The identity of the elite was giving way to an identity of the masses propelled by North American industrial presence. What had been disappearing since 1898, he explained, was not a national identity as such. To the scandal of intellectual peers set firm on a romanticism of language and, of course, a modernism turned toward Europe and Spain (former “motherland” and only recourse against what was seen as cultural erosion stemming from Anglo rule and influence), Gonzalez’s socio-historical analysis did not conform. occupation but instead underwent transformation. Thus island was, for him, a country in the making, one that did not lose identity with the 1898 U.S. Yes, you may say this about any good art, but in Gonzalez’s case the attempt is made even more resonant by the stakes: Puerto Rico. Part of the price was his exile to Mexico, which he preferred to call “transtierro,” (trans)exile, a term carrying a more fluid sense of interconnectedness than the fixed uprootedness of the commonly used “destierro” or “exilio.” His play with words, a trait in Gonzales closely tied to his love of life, was one of the main instruments he used to awaken our knowledge and understanding of ourselves. “There’s a lot of things a person doesn’t want,” Jose Luis Gonzalez (1926-1996) wrote in Ballad of Another Time: “If you stop to think about it, there’s more things he doesn’t want than what he does want.” Gonzalez voiced, perhaps, more than any other writer of the Americas of his time, what he did not want, and lived his life accordingly. What follows is a slightly compacted version of the original foreword to The Americas Series edition of José Luis Gonzalez’s “Ballad of Another Time.” (You can read a chapter from the novella here.)
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