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The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction: Continuity and Reclamation in Borikén (Puerto Rico) 2011th Edition
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- ISBN-100230620256
- ISBN-13978-0230620254
- Edition2011th
- PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
- Publication date
2010
December 14
- Language
EN
English
- Dimensions
5.5 x 0.8 x 8.8
inches
- Length
200
Pages
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Castanha provides a valuable contribution to the ongoing arguments over the long-assumed extinction of the indigenous populations in Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the Caribbean... Original accounts from island jibaros and the historical accounts together support the position for indigenous survivals, and the work is an important counter-narrative to the dominant arguments. Recommended." - Choice
"The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction brings a clear voice to a Native perspective on Puerto Rican identity that previously has been unrepresented, misrepresented, and misunderstood. With solid research and insightful reflection, this book speaks to the Jibaro experience - the Indigenous people who survived being denigrated, romanticized, and written into the margins of Puerto Rican history. The story of their survival has implications for studies of race and nation in the Caribbean and throughout the Americas where the stamp of colonization has been met with subtle and complex forms of resistance." - Pedro Ferbel-Azcarate, Black Studies Department, Portland State University
'Castanha's innovative research carefully and convincinglydebunks the myths of 'extinct' Indigenous peoples inBorikén (what is now located in Puerto Rico), and, in doing so, creates new intellectual space for expressingJíbaro histories anddocumenting resistance to Spanish colonialism as well ascontemporary decolonizing efforts.Drawing on previous ethnographic research, interviews with Boricua/Jíbaro activists,and census data,Castanha providesample evidence to counter colonial images ofBoricuans existingsolely in thepast.This important work is situated within an emerging intellectual body of research emphasizing Indigenous decolonization, resistance, and regenerating oral histories and yields insightful comparisons to colonial experiences of Indigenous peoples in other parts of the world.' - Jeff Corntassel, author of Forced Federalism: Contemporary Challenges to Indigenous Nationhood
'Born from a Puerto Rican mother, descendant from sugar plantation workers who emigrated to Hawai'i at the beginning of the twentieth century and raised in this Polynesian archepelago, Dr. Tony Castanha goes deep into the history of rebellion and resistance of the indigenous Jíbaro Native Americans in Borikén, true name of Puerto Rico. A controversial, radical history, also gathered from oral tradition and ancestral memory, affirms that the indigenous inhabitants were not extinguished by the Spaniards around mid-sixteen century. On the contrary, there was a cultural survival and continuity within native communities in the mountains that became the roots to the Puerto Rican national identity and the following movement for Independence in the nineteenth century. This book, a moving contribution to the Caribbean history, invites us to a magical voyage into spiritual ancestry, the clash of civilizations and the right to self determination for the people of Puerto Rico, a nation without sovereignty, the oldest colony in the western hemisphere.' Etnairis Rivera, Distinguished Puerto Rican Poet, Hispanic Literature Professor at Universidad de Puerto Rico
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- Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan; 2011th edition (December 14, 2010)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 200 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0230620256
- ISBN-13 : 978-0230620254
- Item Weight : 13.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.75 x 8.75 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #8,774,614 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,085 in Hispanic American Demographic Studies
- #6,570 in Government Social Policy
- #7,534 in Caribbean & Latin American Politics
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Castanha claims that his "work is an attempt to draw on alternative sources of written and oral information to allow most importantly, the indigenous Caribbean voice to speak and to be better recognized, for this voice has remained silent for too long." (p. 1) Unwittingly, the last part of this statement reveals the very serious limitations of his approach to the subject matter. Castanha has not been able to locate and assess the indigenous voice of the sixteenth to late twentieth century unless it has been filtered by the Spaniards, Anglo-Americans and other Westerners.[1] He is therefore obliged to choose, or he deliberately chooses to focus on the very problematic voices of the more articulate leaders, activists, and spokespersons for the contemporary Taíno revival movement among Puerto Ricans, along with a few of their supporters in academia and elsewhere.
