Description: In this bold social history, Lillian Guerra explores the nature of popular-class and elite political consciousness in Puerto Rico from 1889 to 1940, the period when North American colonialism was taking shape. Through the prisms of gender, race, and class she analyzes the folk sayings of subalterns in tandem with the literary production of the intelligentsia, producing a mosaic of debate, dissent, and affirmation regarding Puerto Rican identity.

The book focuses on two sources of intellectual and creative expression -- a vast and largely unstudied collection of folk tales, songs, and riddles (the 1914 Mason collection) and the essayist movement (including writers such as Antonia Pedreira, Miguel Melendez Munoz, and Luis Munoz Marin), which appropriated the figure of the Puerto Rican peasant as a symbol of national identity. From these sources Guerra mines a spectrum of opinions and beliefs about the world of the popular classes and she demonstrates that their songs, word-play, and narrative expression formed the nexus for engagement with the elite. What results is an image of the Puerto Rican peasant that works both against and in collusion with elite society.

Guerra's conclusions about class struggle for identity under North American imperialism challenge readers to compare the historical case of Puerto Rico with other colonial cases, not just in the Caribbean but throughout the Americas.

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