Boricua Power

A Political History of Puerto Ricans in the United States

José Ramón Sánchez

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780814783573
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria politica

Where does power come from? Why does it sometimes disappear? How do groups, like the Puerto Rican community, become impoverished, lose social influence, and become marginal to the rest of society? How do they turn things around, increase their wealth, and become better able to successfully influence and defend themselves?

Boricua Power explains the creation and loss of power as a product of human efforts to enter, keep or end relationships with others in an attempt to satisfy passions and interests, using a theoretical and historical case study of one community–Puerto Ricans in the United States. Using archival, historical and empirical data, Boricua Power demonstrates that power rose and fell for this community with fluctuations in the passions and interests that defined the relationship between Puerto Ricans and the larger U.S. society.

1 Dance
A Theory of Power

It is easy to mistake what’s on the surface for what is really going on beneath. It is easy to think that what can be touched exhausts all that is real. Weapons, money, and position provide those who possess them with a clear advantage in what most people conceive as power; getting others to do what they otherwise would not do. The mere possession of those things doesn’t explain, however, why that advantage exists. Similarly, it doesn’t explain why having those things does not prevent the loss of power. It can’t explain why it is that babies and others, like Puerto Ricans, usually considered weak in society are sometimes able to get their way, to get power, despite possessing few of those things.

The dance model can explain the origins and loss of power because it calls attention to agents and social relations rather than things. It gives importance to the role of the agent, both individual and social, in the constitution of society. More specifically, the dance model focuses on the social interests, passions, and habits that set people in motion, usually towards and with each other, and that form the foundation for the exchanges that take place between people while in motion. It is economic, political, and social interests, thus, that send people in motion into each other’s arms, that keep them going as social relations, and that often bring those partnerships to an end.

Power rises and falls with social interests and the movements they inspire. Power, for that reason, is more than things. Money, weapons, and position deliver power only to the extent that others desire money, fear getting hurt, and respect authorities. Power, in that sense, gets going and is kept going because some possess values and others have interests and passions. Agents with values meet or are simply born together with agents with interests. Agents with needs, wants, or desires respond to and can be influenced by agents with the values they seek.

Power is generated in this basic two-way interaction involving agents and interests. Power is generated and is lost in repeated interactions like this and in more complex ones involving many other agents. It is, as a result, something fluid, variable, and dialectical. Agents make the rules that inform such interactions, usually not consciously, not directly, and not in their own time. Agents are usually happy to know those rules, accept their constraints, and perpetuate them. These rules make things happen, make life happen. Agents sometimes attempt to resist the rules but can’t find enough others to join them in casting them aside or bending them their way, and thus resign themselves and continue to perform them (Irvine 2006, 221). In most cases, social agents simply act and carry forward the rules that guide their actions. Power is created and lost in processes that look, thus, a lot like dance.

There are alternative and good ways of depicting and explaining power. The dance model is better than the models based on chess, game theory, or the simple possession of things. It is better because power, like dance, is variable, interactive, and social. Power is not a solid, an eternal status, or an independent force. Dance also better represents the way that people provoke power while in pursuit of something. Admittedly, people also play games like chess for many reasons. Chess is also interactive. Chess is not, however, a good model for power. While people enter chess games for lots of reasons, playing chess requires that each side use logic and reason, and playing it is basically a limited two-party exchange.¹

Chess can’t be played by drunk, dreamy, distracted, or irrational people. Dance can. Also unlike chess, people dance in search of freedom, escape, security, happiness, self-expression, and much more. They also dance, of course, in search of power. More importantly, dancing can result from and invoke any number of human senses—from reason to habit to hedonistic pleasure. Whatever agents’ motivations or states, it is their interests that launch them into an engagement with other agents and that offer the possibility of greater or lesser power. As we often discover, “desires bubble up from deep within us” (Irvine 2006, 218).