In a problematic section on "mythmaking" (pp. 21-50), Castanha relies on academic sources that he would otherwise despise for many of his claims. However, he also maintains that modern scholars who claim that the Taínos became extinct in the sixteenth century have been misled or duped by the deliberate lies and distorted accounts of chroniclers and officials of the Spanish colonial period and should therefore not be trusted. Nevertheless, when it comes to stories told to him by Taíno revivalists and their supporters, his consistent reaction is to accept them at face value without question or with little or no reservation.
His sources among the contemporary storytellers can also be quite bizarre. In addition to the Taíno revivalists that he interviews among "elders," artisans and residents of the interior regions of Puerto Rico (the alleged traditional homeland of indigenous people since the late sixteenth century), he relies heavily on a few individuals who are judged by him to be experts on the history of the island and its peoples. An important source among these alleged experts is a rather mysterious fellow by the name of Oki Lamourt-Valentín, who is described as a "Carib...scholar" and "preeminent linguist of the native language of the island," who also "was basically ostracized by the academy...because his work and views did not conform to the main academic line." (xiv-xv, 17)
As a result of the importance that he gives to Lamourt-Valentín, Castanha's book is peppered with many of his false or crudely exaggerated claims. These include the following among others:
1. "We are Jíbaro." "We are Indians." "We are the Caribs." "...and refer to ourselves as, within the context of a nationality, `Boricuas.'" (pp.xv, xvi) (GHV note: all of these names are conflated here to mean "Indian.")
2. "We (the Taíno) were a great empire," (p.51)
3. "the Spaniards were astounded at the major civilization they had encountered." "This was a major civilization." "It freaked the Spanish out." (p.73)
4. "They (the Spaniards) were kicked out of all the major islands. They only had Havana and the western part of Cuba." They only had "two or three trade outposts" in Santo Domingo. (p. 73) (GHV note: he makes no mention of Puerto Rico in this regard.)
5. "...the commercial language in Borikén was never Spanish. Spanish was a secondary language." (p.73)
These claims are always accepted without question as fact and are often followed by Castanha's claims which like Lamourt-Valentín's, are poorly supported, not supported at all, or they are hurled at the reader without any citations whatsoever. They are also frequently repeated, sometimes ad-nauseam, in a crude effort to convince the average or uninformed reader by repetition of their alleged truthfulness. Castanha's claims include the following among many others:
1. "...there were and are many `white Indians' on the island, as well as throughout the Americas (both pre- and post European contact)." (p.93)
2. "Mestizos," "pardos libres," and "Jíbaros" are all "Indians" in actuality. (pp. xv, xvi, 6, 49, 78, 80, 88, 124 and passim) [2]
3. "...the people called themselves (Jíbaro) before the Europeans arrived..." (p.xv)
4. "...there could have been well over two hundred thousand Indian inhabitants present in Borikén in the late eighteenth century." (p.80 and passim) [3]
5. "...when Abbad y Lasierra penned in 1788 that "mulatos" on the island comprised the largest segment of the population, he was unwittingly referring to mestizo Indian people." (p.79)
6. "a majority of the population in Bolivia is made up of indigenous peoples, this is also the case in Borikén." (p.124)
7. Castanha also articulates exaggerated claims about the "presence" or "survival" of Indian communities in Puerto Rico's mountainous interior regions throughout the period from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. (pp.10, 18-9, 49, 61-2, 64, 65, 74, 74-80 and passim) [4]
8. Castanha also admits that the years from the 1530s to1776 and again from 1808 to the 1860s were periods of "silence" for the alleged Indians of interior Puerto Rico, but he also claims that this was a period of indigenous "passive resistance" because the Indians were ignored, or they forced the Spaniards to ignore them. (pp. 2, 19, 53, 54, 63, 67, 133-4 and chapter 4 in general).
