Long before the ice-cream man comes down the block (twice a day) you can hear his truck playing Brahms’s “Lullaby” over the loudspeaker, and after he is gone, the sweet and gluey tones (a little like the tasteless local ice cream itself) still linger maddeningly on the air. Over and over and over, the music box repeats the treacly phrase—tum-te-tum, tum-te-tum, tum-te-tum tum tum tum!—and you think, probably that’s what Chinese water torture used to be like, used to be like, only you didn’t think it would come to the cadence of Brahms’s “Lullaby”! But finally he takes himself down the street of identical pink and blue stucco houses, and the nothingness of the long day takes over.

Time is longer here than elsewhere; the day begins early, as it does in all the hot Latin countries; at 7 A.M. people are already walking across the garbage-strewn fields next to our house that are a short cut to the 65th Infantry Road, the highway to the airport; they are beginning to lay out streets on these fields; soon there will be more identical pink and blue stucco houses; the men are already at work. And already it’s hot: the even late summer heat of Puerto Rico that before noon clamps you around the back and chest, and that will go on all day and late into the evening, interrupted only by the sudden rains that stop as quickly as they come, and that end always in the same heavy clamping late-summer heat.

The day begins early and it begins indistinguishably from the rest of the day and from all the other days. Across the empty fields back of street number 1, house number 14 (there are so many new developments in Puerto Rico that they no longer bother to give names to such streets), the brown-faced men and women are already going to work, and as you look at the faces, the curious stillness is already on them—the stillness that always seems inertness in the presence of the “continental,” the “American,” the stillness that in my students at the University I can no longer tell from a deeply resistant shyness. “Feed my Iambs.” . . . There is a lamb in the official seal of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and in truth these people are lamblike. We laugh when an outbreak of rapings in Santurce calls out headlines in the Island Times: “New York-Type Gangs”; but as they say, there was no such violence here until Puerto Ricans came back to the Island. I believe them, for their famous docility (which can also be interpreted as the apathy of tropical countries and the Step’n Fetchit sloth in the presence of Americans barking questions in the language they do not know and no longer even pretend to know) shows itself all day long and every day in a variety of silences and withdrawals. Even on the road—and they are the most erratic drivers in the world, with a sickening record of accidents—they will commit every fault but that of excessive speed. They drive, in fact, as if they were on muleback; they drive en famille, arms perpetually hanging out of the car, talking and eating as if they were home; but they are not aggressive. They are used to waiting on life, waiting on other people; they are used to taking orders; they are “sensitive” beyond endurance, but not stormy. The long long hot day long ago took them over, and the sudden rainstorms—to say nothing of the Spanish generals, the Spanish bishops, the Spanish slave owners and feudal owners, and now. . . . And now the bishops are still never Puerto Ricans but are American Irish, and the girl behind the automatic cash register at the super-mercado (run by Grand Union, development by Laurance Rockefeller) may not speak English but she has learned to say “okay, you bet, next aisle, please,” and my lambs are reading Emerson and Thoreau, you bet! “In transcendentalism is implied that there is knowledge of transcendental elements. In these three passages are implied in the following way: Emerson: During these days the people is getting rid of the traditional feelings. . . .”

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Are they “docile” because someone has always taken them over—or are they just docile? To me they are the waifs and wards of big power politics, the submerged colonial mass incarnate, the emerging masses in Africa and South America and the East Indies—the mass just getting itself up through the crust of poverty, racism, and the bush, and which, as it gets up, is immediately handed a television program and a subscription to Confidential. The Puerto Ricans are always being reformed, educated, studied, analyzed, worked on, “developed” by others. Just now they are being worked on by the most intelligent and social-minded administration in Latin America, and thanks to the massive infusion of American capital and the rapid industrialization of the island, Puerto Rico is now the most prosperous and fastest growing economy in this area. But as I see from the complaints of Puerto Rican students who have been to the States, they are very quick to suspect, to misunderstand, to be hurt—and somehow I hear from them more of what they have suffered from Americans than of what they think of Americans. It must be this passivity that explains the hilarious number of anthropologists and sociologists forever prowling this island. I am told that there is still no really good history of Puerto Rico. But let a young American loose with a foundation grant and a manual of behavior patterns, and he doesn’t need to know any history, for he can always look into breast-feeding patterns in the purely Negro areas, or study spiritualism.

