasise the liminal spaces and crevices within the plantation where Caribbean subjects disrupted or operated on the margins of the structure of power that supposed the plantation a prison (Olwig 1993). Prioritising either perspective, addressing each narrative as separate or attempting to untangle their contradictions has the potential for creating a confusing and inconsistent picture of the Caribbean. In my view, plantation processes that result in island nation states have operated in relation to processes of mixtures and hybridities in the constitution of Caribbean island identities. These two approaches create a positive tension from which Caribbean islanders fashion a sense of insular uniqueness in relation to global connections. The Caribbean plantation can be pictured as a prison, a place where knowledges, narratives and subjects are fixed, both discursively and physically. But this insular and disconnected location also generates a crucible, where subjects and identities acquire new forms and meanings and create a distinct language, cosmology and deconstruct racial uniformities. This double imagery of the plantation does not necessarily constitute a contradiction, but that it is emblematic of the mobile and insular processes that characterise the Caribbean process. CREOLE Perhaps the most prominent marker for movement in the Caribbean narrative of identity is the discourse of creolisation and similar processes of mixture, hybridity, miscegenations and transculturations. Creolisations respond to processes of continuity and change in a transposed and colonial context. I do not intend to conduct a comprehensive review of creolisation discourse in this section. Instead, I will highlight the ways in which creolisation is deployed to suggest a Caribbean identity characterised by mobility and difference at the same time as it is used to define, delimit and reproduce insular identities. As I mentioned in the previous section, creolisation is a term that carries wide-​ranging implications but, in the Caribbeanist context, it is consistently used to refer to the process by which the Caribbean person is constituted.



Transinsularism from a Caribbean Perspective

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Historically, it has been deployed to address ideas on Caribbean race, blood, moral values, locality and language (Allen 1998). It is also used to suggest the Caribbean process as improvised, creative, democratic and liberated from discourses of empire (Benítez-​Rojo 1989; Guilbault 1994; Quintero-​Rivera 1998). It is described as a mobile and continuous process that accounts for the multiplicity of narratives and locations that converge in the Caribbean in a constant process of interaction (Burton 1995; Shepherd and Richards 1998). The Caribbean has been addressed as a global example for creolisation. Proclaimed since its colonization as both crucible and epitome of ‘creole’ culture(s), it apparently follows that the Caribbean region be determined the ‘root metaphor’ we seek as we try to get a better grasp on the evermore indeterminate yet interconnected terrain around us. (Khan 2001: 271–​272)

Caribbean creolisation is constructed as the product of processes that involve different forms of ‘rejection, adaptation, accommodation, imitation, invention’ of forms, narratives and experiences (Allen 1998: 44). Creolisation discourse suggests (a) a distancing from the notion of origins and a complication in reconstructing a type of path to a sense of essence or source; (b) a historical experience of colonialism which gives rise to its use as a ‘cross-​cultural encounter and the location of creoleness at an intersection, negotiating between identities and forces, and defined by its relocations’; (c) a continuous process with new ingredients being added and (d) a multiplicity of Creole forms which makes ‘context and point of view crucial in its understanding’ (Allen 1998: 44). Creolisation is also located in a tense relationship between the similar and the dissimilar or between difference and sameness (Allen 1998; Burton 1995). In theory, the Creole subject draws from a variety of specific locations and forms, though possibly creolized themselves, and, through a process that negotiates socio-​historical circumstances and collective creativity (Bolland 1998), the subject fashions a distinct sense of self. However, this process does not lead to a homogenous state of the collective for Caribbean societies, and the creolisation process itself is full of internal contradictions and conflicts that reproduce internal divisions based on, among other categories, race, class, gender, island identity, ethnicity and language (Bolland 1998). I would like to read this tension between difference and sameness as analogous to mobility and insularity. In this reading, mobile processes account for the ephemeral, the interactive and change, and insularity suggests the stable, continuous and located. The idea of a créolité identity is associated with the Franco-​Caribbean literary movement of the same name. The créolité movement revolves around the intentions of engaging creatively and politically with a region characterised by

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Chapter One

difference. The créolité manifesto, Eloge de la Créolité (1989), was the joint work of Martinican writers Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant. In it, the authors react against popular and academic discourses of Caribbean culture that locate the elements that constitute Caribbeanness outside the Caribbean, such as Europe or Africa historically and America or India in the present. The créolité movement looks for a sense of the Antillean or Antillanité through creoleness. Creoleness is defined as an open specificity, a concept that engages with the global interaction of peoples and histories to shape a unique Caribbean experience, ‘united on the same soil by the yoke of history’ (Bernabé et al. 1989). Créolité insists on the necessary complexity of Caribbean identity and disputes essentialising any character of Caribbean identity with arguments for a more mobile, open and non-​racial discourse (Burton 1995: 152). It negates any sense of the universal, static or monolingual category in the constitution of the Caribbean. Instead, it promotes a gathering of histories and cultures that engage in their Caribbeanness through a process of relation (Glissant 1989). In the créolité literary discourse, the Caribbean has always been in a state of formation, constantly reshaping itself, nurtured through infinite wanderings across locations and experiences (Dash 1996): a ‘brewing of a stew’ (Morse 1996: 31), a free-​floating idea of multiplicitous growth, unfixed in any primordial position but extending in all directions through a vast network of branches (Burton 1995; Glissant 1989: 67), thereby reacting against totalising histories and providing for a constant negotiation of moving in many directions (Benítez-​Rojo 1989: 54). The créolité discourse suggests a rejection of the idea that Caribbean expressions are a readable phenomenon, but rather that they are constituted in vagueness and in truncated messages that are in constant flux and shaping (Benítez-​Rojo 1989). Benítez-​Rojo further argues that the history of the Antilles and their contemporary experience is beyond ethnographic and historical knowledge, and the comings and goings of peoples and ideas that have made up and continue to transform the Caribbean can only be grasped through ‘poetic knowledge, romantic knowledge, literary and artistic knowledge’ (Bernabé et al. 1989 cited in Price and Price 1997: 8). The Antilles find their unique identity and uniqueness in the improvised use of multiple histories and spaces (Benítez-​Rojo 1989; Quintero-​Rivera 1998) and it must be the writer who forges a new discourse that transcends literary genres and traditional notions of time and space, while bringing a new language, representative of the Caribbean experience, into existence (Bernabé et al. 1989). The créolité literary discourse has been successful in accommodating, theoretically, the multitude of voices and histories that shape the Caribbean. In its political discourse, however, créolité is less inclusive. The créolité manifesto, Eloge de la Créolité (1989), acknowledges a common thread



Transinsularism from a Caribbean Perspective

19

of experience of the Antilles and advocates a Caribbean confederation as the only way to achieve global recognition and confront global hegemonic processes. However, this call for Caribbean unity is based on a common historical and cultural continuity that prioritises the Francophone Caribbean. Its anti-​nationalist and non-​racialist discourse draws from the Martinican case and its scope focuses on the island’s condition as an overseas department of France (Burton 1995). In other readings, the notion of creolisation has been inextricably linked to the process of nation building in the Caribbean (Bolland 1998). Earlier, I quoted Mintz (1974) who suggests a direct relationship between the emergence of a Creole identity and the formation of a national identity among islands of the Hispanic Caribbean. The connection between a Creole consciousness and national awakening in Jamaica was addressed by Kamau Brathwaite, the renowned Jamaican poet and sociologist. A central question in Brathwaite’s work concerned itself with the issue of whether the political power that had been vested in the black majority after independence could successfully articulate an ideal of a ‘national culture’ (Bolland 1998: 13). His reading of Jamaican history pointed to the process of ‘creolisation as the source of authentic Jamaican culture, rooted in the descendants of the ex-​slaves’ (Bolland 1998: 13). Linked to the idea of the Creole subject is the notion that the Creole person constitutes a unique person or a person who is derived from the Old World but who developed and came to being in the New World (Glissant 1995). This Creole subject does not necessarily respond to the schemes and structures of Europe or Africa, or other locations that congregate in the Caribbean, but constitutes a subject who fashions a new sense of identity. He or she has an intimate knowledge of the land ‘being committed to it by experience and/​or attachment’ (Allen 1998: 40). As an intermediary between two worlds, the empire and the colony, constituting a third person, the Creole distances him or herself from the imperial project and creates a new society with claims to legitimate rule and sovereignty (Bolland 1998: 3). The Creole also creates a new language which is distinct and unique to the elements that initially arrived in the Caribbean. Creole language is associated with novel linguistic variations that emerged in Jamaica (Allen 1998), Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guyana, St. Martin (Glissant 1989) and the Dutch Caribbean –​Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao –​as well as elements of the population in Grenada, Dominica, St. Lucia and Trinidad (Mintz and Price 1985). While the term Creole is used to address the predominant languages in these islands, there is an ambiguity as to whether it refers to a distinct language or to the process by which they came to be. On the one hand, it is used to address the process of relation and colonialism that preceded it and continues to inform its development (Glissant 1995). On the other, it

20

Chapter One

is used to address the specific language that is spoken in each island. This is problematic because the language spoken in each island, while undoubtedly responding to a similar process of mixture and colonialism, responds to its own historical circumstances and is, technically, a different language. Regardless, the term is used to address specific languages and their nationalisation through public education systems, radio, music compositions and press (Glissant 1989; Guilbault 1993). Contrary to literary constructions of creolisation, these understandings of creolisation ultimately function to stabilise and fix the Caribbean person. Elite political discourses of creolisation create a subject that is intimately linked to the land and foster nationalist sentiments that are island-​centred or centred on its colonial past. Language becomes a constant, rather than an open specificity, with calls to standardize Creole and incorporate it into the national curriculum (Burton 1995; Glissant 1989). ‘As popularly conceived, then, the image of creole culture and a creole society emphasises social unity: the new nation as a creole community’ (Bolland 1998: 2). The political idea of a ‘new nation’ arising from a ‘creole community’ rests upon the notion of a common culture that somehow establishes the national limits and ‘constitutes the ideology of a particular social segment, namely a middle class intelligentsia that seeks a leading role in an integrated, newly independent society’ (Bolland 1998: 4). With these contradictions, creolisation has the possibility of losing its analytical and creative strength. Its premise is perhaps too generalised. The idea of creolisation as a discourse of mixture does not necessarily carry a Caribbean specificity, for similar comments can be made about identity in general in contemporary research that looks at global transactions and exchanges of people and ideas (Hannerz 1987; Khan 2001). Through its being hegemonic, however, ‘creole’ remains definitive, and thus recapitulates a safe terrain, rather than diverting normative discourses of difference. ‘Creole’ historically has signalled familiar or recognizable diversity. It thereby recapitulates the same imaginary and is thus a conforming rather than subversive model of culture and society. (Khan 2001: 289, emphasis in original)

It is as if creolisation carries a unitary understanding of culture. It does not seem to add much to the discussion of cultural continuities and changes because it reproduces the purities which it sets out to counteract in the first place. But of more concern is the suggestion that it is a conformist and conservative discourse, lacking the kind of creative subversion that is articulated by the créolité movement. It seems to carry a potential to gloss over internal differences, such as in the case of language –​many in the Caribbean are called Creole –​and internal social divisions. It is criticised for addressing



Transinsularism from a Caribbean Perspective

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‘culture’ as a generalised and all-​encompassing entity, with a ubiquitous quality that does not contemplate an effective ethnographic insight of the quotidian (Khan 2001). It has the potential of becoming an abstract ‘root metaphor’ (Hannerz 1987) with a lack of analytical application to the understanding of social relations. These criticisms do not necessarily argue against the idea of a Caribbean process of interaction, transculturalism, hybridity and other processes of cultural relations. Instead, these concerns argue for historicising the Caribbean process from perspectives that are sensitive to internal differentiations of Caribbean societies. For example, as Kahn argues: ‘Perhaps what is globally applicable about creolisation is not culture (as a reified abstraction) but class and the cultures of particular class positions’ (2001: 292). In a similar vein, Paul Gilroy’s project looks into shifting representations of Caribbean processes of modern identity away from categories that correspond to the intellectual heritage of the Enlightenment. Gilroy’s project enquires into the relationships and intersections created by Atlantic crossings in the constructions of the modern subject. This enquiry, which includes the Caribbean, the rest of the Americas, Africa and Europe, takes us on a journey that examines the convergences between the notions of nationality, ethnicity, authenticity and continuities as ‘characteristically modern phenomena’ (Gilroy 1993a: 2) and critiques the success of such concepts by valuing ideas of the fractal, the hybrid, the restless, the transnational and other mobile discourses and practices. Paul Gilroy is particularly interested in the Atlantic interactions that originated from the process of enslaving Africans. This particular historical narrative looks at the ways in which black intellectuals have engaged with the typologies and intellectual traditions associated with Western modernity. He calls this system of interactions and communications the ‘black Atlantic’. Gilroy highlights the ways in which black experiences operate simultaneously within and outside the project of modernity. He constructs a narrative whereby the black Atlantic experience of modernity is both a contributor and a victim of exemplary modern ideas such as the pursuit of freedom, citizenship and social and political autonomy. His research centres on the ways in which black intellectuals and artists created a sense of the modern at the same time as they were victimised by it. The process of this double consciousness is enacted through transatlantic crossings. Gilroy makes the sea the centre of his explorations and makes it the location of Western modernity. Historicising the ocean in this way shifts attention away from stable narratives and values movement as an important characteristic of modernity. It offers an alternative reading of cultural history as processual and non-​essentialist, where the ocean functions as a metaphor with which we can grasp the reconfiguration of space and time initiated by

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Chapter One

the movements that typify modernity. Focusing on the ocean as a location of study pushes aside previous imagery of networks or webs and proposes a system of communication that enmeshes previously distant locations into an amorphous continuity centred on the sea. But, Gilroy’s mobile, inspiring and creative ocean is balanced by its capacity to contain and reproduce notions of ethnicity and nationalism. The attraction to this project lies in the creative contrasts and political subversions that spring out of such circumstances. By directing attention repeatedly towards crossing experiences and other translocal histories, the idea of the black Atlantic not only deepens our understandings of modern statecraft, commercial power and their relationship to territory and space, it also summons some of the tough conceptual problems that can imprison or ossify the idea of culture. (Gilroy 1993b: 2)

Gilroy’s project is more focused on highlighting the mobile conditions and itinerant practices of black intellectuals and artists that were instrumental in constructing political and artistic programmes of modernity. Mobility, in this case, does not only relate to the physical travels carried out by the individuals he is considering, but also to the intellectual and creative interactions that were produced through these travels. By focusing on the restless temperament of his characters, Gilroy traces a genealogy of ideas and influences that connect the Caribbean, the United States, Europe and Africa. The intellectual genealogy of the black Atlantic corresponds in many ways to processes of hybridity and creolisation elicited in discussions of Caribbean ethnicities, particularly on the issue of creating a sense of self by taking nourishment from a variety of resources in such a way as to complicate any idea of the essential or of the source. The fractal patterns of cultural and political exchange and transformation that we try and specify through manifestly inadequate theoretical terms like creolisation and syncretism indicate how both ethnicities and political cultures have been made anew in ways that are significant not simply for the peoples of the Caribbean but for Europe, for Africa, especially Liberia and Sierra Leone, and of course, for black America. (Gilroy 1993a: 15)

One of Gilroy’s goals is to propose a research and political agenda that moves away from notions of ethnicity and race and their connection to ideas of culture and identity. He evokes terminology and processes such as creolisation and hybridity, not to elicit the creation of a new modern subject, but to construct a subject that goes beyond national, racial, ethnic and other bounded classifications. Gilroy’s proposal is, effectively, a call to move away from discourses that draw on categorisations that respond to racial codes and



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imperial paradigms. In his view, this line of thinking reproduces an ideology of difference based on raciological thinking, fostering racism and concomitant violence which produces an unsustainable ethical stance and hinders a stable and morally consistent political project. Instead, Gilroy encourages us to examine raciological discourses as the product of morally problematic discourses such as imperialism, slavery and fascism. By recognising the legacy of essentialist discourse, Gilroy invites his readers to develop a rhetoric that displaces essentialisms, accept its violent heritage and strive to develop an inclusive and more democratic project. Gilroy’s work has encouraged Caribbeanists to think and write about the mobile elements that constitute Caribbean identity and to see these movements as democratising (Ramnarine 2007). Gilroy’s ideas invite us to address the non-​terrestrial dimension of Caribbean narratives and he challenges his readers not to focus on the Caribbean as an ethnic construction but as an identity that responds to discourses and practices that are constituted in a restless state of transience. However, Gilroy’s suggested call to challenge insularities in the construction of Caribbean social life is difficult to relate to in ethnographic terms. As has become apparent in the history of CARICOM, for example, island uniqueness and island difference are an important frame of reference in the construction of political strategies and a potent source of island activism. In a previous publication (Cubero 2008), I showed how different kinds of insularities are deployed in political contestations surrounding tourism development in the north-​eastern Caribbean. The Caribbean’s insularities are produced through the mobile processes of history that connect the islands to broader spaces. Simultaneously, mobile practices, and the fluid identities that arise from them, function to reproduce an insular space. The contradiction that creolisation embodies stems from a rationale that separates mobility and insularity in the constitutive process of the Caribbean. While the criticisms directed towards Creolists are founded in a consistent logic, they are fuelled by an understanding of mobility and insularity as mutually exclusionary practices in need of separation or reconciliation. A more consistent picture of Caribbean identity politics emerges when the contradictions of creolisation discourse are presented as a dialectic relation in the production and reproduction of Caribbean island identity. TRANSNATIONALISM Caribbean transnationalism usually refers to the migration, more intensive after World War II, of Caribbeans to metropolitan locations that maintain links to their island of ‘origin’. Caribbean transnationalist research pays

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Chapter One

special attention to the quality of the relationships that transmigrants sustain between their host society and their island, highlighting the growing interconnectivity between people in the contemporary world. We define ‘transnationalism’ as the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-​stranded social relations that link together their societies of origins and settlement. We call these processes transnationalism to emphasize that many immigrants today build social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders. (. . .) Transmigrants take actions, make decisions, and develop subjectivities and identities embedded in networks of relationships that connect them simultaneously to two or more nation-​states. (Basch et al. 1994: 7)

Transmigrants are represented as confronting a variety of identity politics in relation to the location in which they find themselves and negotiating these politics accordingly. The quality of interconnections between various nation states is significant because, through these multinational relationships, notions of citizenship, community and ethnicity are re-​examined as subjects negotiate social relations according to the social context in which they find themselves. As transmigrants foster intimate relationships with the societies which they are moving to and from, they participate in processes that redefine the boundaries as well as reconfigure the limits of the nation in which they live and work. This type of research is based the fluidity of identity politics. It relates anthropological constructions of identity to historical processes of capital accumulation and labour struggle, which vary from one location to the next. It examines the ways in which transmigrants shape, and are affected by, hegemonic constructions of identity. Transnationalist research necessarily suggests a reconfiguration of social spaces and a re-​evaluation of social categories that spring from a practice of movement through different national spaces. The Caribbean is consistently represented as a transnational society. Caribbean transnational research looks into the ways in which the politics of sociocultural categories of identity vary from the island to the host society and focuses on how Caribbeans negotiate fluctuating identity politics. All Caribbean islands have a transnational relationship with some metropolitan location (Anselin 1995; Basch et al. 1994; Negrón-​Muntaner et al. 1997; Sánchez-​Korrol 1994). This intellectual trend is significant because it opens the island space beyond its landed confines and recognises movement as an integral part of contemporary Caribbean life (Olwig 1993). Concomitantly, it adds a further mobile dimension to the already fluid ethnic categories that typify the Caribbean process. It also problematises notions of global political and economic structurings such as centre–​periphery because the scope of interconnections that transmigrants reproduce between the two societies blur the boundaries that separate the presumed centre and periphery (Basch et al. 1994).



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Caribbean transnational research points to the fluidity of categories of identity and emphasises the contradictions and ironies that emerge out of these fluidities. In the case of Puerto Rican transmigrants to the United States, research underlines the inconsistency of state politics in reinforcing imagery of ethnic difference with regard to Puerto Ricans in the United States despite the fact that they travel to the United States as citizens (Ramos-​Zayas 2003). The scope of these movements has prompted comments about Puerto Rico performing as a commuter nation, rather than a fixed territorialized ethnicity, with the planes that carry Puerto Ricans to and from the United States resembling aerial buses more than commercial aircraft (Torre et al. 1994). In a similar way, Haitians living in the United States confront different racial typologies than those in their native Haiti and deploy different rhetoric and strategies to achieve social mobility in the United States (Basch et al. 1994). At the same time, Haitian transmigrants continue to leave their mark on Haitian politics as politicians from Haiti draw on their support for the promotion of their policies on the island (Basch et al. 1994). These cases can be seen as a continuation of practices of movement that have historically been an important feature of Caribbean life. However, one could argue that transnationalist research functions to reinforce discourses of Caribbean insularities while adding a mobile dimension to Caribbean identity. Transnationalist research tends to focus on binary movements from an island to a metropolitan location abroad: France for the Francophone Caribbean (Anselin 1995), the United Kingdom for the Anglophone Caribbean or to nations such as the United States, which is the focus of economic and political power in the region. In this way, that transnationalist research reproduces Caribbean colonial movements and goes over the familiar terrain of Caribbeans confronting colonialist structures of power and knowledge. Another way in which Caribbean transnationalism reproduces insularities is through the reification of island-ethnic identities. Transnationalist narratives represent Caribbeans as enforcing categories and practices of islandness in their new settings. In her ethnography of Puerto Ricans living in Chicago, for example, Ramos-​Zayas (2003) shows how her Puerto Rican informants construct themselves as the bearers of authentic Puerto Rican culture in opposition to Puerto Ricans living on the island. In Ramos-​Zayas’ narrative, Puerto Rican transmigrants reproduce a sense of uniqueness in relation to other Hispanic populations of Chicago and in relation to their fellow U.S. citizens by adhering to a rhetoric of being Puerto Rican and by establishing community programmes and activities to foster Puerto Rican values and traditions in the community. For Ramos-​Zayas’ informants, these programmes reproduce cultural continuities that are being diluted or lost in Puerto Rico itself due to the acceptance of U.S. cultural and political values.

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Chapter One

For Ramos-​Zayas, the performance of cultural nationalisms on the part of Puerto Rican transmigrants responds to the subordinate position of Puerto Ricans within Chicago society. Puerto Rican national identity in this case responds to strategic positioning in relation to social contexts and the state (Ramos-​Zayas 2003:  9–​10). An issue that transnationalist research engages with is the contradictions created by subjects that are engaged in processes of travel and interactions while maintaining a sense of their specificity. Transnationalist research focuses on the structures of power and production that locate transmigrants in specific locations and on the ways in which transmigrants relate to these contexts of power and knowledge. The paradox of the current world conjuncture is the increased production of cultural and political boundaries at the very time when the world has become tightly bound together in a single economic system with instantaneous communication between different sectors of the globe. In order to disentangle these contradictory trends, it is necessary to place the construction of cultural demarcations and political boundaries being erected between groupings of people within the context of contention for political power and control of productive recourses, including labour power. (Basch et al. 1994: 34)

Such an approach, while invaluable in understanding the ethnographic conditions in which transmigrants traverse through different social contexts, arises from an academic position that perceives movement and stability as two opposing forces that need to be reconciled or untangled. Untangling these two notions creates a narrative whereby stable categories such as nationality and ethnicity are described in opposition to fluid practices and discourses. Representing these discourses and practices as opposing each other creates a confusing picture of the transmigrant, in which he or she is depicted as mobile and creative on one instance and reactionary and victimised on the other. This inconsistency stems from the conceptual separation of mobile and insular discourses and practices instead of relating them as mutually constitutive processes. A slightly different picture, a more consistent picture, would emerge if contemporary Caribbean movements were written about from a perspective where island specificities are not in contradiction with mobilities but represent a continuity of Caribbean practices of travel and relation.

THE SITE Politically, Culebra is one of the seventy-​eight municipalities, or towns, of Puerto Rico. Vieques, to the south of Culebra, is also a municipality of Puerto



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Rico, while St. Thomas and St. Croix are part of the U.S. Virgin Islands and constitute a separate state from Puerto Rico. Culebra’s public resources are administered by a municipal government which is composed of a locally elected mayor and municipal assembly. The island is included in the legislative district in the north-​east of Puerto Rico. This means that the legislators who represent the north-​east of Puerto Rico in the upper and lower houses of the Puerto Rican legislature have Culebra as part of their constituency. Culebra islanders also vote for the governor of Puerto Rico, the chief executive of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico has been a non-​incorporated territory of the United States since 1898. Currently, the island’s governmental structure is based on a constitution ratified in 1952 by the Puerto Rican government after receiving U.S. Congress approval. Puerto Rico’s official name is the Free Associated State of Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. The island has the right to send one resident commissioner to the lower house of the U.S. legislature, who has the right to speak on the floor but does not have the right to vote on congressional matters. Aside from the resident commissioner, Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico do not have a voice or vote on federal matters. Puerto Ricans living in Puerto Rico do not pay tax to the U.S. federal government. There is an island system of taxation which funds the local government and island services. The island government follows the U.S. structure of government with executive, legislative and judicial branches. Culebra’s population is highly mobile and I have found the population data on Culebra inconsistent and unsatisfying. The 2000 census counted 1868 people living in Culebra and the 2010 census counts 1868. Previous mayors have estimated the population closer to eight thousand. My estimation, taking into consideration electoral records, student population records, public opinion and the general ‘vibe’, is that the population fluctuates between three thousand and four thousand depending on the time of the year, reaching a particular high during summer and Christmas time. The residential areas of Culebra are concentrated on the southern parts of the island, where the main town and neighbourhoods are concentrated. Aside from these densely populated neighbourhoods on the south, the island seems sparsely populated. The main language spoken in Culebra is Puerto Rican-​accented Spanish. The majority of people in Culebra respond to the ethnic narratives of being Puerto Rican, suggesting a long-​term creolisation process that incorporates indigenous, Spanish and African components. There is, however, a significant population of immigrants, long-​term residents and descendants of immigrants from continental America, mostly the United States and Canada. There is also a sizeable Western European population, mostly from continental Europe. Chapter 2 begins with the process by which the island of Culebra was colonised in the late nineteenth century. I will frame the history of Culebra

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within the context of the islanders’ relationship to international militarism. The colonisation of Culebra responded to the Spanish crown’s interests of maintaining a military presence in the Caribbean and stopping Danish and English incursions in the Virgin Islands. With the transfer of Puerto Rico to the United States in 1898, Culebra was designated for use by the U.S. Navy as a practice range. The arrival of the U.S. Navy resulted in the displacement of the population from the original village to the southern parts of the island and the expropriation of large swathes of land in the north of Culebra. The expropriated lands were used for air-​to-​land and sea-​to-​land bombings, and for amphibious landing exercises by the U.S. Navy. In the post-​World War II years, the U.S. Navy increased its exercises and rented out the island to NATO allies as well as Latin American navies. In the early 1970s, the islanders began a grass-​roots campaign to expel the U.S. Navy from the island to regain access to the coastal lands that were expropriated. The campaign was successful and in 1978, the U.S. Navy handed over its interests in Culebra. The anti-​U.S. Navy struggle in Culebra was a seminal moment in the formation of a politicised island consciousness. The chapter makes the case for the cosmopolitan nature of the protest movement and shows how it was a struggle fought on numerous fronts, with different, at times conflicting, agendas. The departure of the U.S. Navy from Culebra released lands that were previously not accessible to the public. The freeing of lands, combined with the attention that the island got during the anti-​Navy campaign, brought attention to the white sandy beaches that dot the north coast of Culebra. This resulted in an influx of real-estate speculators, tourism developers, squatters and a general reorientation of the island’s economy towards the tourism and service sector. In ­chapter  3, I examine different social contestations that arose in the context of a series of state-​sponsored development programmes that encouraged the development of the tourist economy. In the chapter, I attempt to take all these discourses seriously and suggest that their discrepancies are illustrative of the different networks of movement that traverse through the island and constitute its political discourse. The result is an insular discourse characterised by its complexity, cosmopolitanism and references that transcend its regional, colonial and geographical spaces. In ­chapter  4, I turn to Culebrans’ relationship to the sea. I make the case that the sea in Culebra is not an empty, amorphous expanse of water. It is a conceptual and affective location, the site where memories are produced, lived through with embodied knowledge and skilled vision and navigated with intuitive practice-​based knowledge. It has different ‘rules’ than land. It is an active site, mobile and inconsistent at all times. For all the knowledge that Culebrans amass of the sea, full knowledge of the ocean will always be beyond their grasp. While it is an environment that cannot be fully controlled or tamed, it is a constitutive site of islanders’ sense of place. The



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chapter explores these affective connections to the sea as they are mediated through fishing practices and social contests that arose within the Fishermen’s Association of Culebra. Chapter 5 discusses musical practices in Culebra. I compare and contrast the musical inspiration of four music groups on Culebra and highlight the role that transinsular practices play in the process of composing and performing Culebra island music. The chapter shows how Culebra musicians reference discursively discrepant locations and practices in the process of their craft. In this regard, the general terms that drive the creative process of Culebra musicians are not that different from Caribbean musicianship. However, contrary to the narratives of the Caribbean island musics, the music produced in Culebra is yet to be fixed, named or enclosed as ‘Culebra music’ by the academic, political or musical establishment. The lack of fixation of a distinct Culebra sound or the naming of Culebra music gives Culebra musical practice a more experimental, becoming, ever-​crescent quality, dependent on the actual musicians rather than on the nationalist music identity politics or the capitalist music infrastructure and network. In the final chapter, I revise the transinsular debate from a more reflexive perspective and suggest how transinsularism can help us take island studies more seriously. Additional materials, including my documentary film project entitled Mangrove Music, can be accessed online at www.transinsular.org.

Chapter Two

Militarisation and Culebra’s Transinsular Precedents

In this chapter, I will argue that the development of a sense of a Culebra island consciousness found its expression in the islanders’ reaction to imperial militarism. Culebra’s historical narrative does not necessarily correspond with the economically driven motivations behind the colonisation of the Caribbean (Benítez-​Rojo 1995). It does not correspond, for example, with Caribbean grand narratives of creolisation, plantation economies, the slave trade and the accumulation of surplus value by proxy imperial interests. However, I read the story of the colonisation of Culebra as fundamentally Caribbean. It is about a group of people relying on transnational networks in the process of contending with the militaristic agendas of the Spanish and U.S. empires. It is a story of an interlinked struggle, with multiple interests, multiple fronts and unclear understanding of the outcomes, which sought to legitimise a specific insular concern. The story of Culebra’s past reproduces recurrent themes of global mobility, internal complexity and the coming together of complex historic interactions, which is at the heart of Caribbean historiography. Benítez-​Rojo’s characterisation of the Caribbean as a site constituted through a rhizome-​like network of relations of global proportions is especially useful in Culebra’s case (Benítez-​Rojo 1995). The events pertaining to Culebra’s relationship to militarism go beyond the island, nor is it a simple story that pits islanders against continentals or the colony versus the empire. It is a story of transients, marauders, fishermen, sailors, tourists, soldiers, smugglers and other travellers whose dwelling practices left behind evidence of their different claims on the island. This evidence, which in Culebra takes the form of unexploded ordinance, obscure place names, abandoned wells and rusting World War II tanks on radioactive beaches, is the material trace of different, at times discrepant, claims that have been made on the island –​claims which continue to have their effect after the 31

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travellers have moved on. For the visitor, the result is a montaged landscape that has been constituted through a history of antagonistic forces that converge to produce a particular islandscape. Culebra’s narrative of island specificity is very specific and contributes to a unique sense of localism. And yet, or maybe because of this, its story appeals across wide range of discursive fields, recalling attentions and provoking diverse claims of ownership and identity by people transiting through them. The result is an island of multiple signifiers. It is alternatively and simultaneously rendered as a military laboratory, an object of real-​estate speculation, an irradiated site, a heavenly paradise and a tourist non-​place (Auge 2008). This image suggests a landscape where the violent and the pleasurable, heavenly and hellish and the liminal and central converge to constitute a unique set of relations. I see this mingling together of discrepant semiotic signifiers as the result of multiple agents traversing through the site, each one leaving behind material evidence of its intentions for the island. But rather than presenting itself as an incomprehensible collage without a stable signification, Culebra has historically held a power of attraction that results in multiple agents jockeying for access to it. While this chapter is admittedly historical and will present a chronology of events, my motivation for writing it did not come from a desire to do an archaeology of the landscape and ascertain the origin of the constitutive elements of the island. Rather, I hope to show how the transients that populated Culebra experienced the island as it presented itself, without a consistent understanding of their predecessors’ intentions, and made efforts to materialise their project on the island. This chapter focuses on the social contests and struggles that emerged with antagonistic projects for the island met in Culebra. I will attempt to take all these discourses seriously and consider Culebra’s story beyond the binary oppositions that are suggested in, say, islanders versus continentals, colony versus empire, global versus local, hosts versus tourists and military versus civilians. This is a story where people and institutions representing conflicting interests have been attracted to the island, claimed it and imposed their discourse while traversing through the island. I will argue that the expression of a cosmopolitan culebrense narrative took shape as islanders drew from a transnational network of relations in the process of constructing and rendering a sense of an island consciousness. I will first discuss the colonisation process of Culebra, initiated in 1880, and suggest that the Puerto Rican-​led, Spanish-​sponsored colonisation of Culebra was motivated by the reproduction of imperial geopolitical boundaries in the Caribbean. While published historical accounts suggest that the process of state-​sponsored colonisation resembled settler colonialism (Delgado C ​ intrón 1989; Feliciano 2001), contemporary local narratives emphasise the militaristic intentions of the venture and that the process of



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colonising the island was motivated by Spain’s geomilitary concerns in the region (Delgado ​Cintrón 1989). Daily life on the island, however, did not correspond to the military’s expectations. In fact, historical accounts emphasise how the islanders’ relationship to the sea, through fishing, trading, sailing and other practices, was more influential in shaping daily life and in orienting the island’s economic activities than the routines and agendas of the Spanish crown (Feliciano 2001). I will then discuss the 1902 arrival of the U.S. Navy and its occupation of Culebra to use it for military practice exercises. The United States arrival to Culebra represented a violent and painful disruption of island life (Pérez 2013: 24). At the same time, the presence of military personnel on the island resulted in a creative shift in the habitus of Culebra, which still resonates today. The chapter will follow by summarising the sequence of events that led to the expulsion of the U.S. Navy from Culebra in 1975. This was a momentous event in Culebra’s history and it is often described by my informants as one of the defining features of the culebrense narrative. My approach will explore how the islanders mobilised themselves across a transnational network and produced an insularist rhetoric to successfully lobby for the Navy’s expulsion. The activists and leaders of the movement developed a discourse that was able to communicate local concerns across different discursive fields. For example, local activists articulated their project in a way that was intelligible to the U.S. Navy, to venture capitalists, to civil rights activists in the United States, to U.S. Congress, to the U.S. media, to Puerto Rican nationalists, to global religious movements, to the Socialist International and to President Nixon, among others. The networked quality of the anti-​Navy campaign speaks to a sense that the Culebra political experience is not limited to its physical geography; it illustrates the island’s sense of cosmopolitan activism and is indicative of its traninsularity. The awareness that is necessary to speak across numerous discursive fields and communicate effectively a local concern is reminiscent of a cosmopolitan approach in the service of a political programme. It is indicative of Culebra’s archipelagic consciousness. The project of expelling the U.S. Navy from Culebra was not based on binary markers of difference or otherness (colonial specificity in opposition to a global empire, culebrense vs. Americans, etc.) nor was it about defending culebrense difference in opposition to the pressures of global imperialism. It was not a struggle for national liberation, neither was it a struggle for access to their lands. Culebrenses would not have claimed their struggle a victory had these been their goals. The specific goals of the anti-​Navy movement were more related to recovering the islanders’ right to be physically mobile and to regain access to their island space –​sea and land. The activists on the island of Culebra ascribed to a subtle discourse that emphasised transinsular ties in order to make a progressive case for

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promoting the conditions in which autonomy, justice and dignity were possible. For Culebra activists, the struggle with militarism was about crafting a place for themselves in the world and articulating an island project on their own terms, which would speak for itself. COLONISATION OF PASSAGE ISLAND During the European colonisation period of the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, the current island of Culebra appears on navigational charts identified as Passage Island, Ile de Passage or Isla Pasaje. The northern parts of the island are dominated by steep hills, many populated by lush forests that descend into beautiful white sand beaches. The southern areas are mostly flat, dry lands that descend into coastal marshes and mangroves. Its forests of hard wood, deep inner bay protected by mangrove trees and its location between the Danish colonies of St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix and the Spanish colony of Puerto Rico made it an ideal place, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for passing ships to anchor, collecting mangrove trees and timber for charcoal or for making quick repairs on their vessels. Claro Feliciano, local historian and mayor of Culebra from 1921 to 1930 and from 1934 to 1942, describes mid-​nineteenth-​century Culebra as a place that ‘had turned into a refuge for fugitives, smugglers, and foreign evildoers from the Caribbean islands that were then belonging to the kingdoms of England, France, and Denmark’ (Feliciano 2001: 2; all translations mine unless otherwise indicated). There were no officially recognised attempts to colonise Passage Island during the colonial period. It was, effectively, an island of transit under the unenforced jurisdiction of the Puerto Rican colonial government, which responded to the Spanish crown (Iranzo 1995). In the 1870s, the mayor of the neighbouring island of Vieques appointed Mr. Stephens, described as a ‘black sailor’, as a watchman of Passage Island (Feliciano 2001: 14). Local narratives speculate that Stephens was to guard the island from unauthorised settlers such as escaped slaves from Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, peasants from the Danish Virgin Islands, pirates and marauders. The speculation is accompanied by suggestions that the name of ‘Culebra’ predates this period. Local Culebra historian, Juan Romero, claims that while ‘Passage Island’ was labelled on official maps, he has found documents from archives in St. Thomas that suggest that the island was colloquially referred to as ‘Culebra’ during the eighteenth century. In any case, Feliciano reports that ‘within a short period of starting his duties as maritime watchman, he (Stephens) was found murdered, apparently by smugglers, inside the hut that he had built on a beach, that was later known as Careening Point’ (Feliciano 2001: 4).



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In 1871, the Puerto Rico Overseas Affairs Ministry received a proposal from Puerto Rico-​based industrialists, Sáes Hermida, Ramírez and Oppenheimer, to buy or rent Passage Island for commercial purposes. They wished to take advantage of Passage Island’s plentiful forests, its deep harbour and its location in an already common shipping lane to build a shipyard that would service ships of any size and displacement. The governor of Puerto Rico did not concede the license to develop Passage Island. Instead, he commissioned a military expedition to visit Passage Island and report back on the resources of the island (Feliciano 2001). The expedition that surveyed Passage Island recommended that the proposal to develop the island commercially be denied and that the island be officially colonised. The colonisation expedition was led by Don Cayetano Escudero, a retired general of the Spanish army who had previously been involved in campaigns in the Philippines and North Africa. After a ceremonial shooting of the cannon, Escudero and his ten-​soldier battalion proceeded to build a fort and barracks for the men. Among Escudero’s men was a young man from Nevis who served as the cook and medic of the expedition, and a Canary Islander who named one of the surrounding cays of Culebra after his native Lobos Cay. Months later, a delegation from San Juan, the capital city of Puerto Rico, arrived to Passage Island with instructions to begin the construction of a settlement and establish the protocols by which the island was to be colonised. The delegation created three streets –​two streets honouring the king and queen of Spain, Fernando and Isabela, and one street named after Escudero. Public buildings such as a post office, a pier, a delegate house, an area for the mating of cattle and a space for a cemetery were designed and constructed. The settlement was christened San Ildefonso de la Culebra (St. Ildephonse of Culebra). There are different local theories as to the choice of the name San Ildefonso, which include that San Ildefonso was a Spanish saint from the Dark Ages, that it was the noble title of the Spanish minister of overseas affairs and that it was a common name used by the Spanish to name new towns in Central America. The colonising delegation divided the island into ninety plots of different sizes (plots of 50, 100 and 150 acres), of which eighty were separated for residential and agricultural exploitation. The government of Puerto Rico published an appeal in the Puerto Rico Gazette for any person who fulfilled four requirements to settle in Culebra with the offer of tax-​free living and free transport. All potential colonisers had to (a) be agriculturalists by profession, (b) have a stipulated capital, (c) be loyal to the Spanish Crown and (d) be in good standing in their community of origin. The agreement was that the government of Puerto Rico would grant the coloniser a plot of land that the settler had to make productive within six months. If the land was cultivated to the

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satisfaction of the authorities, the settler’s stake on the land was extended to one year and a second inspection could allow the settler to stay for four years. Local historian Claro Feliciano constructs the settlers who responded to the call of the Puerto Rican government as representatives of the Puerto Rican peasant class from the nearby island of Vieques and the mountainous regions of eastern Puerto Rico. These initial settlers came from areas of Puerto Rico where sugar plantations and small-​scale agriculture were the predominant means of production. The larger plots attracted the attention of wealthy Puerto Rico-​based landowners who saw in these plots an opportunity to develop a cattle industry. Within seven years, eighty of the ninety lots of land in Culebra had been transferred to settlers. The settlers were successful in making the land productive and the village of San Ildefonso slowly grew with water cisterns, a church, medical facilities and a school following the initial constructions. By 1892, the population of Culebra had passed two hundred, the church had begun issuing birth and matrimonial certificates and some fifty-​seven head of cattle were brought to the island for pasturing the island. Puerto Rican historian, Carmelo Delgado Cintrón, has argued that the initiative to colonise Culebra was part of a design of Spain’s military and geopolitical strategic purposes to avoid further expansion of Danish, Dutch, French and English influence on the region who had already taken possession of the eastern Caribbean and were making offers to acquire Vieques and settle in Culebra (Delgado ​Cintrón 1989). The insistence on committing colonisers to work the land for extended periods of time and to swear loyalty to Spain and the presence of a military fort and garrison followed the general pattern of Spain’s policy towards the Caribbean, whereby settlers were expected to stay on the islands for extended periods of time, defend the territory against other European interests in the region and contribute to the promotion of Castilian hegemony in the New World (Mintz 1996). This contrasts with French and English colonial interests that were more geared towards the accumulation of profit (Mintz 1996). While the remit of these settlers was to isolate Culebra from non-​Spanish interests, they soon came into contact with passing Danish and English merchant boats that were trading with the open harbour of Charlotte Amalie in St. Thomas. The Culebra peasants were encouraged by the passing sailors to learn how to make fishing equipment, construct boats, and develop general maritime knowledge. Soon enough, the certified land labourers, charged with colonising the island in order to push out squatters and discourage further settlement from other imperial interests, were looking to the sea for their sustenance and created new trade networks. Of special value for the Danish market was sea-​turtle conch that was sought after by firms in St. Thomas which would export the shells to manufacturing firms in Hamburg, Germany, to make combs, brushes and jewellery.



