CENTRO Journal

7
Volume xx11 Number 2
fall 2010

ON THE ETHICS AND

POETICS OF HOW WE
MAKE OUR LIVES:
ESMERALDA SANTIAGO
AND THE IMPROVISATION
OF IDENTITY

Jos R. Rosario

abstract

This interpretive essay explores the early memoirs

of Esmeralda Santiago, When I was Puerto Rican and
Almost a Woman, to show how narrative literature
contributes to understanding how lives unfold as
improvised ethical and aesthetic projects. Santiagos
storied inventions are cast as relating more to
oppositional ethics than to ideological struggle.
Santiago pursues the life she owes to herself, not
the life she owes to others. The ethical lapses in
Santiagos life-making process are construed as the
necessary improvised tactics individuals are
constrained to make when fabricating a life with
the culture and history they inherit. [Key words:
Improvisation, ethics, aesthetics, life-making process]

[ 107 ]
JILL KER CONWAY REMINDS US
THAT HOW WE ACCOUNT FOR
our lives matter. She urges that we not frame the past as either the outcome of
fate or luck, or as something fully determined. She asks instead that we think
of the past in ways that do not cast ourselves as victims in stoic resignation to
our experiences. Her preference is that we construe our life-making process as a
moral and spiritual journey. This view would allow us, she believes, to imagine and
fabricate a life as a moral and ethical project (Conway 1998: 176).
I agree with Conway that fate, luck, or any other force cannot account fully for
our lives. Making a life, as she rightly argues, is an ethically laden enterprise driven by
imagination and created over time. This spiritual journey, as she calls it, is a poetic
fabrication, a series of identity performances (Bateson 1989; Butler 1990; Mishler
1999) that no calculative model riding on deliberate and rational decision-making
can fully explain. There are, as Michel de Certau (1974) observes, moral and aesthetic
elementspoetry, drama, and danceunderlying the mystery of making a life, of
manufacturing what one wants to be.
This more fluid, poetic, and ethically grounded model of life or identity
making is clearly evident in Latino/a narrative. As Karen Christian aptly
demonstrates in Show and Tell: Identity as Performance in U.S. Latina/o Fiction,
there is nothing essentialist about Latino/a identities. Such identities are
perpetually being transformed through the enactment and interpretation of
ethnic performances that appear in literary texts and at other sites of artistic
production (Christian 1997: 20). For William Luis, the idea of identity as
performance in Latino/a literature is best captured by the metaphor of a dance.
Latinos and their culture are engaged in a metaphorical dance with Anglo-
Americans and the dominant culture, he argues. The dance suggests a coming
together of the two and influences the way they dance, to the same tune in
the same dance hall. Though the dance refers to Latino and U.S. cultures, it is
not restricted to one dance or one partner. Once the two partners engage in
the dance, both will change; neither one will remain the same (Luis 1997: xv).
In Daughters of Self-creation: The Contemporary Chicana Novel, Annie Eysturoy
construes this dance as oppositional self-development. [T]he Chicana
protagonist, Eysturoy writes, uses her creativity to claim her identity as a
unique, self-defined woman. This self-definition, she goes on to add, emerges
out of a conscious opposition to patriarchal norms and values. Through the act

[ 108 ]
of narrating her own Bildungs story, the Chicana protagonist claims not only her
own individual subjectivity, but a subjectivity that is rooted in a shared socio-
cultural context (Eysturoy 1996: 131).

