Pedreira and Price-Mars Ramblings

Antonio Pedreira's Insularismo is one of the more interesting essential texts in Puerto Rican arts and letters. Focusing on insular identity, Pedreira's work builds upon arielismo and Ortega y Gassett for a cultural critique of Puerto Rican identity a few decades after US rule. Undoubtedly, Juan Flores has written probably one of the best essays on Insularismo and the bourgeois ideology guiding Pedreira, but I am interested in Pedreira's commonalities with other Latin American or Caribbean writers of the interwar years. Indeed, I am thinking specifically of Jean Price-Mars and Haiti. Although Pedreira embraces the dominant discourses of scientific racism of his day, and laments the racial mixture which typifies the people of Puerto Rico, he shares with Price-Mars and the indigénistes of Haiti an interest in the peasantry and renewing national identity and culture. 

Of course, Pedreira's racism and Hispanophilia make him quite distinct from Haiti. However, during the US Occupation of Haiti, a similar response of Francophilia to US imperialism (and perceived materialist civilization, lacking culture) could be seen. Furthermore, Haitian intellectuals, like their Spanish-speaking peers in Puerto Rico and Latin America, had long associated the US with coarse capitalism, lacking in the refined culture and aesthetics of so-called "Latin" civilization (Auguste Magloire's writings in Le Matin exemplify the trend). Pedreira, however, added to this legacy of Arielismo The Revolt of the Masses, thereby incorporating new European critiques of mass culture. I have yet to come across obvious references or allusions to Ortega y Gassett in Haiti, but similar viewpoints from Western writers undoubtedly reached Haiti during the 1920s and 1930s through Spengler, Maurras, and others. 

However, Pedreira's true similarity with Price-Mars emerges in his call for cultivating Creolisms in Puerto Rican high culture. Like indigénistes of Haiti, Pedreira and Price-Mars were calling for bourgeois cultural projects of renewal, looking to the local for "high art" purposes in literature, music, and art. However, for Pedreira, the Creolisms of the jibaro or peasant masses, are whitened through a mythologized white peasantry that represents the national soul. Obviously, Price-Mars and like-minded compatriots could not accomplish a similar feat, so the black peasantry and their African antecedence becomes the cherished soul of Haitian identity, and the basis of literature, arts, and music. These parallels reveal how like-minded Caribbean intellectuals of the interwar years responded to the Depression and rise of fascism with similar proposals, despite Pedreira seeking to isolate Puerto Rico from the Caribbean.