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37

The residents of Culebra were soon dedicating more of their time to fishing and to sea matters than to attending the land (Feliciano 2001: 39). The shift in interest from land to the sea illustrates the transformative potential of islands like Culebra, where the sea imposes itself as an enabler of new relationships and new forms of dwelling. The presumed peasant, expected to be locked to the land, incentivised by an empire-​building agenda that sought to control island movements, soon transformed into a fisherman whose labours fed into a global process of capital and subverted his colonising mandate. In addition to the transformative effect that the sea had on the economic activities of the settlers, I have often wondered what kind of transformative effects the Culebra waters had on the consciousness and sense of space of the new arrivals. Feliciano describes the first official arrivals like this: The first colonisers that arrived to St Ildefonso, were all farmers, the majority coming from the agricultural areas far from the coast. And so, for almost all those men, their first contact with the sea had been their journey to the new community in a small and fragile sail boat. It was natural that, after that long and pitiful journey, full of dangerous incidents, the sea for them was something like an apocalyptic monster, arrogant, and ferocious, anxious of swallowing the vessel and its crew. (Feliciano 2001: 39)

If these newly arrived peasants had no previous knowledge or connection to the sea, as Feliciano suggests, the experience of the sea must have resulted in a reorientation of their sense of horizon and an encounter with temporal and spatial vastness. The visual scale of the sea in Culebra is accentuated by the presence of cays, rocks and other islands that surround Culebra. The visual presence of other spaces highlights the viewer’s sense of relative space, of an awareness of possible connections and, conversely, of the islander’s specificity and isolation. Also, encountering the sea from a land-​based perspective is an encounter with a radically different ecosystem, characterised by a combination of properties that are irreconcilable. Underneath an undifferentiated surface lies a whole new world populated by strange and mysterious species and shapes –​a site where light is diminished and sound is augmented, with irregular currents, where your embodied engagement with gravity and movement is counter-​intuitive. Sailing and swimming in the open sea requires an embodied understanding that submits to the direction of the wind and the currents, rather than travel in a linear fashion. The idea of the sea for these first settlers must have been harrowing and liberating. Liberating for its opportunity of space, of mobility, connect to new places, new languages and new sources of food. Harrowing because of its mystery, its radically different logic, its poisonous fish, its unchecked power and its unpredictable weather. For the initiate, this experience may lead to a double consciousness that acknowledges being free and trapped at the same

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time –​a consciousness that intimates a respectful, perhaps a Gothic relationship to the sea. I take these transformative shifts as the precedent for an island consciousness that develops in relation to the material conditions of the island, rather than exclusively dictated by the policies and designs of colonial authorities or the individual subjectivities of the islanders. If colonial authorities expected their settlers to trade exclusively with the empire, to be stable, and reproduce a land-​based consciousness, the island’s maritime features presented themselves as an opportunity for settlers to explore alternative possibilities. However, I would not make the case that the Culebra settlers lost their sense of connection to Spain’s imperial project altogether or that colonisation of the island was a failure. Rather, I wish to speculate on the way in which the first wave of settlers had to conform to the dialectics between sea and land in the process of crafting a sense of unique island life, their new home. This new home is liquid, mobile and intrinsically networked. The first generation of colonists of Culebra depended on outside connections for mundane matters. The island depended, and still does, on contact with other islands for goods, water from Vieques, administration from Puerto Rico as well as technical expertise for specialised projects. Many Culebra settlers became captains and owners of important vessels that provided the important link to other locations. The Dolorito captained by Pedro Marques, later mayor of Culebra and namesake of the current main street of the main town in Culebra, is one of the most fondly remembered schooners that transported small cargo and passengers in the region. Another boat with port of call in Culebra was the Ala Blanca, a brig with the capacity to transport cattle and large quantities of water, which included Venezuela, Colombia and the greater Caribbean region in its route. The Arethusa carried passengers and cargo from Culebra to the Puerto Rican capital, stopping in Fajardo, Puerto Rico’s eastern port city. By the turn of the century, it had been substituted by its twin, Peoria (Feliciano 2001). These boats are still remembered by the older residents of Culebra and miniature models of these boats can be found in village bars and in people’s houses. The movement of goods, ideas and practices that have informed people’s lives in Culebra has also left its imprint on the landscape of the island. Most notable is the predominance of names of places that evoke a maritime connection or names whose provenance suggests the island’s connection to other places. To mention but a few instances, Punta Carenero (Careenage Point), close to the settlement of San Ildefonso and now the location of a luxurious hotel, was so named because settlers found a wrecked boat among its mangroves. Cayo Pirata (Pirate Cay), which lies in the middle of the main bay of Culebra, was named following legends of a buried treasure left by a pirate



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on the cay. Bergantín (Brig) or Sail Rock, which serves as a marker between St. Thomas and Culebra, received its name because it looks like a ship from far away. Other names of places in Culebra that carry an association of contact include Playa Soní (Soni Beach), which comes from the bastardisation of the name Sonny, an English Caribbean man who lived with his wife on the north-​eastern coast of Culebra. The beach directly west of Soní is called Tórtolos Beach in reference to people from the British Virgin Island Tortola who settled in the area. One of the cays to the north of Culebra is called Cayo Jeniquí (Jeniquí Cay), a bastardisation of the name Hen’s Key given to the cay by English sailors. There are also names that suggest previous inhabitants to the island’s colonisation such as the south-​western beaches of Tamarindo Grande (Big Tamarind) and Tamarindo Chico (Small Tamarind). The settlers of Culebra found tamarind trees that predated the official colonisation of the island. The narrative of a mobile history of Culebra is also reproduced through references to the physical landscape of the island. Throughout the twentieth century, cattle were imported to Culebra from the Virgin Island of St. Croix. The cattle brought in their entrails the seeds of a robust thorny tree, locally named rayo ​tree, or lightning tree. Its name suggests its thick hard thorns and the speed with which it reproduces. The rayo tree is the most common tree of Culebra and its success is credited with contributing to the demise of agriculture in Culebra. It is resilient, difficult to handle and control and its thorny appearance contributes to the island being described as harsh and inhospitable. The tree, I was often told, originates from West Africa and has come to dominate significant parts of Vieques and the Virgin Islands. Its presence creates an effect that seems to give the islands a common look to them that is different from eastern Puerto Rico, for example, where the tree is not as predominant. Culebra’s cattle economy was successful with a count of five thousand head of cattle to a human population of less than eight hundred in 1960 (Feliciano 2001). But, by the 1970s and 1980s with the development of tourism, the cattle economy became less significant and the herds smaller. Nowadays, cattle do not constitute an important aspect of the culebrense lifestyle and economy. While some current residents keep cows in their plots, along with goats and horses, cattle herding and slaughtering has stopped being a significant aspect of the island’s economy. However, the rayo tree has stayed as a permanent marker of trans-​Caribbean trans-​Atlantic movement, leaving its indelible mark on the island. These vignettes of the colonisation of the island illustrate the mobile and insular discourses and practices that characterised the first decades of official settlement of Culebra. The first generation of settlers of Culebra, while being Spanish subjects and formally committed to a long-​term colonisation

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process, engaged in mobile practices and exchanges that continue to be reproduced today. The exchanges and contacts present in the first decades of the island’s colonisation functioned to create a sense of unique island identity that is informed by insularising discourses of empire, while in mobile contact with other discourses and contexts of knowledge. The mobile character of Culebra’s colonisation process has been inscribed in the landscape, through the names that people called certain parts of the island, and in the narrative and aesthetics of the physical landscape. It presents an alternative to the isolated island that exists within the confines of its imperial agenda and to the image of a fragmented archipelago. Rather, it offers up an image of a mobile and interactive island that contributes to the comings and goings of an interconnected archipelago. THE ARRIVAL OF THE U.S. NAVY In 1898, Spain ceded its sovereignty over Puerto Rico to the United States. The transfer of power followed the U.S. invasion and occupation of Puerto Rico and the signing of the Treaty of Paris of 1898 that ended the Spanish-​ American War. In the Treaty of Paris of 1898, Spain acknowledged an independent Cuba and ceded Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the United States. The Treaty of Paris specified that all lands that were the property of the Spanish government, such as public buildings and unclaimed land, would pass to the jurisdiction of the United States. Lands owned by the Spanish Crown, such as roads, paths and public parks, would continue to be used for their purpose and would be administered locally. Private lands would remain private. In the case of Culebra, this meant that any plots of land that were unclaimed or whose claimants could not provide documentation, were to become the property of the U.S. government, under the authority of the executive branch, that is, the president of the United States. These lands (and only two Culebra settlers produced such documentation) were confiscated and placed under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defence, which decided to use Culebra for military practice exercises (Feliciano 2001). Two years after the U.S. assumed jurisdiction of Puerto Rico, a steam battleship flying under the U.S. flag made its way into the Ensenada Honda (Deep Cove), the main bay of Culebra. Using a Mexican interpreter, the naval officers informed the mayor of their intentions for the island. The Navy planned to claim all lands that were not privately owned, use them for bombing exercises and planned to build its military base on the lands where San Ildefonso already laid. The Navy proceeded to move into the village and evict the people from San Ildefonso.



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The community’s reaction to the Navy’s encroachment ranged from conformist to reactionary. Claro Feliciano describes how three main groups organised themselves under different tactics. One section of the population, represented by a few merchants, followed the Navy’s recommendation to resettle on the southern marshlands of the island, specifically on the other side of Ensenada Honda. The merchants bought the marshlands, designed a town plan with three streets and resettled immediately. They transported their houses and stores in barges across the bay and christened the new village Dewey, in honour of Admiral George Dewey who captured the Philippines from Spain for the United States. This is the main town, the seat of municipal government and main pier that exists in Culebra today. A second group, led by Mayor Leopoldo Padrón, sent a delegation to the then Danish Virgin Island St. Thomas where a wealthy Culebra landholder lived, to ask him for permission to relocate the village to his lands in Culebra. The wealthy Puerto Rican merchant gave permission for people to settle on his land but without conceding land ownership to the settlers. Padrón and many other families moved to this land and christened the town El Cayo (The Cay). El Cayo thrived. Prominent among the villagers of El Cayo were Madame Josephine and her daughter Viviane, who would bake Danish cakes and sweets in the first bakery on the island. The inhabitants of El Cayo began lobbying the governor of Puerto Rico to recognise El Cayo as the official seat of municipal government in Culebra and bestow it the appropriate budget and authority. When the villagers of Dewey heard about the efforts that led to the founding of El Cayo, they appealed to the U.S. Navy to have them recognised as the official seat of insular administration. The Navy favoured Dewey’s location because it was farther away from the base and because its harbour faced out to sea instead of towards the bay where the Navy had plans for military exercises. Eventually, to the Navy’s convenience, Dewey was recognised by the Puerto Rican government as the seat of administration for Culebra, leaving the people of El Cayo without the morale or budget to develop their village. In due course, El Cayo dwindled away as people chose to live in Dewey. Padrón, the last inhabitant of El Cayo, died alone in 1925. While Padrón’s group was moving to El Cayo, a third group, represented by Pepe Santana, opted for a more resistant stance. Santana allied himself with islanders who did not live in San Ildefonso. He organised land labourers and fishermen who lived spread out across the island and who would be the main targets of the expropriations. Their displacement would mean separation from their livelihood. Santana argued to the U.S. Navy and to the Puerto Rican government that the forty-​five acres of land where San Ildefonso was built was land given to the settlers by the Spanish Crown and did not fall under U.S. jurisdiction according to the Treaty of Paris. He further

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argued that the families that lived in the rural areas did not have the necessary resources to leave their plots of land and move to another location. Last, he argued that the Navy did not need to use the entire space of the village and that it would be reasonable if the Navy used its facilities and allowed public access to water cisterns and the pier. Santana was able to speak and write in English and Spanish and wrote a series of letters to the officers of the U.S. Navy and the governor of Puerto Rico pleading his case. But, Santana was unsuccessful in his petition. While he was away selling turtle conch shells in Puerto Rico, Navy sailors sawed off the foundations of his house; the structure was mounted on a barge and transported across the bay to Dewey. By the time the displacement was complete, there were around ninety U.S. soldiers camping in what was San Ildefonso. The public buildings and houses that remained were put to new use by the military or used for scrap wood. The three streets that defined San Ildefonso were unrecognisable as a baseball field now stood in their place. In 1904, a three-​mast war frigate, The Alliance, anchored off the pier of what had been San Ildefonso. It carried sixty men, most of them support personnel such as medics, telegraph operators, engineers and a twenty-​five-​ piece military marching band composed mostly of Puerto Ricans. The sixty technicians who came on the Alliance drew the designs for constructing military installations and started coordinating the construction of the base. Some of the first military construction works were the expansion of the existing pier and the building of additional piers; construction of a carbon oven, barracks for servicemen, hangars and a shooting range; opening a canal that would connect the southern part of the island to the main bay and setting up a telegraph. The barracks built for officers were tended by women from the Danish Virgin Islands, ostensibly for their knowledge of English language. The Alliance functioned as a hospital for the military, culebrenses and people from nearby islands. The Navy hired islanders for the construction and maintenance of the base, which prompted an immigration of people with construction skills to Culebra. Hamlets, composed of newly arrived workers, formed on the margin of the base. These settlements grew based on a service economy created by the presence of military personnel. Feliciano remembers bars, barbershops, shoemakers, tailors and other services emerging on the fringes of the base. The military exercises consisted of battleships and war planes shooting at designated targets on land and sea. Five cannons were placed on land to fire at targets out at sea and warships would fire at targets on land. The Navy would announce days in advance of the practices and would displace people who were living in designated areas for time that the exercises lasted. The population lived under a constant threat of a missed shot and bombings of lands that culebrenses felt their own.



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The soldiers were a sporadic yet persistent presence on the island. Contact between the soldiers and the island population was limited to the times when the soldiers were granted leave and the daily relationships were distant, mostly based around business transactions. Their interaction was contextualised within the fact that the reason behind the soldier’s presence on the island was aggressive in nature. When soldiers were granted a leave, they would flock to Dewey to frequent the bars, bakeries, photographic studios, produce stands, shoe stores, general stores that included gift items and other businesses set up in the village. Older residents of Culebra describe commercial interactions with the soldiers, such as horse renting and the selling of liquor and cigarettes, as if the islanders were constantly taking financial advantage of the soldiers. As the years passed, contact between the soldiers and residents of the island produced significant cultural practices on the island, some of which continue to be reproduced today. A few decades after the U.S. Navy occupied Culebra, the islanders were using American products such as pocket watches, combs, safety blades, drinking soda drinks chilled with ice brought in by the U.S. Navy and, most popular, smoking American tobacco. Culebra preference for American clothing and other products continued throughout the 1960s, reproduced by the practice of buying clothing and other accessories through American mail order catalogues rather than from Puerto Rican or Virgin Island stores. In his recollections on the process of colonisation of Culebra, Feliciano recalls advice by his American teacher to reform his diet habits, for instance, by adding milk to coffee instead of having it black and eating more roots rather than fried, flour-​based foods. He also remembers how workers adopted more American habits in their schedule. Local workers were soon beginning to use working shoes, to take a break at nine in the morning, to not make much effort in lifting or carrying heavy objects, to enjoy free time at midday for lunch and to take more care of health and safety in their work (Feliciano 2001: 186–​187).

The Navy contact was also felt in the favourite past times of the culebrenses. People in Culebra remember that the musical repertoire of local music string bands of the first decades of the twentieth century included foxtrot, heard from the military bands, as well as contemporary popular Puerto Rican music. More significant was the introduction of baseball to Culebra. Tomás Ayala, a long-​term resident of the island, remembers how the soldiers would call on culebrense teenagers to complete a team or organise games of culebrenses versus Navy soldiers. Culebra’s baseball field has now been moved closer to Dewey and it hosts regular games with teams from Puerto Rico and, occasionally, the US Virgin Islands. The baseball field where a young Ayala would play with sailors is no the airport runaway.

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U.S. Navy presence was not consistent during the first forty years of its occupation of Culebra. The military would practice on the island sporadically, and it was not until the World War II years that military exercises became more frequent. Each arrival and departure of soldiers represented a disruption of life on the island. Their arrival meant that people who lived outside of Dewey had to leave their homes and lands and tolerate the bombardment of their space. The U.S. Navy’s encroachment of the land and the restrictions put on the sea and surrounding cays constituted a limitation of the space that the population of Culebra had settled, claimed, named and exploited for survival. At the same time, the temporary departure of the U.S. Navy represented the closing of bars and other businesses that culebrenses had opened to cater for the soldiers and the hamlets that sprang up on the fringes of the base would disappear when military practices would cease (Feliciano 2001). A significant migratory trend associated with the Navy occupation of Culebra was local emigration from the island. The population of Culebra in 1920 was 1335 and two years later it was 800. This migratory trend was stimulated by the damage caused by the bombings, the threat of a missed shot and general Navy harassment in combination with already difficult lifestyle in Culebra due to poor infrastructure, lack of government services, droughts, mosquitoes and hurricanes. The preferred destination for emigrants from Culebra was either Vieques or the U.S. Virgin Islands, which had been bought by the U.S. government from the Danish crown in 1916. These destination choices are interesting because twentieth-​century Puerto Rican migration has been constructed as predominantly focused on urban centres of the United States as a preferred destination. The interviews I collected from people who experienced this migration indicate that it was easier financially, physically and emotionally to travel to the Virgin Islands, where there was an already established trade route and a thriving cosmopolitan context. The tradition of migrating to the English-​speaking Virgin Islands, rather than to the urban centres of the United States, is one of the experiences from which Culebra islanders draw from to construct a narrative that separates them from the Puerto Rican national space. Luisita Feliciano was born in Culebra in 1924. She lived with her sisters and parents on the north-​eastern Flamenco Peninsula on a plot of land which they had claimed for themselves. The Feliciano family was one of many other families that had claimed plots of land in the area, constituting a small hamlet on the peninsula. She remembers how one afternoon, when she was a teenager, a uniformed man came on a horse and told her father, who was harvesting his crops, to leave the crops alone and make the arrangements to take his family to town for an extended period of time. The father was informed that they and the rest of the families in the area should leave soon because military practices were scheduled to begin soon. The angered father threw man off his



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horse and was getting ready to strike him with his machete when Luisita’s mother and brother stopped him. They held the father back and the horseman galloped away. The reluctant family moved to the other side of Flamenco Bay and stayed with the Ayala family, with the intention of staying the three months that the practices were scheduled to take. Around this time, late 1930s to early 1940s, the Puerto Rican insular government, under the custody of the U.S. federal government, set in motion the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (PRRA). The PRRA programme focused on infrastructure development projects in Puerto Rico that were guided to foster industrialisation and urban living. With U.S. federal funds, the Puerto Rican government coordinated the purchase and administration of a sugar processing plant, a cement factory, the construction of houses, electricity infrastructure and developed health and educational programme. In the specific context of Culebra, PRRA funds were used for building new houses in Dewey that would accommodate the families that were displaced due to the military practices. The Felicianos moved to one of these houses in Dewey. They did not have the legal documentation to reclaim the land they had been working on, and the Navy restricted access to the entire Flamenco Bay. Luisita’s father did a few odd jobs in Dewey, but he mostly worked on Luis Peña Cay, located a few metres south of Culebra, as a land labourer, clearing fields and minding the cay. Luisita’s mother died soon after moving to Dewey due to complications during the birth of her ninth child. After the mother’s death, Luisita’s father went to Vieques in search of work, leaving the children under the custodianship of neighbours. After some time living with neighbours, Luisita was sent to St. Thomas where she was reunited with her father, who had moved there after being unsuccessful at finding steady work in Vieques. Luisita has spent the bulk of her life living in different islands of U.S. Virgin Islands and in Philadelphia. She moved in search for work, moving along with her husbands, or at the request of family members, like when she moved to the United States. She worked mostly as a housewife and would occasionally get involved in community matters or in the school boards where her children studied. While living in St. Croix, she spearheaded a lobbying group to pressure the government to install public lighting on the roads leading to her neighbourhood. She returned to Culebra in the early 1990s with her husband who died six years after their arrival. Luisita Feliciano passed away in late December 2016, next door to the house she lived as a child. I have included a narrative of Luisita Feliciano’s case to illustrate some general aspects of the Culebra emigration following the Navy’s occupation. The vast majority of the people of Culebra who lived there during the Navy occupation moved to and lived on at least one of the U.S. Virgin Islands for

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some part of their lives. This migration network indicates a historical tradition of movement outside of Puerto Rico’s national and political space that has informed a sense of Culebra island insular identity. U.S. NAVY CLAIMS CULEBRA Culebran historian Tamara Pérez considers the militarisation of the island in a broader context of U.S. international expansion, and specifically the efforts of the United States to consolidate a network of military bases that would establish control over the maritime traffic in the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean (Pérez 2013). For Pérez, this policy followed the late-​nineteenth-​century Admiral Alfred Mahan’s analysis that imperial success depended on sea power. The initial actions of the U.S. maritime imperial expansion were the procurement of islands and ports in order to build a military network across the oceans that would be key in controlling traffic of goods and military resources. By the turn of the twentieth century, the United States had already purchased Alaska (1887) and had begun making overtures to buy the Dominican Republic, Cuba and the Virgin Islands (which it did in 1917), had drawn up plans to invade Colombia and bring about the independence of the province of Panama (1903), which would facilitate the construction of the Panama Canal, leased land in Guantánamo, Cuba (1902), and made claims to the Philippines, Guam and Samoa, among other Pacific initiatives. Culebra, in this regard, must be understood as part of a network of military bases that, when linked together, form a chain of bases that span the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. In 1941, President Franklyn Delano Roosevelt proclaimed the entire archipelago of Culebra a military practice range for the use of the Navy. An extract from the presidential order reads: At no time shall any person, other than persons on public vessels of the United States, enter Culebra Island Naval Defensive Sea Area, nor shall any vessels or other craft, other than public vessels of the United States, be navigated into Culebra Island Naval Airspace Reservation, unless authorizes by the Secretary of the Navy. (Executive Order, Abstract from Fed. Reg. of 2-​18-​41 cited in Feliciano 2001)

The signing and implementation of this ordinance meant that every boat that was not part of the U.S. Navy required a special pass from the base commander in order to transit through a perimeter of three miles around the Culebra archipelago. Given the importance that the sea played and plays in the islanders’ lives –​former Mayor Anastacio Soto claims that close to 90 per cent of the islanders depended on the sea for their livelihood –​this



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policy meant a serious impact on the quality of life of the islanders. The U.S. Navy effectively insularised the island space and militarised the surrounding waters. For the islanders, the kinds of limitations imposed by the Navy contributed to the feeling that they were living in a ‘prison’, that they were ‘prisoners in their own island’ (Pérez 2013). For all legal and practical purposes, Culebra islanders had no access to the lands lying to the north, north-​east or south-​west of the island, nor to any of the cays surrounding Culebra. Military practices became more frequent and intense after the ordinance was signed. The military practices would last longer and larger-​calibre artillery was used. People were forced to live away from their houses and lands for over four months of the year, the duration of the bombing season. On their return to their plots of land, they would find their gardens littered with shrapnel and their crops destroyed. Access to land was completely restricted and fishing grounds were blocked by battleships, seriously curtailing islanders’ capacity to sustain themselves. The fleets that used Culebra to practice were based on the eastern Puerto Rican municipality of Ceiba, where residents were also evicted for the installation of the military base Roosevelt Roads. The U.S. armed forces began to lobby the Puerto Rican and the U.S. legislatures to acquire the entire archipelago of Culebra through legal means. The Navy’s general strategy was to create the conditions so that the islanders would leave on their own accord (Copaken 2009; Pérez 2013). According to Ramón ‘Monchín’ Feliciano, mayor of Culebra during the anti-​Navy movement of the 1970s, the Navy’s initial strategy was to acquire the entire island by piecemeal and to slowly buy private plots of land from culebrenses who had made the decision to emigrate, while simultaneously lobbying the government authorities to grant it more access over the island. The Navy had attempted to throw us out of the island through various means, including buying lands bit by bit and integrating them to their possessions with the pretext that they were necessary for ‘national defence’. The US Navy had lobbied numerous political forums, such as the Federal Congress and the government of Puerto Rico, to remove all the inhabitants of Culebra and, in this way, consolidate their forces and keep the training area so that it resemble a war zone. Such ideas were expressed by some officers, including Admiral Alfred R. Matters, in a press conference held at the Isla Grande Naval Base in the presence of Governor Luis A. Ferré. (Feliciano 2009: 89)

The request that the islanders be removed outright from the island was denied by the Puerto Rican executive on the grounds that Culebra was a legally constituted municipality of Puerto Rico, and that such a change would require congressional and constitutional reforms in Puerto Rico. However, the Navy appealed to the Armed Services Committee of the U.S. House of

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Representatives to claim Culebra by eminent domain and force the islanders to leave. Furthermore, the Navy received tacit support from the Puerto Rican legislature, which approved the acquisition of public lands by the Navy and purposefully withheld development funds from the island in order to discourage further settlement and population growth (Feliciano 2001; Pérez 2013). The Puerto Rican legislature also approved leasing to the U.S. Navy the surrounding cays of Culebra for $1 a year. These cays were, in turn, rented out by the U.S. Navy to international navies, specifically Latin American and European navies, so that they would carry out their war games on Culebra. Copaken describes the scene like this: by 1969 the island was under attack . . . annually an average of nine and half hours a day, six days a week. Sunday training averaged three and a half hours. During periods of intense use the training went on nearly round the clock. Early each year the Navy even invited some twenty other nations, including such naval powers such as Trinidad & Tobago, with its fleet of one, as well as the Dominican Republic, to join it in firing at Culebra. For the Culebrans, national security had become quite literally a contradiction in terms –​the utterly senseless single greatest threat to their very survival and physical well-​being. (Copaken 2009: 27)

Ramón ‘Monchín’ Feliciano, mayor of Culebra from 1960 to 1980, wrote in his memoirs: the US Navy not only received ships from the Atlantic Fleet, but would invite ships from Europe and South America to shoot at Culebra: with flags from English, French, German, Italian, Canadian, Brazilian, and Venezuelan flags. On many occasions, the small islands of the Caribbean that were gaining independence from England also used Culebra to train its naval personnel in our coasts. They would rent us as a place for military practises to other countries and this was part of ‘national defence’. (Feliciano 2009: 93)

CULEBRENSES CLAIM CULEBRA There is a consensus among historians who have looked into this issue that the islanders’ perceived acceptance of the militarisation of Culebra was informed by the feeling that islanders were powerless to face such a large bureaucratic body like the U.S. Navy, combined with a Puerto Rican political culture that accepted and encouraged the Navy presence in Culebra (Copaken 2009; Feliciano 2009; Pérez 2013). For a large sector of the Puerto Rican political elite, the presence of the U.S. Navy on Culebra was a necessary accommodation, part of the arrangement between Puerto Rico and the United



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States. In this logic, military bases like Culebra were a price to pay in order to benefit from access to the U.S. market, citizenship and accelerated industrialisation. The Navy is credited with developing some infrastructure on the island and this argument was used by Puerto Rican Navy supporters of the benefits that the base has for culebrenses. Indeed, to characterise the relationship between culebrenses and Navy personnel as purely antagonistic is too simplistic. There was an element of the community that made good business with the sailors –​opening of bars, rental of horses, opening of cafes, sex services and the development of a service economy for the sailors when they were on leave in town. Also, whenever the Navy needed an expansion of their facilities, such as new roads, new buildings or the changing of the targets, it would hire locals who would welcome the work and the pay cheque. These kinds of activities suggest the development of a relationship between the islanders and the sailors. However, I would not suggest that culebrenses had overall positive views of the Navy’s presence. Monchín Feliciano describes the sentiment like this: The hope of this community was that one day the Navy would finalise its manoeuvrers and would give us the opportunity to develop the island and once again be able to use the lands of Flamenco for the planting of crops and cattle raising. The people also hoped that the families that lived there for so many years could return to their lands, but disgracefully it was not the case. The assignment of funds for the municipality were insignificant: they would only be enough to cover the payroll of the municipal employees, and was not enough to open new posts or hire labourers. (Feliciano 2009: 95)

Throughout the 1960s, the political discourse that tolerated the Navy’s presence in Culebra shifted towards a more critical stance. This shift can be understood within a broader global context of increasing anti-​militarism, anti-​nuclear proliferation movement and the anti-​war movement. Within the regional dynamics of the Third World, Latin America and the Caribbean in particular, the success of national liberation and anti-​colonial movements presented an alternative to Western imperialist interests. The civil rights and feminist movements of the United States offered culebrense supporters a reference point in identifying the problem of Culebra as a civil rights and colonialism issue and designed their strategy and language accordingly. In the context of Puerto Rico, the signing of the 1952 Puerto Rican Constitution transferred the local administration of the colony from the president of the United States to the U.S. Congress, which, in turn, allowed for local administration of the Puerto Rican archipelago. While the 1952 Constitution received widespread support in Puerto Rico, and the political party that authored and promoted it has consistently been one of the biggest and most powerful

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parties in Puerto Rican politics, the latter parts of the 1960s represented a shift in the Puerto Rican political culture that viewed with increasing scepticism the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. This was illustrated by a shift in the Puerto Rican legislature, executive and grass-​roots movements which were beginning to identify and confront contradictions in the Puerto Rican colonial project. On the one hand, Puerto Rico was not getting closer to sovereignty. On the other, Puerto Ricans were not assimilating to the U.S. political and cultural context. These discursive and affective shifts coincided with a young generation of Puerto Ricans who did not take the military presence for granted. This generation was informed by rising anti-​imperialist sentiment, a regional rather than colonial view of the Caribbean, socialism, the successful independence of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago and the excitement generated by the Cuban Revolution. This new generation also viewed Culebra’s militarisation from a global perspective. They interpreted, for example, that the practice runs of the planes bombing the Puerto Rican archipelago were test manoeuvres for bombings in Vietnam, that Culebra was the test site of new bombing technology that was being used against national liberation movements and that Culebra could have been used as a site to train soldiers to invade Cuba and carry out right wing coups in Latin America. These sentiments coincided with a rise in political activism of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States, whose actions and discourses highlighted the inconsistencies of the Puerto Rican colonial project and of the American capitalist project. In the context of Culebra, the 1960s was met with an increase in the bombing, larger-​calibre bombs and increased plane activity that made life on the island significantly more problematic. For example, Jack Vincent, the school master at the time, reported a rise in hypertensions among his pupils. He noticed the difficulty that children had to focus in class and attributed their emotional restlessness and tiredness to the bombings. This sentiment was accompanied by a growing concern that the Navy was also testing small nuclear weapons, large-​calibre bombs and jet planes, which raised the risk for the civilian population. Furthermore, many islanders were of the opinion that the size of the island was not an appropriate site to test this kind of weaponry. What follows was a rising sentiment among culebrenses that the Navy did not really need the island for its exercises, as it would repeatedly claim, and that the exercises were actually an intimidation tactic to encourage people off the island. The increase in the frequency and intensity of the bombing also meant an increase in the regulation of movement to and from the island. As per the 1941 ordinance, no boat could enter or leave the shores of the island without written consent from the base commander. The increased bombings and the enforcement of the ordinance further contributed to the sense that culebrenses were living in an island prison without receiving benefits or compensation



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that would mitigate the damage to the island and the islanders’ quality of life. Monchín Feliciano describes the scene: The island of Culebra was almost entirely converted into an area of military operations, and maintained a war of nerves against the civilian population. The exit and entry of helicopters was constant and you could barely hold classes in school for the children. But this was not all; they would pressure the people with all sorts of restrictions. The passenger planes had to land only in one direction, even if the weather conditions were adverse, which caused accidents with loss of life. . . . Fishing could not develop because the fishermen were also controlled on a daily basis, on occasions, throughout the entire week. There were in some places of the town bulletin boards that displayed daily updates of the dates and places where there was going to be bombings from ships and planes, as well announcements of other naval exercises. For us, the culebrenses, it was a nightmare that every morning we had to see the officers of the Navy placing announcements, regardless of they were holidays or night-​time. For them, the military there was no truce. . . . The blockade was perfect so that people would feel fear and leave Culebra, something that to a large extent they were accomplishing, for the lack of work and the constant bombardment, many families had already left and their property was worthless. Also, there was nobody buying land because the prices for the land was so low. The government of Puerto Rico did not invest in Culebra and everything was deteriorated at a rapid rate. What we, the citizens of Culebra, did not know is that all of this corresponded to arrangements between the government of Puerto Rico and the Department of Defence of Puerto Rico. (Feliciano 2009: 92–​94)

In 1960, the anti-​Navy sentiment was expressed through newly elected thirty-​ three-​year-​old Mayor Ramon ‘Monchín’ Feliciano. Monchín was a unique mayor in the history of Culebra in the sense that he had military experience, after being drafted to the U.S. Army in 1943. His experiences in the military, in combination with his experience of living in St. Thomas as a child, afforded him a more interconnected, transdiscursive and transisland perspective on the Culebra situation. Monchín was effective in communicating the contradictions of Culebra to the Puerto Rican government and to the U.S. Navy in terms that was intelligible to them. Monchín framed the case against the U.S. Navy presence in Culebra as both a problem of democracy and an economic problem. It was an economic problem on the grounds that the terms stipulated by the Navy, specifically the ordinance that controlled movement through the Culebra waters, hindered the economic development of the island. Monchín made the case that Culebra had a nascent tourist industry that

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could be exploited responsibly for the benefit of the islanders. It was a problem of democracy in the sense that the overwhelming majority of culebrenses did not support the presence of the Navy on the island. And of course, there was the health and safety issue posed by the bombings and their sonic effects, which caused a direct impact on the health of culebrenses. Most concerning was the rise in injuries and deaths of culebrenses, mostly children, who had tampered with unexploded ordinances in the fields and were injured or killed by the subsequent explosion. The thrust of the argument was effective in making the Puerto Rican government and the Puerto Rican political class sympathetic to the Culebra cause. Framing it along economic and political lines, rather than as a problem of global imperialism or emphasising on a peculiar localism, was effective in communicating the contradictory relationship between Culebra and the U.S. Navy, while not alienating moderate voices within the U.S. government. Monchín could speak the language of the U.S. Armed Forces, of his fellow culebrenses, of Puerto Rican politicians and of U.S. legislators. His capacity to engage simultaneously on multiple discursive levels, to empathise with contrasting world views without contradicting his message and to be an advocate for a local issue while keeping an eye out global concerns is reminiscent of an emergent cosmopolitan political discourse. He did not frame his activism as an anti-​American campaign, or necessarily as anti-​imperialist, but as a nativist struggle against the pressures of globalisation. Monchín’s narrative had multiple references, arranged in a way that presented a positive and inclusive programme for Culebra’s future. Monchín did not present himself as the representative of a singular Culebra voice. He accepted the presence of activists with different persuasions and strategies who flocked to Culebra and has acknowledged their contribution in the project’s success. Ultimately, I take that his discourse was more connected to the acknowledgement of a transinsular and networked island consciousness that was being silenced by the state bureaucracy and imperial nationalist militarism, rather than a struggle akin to national liberation. In the spring of 1968, a German boat that was practising on the southern waters of Culebra misfired and the bomb fell behind the mayor’s building and next to the school. A second missile overflew the town and landed in the inner bay. Nobody was hurt, but Monchín, then mayor, contacted the base commander and logged an official complaint, resulting in the German ship having to sail on. That evening, Mr. Vincent, the school master, met with Monchín at his house and they considered possible plans of action. Neither of them had experience in these kind of situations. The main reference model they had to rely on was the civil disobedience tactics of the U.S. civil rights movement that were being reported in the print news. In the coming weeks,



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Monchín convened a series of town assemblies to discuss possible plans of action. These first assemblies, however, were poorly attended. In the summer of 1968, Monchín headed a delegation to Washington DC to meet with representatives, senators and military personnel to promote the problem of Culebra and secure support for its cause. The specific issue that Monchín’s delegation was trying to contest was the ordinance that regulated mobility through Culebra’s waters. His fundamental argument was that the implementation of this ordinance hinders the development of a tourist economy that would directly benefit the islanders and that the overwhelming majority of culebrenses rejected this ordinance. Monchín scheduled interviews and meetings with various military personnel and lawmakers representing the Republican and Democratic parties. Robert F. Kennedy, then senator for New York, was among Monchín’s scheduled meetings. However, Mr. Kennedy was assassinated the day before the scheduled meeting. The delegation lost motivation after the news of the assassination and Monchín in particular felt let down by the visit (Feliciano 2009). While they managed to hold meetings with some legislators and secure support from some junior members of the lower house, the trip did not yield significant results. The argument that the military range was necessary for national security superseded local concerns, especially within the context of the United States’ current involvements in Vietnam, its military interventions in Latin America and its commitments associated with NATO (Pérez 2013). That summer, four real-​estate firms based in the United States, which had recently bought four hundred acres of land in Culebra, presented a lawsuit against the U.S. Navy in federal court to contest the ordinance on the limitation of movement. The suit argued that the ordinance reduced the possibilities of business to thrive; as such, it was unconstitutional. The court was convinced by the U.S. Navy’s argument that its choice of Culebra was not arbitrary and that the usage of Culebra was a necessary component of maintaining the Navy’s readiness in the Atlantic. The courts were also convinced by the Navy’s argument that it had tried to reconcile the demands of national security with the development of private interests. The federal court ruled that neither Culebra nor Puerto Rico had jurisdiction over maritime regulations or national security concerns. As long as Puerto Rico was a territory of the United States it would, in fact, be unconstitutional for Congress to acknowledge Puerto Rican demands over the island’s waters. The developers appealed their case in Boston’s circuit court, but their appeal was turned down. An interesting effect that this court case had was that it was referenced by the Navy to argue in the media that the anti-​Navy movement was not a grass-​roots movement but that it responded to the interests of profit-​motivated foreign land speculators, illegal squatters and the politically motivated Puerto

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Rican pro-​independence movement, whose interests were augmented by journalists. In effect, the Navy would argue that the anti-​Navy movement did not respond to the interests of the islanders (Pérez 2013). More lawsuits followed, but they did not have much consequence. A local fisherman was successful in getting compensation for the destruction of his fishing gear and other real-estate companies filed motions in the courts. These initiatives did not have a direct impact on the minimisation of the bombings or in the loosening of the ordinance that curtailed islanders’ movement. However, the story of Culebra was starting to get attention in the local and international media. During the first months of 1970, four of the five Puerto Rican newspapers published stories on the Navy presence in Culebra. The story was picked up by numerous publications in the United States, most notably the New York Times, Miami Herald, Life and the Washington Post. Syndicated television channels CBS, ABC and NBC sent film crews to the island to cover the story of Culebra, with an emphasis on the islanders’ point of view. The general tone of these reports highlighted the human rights discrepancies at stake in the Culebra case (Pérez 2013). Within this context of media attention and the confidence gained by the activities in the courts, Monchín convened a town assembly at the main square of Dewey with the goal of outlining a strategy against the Navy. Monchín estimates that the entire population of Culebra came to the meeting. The assembly lasted all night and by the morning they had passed two resolutions. One was the drafting of an ultimatum to the Navy. The ultimatum listed the grievances of the culebrenses and concluded with a formal request to the Navy to leave the island. A second resolution was the mandate to constitute a committee called Comité Pro Rescate y Desarrollo de Culebra (Committee for the Rescue and Development of Culebra), whose remit was to ‘to carry out all kind of legal acts with the goal of preventing the U.S. Navy from using the island of Culebra and its adjacent waters as a shooting range’ (Feliciano 2001: 241). The committee, chaired by Anastacio ‘Taso’ Ayala, was established as a non-​governmental organisation (NGO) that would oversee, coordinate and organise the activities to exert political pressure in favour of the culebrenses. The committee raised funds, produced propaganda, networked and organised events that publicised the Culebra cause. On 11 March 1970, days after the all-​night town assembly, hundreds of culebrenses marched to one of the Navy’s observation posts on the north-​ eastern shore of Culebra, where Monchín read the ultimatum to the base commander. The route of this march is the route that recent protests have taken in Culebra. For Monchín, this event manifests how a sense of solidarity and community spirit was enabled by the Navy protest. In my view, it marks the beginning of the grass-​roots direct action movement against



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the Navy and indicates the development of the politisation of an island consciousness. Once the committee was formally constituted, its first public activity outside of Culebra was to convene a march to the Puerto Rican Capitol building and bring its concerns to public attention. The march was attended by hundreds of culebrenses, who were joined by thousands of Puerto Rican activists representing different combinations of anti-​imperialist, anti-​militaristic, nationalist, pro-​ independence and pro-​ human rights stances. The media presence and subsequent political pressure resulted in the upper house of the Puerto Rican legislature to approve a resolution to request President Nixon to suspend military practices and to examine the possibilities of finding a new location for the exercises. Weeks later, an Italian ship, the ‘Vittoria’, was scheduled to bombard Culebra. Members of the committee organised a march to the bombing site in order to act as a human shield to prevent the bombings. Only a few dozen people attended this march. However, the human shield was successful and the warship suspended its operations. Locals today mark this event as a crucial turning point in the anti-​Navy campaign. It showed the power of direct action and gave the island activists the confidence to understand that the bombings can be stopped. It was the first step in civil disobedience tactics and represented an addition to the political pressure tactics that were led by Monchín. In June 1972, the U.S. Navy requested Congress’ permission and money to acquire two thousand acres of land in Culebra. This kind of acquisition request required public hearings to be held in the U.S. Congress, which was an ideal venue for Monchín to present the Culebra case. Monchín called upon the governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Ferré, to support his deposition. However, the governor did not support Monchín’s view, arguing that the U.S. Navy is also the Puerto Rican Navy. As such, the governor’s take on the situation is that it was a national defence issue and that the Puerto Rican executive must support the military. Unsatisfied, Monchín contacted the senators that he met during his previous visit to Washington DC and requested to be included in the list of speakers during the acquisition hearings so as to voice his opposition to the bombings. Through the recommendation of a U.S. congressman, Monchín was put in touch with the prestigious law firm Covington and Burling, which took the Culebra case pro bono. The case was given to Richard Copaken, the newest associate to the firm –​fresh out of law school. Copaken offered Monchín advice on his deposition and began filing motions to delay the exercises. Copaken realised early on that the Navy’s occupation of Culebra was entirely legal. He, therefore, had limited options to make his case to Congress and to the president’s cabinet. Early on in the process, Copaken figured that the case

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for the people of Culebra was not going to be won through the courts, but it was more about the application of political pressure, lobbying and campaigning in the media (Copaken 2009). That said, Copaken pursued legal arguments that were hitherto unexplored. In his research, Copaken found reports that showed the bombings destroyed maritime environments that were crucial for the reproduction of endangered species. This argument gained more traction with the Department of the Interior than the human rights, health issues and democratic or economic issues that Monchín was bringing forth. Monchín’s deposition in Congress was a success. The Culebra case was heard in the Armed Services Committees of the upper and lower houses of the U.S. Congress. Aside from the economic and democratic argument, Monchín’s team addressed discrepancies in the honouring of certain clauses of the Treaty of Paris of 1898 that dealt specifically with the transfer of lands from the Spanish Crown to the executive of the United States. It was argued successfully that when the Navy arrived for the first time in 1900 and later increased its presence after 1941, it claimed lands that were not in their jurisdiction to claim, even if no legal documentation could be produced as to their private ownership. The results of these hearings were a breakthrough for the Culebra cause. On an immediate level, Congress approved the further acquisition of lands, but also approved an amendment that ordered the Navy to study alternative locations for Culebra and draw plans for leaving the island. But perhaps more significantly, the Culebra story gained international attention and quickly got the attention of groups like the College of Lawyers of Puerto Rico, the College of Social Workers of Puerto Rico and numerous Puerto Rican cultural organisations in Puerto Rico and in the United States, which organised events and published editorials making a case in favour of Culebra. The International Association on the Commission for Human Rights and numerous worker organisations in Latin America wrote letters to U.S. Congress and to the president of the United States suggesting that these kind of military exercises were tantamount to genocidal practices. Numerous NGOs and activist groups were founded in New York City which had as their single issue the demilitarisation of Culebra. Most notable was the coalition of four groups  –​ Asociación Manos Fuera de Culebra, SubComite ProLiberación de Culebra, Culebra Social Club (organised by culebrense diaspora in New York City) and Proyección ‘70 –​which organised a series of demonstrations at the Pentagon, Washington DC and the United Nations building in New York (Pérez 2013). Benjamin Pérez, a prominent activist who later became Culebra’s most prolific author, embarked on a speaking tour of university campuses in the United States to promote the Culebra cause. Hundreds of students –​representatives of numerous activist organisations and university student councils –​came to Culebra to set-​up camps in



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the various beaches that were being targeted by the bombings. The leaders of the Puerto Rican Independence Party, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and the Socialist Party of Puerto Rico came to Culebra to campaign. These groups framed the conflict as illustrative of the contradictions of Puerto Rican colonialism and saw in this struggle the possibility of advancing the case for Puerto Rican independence from the United States. Of all the activists who came to Culebra, the representatives of The Religious Society of Friends, also known as the Quakers, are the group that was held in highest regard in contemporary narratives of the protests. The Quakers were not concerned with local politics and encouraged local activists to frame their concerns in more transcendental terms. Contemporary activists describe the Quakers as organised, experienced and being particularly inspiring in terms of their tactics and approach towards the Navy protest. Quakers supported the culebrense tactic of occupying the coasts that were being bombed, but enhanced the process by building infrastructure on the beaches, particularly chapels. When Navy personnel would destroy the chapels, culebrenses quickly built others in their place. During 1970 and 1971, incursions into the firing range and physical engagements with the Navy soldiers and Navy boats became more common. Culebra activists describe general harassment tactics such as placing barbed wire on the road so that military jeeps would puncture their tires, spraying graffiti, vandalising military property and harassing sailors when they were on leave. Fishermen lost their fear of the Navy and would habitually violate the ordinances that prohibited transit through Culebra waters, particularly during military manoeuvres. Two incidents stand out. One evening a scuffle started at the entrance of the base, which was fenced in at the time, and resulted in a Molotov bomb being thrown at a sentry, burning down his station. In another occasion, twelve culebrenses who were camping at the bombing range on Flamenco Beach were arrested for trespassing and sentenced to seven months in the penitentiary. The civil disobedience campaign was paired by a media and lobbying campaign carried out by Monchín, Copaken and the myriad of groups that were supportive of the Culebra cause. The pressure on the Navy became higher after the 1972 elections, which in Puerto Rico resulted in a change of the executive. The new governor, Rafael Hernández-Colón, supported Culebra and the mobilised resources at his disposal to lobby President Richard Nixon to end the military manoeuvres in Culebra. Hernández-Colón made his office available to Copaken and his team, held regular meetings with Monchín and used his contacts in Washington DC to lobby for the Culebra cause. Among his initiatives, Hernández-Colón persuaded his predecessors to join him in signing letters to President Nixon, members of his cabinet and senior figures in the military.

