Abolition and Performance in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean: An Interview with Andrea Morales Loucil
In today’s post, Ashley Everson, a managing editor of Global Black Thought (the official journal of AAIHS), interviews Andrea Morales Loucil about her new article, “El Hijo del Amor: Abolition and Performance in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean.” It interrogates how the mixed-race Puerto Rican playwright and politician Ramón Marín y Solá (1833-1902) drew from his lived experience in his work to advocate for racial equality. A microhistorical account of the Marín y Solá family’s intergenerational changes of status elucidates how state-sanctioned whitening projects under Spanish colonial rule prompted shifting racial categorizations that facilitated their socio-racial ascent into whiteness. Ordinances such as the Decree of Graces of 1815 encouraged European immigration to Spain’s Caribbean colonies in efforts to mollify possible insurrections led by enslaved people. Likewise, policies such as the Código Negro and Bando Contra la Raza Africana in the 1840s revealed how white anxieties about the Haitian Revolution fueled the increasingly hostile persecution of Afro-Puerto Ricans. The article argues that the benefits given to people of African descent who garnered intergenerational proximity to whiteness ultimately cemented Puerto Rico’s socio-racial hierarchy through overt and covert manifestations of racialized violence.
Andrea Morales Loucil is a cultural historian and literary scholar from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, focusing on nation-building movements, race-making processes, and revolutionary poetics of the Caribbean. In 2020, she received her B.A. in History from Temple University after transferring from the University of Puerto Rico: Mayagüez. During her studies, she became interested in how literature shaped cultural narratives of nationality and its ability to capture the aura of revolution in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. Her Master’s thesis at the Miami University of Ohio was completed in 2022 and explored mixed-race Creoles’ navigations of the Spanish Caribbean’s racial politics. She is currently a Gates-Cambridge scholar at King’s College researching how Puerto Ricans of African descent used poetry to contest anti-Black cultural narratives, forged transnational bonds of Afro-diasporic solidarity, and pursued Cuban and Puerto Rican independence.
Ashley Everson (AE): El Hijo del Amor debuted in the Perla Theater in Ponce, which you describe as “a site of both neoclassical grandeur” (322) and, simultaneously, political ferment. How does the theater itself—as an architectural landmark and a cosmopolitan hub for abolitionist and anticolonial movements—shape the meaning of the play? Do you see performance venues as part of the racial and political negotiations you trace?
Andrea Morales Loucil (AML): La Perla’s significance as an architectural landmark and cosmopolitan hub for abolitionist and anticolonial movements shines a light into how Puerto Ricans of African descent could use their proximity to whiteness as leverage to subvert mechanisms of oppression. While there are playhouses that predate La Perla, such as the Tapia Theater in San Juan that was built in 1824, La Perla was a monument to the economic and political power that Ponce’s Creole elite harnessed. As a proxy capital in relation to San Juan, Creole elites in Ponce sought to emphasize their socio-political prowess by commissioning a monument that reflected their ability to rival even the highest echelons of society in Europe and the Americas. Most significantly, La Perla was a testament to the wealth that Ponce’s plantocracy extracted from the merciless exploitation of enslaved people in the surrounding sugarcane fields and coffee plantations. Further, as Ponce operated as a proxy capital to San Juan, La Perla also illustrated that Ponce’s white Creole elite wanted for not and forged their own respective sense of metropolitanism and cosmopolitanism. Under the initiative of the prominent enslaver Francisco Parra de Duperón and Pedro Garriga, enslaved labor funded La Perla’s opulence and construction in 1864. La Perla’s construction under the direction of the Corsican architect Juan Bertoli Calderoni highlights how La Perla operated as a status symbol that Ponce’s white Creole elite used to denote their reproduction of the European Ideal and showcase the wealth they accrued from their relentless exploitation of enslaved people’s labor. While I am not sure of whether Garriga enslaved people, one can assume that he benefited from the exploitation of enslaved people’s labor on some capacity owing to his standing and rank within Ponce’s social circles. The Puerto Rico 1872 slave registry offers a fuller picture of Francisco Parra de Duperón’s relationship with enslavement, indicating that dozens of people from West Africa, the Caribbean, and Puerto Rico were under his possession on his plantations in Ponce and Guayama. Hence, I find it crucial to underscore the significance of La Perla as emblematic of the white Creole elite’s aspirations and concurrent operation as a site of resistance for the members of the mixed-race Creole elite who used its prestige to subvert the racial order.