It also needs to be said that Castanha's use of mainstream academic and journalistic sources are also problematic. On the one hand, he falsely and repeatedly accuses academics of indulging in a conspiracy to silence or erase the history of "Indian survival" (pp.1, 3, 11, 17, 61-2 and passim), but he has no problem with the acceptance of academic and journalistic sources that might support his claims however problematic. Yet, even in these cases, the sources are poorly used, or they are employed in a manipulative or pseudo-scholarly manner.[5] The impressionistic study of Puerto Ricans published by journalist Stan Steiner in 1974 is a case in point and an important source for Castanha and other Taíno revivalists. However, it's not clear that Steiner actually believed that there were still Indians in Puerto Rico when he wrote his book. As a journalist, he reported on the claims that were made by "the storyteller" or the "old Jíbaro" when he visited the interior of the island, but he makes no definitive statement on whether there were actual Indians in Puerto Rico.[6] Castanha and other Taíno revivalists also fail to quote another statement made by Steiner that would not support a major claim they make. Steiner's statement is as follows.
"In the early years of slavery, it was the Jelofe (Wolof) tribesmen of Senegal who were most often shipped to Puerto Rico.... It was the Jelofes who led the way into the mountains, to freedom, where they joined the Borinqueños in their hidden caves and villages.... As a tribal people, the Jelofes and the Borinqueños lived in somewhat similar ways. They had common beliefs. They knew similar trees and gods and spirits. They ate roots and fruits that were familiar, for both were men and women of the tropics. So they understood one another better than either understood the behavior of the Europeans.... The African men on the island outnumbered the black women by four to one; so it was natural that these men sought Indian women as lovers. And the children born of these matings created the strongest bonds between the slaves and the Indians." (pp. 56-57)
In contradiction to this statement, Castanha and other Taíno revivalists have been claiming that the supposedly "small" numbers of Africans and impoverished Spaniards who joined the Taínos in the mountainous interior of Puerto Rico in the sixteenth century, or who migrated into these regions in the decades and centuries that followed, were "absorbed" by a supposedly much larger indigenous population. They also claim that the Africans and Spaniards who migrated into the interior of the island adopted the indigenous culture and became Indians as a result. (pp. 7, 8, 10, 109-112, 117-119, 132, 136 and passim) Steiner clearly does not see it this way and Castanha fails to provide convincing evidence to support his claim.
This assertion is also related to another claim or viewpoint that sees ethnic mixture, biological and cultural hybridity, and creolization among Puerto Rican's and other Caribbean Latinos/as as an impossibility despite the repeated admission that biological, and cultural mixing has in fact taken place. (pp. xiii, 6, 8, 9, 14, 46-47, 52, 112, 135 and passim) According to Castanha and other Taíno revivalists, everything that is non-indigenous has been totally absorbed into the indigenous and rendered invisible or unimportant as a result. (e.g.: pp. 109-112) This allows them to subsequently claim a privileged or exclusive Taíno identity and it also allows them to minimize or erase the importance of the real biological and cultural contributions of Africans, Spaniards and others.
In this regard and not cited by Castanha, are the results of fourteen genetic "admixture mapping" tests published since 2004 that show that Puerto Ricans and Dominicans on average are ethnic hybrids that are overwhelmingly of European and African background. The combined averages of the twelve tests show that Puerto Ricans are 61.7% European, 21.7% African, and only 16.8% of Amerindian background. The results for Dominicans also confirm the long term creolization of this population with results from a single study showing that Dominicans are 46.8% European, 41.7% African, and only 11.5% of Amerindian background.[7]
It also needs to be said that the specific references to indigenous cultural survival in Puerto Rico are also vague or skimpy in Castanha's book despite their alleged importance for claims to a Taíno indigeneity. References are made in a limited and self-serving way to the persistence of pre-Columbian agricultural practices, the cultivation of "ñame, yuca" and "batata," the use of "plants for herbal and medicinal purposes," and the continued adherence to certain religious practices and ceremonials. (pp.8, 9, 109-12, 117-19, 136 and passim). However, the plants, animals and much of the culture introduced by Spaniards and others, beginning in the sixteenth century, are minimized or erased from Castanha's narrative because of his rigid ideological rejection of hybridity or creolization. For example, the reader is not informed that plantains, bananas, mangoes and other products were introduced from the outside and consumed by the islanders everywhere during the Spanish colonial period. The reader is not informed that chickens, pigs, goats and other foreign animals were introduced into island society during the same period and that the meat and other products derived from these animals was consumed by the islanders in all areas. The reader is also not informed that tools and other implements of foreign origin were adopted and used by the islanders, and so on.
