Sherina Feliciano-Santos, A Contested Caribbean Indigeneity: Language, Social Practice, and Identity within Puerto Rican Taíno Activism . New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021. xxiii + 227 pp. (Paper US$ 29.95)
The debate about counter-hegemonic identities is growing due to virtual and digital spaces such as Facebook and TikTok. One of the most exciting cases is the emergence of groups from New York City and Puerto Rico in several social media sites that claim to be descendants of the Taíno populations. These conversations in social networks contrast with the Puerto Rican Department of Education’s claims that Indigenous people of the Hispanic Caribbean are extinct. As Feliciano-Santos argues, this and other state institutions “often rely on their disciplinary intervention to silence, erase, and trivialize alternatives interpretations and understandings of Puerto Rican historical trajectories” (p. 19).
A Contested Caribbean Indigeneity explores the debates related to Taíno activism in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean diaspora in New York City. The analysis is anchored by ethnographic research, as well as analysis of media artifacts and historical documents. Feliciano-Santos’s research has been sustained over nearly two years of fieldwork that includes participant observation and interviews with activist groups that have self-identified as Taíno in Puerto Rico and New York City. Feliciano-Santos, a professor of anthropology at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, defines herself as Taíno/Boricua and builds the book’s narrative on conversations with key informants who provide clues about different elements associated with Taíno identity. In the process, she provides a strong exposition of the challenges faced by the Taíno in the context of Puerto Rican history. Feliciano-Santos’s interest in “Taínoness” stems from her experience with her family from the northwestern region of Puerto Rico. Another reason for her interest was her reflection and experience with Puerto Rican social studies textbooks that adopt a racialized and racist hierarchy of physical beauty in Puerto Rico where curly hair is categorized as blackness and straight hair is indexed as Taíno and Spanish.
This book points to the Taíno as a “powerful symbol” of Puerto Rican national identity in both the archipelago and the diaspora. Feliciano-Santos coins the term Taíno/Boricua as an increasingly visible form of social identification. This concept can be understood as a label to discuss Indigenous activism and political action in Puerto Rico. The Taíno/Boricua category also serves as resocialization of Indigenous practices and figures in the Puerto Rican context. Feliciano-Santos argues that Taíno/Boricua builds communities connected by family narratives that are handed down from generation to generation.
The book’s seven chapters are divided into three parts. The first part discusses various discrepancies in Puerto Rican history and narrative about the extinction of the Taíno. This section relies on decolonial authors (such as Gloria Anzaldúa and bell hooks) and theorists who emphasize symbolic systems (such as Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu) to challenge historical narratives that consistently deny Taíno survival and to seek to break the homogenization of historical narratives.
The second part focuses on the Puerto Rican nation and its ethnoracial regime. Here we find a critique of the jíbaro concept in the construction of Puerto Rican identity. Feliciano-Santos illustrates how historical documents and other cultural products attribute elements associated with the Taíno to the Jíbaros. She also provides a compendium of the different tensions, ambiguities, and conflicts around the term Jíbaro in various national and institutional narratives, and defines jíbaro as the “national archetype, celebrated as encapsulating the essential character of Puerto Rican” (p. 6).
The third part looks at the political mobilizations related to the Taíno. It discusses the self-identification “Taíno/Boricua” as a social and political reference and offers a trajectory of the linguistic debate on the reconstruction of the Taíno language.
The final chapter summarizes the protests and conflicts between the various Taíno/Boricua groups against state agencies in Puerto Rico. Feliciano-Santos offers numerous criticisms of the Eurocentric vision of the “Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña” (Puerto Rican Institute of Culture), a governmental institution in charge of the Taíno heritage and sites in the archipelago. She also highlights the problems faced by Taíno/Boricua groups with other local and federal government agencies due to the lack of recognition by the state. The book’s final part highlights the intersectionality of the Taíno/Boricua movement with environmental, antimilitary, and pro-independence movements.
A Contested Caribbean Indigeneity makes an exciting contribution to debates on cultural claims of Indigenous peoples in the contemporary world. It is part of the Critical Caribbean Studies series of Rutgers University Press.