THESE SCRIPTS APPEAR

THROUGHOUT HER EARLY
WRITINGS AS THE RECURRENT
TROPES AND SYMBOLS THAT
POPULATE HER CHILDHOOD
AND ADOLESCENT MEMORIES:
JBARA, PUTA, PENDEJA, JAMONA,
SINVERGENZAS, BUENOS
MODALES, AND DIGNIDAD.
In her early memoirs, When I was Puerto Rican and Almost a Woman, Esmeralda
Santiago offers a compelling vision of life making as an aesthetic and ethical project
in the manner Eysturoy and other theorists postulate. The purpose of this essay is
to explore this view, which I describe later, following Eysturoy (1996), as oppositional
improvisation. Since I believe this model appears most clearly in Santiagos early
writings, I omit from this analysis the last installment of her biographical trilogy,
The Turkish Lover (Santiago 2004). Focused principally on the years she spent with
Turkish filmmaker Ulvi Dogan, this later work does not speak to Santiagos early
formation and feminist struggles in the 1950s and 60s to make a life for herself
independent of her mothers strong cultural legacies. It is in her first two memoirs
that we find Santiago working with and against the gendered scripts she experiences
as a child. These scripts appear throughout her early writings as the recurrent tropes
and symbols that populate her childhood and adolescent memories: jbara, puta,
pendeja, jamona, sinvergenzas, buenos modales, and dignidad. We also see in these early
works how Santiago references these cultural materials in fabricating a life sufficiently
meaningful to call her own. By the time she leaves home with her Turkish lover, she
appears to have accomplished the childhood and adolescent tasks of what to make of
and how to shape the inherited labels and models swirling about her.
In examining Santiagos early writings, I will be exploring literary themes that
fall within the tradition of Nuyorican literature. The two memoirs represent works
typically identified with Puerto Rican writers living in New York and writing in
English or Spanglish, a blend of English and Spanish, about the experience of
Puerto Ricans living in New York City (Algarin 1975; Mohr 1982; Flores 1993;
Hernndez 1997). Nuyorican literature is essentially literature by Nuyoricans
about Nuyoricans. As Juan Flores points out, Nuyorican literature is a literature
of recovery and collective affirmation (1993: 152). Based on the themes the

[ 109 ]
memoirs recover and celebrate, Mara Acosta Cruz positions the writings within
the tradition of jibarismo literario (2006: 173), a narrative form that traffics in
what Jos Luis Gonzlez calls the mythification of the small town Puerto Rican
peasant (Gonzlez 1982).
Thus, as I explore Santiagos early works, I will be interpreting mostly how Santiago
manages the jbarismo she is born into in Puerto Rico and is haunted by in New York
City. What I mean to show specifically is that Santiagos early life is constructed out of
and in resistance to the material she inherits, and that she accomplishes this project, not
according to the grand narratives that populate the social science literature,
but in much the same poetic way a jazz musician makes music: through improvisation or
spontaneous invention. In the world of social science, success is typically the outcome of
ones personal traits or qualities, ones family, ones social advantages and opportunities,
or a combination of these. I refer to these narratives here as the narrative of individuality,
the narrative of family, and the narrative of structure. To explain Santiagos achievements,
I argue, one needs to move beyond these three schemes to a more literary interpretation
of how Santiago mobilizes her own individual agency to make a life.

THUS, AS I EXPLORE SANTIAGOS

EARLY WORKS, I WILL BE
INTERPRETING MOSTLY HOW
SANTIAGO MANAGES THE
JBARISMO SHE IS BORN INTO IN
PUERTO RICO AND IS HAUNTED
BY IN NEW YORK CITY.
Drawing on the distinction Kwame Anthony Appiah (2005) makes between ethics
and morality in accounting for identity, I also construe Santiagos life making as
essentially ethical because of what she appears to be most concerned about in her
early memoirs. Santiago is principally preoccupied, I point out, with what she owes
to herself (ethics) and not with what she owes to others (morality). In deconstructing
Santiagos approach to life making, therefore, I am only interested in delineating
the aesthetic and ethical contours of her view. I am not ultimately concerned here
with uncovering the motives or reasons that might account for such a view. That
is a subject for a radically different paper. A summary assessment of Santiagos life
trajectory will set the context for this one.