Castanha would have you believe that the economy and culture of the alleged Indians of Puerto Rico's interior and elsewhere was essentially the Taíno of the pre-Columbian period with only minor outside linguistic and religious influences, and that this alleged reality prevailed without significant change for some 400 years from the 1530s to the early 1900s. Castanha would also have you believe that DNA testing is no longer important compared to a demonstration of "cultural continuity" even though he and other Taíno revivalists enthusiastically embraced and exaggerated the findings of earlier and relatively insignificant research that showed that 61% of Puerto Ricans had traces of mitochondrial DNA.[8] An individual interviewed by Castanha by the name of "Isabel" exemplifies the position that he and other Taíno revivalists now take with regard to this issue. After admitting that there is significant African ancestry in her family tree, "Isabel" is quoted as saying that regardless, "all of them are Indio, no matter what." (p.112).[9]
Despite Castanha's efforts to rewrite the history of the indigenous in Puerto Rico as a result of his interviews with contemporary Taínos (etc.), his speculation on their "survival" over the centuries, and his charge that academics and others have tried to suppress their "true" history is a truly bogus claim that he shares with other fanatics in the Taíno resurgence movement. The earlier general consensus on this issue still prevails as originally articulated by historian, Salvador Brau, way back at the beginning of the twentieth century (1904, 1907). Pure blooded Taínos (100% Amerindian) were decimated in the sixteenth century as a result of disease, enslavement and war with the Spaniards. An unknown but probably small number of Taínos most likely survived in the mountainous interior regions and elsewhere into the seventeenth century. These pure blooded Taínos eventually became extinct biologically by mixing physically and culturally with Africans, Europeans and others who came to Puerto Rico during the decades and centuries that followed to produce the hybrid, creolized population and culture that all Puerto Ricans are familiar with today.
Notes
[1] Despite considerable research and linguistic analysis, Dr. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel admitted in an article published in 2011, that she and research colleagues were unable to "recover an authentic, uncontaminated Taíno voice from the written colonial archive available to us, nor have we yet found documents representing the experiences of the Caribbean indigenous Hispanization fictionally recreated by the indigenista literature of the nineteenth century and twentieth centuries." See Martínez-San Miguel (2011: 209 and passim).
[2] The terms Jíbaro, Carib, Boricua, mestizo, and pardo have always referred to specific types or specific groups of people in Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and should never be conflated with "Indian" or "Taíno" the way they are conflated by Castanha and Lamourt-Valentín. Boricua is a term that is used to refer to all Puerto Ricans and is normally used as the equivalent of the term and the idea of a Puerto Rican. The term Carib has been used in reference to the pre-Columbian indigenous populations of the eastern Caribbean, although some modern groups in this region also refer to themselves as Caribs and claim Carib descent. Mestizo and pardo were terms used by the Spaniards during the colonial period, but the terms are also still used in Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean in reference to specific physical types. Mestizos are said to be persons of mixed race in a general sense, or persons who are specifically said to be half European and half Indian. Pardos are by definition persons of mixed African and European ancestry, but were specifically defined by Spanish colonial officials as "light brown" persons who were said to be seventy-five percent European and twenty-five percent Black African.