The theoretical lineage of this dance model can be found in the social power theory of the 1960s (Emerson 1993; French and Raven 1959), Marxism, social network analysis, Bourdieu, and the postmodern theories of Baudrillard and Foucault. The dance model of power presented here shares some elements of those theories. Power, for instance, appears as a relational phenomenon in many postmodern theories, and yet those theories pay very little attention to what gets power going. Early in the 1960s, the social power movement of Emerson and Raven did pull many of the necessary pieces together for a theory of power that could explain its origins. Power was relational for these theorists and sprang from the complex interaction of interests. The theoretical focus on individuals, however, limited its ability to explain the power of groups, institutions, and society. Marxist theory provides a dialectical method that does a good job of capturing the complex interaction of interests and social groups in the construction of social power. Marxist theory, however, reifies economic structures as well as ignores political and cultural power.

The dance model doesn’t just correct each of these theoretical deficiencies. It does so as a coherent model that validates the role of both social agents and social structures in a complex dialectic that reveals how power emerges, changes, and disappears. It does so by a focus on interests, structures, and the consensus and agreement between partners involved in a dance whose outline often gets exposed at particular junctures. That ebb and flow of power can be seen in the historical experience of the Puerto Rican community in the United States. Surface experiences often hide a deeper, unrecognized reality. They are not, however, irrelevant to that deeper reality. The social interaction that is the dance of power has both a surface and an inner dimension.

Real and Theoretical Origins of Power as Dance

The idea that power originates in a dance of mutual accommodation between partners is not a completely new one. It can be found in a number of classical and modern theories as well as in many everyday examples of power. Hobbes’s atomistic individuals, for example, created society or “commonwealth” out of an active and knowing mutual consent and agreement, a “covenant of every man with every man” (Hobbes 1986, 227). More recently, Marta E. Savigliano has observed that tango is like politics and power because “tango is a practice already ready for struggle. It knows about taking sides, positions, risks. It has the experience of domination/resistance from within” (Savigliano 1995, 17).

The erotic and social tension of interests in the constitution of power as a dialectic internal to social relations, as dance, can be found in a diverse number of everyday and theoretical examples. The power of babies, teachers, spouses, congressional aides, and Machiavelli’s royal prince all result from the interest in values that can only be achieved by dancing with others. Each of the examples discussed below demonstrates the ubiquity of dance-like qualities in the constitution of power.

Parents know that babies are some of the most powerful people on earth. Babies can’t talk, walk, or see very clearly. They are a drain on the economic, social, and attentive resources of a family. Despite all this, parents and others make tremendous sacrifices to respond to the immediate and long-term needs of babies. They don’t have to. They could easily refuse to respond or even retaliate against a crying, demanding child by inflicting injury or death. That rarely happens, but certainly not because of anything that a baby can do to prevent it.

We take care of babies because of what babies inspire in us. A baby gets us to move towards it and serve its needs because it has “the capacity to call forth feelings of love and duty on the part of those around it” (Boulding 1990, 125). It doesn’t matter why we have that reaction. It could be the product of biology or socialization. What is clear is that, like an expert, but in this case unknowing, dancer, babies have a special way of getting us to move towards and for them by stimulating the deep, hidden desires and the interest we have in securing their continued survival.²

Similar deep emotional bonds create power in romantic relationships between adults. Individuals often sacrifice everything, even their very lives, in an attempt to please, keep, or mourn the loss of a lover. In fact, as Dennis Wrong has argued, “the power of the loved one over the lover in a passionate, ‘romantic’ love-relationship represents the most narrowly extensive and highly individualized form of power relation” (1993, 16). The loved one can cause tremendous physical and emotional changes in a lover, even if that lover has kept the knowledge of these feelings of attraction to him- or herself.