Santiago against the narratives of individuality, family, and structure

When I was Puerto Rican and Almost a Woman are cast in a coming-of-age, rags-to-
riches form, and trace Santiagos life until she leaves home for Florida to begin [her]
own journey, as she puts it, from one city to another (Santiago 1993: 2). When I
was Puerto Rican recounts her childhood years while living with both her parents in
Macn, a barrio in rural Toa Baja on the northern coast of Puerto Rico. The memoir

[ 110 ]
spans an eleven-year period, from the time she was four until she was fourteen
and her family moves to Brooklyn, New York. Almost a Woman spans an eight-
year period. The memoir covers her Brooklyn years while living with her mother,
grandmother, and eleven siblings, and until she reaches the age of twenty-one.
In both memoirs, we find Negi, short for Negrita, the nickname Santiagos
family gave her for being so black when small, wrestling with her circumstances
childhood and adolescent fears, her silent grieving for Puerto Rico, the expectations
of a strict mother, conditions of extreme poverty, social stereotyping and racial
discrimination in school and other settings, and all the other algos, outside dangers
her mother was forever warning her aboutto forge an identity, a hybrid, as she
calls it, and follow her mothers advice into adulthood: that she not be a jbara,
a puta, or a pendeja, but study, get good grades, and graduate from high school
so that [she] can have a profession, not just a job (1993: 246). She gets to attend
the prestigious New York Citys High School of Performing Arts, graduate from
Harvard University, and become the successful person she is today. How might one
make sense of her achievements?
One way is to measure her lifes trajectory against the grand narratives populating
the social science literature: individuality, family, and structure. According to the
narrative of individuality, success is the result of having the right stuff, as Tom
Wolfe (1979) would put it. Achievement depends largely on personal capacity:
intelligence, resiliency, strong self-esteem, hard work, clever exploitation of
opportunities, and so on. Sociologist Nancy Lpez (2003) refers to this account
as the commonsense view of success, a perspective well grounded in American
Horatio Alger tales, popular anecdotes, and academic research.
The narrative of structure runs counter to this common sense view. According
to the structural account, success in life is connected for the most part to favorable
social conditions, forces, or structures, such as a facilitative political economy,
ample educational and employment opportunities, and non-repressive and non-
discriminatory social practices.

ONE WAY IS TO MEASURE HER

LIFES TRAJECTORY AGAINST THE
GRAND NARRATIVES POPULATING
THE SOCIAL SCIENCE LITERATURE:
INDIVIDUALITY, FAMILY, AND
STRUCTURE.
In the narrative of family, achievement is more a function of the ordered
relations among household members and how those relations fit within the
broader dynamics of a stratified society organized around race, class, and gender.
Although individualism and structural experiences play a role in achievement,
what matters most is where a person falls in the pecking order of family
relations (Conley 2002, 2004).

[ 111 ]
 There is indeed much in Santiagos achievement that is explainable in terms of
this triangular framework of individuality, family, and structure. This is how Santiago
herself explains her outcomes:

Mami drilled into me that I had only one asset. I wasnt the prettiest of her six
daughters, or the strongest of her children, but I was, she often said, intelligent. It
was the power of that intelligence that I trusted. If my one asset was to work for me,
my brain needed to remain unfogged and focused. My clear-headed self-absorption
kept me sober. It also convinced me thatI could be of no help to my people until I
helped myself. (Santiago 1998: 288)

I didnt let the other things that stopped my sisters and brothers stop me. And I
think that I had to overcome a lot of fear: fear of New York, fear of being the object
of prejudice and fear of being stereotyped, something that affects your self-esteem.
You cannot perform well if youre constantly worried about how people are going to
perceive you, and one of the first things that I did away with in my personality was
to stop worrying about what other people were going to think: the Puerto Ricans in
my neighborhood because I was leaving to study in Manhattan, my mother because I
was becoming Americanized and doing things that she didnt particularly agree with
but which I knew I had to do. A lot of us never really lost that fear about what people
were going to think. (Hernndez 1997: 1678)