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This was the result of clever political manoeuvring since previous governors of Puerto Rico actively or tacitly supported the Navy presence in Culebra. The main hurdle for the Culebra cause was that the Navy was also lobbying to acquire the entire island for its military exercises. This was particularly frustrating for Culebra activists because the Navy had been ordered by Congress to identify alternatives to Culebra. In 1972, activists had gained access to military research that showed that the conditions in Culebra were not appropriate for the type of technology and tactics that the Navy was using. Also, there was a growing sense that the political case had been made, and that there was a consensus in the public discourse that the Navy should leave Culebra. However, the Navy made further requests for land acquisitions, continued to make offers to locals to buy lands and began hiring locals to work at the base. An argument that the Navy would rely on during the latter phases of this process was that many of the activists that were flocking to Culebra were representatives of different interest groups, with little or no connection to the culebrense cause, and were using Culebra as a platform for their cause. The Navy cited the presence of Puerto Rican independence and socialist leaders on the island, peace organisations, left-​wing student organisations, environmentalists, real-estate developers, land speculators and journalists as the main protagonists of the protests. The Navy also produced support letters and cited two community organisations that supported the presence of the Navy in Culebra. For Monchín, the Navy’s framing of the struggle as a local culebrense issue that pitted locals versus ‘the rest’ was off the mark. The fact that the Culebra cause was attracting such a wide variety of interest groups, including groups that would otherwise be in disagreement, was something that he was particularly proud of, and understood it as one of the strengths of the campaign. What Monchín found most egregious, however, was the way the Navy was manipulating some locals with job offers and then encouraging these individuals to sign letters of support for the Navy. Research into the support letters by Monchín’s team showed that a significant number of the signatures were names of people who were no longer alive, did not live in Culebra or were minors. Monchín’s analysis of the Navy’s insistence on staying in Culebra was that it responded to internal power struggles within the U.S. military where the Navy was struggling to maintain and justify its budget. Monchín speculated that the closing of the Culebra base would discredit the justification of maintaining bases in Vieques and Ceiba, which could result in a chain reaction that would lead to the closing of other bases in the region. On 22 June 1974, six years after the wayward missile detonated near the school, President Richard Nixon signed an executive order reversing Roosevelt’s ordinance and ordering all Navy personnel and exercises off the



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archipelago from 1 July 1975. The celebrations in Culebra were unprecedented. The date 25 July 1975 was chosen to officially celebrate the exit of the Navy from Culebra. According to Monchín, Governor Rafael Hernández-​ Colón took the initiative in organising the festivities. A huge stage was erected on the main square of Dewey decorated with the U.S. and Puerto Rican flags. The shield and flag of Culebra were inaugurated on that day, and the streets were festooned with Puerto Rican, U.S. and Culebra flags. Next to the chapel (that was built by the Quakers), tents were erected under which a succulent lunch was served for all the guests that shared the celebration with us. The Metropolitan Authority of Buses sent 60 buses from San Juan to transport people to Flamenco Beach. A great multitude of people was invited from different places. Amongst the guests, you could observe Senators Henry Jackson and Howard Baker, the Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico Don Jaime Benítez, the admiral of the base in Roosevelt Roads accompanied by other naval officers, the Governor Rafael Hernández Colón and his wife, all the Puerto Rican press and other figures from the Puerto Rican government and abroad. The celebrations were transmitted live from the main square of Culebra through channel 6, the government channel of Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. (Feliciano 2009: 90)

The speeches of the day, according to Monchín, addressed the process by which the voice of the culebrenses had prevailed and predicted a bright future for the island. Governor Hernández-Colón specifically signalled out Monchín as the protagonist of the struggle. However, Monchín placed the credit on the unity of the people that rallied around the Culebra cause. He specifically mentioned Richard Copaken (the lawyer who took the Culebra case), Luis A. Ferré (former governor of Puerto Rico and leader of the opposition party who advocated for U.S. statehood for Puerto Rico), leaders and militants of the Puerto Rican independence cause and Senators Henry Jackson, Hubert Humphreys, Edward Kennedy, Edmund Muski, Howard Baker, Charles Goodell and Harold Hudge. The general expectation suggested by the speeches of the day was that the departure of the Navy was going to empower the islanders to make decisions on the development of their island, without being conditioned by the Navy. Of particular importance was the regaining of access to the sea and the coastal areas that had been cordoned off during the Navy occupation. THE AFTERMATH A lot of the lands that were under Navy occupation, particularly coastal lands, remained under the jurisdiction of the U.S. government. The lands that the

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Navy bought during its seventy-​five years in Culebra were passed to the U.S. Department of the Interior, which placed them in the custody of the Fish and Wildlife Service. Currently, the Fish and Wildlife has jurisdiction over coastal lands in the north and south-​eastern sections of Culebra, some cays and the Flamenco Peninsula. Many of the lands that are under custodianship of Fish and Wildlife are off limits and permission from Fish and Wildlife is required to access them. Lands that were considered public and that were occupied by the Navy, such as the plots of land that made up San Ildefonso, were passed to the government of Puerto Rico, which placed them under the authority of the Department of Natural Resources of Puerto Rico (DNR). DNR has the authority to monitor and police the remaining lands and surrounding waters in Culebra. The Navy did not decontaminate the lands that it used for bombing. The northern landscape and seascape of Culebra is littered with unexploded ordinance, rusting military tanks, bullets and mines, which pose a threat to the general population should they be developed. A second argument, which recalls Copaken’s environmental angle, concerns the delicate ecosystems and habitats that can be found around Culebra’s coasts. This line suggests that the lands should be left to ‘recover’ or heal after seventy-​five years of human intervention. A third organisation that claimed control of the land and resources of Culebra was Autoridad de Conservación y Desarrollo de Culebra (ACDEC). ACDEC is the successor of the Comité Pro Rescate de Culebra which was dissolved once the Navy left. ACDEC was initially organised as a municipal office, administered from the mayor’s office, which oversaw and implemented policy on the nature conservation and economic development of Culebra. In 1993, ACDEC was incorporated into the Department of Natural Resources of Puerto Rico, but still retains a large degree of autonomy. One of the first issues that ACDEC addressed was the issue of scarce water resources in Culebra, which was ultimately solved by a successful lobby to the Puerto Rican government to lay down underwater pipelines that would bring water from Vieques. ACDEC would also take it upon itself to acquire more lands, on behalf of the Culebra municipality, to be set aside to provide housing for culebrenses. ACDEC would also supervise the development of unlicensed constructions and squatters who were coming to Culebra as land speculators. ACDEC is most visible today as the custodian and manager of Flamenco Beach, Culebra’s main tourist attraction. Each of the three organisations responds to different levels of authority, and their relationship and mandates have not always been understood with clarity by the islanders, particularly the relationship between ACDEC, DNR and the mayor’s office. The complexities regarding the different roles of each organisation were exacerbated in the context that the general mediascape was



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rebranding the island into a tourist destination. If Culebra was experienced as a bombing range throughout most of the twentieth century, within a matter of a few years the island has been reimagined as something akin to a recreational natural park and a Caribbean tourist commodity. These agencies, especially the policies coming out of the mayor’s office and DNR, have been key in the process of managing the effects of this rebranding. The challenge these post-​ Navy agencies have faced is to contend with the vertiginous rise in tourist receipts while keeping their remit to conserve the island’s natural resources in a context where the narratives about the island were in flux. In the following chapter, I will be addressing how the rebranding of Culebra as a tourist destination set the stage for the development of contesting visions for the island. The debates and contrasting imaginaries that emerged in the post-​Navy context recalls some of the themes that were at stake during the anti-​Navy campaign. The mayor’s office, DNR, ACDEC and the Fish and Wildlife Service began their work in a context where tourists, temporary residents, land speculators, hotel developers and tourism entrepreneurs outnumbered the culebrenses. The scale of this shift, the complete takeover of the tourist economy in Culebra and its accompanying discourses and practices require a shift in the methodological perspective that is based on a binary opposition between hosts and guests. I intend to reference the voice of some of the anti-​Navy activists as an attempt to come to terms with Culebra’s complex transinsularity in the context of tourism development initiatives of the early twenty-​first century. CONCLUSION In this chapter, I wished to contextualise the development of a sense of a culebrense island consciousness within the islanders’ response to U.S. militarism. It is important to acknowledge that the history of Culebra is more than its relationship to imperial militarism. Local writers, the most prolific being Benjamin Pérez, have published many short stories, novels and memoirs that capture the textures and rhythms of everyday life in Culebra throughout the twentieth century. In this body of work, the Navy’s presence serves as a backdrop in front of which the drama of culebrense social life unfolds and it is not always treated as the defining feature of Culebra social life. While the politics of representation of the literary productions of culebrense authors and artists lies outside the scope of my narrative, I would insist on the importance that the success of the anti-​Navy movement had on the development of an activist consciousness in Culebra. I suggest that the Navy struggle provided a precedent for future activist activities in Culebra and is key to understanding the broader historical context of the current tourist economy and its local responses.

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The presence of the U.S. Navy in the north-​eastern Caribbean acknowledges the importance that militarism played in the development of the region’s transinsular experience –​a simultaneously isolated and networked experience. Similar to Benítez-​Rojo’s characterisation of Caribbean islands as a set of repeating rhizomes, which simultaneously reproduce and subvert Western modernity, local activists understood Culebra’s militarisation as a node in a transoceanic network of military spaces. The military practice runs in Culebra were part of a larger programme that networked other island bases in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Panama, Hawaii, Japan, Diego Garcia, the Philippines and the Mediterranean. The exercises in Culebra cannot be separated from the U.S. military operations in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Panama, Haiti, Grenada, the Pacific and Europe and its commitments to NATO. Resistance to the Navy’s presence on Culebra was also discursively and spatially networked. It drew from multiple references that included, but were not limited to, the civil rights movement, activism associated with ethnic minorities in North America, national liberation movements, peace movements and the counterculture environment. It was spatially linked across the Americas through transnational network of relations. This network was not necessarily coordinated and many groups operated independently from each other. Yet, they all fed into the public discourse that built political pressure on the U.S. government for the achievement of a singular goal. On a local level, I am interested in the ways in which the responses to the U.S. Navy presence in Culebra were fundamentally about regaining the islanders’ ability to be mobile and engage with discursively different spaces. I read the struggle against the U.S. Navy was a struggle against insularism and to resist it was to engage in practices of mobility –​to continue fishing and to foster networks outside of Culebra. And yet, these networked and mobile practices fed back to the production of a specific island voice. The sea and Culebra’s coasts were the sites where this story took place. All the direct action sites, protests and the destination of marches were to the island’s beaches, particularly Flamenco Beach on the north-​western shore of Culebra, and on waters around Culebra. It was argued by local activists that the continuous bombings of the island and surrounding areas not only placed the lives of the islanders under immediate risk, but also threatened the health of reefs and fishing grounds that were necessary for the reproduction of the community. Activists would often use the sea and cays surrounding the island to gain access to the firing range, impede the military exercises and flee the military authorities after disrupting the exercises. If the sea was a location of the Culebra protest, then the fishermen –​as the custodians of maritime knowledge and as the ones who were being directly affected by the Navy



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e­ xercises –​were the protagonists of the conflict and stood as the metonym for that culebrense voice. The anti-​Navy struggle has consistently been represented and is spoken about today as a heroic feat and it is a central component of the island’s narrative. Although it is well known that there were a few Navy sympathisers and collaborators, some of whom still live in Culebra, the consensus on the island today is that the struggle against the Navy was characterised by a strong sense of community unity and camaraderie. For the community organisers whom I have interacted with throughout my years of fieldwork, the post-​Navy years function as a template to address the contemporary complexities associated with the commodification of the island for the tourist economy, divisions among culebrenses regarding the legitimacy of tourist development projects, environmental concerns and rise in drug-​dealing-​related violence. The anti-​ Navy struggle narrative casts the political culture of Culebra as combative, based on a pride and love for the island’s sovereignty, in difference –​and perhaps antagonism and suspicion towards Puerto Rico and neighbouring Vieques. It suggests a political consciousness that dwells in struggle –​a struggle that, while it took new forms in the subsequent years, maintained its message of island specificity against global discourse that isolated the island.

Chapter Three

Conflicted Visions of Land

Benjamín Pérez-​Rivera, one of the twelve culebrense activists arrested on Flamenco Beach during the peak of the anti-​Navy protest, has since become the most prolific writer in Culebra. He has published seven books of fiction that are inspired by his research on Culebra’s oral history and his life​long experience on the island. Benjamin’s short stories and novels reimagine historical events and characters that, in his view, have shaped the island’s sense of community. In his 2013 story Don Taso Soto –​Capitán del Ala Blanca (Don Taso Soto –​Captain of the White Wing), Benjamín describes the months that followed the U.S. Navy’s departure: Once the exaggerated celebrations for the Navy’s departure had been concluded, where ‘doors were thrown out the windows’, through the enormous waste of money by the government of the Big Island1; with the most sophisticated musical orchestras and modern buses shipped in from the Metro Area,2 gigantic tents, artists groups, clowns, banquets, drinks, fireworks, supersonic equipment, hundreds of guests and of course, the press, national, international and local. All this transmitted on television. The island became known all over the world; the great feat of the culebrenses, had gone around the planet thousands of times. From one day to the next, the island of Culebra changed drastically, it started to get filled with people, people that desperately sought the Promised Land and had not yet found it, because outside of this island, the rest of the world was in flames. . . . Culebra became a Metropolis, all came, Americans, Germans, Spaniards, Chinese, Mexicans, and obviously our Caribbean brothers: Dominicans, Cubans, Jamaicans and people from the rest of the archipelago were also represented. Thanks to the exit of the Navy, the gates were open to a new social, cultural, political and economic transformation; the perfect chemistry to comprehend the 65

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dilemmas of the Tower of Babel, where there was once confusion, disorder, and chaos. (Pérez-​Rivera 2013: 11–​12)

The story describes the environment of post-​Navy Culebra as a chaotic influx of people interested in acquiring lands that were previously off limits. While many of these interests were representatives of transnational land speculators who were biding their time for the Navy to leave, a lot of the land grab of the 1980s was initiated by wealthy Westerners interested in building vacation homes in Culebra, Puerto Ricans and other West Indians settling in Culebra. Many landless culebrenses who lived in the crowded sectors on the southern parts of the island also took the opportunity to squat lands that laid unclaimed after the Navy’s departure. Benjamin’s characterisation of the rush for lands as disorderly and chaotic mirrors the general impression of many islanders that the authorities were either powerless or otherwise ineffective at regulating land uses and transfers, resulting in a laissez-​faire approach towards land management. Benjamín then describes how Monchín retired from public office in 1976 and Anastacio ‘Taso’ Soto, the former chair of the Comité Pro Rescate y Desarrollo de Culebra (Committee for the Rescue and Development of Culebra), was elected as mayor of Culebra. In Benjamín’s story, Taso gave an impassioned speech at his inauguration ceremony that addressed the unchecked land developments of Culebra: The island has been filled with false prophets, beware: while they continue to hoard at any price, our people sell their little houses, lots and leave to dwell under different skies; By God, my dear brothers! Think with serenity, in no other place are we going to be as happy as we are here, in our beloved island. Let us meditate; we cannot forget the criminal expulsion of the Jews, remember the deportation to Babylon, there are many other examples, but the closest, we have it right here, in front of our noses, our neighbours, in St. Thomas, only 8 miles from our coast, there the natives do not own anything, they are not permitted to participate in the taking of important decisions regarding their future. Before, they were in charge of their land, but they grew careless, we still have time . . . Brothers . . . we must be attentive to everything that is going on, let not anybody be neither fooled, nor not pay attention. What will be the future of our island? (Pérez-​Rivera 2013: 15)

Benjamín’s reimagining of Taso’s inauguration speech is illustrative of the broader concern of many culebrenses regarding the impact of land management policies on Culebra and its relationship to island sovereignty. In this chapter, I focus on the ways in which Culebra islander’s relationship to land found its expression in the 2003–​2004 political debates that focused on state-​sponsored infrastructure development and the municipality’s agenda to



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orient the island towards a tourist economy. The discussions on land management and development projects that I witnessed and participated in during my fieldwork produced conflicting views of ‘the local’ that converged on the island, which vied for access and control of the island’s resources. Not unlike the anti-​Navy protest, the positions assumed by Culebra islanders during the tourism development controversies constructed an insular identity by referencing different networks of ideas, images and capital, which were global in scope. The island of St. Thomas was a common reference during my fieldwork, particularly among the generation that experienced the anti-​Navy movement. I am particularly interested in culebrenses reference to St. Thomas because it broadens the island space beyond the Puerto Rico/​U.S. binary opposition of identity politics. While it is physically the closest island to Culebra, St. Thomas is consistently written as a different ethnonational space to Puerto Rico and, by extension, Culebra. St. Thomas is historically the product of the Danish colonial project in the Caribbean and is consistently written as part of the English Caribbean space, whereas Puerto Rico and Culebra are addressed as part of the Spanish Caribbean/​Latin American space of cultural identity. Benjamin’s reference to St. Thomas is illustrative of Culebra’s transinsular connections throughout the Caribbean, irrespective of national and culturalist frames. Another instance why I find the St. Thomas reference significant is because it is consistently held by culebrenses as a negative example of the effects of laissez-​faire land management policy and tourism development. For Bejamin’s Taso, St. Thomas illustrates the effects of an unchecked tourist-​ dependent economy, which result in the undermining of locals to participate in the economy on their own terms, wealth disparity, a rise in violent crime associated to the drug trade and a sense of loss of the island’s character. While many culebrenses have intimate connections and memories attached to St. Thomas, and many visit it regularly, there is a growing sense that the island has become ‘boring’, an anonymous non-​place designed for Western consumption, where political and administrative decisions are not made by locals but by interests responding only to the market and where the main attraction is duty-​free shopping rather than the island’s way of life and its resources. In Culebra, the political arguments relating to the tourism discussions constructed a located island that responded to a specific history within a network of relations, that is, either to the Puerto Rican nation state and its colonial relationship with the United States, U.S. transnationalism, English-​ and French-​ speaking Caribbean tourism development or global ecotourism. These disparate spatial and temporal references were used as a means of articulating difference and island specificity. This created a scenario whereby participants in the political discussions constructed their political

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opponents as ‘foreign’ or responding to interests outside of the island. For all its transnational and global convergences, the social contestations of the early twenty-​first-​century Culebra reproduced binary oppositions between the local and the foreign, regardless of the analytical complications and contradictions generated by constituting a stable locality in such a cosmopolitan and mobile place. In this chapter, I will show how the convergence of the insular and mobile (and related notions such as global and local) functions to mutually constitute an island political identity. Instead of seeing mobile and insular practices and discourses as separate processes that are ‘intertwined’ (Salazar 2005: 630), look in different directions (Meethan 2003: 18), or that their convergence represents a hybrid (Nederveen-​Pieterse 1995) or a kind of collage, I will argue that they are ingrained within each other in the same process and operate simultaneously in a way that complicates the distinction between the mobile and the static. I wish to turn to the idea of Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image and suggest that the contradictory narratives that converge on Culebra recall the shape-​shifting commodity that Benjamin was thinking of in the context of describing the modern experience and the intensity with which people desire the island (Benjamin 1999). The fact that a wide array of views converge on Culebra and that each view is networked through a specific path of relations should not be surprising in a Caribbean context. What has struck me since my arrival to Culebra was the way in which people quickly develop a sense of ownership towards the island, regardless of whether they are transients, recent arrivals or people who acknowledge that their connection to the island goes back one generation, maybe two. Perhaps it is because of the small size of the island, the expectation of familiarity that is created from its small population, the intimacy of social relations, how fast gossip travels and how quickly a visitor can develop a network of acquaintances –​all contribute to developing a sense of membership to the island. But I figure that there could be something more subtle at stake. Perhaps there is something peculiar about the physical or aesthetic character of the island that many people identify with and can relate to? That it harbours some kind of double condition of being unique and different while at the same time it is relatable and desired? And yet, it is an image that is incomplete. For if there was a running theme throughout the tourism development debates, it was that people and interest groups were not satisfied with how the island presented itself. Most of the participants in the development debate were interested in irrevocably changing the physical contours of the island. The study of social contestations that arise from tourism policies is useful to approach the complexities of sites where multiple narratives converge. Tourism suggests a contact zone where social actors meet and enact their



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connections within wider political, social, economic, technological and cultural sphere (Picard 2007: 97) in the process of constituting a locality. I approach tourism as a dynamic set of symbolic, economic and social connections, rather than as a unilateral dynamic emanating from a particular spatial centre or history (Appadurai 1996; Picard 2007: 97). I am particularly interested in the ways in which people open the island beyond its physical confines in the process of constructing their narrative of an island place. In this manner, I am more interested in the rhetorical and political process in which an island space is produced and reproduced, rather than understanding islands as empirically reified places as if their space is constrained by the sea. This chapter discusses how the meeting of multiple visions of the island’s landscape generated a social contest where people negotiated, appropriated and produced strategies of island identity in a process that promised to affect the physical landscape of the island, people’s relationship to the landscape and the patterns of consumption that identify Culebra. VISIONS OF CONSUMABLE LANDSCAPES The image that emerged of Culebra in the post-​Navy years was of an undeveloped, underpopulated, dotted with untouched natural coasts and an island identity that is linked to the landscape. It is an association that continues to be reproduced today by National Geographic, TripAdvisor.com and other tourism publications. The imagery of a virginal tropical landscape recalls the imagery produced by late-​fifteenth-​century Europeans that characterised the Caribbean as an Edenic garden with limitless natural resources (Sheller 2003). Of special importance was the understanding of the Caribbean as a place laden with exotic resources such as fruits, plants, spices, minerals and cultures to be consumed by the various European powers or United States that claimed each island (Sheller 2003). Promotional materials tend to represent an untouched Caribbean landscape waiting to be discovered by the tourist; the deserted beach and the wild rainforest then become the predominant motifs in tourism campaigns. The landscape is constructed as virginal and pristine, untouched by Western modernity. In doing so, tourism promoters are credited with downplaying the region’s historical and cultural legacy. Meanwhile, those romantic ‘desert island’ images of the brochures and the magazines triumph over the real and painful complexities and paradoxes of Caribbean life and culture. Those fantasies mock the history of the Caribbean: from the almost complete annihilation of the Amerindians, through slavery and the plantation system, to migration, the difficulties of nationhood and the forging of new identities and economic strategies.

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Most tourists know little of all this. Until recently, the fantasies projected by brochures and travel agents also failed to distinguish between one island and the next, building on the impression of nothing but sand, sea and sun from the Bahamas to Bonaire. (Pattullo 2005: 144)

These images were a key motivator in the subsequent global movement of goods, people and capital to and from the region as European and later North American interests consolidated plantation systems on the islands. The plantation context provided a different set of categories of representation that was based on systemic violence, slave labour, a hierarchical class system based on race and chaotic miscegenation of peoples from Asia, Africa and Europe. These visions are reproduced today as the region continues to be viewed as a poor and marginal location, so miscegenated that it lacks any kind of cultural authenticity, and a Third World vestige of European colonialism symbolically excluded from Western discourses of modernity (Sheller 2003). These historical visions present a dual image of the Caribbean. On the one hand, the Caribbean can be a hedonistic garden of care-​free living; on the other, it can be a hellish place of violence, political instability, immorality, colonial domination and racism. Euro-​ American understandings of the Caribbean pivot around what Silvia Spitta, following Edmundo Desnoes, has described as ‘a single Manichean political, economic and discursive opposition which was repeated ad nauseaum. This opposition, paradise/​hell, noble savages/​cannibals has persisted to this day, but now it reads: friendly natives/​hostile guerrillas’ (Spitta 1997:160). The interplay of these two discourses in the consumption of the Caribbean creates a sense of excitement and danger, produced through moving closer and distancing, longing and horror, touch and recoil. It is both the site of escapist tourism and the dangerous terrain of criminals, unstable governments, disease and desperate boat people. (Sheller 2003: 107)

This ‘sense of excitement’ that the Caribbean offers the West continues to be reproduced today as Caribbean governments include tourism into their national economic plans. As the world’s fastest growing industry, tourism can be understood as a strategy whereby the region can exploit its resources sustainably, raise its GNP, better the socio-​economic condition of the state, move away from its colonial trappings and become a more influential political constituent. Caribbeanist academia and many Caribbean policymakers are all too familiar with the critiques of how postcolonial development policies in general and tourism development in particular, reproduce economic, political and symbolic structures analogous to colonialism (Brohman 1996; Nettleford 2003; Sheller 2003). The rhetoric that accompanies economic and political



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development acknowledges the colonial past of the region and strives to distance itself from it to build a sustainable economic model on its own terms (Sunshine 1987). However, tourism development research has shown how tourism in the Caribbean reproduces an economic scheme analogous to colonialism (Pattullo 2005). The tourism development scheme that has predominated in the Caribbean, with notable exceptions like Cuba and Anguilla in the 1980s, has been of foreign multinational companies establishing their projects on the islands, sometimes after negotiating favourable tax conditions, offering limited economic benefit for the islands. Hotel complexes are associated with forceful displacement of people from their historical communities and limiting access to coastal areas, which are considered part of the commons (Iranzo 1995). Tourism development is also associated with encouraging an environment of uneven social mobility and realigning access to resources and social opportunities for the islanders. Also, hotel complex constructions are associated with causing significant environmental damage because they are usually built near or on the coast causing damage to ecologically sensitive areas such as mangroves, bays and coral reefs. The irony here is that tourism development compromises the very things that it promotes by irreparably changing the landscape. In Culebra, the development of a transnational hotel complex in the early 2000s was associated by some Culebra activists with general trends of coastal gentrification, which limit locals’ access to the coast in ways that were reminiscent of the U.S. Navy’s land restriction policy. However, the development of the hotel complex, the general context of coastal gentrification and the mayor’s development programme suggested yet another layer of contacts and creative encounters within the Caribbean. It opens up possibilities for new forms of political discourse and action, allows for creative approaches towards homemaking and creates the conditions for islanders to assess the cosmopolitan nature of their island. Tourism, in general, entails people traversing through the region either as guests or migrant workers, leisure seekers or investment capitalists. In fact, the majority of the business owners in Dewey first came to Culebra as tourists and decided to stay. Tourism results in yet another layer of contacts and encounters that contributes to the already complex make-​up of Caribbean society. The tourism development policy of Culebra takes place within Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the United States. In 1952, the U.S. Congress approved the Constitution of the Free Associated State of Puerto Rico (ELA), which defined the island’s current relationship with the United States and established that internal island matters were to be administered locally by a locally elected government, but the island would remain under U.S. federal authority, with the U.S. Congress as the head of state of the island. The island’s ambiguous state of being a non-​incorporated territory

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of the United States has been the primary focus of attention in Puerto Rican politics throughout the twentieth century. However, not all the social actors that got involved in the Culebra controversies see themselves as negotiating the complicated politics of the Puerto Rican colonial project. What I find interesting about the Culebra social contests is that traditional colonial binaries such as nationalism versus assimilationism, empire versus colony and traditionalist versus modernist were not analytically consistent, nor was such rhetoric deployed in a consistent manner by the island’s activists. Instead, pressure groups and individuals drew from different networks of ideas –​such as green politics, transnational capitalism, Puerto Rican development policies and the failures and successes of West Indian tourism development –​in order to position themselves strategically within Culebra. All of these social activists presented their case as if they responded to local island interests, in opposition to their antagonists who were accused of responding to foreign interests. In the process, the political camps that have dominated the Culebra political scene in the past were fragmented among themselves because the terms of the discussion were the result of different networks of argumentation. MOBILE INSULARITIES The more I learned about the process by which an insular island narrative is drafted, the more I was confronted with the fragmented and mobile qualities of the island’s population. One person’s national liberation efforts was another’s colonialism. One group’s attempt to bring about socio-​economic reform on the island’s own terms was seen by another group as further impositions from outside elements that would result in the disempowerment of the locals. In many ways, the social contest that I will be discussing reproduced the well-​known rhetorical binary of host and guest (or local and global, native and foreigner, islander and non-​islander) that characterised classic tourism studies (Nash et al. 1981; Smith 1989). Rather than support or critique the host and guest binary as a conceptual category, I examine ethnographically the discourses at stake and the dialectical images of Culebra that emerge when the island is negotiated and resignified as people engage in the island’s tourism development discussions. The debates that surrounded the 2003–​2004 development projects occurred in a context where the island municipal authorities, in coordination with the Puerto Rican state, were refashioning Culebra as a tourist destination. According to Iván Romero, the mayor of Culebra at the time, infrastructure development was necessary to create the conditions that would foster economic growth and ‘better the quality of life of the people of Culebra’.



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For some, Culebra’s development plans mirrored Puerto Rican development policy, which arguably would bring Culebra closer to the colonial fold of Puerto Rico. However, the intention of ‘updating’ Culebra to Puerto Rican standards highlighted Culebra’s peculiar role within the Puerto Rican project. For example, Romero and his supporters’ rhetoric consistently argued that the development programme would benefit locals. However, critics of his policies outlined the different ways in which the implementation of the development programme responded to interests of construction contractors and Puerto Rican politicians who would benefit from the political and financial capital accumulated by these works. By aligning Culebra as a constituent part of Puerto Rican development, the narrative of Romero’s development program broke away from the traditional identity politics of Culebra, which tended to be more expansive and not reliant on the Puerto Rican colonial project. The most public critic of the development programme was Monchín, who would argue that Romero was ignoring the fact that Culebra’s social history and social reality do not relate to Puerto Rico-​centred development programs. Monchín and his supporters would argue that Culebra should look to the English-​speaking Caribbean for models and anti-​models of tourism development. By including islands that lie outside of the Puerto Rico versus U.S. binary, Romero’s critics were dislodging the colonial politics that has historically predominated the Puerto Rican political scene. North American and Europeans living on Culebra would also not connect with Romero’s narrative of equating Culebra’s standard of living to urban Puerto Rico. Westerners living in Culebra politicised their position by bringing to the development debate a version of Culebra that is informed by Western narratives of the Caribbean, not unlike the visions I outlined above. In doing so, the community of Westerners in Culebra claimed the island as an insular location that was categorically different to Romero’s and Monchín’s and politicised this view in their activism. A consistent thread in the pro-​development argument was the characterisation of Culebra as a marginalised space in relation to Puerto Rican and global circuit of ideas. Ideas of marginality serve to stabilise Culebra by locating it on the fringes of national and Western modernity. However, marginal places can also be understood as ‘zones of unpredictability at the edges of discursive stability, where contradictory discourses overlap, or where discrepant kinds of meaning-​making converge’ (Lownhaupt-​Tsing 1994: 279). By manifesting local and global convergences, Culebra necessarily puts pressure on the discourses of marginality that dominate the representations of Culebra and the Caribbean region. In other words, Culebra’s tourism discussion places the island both at the centre and the margins of the Puerto Rican development project.

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I intend to challenge Culebra’s characterisation as marginal to the Puerto Rican and Western project of modernity by offering an ethnographic case whereby Culebra’s activists inform the production of identity of the presumed ‘centre’ at the same time as they are informed by it. The distinction between centre and periphery, which marginality presumes, is further complicated in Culebra because while people were negotiating within ‘marginality’, they were also engaging in practices of travel and were relating Culebra to insular, national and global spaces at different times and simultaneously. The terms of the debate during the development discussions were ultimately about Culebra’s place in relation to the Puerto Rican nation and to global visions of the Caribbean. I begin with a series of court cases that took place in 2003 and 2004. While the cases may initially seem trivial, the plaintiffs, defendants and their supporters understood their private lawsuits as contributing to the tourism development controversies of Culebra at the time. Through the description of the characters involved in these court cases, I illustrate some of the contradictions and ambiguities that characterize Culebra activists and Culebra politics in general. I will then move on to address the broader social context of Culebra by focusing on the contests that arose when the mayor of Culebra, elected in 2000, instituted a comprehensive development program based on imagery of the island’s marginality and poverty in relation to the Puerto Rican national development project. My ethnographic narrative is designed to present a series of overlapping networks of images and ideas that come together in Culebra and compete or collaborate with each other for resources by claiming to uphold the best interests for their understanding of the local. In doing so, the social actors decentred Puerto Rican versus U.S. colonial politics because they placed at stake who –​in such a mobile society –​has legitimate access to resources and decisions that affect the island. LITIGATION OVER COASTAL ACCESS A few weeks into my 2003–​2004 doctoral fieldwork on Culebra, as the initial enthusiasm of arriving to the field began to subside and I started to accommodate to the island routine, Paul Franklin, a Welsh resident of the island, approached me to ask if I would accompany him to the courthouse the following Wednesday, to be his translator during his trial. I did not know Paul from before, though I had seen him around. After all, Culebra had at the time some three thousand residents and one can quickly get a general idea of its full-​time residents. I had always taken Paul as a member of the slowly growing population of Westerners who have been moving



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to the island during the past twenty years. Westerners on Culebra tend to be wealthy, retired or semi-​retired, seasonal residents who have purchased lands, mostly in the north of the island, and built luxurious estates. Overall, these seasonal residents do not engage with the local population –​Puerto Rican Creoles who speak Spanish –​beyond the necessary exchange of services. Westerners in Culebra have formed their own residents’ associations and others have opened businesses in Culebra to cater to the English-​speaking population on the island. My observation of Paul, before our encounter on the side of a Culebra road, was that he kept mostly to himself. His Welsh accent had become more neutral and he spoke at a low volume and enunciated carefully each syllable. His dress was very similar to the other Westerners on the island, short Bermuda pants, sandals, colourful shirts, and he drove a rouged jeep –​contrary to native islanders who tend to dress less casually and drive inexpensive Japanese cars. He was short and cut an athletic figure with calloused hands that were indicative of his work as a carpenter. Rather than a retired wealthy businessman, Paul came across to me more as a reference to the 1960s Western counterculture movement. Paul had been living on the island uninterruptedly for close to fifteen years. He had married the island’s midwife, a French-​Canadian who has lived most of her life on Culebra, and he had better knowledge of the island’s residents than the usual Westerner. His Spanish was functional but he was unable to manage with confidence the Puerto Rican accent that predominates on Culebra, hence the request for me to appear in court with him as a translator. His neighbour, a wealthy North American industrialist who built one of the biggest and most luxurious houses on Culebra, which includes a pool, desalination plant and a helicopter landing pad, had taken Paul to court for trespassing. Paul’s neighbour had hired bulldozers to clear the coastal area of the bay that he shares with Paul and a third property. In Paul’s view, the removal of the shore’s vegetation was an unacceptable violation of the coastal area and endangered the integrity of the beach and the swamplands adjacent to the bay. Paul felt that the wealthy neighbour did not have the right to develop coastal lands regardless of the fact that the neighbour’s property line included the coast. Paul had contacted the state police and the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) but was getting frustrated at their lack of action. According to the state authorities, the industrialist had the right to clear vegetation up to fifteen metres to the shoreline. During the most recent land clearance, Paul went down to the beach and physically stopped the bulldozers from finishing their job. The police were called and Paul was cited to appear in court the following week. In the mean time, the American owner built a fence and a gate on his side of the bay to, presumably, prohibit any more interference from Paul, or anybody else in his development plans for the beach.

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At the same time, the third property owner of the bay was also taking Paul to court for vandalism. Paul’s second neighbour and his wife are Puerto Rican entrepreneurs and Puerto Rican independence activists who have bought various properties on Culebra and are well known in the Puerto Rican independence movement for promoting cultural events associated with Puerto Rican independence and nationalism. Paul was accused by the couple of breaking a light bulb on the porch of their beachfront house on the same bay where Paul and the American industrialist lived. According to the couple, Paul had been harassing them for weeks by repeatedly asking them to turn off their porch light at night because the bulb’s brightness shone directly into his bedroom. The Puerto Rican neighbours wished the court to place a restraining order on Paul to prohibit him from going to the beach. At the same time, they built a fence and gate closing off public access to the beach from their end of the bay. The Puerto Rican couple explained to me that their problems with Paul were suggestive of the broader issues of American imperialism in Puerto Rico. According to the couple, the presence of Euro-​Americans in Culebra and the way in which they were developing their lands results in an encroachment of Culebra lands and limits the access that native islanders have to land and to the sea, indispensable locations for the reproduction of Culebra island identity. In this sense, the acquisition of coastal lands to build luxurious estates represents an attempt against native islanders’ way of life. In their eyes, their litigations are a continuity to the legacy of the anti-​U.S. Navy campaign. Paul denied breaking the light bulb. He understood these court cases as coordinated efforts by the American industrialist and the Puerto Rican nationalists to acquire the land where he lives with his wife and stepson in order to fill the swamp that lies beyond the beach and develop the bay. He claims to have seen development plans that show how tennis courts and swimming pools will replace the marshlands that lie adjacent to the beach. Paul understood his role as an environmental activist, struggling to maintain the integrity of a delicate ecosystem and lobbying for the best interests of the islanders. The irony of this situation, in Paul’s view, was that the Puerto Rican activist, by assuming a similar stance as the American industrialist, was acting as the stereotypical imperialist while Paul was getting into trouble for supporting the broader environmental interests of the island, suggesting a more intimate connection to the land and its resources. News of the trials went around the island along with conflicting versions of the type of vegetation that the American industrialist was removing, the manner in which the vegetation was being removed and the distances from the shoreline of the affected areas. The local DNR, the agency charged with overseeing the natural resources of Puerto Rico, agreed that the removal of the vegetation was being carried out according to the law. But Paul and his



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supporters did not trust the DNR because of its reputation for green-​lighting construction projects that did not take in consideration local economic interests or environmental laws. The mayor’s silence during the court trials brought attention to the fact that the American industrialist had offered his house to the mayor for his wedding reception. A more controversial issue was the fence building on both ends of the bay, which completely closed off public access to the beach. This concerned the broader population because the limiting of access to the sea had been the central cause of the anti-​Navy movement, which indicated a worrying connection between the cases. The trials did not figure prominently in the island’s media. They were not featured in the local newsletter and they were only being discussed occasionally in the Sunday morning radio program, the only radio show broadcast from Culebra at the time. However, the trials and their significance were frequently talked about in bars, the plaza, restaurants and impromptu gatherings. For the majority of people with whom I spent my fieldwork, the immediate outcome of the trial was not necessarily a matter of urgency. After all, it was an affair among Americans and Puerto Ricans who were taking each other to court over access to a beach that was not frequented much by native Culebra islanders. The importance of the case for culebrenses was the connections it suggested with the broader social contest that revolved around policies and projects that refashioned Culebra as a tourist destination. Iván Romero, the newly elected mayor of Culebra, had implemented an aggressive tourism development plan that had radically altered the physical landscape of the main village and surrounding areas. Supporters of the development project, by and large, argued for the necessity of these projects in order to further democratize Puerto Rican national resources and alleviate discourses of poverty that are invested on Culebra. However, critics of the program suggested that tourism development entailed privatization of sea access, encroachment of lands and the stretching of public services –​such as trash collection, water and electricity –​to cater for non-​island elements. THE COASTAL GENTRIFICATION ARGUMENT Scholars who have examined similar processes have relied on the term ‘coastal gentrification’ to describe the contradictions at stake in these circumstances (Colburn and Jepson 2012; Freeman and Cheyne 2008; Gale 1991). Coastal gentrification in Culebra has been described as a process where a new ethnic class acquires coastal lands and restricts local access to the coasts through privatisation (Iranzo 1995). Similar to urban gentrification, this results in the displacement of locals and the transformation of the space according to bourgeoisie interests and aesthetics.