In general, partners in romantic relationships find that the power each has follows an ebb and flow determined by the level of attention, interest, and love that exists in the other. As Peter M. Blau has observed, “the individual whose spontaneous affection for the other is stronger must accede to the other’s wishes and make special efforts to please the other” (1996, 78). For that reason, Michael Korda argues that the most dangerous moment in a romantic relationship occurs “when one person’s need for the other becomes strong enough to shift the balance of power” in favor of the other (1975, 5). The person who needs the other, who can’t live without the other, becomes weak and vulnerable before that person. When a lover needs another, the need causes the lover to dance, to draw near, to gaze lovingly, and to display feelings of uncontrolled joy. It also causes power to “boil up in unexpected places” in the beloved (Janeway 1980, 3).

New teachers are often similarly surprised and bemused by their own power over students. While it is certainly not perfect or consistent, teachers do have considerable power over students. Students may not do the reading and other assignments, yet they usually give teachers at least a modicum of grudging respect and attention. Most explanations of a teacher’s power, however, center on the grading. Students respond to teachers, the argument goes, because they are afraid of low grades. Teachers thus have power because of the potential harm they can do to students. Wartenberg modifies this argument to say that the harm to the student is not intrinsic to the relation between student and teacher. The harm, he says, is due to social structures. Bad grades hurt because of “the mediation of human beings situated outside the classroom,” people who are capable of denying the student opportunities for employment or further education (1990, 145).

Though true, this characterization of a teacher’s power ignores a more basic dimension. None of it much matters if the students don’t like or want anything (grades, knowledge, attention) from the teacher. Those “outside” structures shape the motivations of students to the extent that students internalize those rules and pressures. Those teachers who work in classrooms where student motivation can’t be taken for granted know that a teacher’s power in the classroom requires a subtle dance of seduction with the students.³ A teacher must get students interested and/or passionate about the material, grades, or teacher. Sometimes this happens with humor, compassion, discipline, positive incentives, or any number of different techniques. bell hooks says as much when she proposes that to “restore passion to the classroom or to excite it in classrooms where it has never been, we must find again the place of eros within ourselves and together allow the mind and body to feel and know and desire” (hooks 1994, in Giroux and McLaren, 118). A teacher’s power is thus built on a seductive engagement, a dance, with students.

The idea that social interests and social relations, rather than social position, generate power is true not only for teachers. Congressmen and senators, or any elected officials, presumably have power and authority generated by the fact that they are the official government representatives for districts or states. Students of American government, however, have found recently that the power of elected officials in Congress often pales beside the power of their staff employees. Legislative aides are hired by legislators to keep them informed about important policy issues, write legislation, negotiate with the staff of other elected officials, and keep in touch with important constituents. They form a kind of “shadow congress,” with most aides wielding an “impressive influence” that is often greater than that of the elected officials they serve.⁴ Sometimes, an aide’s power can oppose that of his or her boss. Analysts suggest that some senators have been reduced to mere talking “dummies” before their “ventriloquist” chiefs of staff.⁵

The more than twenty thousand aides serving legislators in Congress are often the crucial forces in the defeat and success of particular legislation. Despite this impressive influence, their power is fully given to them by elected officials who find the current quantity and complexity of their legislative business daunting and overwhelming. Like novice dancers before a skilled dance instructor, elected officials are seduced by and become dependent on the expertise of aides. They thus willingly give aides much of their power, as Democratic congressman Thomas J. Downey stated, “to formulate and refine ideas” (Tolchin 1991). Senators and congressmen deliver power to their aides because without them they could not conduct their business as legislators.

Senators are, of course, not the first to find that realities of office can force rulers to give others some of their power. Niccolo Machiavelli’s Prince understood the dance of power. That book is not simply, as it is often depicted, a manual for teaching the prince how to rule. It is also a treatise on how those who are ruled affect the power of the prince. One of the most repeated of Machiavelli’s instructions to the prince was that “one ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved” (Machiavelli 1950, 61). Machiavelli argues that this is necessary given the natural character of men whom he views as “ungrateful, voluble, dissemblers, anxious to avoid danger, and covetous of gain” (61).