It’s all such a gold mine, either for the American sociologist or the American chain store; two and a half million Puerto Ricans waiting to get into Woolworth’s, Franklin’s, Kresge’s, Grand Union, and as they wait, they can get their resources counted and their “patterns” studied. They won’t object: why should they? The boy who stands all day long outside the big hotel on the Avenida Norte trying to get rid of the few coconuts he brought down this morning will before long move into the hotel and learn to serve ten different kinds of rum drinks to the alrightniks in the swimming pool—and he will still have the same far, faraway look on his face. The alrightniks will never see him, any more than they see his cousins and brothers in New York; and truth to tell, he doesn’t have the information and undoubtedly lacks the curiosity with which to see them. The Puerto Ricans live on an island in every sense of the word: they are here, and their minds don’t roam around much. Talking with university students about American writers, I have been struck by their refusal to visualize New England landscape or wintry weather. It’s not simply that they haven’t seen snow: neither had the young heroine of Carson McCullers’ novel who so longed to see some. It’s that they are here and cannot easily imagine anything too different from their island, their town. For centuries they were wrapped round in the torpor of the Spanish Empire, and their island was never of major significance to the Spaniards themselves. Puerto Rico was largely the taking-off place for Spain, the “rich port,” in which anchored the galleons bearing the gold back to Spain from Mexico, a last place to which Spanish royal troops retreated from South America after losing to Bolivar.

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Richard Morse, head of the institute at the University for regional studies of the Caribbean, has written a paper on “The Deceptive Transformation of Puerto Rico” in which he points out that there was less transplantation of Spanish society here than anywhere else in Latin America. This explains why even the most ignorant foreigner somehow senses the lack of any real cultural tradition here, of any firm national identity. Not only was there no strongly organized society here under the Spaniards, says Morse, but Puerto Rico even lacked the spontaneous spirit of organization and economic thrift which produces a flourishing class of independent farmers. No wonder that there have been no real group identities here for the sociologists to seize on, not enough “rituals of celebration”: even Catholicism has never been an all-dominating cultural force here, for the Spanish priests were always regarded as agents of Madrid, and evangelical Protestantism has taken hold here as it has nowhere else in Latin America. Morse believes that the island itself has always been passive to history, that it has usually been subject to violence from without, whether by hurricanes or buccaneers or French, British, or Dutch invaders. It has always depended for its sustenance and progress upon more highly organized institutions and societies abroad, and even in the heyday of the Spanish Empire depended on a periodic financial subsidy from vice-regal Mexico (the famous situado), on contraband trade with European ships and with the plantation islands of the lesser Antilles. Now it depends on the skills, capital, and industrializing organization of the United States.