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Guillermo Iranzo examines the consequences of the island’s landscape being refashioned from a military practice range to a tropical island ‘paradise’ with a high investment potential (1995). The departure of the Navy resulted in the driving up the price of lands in Culebra. This was due, in part, to the rise in demand from land speculators, squatters and developers who valued the coast’s ‘high aesthetic value’ (Iranzo 1995). For Iranzo, the change of land ownership represented the consolidation of lands by a new class and of different ethnic groups in Culebra, mainly North Americans, but also Japanese, Europeans and Puerto Ricans (Iranzo 1995). In Iranzo’s narrative, the practice of these new immigrants made it difficult for culebrenses to acquire newly available lands for their own use. Two patterns that Iranzo observed of these land transfers were that (1) the new land owners of Culebra developed luxurious homes on their newly acquired land and cordoned off the property and (2) the lands in consideration were coastal areas away from the already populated southern parts of the island. In Iranzo’s ethnography, these new practices were problematic on two fronts. First, the situation where foreign interests claimed the land and coastal areas of Culebra was reminiscent of U.S. Navy practices of intimidating the population off the coastal areas. Second, the restriction of access to the coast constituted an attempt against culebrense ethnic identity because ethnicity, in Iranzo’s terms, is inextricably linked to ‘the social relations of production, the degree of technological development and the ways of utilising the ecosystem’ (Iranzo 1995: 153). For Iranzo, the restriction of access to land and to the coast, along with the necessary ecological destruction caused by construction projects on the northern coasts of Culebra, represents ‘the destruction of identity itself’ in Culebra (Iranzo 1995: 153). For Iranzo, the practices that refashion the Culebra landscape from a military practice range to a tropical garden with luxurious mansions respond to a perspective that is based on ‘the different class and ethnic position of the resident population and tourists within the context of North American colonialism’ (Iranzo 1995: 97). For Iranzo, the different visions and understandings of the Culebra landscape respond to individuals’ class position within the U.S. colonial regime of Puerto Rico. Class then responds to ethnicity where the working class, peasant and the colonised are represented as Puerto Rican and the bourgeoisie, middle class, imperialist and Euro-​American values correspond to the Western North American. In this sense, the Culebra case represents a way in which U.S. political and economic control of Puerto Rico reproduces a colonial set of relations in Culebra, to the detriment of the ‘native’ population. I would oppose Iranzo’s approach on two grounds. In the first instance, I would suggest that his take on Culebra’s insular and located forms on identity is based on a simple binary opposition that imagines ethnicity as a ‘thing’



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connected to imagined traditional economic practices, mainly fishing. In the second instance, his analysis simplifies the network of colonial relationships that traverse through Culebra. By only looking at the Puerto Rico–​U.S. relationship, Iranzo’s analysis neglects Culebra’s connection to the Danish West Indies, European imaginaries and the internal fragmentations among culebrenses, Puerto Ricans and Westerners. During my fieldwork, I did not find such a clear connection between coastal gentrification and the destruction of Culebra’s island identity. A change in forms of economic practices does not necessarily mean that they cease to be significant nor does it result in the disappearance of an island identity. Fishing, for example, may not form a significant percentage of the average culebrense economic income as it did generations ago. Historically, fishing practices did not play the central role that Iranzo suggests. Rather, evidence that I have collected suggests that fishing was but one of a wide array of economic practices that culebrenses occupied themselves with. Contemporary changes in Culebra’s economic practices are more wide ranging and include changes in patterns of work and consumption linked to state-​sponsored development initiatives, the enlargement of the municipality’s bureaucracy, the growth of the tourist economy and culebrense migration to the United States and to the English-​ speaking Virgin Islands, among others. Furthermore, during my fieldwork I found that fisherman identity is still very present in Culebra and fishermen still represent a strong political lobby on the island. I found that the process of gentrification accentuated the practice of movement that has characterised life in Culebra, rather than inhibit it as Iranzo suggests. The wealthy individuals who bought lands in Culebra for high prices and built luxurious mansions on the island bought their lands from Culebra families and hired culebrense labour to build these mansions. Culebra people who sold their lands for high prices experience an immediate economic benefit from these deals. Given that the culebrenses probably did not buy the land themselves and that it was probably conceded to them by the government, there is a great profit to be made from these transactions. These seasonal residents also employ people to maintain their houses year round, paying a local person $1500 a month to look after one house. If we consider that some culebrenes can look after a few houses at the same time, there is a significant amount of money to be made from these gentrifying processes. During my fieldwork, I learned how people from Culebra would invest the money they acquired from the sale of their lands and buy property in the United States, particularly Florida, or move to a neighbouring island where the standards of living were higher. I also collected incidences where people used the money to pay for their offspring to go to university, buy a car, go on a holiday cruise ship, buy another house in Culebra, live for some time in the Dominican Republic or as in the case of one of my first acquaintances in Culebra, live

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in Zurich, Switzerland for a year with his girlfriend from the money given to him by his grandfather from selling some of the family land. Culebra’s post-​Navy tourism development is not a binary story of ‘non-​ islanders’ appropriating land at the expense of locals. The land transfers in the decades that followed the expulsion of the U.S. Navy were more complex than that. Many culebrenses were participating in the squatting; others were selling their lands to real-estate developers in order to fund their emigration, vacation or lifestyle change and many saw in this process an opportunity for economic development through tourism. Also, not all Westerners were wealthy retirees. In fact, during my fieldwork, it seemed to me that the majority of Westerners residing in Culebra were not millionaires but lived a more humble lifestyle, perhaps more in tune with the 1960s hippie movement. What I find interesting is that the Navy’s departure did not result in an ‘island nationalist’ revival that legitimated local concerns, empowered the islanders and closed the island off from global influences. Nor did it cause a massive influx of foreign elements that reproduced analogous conditions that the locals struggled so hard for during the 1970s. I would rather argue that the Navy’s departure ushered in a new level of transinsularity and plugged Culebra into a broader set of relations that altered the terms of what does it mean to live on the island. DISCREPANT NETWORKS IN CULEBRA’S LANDSCAPE Since 1952, when U.S. Congress approved the Free Associated State of Puerto Rico (ELA), political power in Puerto Rico and in Culebra has been oscillating between two parties. The Partido Popular Democrático (PPD) advocates for Puerto Rico to maintain its relationship with the United States as stipulated in the 1952 constitution. Economically, the party supports measures where the island maintains an intimate link to the United States by providing tax incentives to American industries that establish themselves in Puerto Rico, the use of the U.S. dollar as currency and having trade exclusivity with the United States, among other policies. Politically, it is associated with a populism that upholds Puerto Rican traditions and values without fostering a sense of nationalism that would threaten U.S. legitimacy on the island. The main opposition to the PPD has been the Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP). The PNP advocates that Puerto Rico become the fifty-​first state of the United States. Its platform is based on the notion that the way to resolve the inconsistencies of the colonial ELA is by consummating the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States and fully incorporating the island into the federal union. Throughout its history, the party has been associated with promoting neo-​liberal economic policies and assimilationist rhetoric.



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The third party of the Puerto Rican political landscape is the Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño (PIP). The PIP has historically struggled at the polls but always managed to win a seat in the legislature and have a persistent voice in the Puerto Rican political scene. Its platform is based on viability of Puerto Rican independence from the United States and the participation of Puerto Rico in the broader Caribbean and international trade and political community. Historically, the PPD, the party that advocates the status quo, has held the mayoral seat in Culebra. The mayors of Culebra have been associated with traditional community patriarchs who had a paternalistic approach towards administering the municipality. These mayors would have maintained an ideological discourse that would not contradict the populist national agenda of the party, while promoting a discourse that Culebra is a somewhat distinct space from Puerto Rico. This was Monchín’s, Taso’s and Romero’s party. The PNP won the mayor’s seat in Culebra for the first time in 1996. The victory of the PNP in Culebra coincided with a Puerto Rico-​wide PNP victory that ushered in a government that promoted a neo-​liberal agenda for Puerto Rico and an extensive infrastructure development plan. In the case of Culebra, however, Abraham Peña, the PNP mayor, presented himself as more conservative than his Puerto Rican counterparts. Abraham’s development policy did not follow the national example and promoted a more measured plan focused on promoting Culebra arts and culture. His opponents characterised the administration as having a somewhat traditionalist agenda, reflected by instituting curfews for minors (announced by a siren), banning alcohol during carnivals and controlling public festivities associated with mass tourism. The ordinances and the perceived slowness of the administration in comparison with the rest of Puerto Rico, which was experiencing a construction boom, presented the PNP in Culebra as conservative and traditionalist, in opposition to the neo-​liberal and assimilationist policies implemented by the PNP in Puerto Rico. The accusations may have carried special significance because the Puerto Rican national press was covering series of aggressive Puerto Rico-​wide infrastructure projects such as an underground and elevated train for the capital, a super aqueduct for the north-​west, a highway system for the east and an international harbour for the south. Another issue that dominated the Puerto Rican press was the controversial U.S. Navy presence on the island of Vieques, a few miles south of Culebra. From 1999 to 2003, the Vieques issue dominated Puerto Rican media. The national attention dedicated to the Puerto Rican infrastructure projects and the U.S. Navy controversy in Vieques could have contributed to an impression that the south-​east of Puerto Rico along with Culebra have historically been marginalised from recent developments in Puerto Rico’s nation-​building programme.

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For the following elections, in 2000, the PPD in Culebra exploited the imagery of a PNP administration that lacked the initiative to properly address the underdevelopment and marginality of Culebra in relation to Puerto Rico. Iván Romero, the young and articulate PPD candidate (and Abraham’s nephew), argued that Culebra lagged behind Puerto Rico in infrastructure developments and blamed the incumbent for a development deficit in relation to Puerto Rico. His slogan, ‘bettering the quality of life in Culebra’, promised that he would work to alleviate the disparity of resources that an average family in Culebra has in relation to a Puerto Rican family. He highlighted the current administration’s lack of projects to address the infrastructure deficiencies of schools, the water service, the electricity service and ferry services to Puerto Rico and categorized them as a gross oversight on the incumbent’s behalf. Romero promised that he would lobby for Culebra to be allocated more resources by the national state and that he would institute policies that would promote a sustainable economic program for Culebra, principally the regulation of tourism. Romero argued that the tourist potential of Culebra had not been exploited effectively and that the average Culebra family had not benefited from the amount of money that visitors were leaving on the island. Romero also argued that Dewey, the main village of Culebra, was not planned to accommodate such an influx of tourists and as a consequence the residents suffer from traffic congestion, lack of water services and noise and trash collecting problems, among other problems. In his 2000 campaign, Romero promised to address these issues with a comprehensive program that included investment in infrastructure, promotion of Culebra businesses, tax incentives for new businesses to establish themselves in Culebra and lobbying for more resources from the national government. Romero won the 2000 mayoral race by a landslide, a victory that coincided with a PPD victory of the executive branch in Puerto Rico. The new governor of Puerto Rico embarked on a policy reminiscent of the populism and paternalism that characterized the party during the 1950s and 1960s, which are associated with vast industrialisation projects, the promotion of urban living, encouraging emigration to the United States and the promotion of federal welfare programmes. Among the principal concerns of the new administration was to address the so-​called ‘pockets of poverty’ that had been neglected by the late 1990s development boom of Puerto Rico. The new governor’s rationale was that ‘poverty’ was the product of centralized planning that was selective in its impact and that it would be alleviated by allocating funds and special programs to be administered by the ‘special communities’ themselves, thus democratizing social planning by promoting community self-​management.



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In this political environment, Romero, the new mayor of Culebra, easily justified the need of his municipality for funds. Historically, the Puerto Rican media and popular discourse has invested Culebra with imagery of poverty and marginality in relation to metropolitan Puerto Rico. The U.S. Navy occupation of Culebra resulted in the situation where the U.S.-​sponsored industrialisation and urbanisation of Puerto Rico did not occur in Culebra. Until recent years, Culebra did not have the many services that are taken for granted in urban spaces of Puerto Rico such as twenty-​four-​hour lighting, a reliable water service, pharmacies, a sewage system and so on. Culebra also does not have other amenities that are common in Puerto Rico’s urban spaces such as fast-​food restaurants, clothing stores, electronic goods shops, malls, traffic lights, fast Internet connection and so on. This lack of markers of modernity presents Culebra to Puerto Rico as a place that has symbolically been left out of the Puerto Rican modern project and fosters imagery of a poor isolated population that has been overlooked by the state. This imagery is also reinforced aesthetically by Culebra’s lack of infrastructure in a dry and harsh landscape dominated by thorny trees in comparison with Puerto Rico’s lush rainforests and its dense urban landscapes. The idea that the people of Culebra live a harsh life, on the margins of the Puerto Rican modernization project, was accepted in San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico, and funds for development projects as well as construction contracts were quickly approved. The special, and new, attentions that Culebra received from the Puerto Rican central government responded to a broader policy of the new governor to pay special attention to what her administration called ‘special communities’ which were described as ‘pockets of poverty’ that were left behind by the construction boom of her predecessor. Some of the development projects green-​lit by the new mayor and funded by the Puerto Rican state were a new secondary school with a capacity for seven hundred students, a sports complex, broadening of the pier area, widening the main road in town, a water treatment plant, a sewer system for the main village, facilities for more shops in town, parking lots outside town, legislation to provide tax incentives for new businesses in Culebra, municipal control of Flamenco Beach, hiring lifeguards for the beach, regulation of the camping ground, placing all telephone and electric lines in town underground, a public housing complex, a new plaza, a second bridge connecting the town to the south-​eastern peninsula of the island, a youth centre housing computers with Internet access and a variety of arcade games, a new government centre to house the mayor’s office and all the municipal authorities, increased police presence, asphalting roads and an emergency centre to house the fire, civil defence and police departments. As promised, the construction program was enacted under the slogan of ‘bettering the quality of life of

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Culebra’, suggesting that the mayor was working to alleviate the discourse of poverty and marginality through an agenda that focused primarily on infrastructure development. An underlying logic to the development program was to further the democratization of Culebra by bringing it into the national fold and pair the resources between the Puerto Rican and Culebra islanders. However, for many islanders this ‘updating’ of Culebra was effectively an aesthetic makeover designed to refashion the landscape to make it more appealing for Western tourist consumption. The projects focused on the town centre and the pier area and were more targeted at improving the tourist facilities. The tax incentives were targeted for businesses that offer services to tourists, for example, car rentals, souvenir shops, restaurants and cafes. The scale of the constructions broadened the main street of Dewey, flattening the hill where the Old Municipal Building was, and expanded the pier area. These were designed so that it would facilitate the entry and exit of tourists and cargo from the ferries. Criticisms of the constructions ranged from the accusation that the constructions were not coordinated adequately –​they were carried out simultaneously with poor coordination between the projects that resulted in delays –​and caused disruptions to daily life in Dewey, to informal accusations of conflict of interests between the contractors and the mayor’s office, to labelling the whole program as unnecessary. Perhaps the most public critique came from Monchín, who would speak every Sunday morning in a two-​ hour radio show broadcast from Culebra. Monchín drew parallels between the anti-​Navy struggle, the land grab that characterised the immediate years after the Navy’s departure and the current controversy by arguing that these cases were essentially about local access and local control over the island’s resources, primarily land and sea access. In his view, the type of tourism development that Romero was promoting marginalized native islanders on their island, rather than empower them. Monchín believed that Culebra did not need tourism on the scale that Romero was envisioning and that such construction projects were ultimately designed to benefit construction firms that, incidentally, had personal links with the vice mayor’s office. He would also quote negative examples of tourism development of this kind such as on St. Thomas where large-​scale tourism development projects, according to people in Culebra, have effectively marginalized the local population into ghetto-​type housing conditions. As an alternative, Monchín referenced cases of other islands in the West Indies, primarily the British Virgin Islands and other islands of the Leeward Islands, where models of sustainable ecotourism have been successfully implemented. But what lay at the core of these criticisms was the argument that this type of tourism development was not sensitive to a historical reality of Culebra and its social relations. In Monchín’s view, the attraction to Culebra



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is not just Flamenco Beach. It is also the slow pace of Dewey and surrounding neighbourhoods, its low crime, its nature and intimate social relationships. Ultimately, Monchín was concerned that Romero’s programme would eliminate the conditions that attracted people to Culebra. There was also a fundamental difference in how people on different sides of the development debate qualified the landscape. Where Romero saw a marginalized and poor population living in a harsh, dry landscape, but with great tourism potential, Monchín and his supporters saw a beautiful landscape, invested with a memory of island activism and resistance to imperial interests, with enough tourists visiting it. If Romero looked west to Puerto Rico for a reference of how to administer his municipality, Monchín looked east to the West Indies for examples and counterexamples of tourism development. What both politicians shared was the argument that they best represented the interests of the local islanders and were empowering its inhabitants to maintain a sense of integrity against non-​insular elements.

ROMERO’S REJECTION OF THE NOBLE SAVAGE: TWO INSTANCES Costa Bonita The state-​sponsored constructions were taking place in tandem with private tourism developments projects, which further complicated the general environment of uncertainty regarding Culebra’s identity politics, sovereignty, its future direction, aesthetics and network of relations. Throughout the 1990s, a Puerto Rico-​based investment group acquired permits to construct a four-​star resort complex, with 3 restaurants and 164 villas, within the bay of Culebra. The resort was called Costa Bonita Resort Villas and it is one of three similar resorts that opened in Culebra recently. The permits for Costa Bonita were acquired legally in Puerto Rico and in Culebra. However, the Culebra municipal and Puerto Rican state authorities that provided the permits later claimed that the Costa Bonita group changed its design plans after getting the permits, suggesting that, if the actual and updated plans been submitted its permits would not have been approved. Mayor Romero and his predecessors publicly opposed the project. I was surprised by this given Romero’s argument that the disparity of infrastructure resources between Culebra and Puerto Rico was indicative of the failures of Puerto Rican democracy; it seemed to me that his administration would look favourably to this addition to the Culebra landscape. Not only is the Puerto Rican coast dotted with hotel complexes like Costa Bonita, but many Puerto Rican municipalities and governors encourage these kind of hotel

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developments as a means to reduce unemployment and attract investment capital to their regions. However, according to Mayor Romero, the Costa Bonita design did not take into consideration the islanders’ sensibilities or needs and was more geared as a money-​making scheme for the investment group and that would not have a positive impact on the island’s economy. Romero further argued that the scale of the project did not take into consideration the resources that the island has such as water, electricity and garbage disposal. For Romero, the hotel complex would stretch the island’s public resources and hinder the municipalities’ capacity to provide services to their constituents. Other local critics were concerned about the environmental impact of the complex that was being built adjacent to an important mangrove area that serves as a key breeding ground for marine life. The magnitude of the construction, which included a marina, placed the mangrove in danger of destruction. Finally, but no less importantly, Romero, his supporters and the general consensus on the island criticised the aesthetics of the complex, pointing out how it stands as an eye sore in relation to the rest of the island’s landscape. For Monchín, the concern was that culebrense agency was frustrated by the ‘greater economic interests’ of Puerto Rico (los grandes intereses económicos). Monchín’s concern is that resorts like Costa Bonita will attract mass tourism to Culebra and will compromise local businesses, pace of life and the resources that attract tourists to the island in the first place. In the eyes of many culebrenses, the Costa Bonita project was not the first instance where high-​impact construction projects have been approved in Puerto Rico and implemented on Culebra without an awareness of the effects they would have on Culebra’s ecosystem or the needs of the islanders. The sense of disempowerment is institutionally produced by the fact that the main permit offices are in San Juan, not in Culebra. Permits for projects like Costa Bonita are approved in San Juan by bureaucrats with little or no connection to Culebra. Experiences like these produce a rhetoric that is reminiscent of a colonial relationship of power where decisions that have an impact on Culebra are orchestrated from the capital of Puerto Rico with little regard to local needs and sensibilities. Costa Bonita’s marketing materials also fed into imagery that recalls colonial contexts. Its website used to greet the visitor with a picture of a parrot and the following text: As our seaplane splashed down in the crystal cove of Culebra Island, I felt as if I had found a buried treasure. Not coins or jewelry, but rather something far more rich. I found emerald waters that sparkle and warm smiles that shine. I found a place that defines peace and tranquility. And it’s not very often that you find a hideaway paradise that completely awakens your soul. Costa Bonita is truly a hidden gem.



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Culebra is an undiscovered island which is part of the Spanish Virgin Islands, internationally known as paradise, and at Costa Bonita Resort Villas, we promise you will find hidden treasures in this gem of the Caribbean! (http://​www. costabonitaresort.com/​)

The project’s marketing strategy contributed to a growing sentiment that the hotel complex was based on an image of Culebra as backwards, virginal, underdeveloped and passive. There was something about the design of the buildings, its imposing intensity and the fact that the construction was off limits, with very few locals hired for the construction, which lent itself to the site feeling alien to Culebra. In my conversations with Monchín, and with members of the Romero administration, I sensed that the actual concerns against this project was the perception that the project had a paternalistic approach towards the island, that it anonymised Culebra, that it did not contribute to the ‘story’ of the island, that it was ‘out of place’ and that it responded more to a high-​end, consumer-​based tourism, which silenced the island’s voice, homogenised it, made it look like a cruise ship and is reminiscent of Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas. I cannot help but wonder if Mayor Romero’s opposition to the project, who otherwise seemed comfortable with glossy-​looking construction projects built by Puerto Rican contractors, was a response to a discourse and imagery that depicted Culebra as underdeveloped on continental rather than local grounds, to a depiction of the island that rested on the twin imaginaries of nature (savagery) and nobility –​a passive and pristine location designed and ready-​made, awaiting for Western consumption. It was a different set of images of Culebra than those presented by Mayor Romero during his campaign and in promoting his development plans for Culebra. Romero’s narrative of Culebra, for all its complexities, reiterated that his plans responded to local interests and were geared to empower the islanders. Reactions among informants my age and younger were also mixed. Some friends of mine in Culebra looked forward to the jobs and opportunities that were expected from the complex. Some of my closest friends approached Costa Bonita and offered their services to work in the restaurants of the complex, to play music and as handymen, among others. Others assumed a combative approach towards the project and actively set about harassing the construction. On a few occasions, young men would trespass the construction site and vandalise the equipment and the progress of the construction. But the most visual and public kind of resistance towards Costa Bonita took the shape of a series of stencilled graffiti that would appear overnight in visible places around the south of Culebra. The graffiti were made up of slogans, images and references to the anti-​U.S. Navy movement, suggesting a direct link between projects like Costa Bonita and the ecological and political

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disruptions of the Navy. For this lot, Costa Bonita became a metonym for unchecked tourist development in Culebra that was based on the idea of ‘othering’ Culebra along Western colonial lines, which undermined its insular social relations, activist history and broad network of connections. The Costa Bonita project has been struggling financially since its opening in the mid-​2000s. The project was marred by different engineering difficulties, its completion was delayed, it was not successful in attracting the amount of guests that it needed to be profitable and it lacked support from the local community. The complex has been sold numerous times, and there was not clarity among my informants about who owns the hotel now. The running gossip on Costa Bonita, and another hotel complex that went bankrupt in Culebra, was that it is part of a complicated transnational money laundering scheme, a node in a network of investments and debts with no clear owner. Estudios Técnicos, Inc. The planning consulting firm Estudios Técnicos, Inc. (Technical Studies, Inc.) was hired in 2003 by the municipality to evaluate and recommend how to proceed effectively with the development of the island. Estudios Técnicos, Inc. is the top private research firm in Puerto Rico specialising in planning, financial assessment and marketing strategies. They are well known in the research community of Puerto Rico for consistently securing government and private contracts, making them one of the most influential research centres of Puerto Rico. In Culebra, Estudios Técnicos carried out extensive quantitative research, telephone surveys, financial analysis and focus-​group meetings to then offer recommendations to the mayor’s administration on the development plans for the island. Their surveys and questionnaires were geared towards understanding the islanders’ view on what aspect of the infrastructure development should be prioritised. Their financial analysis compared and contrasted Culebra to the other Puerto Rican municipalities. The report, published in 2004, offered seventy specific recommendations that are grouped into five categories: land use, transportation, economic development, integrity of the ecosystem and health and social equity. The basic argument of the report promoted ‘sustainable development’ and that Culebra’s development programme prioritises community inclusivity and empowerment (Estudios Técnicos 2004). The report references the case of tourism development in the Balearic Islands –​where a development plan that focuses on agro-​and ecotourism, community management of guest houses, the use of renewable energy, valuing local architecture, the passing of laws protecting nature, promoting cultural tourism and local handicrafts, market for older tourists and the creation of nature parks that are administered locally –​ as an example for Culebra to emulate. Effectively, the recommendations



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suggest a development that minimises the impact on the physical resources of the island and encourages local industry. Estudios Técnicos’ analysis of Culebra and its recommendations for tourism development recalls continental understandings of islands as isolated spaces, on the margins of modernity. For example, the report credits Culebra’s small size, U.S. Navy presence and physical detachment from Puerto Rico for its underdevelopment. In this analogy, Culebra is the ‘island’ to Puerto Rico’s ‘continent’ and Culebra’s woes are due to its marginality in relation to Puerto Rico. There are numerous local inconsistencies in this approach. For someone like Monchín or for my friends who would oppose the Costa Bonita project, Culebra does not suffer from an underdevelopment problem –​its infrastructure is fine as it is. After all, tourist receipts are on the rise and local hostels, restaurants and cafes are thriving. As for characterising the Navy as a historical problem for Culebra’s development, Benjamín and other anti-​Navy activists would claim that it is the radiation pollution and unexploded ordinance left behind by the Navy that are controlling what would otherwise be unchecked tourism development projects –​a welcome relief to a Puerto Rican bureaucracy that fast-​tracks projects against local interests and in favour of Puerto Rican contractors or Western speculators. Culebra’s municipal government seemed to take on board many of the technical suggestions of the Estudios Técnicos report. However, the principled suggestions of the report were either ignored or contradicted by Romero’s policy. This may seem surprising since the discourses and imaginaries that guided Estudios Técnicos’ recommendations aligned themselves with Mayor Romero’s contextualisation of Culebra’s story as an integral part of the Puerto Rican project. Estudios Técnicos’ recommendation, however, referenced Puerto Rican style of urban development as a negative example. Instead, it proposed a development plan that encouraged marketing the island as an ecotourism destination by showcasing its spectacular beaches, wildlife and wild natural landscapes. It also recommended that future development projects be carried out in a way that minimises the ecological impact of the island in order to ensure that its main attractions –​primarily the island’s nature –​be preserved for future visitors. Estudios Técnicos also proposed limiting infrastructure development, controlling the amount of tourists that come to the island and maintaining an integrity of the vernacular architecture and planning of Dewey. Estudios Técnicos held regular public meetings in Culebra to update the residents on their findings, hand out questionnaires, get feedback on their research and carry out focus groups. The people who voiced their opinions in these public meeting and in impromptu meetings in bars or corner conversations did not observe a consistent policy on development issues. On the one hand, we were witnessing many state-​and privately funded high-​impact

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construction projects going on simultaneously in the main town of Culebra and its outlining sections. These projects were being justified on the grounds that they are required in order to empower the residents of Culebra by creating the conditions for social mobility and, perhaps, usher in Culebra into a middle-​class, urban, consumption-​based lifestyle –​akin to their interpretation of San Juan. At the peak of these construction projects, the municipal government hired a consulting firm that was publicly recommending a different course of action. I did not come across anybody in Culebra who clearly understood how the definition of sustainable development, as it was defined in the public meetings and brochures distributed by Estudios Técnicos, coincided with the scope and discourses of the construction projects. This ambiguity characterised Mayor Romero’s development policy throughout his tenure and may have contributed to him losing the 2004 elections by a landslide to his uncle Abraham Peña. I find Mayor Romero’s complex relation between his policies and advisors to be illustrative of the transinsular convergences that constitute Culebra’s social space. In order to justify a modernising project that would raise the standard of living in Culebra, and advance his political career, the mayor elicited a narrative of Culebra’s poverty and isolation, a passive signifier beholden to Puerto Rico which is, in turn, beholden to the United States. However, he was also interested in empowering his constituents and achieving a degree of parity with its putative continent, Puerto Rico. From this perspective, Estudios Técnicos’ evocation of a pristine natural landscape inhabited by people with a unique cultural heritage, which manifests itself in its own vernacular architecture, results in the commodification of an ‘other’ Culebra –​it ‘orientalises’ the island. The discourse of ecotourism and cultural tourism not only constructs Culebra as a passive ‘noble savage’, it also goes against Romero’s goals to industrialise and urbanise Culebra and align the island’s social and physical landscape so as to provide his constituents with opportunities of personal development comparable to residents in Puerto Rico. Personally, I could never stomach the scale of the constructions and found them unnecessary and counterproductive. I also found the vision for Culebra that was suggested in these projects to be inconsistent. I could not square the argument for local empowerment by encouraging an economy that would make Culebra more dependent on a singular location, Puerto Rico. I would particularly take issue with the characterisation of Culebra as a Puerto Rican outpost to be ‘upgraded’ so that it fit with the U.S. imperial project in the Caribbean. However, I do not think that I have ever been able to persuade supporters of Romero’s programme of my scepticism. My general argument would reference Monchín’s line that the kind of development projects put forth by Romero’s administration take into account neither the limitations of the physical resources of Culebra nor the quality of its social relations. My



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argument would also reference concerns of other activists who argued that this kind of development will result in a ‘homogenisation’ of Culebra into a ‘non-​place’ without genuine democratic institutions. I would speculate that the kind of mass tourism that was being encouraged by this context would result in an ecological disaster and would further degenerate into a situation where the main attraction to the island is not the island itself, but its amenities. Like the casinos at Las Vegas, Nevada, the theme parks in Orlando, Florida and the duty-​free shops in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, the main attraction to Culebra would become its hotels, golf cart rentals, fast-​food restaurants and industrialised souvenirs. Dewey would be designed as a shopping mall and Flamenco Beach as a museum, like the reef at Cinnamon Bay in St. John that has underwater placards with the names and general information of the reefs for snorkellers to read as they swim by. I would argue to my friends that this kind of development would result in the end of cottage industries, the end of gardening and the homogenisation of political consciousness. The most common responses I would get would go along two lines. Regarding my prediction that the constructions would cause irrevocable damage to Culebra’s natural resources, Romero supporters would claim that Culebra’s natural resources were already damaged by Navy bombing and the illegal constructions of the 1980s and 1990s. On the grounds that Culebra was ‘fine as it is’, long-​term residents would point out to me that there has been a significant rise in visitors to Culebra since the mid-​1990s. In 1996, the Port Authority of Puerto Rico, which administers the ferry service between Culebra and Puerto Rico, began offering ferry and cargo service to Culebra twice, sometimes three times a day, whereas previously the ferry service was much more inconsistent and cargo came once a week. The rise in transport services to and from Culebra coincided with a rise in international attention that Culebra’s beaches were getting from tourism publications like National Geographic, Geo, Scuba World and other international publications. The so-​ called update of Dewey’s infrastructure, the argument went, was necessary to attend the swell in visitors to the island. The more powerful argument that I encountered, however, was the suggestion that I was partisan to some kind of conservative folkloric trend that was not interested in developing the possibilities of Culebra islanders to fulfil their individual potential, with similar access to resources as I did, growing up in San Juan. It was suggested by my interlocutors that I was adopting a colonising position by arguing that Culebra comply with my personal imaginings of a tropical paradise on the margins of modernity; while I got to enjoy the comforts provided by urban living, university education and the luxury of living as a researcher, those same opportunities were not afforded to culebrenses. My argument for sustainable development, ecotourism, promoting local crafts and promoting that the island’s imagined geography transcends

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the Puerto Rican colonial project was met with suggestions that I was arguing for the island to remain marginalised from the Puerto Rican project, underdeveloped, underpopulated, and that it conform to a nostalgic imaginary of a folkloric past that did not really exist, a noble savage island. Mayor Romero’s stated agenda focused on the stimulation of a tourist economy in order to better the quality of life for Culebra residents. His frame of reference was the U.S. model of urbanisation as it was implemented in Puerto Rico. However, the frame of reference located Culebra within a colonial set of relations and necessarily produced images of a passive noble savage. In terms of policy, I suggest that this network also created a political challenge for Romero because it made it difficult to make the case for a local empowerment, while at the same time privileging Puerto Rico-​based contractors, hiring Puerto Rico-​based labourers, relying on U.S. federal funding and selectively listening to Puerto Rican advisors. In discursive terms, Romero was limiting the transinsular possibilities of Culebra. Unfortunately, for Mayor Romero, the effect of his policies, his vision for the island and the content of his discourse recalled many sentiments of the disempowerment of islanders thirty years earlier during the Navy struggle. In my estimation, this contradiction was key in understanding the landslide victory and return of Mayor Abraham Peña, who had less funding than Romero, was of the minority party and campaigned for a shorter period of time. While Peña’s narrative was equally complex, his sense of insularism was informed by a transinsular network that included the Greater Caribbean and the United States and, perhaps most significantly, did not see the ocean as a barrier, a theme that I will turn to in the next chapter. BINARIES NONETHELESS Paul Franklin was being taken to court at the peak of the development debates. His case brought attention to the coastal gentrification of Culebra and was made more sensitive by the fact that it was an election year. Key characters who opposed the development program, such as Monchín, accompanied Paul to the hearings, testified and accompanied the lawyers in field visits. Monchín would often repeat to me that his opposition to the state-​ sponsored development and his support for Paul were connected because both processes went back to the same contestation, which was about democratizing control of land and sea access in Culebra, instead of handing Culebra over to the ‘big financial interests’, whose intentions with Culebra were profit-​ motivated. Monchín’s standards on whom to support were not ethnic, unlike Paul’s Puerto Rican neighbours who connected their lawsuit ethnic struggle on the island, or linked to political party. Monchín was supporting a European



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immigrant, who by his ethnicity was being labelled as a gentrifying agent of Culebra, against a Puerto Rican couple who were renowned for their support of Puerto Rican anti-​colonial causes, in a controversy that pitted him against his own political party. Instead, the criteria employed by Monchín to decide whom to support revolved around a shared understanding between individuals about what it means to live in Culebra. Monchín’s desire to protect the island from Puerto Rican big speculating interests coincided with Paul’s concern of keeping the bay and its surroundings free from development. From this perspective, the opposition to the American industrialist may seem straightforward. The American’s intentions are consistent with land speculation and developing it to raise its market value. A necessary step in this kind of privatisation is to limit islanders’ access to the shore. The issue of curtailing access to land and, especially, the sea is reminiscent of U.S. Navy practices and recalls the binary of Unites States versus Puerto Rico that is suggested in Iranzo’s coastal gentrification analysis. However, this aspect of the case gets complicated when Romero was implicated in collaborating with the American industrialist and fostering a close personal relationship with him. Romero did not have any qualms of being associated with Western residents of the island, nor following the advice of Puerto Rican consultants for his agenda because, in his mind, such is the condition of Culebra. Culebra is, in Romero’s final analysis, a municipality of Puerto Rico and his constituency is cosmopolitan. Romero’s views on democratizing Culebra’s resources were informed by the view that Culebra had not benefited from industrialisation process of Puerto Rico and his programme was intended to redress this gap in Puerto Rican democracy. The result was that his policies were oftentimes compared with the policies of the PNP in the late 1990s, which promoted neo-​liberalism, infrastructural development and close connection to the U.S. bourgeois class. The position of the Puerto Rican couple who were suing Paul for vandalism was more consistent with Puerto Rican anti-​colonial and nationalist rhetoric. As I mentioned above, the couple had a history of participating in independence advocacy groups and promoting cultural events in Puerto Rico. They have recently got involved in Culebra NGOs that promote Culebra cultural events, have participated in the coordination of marches and protests against the privatization of beaches in Culebra and have written essays that speak about the endangering of Culebra lifestyle due to tourist development. In their mind, there is no contradiction between taking Paul to court and barring him from the beach, closing off their own property (which is not allowed by the Puerto Rican Constitution) and marching for public access of other beaches on the island because it takes place in a broader colonial context where what is at stake is the expulsion of U.S. presence from the region. For the Puerto Rican couple, Paul represented a foreign agent, a symbol of

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Western encroachment of Culebra land, and their issues with him were a continuation of the struggle to achieve full independence of Puerto Rico from the United States, and they were using Culebra as a location to extend their struggle. The court cases and their broader political context highlight a series of contradictions that do not fit into static political models. Each character and pressure group positions themselves within a transinsular set of relations that include, but are not limited to, the colonial context of Puerto Rico, Culebra’s transinsular connections to the Virgin Islands and Leeward Islands and the Caribbean’s global imagery. But regardless of the complexities and contradictions that characterize this contest, the activists and politicians of Culebra continue to reproduce binary categories –​insular versus mobile –​when planning and carrying out their plans for the land. My intention with this chapter has been to show how Culebra islanders draw from a particular transinsular network of relations when crafting their sense of place and then lobby for this ‘place’, in opposition to interests that lie outside of their network. These social contests are enacted through different visions of the Culebra landscape, each of which assume an authoritative definition of the island and the nature of its social relations. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, I have been impressed by the degree of commitment that visitors to Culebra (myself included) are willing to dedicate to implement their vision and project for the island, while claiming that their project is in the interest of the islanders. As I type this, in 2016, there are various cases like Paul Franklin’s still open. The most public one concerns a Puerto Rican businessman and lawyer, who has acquired several acres of land on the eastern hill of Flamenco Beach. He has fenced off his property, which is in violation of the terms of the Treaty of Paris of 1898, has deforested sectors of the hills, which is causing heavy sedimentation on Flamenco Beach, and has applied for permits to build windmills within a nature reserve. Regardless of the contradictions of this project, which is contributing to the damage of Culebra’s main tourist attraction, the owner of these lands has made the claim in public hearing that his windmill project is in the best interest of the islanders and has secured support from Puerto Rico and elements of the Democratic Party in Washington DC. The deforestations and fencing of the property have been met by two protest marches, which followed the same route that Monchín led in opposition to the Navy, by hundreds of full-​time residents of the island and a lawsuit brought about by the current mayor of Culebra. These social contests, I contend, can be imagined as the product of Culebra’s networked, transinsularist condition. The excitement generated for Culebra is constituted within a series of cross-​cutting, rhizomic and



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transinsular networks and continues to encourage its residents to dwell in struggle. As Benjamín Pérez said at the most recent protest on Flamenco, ‘We do not live here for free’ (aquí no se vive de gratis); to dwell in Culebra is to engage with the complexities of its cosmopolitanism and continuously struggle for the authoring of a life project and crafting place within the island. NOTES 1. In Culebra, Puerto Rico is referred to as “la isla grande” or big island. 2. Metro Area refers to San Juan Metropolitan Area.

Chapter Four

Working the Ubiquitous Seas

INTRODUCTION: HOW IS THE SEA? I met Flores Soto in the summer of 2002 at the facilities of the Fishermen’s Association of Culebra. We would run into each other often during that summer and discuss Culebra’s past and present, his vision for its future, stories in the news and the technicalities of sailing and fishing. Flores was born in Culebra in 1950, has lived most of his life on the island, with occasional stints in St. Thomas and Spain, and was one of the activists arrested on Flamenco Beach during the anti-​Navy protest. If I were to write up his curriculum vitae, he would probably come across as a contributor to, what Baldacchino and Bertram describe as, an economy of scope, of temporality and of polyvalency, rather than to an economy of scale (2009). For Baldacchino and Bertram, an economy of scope includes entrepreneurship, flexible specialization, stints abroad and a multifunctional skill set (Baldacchino and Bertram 2009: 145). However, for all his occupational multiplicity, Flores’ life has consistently gravitated around the sea. During the summer of 2002, one of Flores’ job was as an independent contractor to the Fish and Wildlife Service. At dawn, he would set out in his small dinghy to patrol the sandy coasts of Culebra and its cays to monitor and document nests of hawksbill turtles (Eretmochelys imbricata) and leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea). During one of the trips that I accompanied him on, I spotted a yellow butterfly fluttering a few centimetres from the surface of the water. The yellow of the butterfly stood out against the navy blue of the deep water, and I could not take my eyes off it. I pointed it out to Flores and he replied that you can see butterflies all over the waters of the Virgin Islands.

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He also added that sometimes you get to see deer1 swimming between the cays of Culebra and that you should steer away from them because they tend to panic if a boat gets close to them and drown. I was struck by the presence of non-​marine life traversing through the archipelago. During my trips with Flores, I started to actually sense the archipelagic dimensions of Culebra. Before this experience, my understanding of Culebra’s networked quality was more of an intellectual, ideological and historical understanding, in contrast with a more experiential or embodied understanding. Standing on a small dinghy amidst yellow butterflies, in viewing distance of the cays of northern Culebra, Vieques, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas and St. John, the knowledge that Tortola, Virgin Gorda and Anegada were right behind the mountainous St. Thomas, and St. Croix appearing like a hazy blue cloud just over the horizon, I experienced a sudden realisation of the sea’s constant and consistent presence in a region that has been carved by imperial and nationalist interests. I have since become interested in the ways in which the sea functions as a connector and isolator of island experiences. In context of the north-​eastern Caribbean, the sea is the medium through which island identities are connected and differentiated from each other. I intend to show how culebrense relationship to the sea demonstrates the sea’s simultaneous connecting and alienating effects, contributing the transinsular complexities of Culebra life. At every beach that we would anchor, Flores would get off and walk along the coast looking for turtle nests. Depending on the season, he would be looking for undulations on the sand that would indicate whether a nest had been laid or had it hatched. If a nest had been laid, he would note the location of the nest in his diary and cover the tracks so that poachers would not identify the nest. If a nest had hatched, he would open the nest, count the egg shells inside and note the data in his diary. We would then get back on the dinghy and go to the next beach or cay. As we cruised between bays, often times in silence, Flores would throw a fishing line. A kind of game would ensue where he would predict the species of fish that would bite and at what moment: ‘a yellow tail will bite just as we pass this rock’. Flores’ guess of the species of the fish would also be informed by the way the fish pulled on the line. He would invariably be correct. Flores knew the areas where certain species congregated, the location of underwater reefs, the behaviour of the currents, the depths, the sand bars and other underwater obstacles where conch and lobster could be found. Occasionally, he would point to a sea animal such as a turtle as it came up for air, dolphins swimming by, a school of fish, a barracuda or a shark that could be seen from the surface. I would often miss these sightings and joke that he was making fun of a city boy with his lies. ‘The thing is, Cubero, I have been navigating



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these places all my life. One knows what to look out for. Marine life just stands out’. And yet, for all of Flores’ confidence at sea, I could not help but detect in him a slight sense of trepidation. On one occasion, we almost ran over a couple of scuba divers who were diving without appropriate markers. When I scolded Flores for not seeing their neon-​coloured fins, which was how I noticed them, he narrated to me a series of accidents and fatalities that have recently occurred in Culebra waters. The victims of these fatal accidents were not only inexperienced mariners but they also included lifelong sailors and fishermen from Culebra and other islands. The mysterious aspect of these accidents is that, in some instances like scuba diving accidents, the bodies were not recovered. Flores attributes these disappearances to the nature of the currents and depth of the water on the eastern sections of Culebra, which drags bodies and debris north and east. Regardless of this rational explanation for these disappearances, his idiomatic approach suggested that he placed responsibility on the sea itself: la mar se los lleva, which means ‘the sea (in feminine) takes them (the bodies)’. Flores’ personification of the sea is not unique. It is common in Culebra for people to refer to the sea’s mercurial character and use emotive adjectives, such as ‘angry’ or ‘calm’, to describe maritime conditions. The sea in Culebra is referred to in the feminine, la mar, instead of the grammatically correct masculine or neutral el mar. Within the context of the gendered dynamics of Spanish, I take the feminisation of the sea the result of its communion with people and suggest its inclusion into ‘the social’. Usage of the grammatically correct masculine has the effect of neutralising the sea. It is as if the waters were endowed with a character or personality, which points to the sea’s active role process of shaping island life. I really enjoyed my trips with Flores. In fact, I never turn down an invitation to go sailing or on a boat ride and I get jealous if I find out that friends would go on a sail or a fishing trip without me. Boat rides evoke in me a sense of freedom of movement –​a movement away from the confusions of land policy debates, a movement in any direction through a space with no roads and a movement to ‘other’ island spaces at my own pace. Fishing and diving for conch or lobster gives me a sense as if I am collecting my own food on my own terms, rather than spending money at the local market. But these naïve and romantic notions of freedom of movement, of being in contact with ‘nature’ rather than with ‘modernity’, is tempered by my clumsiness on boats, my quick descent into seasickness, which I treat by closing my eyes and lying on the deck. My friends associate this reaction to my unrecognised fear of the ocean; that my retreat into my own body is a sign of my cowardice to not face or submit to the ocean. The headaches, dizziness and vomiting are necessary steps in the process of learning to commune with the sea and my avoidance of these symptoms is an avoidance of the sea. My seasickness, the soreness

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and absolute tiredness that I feel after a few hours at sea, the possibility of an accident and the knowledge of fatalities combine to provoke in me a sense of respect to the ocean. Flores would tend to agree with my general views. While he has little sympathy for my approach towards seasickness, he does have sympathy for the idea that the ocean fosters a sense of respect and humility. Flores claims that the ocean’s double condition has had a transformative effect on his physical body and sense of self. For Flores, working and being in daily contact with the waters of Culebra has put him in a position where he is more aware and conscious of life than people who spend their time on land. ‘Working at sea’, he would say, ‘in this way . . . one gets to appreciate life more and it humbles you towards life . . . it ennobles one’ (enoblece a uno). This approach of respect towards the ocean is reflected on other aspects of Flores’ life. It is related to his opinions of environmental policies, his scepticism towards scheduled work, his analysis that the inconsistencies of the Puerto Rico–​ U.S. relations can be solved with Puerto Rican independence, his resistance to the divisive effects of identity politics and cosmopolitan ethic. Flores’ characterisation of the sea is not shared by all fishermen in Culebra. Many members of the Fishermen’s Association, and some projects put forth by the administration of the Association, present a more, say, objectifying approach to the ocean, where the sea is imagined as a resource to be exploited. These diverse relationships towards the island space are expressed through fishing practices. I connect, for example, the technology of Flores’ generation, trap fishing, with a peculiar kind of knowledge and relationship to the sea, which contrasts with techniques that have since emerged. Laying the trap in a productive site requires the fisherman to have a good awareness of the underwater geography of Culebra. This knowledge is gained through trial and error and by sharing this knowledge with his peers. The process of retrieving the trap requires a degree of seamanship, wherein the fisherman can find the trap by surveying the fluid surface. While some fishermen lay buoys to mark the location of their traps, many fishermen in Culebra do not because it raises the chances of their trap being emptied by a passing fisherman. Fishermen in Culebra triangulate their traps with landmarks, amount of time it takes to arrive to the location and compare the weather conditions at the time of laying and collecting the traps. Trap fishing requires continuous maintenance to the handmade traps and to the winch that is used to lift the trap. Trap fishing contrasts with scuba fishing, perhaps the most popular type of fishing during my fieldwork in Culebra. Spear fishing with scuba gear became a popular alternative to trap fishing, which is comparably less efficient, economically inconsistent and environmentally damaging. Compared to trap fishing, scuba fishing is a more precise form of fishing where the fisherman is immersed in the environment of the prey and gets to select what he



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collects, resulting in a more efficient and profitable catch of high-​quality fish. An important contrast between the two techniques is that the experience of immersion places the fisherman in closer contact with the underwater world, in opposition to the trap fisherman who stays on the surface and imagines the underwater world. The diver does not require the degree of seamanship of the trap fisherman. Instead, he relies on his diving equipment, knowledge of decompression thresholds, safety techniques and knowledge of which species to spear and where. Both experiences are technically different and entail different approaches towards the ocean. I take trap fishing as the artisanal and handmade option, based on experience-​rich seamanship that maintains a respectful distance to the ocean, in contrast to scuba’s technophile, immediate, time-​conscious and efficient approach. The success of scuba fishing in Culebra is due to its efficiency and from the fact that it is more profitable than any other form of fishing available in Culebra. I found the profit motivation expressed when some divers would take risks with their gear, such as diving until the oxygen is completely depleted from their tanks or not observing decompression safety standards. Also, the sheer amount of marine life, conch and lobster in particular, that is extracted from the Culebra waters, by locals and visitors in particular, points towards a vision of the ocean as a site from where resources are extracted for export to nearby islands, for the generation of profit. In my view, there is a connection between the possibilities afforded by scuba equipment, the experience associated with taming or bypassing the dangers of the ocean and the implication of imposing a human-​centric experience (via breathing-​enabling technology) to the underwater world. The practice of immersion minimises the mysteries of the ocean, that unknown factor of the underwater world that Flores’ parents and grandparents did not have access to in the pre-​World War II years. Recently, there has been an increasing trend in Culebra of free divers or subaquatic fishermen. The technology of subaquatic fishing is a mask with snorkel, a thick wet suit, weight belt and free-​diving fins. The free diver goes out on his or her boat, sometimes accompanied by another diver for safety’s sake, to a site that is renowned for its deep fish –​not unlike the scuba diver. The free diver would then do multiple submersions, any one can last up to five minutes, from ten to thirty metres in the hunt for fish. The first immersions are meant to scout the underwater floor and identify the fish that the diver wishes to spear, which are followed by multiple immersions that will result in the capture of the fish. The physical demands of this kind of fishing are extraordinary –​holding the breath, pushing the body to the depths of the ocean, the radical change in temperature, the disorientation, while maintaining a sense of mindfulness and awareness of the task on hand, and pushing the body back to the surface.

