Anemia and Vampires: Figures to Govern the Colony, Puerto Rico, 1880 to 1904

Abstract

In order to become the governing authority of the emerging Puerto Rican nation before the invasion of the United States in 1898, a group of letrados constructed the phantasm of a coherent and integrated national Self by excluding a phantasmagoric Other (such as the infirm Puerto Rican iíbaro).The reader will remember that, unlike the majority of Latin America, Puerto Rico was not an independent republic by the end of the nineteenth century but remained a Spanish colony. I borrow the term letrado from Angel Rama. He uses it to describe not only a class of cultured intellectuals but also a particular type of colonized consciousness that accepts the arbitrariness of the connection and, therefore, the implied rupture between signs and referents. A close examination of the works by members of this educated elite makes apparent the complexity of the dynamic between discourses of the Self and the Other that sustains this act of empowerment, as well as acts of empowerment similar to this one.