Morse’s paper, which I discovered thanks to sarcastic comments on it by a columnist in the Island Times, explains a good deal of what troubles me about Puerto Ricans—as much here as in the United States. If there is no strong local tradition on the part of migrating groups, if there is no articulated and positive ideal in their own history for which they seek expression and fulfillment in the new country—as was true of the Irish with their longing for political emancipation and religious tolerance, of the German democrats and liberals who loved the republican idea, of the land-hungry Italian peasants and the oppressed East European Jews—then it follows that some of these “newcomers,” as Oscar Handlin calls them, will not consciously seek any real attachment with American culture. Handlin thinks that for Puerto Ricans the “break of migration” is not “as sharp as it had been for Europeans. . . . Such newcomers did not feel the complete and total sense of foreignness that overwhelmed the European immigrants, and, therefore, did not feel called upon to create the institutions which were the response to the shock of separation.” But in Puerto Rico itself one discovers on every hand that these cultural institutions have never existed, and so cannot arbitrarily be created in New York. As many a schoolteacher in East Harlem has learned, Puerto Rican kids are often as illiterate in Spanish as they remain in English; and judging from the frenzied missionary effort of the Catholic church to reclaim Puerto Ricans in New York for the faith, they often arrive without any real religious traditions at all. Handlin thinks that Puerto Ricans have a sense of connectedness with the United States because they are already American citizens. But I think that it is because citizenship has simply been granted en bloc, because they have not had to earn it as a voluntary and individual act, that they lack connectedness with the United States and even with its language. During the Korean war many Puerto Ricans in the American forces were killed, Dan Wakefield says in Island in the City, almost as a direct result of not knowing English, and he suggests that the American army was at fault at not assigning these troops to officers who could give orders in Spanish. But it must be a powerful feeling of separation from the United States that will keep a soldier from learning enough English to keep himself alive, as so many refugees did. And lecturing in English here in Puerto Rico, I can testify that this feeling of separation exists; I have taught American literature all over Western Europe, but have never had such trouble communicating with my students as I do here. The United States figures here simply as Big Brother, and my boys and girls don’t quite believe in what I am saying—or in its possible relevance to them. The more prosperous ones do, of the class from which Jose Ferrer came. In 1949, when Ferrer was given the medal of the National Academy of Arts and Letters for the best diction by any actor on the American stage, I heard him deliver a bitter and powerful attack on intolerance against Puerto Ricans, and truly, his diction was beautiful. But his complaints against the inhumanity of the city don’t help me much when I go over a page of Thoreau or Melville with my students. I have never cared for the humor of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*PL*A*N, but he tried, didn’t he? Yes, yes, my students try, too, and the babble from the speech clinic is all around me as I teach. But let us say that they try without hope; they don’t really believe, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once said of his German-born father, that being an American citizen seemed to him the greatest privilege in the world. And why don’t they believe it? Because individuals among them are treated with disrespect, as are individuals among Negroes, Italians, Jews, California-born Japanese? It is because they see themselves as wards of the state, as colonials, not as immigrants; it is because they are “associated” with the United States, not attached to it. They are in no position to see what they can make of the United States; they are in positions only to suffer from it.

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Historically, the great achievement of the United States as a civilization has been its creation not of a tradition but of a promise; it has been extraordinary in its ability to suggest to all peoples the fulfillment of their particular hopes. If anything, it has promised the fulfillment of too many: this is why immigrants jokingly curse Columbus, for having prepared the frustration with the promise. There is a kind of bitterness about America which is the other side of the universal and infinite hopes connected with it. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said, France was a land and England a people, but America, “having about it still that quality of the idea, [is] harder to utter.” Even Mark Twain, who like all his generation in the West was an immigrant from a fabulous natural world to the era of Mark Hanna and Rockefeller, spoke like an immigrant when he said crossly that wonderful as it was to discover America, it would have been more wonderful to lose it. No country can disappoint like America, for no other country has aroused so many hopes. But such hopes can arise only from an identity of one’s own and a specific tradition sharp enough to arouse the possibility of its fulfillment in this country. Otherwise there is no spiritual marriage at all between America and its newcomers, and the great epic of immigration simply becomes a picture of the lesser breeds attached to the white Protestant majority.

Richard Morse says that the essential lack of direction behind the “spillage” of American capital and techniques into Puerto Rico has merely perpetuated and deepened the instability of the Puerto Ricans, and that the industrial boom has significantly lacked any counterpart in agriculture or education or city planning. Now “the hard shell of top-level technocrats covers an underbody of soft institutions.” Needless to say, Governor Muñoz Marín is worried about this situation, and now that massive industrialization, “Operation Bootstrap,” is so brilliantly under way, he has called for “Operation Serenity,” for a massive cultural and spiritual effort to close up the gap behind Puerto Rico’s industrial progress. If Puerto Rico is “the Formosa of the New Dealers,” Muñoz Marín—and his equally brilliant wife—are certainly not the Chiang Kai-sheks. Muñoz Marín’s salary is astonishingly modest; he has refused pay increases, and he is as imaginative and dedicated to the welfare of his people as an administrator can be. The United States would be fortunate indeed if it were led with half as much imagination and eloquence as Puerto Rico is by the present commonwealth government. But in Puerto Rico all such operations, whether toward industrialization or “serenity,” seem to percolate downward; and Luis Muñoz Marín, with his warm heart and his quick brain, is still in the tradition of a famous father and of the Puerto Rican intellectual elite, a teacher and reformer from the governor’s palace. And because he represents so much of what is best in the American Democratic party, New Deal wing, his friends worry over what may happen to Puerto Rico in Washington—where its fate has so often been decided—if the Republicans, some of whose leaders have repeatedly expressed their contempt for Puerto Rico and all its works, win again in 1960.