The term Jíbaro has been used as a label for the rural peasant population of Puerto Rico--especially those persons living in the mountainous interior region of the island. The term Jíbaro has also been equated with "hillbilly" on the United States mainland; however, the origin of this term and its evolution has varied over time. Research by historians and other social scientists have demonstrated that there has never been a connection between the term "Jíbaro" and the pre-Columbian Taíno population of the Caribbean. According to the evidence, the term Jíbaro was probably first applied to Puerto Rico's rural population in the early eighteenth century by Spaniards and the island's Creole elites. Prior to the eighteenth century, the term Jíbaro was used and applied in a very insulting, derogatory manner elsewhere in the Spanish colonial empire. It was used, and is still used, to refer to the Jivaros or Xívaros (the modern Shuar) of Amazonian South America, who were famous during the colonial period for their effective resistance against the Spaniards. In Mexico, the term became a negative racial category that signified the mixed offspring of Africans and Indians. In Cuba and Santo Domingo it was employed as an adjective to define a state of wildness in certain animals, especially undomesticated dogs in forest areas--for example, as in the term perros jíbaros. Historian, Francisco Scarano, believes that all three meanings might have been combined when creole elites and Spanish colonial officials in Puerto Rico began to use the term negatively to describe and define the still largely autonomous rural population of Puerto Rico's mountainous interior in the early eighteenth century. Scarano and others have also concluded that segments of the creole elite, who soon began to advocate for greater autonomy if not total independence for Puerto Rico, began to idealize the "Jíbaro peasant" and even adopted a partial Jíbaro identity in order to separate themselves from the colonial authorities and the conservative creoles who supported total royalist control. See Scarano (1996: 1413-15). Otherwise, the earliest known written application of the word Jíbaro in Puerto Rico is that of Manuel Moreno Alonso (not the author of El Gíbaro) who used the term to describe the population of Aguada in the 1745 journal of his trip to Puerto Rico. In the journal, he states that the men of Aguada are "called gívaros" and are "amulatados" (mulato) in appearance, and the women are gypsy-like, or in his words "propiamente agitanadas." See Scarano (1996: 1415) and Feliciano-Santos (2011: 59).
[3] Castanha and other Taíno revivalists who claim that there were hundreds or even thousands of pure blooded or mixed Indians living in the interior of Puerto Rico in the eighteenth century need to take into consideration the thoroughness and the motivations behind Field Marshal Alejandro O'Reilly's 1765 survey of the island. In the aftermath of the Seven Years War with England (1756-1763), Spanish royal officials, such as O'Reilly, were sent to the American colonies to report on the natural resources, commercial activities, the status of colonial populations, and on other issues of concern to the royal government in a concerted effort to encourage economic development, maximize labor utilization, and increase revenues for the state. There was seemingly no motivation or reason to conceal the existence of a Native American population in Puerto Rico during this period. The same can also be said of Abbad y Lasierra's survey a decade later. The reader can find a summary of O'Reilly's census in Abbad y Lasierra (2002: 378-80).
[4] Contrary to assumptions that Castanha makes or would make, the surviving allegedly isolated Indian populations of interior Puerto Rico were probably decimated through diffusion by the epidemic diseases that also struck the indigenous people that were controlled by the Spaniards. According to recent and not so recent research, this is what apparently happened in southeastern North America and also in the Inca Empire and other regions prior to the arrival of the Europeans. In quite a number of instances, the spread of bacteria, viruses and epidemics by diffusion from one Native American group to another preceded the actual arrival of the Europeans in particular regions; however, there is a debate on this issue with regard to North America. For the Inca Empire and southeastern North America, see Alchon (2003: 75, 93), Cook (1998:72-3, 76-83, 154-162 and passim) and Hays (2010: 76). For a critique of this issue with regard to southeastern North America, see Kelton (2007: Chapter 2).
[5] Castanha tends to rely on old publications by Adalberto López (1980), Loida Figueroa (1978), Stan Steiner 1974), and Juan Angel Silén (1971), among others. To a much lesser degree, he also cites more recent publications by others, such as Samuel M. Wilson (1997), and Fernando Picó (in a contradictory manner, 2006), but in all instances, Castanha suggests or would have the reader believe or assume that the authors of these works support or would support the idea of indigenous survival, which is not the case.
[6] Although Steiner makes no definitive statement on this issue, the book publisher included an image of a young woman by the photographer, Geno Rodríguez, that includes the caption "a contemporary Indian girl from Jayuya." (see pictures after p.110).