To her intelligence and capacity to conquer fear, we can easily add courage, the
virtue the audition panel at the High School of Performing Arts recognize when
they first meet her: they see a fourteen-year-old Puerto Rican girl jabbering out a
monologue about a possessive mother-in-law at the turn of the century, the words
incomprehensible because they went so fast (Santiago 1993: 270). The panel asks
her to step outside after she auditions so that they could laugh. They then invite
her back to perform a pantomime with a student in the school. She is given a second
chance because, as a member of the panel told her ten years later, they admired the
courage it took to stand in front of us and do what you did (1993: 270). Santiago calls
it chutzpah and laughs when she hears the story.
Besides intelligence and courage, or chutzpah, as she claims, Santiago also had
structural advantages. It took a school counselor to show interest, press her with the
right question (So what do you want to be when you grow up?), point her to the
right school, and with assistance from his colleagues prepare her for an audition she
never imagined attending. She had access to a prestigious high school and then to
prestigious universities.
Finally, her place in the familys pecking order may also have played a role in her
successful trajectory. For as long as I could remember, she writes, Id been told
that I was to set an example for my siblings. It was a tremendous burden, especially
as the family grew, but I took the charge seriously, determined to show my sisters
and brothers that we need not surrender to low expectations (1998: 287).
Individual, structural, and family factors seem to explain Santiagos storybut up
to a point. The framework does not tell us how Santiago deploys her own agency,
her own determination, as she frames it in the passage above, to manufacture her
achievements. Individuality, family, and structure point only to the materials with
which she works and her conscious decision to work with and against them. How she
works with and shapes those materials to fashion her own identity is another matter.

[ 112 ]
Does her performance conform to a life plan she deliberately crafts, or does it tend
to rely more on serendipity and spontaneity, bending freely to circumstances and
opportunities as they unfold? How she comes to attend New Yorks prestigious High
School of Performing Arts and then makes her way to college suggests the latter.

IT TOOK A SCHOOL COUNSELOR

TO SHOW INTEREST, PRESS HER
WITH THE RIGHT QUESTION (SO
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE
WHEN YOU GROW UP?), POINT
HER TO THE RIGHT SCHOOL,
AND WITH ASSISTANCE FROM
HIS COLLEAGUES PREPARE HER
FOR AN AUDITION SHE NEVER
IMAGINED ATTENDING.
While Santiago grew up believing, as her mother insisted, that education was the
sure path to success, she had inherited no script to follow in how to achieve that
goal. She was essentially on her own to craft whatever performance she could devise
to satisfy her mothers expectations. So when Mr. Barone, her school counselor,
inquires about her life plans, she fails to answer. She reveals her passion for reading
when the counselor presses to know, but not much more. She fails to admit that in
Puerto Rico she longed to be a jbara, although her mother objected. Neither does
she admit that she had also imagined being a cartographer, then a topographer
(1993: 258).
Even though she claims not to like people, she leads Mr. Barone into believing
she does after he mentions her school test results indicated she might be good
at it. If she rejects nursing and teaching as options when he proposes them, and
then eventually points to modeling as her chosen path, it is not because she has
thought much about modeling and has imagined herself doing it. Her decision
is a serendipitous one. It occurs to her only after recalling her mothers pleasure
the night before at seeing on television fifty of Americas most beautiful girls
paraded in ruffled tulle dresses before a tinsel waterfall. Arent they lovely?,
she remembers her mother murmuring, as she sat mesmerized through the whole
pageant (1993: 259).
Not long after telling Mr. Barone a model is what she imagines being, she tells him
that what she really wants is to be on television, mostly because she does not know
what to make of his response at hearing her say model. Interpreting her desire to
appear on television as an interest in acting, the counselor asks whether she has ever