This premise bolsters the significance of El Hijo del Amor’s premier in 1872 as a mixed-race man—whose father arrived as a Decree of Graces beneficiary and enslaved his mother—used a monument to the European Ideal to denounce racial prejudice a year before the abolition of slavery. When examining Ramón Marín y Solá’s delicate navigation of Puerto Rico’s racial politics and the negotiation of his subjectivity, it is vital to remember the extant degree of racial violence and hostility that Puerto Rican society enacted upon enslaved, freed, and free people of African descent. La Perla’s operation as a bastion for Ponce’s white Creole elite emblematized the power that the planter class wielded. It was a stark reminder of the wealth extracted from the enslaved people who arduously toiled in its neighboring plantations. It is therefore paradoxical while showcasing the fissures within Puerto Rico’s racial order, similar to how Marín y Solá’s message in El Hijo del Amor and performance in La Perla simultaneously denounced racial prejudice but ultimately reified the racial order by proffering a palatable message that would appeal to La Perla’s predominantly white audience.
Ramón Marín y Solá’s proximity to whiteness and standing as a man of letters certainly facilitated his navigation of Ponce society and empowered him with the ability to disrupt La Perla’s Eurocentric repertoire—which routinely boasted Spanish zarzuelas, Greek tragedies, and the works of Lord Byron—to stage a play that depicted racial prejudice as a blight on Puerto Rican society. At the same time, Marín y Solá’s proximity to enslavement and being the “recognized” child of an Italian planter allows us to contextualize further how he negotiated his identity at a time of increasing hostilities toward people of African descent. Román Baldorioty de Castro, similar to Marín y Solá, carefully navigated the racial line by proliferating political ideologies that would appeal to white Creoles in his pursuit of emancipation and self-determination. Baldorioty de Castro advocated for gradual emancipation as opposed to immediate abolition and Puerto Rican self-determination as an autonomous Spanish province instead of independence. These political and ideological fragmentations show us how proximity to whiteness and power inform the construction of Puerto Rican liberation movements and their limitations in regards to collective liberation.
La Perla’s machinations as a beacon of the white Creole elite’s power indeed inhibited many of the liberties and likely influenced El Hijo del Amor’s message that, while racial prejudice was abhorrent, reconciliation could still be attainable. In turn, one can observe how mixed-race Creoles seeking to mobilize toward liberation through white institutions often faced the choice of diluting their critiques of the racial hierarchy as they strove toward greater freedoms for people of African descent. Yet, this did not always result in a collective sense of liberation and subsequently could reproduce mechanisms of exclusion that affected people of African descent who were enslaved, working class, or lacked proximity to whiteness. Thus, people of African descent who lacked the socioeconomic access and adopted more radical approaches to the pursuit of Puerto Rican liberation were unable to access institutions such as La Perla to mobilize toward freedom.
I also consider how enslaved, freed, and free people of African descent used performance as a way to dissent throughout Puerto Rico’s plantations, countryside, and maroon communities in the shape of bembés, baquinés, and bomba. For Puerto Rico’s Afro-descendant communities, these festivities and performance practices emblematized the retention of their African customs and actively defied the law.
In 1837, the Puerto Rican colonial government criminalized the performance of these Afrocentric dances, funeral rites, musical genres in public (except for their performance under a designated time allotment) to further infringe upon how people of African descent retained their cultural practices. Embracing these cultural practices and participating in these performances provided a pathway for people of African descent in Puerto Rico to dissent against the colonial administration’s efforts to sever their Afro-diasporic kinship and resist assimilation. As a result, I view performance venues and performance as a significant aspect of the racial and political negotiations I trace to highlight how currents of power shaped the various ways in which people of African descent negotiated their subjectivity in the pursuit of liberation.
AE: You highlight legitimacy, honor, and respectability as central to Puerto Rican racial orders. How does gendered performance—particularly the figure of the “tragic mulatto”—complicate the pursuit of legitimacy and social mobility in El Hijo del Amor?
AML: This is a fantastic question. Puerto Rican society, while often perceived and portrayed as malleable, is rigid in its contours of the racial line. Featurism, colorism, texturism, class, proximity to whiteness, legitimacy, honor, and respectability were all key components to how racializing mechanisms operated and categorized people of African descent. This set of interchangeable variables, as well as dispensations such as a limpieza de sangre, could allow some Puerto Ricans of African descent to circumvent the social challenges that the categorization as a “recognized,” “natural,” “legitimate”, or “illegitimate” children posed. In Eduardo’s case, his performance as a “tragic mulatto” who is torn between departing from his mother’s side in the pursuit of upward mobility and is contentious with Doña Ana’s bigotry highlights how mixed-race Creoles like Marín y Solá tacitly negotiated their positionality to appeal to white audiences’ sympathies. Specifically, there is an overcompensation in Eduardo’s characterization as a young mixed-race Puerto Rican man whose respectability, proximity to whiteness, and honor serve as a way to criticize Doña Ana’s odious behavior towards him. Hence, El Hijo del Amor positions Eduardo as a person who is undeserving of ill treatment owing to his embodiment of the European Ideal vis-à-vis his embodiment of respectability politics and not because racial prejudice is an unjustifiable enaction of violence.