Machiavelli’s conclusions are, actually, based on what is most efficient given the complex interaction between the prince and the ruled. Later on, Machiavelli explained his reasoning. The prince should rely on fear because “men love at their own free will, but fear at the will of the prince” (63). What exactly the prince can do to inspire love in followers is complex, varied, and hopelessly unpredictable. Splendid oratory may do it one time, but bravery in battle may be what is needed next. The people’s heart is too whimsical and fickle. Fear, however, is easier for the prince to create and control in the people.

Fear is a tool for power that is easier for the prince to harness. The prince’s ability to gain and maintain power thus requires that he present his partners, the ruled, with something they cannot avoid or control—their own fear. The prince’s power is secured by establishing control of what the ruled cherish above everything else—their lives. That coercive power is easy to attain yet fleeting. Machiavelli’s main point is, however, about knowing your partner. In social dancing, good leads know that their ability to guide, and influence, the movements of their partners is, in large measure, determined by their giving clear signals about where to move and when. The leader can also use manipulation and propaganda. What is important for the leader is knowing what partners need, want, desire, and, most of all, fear.

Dancers gently push and pull each other across the dance floor. At times, they appear almost as one being. At other times, a partner makes radical independent movements that are only possible because of the connection of one to the other. Nothing captures this complex exchange better than the idea of dialectical movement developed by Hegel and Marx. Hegel’s ideas about the master-slave relation constitute a good example.

The slave master, we naturally expect, has an incredible amount of power over the slave. Hegel, however, demonstrated that the master is, in some ways, actually weak before the slave. The master can only achieve his independent power as an agent through someone who has a reduced status as the “other”—the slave. As Hegel states, “the master gets his recognition through an other consciousness … by the fact of being dependent on a determinate existence” (Hegel 1967, 236). In a similar way, social dancers can demonstrate their skill and energy only with and through their partners.⁶ Social dancing shackles one dancer to another, good and bad. It also makes possible movements and freedom that could not be imagined otherwise.

Marx turned Hegel back on his feet. He showed how, in capitalist society, it is labor that is realized through capital. As Marx stated in the Communist Manifesto, “in proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e. capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariate, the modern working class, developed—a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital” (Tucker 1972, 340). Both Hegel and Marx argue, then, that one class’s capacity and power to perform is realized through the other. The dance notion is, in this way, a metaphorical restatement of Hegel and Marx’s dialectics of social change. Dialectics focuses on the complex inner dependence and exchange that Marx found in the class relations of capitalism. The dance model extends the dialectic. It explains how and why one party or class appears to gain power, in more than the productive sphere, to turn things and the table its way.

The previous examples demonstrated how power gets created in social relations. What’s important is not only that social agents interact and get created by that interaction, or even that those relations are objective features of the social structure. What’s important is the role of social interests, passions, and habits. It is these features of the dance model that permit us to overcome the continuing dichotomies in social theory between agency and structure, power and powerlessness, as well as permanence and change.

Social dancing requires passionate, interested, cooperative, and compliant partners. Power emerges from the collective contribution of active, collective subjects. It is the elemental product of each partner’s actions. As Richard Schmitt argued, “power is not owned by individuals but is rather a collective product” (1995, 153). Dance reminds us that power is an unstable combination of structure and energy between passionate, interested partners.

Power as Dance

Power is the ability to shape the way others think, feel, and act. The dance model explains how people get and lose that ability. If we assume, instead, that power is thing-like (money, arms, bodies), we could not explain how people get the ability to shape others. Money can influence some people and not others. People, in capitalist societies, usually desire money, but not always. Guns can force some people to do what they otherwise would not, but not always. There are people who are not easily stopped by guns. These people are often heralded for their bravery and heroism. The key point is that having money or a weapon is not, by itself, enough to create power. Other parties also play a role.⁷ It is not enough to claim, as many recent theories do, that power is relational, that it flows in two directions and that both parties in a power relation have some. That merely gets at the operational dimensions of power. The key is explaining how that capacity gets created for either side.

Voluntarist and structuralist explanations are inadequate. They assume too much ...