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My interviews and experiences with these fishermen show an approach to the ocean that is characterised by a more direct, less mediated, physical contact with the underwater world. It is a kind of fishing where the diver submits himself or herself to the hostile environment of the underwater world and operates within his or her physiological limitations with significantly less mediation than the scuba diver. This approach entails a stance of observance and humility towards the reality of the underwater world. Free divers submit their bodies to a regime that regulates their diet (avoiding lactose products, following a high-​ protein diet and no consumption of tobacco and alcohol, among other prohibitions), changes their breathing habits, develops an awareness of their heart rate and attempts to control it, all of which result in a heightened awareness of their body’s reaction and sense data in this hostile environment. This level of submission to the ocean, free divers argue, leads them to develop a more acute consciousness and awareness of the subtleties of the underwater world like the behaviour of fish towards each other and towards the divers, the sounds fish make to communicate, the inconsistency of underwater gravity and the effects that free diving has on the body. Anthony Negrón, a free diver in Culebra who lives off his free-​diving catch, puts it like this: The distance between the bottom and the surface removes any kind of possible reference in my favour –​eyes shut and strong lungs that expand and enrich my blood and muscles with oxygen –​my body in a perfect vertical and my legs maintain a slow rhythm advancing into a blue and enigmatic destiny –​20 meters and I barely have half of my lung capacity –​given that the air in my lungs has compressed, my body is now negative and becomes like a stone with a progressive speed towards the bottom of the ocean –​35 meters, I have touched the bottom, but the pressure is intense and your subconscious creates rivalries that you need to block in order to survive –​I only have one fourth of my lung capacity –​ I can barely think prudently and when I open my eyes I cannot appreciate any colour –​everything is black and white –​my heart maintains an abnormally low pulse –​it barely beats –​my circulatory system is so compressed that the blood can barely flow through the more narrow spaces –​the game begins and my hunter instinct awakens and with a lot of patience and persistence I attempt to comprehend my environment and, at the same time, I contemplate the presence of a wide number of marine species that surround me attracted by curiosity –​ (but I can only select one –​only one piece) –​far away I can barely perceive the presence of a good specimen and, automatically, my instinct allows me acquire a shooting position of one (possible) prey –​but time runs and I enter into a margin where there is no room for mistakes –​this how the barrier between death and every second that passes is a second of life that I leave in the surface –​even if this is unconscious –​the animal gets into shooting position and I opt for a shot, as accurate as possible, in an attempt to immobilise the animal –​but things are not always as you wish them to be and the animal tears with an abnormal



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strength and seeks refuge close by –​time does not forgive and, on occasions, a number of factors block your capacity to reason –​opt that there aren’t many options –​and think that maybe the only option to save your life and to secure the fish is unfolding the string from the reel and return to the surface albeit on occasions without knowing that if you are within your limits or not –​once I am on the surface, I calmly attempt to recover by breath –​I am alive and I am well –​but if I want to have success and reach my goal, that fish to become my sustenance –​I need to annihilate my feeling of fear –​nothing of rivalries and I have lost my right to get angry –​there can’t be doubt –​my calm must persist along with my force of will –​and in my subconscious recognise that to be successful in this I need to repeat this process who knows how many times –​a photograph with big fishes produces thousands of speculations –​but inside the heart and the practises of a subaquatic fisherman there exists a totally different UNIVERSE. (translation mine)

While there are few subaquatic fishermen in Culebra, their impact on the fishing scene has been significant. Anthony Negrón is one of the few fishermen in Culebra who makes a living off fishing and argues that the subaquatic approach has numerous characteristics that are appealing in Culebra. Negrón’s skill at finding high-​quality fish in a short period of time, the low overhead cost and how quickly he manages to sell his catch in Culebra are some of the indicators that make subaquatic fishing in Culebra pleasurable and appealing to him. Another reason that Negrón references is the view that subaquatic fishing is more environmentally sustainable than other techniques. Given the physical demands of subaquatic fishing, the fishermen must be very judicious in the amount of fish they spear and must limit themselves to catching only the most extraordinary specimens. This necessarily results in the subaquatic fishermen making less money than the scuba or trap fishermen. However, fishermen like Negrón are not concerned by this because, they argue, living within their means is connected to the broader philosophy of subaquatic fishing where the diver fishes within his or her embodied means –​without tanks and limited aid from mechanical technology. It is connected to the concept of conscious or mindful fishing, in opposition to conspicuous fishing, and acknowledges the details of the process of fishing, the behaviour of wild fish, the effects that diving has on the body and acknowledges the fact that the waters surrounding Culebra and the Caribbean Sea in general do not have a high fish population and must be exploited carefully. For Negrón, subaquatic fishing requires a commitment that transcends the actual practice of fishing and has an impact on his daily life. At times, he claims to find himself socially alienated and has expressed to me his difficulty in sustaining long-​term relationships with people who do not share their passion for the sea and for fishing.

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For Negrón, businesspeople in Culebra recognise his physical and skilled efforts, his ethical stance, his approach of catching less but higher-​quality fish and show their respect for this craftsmanship by buying from him directly, rather than from the Association. Negrón’s holistic approach to the process of fishing is also appealing to tourists and businesses in Culebra that seek an image associated to the island itself, who wish to promote an image of an authentic, local or otherwise uniquely sourced fish. That said, it is important to maintain that subaquatic fishing is a very dangerous and highly skilled practice and, while I am sure that Negrón would not mind subaquatic fish catching in Culebra, I do not think that the practice will achieve the analogous popularity that scuba has among local fishermen, precisely because of its physical demands, danger and the level of commitment that is required. I have elaborated on the different fishing practices in Culebra because I am interested in the different ways in which culebrense relationship to the sea is mediated through various discursive, technological and institutional forms. As an economic practice, fishing in Culebra has historically been ancillary in relation to farming, cattle herding, factory work, tourism and government work. Fishing today has been further displaced by tourism, construction and the growth of the government. However, the discourse that Culebra is a ‘fishing community’ is very popular. In the following sections, I will be expanding on how it is reproduced in institutions like the Fishermen’s Association, the importance given to the Association’s activities in public discussions and externally funded projects that are based on the idea of Culebra being an island of fishermen. I will approach the Culebra Fishermen’s Association’s projects, political stance and internal issues as mediators of the different emotional and affective relationships that culebrenses have towards the sea. While the Culebra’s Fishermen’s Association has had its chequered history, recently showing difficulty in convening its members into an effective political lobby, I would still support the Fishermen’s Association’s agenda –​a forum where the island’s connection to the sea is showcased –​which still has the power to draw a lot of attention and social capital in Culebra. In this context, I approach fishing in Culebra as a creative practice, a craft and an activity analogous to artisan work or art, rather than an economic activity. Given the different technological options available to Culebra fishermen, I suggest that the mediations, techniques, technologies and approaches of individual fishermen are the result of subjective choices, an expression of individuality and a choice that informs a life project. While the agenda of the people who work with the association suggests that they are arguing for more than safeguarding a ‘way of life’, for an island identity or for their income, I read the individuals’ agendas as vicarious articulations of a connection to the sea that embeds itself in culebrense social life.



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The sea, I learned from Flores and other culebrenses, is not an empty, amorphous expanse of water. The sea is a conceptual and affective location, the site of embodied memories, lived through with embodied experiences and skilled vision and navigated with intuitive practice-​based knowledge. It has different ‘rules’ than land. It is an active site, at all times mobile and inconsistent. For all the knowledge that Flores and his co-​seafarers amass, full knowledge of the ocean will always be beyond their grasp. It is an environment that cannot be fully controlled or tamed. And yet, it is a constitutive site of islander’s consciousness. If there would be such a thing as a ‘grammar’ of island life, an elemental ‘particle’ that constitutes an island, I figure it would be found inside its waters. The sea is a central component of Culebra’s story. It has embedded in its nature that double condition of connection and isolation; it is mobile and static, the end and the beginning of the island and the site of liminal experiences and of familiarity and home. The sea is the site where the pleasures associated with the freedom of movement –​movement away from land politics –​and the constraints of negotiating unpredictable water conditions can be enacted simultaneously. I wonder if the art of being-​at-​sea lies somewhere inside that eccentric moment where knowledge, practice and certainty meet nature, disorientation and profound doubt. The process of developing a passion and knowledge for the sea and sea matters is a way in which the production and reproduction of a sense of island life is mediated. But it is not an experience that is specific to Culebra. This double signification is relatable to the broader Caribbean experience. In the section that follows, I will offer a brief review of different ways in which oceanic metaphors, methodologies and historical narratives have contributed to an oceanic understanding of the Caribbean. The theorists that I will be referring to understand the Caribbean process of identity as part of a global connection of relations that are mediated by the Atlantic Ocean. The sea, from this perspective, is the space of movement and travel through which the Caribbean incorporates and exchanges cultural materials and experiences that inform its regional specificities. In these narratives, the identities of the Americas, Europe and Africa are entangled with each other in a continuous process of transoceanic exchanges. These ideas of cross-​fertilisation occur in tandem with the national projects of Spain, England, Holland, France and Portugal as they attempted to extend their national agendas overseas, and the compartmentalisation of the islands into distinctive ethnic, linguist, racial and cultural groups can be read as the legacy of such agendas. I will argue that while the sea can be understood as a barrier between places and fragments the regions into distinct social-​cultural locations, the sea can also be seen as a connector or a conduit between places.

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THE ATLANTIC I am interested in the tensions that arise when considering the capacity of the Atlantic Ocean, and the oceans in general, to serve as a barrier between continents and histories at the same time as it unites and meshes together physically distant experiences. My interest in the sea is directed towards exploring the transformative effects that the sea has in shaping Western modernity and, specifically, the Caribbean experience. I would like to develop an approach where the sea is more than a location of transit and consider the possibility of the ocean as a historical and creative agent and as the location where significant interactions, struggles and subjectivities have been articulated. Thinking with the sea gives a concrete shape and colour to the ocean by documenting the journeys and processes by which people traversing the Atlantic produced and reproduced social relationships that continue to inform today’s ‘explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective’ (Gilroy 1993a: 17). The transoceanic journeys addressed by Atlantic theorists do not necessarily have a fixed route. The Atlantic experience is set in motion in constant comings and goings by merchants, manufacturers, planters, and royal officials building trade routes, colonies and a new economy connecting the four corners of the Atlantic . . . by organizing the labour of servants, slaves, sailors, soldiers, urban and rural labourers, and factory workers. (Rediker 2004: 111)

These ventures and travel experiences are then layered with contacts, interactions and exchanges that oceanic crossings provide. In the case of the Caribbean, for example, one can begin talking about the comings and goings of West Africans, East Indians, Far Easterners, indigenous, Europeans and Mediterranean peoples converging, resisting, complying, creating, destroying and reproducing the region through a 500-​year process. The expectation is that by thinking in Atlantic terms, the nationalist perspectives of writing history are decentred. Klein and Mackenthun argue that ‘even as Western seafarers master and conquer the Atlantic, their culture has an increasingly incomplete control over the definition of ethnic and national boundaries that their projects were meant to sustain’ (Klein and Mackenthun 2004: 8). The processes of Western modernity, which are traditionally understood to be land-​bounded and national in character, can now be understood to be made possible by the contacts and relations produced in the Atlantic and the global connections it offers. Atlantic historians situate revolutionary and ideological movements of modernity such as the Mercantile and Industrial Revolutions (enabled by Benítez-​ Rojo’s ‘Caribbean Plantation machinery’, 1989) and ideological revolutions such as the American and



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French Revolution (located in Rediker’s ‘Red Atlantic’, 2004), and explore contemporary forms of ‘counter cultures of modernity’ (in Gilroy’s ‘Black Atlantic’, 1993a) as spatially linked to different locations and all conceptually entangled with each other through Atlantic and Pacific contacts and relations. From this perspective, the Caribbean functions as a port of call in the meanderings of relations that inform the cultures of the Atlantic. I am interested in oceanic constructions that recognize the metaphoric and concrete ways in which traversing, imagining and engaging physically with the sea has given shape to the Caribbean, specifically Culebra, as a mobile and insular place. THE SHIP The trans-​Atlantic sail boat or cruise ship is perhaps one of the more significant tropes of Atlantic crossings. It is the enabler of ocean travel. It has been, according to Foucault, the great instrument of economic development, from the sixteenth century until the present, and simultaneously been ‘the greatest reserve of the imagination’ (Foucault 1986: 27). Ships serve as enforcers of imperial and national projects by functioning as barriers of contact and reinforcing Caribbean fragmentation at the same time as they can serve to subvert the national and imperial power structure in which they operate by facilitating contact and interaction between islands and continents. Transoceanic boats are the vessels where many of the contradictions and revelations of the sea can be found. Historically, boats are the containers that initiate and reproduce the movements and contacts that give shape to the Caribbean. As they fly national flags on their top masts and are commanded by elements of the national elite with orders to either patrol water ways from declared national enemies or transport goods destined for the coffers of their respective imperial projects, boats serve to produce and reproduce ideas and policy about empire and carry within them the very elements that empower a nation. This is certainly the case in how Benítez-​Rojo (1989) describes imperial seventeenth-​century Spain’s ‘machinery’ of exploitation of the Americas. A ship would leave a southern harbour of Spain, Seville for example, on route to the Americas escorted by a military fleet to guard against pirates and buccaneers that operated off the coasts of Africa. Once in mid-​Atlantic, the military fleet would retire, leaving the vessel unprotected until it arrived to the Antilles. Here the merchant boats would make stops along a network of forts, primarily located in San Juan, Puerto Rico and Havana, Cuba, which would dispatch fleets to escort the merchant ship to the mainland where it would be loaded with Peruvian silver and other goods before making the journey back escorted in the same manner (Pérez-​Mallaína 1998).

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Trans-​Atlantic ships are constituted by elements from a variety of locations that do not represent the national and imperial interests that they are supposed to reproduce. Historical research has shown that the nationality of a significant percentage of the crews who manned these ships did not correspond to the colours under which the ship sailed. In the case of Spanish ships, it is estimated that around 40 per cent of the crews who manned Spain’s ships during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not Spanish (Pérez-​Mallaína 1998). The Admiral himself, Christopher Columbus, was not Spanish but Genovese and his crew hailed from Portugal, Italy, North Africa, the Levant, Flanders and a certain Luís de Torres who claimed to speak Hebrew, Arabic and Chaldean2 (Klein 2004).3 While maritime countries, like seventeenth-​century England and Spain for example, had policies to restrict the amount of foreigners permitted to crew their ships, closer examination of the historical documents suggests that this policy was not necessarily adhered to faithfully when it came to actually choosing a crew in the busy ports. In the case of a busy port like seventeenth-​ century Seville, crews were usually put together on a last-​minute basis (Pérez-​ Mallaína 1998). The verification of the sailor’s nationality would have been complicated because of Spain’s multi-​ethnic and multilingual society. At times, a Frenchman, Portuguese or Italian could pass as Basque, Galician or Catalan for the Andalusian customs officer (Pérez-​Mallaína 1998). The ships’ roster represented a motley crew of nationalities that flocked to global harbour cities such as London, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg or Seville in search of opportunity and adventure (Chappell 2004; Pérez-​Mallaína 1998; Rediker 2004). Also, during the voyages of discovery, and subsequent travels to the Americas, it was common to take on board ‘natives’ from the area presuming that they would function as good navigators and guides in the new seas (Klein 2004). At times, these ‘guides’ served as translators or mistranslators to the lands that westerners were becoming acquainted with. Western maritime knowledge grew in relation to knowledge that was already being reproduced in the Caribbean archipelago by the people who lived before European contact as well as by buccaneers who operated on the fringes of national law (Chappell 2004; Neill 2000). In the context that European nations were engaged in an expansionist project, an extension of nationalist policies in the New World, these ship spaces disrupt or make a parody of the expansionist agenda of Europe (Klein 2004). These ship spaces are suggestive of Foucault’s heterotopias. In his discussion on the qualities of social relations that make up modern spaces, or sites, Foucault shows particular interest in those sites which ‘have the curious property of being in relation with all other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect’ (Foucault 1986: 24). Foucault addresses heterotopic sites as locations that are linked to other sites at the same time as they contradict the categories



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and qualities that give them shape in the first place. These sites are capable of presenting the subject with multiple locations ‘juxtaposing in a single real place, several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’ (Foucault 1986: 25). Examples of such modern sites could be museums or libraries where a multitude of histories and knowledges converge and are classified at the same time as the collections within them may subvert such classifications. Festivals and Caribbean Carnival lie just outside the city or in a demarcated location within the city and they can display a vast array of locations and histories robustly expressed in a short period of time. The Atlantic ships that have shaped and continue to inform the Caribbean identity process carry within them people, ideas and goods of modernity which suggest the multiple geographies and histories that Foucault is suggesting with his heterotopic sites. A further characteristic of heterotopias that can be linked to Atlantic ships is the notion that: Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of a barracks or prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications. (Foucault 1986: 26)

This dual character of openness and closeness, connection and isolation, is characteristic of trans-​Atlantic life. Sailors are in contact with a variety of colonial and imperial locations and engage with the vastness of the sea, yet they are confined to the small space of a ship and are dominated by the authoritarian command of a strict hierarchy on board (Pérez-​Mallaína 1998). The ship is a symbolic island or prison closed upon itself with its own codes, terminology and camaraderie at the same time as it functions as a carrier of global goods and ideas. And yet, a colonial, nationalist fragmentation still impresses itself on the region. European powers understood the region as a place to extend their boundaries and to extract wealth and knowledge for consumption (Sheller 2003). These constructions necessarily saw the islands as units of production which, from a European perspective, operate independently from each other. I am referring specifically to the conflations between colonial histories and assigning each island-specific cultural and ethnic identities, such as Spanish, English, French or Dutch Caribbean identities. THE CULEBRA FISHERMEN’S ASSOCIATION The idea of Culebra as a fishing community dates back to local foundational myths of the colonisation of the island. The first sanctioned settlers

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of Culebra, official land labourers, could not help but to turn to the sea and learn fishing techniques from passing Danish sailors who traversed the area (Feliciano 2001: 39). Fishing became a successful way to complement agricultural products that were failing due to extensive droughts. ‘Soon enough the colonisers dedicated themselves more to fishing than to agriculture’ (Feliciano 2001: 39). Feliciano’s narrative suggests that the work entailed in fishing, such as the required knowledge to build boats, the crafting of fishing tools and knowledge of edible species, seasons, currents, weather and so on, was a cornerstone in the formation of the Culebra experience. The image that conflates culebrense with a fisherman was again deployed during the U.S. Navy protests when it was argued that the U.S. Navy practices threatened the island’s coastal resources and, by extension, the islander’s livelihood. Local narratives of the U.S. Navy struggle located the majority of the protests and conflicts at sea or on the coasts, when fishermen would mobilise and confront the battleships at sea in order to prevent the military exercise. Friends of Flores Soto who participated in the Navy protest would concur that oftentimes fishermen infiltrated the Navy practice range in order to serve as human shields against the bombing and, in their small boat, would later escape the authorities dispatched to arrest them. Stories like these were often repeated to me during liming sessions at the Culebra pier. The stories reiterate how culebrense knowledge of the waters and cays surrounding Culebra gave them the advantage over the Navy in navigating the Culebra waters. In his PhD dissertation regarding land transfers in Culebra, Guillermo Iranzo refers to Culebra as a ‘coastal community’, suggesting that coastal activities are constitutive of Culebra identity. He goes further by arguing a connection between a Culebra island-ethnic identity and ‘mode of production’ that is linked to the island’s maritime resources. For Iranzo, Culebra’s identity is predicated on the islander’s access to coastal resources, fishing and a mode of production which is linked to the landscape. While I would not want to suggest such a clear connection between ethnic identity and mode of production in Culebra, what I find more important in Iranzo’s dissertation is the construction of Culebra island identity as being bounded to the coast and to practices of harvesting the sea. In the years following the ousting of the Navy in 1975, fishermen and women in Culebra organised the Fishermen’s Association of Culebra (Asociación de Pescadores de Culebra), which was initially chaired by Anastasio ‘Taso’ Soto –​the chair of the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Culebra and the successor of Monchín in the mayor’s office. The initial function of the Association was to serve as a cooperative to support fishermen. It served as a centre for recollection, cleaning and distribution of catches. The Association received Puerto Rican government money in the late 1970s, as part of the Puerto Rican government’s policy to support



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grass-​roots initiatives and as a result of the attention that Culebra garnered due to the Navy struggle. With these funds, they broadened their services to include a petrol station with access to the sea, grants, low interest loans for members, salary for an administrator, two boats with the capacity to stay up to seven days at sea, discounts on petrol for members of the Association and other similar services. In return, members were expected to dedicate a few hours a week to maintaining the Association, primarily cleaning fish, maintaining the building and running the petrol station. The board of the Association has historically been composed of people who served in other positions of leadership in Culebra such as mayors, policemen, businessmen, firemen, academics and school teachers. During my fieldwork years, the day-​to-​day operations of the Association were overlooked by Mary Soto, Flores Soto’s sister. A prominent board member, who offered me insight into the intentions and goings on of the Association was Lourdes Feliciano, Monchín’s daughter. During its first years, the Association counted with a healthy number of motivated members who were very effective in getting resources and accumulating political capital in Culebra and among the network of fishermen in Puerto Rico, St. Thomas and Vieques. The initial success of the Association can be contextualised as part of a greater revival of Culebra’s grass-​roots initiatives that followed the expulsion of the U.S. Navy. This revival included the founding of a residential home for the elderly, a health clinic, numerous youth programmes and culture and arts programmes, among others. During the decade of the 1990s, some culebrenses would say that after the 1989 Hurricane Hugo disaster, membership began to dwindle and the Association’s capacity to convene people began to fade. Also, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Culebra experienced the steady growth of the municipal government, the opening of a pharmaceutical factory on the island that offered mass employment and the rise of the tourism industry. In 1996, the Puerto Rican Port Authority, which manages the ferry service between Culebra, Vieques and Puerto Rico, started offering daily service between Culebra and Puerto Rico, whereas earlier the service was more sporadic and inconsistent. With these options, the people in Culebra who fished were spending less time fishing and more time working at the pharmaceutical plant, municipal services office, tourist-​related work or construction, all for a higher remuneration. The number of members as well as the enthusiasm for the organisation that characterised the Association in its early years declined. During the early 2000s, when I started visiting Culebra regularly, the Association was looking into ways they could diversify its activities in order to sustain itself financially. It also felt that it needed to hire staff to clean the fish, operate the petrol station and do general maintenance work. The Association opened a restaurant next to its facilities to cater to the nascent

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tourist industry and hired staff to run the petrol station and to clean and sell fish. Eventually, the Association earned more income from petrol sales to tourist boats and cars than from sales of fish and lobster, government grants and membership fees and services. For some people within the Association, there was a concern that this type of diversification diluted the grass-​roots, communal and fisherman imagery and rhetoric that guided its founding. The hiring of staff, opening a restaurant and earning more money through petrol sales than fish sales could be read as practices that represented the potential demise of the fisherman, which embodied Culebra’s political activism and insular identity. The board of directors was concerned by this but did not see an alternative to the situation. The board had to negotiate the reproduction of its organisation, fundamentally based on the continuation of practices that represented a located island identity founded on community values, with a fiscal situation that suggested that fishing did not hold the same place in Culebra society as it once did. The board of directors of the Association was debating between continuing with a programme that assumed a located island identity based on fishing through a grass-​roots/​communal strategy and applying an entrepreneurial approach that would minimise member participation and possibly generate more revenue for the organisation. Mary Soto, Flores’ sister and the administrator of the Association, argued for a change in the vision and strategy that guided the Association. Among other things, she supported changing the name of the Association, applying for a change in its fiscal status so that it be deemed a commercial organisation and adopting a strategy that engaged more aggressively with the tourist industry. She argued that the practices of the Culebra fisherman that gave shape to the Association are no longer sustaining the Association and that the Association must adapt to the changing circumstances of the island if it is going to continue being the representative of local fishing interests in Culebra. She expressed the concern that to continue the current strategy would eventually lead to the Association being placed in a position where it would have to sell its facilities to an outside private interest that would probably close the fish market, not offer local fishermen any support and run the petrol station and restaurant for profits that would be taken out of Culebra. Mary’s view suggests an approach that embraces the emerging tourist economy of Culebra and accepts it as a means to sustain the Association and continue supporting its members. Mary was interested in reproducing an idea of a ‘local fishing community’, but in order to do so sustainably, the Association would have to incorporate a variety of services and activities that are not solely dependent on its membership. The amount of membership dues, the members’ commitment to carry out maintenance tasks and their availability to come to meetings were not enough to sustain the organisation.



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Mary did not interpret the fact that their members were not paying their dues or not going to the meetings as an end of the fishermen in Culebra. Rather, this represented a diversification of economic and fishing practices on the island where the majority of the Association’s members did not rely on fishing as a significant part of their income but fished as a supplement to their income, for sport, leisure and for more subtle reasons connected to the maintenance of a lifestyle, like her brother Flores. More importantly, I think that Mary would rather see the Association turn profitable in Culebra hands rather than in hands of entrepreneurs based outside of Culebra. However, other people in the board of directors maintained that the current strategy of functioning as a not-​for-​profit organisation, dependent on its membership, was sustainable because the fundamental idea of Culebra being a fishing community, cemented on traditional practices and a history of political activism, remains the dominant discourse on the island. Lourdes Feliciano, one of the board members and Monchín’s daughter, would not disagree with Mary’s assessment that membership participation has gone down but maintained that the Association’s role of showcasing the interests of local fishermen through grass-​roots activities was still a legitimate project. For Feliciano, the connection between fishing and Culebra is self-​evident and the Association would do good by positioning itself as the organisation that articulates this connection. Lourdes Feliciano proposed an alternative strategy for the Association that focused on raising the profile of the Association through projects that had a significant political impact on the island. These projects would bring attention to the Association and raise the commitment of its members. From this point of view, a change in the strategic plan of the Association towards a more entrepreneurial approach may represent a deviation from the idea that has shaped the image of the Culebra fisherman. The discussions on the future of the direction of the Association became more poignant after Mayor Romero’s municipality’s government proposition to demolish its facilities for the construction of a road that would lead from a proposed bridge linking the village centre to the south-​eastern peninsula of the island. The proposed road, which was part of Mayor Romero’s general development program, would offer another connection to Culebra’s south-​ eastern peninsula and give easier access to undeveloped lands that were slated for the construction of a low-​cost housing complex. The proposed demolition of the Association brought up the question of the Association’s legitimacy. The argument from the mayor’s office, at that time, was that since fishing has ceased to be an important source of income for the average Culebra household, the Association’s role in Culebra had become redundant. The Association was expected to give way to a new Culebra that was being fashioned, away from a peasant and working-​class economy towards a tourist-​oriented economy and middle-​class/​urban living.

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The board of directors of the Fishermen’s Association joined the chorus of critics of Romero’s development plan. They supported the view that the scale and nature of the development projects in Culebra were not sustainable and would bring about negative social and environmental consequences to a Culebra that was functioning in a sustainable manner. The board of directors also questioned the legal integrity of the construction contracts. Some people in the Association were suspicious of the presence of individuals within the mayor’s office, who were not from Culebra and were using the mayor’s office to benefit financially from the construction contracts. I am interested in the intersections of arguments brought forth by the Association that advocated for (1) the preservation of a Culebra way of life that is linked to the natural resources of the island, (2) an institution that promotes fishing identity as a perishable practice that is linked to island identity and (3) people from outside the island being suspicious of government corruption, all of which promote an insular understanding of Culebra. In this context, the Association was unified as an entity of resistance against development projects, which were understood to threaten island sovereignty and a specific kind of insularity. I turn now to two cases where the board of directors supported development programs which originated outside of Culebra that, arguably, interfered with local fishing practices. I see these programmes as attempts by the Fishermen’s Association to maintain visibility and political relevance on Culebra, secure the fiscal solvency of the organisation and, on a more subtle level, contribute to the ongoing conversations that culebrenses have with the surroundings waters. The different visions within the board of directors of the Association regarding the most effective way of designing the organisation and their position towards the development program of the Culebra municipal government serve as a way to talk about how multiple seascapes express themselves in Culebra. THE FISHING RESERVE In 2001, the Association successfully lobbied for the establishment of a marine reserve along the western coast of Culebra. The Association was concerned that practices of overfishing were affecting the area’s capacity for fish to reproduce. There have been different local theories to account for the decrease in fish population. A common theory in the public discourse is that local fishermen have not been fishing responsibly. Critics singled out trap fishing –​wooden box with bait inside that is left in the water overnight –​that collects marine life indiscriminately as a particular concern. The argument was that trap fishermen forget where they left their traps or forget to collect them, leaving the trap to continue collecting marine life, causing damage to the general area. The theory put forth by the Fishermen’s Association is



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that local fishermen are well aware of the capacity of the Culebra waters and that it is not locals who are overfishing, but fishermen coming from Vieques, Virgin Islands and numerous ports of Puerto Rico who contribute to the overfishing. Environmental activists relate the decrease in marine life to unchecked construction projects in Culebra, Vieques and the Virgin Islands, which cause sedimentation and pollution on the mangroves and reefs, which in turn, result in the curtailment of marine life to reproduce. Others in Culebra claim that there is no such thing as overfishing and that this was a discourse made up by activists and the Fishermen’s Association in order to give credibility to their projects. The reserve was designated a no-​fish zone and boats of certain size and displacement were prohibited access. The rationale behind the plan followed up on analogous state policies that placed moratoriums of certain species of fish and marine life during specific months of the year. The fishing reserve and the moratoriums are designed to prevent the extinction of specific marine life due to overfishing. The reserve was to be patrolled by the Department of Natural Resources of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The project received smug support by some of the fishermen members of the Association. Some fishermen, while supporting a reserve in principle, were initially concerned that it limited the space where they could fish and showed scepticism at the way in which it was being enforced. While the initiative was initially from the Association, the management program of the reserve had been administered by a marine biologist based in Puerto Rico. In public meetings convened to discuss a management plan for the reserve, the marine biologist made reference to the need for the fishermen of Culebra to get involved in this project because the fishermen are the custodians of knowledge of Culebra waters and it is the fishermen who know the specifics of breeding grounds of certain species and are knowledgeable of the more sensitive areas of the reserve. Local fishermen’s cooperation was also necessary for the success of the reserve because, according to the marine biologist, projects like these require a grass-​roots element in order to function effectively and democratically. The success of the marine reserve, as it was conceived by its sponsors, ideologues and managers, depended on the presence of a politicised fishermen identity in Culebra which would motivate fishermen to get involved in such a venture because, presumably, the project constituted the protection of the resources that permitted island fisherman identity to flourish. But the project was essentially run by the marine biologists; the social component of the project was put in the hands of the Fishermen Association that had already begun to lose its power to convene fishermen in Culebra. The design and implementation of a management plan and the general acceptance of the reserve took over a decade. A significant setback in the strategic planning of the reserve was a lack of interest on the part of the fishermen

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members of the Association and the community at large. While most of the people I spoke with about the reserve agreed to its establishment on principle, only the board of directors of the Fishermen’s Association came to the meetings that dealt with the issue. Some members of the Association showed suspicion towards the academic biologist who came from Puerto Rico and was perceived to assume a position of authority on the island. Others understood the reserve to be a project that originated outside of Culebra, with little room for local participation (not unlike Mayor Romero’s development policies), and questioned the motives of the reserve promoters. I suggest that an important contradiction of the marine reserve project lies in the unproblematic assumption that the island of Culebra is constituted as a bounded community held together by a politicised fishing identity. The advocates of the reserve expected that the fishermen would seize this opportunity to have Puerto Rican and U.S. funds invested for the environmental benefit of the waters of Culebra. However, some members of the Association interpreted the reserve as a curtailment of the waters that they traditionally fish on and claim as part of their identity space. The way the reserve scenario played out may have struck a negative chord among some Culebra fishermen who were put in a position where ‘outside’ elements of Culebra were setting rules and regulations based on academic knowledge of the area and were expecting the fishermen to support such restrictions.4 This frustrated some members of the Association who expected the organisation to look after their interests. Regardless of the reasons that may lie behind the Association’s difficulty to rally its members, I wish to address the seemingly contrasting positions that the Association assumed in the context of the development debates. For the reserve management plan, which was implemented around the same time as the 2004 municipal elections, the board of directors promoted an insular project for Culebra, but accepted non-​insular influence when it came to managing the reserve and expected its members to follow suit. Seen in this manner, the Association’s position seems inconsistent –​at one moment advocating for insularism and resisting outside influence and development discourse, the next moment accepting outside forces that promote the management of Culebra waters. A way to account for this apparent inconsistency is by looking at the nature of the projects that the Association was engaging with. The Association's campaign against Romero’s development plans was couched on a vision that could not reconcile the scale and scope of the development programme and a continuity of Culebra practices. Members of the board of the Fishermen’s Association were sceptic towards a development programme that was based on a Puerto Rican (“continental”) style of development. The marine reserve project, which the Association embraced, had the narrative of reproducing the idea that Culebra was a fishing community, thus legitimising the Association and a sense of ocean-​centred insularism.



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While initial reactions to the reserve were mixed, antagonistic and hesitant, recent reactions –​15 years after the establishment of the reserve –​are overwhelmingly positive. I wonder if former sceptics towards the reserve, particularly those who saw the reserve as a paternalistic project that blamed locals for mismanagement of the ocean, have gotten used to the idea of the reserve and have grown to accept it as a matter of fact. The prohibitions associated to the reserve operate in tandem with other restrictions that impose stiff fines for catching certain species of fish, conch, crabs and lobster during specific times of the year. These policies, enforced by the Puerto Rican and U.S. federal governments, are specifically designed to curtail overfishing practices and they are widely supported in Culebra by fishermen, businesses and the population at large. The acceptance of the reserve, and similar restrictions, can be contextualised within growing environmental concerns in Culebra, which acknowledge a link between the rise of leisure boats, fishermen and beach tourists and the destruction of coral reefs, of mangroves and the pollution of the water, which hinders fish reproduction. This is recognised in a myriad of ways such as youth groups that organise cleaning brigades of the coasts, teachers taking their pupils on turtle patrols, municipality’s involvement in lawsuits of environmental concern, a rise in recycling awareness and the rise of businesses that promote ecotourism, among other initiatives that promote a general context of environmental awareness. If Mayor Romero’s early 2000s campaign suggested a vision of Culebra as a resource to be exploited for the islanders’ empowerment, the policies supported and promoted by the Fishermen’s Association envision a mutually informing relationship between the islanders and the physical resources of the island. SNAPPERFARM In a bolder move, during the early 2000s, the Association supported a private capital aquaculture scheme initiated by a U.S.-​based firm. Snapperfarm, Inc. approached the Association for support in an offshore aquaculture scheme whereby fish spawned in Florida would be bred in captivity in underwater cages a few miles south of Culebra. The Snapperfarm venture is a private, profit-​motivated business that received initial support, investment and sponsorship from the University of Florida, Sea Grant5 and the University of Puerto Rico. The Fishermen’s Association gave its full support to the scheme. It offered Snapperfarm space in its docking area, letters of support, logistics, promotion and freezer space to keep the fish once harvested. In return, the Association would get Snapperfarm fish at a discounted price, which it would sell from its facilities.

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The board of directors of the Association, particularly Lourdes Feliciano, supported Snapperfarm on the grounds that suggested that aquaculture projects were a sustainable alternative to the global problem of overfishing. Some prominent members of the Association saw in the scheme an opportunity to showcase Culebra as being at the forefront of fishing management programmes. Another benefit for the Association, which would have been appealing to those members of the Association who were concerned over the fiscal situation of the Association, was the possibility of having a constant supply of high-​quality fish available to sell to the public. The membership of the Association, however, did not support the initiative. I did not come across a member of the Association who looked favourably on the American venture. Although Snapperfarm did not put at stake the livelihood of Culebra fishermen, it tread on a space that fishermen in Culebra claim for themselves. Resentment towards Snapperfarm, and towards the Association for supporting it, was manifest in comments and gossip that spread through the island. A few members of the Association told me that they were going to look for these underwater cages and vandalise them. Others spread gossip that Snapperfarm was not really breeding fish because large amounts of the fish it was breeding were found in the municipal dump. Others were concerned that the species that was being bred was not indigenous to the area and if the specimens would escaped the cages it would cause an imbalance in the ecosystem with irreparable damage. One day, as I was updating my notes at a bar, a member of the Association came with a shark that he had caught. He had the shark in the back of his pickup. He was complaining that all the freezer space at the Association was full of Snapperfarm fish and the Association did not have space for his shark. The fisherman was driving around Culebra businesses and offering the shark. He had sold half of it already to a restaurant but was anxious to sell the second half because sharks need to be cleaned and stored quickly and he did not have room in his own house for it. He used this incident to make general complaints against the Association for not being effective in its policy to support fishermen of Culebra or in its own policy to run the organisation efficiently. The fisherman ended up storing parts of the shark in other people’s houses that had large freezers. By 2006, the Snapperfarm operation in Culebra was running smoothly. Its groundbreaking aquaculture technology was receiving consistent support from numerous governmental and research organisations in the United States and Puerto Rico, and they had smoothed over their logistical operation. The hatchlings were coming at a steady rate from Florida, as well as the feed for the fish, the cages were holding well to the underwater conditions of southern Culebra and there was a steady stream of fish being harvested from the cages to be sold in Culebra and Puerto Rico, while some specimens were sent



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to Florida for research purposes. However, Snapperfarm was still struggling to produce a profit. The stumbling block was that the scale of the Culebra operation was not enough to cover the overhead costs and make the operation economically sustainable, let alone profitable. Snapperfarm in Culebra had two cages capable of producing fifty tons of fish per year. It calculated that it needed to produce five times that amount in order to be profitable and not be beholden to government and university grants, which had an end date. Snapperfarm’s management began the process of applying for permits to the Puerto Rican government to enlarge its operation, but was not successful in securing the permits within its deadline. In 2009, Snapperfarm closed its operations in Culebra and moved its infrastructure to Panama, where it was conceded the permits to operate at a profitable scale.6 Snapperfarm’s departure from Culebra coincided with an increased rift between the board of directors of the Association, who were not fishermen, and its members. There was a concern among the members of the general direction of the Association and, more delicately, its finances. There was a growing sentiment among many members that their role was limited to providing fish to the Association that would then sell it and promote its agenda in Culebra –​an agenda that did not always align itself with the interest of the members. The board of the Association would claim that it was transparent and would argue that the members were not putting their part into the Association, as in not contributing to meetings, leaving the board with no other choice but to make the big decisions. Members of the board would also argue that members of the Association were still reaping the benefits of membership by having access to storage space, discounted petrol, steady sales of their catch, assistance with the acquisition and renewal of licenses and permits, access to information on fishing regulations and a lobbying body for their interests. After a series of tense meetings, a state audit was carried out, which revealed a financial discrepancy in the Association’s accounting books. The audit resulted in the temporary suspension of the Association’s activities. The mayor at the time, Abraham Peña (the mayor who succeeded Iván Romero), encouraged members of the Association to continue the organisation, without the board of directors, until the auditing issues were sorted. The mayor offered his offices and his staff’s knowledge of business administration to assist the members in managing their resources and continue their craft. The mayor’s office took control of the dry dock and the space previously used as a restaurant and rented the site as a means to raise revenue that would contribute to sorting out the financial issues of the Association. Mayor Peña also sought legal counsel to mediate the various misunderstandings between the board of directors and the members. When mayor Peña passed away in 2011, the project of a parallel Association lost steam.