[ 113 ]
performed in front of an audience, and she recounts her experience in Puerto Rico:
that she had recite[d] poetry and had been an announcer in [her] school show
(1993: 260).
She finds Mr. Barones subsequent decision to contact the New York City High
School of Performing Arts on her behalf surprising, and she appears sheepish and
bewildered. She recalls leaving his office strangely happy, confident that something
good had just happened, not knowing exactly what (1998: 260). She had agreed
to an academic education without knowing what it meant and too embarrassed to
ask (1998: 35). She only knew that until Mr. Barone showed [her] the listing for
Performing Arts High School, [she] hadnt known what to do to change her life
(1993: 261).

I APPLIED TO MANHATTAN
COMMUNITY COLLEGE, SHE
WRITES, BECAUSE IT WAS
ON 51ST STREET, OFF SIXTH
AVENUE, CLOSE TO THE THEATER
DISTRICT AND DANCE STUDIOS
WHERE I STILL TOOK LESSONS.
COURSES FOCUSED ON BUSINESS,
ADVERTISING, AND MARKETING.
I SIGNED UP FOR THOSE THAT
ALLOWED ME TO BE OUT OF
CLASSES BY ONE OCLOCK IN
THE AFTERNOON. AFTER SCHOOL,
I PICKED UP TEMPORARY JOBS AS A
RECEPTIONIST IN NEARBY OFFICES.
The very first in her school to attend the New York City High School of
Performing Arts, an institution she never imagined attending, Santiago delights
in graduating four years later, without getting pregnant, without dropping out,
without algo happening to [her] (1998: 142). Unquestionably successful, she leaves
the institution, however, with no fixed plan on the next phase of her trajectory.
She rejects going to college and begins a seemingly spontaneous course from job

[ 114 ]
to job uncertain of her future. She tries but fails at the skills gained from
the only practical offering at the High School of Performing Arts: a typing
course, where each key stroke was a nail that hammered [her] future onto a
rubber platen. If not an actress, a secretary. If not a dancer, a secretary. If not a
secretary, what? (1998: 142).
When finally she decides to attend a local two-year college, she does so mostly
because of cost and convenience. I applied to Manhattan Community College,
she writes, because it was on 51st Street, off Sixth Avenue, close to the theater
district and dance studios where I still took lessons. Courses focused on business,
advertising, and marketing. I signed up for those that allowed me to be out of
classes by one oclock in the afternoon. After school, I picked up temporary jobs as
a receptionist in nearby offices (1998: 192). While at the school, when gorgeous
Mr. Grunwald, her mathematics teacher, the one she and a friend long to sleep
with, asks how she expects to use her college education, she says, Get a good job.
But as the teacher probes, she wavers between advertising and marketing as sweat
collected on [her] forehead, [her] upper lip. And when he recognizes she has no
idea, she shakes her head as tears come to [her] eyes (1998: 213).
As these passages illustrate, there is more to Santiagos life making than the
grand narratives of individuality, family, and structure would have us believe.
These narratives are silent on how Santiago performs to creates a life path, how
she mobilizes agency to fabricate her own scripts as she engages the materials she
inherits, as well as the opportunities and challenges she faces. Yet performance is
undeniably crucial to what Santiago becomes. Consider what she says in connection
with a number of the life models she inherits and works with and against:

To avoid the hot-tomato label, I dressed neatly but conservatively. I didnt smoke
or drink. If I was in a situation where drugs were being shared, I walked away, so as
not to confirm the stereotype of Puerto Ricans as drug abusers. There were enough
alcoholics in my family for me to know that it wasnt fun, or pretty, and that whatever
a drunk sought to abolish with liquor never went away. (1998: 287)

How might one characterize the kind of world making Santiago engages
and references in this passage? In the subsequent sections, I turn to ethics,
improvisation, identification, and opposition to propose an answer. Improvisation
and ethics are explored first.