When a people has never had a chance to work out a deep national identity of its own, when its experience has fundamentally been that of dependency, when even in its religious practice it shows an inner mutinousness against the beliefs imposed by the conqueror—then it must seek in external political solutions at least the sign of the independence and unity it has lacked in the past. Whether under the Spaniards or under the Americans, the Puerto Ricans have always debated the same problem—whether to be “associated” with the larger country, or to be independent of it, or to become directly part of it. The Puerto Ricans were granted autonomy within the Spanish Empire just as the Spanish-American war broke out. Since this was followed by American domination of the island, Puerto Ricans think that the everlasting problem of their political status might have been solved if it had not been for the war of 1898. But even if one grants the closer ties to Spain, it is obvious, from the continued restiveness of the Puerto Ricans under commonwealth status and a native administration, that Muñoz Marín’s hope—to deflect the agitation for purely formal solutions into a massive effort to raise living standards—has in the first respect not succeeded. The Puerto Ricans are very busy debating statehood versus commonwealth status, and there is still a core of intellectuals with strong faith in Puerto Rico’s national culture who are simply for independence, while the hard-bitten extremists who tried to kill Truman and shot up Congress are still represented by the Nationalist party. Muñoz Marín, who was once simply for independence and now of course strongly backs commonwealth status, tried to detour the statehood movement by coming up with a new formula: there would be time to consider statehood only when the per capita wealth of the islanders reached that of the poorest state in the union (Mississippi); it was calculated that this would happen in the 1990’s. Without directly opposing statehood, Muñoz Marín managed to give the procommonwealth forces a handle against it, and the next day the New York Times editorially applauded Muñoz Marín for his brilliant and thoughtful solution. But while the Times drew a sigh of obvious relief at being able to put the problem off for thirty years, at least a few Puerto Rican intellectuals pointed out that even considering statehood wholly in economic terms was distinctly not complimentary to the United States.

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The demand for statehood is probably strongest in the prospering new middle class. Now that they travel like Americans between San Juan and New York, or gaily study psychoanalysis in Iowa City and the theater arts in Dallas (unlike the poorer and darker-skinned Puerto Ricans, who arrive on the hideous economy flight that seems to be the airlines’ effort to duplicate the steerage in mid-air), many businessmen and doctors and lawyers are all for statehood, and you can see in the rear windows of the newer and bigger cars stickers asking for admission of Puerto Rico as the fifty-first state. But obviously statehood is spiritually inconceivable to Governor Muñoz Marín—and many Puerto Ricans—and how else should it be? They are Latin Americans; their language is Spanish; and Governor Muñoz Marín, one of the principal advisers to Washington on Latin American policy, is, as head of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, a far more dignified and significant figure than he would be as head of just another American state. Understandably, since by now many Puerto Ricans feel closer to the elites on the mainland than they do to the peasants in the hills, statehood promises more secure personal status. So with one thing and another, the everlasting argument about what Puerto Rico is to be still boils over. And how it fascinates and enthralls! How many stickers in the back of how many cars! What endless excitement! Like the Russians of the 19th century debating Slavophil against Westerner, the Puerto Rican may yet discover that debates about which culture to join up with are a symbol of national powerlessness. But in Puerto Rico these debates cannot conceal the fact that there is no positive, rich, and glowing national past either to save from the Americans or to affiliate with them.