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I do not wish to overemphasise the connection between the Snapperfarm project in Culebra and the Association’s internal discrepancies. The conditions that led to the temporary suspension of the Association are the result of a complex set of circumstances that accumulated during many years, the Snapperfarm venture playing a relatively minor part. My interest in the relationship between the Association and Snapperfarm is in the way in which it presents the different seascapes that surround Culebra and highlights the passions that these seascapes evoke. While Snapperfarm may seem as a transnational, disembedded from Culebra’s social relations, large-​scale and industrialised venture, it actually played into the most intimate space of Culebra’s politics. The Association, perhaps expecting to continue capitalising on the popularity it gained from the successful lobby of the maritime reserve, may have seen in Snapperfarm an opportunity to continue to position itself on the vanguard of fishing management programmes at a time when similar associations, which relied on the model of member participation for their sustainability, were closing in Puerto Rico. It seems to me, however, that the Association was not effective in persuading the membership of its vision for the Association and its vision for the Culebra waters. This resulted in the membership questioning the Association’s credibility and intentions and attempting to strike out on their own with support from the mayor’s office, which welcomed it. The involvement of the mayor broadened the power struggle into who would have access to the Association’s facilities, discourse and management –​a struggle that pitted strong personalities with different visions of the island’s seascape and visions for the island. I find interesting that regardless of all the emotions and discrepancies at stake, the question of the legitimacy of a Fisherman’s Association was never brought up. The Association never actually closed and the idea of an island community connected to the experience of the sea was never really in question. The new mayor, Iván Solís (who succeeded Peña), took on a conciliatory approach towards the discrepancies between the board and its members. For Mayor Solís, there is no reason to let the Association fail. If run well, it has all the possibilities of a productive and sustainable public corporation. As of 2016, the plan is for the Association to reorganise itself in a way that the members would have a leading role in the decisions and management of the Association. The board will be made up exclusively of members who are fishermen and will receive bureaucratic support from the board that oversees the Maritime Reserve. The first task of the new board is to serve as a facilitator between a Puerto Rico-​based lawyer and the members to renew all the boat permits and licenses that ran out during the Association’s hiatus. This new organisation of the Association is expected to devise a plan, in collaboration with the mayor’s office, to address the issue of the debts that were discovered during the state audit. My own general expectation is that the Association



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will have to seriously consider Mary Soto’s view of diversifying the services of the Association and embrace Culebra’s tourist economy as a means to continue sustaining the grass-​roots/​local/​artisanal approach that the many members care so much about. The different projects and stories associated with the Fishermen’s Association of Culebra are illustrative of the particular role that fishing has in Culebra society. These events are a manifestation of the islander’s connection to the sea, a suggestion that the sea is part of island life, that there is no division or border between land and sea in the island experience and that the island is constituted within that space of land and water. Some types of fishing in Culebra have an artisanal quality to them, the purview of traditional folklorists, analogous to what musicians or artists do; it is not intended to have the malice associated with party politics or business management. In the context that it has such innocent and practice-​based associations attached to it, it may seem striking that its internal politics take the political dimensions that it did. I am inclined to think that the ambiguities and dilemmas that the Association and its members were facing are the result of the general dynamics that make Culebra a place where insular identities are crafted through activities and people who live in a conceptual and physical state of movement. In this case, the movement is at sea. What lay at the heart of the discussions around the Fishermen’s Association was valuing and giving meaning to the role that working at sea has for people in Culebra. In the process of contesting the polyvalency of the sea, the islanders, as the custodian of an identity that works at sea, mobilised and insularised the island in the process of crafting their goals. I am interested in the tension at stake when the narrative of Culebra being a ‘fishing community’ populated by ‘fishermen’ is evoked within the context that fishing has not been a significant contributor to the Culebra economy for decades, that the Fisherman’s Association of Culebra is struggling with its credibility and that there is a steady decline of marine life in the region. I do not take fishing in Culebra as necessarily a collective choice, an identity dictated by the structuring features of Culebra society, nor as an economic activity dictated by the ecological environment culebrenses find themselves in (Iranzo 1995). Rather, I see the character of the fishermen of Culebra as the product of their own individual creative choice to craft a certain lifestyle. Trap fishing, scuba and free diving are different ways in which individuals mediate their connection to the ocean and explore their different capacities and capabilities as islanders. To fish in Culebra is a conscious exercise, a choice that puts people in a situation to struggle for their craft –​a struggle to position themselves in relation to bureaucratic politics of NGOs and the state, against the prejudice that makes them responsible for the diminishing of marine life, a struggle to relate to the mercurial sea and a struggle to

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continuously seek for ways to develop their specific skill and vision for themselves. Working at sea places the islanders in a situation where they have to solve problems, to be alert, mindful and conscious of the tasks at hand. It is very difficult and satisfying work, a pleasurable activity that challenges the person to be continuously creative. Fishermen speak of the therapeutic effects of fishing, that it eases the mind and has notable physiological benefits. For some fishermen, working at sea has immediate health benefits such as relief of body pain, relief of headaches and quick recuperation of the joints. I also found that having knowledge of the sea, and of fishing and sailing in particular, is desirable, admirable and a source of pride. This would most certainly be the case during fishing tournaments, which are held at least once a year in Culebra, but also in more quotidian contexts such as casual conversations or sidewalk encounters. These displays of knowledge are expressed when people talk, without being provoked, about a certain species, catch, technique, locations, state of the sea and so on. Conversations regarding fishing and sea matters sometimes took a confrontational turn as people would disagree on or challenge certain technicalities. I often witnessed spontaneous debates and discussions that would arise out of a passing and seemingly trivial comment regarding sailing. A group of men would be ‘liming’7 on the sidewalk and a passing remark regarding the change of wind would spark a heated debate that would elicit each individual’s knowledge of currents, cays, star movements, wind directions and sea skill in general. At other times, if I were to make a comment regarding my opinion of a certain individual’s fishing or sailing skill, I would usually be corrected as my listeners would point out the person’s questionable skill in relation to their own. To be afflicted by seasickness or accused of seasickness is a veritable and embarrassing sign of not mastering the sea, and the source of comments that question a person’s sea-​worthiness. People not only competed for having knowledge of the sea but would also have judgemental attitudes towards a person who did not seem to master fishing and sailing matters. Having knowledge of fishing and sailing permitted a person access to certain circles and was a way of showing how culebrense a person is. CONCLUSION: THE UBIQUITY OF THE SEA Fishing is but one of the many mediations that can be examined to discuss culebrense relationship to the sea. Sailing and living on sailboats, for example, is an aspect of island life that I have always been interested in. Throughout the Virgin Islands and the Lesser Antilles, there is a strong presence of people who live on sailboats and for whom sailing is their lifestyle. There are also numerous captains who charter their sailboats for tourists.



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Tourists also have the option to rent a sailboat in one location, say Miami, and return it in another, for example, Caracas. The people living on sailboats in Culebra are not tourists, but people who have made sailboats their home. Culebra’s internal bay, Ensenada Honda, plays an important part in the Caribbean’s sailing network. Its deep waters, narrow entrance and calm currents make it an ideal location to anchor all year round. The mangroves on the shore of Ensenada Honda in particular are ideal locations to moor a sailboat during a tropical storm or hurricane. The flexibility of the mangrove tree and the way it has grown on the bay’s north-​eastern corner make for an ideal location to pass the hurricane season. At any point of the year, there are dozens of sailboats moored inside Ensenada Honda. Speaking with sailors, going on day sails and living on a sailboat for a few months, I learned how life on a sailboat is a radically different experience to what I had been used to living on land, which has been mostly in urban spaces. The first-​time visitor to a sailboat encounters the confusing prospect of relearning how to move his or her body inside a confined space, where every centimetre of the living space is accounted for. Once, the visitor learns how to move inside the cabin and gains confidence moving around the edges of the boat, there is the realisation that the sailboat itself requires constant attention. A good percentage of your time is taken up fixing things on the boat, cleaning and making plans to make additions to the boat. Some people may want to add a TV set to the cabin, an electric cooler or light bulbs. These amenities need batteries, solar panels or a windmill and electrical wirings that will need tending to. Other tasks may include the need to maintain the engine, review the weather, address the continuous issue of access to fresh water and ice, clean the underside of the boat and maintain a dinghy to be able to come to land, among many other details that make ​up a lifestyle where the sailor must submit to the impositions set by the boat and the sea. And yet, all the people who live on boats in Culebra describe their lifestyle as being ‘free’, of experiencing a sense of liberty from the contradictions associated with land politics, such as tourism development debates and national party politics –​a freedom to traverse through national spaces at your own whim. Sailors also describe that their lifestyle encourages an awareness of your own sense and body, of your bowel movements, of your diet, your agency and an awareness of having more choices and possibilities afforded than people who live on land, bounded to houses. Paul Franklin, who lived on a sailboat and has ample sailing experience, was perhaps one of the first people to bring this to my attention. Franklin spoke about sailing as a liberating experience where ‘you just open your sails and you go . . . It’s just you and the sea. No rules or laws. You just navigate the current and the wind and you go to wherever you want to go’. This peculiar sense of movement contributes to imagining a different geography than one

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that is informed by land-​based maps. A sailor living on the Culebra waters would be tempted to bypass the national fragmentations of the Virgin Islands and the Leeward Islands and think of them as a ‘neighbourhood’, a common region and a collection of islands in such proximity to each other that a sailor would not need to spend more than one day travelling from one island to the next. Living on a boat, to be clear, does not entail total disconnection from land or not having to deal with national markers of difference like, say, the U.S. Coast Guard or the Customs and Immigration Offices in each of the jurisdictions. Rather, my observation has been that sailing broadens the connections and spatial imagination of the Caribbean in ways that counter the fragmentation of the region into colonial spaces. Another recurrent oceanic theme in Culebra is the way the ocean provides material sources for creative practices. Objects found randomly around the coasts of the island are a common source of materials for the making of arts and crafts in Culebra. The northern coast of the island is subject to strong currents that bring debris to the coast and older culebrenses remember how trash dumped into the sea in St. Thomas would drift to the north shores of Culebra, before St. Thomas had a garbage dump. Materials from passing ships wash up on the shores of Culebra, such as milk cartons, beer cans, caps, sandals, children’s toys, ropes, lifesavers and the occasional sealed box of cocaine and marijuana dumped in the sea by drug traffickers Flores claims to never have bought a hat or a pair of sandals in his life. During his patrols, we would always find flotsam on the coasts that we could use in our daily lives. The shores of Culebra also receive objects of nature such as seaweed, coconuts, trees, shells and all sorts of natural debris. Taking in consideration that missiles and bullets from the U.S. Navy are still washing up on the shores of Culebra, the shores of Culebra are full of materials which are recrafted and recontextualised by the islanders. A house in Dewey has its entire garden area decorated with unexploded missiles and bombs lined up randomly along with ceramic ducks, a pond and plastic toads sitting on miniature benches. Benjamín Pérez, who lives in the main street of Dewey, has decorated his entire garden with dried tree stumps, deer skulls, rocks with odd formations, hanged fishing buoys from a tree and a variety of found objects such as bottles, tools and cattle harnesses found in the general vicinity of the original settlement of Culebra, San Ildelfonso. This list could include ways in which the sea is incorporated into the body by food consumption choices, jewellery, clothes and tattoo preferences. All of which are overwhelmingly associated to the sea. It could include the politics of representation by examining the ways in which Culebra is branded by marketing materials as a continuous coast, suitable for a beach or yacht



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holiday. This politics of representation extends to the decoration and general aesthetics of bars and restaurants in Culebra that feature maritime motifs. All the souvenirs available at gift shops are sea-​related themes. The presence of the sea in Culebra recalls the ‘ubiquity effect’ as described by sound theorist and architect Pascal Amphoux. For Amphoux, sonic ubiquity is linked to spatio-​temporal conditions that express the difficulty or impossibility of locating a sound source (Amphoux 2005: 130). An ubiquitous sound seems to come from everywhere and from nowhere at the same time –​from a singular source and from many sources simultaneously (Amphoux 2005: 130). The ubiquity effect is based on the paradoxical perception of a sound that we cannot locate, we know is localized, and the closer we get to the sound source the less localizable it is. A condition for the ubiquity effect to occur is that we must consciously look for the source location of the sound and fail to identify it. It is different from background sounds in the sense that the listener who suddenly enters any given space may recognise the background sound (e.g. walking into a room for the first time and you hear the radio on) and because background sounds are not constant (e.g. the passing of a plane or of an ambulance siren in a city). Ubiquitous sounds are constant and pervasive; they have an uncanny feeling that is simultaneously welcoming and disconcerting. Ubiquitous sounds, for Amphoux, have two fundamental characteristics. In one instance, its etymology ubique connects the effect with space –​with anywhere and nowhere –​and it is a fundamental characteristic of any given space. Given that sound always requires a physical medium, like air or any other physical structure so that it can vibrate through or bounce off from, the ubiquity effect acknowledges the dialectical relationship between sound and space. In a second instance, ubiquitous sounds have a power dimension in the sense that the listener can identify it but does not know where it is coming from, leaving the listener frustrated of not being able to identify the source of his or her sonic experience. For the receiver to be, in fact, ignorant about the origin of a sound is already to ‘be possessed’. This is how myth works in an oral society; it is also how rumours work. These phenomena are characterized by the impossibility of knowing the source or origin of a story that is carried from one individual to another, and which exists only because it is told and retold. At the same time, to not know where a sound comes from is almost to believe in the manifestation of a superior force or a transcendental power: God, the State, Nature, the Father. On the other hand, for the sender, the exercise of power consists in making its voice heard without being detected: to control, listen, inspect, with no chance of being controlled, listened to or inspected (or perhaps to show only what is intended to be presented); such is the strategy of power. (Amphoux 2005: 138)

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I have found in Amphoux’s approach towards sonic ubiquity an inspiring analogy to consider ways of talking about the role the sea plays in Culebra. The sea has a material formlessness that nonetheless shapes and encompasses the Culebra experience. It simultaneously isolates and connects the island and gives it its fundamental spatial character. The sea has this moulding effect through its direct physical presence and through its reverberant effects. In other words, the effects of the sea are direct and indirect, they echo throughout Culebra society, and have consequences on the island’s political contests, arts, cuisine and so on. It is has an ever-​present quality, and yet, its source of power cannot readily be identified. The ocean has an effect on the islanders’ sense of space and social relations, and provides the circumstances for being able to explore different crafts and ways of being-​in-​the-​world. But it is not a one-​way street. When I consider people’s relationship to the sea in Culebra, the image that is conjured is neither a monolithic object of nature nor a backdrop in front of which social life happens. Culebrenses, tourists, seasonal residents, turtles, deer, the Navy and coconuts, all are actively and physically engaged with the sea of Culebra. The ubiquitous effect of the sea does not allow for Culebra residents and visitors to survey the ocean while positioning themselves outside of it. Rather, they participate alongside the sea, fight over it, create from it, destroy its contents, make policy to preserve it and expand their understanding of the sea from within. This results in an effect where all the island’s elements are constitutive of the seascape; they perceive and mould the surrounding waters in a simultaneous action. This ubiquity of the sea also means that it is constantly morphing; it directs our attention to its continuous unfolding, a time-​based medium not unlike sound. The result here is the production of a kind of contract between the islanders, the land and the sea to form a single island entity. But this entity is physically mobile and in a continual state of flux. The sea offers an open space that stretches beyond the horizon, evoking a sense of endless space that permits the subject to operate beyond landed restrictions. It offers the opportunity to travel and traverse through to other locations, circumventing landed institutions that organise modernity. Culebrenses localise, stabilise and claim the waters that surround their island in the process of engaging creatively and physically with the sea. The process of fixing the waters around Culebra is, paradoxically, achieved while traversing through them. For the people whom I related to in Culebra, the process of consuming, knowing and expressing the sea is fundamental to their understanding of the island and bears upon the quality of social relations that they maintain daily. In Culebra, the sea is a location that ennobles a person, causes a person to remember, attracts tourists, inspires artists and provides food and household decorations, while manifesting a fluctuating state or a mercurial ‘personality’.



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I do not wish to give the impression that people from Culebra relate to the sea in a unique way, different from all other Caribbean islands, or that the dynamics that I will be addressing are endemic to Culebra. If anything, I hope to convey a sense that individuals in Culebra relate to the sea in different ways. Rather, I think that the Caribbean Sea can be thought of as a unifying theme between islands in a region fragmented by national, postcolonial thinking. People in Culebra relate to the sea in ways that include the sea in the production and reproduction of Culebra island identity. In this sense, the sea is included in the process of constituting a Culebra experience. As a consequence, the island is extended beyond its land demarcation and the limits of the Culebra experience are blurred. NOTES 1. I have collected various stories that account for the introduction of white-​tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) to Culebra. Monchín claims that he played a role in introducing deer to Culebra in the late 1960s as a tourist attraction. Another recurrent story is that Navy sailors introduced the deer for recreational hunting. 2. A southern Mesopotamian language. 3. Other subversions of power relations can be found in Nancie Gonzalez’s (1988) ethnohistory of the Garifuna, where she documents instances of Caribbean indigenous peoples owning plantations and engaging in slave and goods trades with westerners. 4. There have been cases where Culebra fishermen do not respect the reserve and went to the designated area for conch and to lay fish traps. 5. Sea Grant’s legislative charge (PL107-​ 299) is to ‘increase the understanding, assessment, development, utilization, and conservation of the nation’s ocean and coastal resources by providing assistance to promote a strong education base, responsive research and training activities, and broad and prompt dissemination of knowledge and techniques’. http://​www.nsgo.seagrant.org/​other/​greenbook_​doc/​sg_​ strategic_​plan_​082304.pdf 6. Their new company name is Open Blue and its website is http://​www.openblue. com/​ 7. Refers to ‘hanging out together in the street’. See Eriksen (1990) for description.

Chapter Five

Musical Movements

In this chapter, I turn to the different ways in which transinsular movements inform musical practices and a musical consciousness in Culebra. Culebrenses continuously draw on musical resources from various island locations, and their respective transnational networks, when composing and performing their island music. I will be placing the musical process of Culebra in relation to narratives of other island musics of the Caribbean and argue that movement and its concomitant hybridisation is a consistent driving force in the constitution of musical identities throughout the region. However, contrary to the narratives of the Caribbean island musics that I will be surveying, the music produced in Culebra is yet to be fixed, named or enclosed as ‘Culebra music’ by the academic, political or musical establishment. The lack of fixation of a distinct Culebra sound or the naming of Culebra music is primarily due to an absence of a capitalist music infrastructure and network that is interested in exploiting Culebra’s musical potential and because of Culebra’s marginal location within the national musical identity process of Puerto Rico. I will begin by offering a brief survey of texts that have addressed Caribbean musics, specifically salsa and steel drum music. My intention with this exercise is to highlight the ways in which Caribbean music has been linked to the constitution of the island nationalism. I will show how Caribbeanist writings on music mirror some of the tensions and paradoxes that are at the core of this project. The dominant discourse in writing on Caribbean music is to emphasise processes of hybridity, transculturations and creolism in the formation of Caribbean music. These narratives of mixture and hybridity suggest a regional tendency of movement and travel between the islands of the Caribbean, regardless of the linguistic, colonial and transnational networks of the specific islands. However, the movement suggested by the hybrid and transcultural process is gradually arrested once the music 129

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in question achieves a degree of popularity and finds itself swept into the national and transnational politics of the island or colonial region. The result is a narrative which suggests that movement precedes insularity in the process of Caribbean identity formation, instead of an ongoing dialectic between insularism and movement. My survey will focus on musical practices that have been constructed as identity markers of distinct linguistic and colonial regions of the Caribbean. In these narratives, insular musical identity has been preceded by processes of movements, which have been addressed as transculturations, hybridities or creolisations. First, I will address salsa, a rhythm associated with the Spanish Caribbean and a pan-​Latin American identity. The origin narrative of salsa locates the rhythm in movement between the United States, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Venezuela and the British West Indies. However, throughout its popularisation, in the second half of the twentieth century, salsa has been constructed as an identity marker for the Spanish Caribbean and Latin America and as a symbol of nationhood and resistance to U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico. Second, I will discuss the historical process of the steel drum as a musical instrument. The historical narrative of the steel drum relates this instrument to the politicisation of a black ethnic identity and to the nation-​ building processes of Trinidad and Tobago, in the context of independence from Britain. Yet, along its development, there have been key characters and processes from neighbouring Caribbean islands, Venezuela and other locations that have made significant contributions to the movement that sprung around the instrument. The principal insularising agents in these two cases are the capitalist music industry and the nation-​building process. The media industry is an important player in the process of reproducing a type of music as bounded to a specific place and time. Media producers are portrayed as the mediators in the production and distribution of the music. Along with this mediating power, they are also involved in ascribing meaning to the musics through the packaging and commoditising of the music and its performers. The state also plays a role with regards to ascribing value to specific music. In the case of the Caribbean, states have used music as a medium through which they have promoted the construction of a national identity. I will follow this discussion with an ethnographic narrative of contemporary music in Culebra. While Culebra produces a significant number of music bands, most of them for the religious community, my ethnography will focus on four secular music groups. My rationale for choosing these groups is that musicians claim that these groups are composing and performing a type of music that is unique and different from music composed and performed on the neighbouring islands. Without arguing that Culebra music is a new and original musicological expression, I will argue that such claims constitute



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a demonstration of Culebra’s insular identity. My narrative is based on the notion that musical identity of Culebra is constituted and continues to develop in a historical dialectical process of transinsularism. I will present two ways in which the musicians of Culebra make claims about composing and performing an original type of music through transinsular relations. First, I will show how Culebra musicians’ choices of instrumentation and musical genres serve as markers for the network of relations that informs the historical and day-​to-​day experience of Culebra. The musical groups that I will be describing incorporate musical instruments and genres that are linked in popular, academic and political constructions to the Spanish Caribbean, the English Caribbean and their respective transnational networks. In this sense, Culebra musicians transgress the musical constructions of place that dominate Caribbeanist writing on music. The transgressions of these musical boundaries question the essentialisms that conflate musical performances with ethnic identities, which in turn are territorialised to an island or a regional group. They also draw attention to the difficulty of asserting musical origins. In the case of Culebra, the musical resources that island musicians claim to draw on are the product of a historical network of movements where the musical meanings and forms have continuously been reshaped and reappropriated in the course of their travels. The musical materials that Culebra musicians use, while associated with specific islands and colonial histories, have arrived to Culebra after such a process of travelling and resignification that it becomes problematic to ascertain with certainty the genuine origins of the musical materials used by culebrenses. The second way in which I observed that Culebra musicians make a claim to a transinsular musical identity was through their playing itself. They claimed to be able to play their music in an original way and having a distinct sound that is endemic to the island. A common feature of the performing and composing style of the four groups that I will be describing is the negotiation between structure and improvisation. I will show how musicians in Culebra claim uniqueness by navigating through the structural, repetitive and predictable as well as through the improvised, ephemeral and the random in the process of composing and performing their music. I would not qualify the negotiation between structure and improvisation as a unique practice of Culebra because Caribbean music in general is constructed as an improvised and malleable type of music. Instead, I would stress that the culebrense claim to a novel style of playing is demonstrative of a musical insular identity. I will further argue that the navigation between structure and improvisation does not only function as a category to describe the compositional and performative process of Culebra music but also mirrors the quality of social relations that are produced through music and its related activities. In this sense,

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concepts associated with structure and improvisation are not only suggestive of what happens on stage during the performance, but also qualify the social events backstage, during rehearsals and during other music-​related activities. The tensions surrounding structure and improvisation, as it relates to Culebra music, can be read as evocative of the tensions between insularity and movement, where structure stands as a metaphor for an insular set of relations and improvisation for mobility and polyphony. As I type this in early 2017, there has not been an interest from music producers to engage with the music scene of Culebra. Neither has any element of the Puerto Rican national state or nation-​building process been interested in integrating Culebra into the Puerto Rican musical landscape. While musicians of Culebra use Puerto Rican music, as well as music that is part of the Puerto Rican transnational network, Culebra musicians have not taken part, in a consistent way, in the musical process of Puerto Rico. The absence of these two processes has contributed to the lack of fixing and delimiting of the island’s musical identity in a context outside of the island. Nonetheless, my ethnographic account will demonstrate that a musical insular identity is reproduced in Culebra regardless of the absence of insularising institutions. The uniqueness of Culebra music is not because of its musicological or performative elements but because of its particular location within a network of relations in the Caribbean context. More information and materials on Culebra music can be accessed online at www.transinsular.org. MUSIC AND PLACE As a social practice, music making and its related activities are necessarily part of the processes that articulate and mediate the social relations that constitute place. Contemporary writing on music has represented music as a mediator and indicator in the articulation of social process that constitutes various aspects of collective identity (Bennet 2004; Lewis 1992, cited in Bennet 2004; Manuel 1995). Whiteley argues that debates arising from these discussions are united by the recognition that musical processes occur in particular places, which are signified by the imaginative and the sociological, and are shaped by specific musical practices and by the pressures and dynamics of political and economic circumstances (Whiteley 2004). Music, then, plays a significant part in the way that individuals author space, musical texts being creatively combined with local knowledges and sensibilities in ways they tell particular stories about the local, and impose collectively defined meanings and significance on space (Bennet 2004: 3). In the context of current global mobilities and contested notions of place and identities, music becomes a resource for different cultural groups



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involved in debates over identity and place. Both as a creative practice and as a form of consumption, music plays an important role in the narrativisation of place, that is, in the way in which people define their relationship to local, everyday surroundings (Bennet 2004: 2). The developments of music’s social meanings, structure, sounds and styles are constructed as agents as well as products of the processual and shifting significance of identities and place. In the case of the Caribbean, music is constructed as a powerful tool and agent in the expression of Caribbean identity: ‘Music, in a word, is the most visible, popular, and dynamic aspect of Caribbean expressive culture’ (Manuel 1995: 2). Recent literature on Caribbean music relates the musical identification process to the awareness and affirmation of an island identity, which parallels the constitution of the island place. Music is one of the expressions that play a role in the negotiation of cultural resources and affirmation of cultural identity in its postcolonial and transnational context (Aparicio and Jaquez 2002). In the following sections, I will highlight how the narratives of Caribbean musical elements contain the tensions of mobility and insularity. However, I will argue that the analysts of Caribbean music tend not to make these tensions the cornerstone of the Caribbean music process. Instead, the tendency is to reproduce the island space as bounded to its land confines and to its transnational circuit, usually the United States for the Spanish Caribbean and Latin America and England for the English Caribbean. In these cases, movement is written as a precondition or a state of precategorisation before the eventual consolidation of a musical identity by state forces and the capitalist music industry, personified in music producers and the radio industry, and the nation-​building process. Salsa and steel drum music are written as directly linked to the constitution of island and regional identities. They have been instrumental for, as well as products of, the emergence of national movements. Such is the case of the steel drum for English-​speaking Trinidad and Tobago, where the instrument served as a platform to address colonial issues; it is also the case for salsa in Spanish-​speaking Puerto Rico. They can also be taken as illustrative of the mobile character of Caribbean society. These two musical expressions are constructed as being the product of fusions, creolisms, transculturations and hybridities. Creolization is the cultural interaction and convergence (‘or interculturation’) that accompanied the ongoing social interactions between the variety of peoples in the plantation regions of the Americas. Members of different populations creatively drew on their diverse cultural heritages in adjusting to their new natural and social environments. In each setting, a creole culture consisting of both reinterpreted Old World and distinctively local cultural symbols and practices gradually emerged. (Stuempfle 1995: 7)

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These categorisations necessarily signify contact and interaction –​island spaces in continuous interaction with different locations. The scope of these meanderings is such, that it becomes problematic to ascertain any kind of musical originality or authentic origin other than those claimed by the musicians themselves, which can only suggest the immediate inspiration for the musical process rather than reveal the centuries of routes of the creative process. Caribbean writing on music, however, tends to be about the gradual consolidation of insular identities and their relationship to transnational and global spaces. Both the capitalist media and the nation-​building process feature as important channels for the reproduction of musical insularism regardless of explicit movements and creative changes in the music. THE SPANISH CARIBBEAN: SALSA, FROM TRANSNATIONALISM TO NATIONHOOD Like any Caribbean music, the exercise of tracing the musicological genealogy of salsa is complicated by the movements and interactions that characterise the region. Peter Manuel and Angel Quitero-​ Rivera locate the ancestral origins of salsa music in European and African traditions (Manuel 1995; Quintero 1998). These initial fusions are the historical consequence of European colonialism in the Americas. Antonio Benítez-​Rojo writes of sixteenth-​century Cuban music, These song and dances were not totally African nor totally European: they were arrays of cultural fragments in state of creolization, fragments in flux, fragments momentarily put together here and there by different performers according to their desires, interests and capabilities. (Benítez-​Rojo, 2003: 18)

A more immediate assessment of salsa places its origins in multiple locations that converged in New York City throughout the twentieth century. Musical traditions harking from Cuba, Puerto Rico and the U.S. jazz scene are credited with being the most important contributors to the rhythm. The Cuban contribution was made through the musical symbol of post-​ independence Cuba, ‘son’ (Manuel 1995). By the 1940s, New York City had become an important centre for Cuban music with many aspiring musicians flocking to the city in search of a career (Manuel 1995). Son was one of the more popular dance-​music orchestral genres among the growing Hispanic population of New York City. Manuel credits son’s popularity with providing the general instrumental and musical structure of what eventually came to be called salsa (Manuel 1995). Some critics like Peter Manuel and musicians like Tito Puente have gone as far as to argue that salsa is but an updated version of Cuban music (Manuel 1995).



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Dance music that migrated to New York from Puerto Rico was based on the smaller scaled ‘combo’, one of the more popular and influential ones being Cortijo y su Combo. These combos consisted of fewer instruments and were melodically less elaborate than the Cuban son. They featured numbers influenced by bomba and plena, rhythms associated with the coastal areas of Puerto Rico, with a strong presence of a singer. The coastal association is significant because coastal areas in Puerto Rico and the specific coastal area where bomba and plena are reputed to originate are associated with having a predominantly black population, the product of maroon communities from Puerto Rico and the West Indies (Quintero 1998). Quintero also points to the presence of bomba and plena, and its West Indian influence, in the formative years of salsa and to the influence of combo’s improvisational tradition on salsa singing (Quintero 1998). Also, Puerto Rican musicians have featured prominently in the more popular and important salsa orchestras, especially singers like Ismael Rivera, orchestra leaders like Tito Rodríguez and composers such as Catalino ‘Tite’ Curet Alonso. The converging of musical traditions from the Caribbean and Latin America in New York City throughout the twentieth century should be placed in the context of the thriving Harlem jazz scene that was so prominent from the 1920s onwards (known as the ‘Harlem Renaissance’). Caribbean dance orchestras easily incorporated jazz into their compositions (Manuel 1995). The musical connection between jazz and salsa can also be found in the social reality of New York City. Caribbean and Latin American migrants to New York tended to settle in areas associated with the urban working class and African Americans, notably Harlem, the Bronx and the Lower East Side (Sánchez-​Korrol 1983). The musical interactions between Harlem and Caribbean musicians illustrate the racial landscape of New York City and suggest communication between Caribbean and Latin American migrants and the African American community in Harlem. Musicians from other Latin American and Caribbean locations participated in the music scene that later was called salsa. Peter Manuel notes the contributions of Venezuelans and Colombians as they brought in musical traditions such as vallenato and cumbia into the mix. As transnational migrants, these musicians informed their musical experience and identity in a process of travelling through various destinations in the Americas. Simultaneously, they were contributing to the formation of a music style and rhythm that would serve as a pan-​Latin American identity marker and as a medium for expressing a Puerto Rican national identity. Peter Manuel related the appearances of the word ‘salsa’ with an urban working-​class Hispanic expression of identity in the 1960s context of activism in the United States. Among Puerto Ricans in New York, a ‘new social consciousness’ fuelled by the desire to embrace ‘Puerto Rican tradition and

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capture the spirit of the barrio in all its alienated energy and heightened self-​ awareness’ was emerging (Manuel 1995: 73). The New York–​Puerto Rican or Nuyorican identity is associated with second-​and third-​generation Puerto Ricans living in urban centres of the United States. Politically, it is associated with valuing Puerto Rican traditions and expressing a sense of nationalism in a struggle for recognition and inclusion within the U.S. socio-​economic structure (Ramos-​Zayas 2003). The music that was coming out of the Nuyorican neighbourhoods became a way of expressing this ‘new social consciousness’. Salsa was a distinct way of playing music that served as an indication of difference in the context of urban poverty and social exclusion in the United States (Quintero 1998). The popularisation of the term ‘salsa’ and its rise is linked to Fania Records and later to RMM, two record companies credited with being the most important promoters, producers and distributors of salsa (Manuel 1995). These two production companies, especially their presidents Jerry Massuci and Rafael Mercado for Fania and RMM, respectively, are credited with popularising salsa worldwide and with giving the nascent rhythm its distinctive sound. These two production companies produced what undoubtedly became the classic artists and orchestras of salsa. The use of the term ‘salsa’ (sauce) seemed an appropriate term for the style of music which is the product of a myriad of different musical expressions. Peter Manuel quotes Sergio George, In my opinion, the true salsa sound of that era was the musical fusion of New York with Puerto Rico, with Cuba and with Africa; that whole fusion was for me the true roots of salsa in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It came out of a street sound, a barrio sound. People jamming in the park with the congas and somebody coming to sing . . . That was the raw salsa sound (Manuel 1995: 74).

Salsa’s popularity in New York plugged the genre into the transnational circuit of the United States, Latin America and Caribbean. Salsa’s categorical flexibility further contributed to its popularity as musicians laced their salsa numbers with plena, bomba, son, guaracha, charanga, cumbia, vallenato, calypso, merengue and any other rhythm fancied by the composer. These hits ‘illustrate how salsa can be enriched by creative and eclectic infusions from its stylistic and geographical margins’ (Manuel 1995: 83). Salsa became the favoured music among the Puerto Rican and Cuban communities and soon became resignified as a symbol of Nuyorican and pan-​Latino ethnic identity (Manuel 1995). In Puerto Rico, salsa became a way of expressing and affirming a sense of national insular identity in the context of U.S. colonial relationship with Puerto Rico. Angel Quintero-​Rivera has written about salsa as an oppositional symbolic practice to U.S. cultural hegemony in Puerto Rico. For



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Quintero-​Rivera, there are two ways in which the playing of salsa is a contesting symbol and practice to U.S. presence in Puerto Rico. One of them is in the way in which its form and practice are signified in opposition to Euro-​ American ways of making music. According to Quintero, salsa’s form prioritises rhythm and syncopated polyphony. The emphasis on rhythm constitutes an irreverent answer to Euro-​American ways of making music which prioritise melody. This arrangement is reproduced on stage with the placement of the percussions in front of the brass section. A second way in which salsa’s way of playing symbolises a challenge to U.S. hegemonic power over Puerto Rico is through the practice of improvisation. In Quintero’s (1998) argument, the way in which improvisation functions in salsa constitutes a symbolic practice of democratisation and plurality. In this way, salsa symbolises a liberating practice, where musicians have the possibility to subvert the roles that musical instruments have in the Euro-​ American way of making music. The way salsa is improvised permits musical instruments that in the Euro-​American tradition play the role of accompaniment, such as trombone or drums, to function as the lead. For Quintero, this practice is a direct contradistinction to Euro-​American ways of playing music that dictate consistent roles of each instrument and musician. In this type of narrative, salsa is a symbol of Puerto Rican national identity by virtue of its degree of difference to music associated with U.S. cultural hegemony. For Quintero, salsa has the capacity to symbolise a sense of Puerto Rican affirmation of its insular identity and resistance to U.S. cultural hegemony on the island and global stage. Salsa has a dual character of being the product of Puerto Rico’s colonial condition at the same time as it constitutes an expression of the island’s sense of national identity. These narratives of salsa result in insularising Puerto Rico, by confining its musical identity, and cast salsa as a mediator of the colony. The effect is a Puerto Rican experience that is constructed in a binary relationship with the United States, fixed either to the island or to the United States. This binary limits the political and creative possibilities of the Puerto Rican project, constitutes Puerto Rico as bounded to the island and excludes the island from the broader Caribbean and global context.

THE ENGLISH CARIBBEAN: THE STEEL BAND MOVEMENT OF TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO The narratives of the steel drum and the history of the steel band movement also present a tension between the mobile and the insular. The steel drum is a musical instrument that was invented in Trinidad and Tobago and rose

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to prominence in tandem with the constitution of Trinidad and Tobago’s national identity (Stuempfle 1995). The steel drum’s social development is constructed as inextricably linked to Trinidad and Tobago’s independence from England and the nation-​building process that followed. I will argue that in the narrative of the steel drum, the nation-​building process insularised the twin island state and emphasized the Afro-​Caribbean element of Trinidad and Tobago’s society. In this sense, the steel drum was instrumental in the construction of Trinidadian society as an Afro-​Caribbean nation, which led to subsequent political divisions along ethnic lines (Stuempfle 1995). There is a latent presence of movement threaded into the narrative of the steel drum that problematises clear connections between the representation of Trinidad as an Afro-​Caribbean nation and the steel drum as an essentialised expression of Afro-​Trinidadian ethnic identity. Trinidad and Tobago is written about as ‘the most cosmopolitan country in the Caribbean, its people come from Africa, India, France, Spain, England, Venezuela, United States and other islands of the Caribbean’ (Brown 1990: 82). It is also described as ‘one of the most ethnically complex places in the world’ (Stuempfle 1995). The literature on Trinidadian musical identity expresses plenty of indications of movement and connections. I would argue, however, that these indications are treated as contextual and background information regarding Trinidad and Tobago’s social landscape, rather than a constitutive force in the creation of Trinidad and Tobago’s sense of identity. In what follows, I wish to highlight the process of movement and transinsularity that has informed Trinidad and Tobago’s national instrument and place these movements in relation to the subsequent insularities that emerged. With the banning of the tamboo bamboo1 percussion ensemble in Trinidad, percussionists of the 1930s began experimenting with metal containers. They soon discovered that the bottoms of metal containers could be pounded into different shapes to produce musical tones when struck with sticks. After what must have been an extraordinary period of experimentation, the early steel band began to take shape. A steel band orchestra consists of steel oil drums cut to different lengths according to the intended range of the instrument; the basses are longer and the tenors shorter. The bottom of the drum is moulded through a complicated process of burning, bending and pounding that shapes the drum into cells. When cooled, each cell is tuned by banging and shaping until it rings with the intended note. The precise identity of the inventors of the process of shaping and tuning the drum is contested and is probably impossible to ascertain. But the experimentation and creation of the steel drum was certainly the work of young, working class, marginally employed or unemployed men of African descent who lived in close-​knit villages or at the margins of urban centres of Trinidad



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(Stuempfle 1995). The raw materials for the steel bands, oil drums, were the product of discarded materials from the U.S. and British corporations that controlled the British Caribbean oil industry (Liverpool 1994). The presence of foreign oil companies was necessary for a healthy supply of discarded oil barrels for the production and reproduction of the steel drum. The oil industry of Trinidad, coupled with the presence of U.S. military bases on the island, created a need for labour on the island that prompted a migration of people not only from Trinidad and Tobago’s rural areas but also migrants from other Caribbean islands and Venezuela (Brown 1990). The presence of these migrants is reflected in the demographic composition of the steel bands at the height of their popularity. Surveys of bands of the 1950s and 1960s describe how some steel bands were composed of musicians descending from African, Indian, Venezuelan, second-​generation Portuguese and white Trinidad Creole of French origin (Brown 1980; Weller 1961). Stuempfle (1995) describes the role of Venezuelan arrangers and band directors who made important contributions to how the contemporary steel band is orchestrated. With these indications, I wish to suggest that, like Trinidadian society itself, the components that made up the steel drum and the pioneer steel bands arrived to Trinidad and Tobago in the process of travel. By the 1940s, steel drums had become a common sight in Trinidad’s Carnival procession. Ten years later, the instrument had become popular in Trinidad with middle-​class youths forming bands of their own and steel bands in general receiving government support. The steel band and Trinidadian Carnival were soon constructed as intimately linked to the development of calypso music (Brown 1990; Juneja 1988). Throughout the steel band’s development, calypso music has been the band’s music of choice, although today’s steel bands are keen to demonstrate the versatility of the steel drum and their skill in playing any kind of music, notably European classical music (Stuempfle 1995). Calypso, like salsa, is a musical rhythm that, while written as constituted in movement, has been represented as symbolic of localised discourses and identities. Brown writes, It may be that calypso is a synthesis of the songs styles of several ethnic groups. The origin of the word itself is unknown, but several possibilities have been suggested the French carrouseaux, a drinking party; the Spanish caliso, a topical song; of the Carib carieto (Warner 1985: 8). It is clear, however that the improvisatory style of the music comes from African songs of derision and social commentary. (Brown 1990: 84)

The music grew and travelled in a tangled web of movements of stevedores, sailors, radio and music bands on tour (Aho 1987), and ‘as migration

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throughout the area continued, the calypso spread from territory to territory, in most cases growing and feeding on the African presence and the islands’ existing African musical bases to become by the 1950s, the music of the Caribbean’ (Liverpool 1994: 185). I take Liverpool’s enthusiasm for a pan-​Caribbean musical identity lightly. While calypso has become a powerful presence in the West Indies, it is, nonetheless, constructed as an expression of the English Caribbean and English Caribbean Carnival. Calypso can be cited as one of the influences of salsa, but ethnomusicologists do not include calypso as part of the repertoire of the Spanish Caribbean. Liverpool’s comment is another indication of localisation where, from his perspective as an Anglo-​Caribbean writer, the Caribbean person is constituted as an English-​speaking African descendant who, while constituted in a relational process of movement, constructs his space by linguistic and colonial commonalities. The Trinidadian steel band’s popularity grew alongside its nationalisation. Steel bands were instrumental in the independence process and subsequent nation building of Trinidad and Tobago. The steel band movement’s popularity was linked to values such as ‘social consciousness, egalitarianism, nationalistic pride and a favourable attitude towards Afro-​Trinidadian culture’ (Aho 1987: 51). By the time of Trinidad and Tobago’s independence from England in 1962, the steel drum had already become a national symbol (Stuempfle 1995). Politics at the time of Trinidad and Tobago’s independence was divided along ethnic lines. The People’s National Movement (PNM), headed by Dr. Eric Williams, was the elected government that preceded and followed independence. The PNM is associated with reproducing a discourse of Afro-​ Trinidadianness, while opposition parties are constructed around discourses that value other ethnic groups in Trinidad, principally the East-​Indian component of Trinidadian society that makes up roughly 40 per cent of the population (Aho 1987). Steel bands in pre-​and post-​independence Trinidad and Tobago associated themselves with the PNM. It was the PNM that gave initial sponsorship to the steel band movement in the 1950s, thus securing the support of the steel band movement. Securing the allegiance of the steel band movement was essential in PNM’s subsequent victories in the polls that led to independence. Calypsonians and steel bands had tremendous popular appeal. The support of a popular steel band ‘could almost assure election’ (Aho 1987: 47) of the political party they supported. His government [Eric Williams’] soon established the Carnival Development Committee (CDC), a government agency which still sponsors competition for calypsonians, steel bands and masquerade bands. In a sense, these cultural



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expressions of the people became the official culture of the nation. In 1962 Trinidad became independent under Dr. Williams’ party . . . Calypsonians such as The Mighty Sparrow and steel bands such as the Desperadoes helped elect the new government. (Brown 1990: 96)

The invention of the steel drum and the emergence of a West Indian musical identity paralleled the processes that constituted a political identity around Afro-​Trinidadian nationalism, in opposition to English colonialism, but in exclusion to other groups of Trinidad. The politics of Trinidad and Tobago’s nation-​building process arrested the steel drum and fixed it to an Afro-​ Trinidadian nationalist ideology. The narrative of the steel drum and the steel band movement constructs these expressions as symbolic markers for an insular identity that is constituted in movement. MUSICAL MOBILE INSULARITIES The music of Culebra is not categorised into a definable rhythm or genre, nor is it recognised in any scene outside of Culebra. Culebra’s process of movement indicates that the island's influences and performances will always be in flux. In this sense, music in Culebra has this double condition of being very local and landlocked and yet it is constituted and claimed through its openness. I am interested in the different claims of distinction of Culebra musicians and argue that this distinction is made because of the peculiar processes of movement that make up their music. The movements that I will be referring to are those that provide interactions with spaces that lie in a variety of discursive regions, both inside and outside of the national and transnational spaces that are associated with Puerto Rico and the British Virgin Islands. Culebra music is nurtured by the spatial location of the island. The people of Culebra perform and consume music in close proximity to a variety of urban and rural settings as well as different national, linguistic and ethnic spaces. Central to Culebra islanders’ claim of their distinctive and unique sound is the notion that the culebrense musicians move between different specific musical discourses in the process of developing their craft. I will address four music groups of Culebra. These four groups claim to produce and reproduce a sense of unique island identity in composing and performing their music. The basis of these claims lies in the structure and form, or ‘way of playing’, of the music they compose and perform. By structure, I am referring to the combination of instrumentation, choice of language and musical genre that musicians put together on stage. These combinations transgress colonial conflations of musical practices with island identities that dominate academic and political understandings of the Caribbean –​as if

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English, Spanish, Dutch and French Caribbean islands had discreet and independent forms of music. By form, I refer to the performative act and practices tangential to music making. I will argue that the position of the structural, repetitive, copying and predictable alongside the improvised, ephemeral, parodical and the random in the music-​making process can be read as a symbolic tension of the mobile and insular character of Culebra society. Culebrense musicians elicit and embody a variety of discursive locations when they perform their music. They challenge spatial and located understandings of Caribbean music by bringing together different musical languages, tropes and practices that are not associated with being on the same stage together. Some culebrense musical tastes may be at odds with each other and in contradiction with musical identities that are understood as located to specific regional locations. But culebrense musical tropes are not displaced or contradictory. What is at stake is not a negotiation over placement and displacement, but rather a creative process that is informed by transinsular relations. Culebrense musicians make these musical appropriations consciously and deliberately in the process of shaping a sense of a distinct island identity. Meaning, that the musical constitution of Culebra is a selective process where the musicians are aware of the musicological regionalisations that they are transgressing and exploit these transgressions in order to claim a sense of originality. However, I do not believe that these decisions are necessarily done with the intention of questioning the relationship between place and culture. They do not set out to be out of place. Rather, they are creating their musical place by drawing on contacts with islands and spaces that are part of their daily experience. The musical transgression occurs when these musical expressions are put in relation to national and historical constructions of Caribbean islands and when islands are understood as metaphoric insular spaces. I argue that these transgressions are not subversions of Caribbean spaces but a continuation of historical movements that characterise the region. Culebra music is shaped in a reality where people’s experience is conditioned by movement. Through moving, they cultivate a musical experience and use it to shape a sense of their island place. It is perhaps a truism to point out that these modernist and postmodernist composers who have drawn upon or made reference to other musics (non-​ western, folk or urban popular) are not producing that music but drawing upon it in order to enrich their own compositional frame. They are transforming that music through incorporation into their own aesthetic: appropriating and re-​presenting it. Crucially, in doing so, they intend not only to evoke that other music but also to create a distance from it and transcend it (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000: 15).



