On the pristine and threatened island that
reflects some of the worst and the best of contemporary American identity.
Elsewhere in this issue of the magazine there’s
a travel-guide style piece for trips to “America’s
51st state,” Puerto Rico. Much of the article focuses on San
Juan, the island’s capital and largest city; it’s also the site of November’s American Studies
Association conference, the first which I’ll be attending in many years (as
a particularly grueling part of my Encyclopedia of American Studies editorial
board duties). But while I could dedicate this post to my travel plans, I
thought that perhaps a second inspiration, one provided by the first site
detailed in the article—the small
neighboring island of Vieques—might be of broader interest to readers and
fellow American Studiers. (Although if you’re going to be at ASA, let me know here
or at brailton@fitchburgstate.edu
and we can have an AmericanStudier meet-up!)
The Vieques section of the article begins
with a pretty egregious sentence: “It could be said that bombs saved Vieques.”
I get the author’s point—the U.S.
military’s multi-decade use of much of the island for live-fire training
exercises means that it has been significantly less touristed than much of
the rest of the Caribbean—but it not only rings utterly false to what bombs do
to any place where they fall, but also elides the very controversial history
surrounding that military practice. For one thing, as detailed at that link
above, the military also used Vieques as a dumping site for various dangerous
and toxic wastes and chemicals; such abuses have been far more destructive to
the affected parts of the island than even the worst tourists could ever have
been. For another, the military continued its live-fire exercises for many
years after they began to receive extended
and vocal pushback and resistance, demands from both Puerto
Ricans and other concerned Americans that these practices cease. At their
broadest level, these histories and abuses parallel much of the worst of how the
U.S. government and military has engaged with the Caribbean and the Western
Hemisphere over the 20th century.
Yet the island can also be connected to some
of the most ideal aspects of contemporary American community and identity. For
example, those protests eventually but importantly succeeded—in
2003 the military changed its policies and stopped using Vieques for those
different but equally damaging purposes, one of the 21st century’s clearest
victories to date for social and political activism. Moreover, that section of
the island was converted into a National Wildlife Refuge,
a wonderful way to keep it from being immediately overrun by those
aforementioned tourists and to honor the conservationist
legacy of one of America’s most famous visitors
to Puerto Rico, Teddy Roosevelt. And finally, I would argue that
remembering America’s complex relationship to Vieques would force us to engage
with the island’s history as part of
America, both legally (as of course all of Puerto Rico has been for more than a
century) and thematically (as, I
have argued in this space, all of the Caribbean can be seen as intimately
interconnected with the United States, and vice versa). All good reasons to
visit Vieques, and not just for the pristine beaches!
Finally air-inspired post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Perspectives on
Vieques, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, or related places and themes?
10/4 Memory Day nominees: A tie between Frederic Remington, the talented artist and
illustrator who is worth remembering as much for his connections
to American legends and myths
as for his own impressive
career; and Buster
Keaton, the pioneering comedian
and filmmaker whose most famous work likewise
engages
directly with questions of American
history and mythology.
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