Coloniality of Diasporas

Rethinking Intra-Colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context

Kenneth A. Loparo, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137413062
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137413079
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

Focusing on piracy in the seventeenth century, filibustering in the nineteenth century, intracolonial migrations in the 1930s, metropolitan racializations in the 1950s and 1960s, and feminist redefinitions of creolization and sexile from the 1940s to the 1990s, this book redefines the Caribbean beyond the postcolonial debate.

PART I

Colonial Archipelagic Dislocations

CHAPTER 1

La gran colonia: Piracy and Coloniality of Diasporas in the Spanish and French Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century

Pirates in the Caribbean … Again

Buccaneer, corsair, filibuster, pirate, and privateer are five terms commonly used to refer to the dark side of imperial expansion or to the impulse of the free market in the configuration of the colonial Caribbean as an archipelago where the Spanish, French, British, and Dutch empires collided from the beginning of the seventeenth century. These terms also refer to displacements taking place within colonial/imperial networks that cannot be contained within notions of sovereign states or modern nations. In this chapter I review the etymology and meaning of pirate, the first term to be documented in etymology dictionaries, followed by a reading of two texts that focus on piracy in the Caribbean archipelago. I use piracy as a different paradigm for imperial assimilation in the seventeenth century. I advance here a broader reflection on the limitations of the national and postcolonial theories to explain experiences of “extended colonialism” taking place in international imperial contexts, as is the case in the Caribbean.¹

Used for the first time in 1254, pirate comes from the Greek peirates, literally meaning “the one who attacks.”² It is usually associated with illegal appropriations or hostile behavior taking place in open sea. The contemporary meaning of piracy, as the “one who takes work without permission,” was not used until the eighteenth century, however, although sea robber already implies taking property without the appropriate authorization. Several dictionaries confirm the common meaning in Spanish, English, and French in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries:

PIRATA. El cosario que roba por la mar, latine pirata, …

(Covarrubias, Tesoro, 1611)

Pirate

(English translation) A pirat, rover, sea robber (231)

(James Howell, A French and English Dictionary, with another in English and French, London, 1673)

Pirata, m. Pirate, escumeur de mer, corsaire.

(César Oudin, Tesoro de las dos lenguas española y francesa, 1675)

In some English dictionaries there is a recognition of the change in meaning for the term from a neutral or even positive definition into a negative one:

Pirata, a Pirate

(English law definition): is now taken for one who maintains himself by Pillage and Robbing at Sea. But in former times the word was used in a better sense, being attributed to such Persons to whose care the Mole or Peer of a Haven was intrusted. And sometimes for a Sea-Soldier.

(242) (John Cowell, A Law Dictionary, London, 1708)

My work circumvents the modern and romantic reappropriations of the figure of the pirate as an icon of the free-spirited men and thinkers that configure a predominantly nationalist imaginary in order to explore a more nuanced argument: the pirates are those who question the imperial order but not necessarily to propose a national project or a communal identity based on the idea of a singular form of political or cultural belonging. As subjects who roamed freely within and beyond the confines of more than one empire, pirates also represent the chaotic nature of the multiple displacements taking place to configure the quintessential translocal identities of the Caribbean. The cultures and communities forged in the context of these extended colonial conditions of the seventeenth century cannot be comprehended if one applies two of the predominant, contemporary paradigms in the study of Latin American modernities: the formation of a national identity and/or state as described by Benedict Anderson in his foundational book Imagined Communities or the longing for an independent nation as defined by the Latin American criollo imaginary of the first half of the nineteenth century. Nationalism and sovereignty continue to be prevalent teleologies that anachronically reduce the complexities of Caribbean colonialities.

This chapter proposes a close reading of two texts from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—the Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez) (1690) authored by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (Memoirs of Pere Labat) (1693–1705) by Père Labat—to explore piracy as a displacement that constitutes subjectivities existing beyond the confines of the empire to question the political projects in the context of the extended colonialism of the Caribbean and Philippine archipelagoes.³ In these two texts, we identify narratives and imaginaries that go beyond the simplistic opposition between colonial and metropolitan centers.

The Infortunios and the Nouveau voyage share some crucial characteristics. First, they were both written at the specific juncture of a moment of crisis for the Spanish empire after a long period of domination. In the case of the Caribbean, the seventeenth century marks the moment in which England, Holland, and France began to compete directly for the acquisition of overseas territories in the Antilles and in the New World (Bosch 1981, Knight 1990). Therefore, the texts analyzed in this chapter depict a critical period of Spanish domination, at the beginning of a second form of colonialism characterized by an open competition among several European powers in the seventeenth century.