Eduardo’s familiarity with the European customs that the white Creole elite upheld further reproduces the notion that the “correct” ways for people of African descent to dissent align with white conceptualizations of respectability. Ramón Marín y Solá likely sought to emphasize Eduardo’s respectability as a “tragic mulatto” to appeal to La Perla’s predominantly white audiences as he contended with being a mixed-race playwright staging a play that denounced the institution of slavery in a theater which was built on the backs of the enslaved people who continued to endure merciless violence as they ardently toiled the countryside’s plantations and urban center.
Respectability, honor, and the pursuit of legitimacy became vehicles to assert Eduardo’s personhood in a society that was increasingly hostile toward people of African descent. Eduardo’s suffering as he tearfully laments his separation from his mother, Laura, and his endurance of Doña Ana’s cruelty in the pursuit of upward mobility showcases a splintering image of how Eduardo’s embodiment “tragic mulatto” trope subverted the racial order and reified its stability. On the one hand, framing Eduardo’s humanity as contingent on his reproduction of respectability politics and notions of honor and legitimacy reinforces the racial hierarchy’s stability. Conceptualizations of honor, legitimacy, masculinity, and respectability were racializing mechanisms that operated to enforce white supremacy through the policing of conduct and as a justification for racial violence. In turn, the colonial government and Puerto Rican society could grant some mixed-race people varying degrees of mobility that were contingent on their proximity to whiteness vis-à-vis their reproduction of respectability politics. White Puerto Ricans could easily revoke this extension of conditional freedom upon the exhibition of behavior that was deemed “unseemly” in the eyes of white society.
Further, the characterization of Eduardo as a person of African descent who is undeserving of the racial abuse that society subjects him to owing to his proximity to whiteness and reproduction of respectability politics further hinders collective liberation. Some mixed-race Puerto Ricans of African descent, such as Ramón Emeterio Betances, outwardly refused to engage with respectability politics or assimilate into whiteness by proudly embracing their Blackness as they emphasized the significance of forging Afro-diasporic bonds of kinship. The refusal to emulate the European Ideal and engage in the respectability politics that stabilized white hegemony presented a broader disruption of the racial order’s machinations as Afro-diasporic solidarity took precedence over acceptance into white society. On the other hand, Eduardo subverts the racial hierarchy by refusing to sever the bonds of kinship between himself and his mother despite the socioeconomic incentives that completely assimilating into whiteness offered. Laura’s letter to Eduardo presents a powerful illustration of the heartbreak that many people of African descent underwent as they sought intergenerational prospects and mobility.
I find that Ramón Marín y Solá’s inclusion of this tender moment between Eduardo and Laura presents a scathing critique to Puerto Rican society, which often sought to erase women of African descent systemically given that Puerto Rican society followed the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrum (children followed their mother’s condition). The state-sanctioned whitening efforts that swept across nineteenth century Puerto Rico, such as the Decree of Graces of 1815, subsequently coerced people of African descent who sought intergenerational mobility and safety from racial violence to assimilate into whiteness by severing kinship ties. Ramón Marín y Solá’s decision to have Don Juan denounce Laura’s stigmatization and Eduardo’s embrace of his mother disrupts the fabric of white hegemony by directly contending with political and social practices that subjected women of African descent to gendered and racialized violence.
Marín y Solá’s oeuvre bolsters Laura’s significance in El Hijo del Amor’s sequel, Lazos de Amor (1868), which prominently features her as the play’s protagonist. I think that Marín y Solá’s lived experience as Rosa Solá and Vicente Marín’s child indelibly influenced how he negotiated the racial line and characterized Eduardo as a “tragic mulatto” whose virtue and honor would hopefully surpass the tribulations that prejudice brought forth. While one can recognize that the reproduction of respectability politics bolstered and reinforced the racial hierarchy’s stratification, it is also crucial to contextualize Marín y Solá’s negotiations within his lived experience as a “recognized” child of Rosa Solá and Vicente Marín. Increasing hostilities toward people of African descent as the colonial government enforced punitive legal codes that criminalized Black life shaped Marín y Solá’s formative years. From the celebration of carnaval to mourning the dead, the colonial government incessantly subjected Puerto Ricans of African descent to constant surveillance and repression in efforts of curtailing their pursuit of collective liberation.
Perhaps as a way to voice his discontentment with Puerto Rican society and seek justice for his mother, Marín y Solá’s use of the “tragic mulatto” archetype in El Hijo del Amor subverts the genre by offering a reconciliatory ending that culminates with Eduardo’s acceptance into Don Juan’s household and his pursuit of an education abroad. Eduardo is subsequently able to surpass the limitations that Puerto Rico’s anti-Black society placed upon by using his respectability and honor as leverage to gain socioeconomic mobility.
