Entry Questions
Before the video: What do you know about the ELA (Commonwealth) and Puerto Rico’s political status?
After the video: Why do many people consider the ELA a failure and a masked colonial status?
La Brega‘s host, Alana Casanova-Burgess, traces the history of Levittown’s boom and bust. This massive suburb was founded on bringing the US middle-class lifestyle to Puerto Rico during a time of modernization and industrialization in the archipelago.
Casanova-Burgess uses her personal story and historical, media, socio-political, and literary discussions to analyze the promises and translations of the US American Dream in Puerto Rico.
The Post-Maria Generation
Hurricane Maria had a strong impact, ripping the veil off Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the United States—particularly for those living outside of the island, but even for some living there. But that unveiling process had been underway since 2016, with the declaration of the debt crisis, the determination that Puerto Ricans could not declare bankruptcy, and a series of Supreme Court rulings that made it patently clear that the island’s commonwealth status did not offer any measure of sovereignty.
These events had started peeling away Puerto Rico’s facade as a decolonized place. My generation and older people were taught that in the 1950s, we had been decolonized through the creation of the Commonwealth, or Estado Libre Asociado. Although some questioned this notion, and there had always been an anti-colonial movement, the promise of prosperity and the escape valve created by migration had long cloaked the enduring relationships of colonialism.
People talk about how Maria ripped leaves off trees and, metaphorically, off Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the US. The storm made our vulnerability and unequal relationship with the United States undeniable.
“Sofá” by Cezanne Cardona
Puerto Rican writer Cézanne Cardona, focusing on lives in the suburbs of Levittown, proposes tensions and interconnections between individual lives without many prospects and the failures of the modernization project in Puerto Rico.
Cardona uses a sofa as an object that carries a working-class family’s history, misadventures, and weight but also signifies the fallout of the suburban “dream” in Puerto Rico. The sofa’s decay symbolizes the failures brought by the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the US and the marginalization of Puerto Ricans in the archipelago. However, Cardona narrates individual acts of healing and creative survival.
“I spent months jobless, and the only things that came up were temporary jobs that didn’t pay enough to rent a studio… He told me that things had changed, that people no longer respected the baseball fields that they used them as if they were garbage dumps… once the election year was over, the municipality didn’t want to renew our contract, and my father was devastated.” (67)
What is the relevance of this section of the story for our discussion today?
Presentation(s):
A
Group 3
B
In-class Written Reflection
Analyze the significance and symbolism of the sofa’s journey from one of these interrelated points of view in Cardona’s story. Consider the discussion complemented by the La Brega podcast and Bianca Graulau’s video.
Option One
Explore it from the protagonist’s psychological point of view.
Option Two
Examine it through a political frame.
Option Three
Elaborate it from an economic perspective.