And to make the situation even drearier, the American businessmen and technical experts and supermarket designers who in typical American fashion have “expertise” without culture, who no longer have any intellectual convictions of their own with which they can either challenge, or adopt, or reject the culture of others, are now all “liberals” to a man, sympathetic to Puerto Rico as a matter of course, and sit around the bars discussing affiliation versus independence as if this gummy question were one that they could answer. If ever proof were needed that Americans do not have enough pride and self-knowledge even to think of themselves as “imperialist” custodians of the “lesser breeds,” it can be found in Puerto Rico. The manager of a soft-drink company told me that he thought the United States should “hold on” to the island, whatever the cost to us, only in order to show the world how beneficent and richly devoted to the welfare of other peoples we can be. This would show up Russia in the eyes of the world and give us a higher score in the cold war. Most of the Americans I meet here don’t even think of themselves as “holding on” to Puerto Rico. The intellectuals at the University, many of whom came expecting a breath of Latin culture, a whiff of the mother continent, by now either feel like Puerto Ricans or just feel sorry for them; whereas the technical experts, the airlines personnel, and the journalists find it all too easy not to think beyond their jobs. This in part I can understand, since the heat, the perpetual need of a lift, the lack of the more oppressive stateside taxes on liquor and the bathfuls constantly being flown in from the free ports of the Virgin Islands—to say nothing of the fact that you can conveniently buy your liquor in the supermercado and that the rum is cheap and the local beer excellent—make this place a perpetual New Year’s Eve party. The swimming pool is never far from the bar, and all you need to cover your nakedness is a credit card.

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Of course there are other Americans who do not drink at all. There is a whole group of evangelical young American physicians who have given up big incomes in the United States to build up medical stations like Castaner, in the middle of the island—which can be reached only by mountain roads so winding that people in small cars often take dramamine. And there are young writers and artists at the university in Rio Piedras who are there out of a deep interest in Hispanic culture, who know their Lorca and their Machado as well as they know their Hart Crane, and so are not as homesick as I am when I read my students’ papers on The Great Gatsby. They do not believe in the press-agent talk of Puerto Rico as a “hybrid” of two cultures; they are there for the Spanish, like the wonderful Spanish Loyalist scholars you run into at the University. But between the young American officers here and in the Virgin Islands, who like the medical scientists here seem virtually the last Americans with a keen professional edge to their lives, there is a whole group of Americans who have come here in flight: from broken marriages, from the lifelong stigma of having once belonged to the Communist party, from . . . the difficulties and pains of not being better than they are. An American Somerset Maugham could do a picturesque novel on the drifters, the ex-radicals, the drunks, the queers, the invalids seeking the sun, the missionaries, the Southern crackers who have gravitated here as a matter of course and interestingly have learned to be civil to their Negro neighbors. And what I mind most about Puerto Rico is not that this island absorbs so many Americans, but that it enervates them, gives them no mark to shoot at, nothing hard, clear, perfect of its kind to be equal to. The torpidity I mind as I mind it anywhere, whether in Latin America or in those parts of the United States where insularism makes itself felt, sooner or later, in the same peculiarly thin, two-dimensional quality of a society wholly “modern,” without tradition and without ideas. The Spanish Republicans in Puerto Rico do not have this peculiar sensitiveness without pride, this readiness to take offense from a stranger; the Englishwoman at the University speech clinic, who has spent much of her life teaching Latin Americans, does not have it. But with Puerto Ricans one always finds oneself discussing their feelings and their sufferings, never their ideas and their hopes.

And so history always repeats itself here as the sterile tale of the bigger nation and its Puerto Rican victim. Unfortunately, there is not as much time left for Puerto Ricans as there used to be, for as everything moves faster and faster even as the subject nations and peoples come forward, there is barely a chance to make up for the centuries of intellectual numbness before the smoothing out process of mass culture takes over. Independence will not create in Puerto Ricans the past they lack; statehood, should it ever be granted, will not automatically create the self-respect they seek; the present commonwealth status of “association” will continue to symbolize the uneasiness that must persist so long as the people do not know what to hope for—or the direction from which their hope is to come.

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