AE: Looking ahead, how might your work on El Hijo del Amor reshape the way scholars teach Caribbean intellectual and literary history? What tools does this play provide for rethinking race, abolition, and identity in the classroom?
AML: I hope that my work on El Hijo del Amor will prompt scholars teaching Caribbean intellectual and literary history to interrogate how Puerto Rican racial politics reproduced nuances and fragmentations within conceptualizations of freedom, race-making processes, and the pursuit of self-determination. My combination of historical precedent with historical analysis will hopefully facilitate scholars’ contextualization of the circumstances and challenges that Ramón Marín y Solá encountered in his navigation of Puerto Rico’s malleable racial order. Further, the methodologies and frameworks I implemented will be helpful to reshape how we teach Caribbean intellectual and literary history by showcasing how they often converged as part of the broader Afro-Caribbean world of letters. In turn, I hope that my work on El Hijo del Amor will allow scholars to interrogate how individual negotiations of subjectivity according to historical actors’ positionality inform the trajectory of intellectual and literary history. El Hijo del Amor belongs to a broader corpus of Afro-Caribbean literature such as Adolphus, a Tale by Anonymous (1853). Likewise, El Hijo del Amor can help us rethink how the “tragic mulatto” archetype in the broader literary sphere operates differently among Black, mixed-race, and white authors. Placing El Hijo del Amor in conversation with works such as Victor Séjour’s La Mulâtre (1837), Adolphus, A Tale by Anonymous (1853), William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), The Slave Son by Mrs. William Noy Wilkins (1854), and Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859), would yield some crucial interventions through comparative analyses that examine how racial politics differed in their approaches to racial stratification but ultimately converged to ensure the racial hierarchy’s stability.
El Hijo del Amor provides an intricate perspective into how Puerto Rican racial politics evolved, people of African descent shaped intellectual histories, and the Afro-Caribbean world of letters was integral to the pursuit of liberation.
Further, El Hijo del Amor provides a series of toolsets that will facilitate students’ navigation of the shifting racial politics that granted some mixed-race people of African descent with the ability to draw from their lived experiences to advocate for abolition while simultaneously reifying the racial hierarchy through the reproduction of respectability politics as a means to obtain upward mobility. By interrogating how power informed the construction of La Perla and the consequent importance of Marín y Solá’s subjectivity as a mixed-race man and son of an enslaved woman, students will be able to gain a deeper understanding of how he was able to subvert the racial hierarchy by using his knowledge of the racial order’s intricate machinations to contest the currents of power that enveloped Puerto Rican society.
El Hijo del Amor will also allow students to interrogate and dismantle the myths of “racial democracy” and “racial harmony” that permeate the Hispanophone Caribbean and Latin American nation building movements as they examine how people of African descent used their positionality to denounce racial prejudice and the institution of slavery. In turn, this play will empower students with the tools to critically examine how narratives of nationality, nation-building movements, and historical narratives are constructed through the lens of El Hijo del Amor and Ramón Marín y Solá’s lived experience. By reading El Hijo del Amor alongside a biographical snapshot of Marín y Solá’s political mobilization and his family’s intergenerational changes of status, students will be able to contend with the various pathways that people of African descent pursued towards greater freedoms and their collective effect on Black liberation.
Given how Puerto Rico’s racial politics may appear malleable but ultimately constrain under duress upon the denunciation of anti-Black racism, students who engage with El Hijo del Amor will hopefully be able to examine how conditional freedoms and varying degrees of liberty did not entail collective liberation or racial equality on a larger scale. Further, Ramón Marín y Solá’s personal negotiations of his subjectivity in his navigation of Puerto Rico’s racial politics, and their representations in El Hijo del Amor, showcases how Puerto Ricans of African descent often diverged in their approaches to abolition, self-determination, and identity. My comparison of Marín y Solá and Román Baldorioty de Castro with the Afro-Puerto Rican freedom fighters Ramón Emeterio Betances and Francisco Gonzalo “Pachín” Marín will provide students will the tools to explore the nuances of Black political thought and intellectual histories in the development of Puerto Rican liberation movements.
Ultimately, I hope that my work on El Hijo del Amor will demonstrate to students that there were people of African descent who actively denounced white supremacy and clamored for their freedom through different pathways. My wish is for El Hijo del Amor to showcase how, despite Puerto Rican historical narratives’ efforts to sanitize the legacies of enslavement and colonialism in the archipelago, students will be prepared with the toolsets to interrogate how currents of power inform nation-building movements and highlight how people of African descent have spearheaded the pursuit of liberation throughout the Americas.
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