Ethnography of the status question and everyday politics in Puerto Rico
View/ Open
Date
30/06/2015Author
Ellis, Christopher David
Metadata
Abstract
This thesis is about the power of political elites to establish the
framework of political discourse, and to thereby control political power, in
Puerto Rico. The Puerto Rican 'status question' - the debate about the island's
ultimate juridical and political relationship with the United States and the rest
of the world – is considered a manifestation of such power. Formal domestic
politics in Puerto Rico is structured around three party political desires for an
uncertain and unknowable postcolonial future, and not around any set of
distinctive ideological positions for engaging with political issues in the present.
An unresolved question of nationalism and state building therefore becomes the
structural filter through which all politics must necessarily pass. Inspired by
the concept of hegemony, the thesis is firstly interested in how political elites
exercise power to establish status as the framework for domestic political
discourse. Secondly, and more importantly, it is interested in how this
framework is reinforced, modified, resisted and even overcome through elite
exercises of power in concrete political settings.
The thesis takes a particular focus on the relationship between status
positions and everyday political practices in three Puerto Rican municipalities:
Guaynabo, Caguas and Lares. The author arrived at this focus through an
ethnographic engagement with the field that was made possible by his research
positionality as a white British outsider to Puerto Rico. The thesis tells the story
of the nuanced ways in which local political elites engage with the status
question through practices of politics on the ground. Elite performances of local
state power do not straightforwardly reproduce the hegemony of status, but
rather, create a more complicated empirical terrain of contradictory,
unexpected and subversive effects.
In certain places, everyday practices of municipal politics appear to
reflect the intractable entanglement of local priorities and centrally prescribed
status positions. In others, politics gets done in ways that leave the status
question behind, creating effects that include city-state sovereignty, elevated
standards of living, non-nationalist forms of politics, and non-state-centric
possibilities for decolonisation. Ironically, therefore, a political system that is so
profoundly shaped by discourses of nationalism and state building is disrupted
in practice by some of the very actors who help to give the system this shape.
These findings contribute to critical geographies of the Caribbean and to recent
debates on politics, power and decolonisation in Puerto Rico.