The second aspect shared by these texts is that they narrate the political experiences of insular and overseas territories conceived within the geopolitical framework of archipelagoes. The Infortunios constrasts the marginality of the Caribbean with the economic productivity of the Philippines, while Nouveau voyage refers to the Caribbean as an archipelago intervened by European imperial alliances and competitions. Archipelagoes represent a challenge to the traditional models of state formation and national configuration, but they also interrogate the modes of imperial expansion and assimilation in the seventeenth century. Since some colonial scholars have argued that archipelagoes and insular territories received a different treatment under Spanish imperialism (Stevens-Arroyo 1993, Morillo-Alicea 2005, Merediz 2004), this chapter addresses a corpus of texts in which the uniqueness of this colonial model is explored from the perspective of the very specific modes of identification and disidentification with the Spanish empire that were forged in these insular territories. Given that these archipelagic systems lacked a center of power or operation that is easy to identify, the Spanish crown used the exploitation form, as compared to the settler model, in the establishment of their colonies. As a result, local identities were configured in a colonial context that was different from the tierra firme or the continental Americas (Knight 1990, 27–65). At the same time, both the Caribbean and the Philippines were the loci of interaction and exchange of different translocal populations, while occupying an uncomfortable place within Latin American, South Asian, and US American sociopolitical and cultural histories. The historical uniqueness of these seventeenth-century Caribbean and Philippine colonial conditions is synthesized in the symbolic depictions of colonialism, imperialism, and piracy that function as the core of the narratives I analyze here.

Beyond the specific historical and geopolitical contexts shared by these narratives, there is a formal aspect that defines this corpus: both of these texts narrate a story where the figure of the colonial functionary is not represented as hero or role model. None of these texts represents the history of an “ideal vassal” that would support a Eurocentric reading in the seventeenth century. Rather in both of these stories the moral center of the narrative remains an empty signifier, since all the characters engage in questionable political, social, or affective practices that are not effectively counteracted by a protagonist who plays the role of morality, justice, truth, or progress. Quite the contrary, these texts dwell on the representation of the blind spots and dark sides of the colonial/modernity dyad, telling the story of an anomalous political project that lies beyond colonialism, postcolonialism, and nationalism. Treason, contraband, assimilation, whitening mythologies, displacement, deceit, revenge, and projects of racial and/or social climbing mobilize plots that conclude with the disappearance or destitution of the questionable protagonist.

In this chapter I use the pirate as a point of departure to read the alternative narratives of colonial disidentification that cannot or do not culminate in a narrative that could eventually belong comfortably to a single national imaginary. In each of these narratives the protagonist is represented as a loner that questions the colonial system, yet he is not interested in proposing an alternative collective imaginary for the sake of an empire. Displacement, errantry, and secrecy within the overseas imperial territories become the central motives behind a colonial imaginary in crisis, and it is from this problematic juncture that these texts represent a unique inflection of “coloniality of diasporas” that I study in this book.⁴ I propose to trace another history of piracy as displacement of the creole and national imaginaries that were produced in moments of imperial crisis in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century. In my reading of the Infortunios and the Nouveau voyage, I will also continue analyzing the lexicographic and semantic developments of notions of contraband and piracy. I will focus on the formal development of the protagonist and his anomalous position within the colonial order in which he is represented. I will conclude the chapter by circumventing the script of the ideal vassal and the model forefather in order to propose the crypto-pirate as a particular inflection of the coloniality of diaspora that conceives the Caribbean as an atypical zone within the postcolonial globalized imaginary that has become hegemonic in literary studies informed by a nationalist paradigm.

Alonso Ramírez: Traitor or Pirate?

The well-known narrative of the Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez is the account of one of the several failed voyages taking place during the colonial period in the Americas. Alonso Ramírez was born in Puerto Rico and when he was only 12 years old he decided to leave the island to reside in a more central zone of the Spanish empire, as well as to identify a more lucrative profession than the “oficio del padre.”⁵ Alonso’s initial plan was to locate his relatives in the Viceroyalty of the New Spain and settle there. However, this idea soon failed when he was not recognized by his relatives; he later got married and became a widower in less than a year. The narrator presents his trip to the Philippines as an afterthought and punishment for his lack of productivity, yet several critics have noted the important commercial links between the New Spain and the Philippines through the Manila Galleons (Bjork 1998, Buscaglia-Salgado 2003, 2011, Martínez-San Miguel 2008a). Through my reading of the Infortunios, I argue that the intracolonial network between the Caribbean and the Philippines is central to Ramirez’s decision to go to the Pacific region and that his interactions with the English pirates facilitate the construction of an alternate narrative that lies beyond the frameworks provided by the nation and even the empire.

Ramírez spent five years roaming different territories freely in the Pacific Ocean as an independent merchant—in what is now believed to have been a time devoted to piracy (López-Lázaro 2007, Buscaglia-Salgado 2005, 2011)—until he was captured by English pirates, becoming a captive for two years. Most of the narration of the text is devoted to the description of the many tortures inflicted on Ramírez and his men by the English pirates and a sevillano named Miguel who had become a pirate, but who, according to Buscaglia-Salgado, was actually another prisoner of the English pirates (Buscaglia 2011, 64–66). The text ends when Ramírez is suddenly set free by his captors close to the coast of Brazil. Once he re-emerged within the spatial and political jurisdictions of the Spanish imperial script in New Spain, Ramírez became famous for having survived as a captive of pirates, and for returning as a loyal Christian and Spanish vassal. Once the Count of Galve, the then viceroy of New Spain, heard of Ramírez and his men’s story of survival, he sent Ramírez to see Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, a famous creole mathematician, cosmographer, and writer who ultimately put in writing the story of Ramírez’s many adventures.