[7] A recent study which also supports previous research shows that Puerto Ricans on average are 63.7% European, 21.2% African and only 15.2% Native American. See Via et al. (2011).
[8] See Castanha's misinterpretation of the findings published in 2005 by Martínez-Cruzado and his team on pp.15, 49, 66, and 135.
[9] A Taíno revivalist version and application of the racist "one drop" rule utilized in U.S society against African Americans has also been articulated on the internet. See for example the comment by "Cacique Coquí" that "one drop" of Taíno blood is sufficient for membership in a "Taíno" tribe in Haslip-Viera (2008: 230)
References
Abbad y Lasierra, Fray Iñigo. 2002 (1866, 1776). Historia geográfica, civil y natural de la Isla de Puerto Rico. 3ra. ed. Madrid and San Juan: Editorial Dos Calles and Centro de Investigaciones Históricas.
Alchon, Suzanne Austin. 2003. A Pest in the Land: New World Epidemics in a Global Perspective. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Brau, Salvador. 1996 (1904). História de Puerto Rico. San Juan: Editorial Borinquen.
_____. 1969 (1907). La colonización de Puerto Rico: desde el descubrimiento de la Isla hasta la reversión a la corona española de los privilegios de Colón. San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña.
Cook, David Noble. 1998. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.
Feliciano-Santos, Sherina. 2011. "An Inconceivable Indigeneity: The Historical, Cultural, and Interactional Dimensions of Puerto Rican Taíno Activism." unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan.
Figuera, Loida. 1978. History of Puerto Rico: From the Beginning to 1892. New York: L. A. Publishing Company.
Haslip-Viera, Gabriel. 2008. "Amerindian mtDNA does not matter: A reply to Jorge Estévez and the privileging of Taíno identity in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean," Centro: The Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 20(2): 228-37.
Hays, J. N. 2010. The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Kelton, Paul. 2007. Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
López, Adalberto, ed. 1980. The Puerto Ricans: their History, Culture and Society. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company.
Martínez-Cruzado, Juan Carlos, Gladys Toro-Labrador, Jorge Viera-Vera, Michelle Y. Rivera-Vega, Jennifer Startek, Magda Latorre- Estéves, Alicia Román-Colón, Rebecca Rivera-Torres, Iris Y. Navarro-Millán, Enid Gómez-Sánchez, Hector Y. Caro-González, and Patricia Valencia-Rivera. 2005. "Reconstructing the Population History of Puerto Rico by Means of mtDNA Phylogeographic Analysis." American Journal of Physical Anthropology 12( September): 131-55.
Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda. 2011. "Taíno Warriors? Strategies for Recovering Indigenous Voices in Colonial and Contemporary Hispanic Caribbean Discourses," Centro: The Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 23(1): 196-215.
Picó, Fernando. 2006. History of Puerto Rico: A Panorama of Its People. Princeton, NJ: Markus
Wiener.
Scarano, Francisco A. 1996. "The Jíbaro Masquerade and the Subaltern Politics of Creole Identity formation in Puerto Rico, 1745-1823," American Historical Review 101(5): 1398-1431.
Silén, Juan Angel. 1971. We, the Puerto Rican People: A Story of Oppression and Resistance. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Steiner, Stan. 1974. The Islands: The Worlds of the Puerto Ricans. New York: Harper and Row.
Wilson, Samuel M., ed. 1997. The Indigenous People of the Caribbean. Gainesville. University Press of Florida.
Via, Marc, Christopher R. Gignoux, Lindsey A. Roth, Laura Fejerman, Joshua Galanter, Shweta Choudhry, Gladys Toro-Labrador, Jorge Viera-Vera, Taras K. Oleksyk, Kenneth Beckman, Elad Ziv, Neil Risch, Esteban González Burchard, and Juan Carlos Martínez-Cruzado. 2011. "History Shaped the Geographic Distribution of Genomic Admixture on the Island of Puerto Rico," PLoS ONE (January): 18pp. [...]."
Reviewed by Gabriel Haslip-Viera in " Centro: The Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies," vol.24, no.1 (2012), pp.192-199.