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THE SOUNDS OF CULEBRA I: LA SONORA CULEBRENSE The two oldest musical groups that are still playing in Culebra are La Sonora Culebrense and Los Isleños (The Islanders). These two groups make use of musical associations with various island regions and use these variations to stake a claim on culebrense musical identity. The combination of the musical tropes they use is the result of the musicians’ experiences of mobility. The history of both bands is intertwined and sporadic. Both groups go back to the early 1970s. In its beginnings, La Sonora Culebrense was a salsa orchestra with a musical line-​up that corresponded to the requirements of a salsa orchestra –​a brass section dominated by the trombone, a percussion section composed of a pair of congas, bongos, bell, a pair of timbales, piano, bass and a singer. They played an array of tropical rhythms associated with the Spanish Caribbean and Latin America, mainly salsa and merengue. Los Isleños was a smaller band founded by Victor Felix ‘Cucuito’ Munet. Cucuito Munet was born in Culebra in the mid-​1940s and like many of his peers went to St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI), in order to finish his secondary education. While living in the USVI, Cucuito learned and mastered the steel drum. On his return to Culebra, he founded Los Isleños. The Los Isleños line-​up consisted of a steel drum as the main instrument, played by Cucuito Munet, guitar, a percussion section, bass, drum set and piano. Their repertoire mainly consisted of popular calypso songs from the USVI and original calypso compositions by Munet. Los Isleños and La Sonora Culebrense started and broke up around the same time. In both cases, musicians connected to the groups left Culebra. For example, the director of La Sonora Culebrense left for Florida and members of the brass section moved to either Vieques, St. Croix or Puerto Rico. In the mid-​1980s, Cucuito Munet brought together the musicians and concepts of his Los Isleños and the original Sonora Culebrense under the name La Nueva Sonora Culebrense, although people continued to call it La Sonora. The line-​up of the new Sonora was orchestral. It incorporated all the instruments of a Latino tropical music orchestra and a calypso band. The core of the orchestra was composed of members of the Munet’s extended family, which Cucuito had recruited. Their repertoire was eclectic. They would play Latin hits of the time as well as compose their own numbers using the steel drum as the lead instrument. But La Sonora was better known for its calypso numbers, mostly cover versions of music from the St. Thomas Carnival, and a few original compositions; it was also known for syncopating popular Latin songs into calypso and soca, sung in Spanish. All the people who commented to me on the 1980s incarnation of La Sonora mentioned the steel drum and

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Cucuito’s ability and skill in playing the steel drum as the main attraction of the group. La Sonora was a hit. It became the staple band that played on weekends in the dance hall of Culebra and at special events. It toured Puerto Rico extensively playing at almost all of Puerto Rican Carnivals. It played in radio stations, the stadium of the capital of Puerto Rico, television programs and was sponsored for some time by Budweiser. Most of the tours were organised through a record promoter. The promoter would find it presentations, usually in municipal Carnivals in Puerto Rico, and then charge the band a commission for arranging the gig. La Sonora Culebrense gathered broader recognition with a television presentation and front-​page coverage on an entertainment magazine. However, just when the band seemed to begin to receive islandwide attention and at the beginning of a short tour of the Dominican Republic, key musicians left the band and La Sonora disbanded. In the early 1990s, Cucuito Munet left Culebra to move to Boston, where he died in 2001. La Sonora Culebrense still continues to play, but with less musicians and with a smaller repertoire. It traded the rhythm section, except for the drum set, for an electronic rhythm machine and with Cucuito’s departure it lost the steel drum. While it kept the brass section for some time, the musicians who made up the brass section have either left Culebra or lost interest in the project. The current band has lost its orchestral element and consists of guitar, drum set, electric piano, electronic drum machine, bass and singer; most of the musicians are kin of Cucuito Munet. The songs of La Sonora tend to be cover versions of popular Carnival songs of the USVI, particularly St. Thomas. Mario Albert, one of the singers of La Sonora, explained to me that the musicians would get hold of CDs from the most recent Carnival of the USVI or the British Virgin Islands either through friends or by going to Carnival themselves. With the music in hand, they, with a friend’s help, would translate the lyrics to Spanish, collaborate in rewriting lyrics so they make better sense in Spanish or improvise Spanish lyrics following the metre of the song during the presentation. During rehearsals, the band would try to figure out the chords and prepare the song for a presentation. La Sonora also does cover songs of hits that are in the Puerto Rico–​U.S. transnational network and does simpler arrangements of Cucuito’s songs. The managerial organisation of La Sonora is lax. It does not have regular rehearsals and plays only when called on for a specific occasion. Its musicians vary from presentation to presentation. But there is a consistent roster of singer, guitarist, bass player, drummer and electronic drum machine. It played once as a group in an organised presentation during my year of fieldwork. The lack of promoters and the fact that all the musicians have other means of making a living contribute to its inconsistency.



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La Sonora’s musical presence in Culebra is felt more through the presence of its musicians on the island. They play in other groups –​as I will discuss below –​like in church groups or make surprise stage appearances to accompany visiting music groups. In one instance early in my fieldwork, La Sonora was scheduled to play in the Culebra Carnival but the musicians did not organise themselves for the presentation. A rock group from Puerto Rico played in its time slot. One by one the core members of La Sonora climbed on stage as if to jam with the rock group, resulting in the eventual displacement of the rock group from the stage and an improvised presentation of La Sonora. La Sonora is also present in people’s conversations regarding Culebra music and through recordings made of some of its live performances that circulate in the island. The performances of La Sonora mimic the calypso acts of St. Thomas and St. John. La Sonora imitates the structural elements of bands from the British Virgin Islands by following the basic instrumentation of calypso bands –​one or two singers, guitars, bass guitar, electronic piano, electronic drum machine, brass section and acoustic drum set. Its sets are also continuous, meaning that there is little or no space between the songs as one number folds into the following one. La Sonora also draws inspiration from the same songs as the calypso bands from the British Virgin Islands which also tend to do cover versions from the more popular compositions of Carnival. However, the musicians of La Sonora use musical tropes to differentiate themselves from the Virgin Island bands. The musicians of La Sonora whom I spoke with pointed to the fact that, because they sing in Spanish and because the majority of their lyrics are improvised, the meanings of the songs are changed and are adapted to a culebrense experience. Another innovative element of La Sonora, according to the singer, is in the configuration of the rhythm section of the group. La Sonora was one of the first groups in the area to have a rhythm section composed of an electronic drum machine and an electronic drum set. This gave the group a distinctive sound and permitted the musician in charge of the percussion to innovate over the calypso beat, usually by incorporating variations and syncopations of a more Spanish Caribbean or Puerto Rican flavour. Most calypso bands use an electronic drum machine with an acoustic drum set and follow a rhythmic pattern that characterise them as contemporary calypso bands. A third innovation is the fact that La Sonora includes music from the Puerto Rican musical network into its repertoire. This means that La Sonora plays merengue, rancheras and other beats with a calypso and soca arrangement. According to the singer of La Sonora, this is an innovation of the group that has been copied by bands in the neighbouring island of Vieques. Throughout its history, the organisation and social relations of La Sonora can be characterised as having an ephemeral quality. The constant comings

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and goings of its musicians which continuously reshape the line-​up, the lack of rehearsals, the lack of structured playing dates, the lack of a set list of songs to play on stage and the spontaneous ways in which incarnations of the group get formed and then disband again point to the ephemerality of social relations that constitutes the band and is indicative of the transitoriness of culebrenses in general. Regardless of the apparent disorganised state of affairs in La Sonora, the musicians of the group are very proud of their achievements. These achievements are undeniably linked to Cucuito, his charisma, generosity, leadership and musicianship. They understand their music as novel and pioneering. In my conversations with them, they carried a sense of responsibility as ambassadors of Culebra wherever they travelled as group: Nosotros hacemos esto para poner el nombre de Culebra en alto (‘we do these things to put the name of Culebra high up’, A. Munet interview). THE SOUNDS OF CULEBRA II: LOS ISLEÑOS In 2003, the name Los Isleños was chosen by nineteen-​year-​old Julio ‘Yunito’ Munet, Cucuito’s second cousin. Along with his father and elements of the Sonora Culebrense, he rearranged and played Cucuito Munet’s old songs. The line-​up is similar to the old Isleños (guitar, bass, piano, congas and drum machine) with the particularity that almost all the musicians, with exception of the pianist and conga player, are close kin. Yunito Munet learned the rudiments of the steel drum from the Municipal Steel Band, which I will discuss below, but developed his skills as a self-​taught musician. His quick progress on the drum and his uncannily similar style to Cucuito have prompted comments that the youngster has inherited Cucuito’s talent or that Cucuito is still manifesting himself through the teenager. Yunito himself talks about recently being drawn towards the instrument in an unexplained spontaneous way suggesting that he felt a sudden urge to play the steel drum and dedicate himself to mastering the instrument. The biggest public exposure that the group has had has been the ‘Matutinos’, for which it was paid by the municipality during the 2002–​2003 Christmas season. The ‘Matutinos’ is a Christmas tradition that, while it borrows from the Puerto Rican tradition of parranda,2 is only practised in Culebra. It began when Cucuito Munet would walk through the streets and paths of Culebra playing his steel drum during Christmas nights (from the 19th to the 24th of December) from around 4 a.m. until dawn. It became customary to join Cucuito during the serenades as he passed by people’s houses. These nights would usually end in loud parties with dozens of people following the steel drum, playing and singing typical Puerto Rican Christmas music.



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The recent ‘Matutinos’ have been a much more elaborate and planned affair than the ‘Matutinos’ of the late 1990s. A small cargo truck would be fitted to function as a carriage, commonly seen in Carnivals of the English Caribbean. The musicians played through loudspeakers. They started at 4 a.m., and people followed in their cars along an already assigned route. The parade would usually end at an agreed person’s house where the revellers would be served a hearty meal of typical Puerto Rican Christmas food. After the ‘Matutinos’ season, Los Isleños has been receiving engagements to play at private functions and at special events in hotels of Culebra. Musically, the current incarnation of Los Isleños functions similar to a jazz band. There is a base that consists of guitar, piano, bass, conga player and an electronic drum machine which provide the basic structure of the piece that is pretty much unchanging throughout the song. The steel drum functions as the lead instrument. In the case of Los Isleños, Yunito provides the melody and improvises variations and solos to the piece. As the main melodic instrument in the band, Yunito dictates the duration of the song and directs any chord changes throughout the piece. Los Isleños arose spontaneously in a brief period of time without much planning. It began playing after very few rehearsals and got engagements pretty quickly. Its initial success is being greeted with a lot of encouragement because that type of ensemble had not been seen in Culebra since Cucuito left. During the past years, Los Isleños has been the staple Christmas music in Culebra. Yunito has joined the Puerto Rican state police and is stationed outside of Culebra. The rest of the band members live full-​time in Culebra, but can only really rehearse when Yunito comes to visit. There is a connection between Yunito’s project and Cucuito’s. Benjamín Pérez (see ­chapter  3) wrote a short article in a local newsletter extolling the similarities between the two men. Benjamín recalled Cucuito’s humbleness, charisma and skill with the steel drum, and reminded his readers of the joy and happiness that Cucuito brought to Culebra. The article continued by making similar judgements about Yunito and suggesting that Yunito is some kind of reincarnation of Cucuito. Yunito himself mentions his second cousin as the primary source of inspiration and links his death with his spontaneous interest in the instrument. The attachment to Cucuito’s legacy suggests a sense of consistent social relations in Culebra. It points to an insularity where musical groups are formed with the intention of reproducing the memory of one of their more prolific and charismatic music artists. It suggests a static musical identity regardless of the historical connection that Cucuito had as a mobile musician. However, the two incarnations of Los Isleños respond to very different circumstances. Regardless of how people talked about Cucuito, there are people who remember the initial resistance that culebrenses had towards Cucuito’s concept, especially Los Matutinos which was seen as an

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encroachment of a popular practice on a profoundly religious time of the year. Also, many culebrenses point out that Cucuito actually abandoned his Los Isleños project in order to be a part of La Nueva Sonora Culebrense. In contrast, Yunito met immediate success with his group. Musically, the current incarnation of Los Isleños seems to be a much more dynamic and contemporary affair, with Yunito displaying virtuoso jazz solos and manoeuvring complicated syncopations and chord changes, contrary to Cucuito’s Los Isleños that seemed to be a more folkloric exercise in Puerto Rican and St. Thomas music using the steel drum. THE SOUNDS OF CULEBRA III: THE CULEBRA MUNICIPAL STEEL BAND Throughout the mid-​1980s, Fundación Culebra Inc., a Culebra-​based non-​ governmental organisation, began a campaign to acquire the necessary number of steel drums to put together a standard full orchestra steel band, being around fifty individual instruments to be played by twenty to thirty musicians. The acquisition of a steel band was preceded by other cultural initiatives that Fundación Culebra carried out. Most notably, the Fundación took it upon itself to raise funds for the restoration of the Culebra lighthouse, the organisation of Moko Jombes, a calypso dancing troupe that features stilt walkers mimicking stilt walking practices of the St. Thomas Carnival, the founding of a Culebra history museum and the promotion of certain publications, among other activities. For Dolly Camareno, the coordinator of Fundación Culebra at the time that the drums were acquired, explained to me that a steel band would not only function as a pedagogical program to establish music education on the island, but more importantly, it would reproduce culebrense identification with West Indian symbols of cultural identity. In her estimation, the musical tastes of Culebra are in tune with the English-​speaking Virgin Islands just as much as with Puerto Rico. Therefore, steel band projects would be successful because of the musical and performative identification. The drums were acquired in the early 1990s from Mr. Hilary ‘Baga’ Rezende, a steel drum artisan in St. Croix. Cucuito Munet was hired to offer steel drum classes, but the project fell through when he left Culebra to go to Boston. The steel drums were kept in storage for years and were damaged by the passing of Hurricane Marilyn in 1995. The project was abandoned after Dolly left the island in 2002. Custody of the drums was passed over to Ramón ‘Papo’ Gómez, an air plane mechanic and one of the bass players of La Nueva Sonora Culebrense. In 2002, the newly inaugurated Iván Romero Municipal Administration showed interest in founding a marching band that would promote music



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instruction to Culebra’s youth and serve as a representative of the municipality in official events. José Peñalbert, a music teacher from Puerto Rico, was hired to start a military-​style brass marching band. The project of the Municipal Marching Band did not have sufficient funds to acquire the necessary instruments. Peñalbert started by offering music reading lessons and teaching children to play the block flute. After a few weeks, Papo Gómez approached Peñalbert and showed him the steel drums that Fundación Culebra had acquired. Papo explained to Peñalbert that it would probably be more successful to try to make a steel band rather than a brass band in Culebra. Aside from the logistics and costs of having to buy the necessary instruments to make a brass band, these steel drums were already there and some might be salvaged. More importantly, Papo explained to Peñalbert that ‘this is what people in Culebra like’. Peñalbert claimed that although he knew of the existence of such an instrument, he had never seen a steel drum in person before. Papo told me that Peñalbert’s first reaction was, ‘does that trashcan sound?’ Peñalbert took one of the drums to his flat and identified its notes. He bought books and manuals over the Internet and familiarised himself with the technicalities and history of the instrument. The first people to join the steel band were Papo Gómez, his son and friends, Papo’s brother José and relatives of Cucuito Munet. During its two-​ year existence, the Municipal Steel Band of Culebra grew at a steady pace and its level of technical skill improved accordingly. When I commented to Peñalbert on the progress of the band, after a few months of my doing fieldwork, he answered that it is easy for the children of Culebra to learn to play the steel drum. He argued that people in the band were highly motivated to play the steel drum and learned it quickly due to the fact that they have been listening to it all their lives. The availability of steel drum music in Culebra, the exposure that people in Culebra have to the English-​speaking Caribbean musical practice and the ease with which the steel band project took off once a teacher was found often prompt comments such as ‘children carry this type of music in their blood’ (J. Peñalbert interview). Such comments suggest an embodied connection between being exposed to and performing music from the British Virgin Islands to being an ethnic culebrense in distinction to being an ethnic Puerto Rican. The Culebra Steel Band was called to play at official events such as the inauguration of public works, opening the Carnival of Culebra, school graduations, exhibition presentations in schools in Puerto Rico or for public guests who come to Culebra. The highest-​profile performance of the Culebra Steel Band was when it was included in the production of a big-​budget Puerto Rican feature film in Culebra and when the governor of Puerto Rico came to inaugurate the new pier built in the town centre.

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The repertoire of the Culebra Steel Band is varied. Initially, Peñalbert guided the Steel Band to play calypsos and soca, genres that are commonly associated with the steel drum. The band also played classical European music with calypsonian syncopations. As the musicians and their director got more confident, they started experimenting with pieces that covered a broader spectrum. They began practising Puerto Rican traditional songs, such as plenas, a rhythm that carries strong associations with the Puerto Rican nation. They also began experimenting with songs that are part of the U.S. musical network, such as themes from Star Wars, the theme song of the Mortal Kombat video game and popular rock tunes. The Culebra Steel Band’s plans were to continue growing in numbers, improve its musical technical skills and acquire a degree of fiscal autonomy from the municipality. A concrete long-​term goal it had was to be able to play at Carnivals of English-​speaking Caribbean islands. Papo Gómez told me that he would be very keen to be accepted in the St. Thomas Carnival to participate in the procession, but has set as a long-​term goal to be able to play well enough to participate in the Panorama competition in Trinidad, the world’s most renowned steel band competition. While culebrenses go every year to the St. Thomas Carnival, there has not been a consistent presence of culebrense acts in the Carnival procession. The desire of the Culebra Steel Band to participate in the procession of St. Thomas Carnival suggests Culebra’s desire for inclusion into one of the most important expressions of Virgin Island popular culture. But the culebrenses would be participating in the Carnival on their own terms. They would use a West Indian symbol of identity but keeping a distance from being West Indian by embodying and playing an identity associated with the Spanish Caribbean, more specifically Puerto Rico. In 2003, Peñalbert embarked on a campaign to have the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, Puerto Rico’s governing body of national culture, recognise the steel drum as an instrument that has contributed to Puerto Rican culture. His argument was that the steel drum has played an important role in the formation of Culebra identity. If successful, his move would have made the Culebra Steel Band gain recognition from elements of the Puerto Rican nation. Similar to the desire to participate in the St. Thomas Carnival, the Culebra Steel Band is seeking recognition from a national project, while maintaining a sense of distinctiveness from it. The Culebra Steel Band is the only steel band in Puerto Rico, and I do not think that the intention behind seeking the recognition of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture is to reproduce the steel band concept in Puerto Rico but rather to institutionally legitimise its innovations and develop the recognition of culebrense uniqueness within the Puerto Rican establishment. The motivations behind these moves exemplify the interactions between insularity and mobility that characterise Culebra and legitimise the culebrense



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claim for a musical identity that locates itself within a discursively unique musical landscape. This discursive difference is the product of political and national fictions that construct the Caribbean according to a linguistic and national index. But it is a fiction that culebrense musicians choose to participate and engage with in order to gain recognition and develop a sense of island legitimacy. The Culebra Steel Band understands that its concept challenges the historical geographical associations that have dominated Caribbean cultural identity constructions and wish to exploit these associations to assert a sense of distinction. The Culebra Steel Band politicised these challenges because it was, effectively, a municipal entity, under the direct supervision of the mayor of Culebra, and was lobbying to be recognised by the Puerto Rican national state at the same time as it was making preparations to be a part of national expressions of the British Virgin Islands and Trinidad and Tobago. Abraham Peña, the mayor who won the 2004 elections, ordered a routine audit of the municipality. The Culebra Steel Band project was suspended temporarily while the drums were audited. This move was accompanied by other circumstances that resulted in Peñalbert resigning from his post. The steel band project was very much centred on the individual figure of Peñalbert. He was, after all, hired for the project and could dedicate all of his time to its development. The rest of the steel band members are either too mobile or too occupied with other tasks –​fishing, their day jobs, family commitments and the like –​in order to dedicate the time and effort that organising the steel band needs. More recently, Yunito Munet has shown an interest in rehabilitating the drums that can be salvaged and, on occasion, visits the storage space where the drums are kept in order to polish, clean and tune them. Like La Sonora Culebrense, the Culebra Steel Band’s process also suggests a connection between ephemerality and movement. The Culebra Steel Band project stuttered for many years, always depending on key characters who came and went through Culebra. The project seemed to have finally taken off when a music teacher from Puerto Rico arrived to the island and was introduced to the steel band concept. The Culebra Steel Band thrived for two years but quickly disbanded once the director decided to quit his post. I would imagine the steel drums back in their warehouse under the custody of Papo Gómez, waiting for the right combination of people, motivation and circumstances to rekindle the organisation of the group and start again a project that serves as a marker for Culebra insular identity. THE SOUNDS OF CULEBRA IV: LA WIKI SOUND The most recent musical group to organise itself in Culebra also arose out of the Sonora Culebrense. Julio Enrique ‘Wiki’ Munet and his brother Rubén

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Munet, Cucuito’s cousins, got together with Jorge Acevedo, a local artist who had been living on the island since the late 1990s, to form La Wiki Sound. Wiki and Rubén were part of the percussion section of the Sonora Culebrense during the orchestra’s busiest time in the mid-​1980s. Jorge Acevedo learned to play the congas with various people but claims to have learned the bulk of his skill in a percussion workshop run by the Ayala Family in the town of Loíza, Puerto Rico.3 The three of them got together in 2000 to do an all-​ percussion ensemble. Jorge approached Wiki, who was rehearsing with the short-​lived Culebra Tropical Swing, to ask him if he could teach him how to play the calypso beat on congas. Later, Jorge and Wiki would get together occasionally to play for leisure. They got together with Rubén who owns a drum machine, the one used in La Sonora Culebrense. They began playing as La Wiki Sound Machine. Rubén would programme the drum machine to following specific structured beats that would keep Wiki and Jorge in beat as they did variations and improvisations over the beats. During a presentation at a bar, a culebrense, who was annoyed that they were using a drum machine, disconnected the apparatus so as to taunt the musicians.4 To their own surprise, the absence of the drum machine did not affect their playing nor did it affect the necessary communication between the drummers. Jorge says that the disconnection of the drum machine was the best thing for them because it obliged them to play while listening to each other and it culminated the process of making the Wiki Sound fully acoustic, which is what they were striving for in the first place. The music that Wiki Sound plays is a constant negotiation between structure and improvisation. Jorge commands four differently pitched congas, one of which he shares with Wiki, to provide the basic rhythm of the piece. Wiki uses the highest pitched conga, sharing a second conga with Jorge, in order to function as ‘the voice’ of the piece, ‘the voice that flutters over the basic rhythm’ (J. Acevedo interview in film Mangrove Music). Rubén traded the electronic drum machine for percussion accessories such as a scraper and cow bells. The three musicians complement each other in a tension between keeping the assigned beat and improvising in distinction and in relation to each other. The types of beats the Wiki Sound plays have historical precedents in salsa, guaguancó, merenge, plena, bomba, samba, calypso, soca and others rhythms that require a specific metre and beat, which are reproduced through traditions of music playing and a documented recording history. Rubén explained to me that their basic method of composition begins with attempts to cover their favourite beats. They will discuss the beat shortly before a presentation, attempt it and improvise over it during the presentation. Given that they do not rehearse, each presentation that they give is an attempt to build on the rhythmic patterns they worked on during their previous presentation. They



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will repeat certain motifs if they decide that they work, but the Wiki Sound is always looking for new ways to experiment and build on established rhythms. The Wiki Sound claims to be original in two ways. First, its originality stems from its combination of pan-​Caribbean rhythms that suggests a non-​ nationalist or pan-​ Caribbean musical conversation. According to Rubén, their knowledge of West Indian rhythms such as calypso and soca and Latin American rhythms such as salsa, plena, bomba and samba makes their musicianship innovative and unique among percussion players in Puerto Rico. Second, the constant negotiation between structure and improvisation at times blurs the distinction between the rhythms as they attempt to reconcile and negotiate them. Musically, their performances consists of working in and around the differences of the rhythms, providing smooth transitions from one beat to the next and making necessary adjustments as the piece proceeds. According to Rubén, this gives the Wiki Sound a unique and distinct sound that is not reproduced elsewhere. Another aspect to the Wiki Sound’s sense of originality is Wiki’s performative and technical skill with the congas. Wiki’s showmanship adds another dimension to the presentation, making the presentation enjoyable regardless of the listeners’ previous knowledge of the musical concepts they are negotiating in. I believe that the popular and musical success of La Wiki Sound functions around its improvisation over recognisable beats and because of the affective qualities that its percussion music has on its listeners. After years of playing together consistently, the Wiki Sound has composed original pieces. These compositions do not necessarily imply the invention of new beats or rhythms. The music it plays every Saturday is, according to the musicians, the product of organised composition that was authored by the Wiki Sound. I have observed how La Wiki Sound gets annoyed at people trying to join and improvise with the band. Rubén Munet explained to me that he understands why people would like to join them, because the kind of music they play is associated with communal participation in an improvised manner. However, the three men have been playing together for so long that they have shaped a specific way of playing that is difficult for people who do not share their experience to join and keep up. Also, the pieces that they play have set arrangements which a person who does not know the song will not be able to follow. The way La Wiki Sound plays its percussion music and the way it organises its plans as a band are suggestive of discourses and practices of both mobility and insularity. Its songs follow a repetitive pattern, given that it strives to keep within the confines of prescribed rhythms. However, it claims to break away from prescribed rhythms through the process of improvisation and radical changes of speed and pattern within the same song. Also, its intentions of professionalizing itself, through logos on its shirts and on its

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CD, business cards and uniforms, suggest a nascent insularity in its intentions to become a music group from Culebra. However, it does not seem to have any specific plan as to how to achieve professional status and be able to make more money from its art. It has no plans of organising a tour, nor has it contacted any elements of the media, and it seems wary of promoting itself gratuitously. It is selective about the gigs it accepts and takes pride in the way in which it is treated by the venue that hires it. As of 2017, La Wiki Sound has been playing every week, for over fifteen years, to a full audience at a local bar in Culebra and has done a few presentations in Puerto Rico. It has recorded two live CDs, using Jorge’s personal computer as recorder and CD burner, and is selling them from Jorge’s shop. It has also instituted a uniform for the trio and business cards. It has been approached by Puerto Rican television producers for short presentations on Puerto Rican national television, but such presentations have not panned out. In the meantime, the group continues to play every week at the bar and in public events which it is called to. The most lucrative contracts have come from tourists passing through the island who get interested in the group and hire it for special events in Puerto Rico. During my most recent visits to Culebra, I did not get a sense that the Wiki Sound was particularly interested in developing a musical career. The three members work in different capacities and travel often, and I get the sense that they just enjoy playing with each other, always trying to figure out new directions for the group. SOUNDS OF CULEBRA: CALYPSO The communication between Culebra and the English-​ speaking Virgin Islands has not resulted in a process of assimilation of Culebra identity into the English-​speaking Virgin Islands. While culebrenses identify with Virgin Islander music, most culebrenses do not identify with other aspects of Virgin Islanderness such as language, political culture and colonial history. The English-​speaking Virgin Islands are part of the Culebra landscape and many culebrenses spent significant part of their lives in the British Virgin Islands, but the culebrense experience is selective of the practices and materials that mark its insular identity. The presence of English Virgin Island music in Culebra is centred on calypso bands and reggae acts that get exposure during Carnival and through radio. For all its versatility and global popularity, the steel drum and calypso music is very much associated with English Caribbean music. Steel drum music and calypso has not competed favourably with the main types of popular music listened to in Puerto Rico. The most popular types of music heard in Puerto Rico are salsa, merengue, bachata and, more recently, reggetón.5



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Commercially successful popular music that comes via the United States is also part of the Puerto Rican musical landscape. Interest in steel drum music and calypso in Culebra arises from a historical relationship of trade and migration that the island has had with the British Virgin Islands, locations associated with English Caribbean musical landscape (Liverpool 1994). English Caribbean music has always been a part of Culebra’s musical landscape. People in Culebra have been going to the St. Thomas Carnival for the past three generations. Radio was another way to listen to English Virgin Island music because any radio can pick up radio stations and programmes that transmit from the British Virgin Islands. Also, during the early 1980s, there was a Culebra-​ produced radio programme that mostly transmitted calypso. People also remember fondly Cucuito’s skill and charisma in bringing steel drum music to Culebra and reproducing it through Los Matutinos and the various incarnations of Los Isleños and La Sonora Culebrense. The singer of La Sonora Culebrense explained to me that even though St. Thomas constitutes a different location from Culebra, the physical proximity to the island initiates a series of contacts and processes of identification: ‘. . . because it is so close. One takes a boat and arrives easily. Even though it’s another world, we like the culture, the Carnival, the music, the town. We live that’ (M. Albert interview). It is this ambiguity of locations that interests me about Culebra music. It offers the possibility to open Culebra space beyond its national confines and embrace wider possibilities of agency and creativity. The music of Culebra embodies or enacts the creative possibilities of Culebra and points towards the possibilities of the Caribbean in general. MOBILE INSULARITIES OR IMPROVISED STRUCTURES IN CULEBRA’S SOCIAL RELATIONS Music in the Caribbean is both a product of and an agent in the process of shaping a sense of island identities. In the process of island shaping, nationally oriented knowledge has divided the Caribbean into distinct musical locations and regions. These discursively different locations are constructed as nodes in a web of movements that inform their respective island musical identity and continue to be reconstituted through regional and global movements. In my descriptive accounts of the Culebra music groups, I tried to highlight how musicians assert a sense of unique island identity through their practices of movement, which exposes them to a variety of musical networks. My intention with these descriptions was to bring attention to the ways in which music groups in Culebra enact the mobile process in creating an insular music.

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The interaction between mobility and insularity is also a product of and an agent in the social relations that shape the music groups of Culebra. The improvised and structured social relations that give shape to Culebra musical groups mirror the compositional and performative practices of the groups and are indicative of the mobile insularity that characterises Culebra’s daily life. I think of the structural, repetitive, monotonous, predictable and copying as categories that contribute to the insular in Culebra. In the same way, I address the improvised, ephemeral and the random as symbolic practices of the mobile. These categories can serve as symbolic tensions of the mobile and insular character of Culebra society. Music groups in Culebra tend to spring up on an improvised basis without definite plans as to a concept to follow or long-​term vision for their project. Instead, they pan out as a product of a combination of circumstances between the presence of particularly motivated people with the political and economic conditions of a given moment in time. With a continually shifting set of characters and political circumstances, spontaneity and ephemerality become the keywords in tracing commonalities between music groups of Culebra. Music groups in Culebra do not tend to last for long periods of time. They tend to organise themselves spontaneously for a specific event and disband soon after the presentation. The groups with a longer lifespan are not likely to have a consistent line-​up and as a consequence their concept is continuously shifting from presentation to presentation. The ephemerality of music groups in Culebra is linked to the constant movement of people through the island, which contributes to a sense of social improvisation where music groups do not tend to have continuity of their projects. Continuity of the groups is established through the repetition of band names. These bands build on the concepts and popularity of their previous incarnations and have a core of consistent musicians who are usually related kin; in the case of Culebra, contemporary secular music has tended to be associated with the Munet family. These groups also have a repetition of songs. Through mimicking older groups and covering songs from other groups, they usually have a catalogue of songs which they work with. The groups usually play the same numbers, with slight variations, in their presentations. The repetition of music groups and repetition of songs, and the fact that the songs are repetitious and cyclical themselves, suggest the insularity and smallness of Culebra, whereby people familiarise themselves with the group and their set after a few presentations. The tensions created between the free-​flowing, processual and the inconsistent in relation to the structured, consistent and the repetitious are a common theme in Caribbean music criticism. Hebdige (1987) and Manuel (1995)



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in particular address issues of structure and innovation in their surveys of Caribbean music. In Hebdige’s narrative on Jamaican reggae, the musicological pattern of Caribbean music has been the repeating beat (Hebdige 1987). He demonstrates in two ways how the practice of copying and repetition was instrumental in the formation of Jamaican reggae. On the one hand, there is the influence of repetitive Rastafarian drumming as an early element in the formation of reggae and the reappropriation and parodying of existing music in the formation of Jamaican dancehall. Peter Manuel writes of Caribbean music as a music that emphasises on rhythm characterised by the call and response motif: a related characteristic is what I call a cellular structure, meaning that pieces end to be constructed by repetition and variation of a short musical cell or ostinato. Variety is provided by altering the pattern or by combining it with another feature, such as a narrative text. (Manuel, 1995: 9; emphasis in original)

The engagement that occurs during a musical call and response is an articulate way in which to render the relationship between improvisation and structure that I have been discussing in this chapter. I would like to draw attention to Manuel’s biological metaphor in addressing Caribbean music. He is not the only critic to use biological metaphors to address Caribbean music. Guilbault quotes Bergman who visualizes Caribbean and Latin American music as the branches of the mangrove tree. There is a common root system and a main trunk from which all the branches of the tree grow. But each of the branches also sends down its own roots and begins to develop independently while remaining attached to the trunk. . . . But all the branches are interconnected by the flow of invigoration from the central roots, which are occasionally fertilized with new material. (Guilbault 1993: 47)

I find Manuel’s and Berman’s biological connection interesting because it gives Caribbean music an organic quality that develops on its own terms while being part of a broader system. It also gives Caribbean music a corporeal and physical value that adds to its significance as a constituting social practice of island identity. The discussion of the physicality of Caribbean music, at the conceptual and performative level, suggests a sensorial and experiential dimension to the exploration of the region. It points to the evocative and non-​ textual qualities of Caribbean life. Perhaps these biological metaphors are a way of grasping representations of Caribbean complexities that have eluded textual forms of representation and rest more on performances that, through rhizomes and onion-​like historical processes, are continuously in a process of becoming (Benítez-​Rojo 1989; Hall et al. 1992; Hall and Gay 1996).

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NOTES 1. Tamboo bamboo was a percussion ensemble that consisted of bamboo sticks cut to different sizes and stamped on the ground to produce differently pitched beats. 2. Parranda is a typical Christmas festivity practised in Puerto Rico and other countries associated with the Spanish Caribbean. It basically consists of musicians gathering at a person’s home and going house to house playing typical Christmas music. At each house, the revellers are treated with Christmas food or rum. The owners of the house have the choice to join the group of musicians as they continue moving from house to house. It is an all-​night affair. 3. The Ayala Family is a renowned Afro-​Caribbean dancing and percussion group in Puerto Rico. It is probably the most well-​known group of its type in Puerto Rico. 4. In Culebra, the use of a drum machine can be interpreted as inauthentic or karaoke-​type playing and suggests that the drummers are not skilled enough to play on their own. In Culebra, a drum machine is used when acoustic percussion instruments are not available or as a complement to the acoustic drums. 5. Merengue and bachata have a historical association with the Dominican Republic. Reggetón is possibly the most popular music in Puerto Rico. Its categorisation and history are contested but it is associated with working-​class Puerto Rican urban youth. Its general influences are credited as being hip-​hop and dancehall.