The interpretations of the Infortunios as a narrative of resistance to the Spanish imperial order have been developing steadily since the 1990s.⁶ For example, Álvaro Félix Bolaños focused on the pending accusation of treason as the motive behind Ramírez’s narrative (1995), while José Buscaglia-Salgado has recently argued that Ramírez was a crypto-pirate (2005, 2011). I would like to read Infortunios as a narrative of the crisis of the Spanish empire in the Americas; here piracy is used as an alternative perspective for simultaneously questioning the protonational and imperial frameworks of the Spanish empire.

In the last chapter of my book From Lack to Excess, I develop a reading of the Infortunios that focuses on the constitution of Ramírez as an anti-hero or failed epic hero and a possible pirate that questions the hegemony of the Spanish order by escaping into the distant Pacific blind spots of the Spanish empire (Martínez-San Miguel 2008a, 145–164). Buscaglia-Salgado reads these same scenes as part of a hidden narrative of piracy and resistance that is not revealed completely by Ramírez (2011). Regardless of which interpretation seems more convincing, it is evident that Ramírez actively resists the mandate to function as a prodigal son who returns to the imperial order with the narration of his years of captivity. Instead, Ramírez chooses to “roam freely” as an independent agent escaping the logic of the Spanish empire by fleeing to the less-regulated Pacific domains. In the new reading I propose here, I focus on the constitution of Ramírez as an anti-hero and a possible pirate to question the hegemony of the Spanish order in the articulation of the Caribbean and the Philippines as archipelagic heterotopias for the Spanish empire. In this context, Alonso Ramírez is a protagonist that cultivates marginality and ellipsis as a way to remove himself from the imperial script of Catholicism, loyalty, and vassalage. The coloniality of his diaspora relies, precisely, in his open resistance to assuming his role as a Spanish creole vassal, to privilege an alternative story of free agency and self-interest that allows him to survive at the margins of a crumbling imperial order.

I would like to begin my analysis of the Infortunios by revisiting the elliptical section of this narrative in which the narrator summarizes his life as an independent merchant in the Pacific in a relatively short passage in the second chapter.⁷ In less than three pages, the narrator summarizes five years of his life outside the direct control of the Spanish empire. He makes references to the abundance of resources and the rich and intense commercial exchanges between Portuguese, Spaniards, French, Dutch, and British empires taking place in Manila, Singapore, and Batavia, among many other places. The section concludes as follows:

El concurso que allí se ve de navíos de malayos, macasares, sianes, bugifes, chinos, armenios, franceses, ingleses, dinamarcos, portugueses y castellanos, no tiene número. Hállanse en este emporio cuantos artefactos hay en la Europa, y los que en retorno de ellos le envía la Asia. Fabrícanse allí para quien quisiere comprarlas, excelentes armas. Pero con decir estar allí compendiado el Universo, lo digo todo.

(Sigüenza y Góngora 1990, 103–104)

[There is no way of measuring the great number of ships that can be seen there belonging to Malays, Macassars, Siamese, Buginese, Chinese, Armenian, French, English, Danes, Portuguese and Castilians. All the manufactured goods from Europe as well as those that, in return for these, are shipped from Asia, can be found in this emporium. Excellent weapons are made there for those who would wish to buy them. I say it all, though, by stating that the entire Universe is abridged there.]

(Buscaglia-Salgado 1990)

This section of the Infortunios is the only detailed description of Alonso’s successful incorporation into the commercial networks of the Pacific. Ramírez describes the Pacific as a more lucrative zone that escapes the firm control of commerce that characterized the Spanish empire (called exclusivismo).⁸ In this passage, an international commercial network seems to exist with no apparent contradictions with the trans-Atlantic imperial project in the Caribbean and the Americas (Bjork 1998). In fact, Europe, Asia, and the Americas coincide here, since the best products of each continent are found at moderate prices. Therefore, in this distant and marginal space of the Spanish empire, Ramírez is able to become a successful merchant and a world traveler, occupying a protagonic role that is absent in most of the remaining narrative of the Infortunios.

The second relevant detail that I would like to note is the tone of fascination and excitement prevalent throughout this descriptive passage. While the beginning of the Infortunios highlights the many dimensions of Ramírez’s marginality, poverty, and misery, in the second chapter we find Ramírez enjoying a brief moment of freedom and wealth that is unexpectedly interrupted when he is captured by English pirates in 1687. This mom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Coloniality of Diasporas in the Caribbean
• Part I: Colonial Archipelagic Dislocations
• Part II: Caribbean Colonialities
• Part III: Extended Postcolonialities
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index