Conclusion An Eye on the Creative Tension

This research project arose out of a concern that the discursive map of the Caribbean corresponds with colonial histories (i.e. English, French, Dutch, Spanish) and that these imaginings were being reproduced in Caribbeanist research and politics. My initial research agenda focused on deconstructing these discursive regions of the Caribbean and prioritising the mobile and interactive experiences that constitute Caribbean island identity. My expectations were twofold. In one instance, I wished to contribute to a research agenda that proposed a discursive map of the Caribbean that took seriously the ethnographic practices of Caribbean islanders, rather than begin with continental visions predicated on imperialist agendas. From this point of view, the movements that characterise Caribbean island life are neither initiated nor mediated by imperialists’ interests, but by islanders themselves as they struggle to live their lives on their own terms. My experiences in Culebra have motivated me to attempt to contribute to a research agenda that imagines the Caribbean experience as an archipelagic experience that is informed by local perspectives of intraregional movements. Taking these intraregional movements seriously has led me to reconsider the terms of Caribbean identity as island-​specific, linguistically determined or based on markers of ethnicity and race. My findings in Culebra suggest an approach towards identity that is based on the configuration of relationship networks that individuals reference in their daily lives and in their political positions. It also points towards a view of identity that is based on commensality and a sharing of a world v​ iew, rather than independent, static and easily identifiable structural features. The process of crafting an island life, I found, is more related to creative practices and choices of individuals as they struggle to navigate the contradictions of the island experience. 159

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A second expectation I had with this project was to examine the terms on which the idea of ‘island’ is based on. In the process of researching this book project, I found that the idea of a Caribbean archipelago that is divided into discreet colonial regions is not just the result of empire-​building narratives of Western European nations. It is also based on a vision that sees islands as isolated, inward-​looking, static, conservative, internally reproducing themselves, xenophobic, on the margins of history, controlled environments, akin to laboratories and in need of continental administration. The type of island that emerges from this vision is a space that is characterised in opposition to the continent. The idea of a ‘continent’, in this context, is not only a geographical marker but also connotes a relation of power to which the island is subject to. In many instances, these continental views were imposed on Culebra, as when the U.S. Navy used the island as a location to test its equipment and tactics as if Culebra were some kind of isolated laboratory. Also, the view of Culebra as a marginalised location found its expression in Puerto Rico-​funded development projects that were based on the idea that Culebra had been neglected by the Puerto Rican state and was in need of an infrastructure update. In other instances, Culebra islanders themselves produced a discourse of island specificity when, for example, they organised themselves in opposition to the U.S. Navy, contested the tourism development projects or when they make the claim of playing island-​specific music. While it is safe to say that the Culebra experience opposes a ‘continent’, there are instances where the associative dimensions of this opposition are not consistent. During my time living in Culebra and my subsequent correspondence with the islanders, I have often found the island experience to be anything but isolated, conservative, marginal, xenophobic and internally reproducing itself. One of the central claims of this book has been that discourses of island specificity are necessarily mediated through networks of movement, rather than emerging spontaneously from Culebra. The anti-​Navy protest movement, the Fishermen’s Association’s policies and musical practices result in an image of an insular and unique location. But these discourses and practices are produced through references to networks of ideas and mobile experiences –​networks that, more often than not, do not correspond with imperial and continental imaginings of the Caribbean. The effects of these movements can also result in placing Culebra on the vanguard of social developments, rather than on the margins. For example, the military exercises carried out in Culebra throughout most of the twentieth century placed Culebra at the centre of the development of military technology and tactics. The Fishermen’s Association of Culebra’s relationship with Snapperfarm, Inc. placed Culebra at the vanguard of ground​breaking aquaculture technology. In ­chapter  3, I described the consequences of Mayor Romero’s successful lobby to the Puerto Rican government to place Culebra

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at the centre of its development agenda and negotiated an unprecedented amount of funds to be earmarked for Culebra’s infrastructure development. In ­chapter  4, I examined how culebrense musicians imagine themselves at the centre of a convergence of different musical traditions and draw from this position to create new and original music. In these instances, Culebra can be understood as being at the centre of social processes, rather than being exclusively on the receiving end of continental policy. In this book, I have proposed the notion of transinsularism as a means to address the simultaneous –​mobile and insular, open and closed, peculiar and common, peripheral and central –​character of Culebra island life. My approach towards transinsularism started as a means to come to terms with the challenges posed by the discourses and practices associated with culebrense identity and write about it on its own terms. The inconsistencies of culebrense, when examined through the lens of identity studies, made it difficult for me to understand and render its characterisation consistently. The term culebrense is alternatively used in relation and opposition to Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the broader Caribbean, the United States, Europe and the imagined ‘West’. For a while, I considered that culebrense could be thought of as a peculiar configuration of these references. That is, that the island is made up of the same components as any other Caribbean island, but these components are configured in a unique way. The challenge with this approach is that, as I have shown in ­chapters  3, 4 and 5, culebrenses are in disagreement as to what is the configuration of these components. The prospect of writing about the culebrense experience got further complicated when I began to realise the central role that immigrants to Culebra have played in the island’s history and in its social relations. In every chapter of this book, I have shown different ways in which immigrants to Culebra have central roles, at times are the protagonists, in social processes of the island. Then there is the role of temporary residents, tourists and other travellers who also make important contributions to the Culebra experience and, as a result, their contributions challenge unitary understandings of the island. My inspiration to move away from seeing culebrense identity as a strict binary opposition, or as an object to be assembled and positively identifiable, was initially informed by my conversations with Benjamín Pérez (see ­chapter  3) and Flores Soto (see ­chapter  4). Both of these men have a clear record of island activism. Both allowed themselves to be arrested and spent time in prison during the anti-​U.S. Navy civil disobedience protest and are public advocates for Puerto Rican independence from the United States. From the perspective of Puerto Rican colonial politics, Flores and Benjamín could be categorised as Culebra chauvinists, Puerto Rican nationalists and, perhaps, anti-​immigration advocates. However, their narrative of Culebra is much more inclusive and draws a different kind of opposition. Their experiences

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during the anti-​U.S. Navy protests exposed them to Quakers, internationalists, communists, feminists, indigenous movements, Puerto Rican nationalists and Navy apologetics. After the Navy’s departure, Culebra received a sudden rise of immigrants, seasonal residents, tourists and travellers. Both Flores and Benjamín spent periods of their lives abroad. Their ideas on Culebra and its future are informed by their travels and relationships with fellow travellers. For example, their political stance during the tourism debates referenced similar processes that have occurred in the Caribbean, which in their view has resulted in the disenfranchisement of local islanders in favour of multinational’s accumulation of profit, and articulated this observation with environmental and socialist concerns. Benjamin’s and Flores’ analysis of Culebra’s political contests bypasses nationalist concerns and focus on the effects that policies have on local relationships and in fostering a sense of commensality on the island. From this perspective, the term culebrense loses its objectifying quality and becomes more of an idiom, a shorthand, that frames the story of the islanders’ relationships. Neither Flores nor Benjamín oppose tourism or immigration to Culebra (either their parents or themselves were immigrants at some point in their lives). Neither do they express their position along ethnic or nationalist lines. Their discourse focuses on the actions of individuals, rather than on their structural features such as language, race, place of origin, class and so on. For example, during our discussions on tourism and fishing policies, I appreciated how Flores and Benjamín would rarely use ethnic or racial terminology to describe people. Rather they would focus on ‘gente’ (people), ‘compañero’ (partner, companion or comrade) or ‘human being’ (ser humano) when speaking of characters or social groups. I was attracted by their approach because it suggested an island politics that was not exclusive. Still, I would find it confusing at times. During my years at the University of Puerto Rico, I was exposed to a different kind of identity politics to what Benjamín and Flores were articulating. In my courses on the Anthropology of the Caribbean, Puerto Rican History, Political Science and so on the readings and discussions focused on the systemic qualities of colonial exploitation such as capitalism, imperialism, globalisation and other global trends and their impact on national economies and national identities. While concepts associated with social identities were read as fluid, contested and discursive, they were still spoken about as objects or forces that impress themselves on individuals and shape their consciousness. Identity, my impression was, is a structural force that –​akin to capitalism –​structures individuals’ lives beyond their control. The role of the researcher, I figured, was to identify the terms on which these structural features work. However, my fieldwork experiences in Culebra did not add up to this expectation. Culebrense identity politics did not present itself conveniently

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and I could not easily map it so as to provide a model of ‘how it works’ or ‘what is it made of’. Rather, what I was experiencing and learning was an identity politics that focused more on individuals, travelling, practices, skills, lived experiences and world views, rather than structural features that emphasise on singular dimensions of the island experience. The challenge of identity, I thought during my time in Culebra, was that it required a sedentary set of concepts that would be assembled to create a subject. But what happens when the subject does not believe in these fixations and chooses to engage the conversation on mobile terms? My first literary reviews for this project focused on identifying Caribbeanist research that focused on the creole and promoted the view of the Caribbean as a site of interactions. My initial intention was to characterise these movements as operating outside prescribed colonial and postcolonial spaces and highlight their transgressive and liberatory dimensions. Along the way, I wished to problematise insular constructions of islands, offering instead a picture of islands as connectors. However, as I discussed in ­chapters  1 and 5, these creolisations, mixtures and hybridities ultimately function to produce and reproduce static categorisations of identity. For all the arguments made for the processual character of Caribbean culture and creative practices, Caribbeanist discourse, I felt, continued to reproduce static, island national, models for understanding the Caribbean experience. Would it be possible to write about an island identity without confining it? I found references to these kind of connections in anthropological approaches to cosmopolitan studies. I was particularly drawn to research that values an individual’s agency and creativity to substantiate a life project in relation and opposition to its broader social context (Hanerz 1990, 2006; Rapport 2003). For Beck, the term ‘cosmopolitan’ carries associations of an individual or a society that possesses knowledge from various cultural contexts and moves freely among them (2000). I am interested in examining the potential of these movements to challenge the terms of identity discourse so as to move beyond the acknowledgement of the global, transnational or multicultural subject. I was attracted to the potential of cosmopolitanist research to facilitate an ontological and ethical project that contributes to a vision of human universality as an alternative to analysis that is based on the study of structural differentiation (Wardle 2010). Cosmopolitan anthropology, in the context of this project, does not render individuals as antisocial subjects nor does it seek to minimise human differences. My take on cosmopolitan ethnography acknowledges individual imaginations and the ways in which they openly converse with each other (Werbner 2008). My proposal of transinsularism is an attempt to render the imaginaries that are enabled in a context of mobility; it attempts to understand the plurality of experiences and new forms of difference and places

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these imaginaries in conversation with each other with an eye for suspending the question of hierarchy between imaginaries. A cosmopolitan ethnography offers an analysis whereby individuals are the producers and interpreters of social categories, rather than being defined by them. In this regard, structural categories are claims enacted by people in order to substantiate a life project. To be ‘human’, from this perspective, is to have a capacity to author a unique life trajectory through a field of circumstances, to have an impact in the world and to contribute to its development. The image that I have wished to convey in this project is that of a specific island subject that constructs his or her sense of self through interaction with other island subjects and other island spaces. This mutual interaction does not lead to the elimination of difference between the islands, as if they become one common cultural space. I use the word ‘transinsularism’ to describe the ways in which the island experience is nurtured by contacts and its sense of island specificity is further developed. For example, during my initial months of fieldwork, I wished to focus on Culebra’s relationship with the English-​speaking Caribbean and prioritise this relationship over the nationalist and linguistic trappings of Puerto Rican, or Spanish-​speaking Caribbean, identity. I hoped that my research would contribute to puncturing through the regional fragmentations of the Caribbean archipelago and contribute to a discourse that envisions the Caribbean as a common experience. However, during my process of participant observation, I realised that my agenda posed two challenges. On the one hand, the culebrense experience is not the same as the Virgin Islands. Part of the idea of culebrense is an acknowledgement of the connection to the Virgin Islands. But this acknowledgement is referenced in order to craft a unique Culebra discourse and practice. Culebrenses may see themselves as part of the broader Virgin Island space, but this is not a claim for ‘sameness’ in relation to the English-​speaking Caribbean. The second challenge that I faced was that the Culebra is very much embedded in the network of relations that constitute Puerto Rico. However, this network does not necessarily mean that the culebrense discourse does not make a distinction with Puerto Rico. On the contrary, the culebrense narrative emphasises its distinction from Puerto Rico. As the research process carried on, it became more apparent and undeniable that island isolation and island connection were equally powerful categories in the expression and representations of Culebra identities. Neither dynamic prevails in Culebra but they operate in a mutually informing process, where insularity cannot but function in relation to mobility and vice versa. The challenge I found was to find a conceptual stance and a vocabulary that would be able to represent the ways in which these processes balanced each other out and informed each other without falling into separations, inconsistencies or valuing one over the other. My intention has been to create an

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account that sees mobility and insularity as mutually constitutive processes and show how they are part of people’s quotidian and historical life. When I returned from the field, I was tempted to approach my data and draft outline by cataloguing instances of Culebra that represented insularity, such as the nation, race, language and island specificity, and list them as processes that represent stasis and continuity. I would then proceed to catalogue Culebra instances that represented mobility, such as migration and connection to the English-​speaking Virgin Islands. I imagined a manuscript that would be divided in two parts where one part would represent insularity and the second part movement. As I started cataloguing my diaries and other research materials, I quickly realised the futility of this approach because the categories that I had used to denote movement or insularity were in fact a combination of both. For example, the idea of nation, I thought, would suggest insularity because it sees Culebra as a constituent of the Spanish-​speaking Caribbean and anchors the island within the Puerto Rican project. However, I found that the nation in Culebra denotes movement in the sense that it suggests a link outside of the island itself and also because the Puerto Rican nation itself is on the move through a transnational relationship with the United States. On the other hand, the English-​speaking Virgin Island connection, which I had taken as a marker for movement, could also be constructed as a marker for insularity, because at times the connection is elicited to argue for a unique insular identity that is separate from Puerto Rico. I continued searching for possible keywords and frameworks that I could use to organise my materials in a way that would communicate the ways in which these apparent contradictions were, in fact, the creative components of islanders’ sense of self. I approached the theory of cinematic montage as a possibility in my writing presentation, thinking that I would be able to convey a sense of clash or coming together of two seemingly disparate discourses that would generate a third. I also considered other keywords such as ‘operating in tandem’ or ‘parallel discourses and practices’. But they seemed to eventually fall back on the notion, which I wanted to avoid, that mobility and insularity were somehow incompatible processes that constitute a contradiction to be reconciled. Eventually, and in many ways due to inspiration I drew from Clifford’s Routes (1997) and Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1993), I resolved to leave the contradiction open and do my best to maintain a tension between insularity and movement in the processes and events that I was writing about. By using the word ‘tension’, I do not wish to suggest that I see mobility and insularity as creating a negative conflict between each other. Rather, I wish to convey a sense that the processes of Culebra that I have addressed in this book are produced and reproduced in a creative tension through insular and mobile practices and discourses.

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Conveying this sense of tension without resorting to separation of mobility and insularity has been the greatest challenge in the writing stages of this project. In each chapter, I have strived to demonstrate the ways in which the processes and events that give shape to an island experience contain within them mobile and insular dimensions and that Culebra events and processes are constituted within these dimensions. Chapters 4 and 5 address themes that are particularly well suited to convey the mutual constitution of mobility and insularity. Both chapters address creative practices and speak to the relationship between skills and identity. This practice-​based approach towards identity, where identity is a way of doing something, rather than an existential condition, was particularly useful in thinking through the materials for the chapters. The ways in which people of Culebra relate to the sea and to their music contain within them mobile and insular components that complement and constitute each other. Chapters 2 and 3, however, were more challenging because their main themes –​militarism and land, respectively –​were more discursively compatible with the notions of mobility and insularity. The challenge was to convey consistently the ways in which the people of Culebra produced and reproduced insular and mobile discourses and practices when relating to the issue of land and history. Making the film Mangrove Music, which can be accessed online at www. transinsular.org along with other materials on Culebra, represented a similar process but entailed different challenges. While filming, I was primarily concerned with accumulating footage that would give a sense of the place of Culebra. I collected a lot of establishment shots of the landscape and its particularities. I also looked out for processes and scenes that addressed the issue of the film subjects interacting with their space and with each other. I wanted to make a direct connection between the processes, events and interactions I was filming and the physical and social qualities of the place. An additional theme that I paid constant attention to while filming was the connection that the people of Culebra, specifically the musicians I was filming, had with the English-​speaking Caribbean. However, as my fieldwork progressed, I realised that moments that could represent Culebra’s connection with the English-​speaking Caribbean had not taken place as I had expected them. For example, the musicians of the Wiki Sound did not go to the St. Thomas Carnival, as they had planned at one stage, and the Municipal Band of Culebra had only one travelling engagement during my year of fieldwork. I conducted on-​camera interviews with members of the Municipal Steel Band and of the Wiki Sound as my fieldwork period was drawing to a close. During these interviews, I asked the interviewees to expand on their musical influences and general experiences with the English Caribbean. It was not my main intention to use these ‘talking heads’ in the film. I collected them in case I would feel, during the editing, that I needed an unambiguous statement

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that would make clear the connection between Culebra and the Virgin Islands. However, I did not see the need for these interviews during the editing process and was pleased I did not, because I had been striving to keep as close as I could to making an observational film with limited use of interviews. The conversations with the camera that appear on the film were not planned or structured, but occurred as the film subjects addressed me in the circumstances in which we were in. On my return to Manchester, I proceeded to log and catalogue my footage. I used a similar rationale to cataloguing my rushes than I had used to classify my field notes. I created a table where I put scenes according to their potential for creating meaning in a narrative and their potential for communicating movement and insularity, all within a framework of intending to make a film about the place. This was my first selection of scenes. After this initial classification, I started working on my readings and text and left the footage alone. I returned to my rushes a year after my return from fieldwork, when I had a clearer idea of the central argument of the project. I did a second revision of my scenes emphasising the issues of the subject’s relationship with the place. I was initially concerned about how I would translate the subtleties of the theoretical idea of the project into a film, especially when I had not been thinking in those terms at the time of filming. I resolved to continue editing intuitively but keeping in mind the general theme of the project. The first edit of my film was a four-​hour collection of scenes that I felt conveyed the themes of the project best, while offering a sense of the pace and texture of life on the island. However, I continued to worry about the footage’s ability to carry the themes that I wanted the project to be about. The more I learned about my footage, the more I categorised scenes into either mobility or insularity. I began to lose confidence in my film because I was not finding a way to convey the themes and issues in the way that I wanted. I was being frustrated by the stubbornness of the footage and my powerlessness to fashion it to my purposes. Regardless of the amount of editing and manipulation that can be done to the footage in the process of editing, its malleability of meaning is restricted to what actually happens within the frame. For example, in the process of editing, I can alter the order of events that occurred, I can splice people’s statements according to my convenience and I can alter the qualities of colour, brightness and contrast. But the type of editing to which I was committed did not permit me to alter what actually was happening in the scenes nor could I include scenes and shots that I had not filmed. Throughout the process of organising and editing the film, I continued to fall back on my intuition and tried to permit the footage to express itself, regardless of the academic obligations I had committed myself to. In retrospect, my filmmaking process can be characterised as a negotiation between my intuition and my academic obligations. My decision to include

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the two music groups in the film did not follow a specific logic. Perhaps, I wanted my rushes to represent the individuals whom I was spending more time with; perhaps I was thinking that the differences between the music bands would highlight their commonalities. I proceeded to organise and choose my scenes according to similarities and differences they suggested between the Wiki Sound and the Municipal Steel Band, by their evocation of movement and insularity, as well as by what, I felt, the film needed. After a slow and extended process of moulding, shaping and fashioning the material, the film began to take shape and its logic to resemble more a montage of different scenes –​some contradictory others complementary –​that, when placed in relation to each other, created a narrative. The narrative of the film juxtaposes two different music bands engaging in similar practices which suggest insularity and mobility. I believe that juxtaposing the two music groups and the different ways in which they suggest stasis and travel highlights the common features between them. While I recognise that using terminology like ‘juxtaposing’ and ‘montage’ suggests a separation between insularity and movement, I believe that the film’s narrative succeeds in bringing together these seemingly discordant practices and placing them in conversation with each other in the reproduction of musician identity of Culebra. In this way, the film becomes part of the argument of the book by exploring further the creative contradictions that constitute life in Culebra. But the film goes beyond that. The film does not only address conventional ethnographic issues such as place and music, it also suggests the more nuanced and subtle aspects of life in Culebra. It suggests the intimacy that people share, the pace of the island, the different textures and forms that make up the island and details of everyday life, which come out when musicians are not publicly performing. In this way, the film adds to the text by offering another layer to this representation of Culebra –​a layer that consciously acknowledges the intuitive dimensions of academic research and that, through its exploratory nature, gives further insight into social life on the island of Culebra.

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Index

Abraham Peña 81, 82, 90, 92, 119, 151 activism xii, xvi, 23, 33–​34 50, 52, 55–​58, 61–​62, 65, 71–​74, 76, 85, 88, 89, 91, 94, 97, 112, 113, 115, 135, 161 Admiral Alfred Mahan 46 aesthetic xiv, 40, 68, 77, 78, 83, 84, 85, 86, 125, 142 Africa 12, 13, 15, 18, 19, 21, 22, 27, 35, 39, 70, 105, 107, 134, 138, 139, 140 Africans 21 North Africa 108 West Africa 39 West Africans 106 African Americans 13, 15, 135 Alaska 46 American Revolution 106 Anastacio “Taso” Ayala 54, 65, 66, 67, 81, 110 Anegada 98 Anguilla 71 Anthony Negrón 102, 103 anti-​colonial  49, 93 anti-​imperialism 50, 52, 55 anti-​militarism  49, 55 anti-​Navy 28, 33, 47, 51, 53, 54, 55, 61, 63, 65, 67, 77, 84, 89, 97, 160 anti-​nuclear proliferation  49

anti-​war movement  49 Antilles 12, 14, 18, 19, 107 Antillean xiv, 18 French Antilles 11 Lesser Antilles 122 Archipelago ix, xiii, xvi, xvii, 1, 3, 4, 7, 40, 46, 98 Archipelagic xiii, 4, 7, 33, 98, 159 Archipelagraphy 7 Caribbean Archipelago 1, 2, 108, 160, 164 Culebra Archipelago 46, 47, 59 Puerto Rico Archipelago 1, 49, 50, 65 Virgin Island Archipelago 1 Armed Services Committee 47, 56 Asociación Manos fuera de Culebra 56 Atlantic 21, 46, 53, 105, 106–​107 Atlantic Fleet 48 Black Atlantic 21, 22, 107 Red Atlantic 107 trans-​Atlantic 21, 39, 109 trans-​Atlantic ships 107, 108, 109 Autoridad de Conservación y Desarrollo de Culebra (ACDEC) 60, 61 Ayala Family Culebra 45 Loíza 152 175

176 Index

baseball 42, 43 beach ix, x, xi, 7, 28, 31, 34, 57, 62, 69, 75, 76, 77, 83, 89, 91, 93, 98, 117, 124 Flamenco Beach x, xi, xv, 57, 59, 60, 62, 65, 83, 85, 91, 94, 97 Soni Beach 39 Tortolos Beach 39 Tamarindo Grande 39 Tamarindo Chico 39 becoming 10, 21, 29, 108, 157 being-​at-​sea  105 Benjamín Pérez 56, 61, 65, 66, 67, 162 better the quality of life 72, 92 bomba and plena 135, 136, 150, 152, 153 bombings ix, x, 28, 40, 42, 44, 47, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 60, 61, 62, 91, 110, 124 Boston 144, 148 Boston Circuit Court 53 Britain 130 British West Indies 130 Budweiser 144 Calypso xiii, 2, 136, 139, 140, 143, 145, 148, 150, 152–​155 Calypsonian 141, 150 Canary Island 35 Caracas 123 Careenage Point 38 Caribbean xiii, xvi, 1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 28, 31, 32, 36, 38, 49, 50, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 81, 90, 92, 94, 105, 106, 107, 124, 130, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 141, 151, 155, 160, 161, 162, 163 Afro-​Caribbean  138 Anglophone Caribbean 9, 25, 73, 140, 150, 164, 166 anthropology of 162 archipelago 1, 2, 108, 160, 164, 108, 160, 164

British Caribbean xiii, xvi, 1, 2, 39, 67, 131, 133, 140, 147, 154, 155 Caribbean subject 14, 15, 16, 20, 23, 24, 25, 39, 65, 140 Caribbeanist xvi, xviii, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 16, 23, 70, 131, 159, 163 Caribbeanness 18 carnival 109, 140, 150 creolisation 17 confederation 19 culture 18, 163 dance 135 Danish Caribbean 1, 67 Dutch Caribbean xiii, xvi, 9, 19, 109 ethnicity 22 experience 18, 105, 106, 159, 163, 164 Francophone Caribbean 9, 19, 25, 67 French Caribbean xiii, xvi, 17, 142 history 16, 31, 69, 70 identity 8, 16, 18, 23, 25, 109, 130, 133, 151, 159 insularity 25 islanders 159 islands xiii, 1, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 24, 34, 48, 62, 127, 129, 130, 138, 139, 142, 161 landscape 69 map 159 migration 3, 11, 15 movements 25, 26 music 29, 129, 131, 133, 134, 140, 142, 149, 154, 155, 156, 157 musicians 135 narrative 16, 23 nation-​building  19 non-​Spanish xiii, 14 north-eastern 62, 98 oil industry 139 pan-​Caribbean 4, 140, 153 plantation 15, 16, 106 policy-​makers  70 poverty 13 practices 26

Index

process 16, 17, 21, 23, 24, 105 race 12, 17 sailing 123 spaces 142 Spanish Caribbean xiii, xvi, 1, 2, 9, 10, 19, 67, 130, 131, 133, 140, 143, 145, 150, 164, 165 social relations 13 society 13, 17, 21, 23, 24, 25, 69, 71, 133 trans-​Caribbean  39 transnationalism 23, 24, 25 tourism 61, 71, 87 visions 74, 157, 164 Caribbean Sea 103, 127 CARICOM 9, 23 Carmelo Delgado Cintrón 36 Carnival 7, 81, 144, 154, 155 British Virgin Islands 144, 145 Caribbean 109 Culebra 145, 149 English Caribbean 140, 147, 150 Puerto Rico 144 St. Thomas xiii, 143, 148, 150, 155, 166 Trinidad and Tobago 139, 140 United States Virgin Islands 144 Catalino “Tite” Curet Alonso 135 cattle 35, 36, 38, 39, 49, 104, 124 Ceiba 47, 58 centre-periphery 3, 24, 74, 161 charanga 136 civil rights 33, 49, 52, 62 Claro Feliciano xv, 34, 36, 41 Coast Guard 124 coastal community 110 coastal gentrification 71, 77, 79, 80, 92, 93 College of Lawyers of Puerto Rico 56 College of Social of Puerto Rico 56 Colombia 38, 46, 130, 135 colonialism xiv, xvi, xvii, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 25, 28, 32, 33, 34, 36, 38, 49, 50, 57, 67, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 78, 79, 80, 86,

177

88, 92, 93, 94, 109, 124, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140, 141, 154, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163 post-​colonial 9, 127, 133, 163 trans-​colonial  1 anti-​colonial  49, 93 combo 135 Comité Pro Rescate y Desarrollo de Culebra (Committee for the Rescue and Development of Culebra) 54, 60, 66 consciousness 37, 38, 102, 162 activist 61 archipelagic 33 Creole 19 double 21, 37 island 31, 32, 38, 52, 55, 61, 105 land-​based  38 musical 129 national xiii political x, 28, 63, 91 social 135, 136, 140 contact 3, 15, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 68, 71, 100, 101, 102, 106, 107, 108, 109, 134, 142, 155, 164 continent xi, xvii, 2, 7, 9, 10, 11, 31, 32, 87, 89, 90, 106, 107, 116, 159, 160, 161 Cortijo y su Combo 135 cosmopolitan xi, xvi, 2, 4, 6, 28, 32, 33, 44, 52, 68, 71, 93, 95, 100, 138, 163, 164 Costa Bonita 85–​88 court case 53, 54, 56, 74, 75, 76, 77, 92, 93, 94 Covington and Burling 55 craft 5, 22, 25, 29, 34, 38, 88, 91, 94, 95, 104, 110, 119, 121, 124, 126, 141, 159, 164 creativity xvii, 2, 4, 5, 6, 12, 17, 20, 22, 26, 29, 33, 71, 104, 106, 121, 122, 124, 126, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 142, 155, 159, 163, 165, 166, 168 creole 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 163 community 20

178 Index

consciousness 19 culture 15, 17, 20, 133 identity 19 language 19, 20 society 3, 20 subject 17, 19, 75 Trinidadian 139 creolisation xvi, 3, 4, 8, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 27, 31, 130, 163 créolité movement 18 Cuba 40, 46, 50, 62, 65, 71, 107, 130, 134, 136 music 134, 135 Revolution 50 Culebra (name of) 34 Culebra History Museum 148 Culebra lighthouse 148 Culebra Municipal Steel Band 149, 150, 151, 166 Culebra Social Club 56 Culebra Tropical Swing 152 cumbia 135, 136 Customs and Immigration Offices 124 dance hall xiii, 144, 157 Danish sailors 110 deer 98, 124, 126 Department of Natural Resources of Puerto Rico (DNR) 60, 61, 75, 76, 77 development programme 73, 76, 77, 81, 84, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 113, 114, 116 debate 73, 74, 92, 116 discourse 116 economic 51, 53, 60, 80, 88, 107 funds 48 infrastructure 28, 45, 66, 72, 82, 84, 88, 89, 93, 161 land 66 projects 5, 67, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 83, 89, 90, 114 policy 72, 73, 81, 89, 116 political 71 Puerto Rico 73, 82, 89, 116, 160

social 138, 160 state-​sponsored  79, 92 sustainable 88, 90, 91 tourism 23, 61, 63, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 77, 80, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 93, 123, 160 Dewey 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 54, 59, 71, 82, 84, 85, 86, 91, 124 dialectical image 6, 7, 68, 72 Diego García 62 dolphins xi, 98 Dolly Camareno 148 Dominican Republic 46, 48, 62, 79, 144 Don Cayetano Escudero 35 dwelling 5, 6, 31, 37, 63, 66, 95 El Cayo 41 embodiment 28, 37, 98, 103, 105, 112, 149 empire (imperialism) 3, 17, 19, 31, 32, 33, 37, 38, 40, 72, 107, 160 empowerment xvi, 59, 80, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90, 92, 107, 117 disempowerment 72, 86, 92 encounter 12, 15, 16, 17, 37, 71, 75, 91, 122, 123 Ensenada Honda (Deep Cove) x, 40, 41, 123 ephemeral 5, 17, 131, 142, 145, 146, 151, 156 essentialism 23, 131 Estudios Técnicos, Inc. 88–​90 ethnomusicology 140 Europe 9, 12, 14, 15, 18, 19, 21, 22, 27, 34, 36, 48, 62, 69, 70, 79, 105, 108, 109, 134, 139, 150, 160, 161 European xi, 12, 13, 15, 69, 70, 73, 78, 92–​93, 106, 108, 134 Fajardo ix, xii, 38 Fania Records 136 feminist movement 49, 162 ferry and cargo service ix, 82, 91, 111

Index

film-​making editing xvii, xviii footage 166, 167 Mangrove Music xvii, xviii, 29, 152, 166 Working the Restless Seas xv Fish and Wildlife Service 60, 61, 97, 115 fishermen xii, 31, 37, 41, 51, 54, 57, 62, 79, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122 Fishermen’s Association xvi, 29, 97, 100, 104, 110, 114, 115, 116, 117, 120, 121, 160 fishing xii, 29, 33, 36, 37, 47, 51, 54, 62, 79, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 151, 162 conspicuous fishing 103 fishing community 104, 109, 112, 113, 116, 121 fishing net xiv mindful fishing 103 over-​fishing 114, 115, 117, 118 SCUBA fishing 100, 101, 121 sub-​aquatic or free diving 101, 103, 104, 121 trap-​fishing 100, 101, 114, 121 Flores Soto 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 105, 110, 111, 112, 113, 124, 161, 162 Florida 79, 91, 117, 118, 119, 143 France 9, 12, 19, 25, 34, 105, 138 Franklyn Delano Rossevelt 46 Ordinance 58 freedom 21, 99, 105, 123 Fundación Culebra, Inc. 148 globalisation xvi, 7, 52, 162 green politics 72 Grenada 19, 62 guaguancó 152 Guam 40, 46 Guantánamo 46

179

guaracha 136 Guatemala 62 habitus 33 Haiti 3, 10, 11, 19, 25, 62 Hamburg, Germany 36, 108 Havana 9, 107 Hawaii 62 hawksbill turtles 97 heterotopia 108, 109 hierarchy 109, 164 Holland 105 Hilary “Baga” Rezende 148 Hurricane Hugo ix, x, xi, 111 Hurricane Marilyn 148 hybrid 4, 129 hybridity 16, 21, 22, 68, 129, 130, 133, 163 identity xvi, xvii, 5, 6, 7, 10, 13, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 32, 74, 132, 133, 135, 138, 159, 161, 162, 163 Afro-​Trinidadian  138 Caribbean 2, 3, 5, 8, 16, 18, 23, 25, 46, 105, 109, 130, 133, 140, 159 créolité 17, 19 Culebra xi, xii, xvi, xvii, 5, 73, 78, 79, 85, 110, 112, 115, 127, 131, 150, 154 culebrense xvi, xvii, 6, 78, 161, 162 cultural 67, 133, 148, 151 fisherman 79, 114, 115, 116, 121 island xiv, 1, 2, 3, 5, 17, 40, 67, 69, 76, 79, 104, 110, 112, 114, 133, 137, 141, 142, 151, 154, 155, 157, 159, 163, 165 Latin America 135 latino 136 music 29, 129, 131, 132, 133, 137, 138, 140, 141, 143, 147, 151, 155, 168 national 19, 26, 130, 136, 137, 138 Nuyorican 136 politics 24, 67, 68, 100, 141, 163 practise-​based  5, 166

180 Index

Puerto Rico xiii, 135, 150, 164 Spanish Caribbean 130 Trinidad and Tobago 138 West Indian 150 image x, 6, 7, 11, 20, 22, 25, 32, 40, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 74, 82, 83, 86, 87, 92, 94, 104, 110, 112, 113, 126, 160, 164 imaginaries 7, 16 improvise 4, 17, 18, 131, 132, 135, 137, 139, 142, 144, 145, 147, 152, 153, 156, 157 individual xii, 5, 6, 14, 22, 38, 58, 72, 78, 79, 91, 93, 104, 109, 114, 121, 122, 125, 127, 132, 148, 151, 159, 162, 163, 164, 168 Industrial Revolution 106 Institute of Puerto Rican Culture 150 instrumentation (musical) 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 141, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150 insular xiv, xvii, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 23, 25, 26, 28, 31, 39, 40, 41, 47, 68, 88, 92, 94, 107, 114, 116, 121, 130, 132, 133, 134, 137, 138, 142, 147, 150, 153, 154, 155, 156, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168 identity xiv, 16, 46, 67, 107, 112, 121, 131, 136, 137, 141, 151, 154, 156, 165 insularism 3, 9, 11, 33, 62, 116, 130, 134 sapce and place 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 12, 14, 15, 23, 72, 73, 74, 78, 107, 142 interaction 7, 10, 15, 17, 18, 21, 22, 26, 31, 43, 106, 107, 133, 134, 135, 141, 150, 156, 163, 164, 166 International Association on the Commissions for Human Rights 56 ironic 16 Ismael Rivera 135

isolation xvi, 4, 13, 37, 90, 105, 109, 164 Iván Romero 72, 73, 77, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 113, 114, 116, 117, 119, 148, 160 Jack Vincent 50, 52 Jamaica xiii, 3, 11, 12, 13, 19, 50, 65, 157 Japan 62, 75, 78 jazz 134, 135, 147, 148 Jerry Massuci 136 Jorge Acevedo 152 José Peñalbert 149, 150, 151 Juan Romero 34 Julio “Yunito” Munet 146, 147, 148, 151 Julio Enrique “Wiki” Munet 151, 152, 153 King and Queen of Spain 35 La Nueva Sonora Culebrense 143, 148 La Sonora Culebrense 143, 144, 145, 146, 151 La Wiki Sound 152, 153, 154, 166, 168 land management 66, 67 landscape x, xiv, 6, 32, 38, 39, 40, 60, 69, 71, 77, 78, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 89, 90, 94, 110, 132, 135, 138, 151, 154, 155, 166 Latin America xiii, 9, 10, 28, 48, 49, 50, 53, 56, 67, 130, 133, 135, 136, 143, 153, 157 leatherback turtles 97 Leeward Islands x, 13, 84, 94, 124 Leopoldo Padrón 41 Lesser Antilles 122 libraries xi, xv, 109 liminal 12, 16, 32, 105 liming 110, 122 Lobos Cay 35 Los Isleños 143, 146, 147, 148, 155 Lourdes Feliciano 111, 113, 118

Index

Luis Ferré 55 Luis Peña Cay 45 Luisita Feliciano 44, 45 mangroves 34, 38, 71, 86, 115, 117, 123, 157 margins x, xvi, 4, 10, 13, 14, 16, 42, 70, 73, 74, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 89, 91, 92, 102, 129, 136, 138, 160 marine life xi, 86, 98, 99, 101, 114, 115, 121 marine reserve 114, 115, 116 Mario Albert 144 maroon 135 Mary Soto 111, 112, 121 matutinos 146, 147, 155 media attention ix, 33, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 60, 77, 81, 83, 130, 134, 154 Mediterranean 62, 106 Mercantile Revolution 106 merengue 136, 143, 145, 154 Miami 123 militarism 5, 28, 31, 34, 49, 52, 61, 62, 166 miscegenation xvi, 14, 16, 70 mobile xiii, xvii, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 33, 38, 39, 40, 62, 68, 72, 74, 94, 105, 107, 126, 133, 137, 141, 142, 147, 151, 155, 156, 159, 160, 161, 163, 165, 166 mobility xiii, xvii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 12, 16, 17, 22, 23, 25, 31, 37, 53, 62, 71, 90, 132, 133, 143, 150, 153, 156, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168 modernity xvi, 6, 7, 12, 21, 22, 62, 70, 73, 74, 83, 89, 91, 99, 106, 107, 109, 126 Moko Jombes 148 montage 6, 32, 165, 168 Mr. Stephens 34 multiple signifier 32 museums xviii, 91, 109, 148 music xii, xiii, xvii, 2, 5, 20, 29, 43, 87, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 136,

181

137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 148, 149, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 160, 161, 166, 168 Caribbean 29, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 140, 142, 153, 155, 156, 157 consciousness 129 Cuban 134 Culebra 29, 129, 130, 131, 132, 141, 142, 145, 147, 154, 155, 156, 161, 168 establishment 129 ethnomusicology 140, 157 identity 2, 29, 129, 131, 132, 133, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 147, 151, 155, 168 industry 130, 132, 133 infrastructure 29, 129, 130 instrument 130, 131, 137 insular 130, 132, 134, 155 island 29, 129, 160 musical landscape 132, 133, 151, 155 musicians 29, 121, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 166, 168 Puerto Rican 43, 132, 135, 145, 146, 154, 155 steeldrum 129, 133, 149, 154, 155 tradition 135, 161 Trinidadian 138 Virgin Island 154, 155 West Indian 141 nation 2, 3, 10, 14, 16, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 67, 73, 74, 81, 82, 106, 107, 124, 127, 130, 165 Afro-​Caribbean  138 agenda 81, 105, 107, 108 awakening 19 Caribbean 151, 155, 163 consciousness xiii culture 19 defence 55 economy 70, 162 elite 107

182 Index

European 108, 160 flag 107 fragmentation 124 government 82 identity 14, 19, 26, 130, 136, 137, 138, 162 law 108 liberation 33, 49, 50, 52, 62, 72 methodological nationalism 7 movement 133 music 129, 142, 155 nationalisation 20 nationalism 22, 26, 72, 76, 80, 129, 136 nationalist xiii, 5, 20, 29, 33, 52, 55, 80, 93, 98, 106, 109, 140, 162 nationality 108 nation-​building 3, 19, 81, 130, 132, 133, 134, 138, 140, 141 nation-​hood  69 party politics 123 policy 108 Puerto Rico 46, 67, 74, 76, 77, 81, 84, 132, 135, 137, 150, 151, 154, 161162, 164, 165 security 53 space 44, 123, 141 Spain xiii, 105 subject 3 symbol 140 Trinidad and Tobago 138, 140, 141 NATO 28, 53, 62 network of relations xvii, 31, 32, 62, 67, 85, 94, 131, 132, 164 Nevis 35 New York City 56, 134, 135, 136 Nicaragua 62 noble savage 70, 90, 92 North Africa 35, 108 North Americans xi, 9, 70, 73, 75, 78 Nuyorican 136 ocean 7, 8, 10, 21, 22, 28, 46, 92, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105, 106, 107, 116, 117, 121, 124, 126

Atlantic Ocean 106 Pacific Ocean 46 pan-​Caribbean 4, 140, 153 Panama 11, 46, 62, 119 Panama Canal 46 Panorama 150 parody 108, 157 parranda 146 Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño (PIP) 81 Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP) 80, 81, 82, 93 Partido Popular Democrático (PPD) 80, 81, 82 Passage Island 34, 35 Paul Franklin 74, 75, 76, 92, 93, 94, 123 Pedro Marques 38 People’s National Movement (PNM) 140 Pepe Santana 41, 42 Peruvian silver 107 Philadelphia 45 Philippines 35, 40, 41, 46, 62 plantation 4, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 31, 36, 69, 70, 106, 133 plurality 6, 137, 163 politics of representation 61, 124, 125 polyphony 132 Port Authority of Puerto Rico 91, 111 Portugal 105, 108 post-​Navy 61, 63, 66, 69, 80 poverty 13, 74, 77, 82, 83, 84, 90, 136 Proyección 70 56 Puerto Rican Nationalist Party 57 Puerto Rico ix, x, xii, xiii, xiv, 1, 2, 11, 26, 27, 34, 36, 38, 39, 43, 46, 47, 56, 62, 93, 94, 98, 107, 111, 115, 116, 118, 120, 135, 137, 141, 143, 144, 149, 152, 154, 164, 165 constitution 49 development 45, 73, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 90, 92, 160 Free Associated State 27, 71, 80

Index

government 27, 35, 41, 42, 51, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 78, 82, 150 identity xiii, 25, 129, 150 music 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 145, 148, 149, 151, 153, 154 nation-​state  81 political parties 80–​81 relationship with Culebra 38, 63, 67, 73, 82, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 93, 161 relationship with USA xiii, xiv, 25, 27, 28, 40, 248, 50, 53, 67, 71, 73, 78, 79, 93, 94, 100, 130, 136, 137, 144 Resident Commisioner 59 Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration 45 race xvi, 5, 8, 13, 14, 15, 17, 22, 70, 159, 162, 165 Rafael Hernández Colón 57, 59 Rafael Mercado 136 Ramón “Monchín” Feliciano 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 66, 73, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 110, 111, 113, 118 Ramón “Papo” Gómez 148, 149, 150, 151 rancheras 145 Rastafarian 157 rayo tree 39 reef ix, 62, 71, 91, 98, 115, 117 Reggae xiii, 154, 157 repetition 156, 157 rhizome 10, 16, 31, 62, 157 Richard Copaken 48, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60 Richard Nixon 33, 55, 57, 58 RMM 136 Robert F. Kennedy 53 Roosevelt Roads 47, 59 Rubén Munet 151, 152, 153 sail boats x, 36, 37, 99, 107, 122, 123, 124, 155 Ala Blanca 38 Arethusa 38

183

Dolorito 38 The Alliance 42 Peoria 38 salsa 2, 129, 130, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 140, 143, 152, 153, 154 samba 152, 153 Samoa 46 San Ildefonso de la Culebra 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 60 San Juan, Puerto Rico ix, x, xi, 9, 35, 59, 83, 86, 90, 91, 107 SCUBA xi, 91, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 121 Sea Grant xvi, 117 seascape 60, 114, 120, 126 seasickness 99, 100, 122 serenades 146 settlement 11, 24, 35, 36, 38, 39, 42, 48, 124 Seville 107, 108 shark xi, 98, 118 slavery 15, 23, 69 Snapperfarm 117, 118, 119, 120, 160 soca 143, 145, 150, 152, 153 Socialist Party of Puerto Rico 57 Spain xiii, 14, 33, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 97, 105, 107, 108, 138 squatters 28, 36, 53, 60, 78 St. Croix xiii, 27, 34, 39, 45, 98, 143, 148 St. Thomas xiii, xiv, xvii, xviii, 27, 34, 36, 39, 41, 45, 51, 66, 67, 84, 87, 91, 97, 98, 111, 124, 143, 144, 145, 148, 150, 155, 166 steel drum 129, 130, 133, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 154, 155 struggle ix, x, 5, 24, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 52, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 80, 84, 92, 94, 95, 106, 110, 111, 120, 121, 136, 159 SubComité Pro Liberación de Culebra 56 swimming 37, 76, 98 syncopation 137, 143, 145, 148, 150

184 Index

Tamara Pérez 46 tamboo bamboo 138 The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) 57, 59, 162 Third World xvi, 49, 70 Tito Puente 134 Tito Rodríguez 135 Tomás Ayala 43 Tortola 39, 98 total institution 13 tourism 68, 69, 71, 72, 82, 84, 85, 87, 91, 162 campaign 69 Caribbean 71 debate 67, 68, 73, 74, 162 development 23, 28, 39, 61, 67, 70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 80, 84, 85, 88, 89, 123, 160 economy 104, 111 eco-​tourism 67, 84, 88, 89, 90, 91, 117 entrepreneurship 61 mass 81, 86, 91 policy 68 promotion 69 publications 69 transculturation 3, 16, 21, 129, 130, 133 transients xiv, 6, 31, 32, 68 transinsular xvii, xviii, 3, 4, 5, 29, 33, 52, 61, 62, 67, 80, 90, 92, 94, 98, 129, 131, 138, 142, 161, 163, 164 transnational xiii, 2, 3, 8, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 31, 32, 33, 62, 66, 67, 68, 71, 72, 88, 106, 120, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 141, 144, 163, 165 Treaty of Paris 40, 41, 56, 94 Trinidad & Tobago 11, 19, 48, 50, 130, 133, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 150, 151 turtle conch 36, 42 ubiquity 125, 126 ultimatum to the US Navy 54 United Nations 56 United States xiii, 1, 2, 9, 22, 25, 27, 28, 33, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 49, 50, 53, 54, 56, 57, 67, 69, 71, 72, 79, 80, 81,

82, 90, 92, 94, 118, 130, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 155, 161, 165 Congress 27, 33, 49, 53, 55, 56, 58, 71, 80 Department of the Interior 56, 60 media 33 military ix, x, 33, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 62, 78, 107, 110, 139, 149, 160 Navy ix, x, 28, 33, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 69, 71, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 84, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 110, 111, 124, 126, 160, 161, 162 Pentagon 56 University of Florida 117 University of Puerto Rico xi, xiv, 117, 162 vallenato 135, 136 Venezuela 38, 48, 130, 135, 138, 139 Victor Felix “Cucuito” Munet 143, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, 152, 155 Vieques xii, 1, 26, 34, 36, 38, 39, 44, 45, 58, 60, 63, 81, 98, 111, 115, 143, 145 Vietnam 50, 53 Virgin Islands xiii, xiv, 1, 2, 11, 27, 28, 34, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 59, 69, 79, 84, 87, 94, 97, 98, 115, 122, 124, 141, 143, 144, 145, 148, 149, 150, 151, 154, 155, 161, 164, 165, 167 Vittoria 55 Vrigin Gorda 98 Washington DC 53, 55, 56, 57, 94 West Africa 39, 106 West Indies 4, 79, 84, 85, 130, 135, 140 Western European 27, 160 Westerners 66, 73, 74, 75, 79, 80, 108 Wet Indies 4, 79, 84, 85, 130, 135, 140 Williams, Dr. Eric 140, 1​ 41