Improvisation and ethics in Santiagos world making

The available scholarship on Santiagos work is replete with interpretive accounts
of the multiple themes that run through her memoirs: construction of bicultural
femininity (Mayock 1998); reconstruction of puertoricanism (Torres-Robles 1998)
as well as culture (Szadziuk 1999); manifestation of self in autobiography (Gatto
2000); connections between language and the formation of identity (Sprouse
2000); deconstruction of autobiographical writing and invention of a Latina
feminist narrative (Morales-Daz 2002); subaltern cosmopolitanism (Khader 2003);
commodification of Latina writing in a market economy (Acosta Cruz 2006);
identity as changing and contradictory positionality (Vizcaya Chano 2006); colonial
and post-colonial connections among pride, shame, food, and hunger (Marshall
2007); post-modernist influence in narration (Strongman 2007); and counter-
hegemonic challenges to American democracy. But perhaps the work that comes

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closest to shedding light on the question of Santiagos use of agency in her own
formation is that of Gatto (2000).
Gatto relies on the theoretical work of William Luis, Paul Ricoeur, Sidonie
Smith, and Annie Eysturoy to develop a variant of the earlier notion of identity
as fabrication and performance referenced in the introduction. Gatto then uses
this notion to construe Santiagos identity making as negotiation, as a constantly
negotiated process, never complete, but rather subject to diverse influences and
forces of integration and disintegration (2000: 89). Gatto resorts to the metaphors
of mambo, merengue, and salsa to cast Santiagos ongoing negotiations as
representations of artistic performance. Gatto is fundamentally correct: there
is much artistry in how Santiago goes about making a life. I would add, however,
that there is much serendipity and spontaneity, as well as ethics, to Santiagos
fundamentally aesthetic negotiations.

GATTO IS FUNDAMENTALLY
CORRECT: THERE IS MUCH
ARTISTRY IN HOW SANTIAGO
GOES ABOUT MAKING A LIFE.
Santiago is quite clear in telling us, on more than one occasion, and when much
older, that she sees the making of her life in improvisational terms. Her allusion to
improvisation first appears when she describes her relationship to method acting, the
theatrical approach to dramatic art practiced at the High School of Performing Arts.
Method acting required that she explore improvisationally her deepest self for the
emotional truth that informed the moment lived on stage (Santiago 1998: 74). But
feeling too vulnerable, it seems, she rejected the method acting conception of truth.
Revealing her deepest self meant putting on public display the most sensitive parts
of her biography: that she was illegitimate, shared a bed with [her] sister, and that
she was on welfare. Rather than disclose these truths, she resorts to concealment,
to using method acting to fabricate or invent a simulated reality, a false self that
evolved, she says, as the extended improvisation of [her] life unfolded. She chooses
to improvise not a genuine character, but a protagonist as cheerful and carefree as
my comic book friends Bettty and Veronica, Archie, Reggie, and Jughead (1998:
74emphasis added). As soon as she left the dark, crowded apartment where I
lived, she tells us, I was in performance, pretending to be someone I wasnt. She
was, as her teachers and fellow actors would say, indicating, committing the worst
sin a Method actor can commit on stage. To indicate meant to be in the moment by
going through the emotions, rather than to actually live it (1998: 74).
In a subsequent passage, Santiago invokes the metaphor of improvisation yet again
to explain how she coped with lifes travails. In the cramped, noisy apartment where
my mother struggled to keep us safe, where my grandmother tried to obliterate her
pain with alcohol, where my sisters and brothers planned and invented their futures,
she writes, I improvised. When it hurt, I cried silent tears. And when good things
came my way, I accepted them gratefully but quietly afraid that enjoying them too
much would make them vanish like a drop of water into a desert (1998: 89).

[ 116 ]
 It is fairly clear from Santiagos lines that she imagines world making as an
improvisational venture. But equally clear is what her lines appear to intimate as
well: that her world making entails more than spontaneous construction. In crafting
a world, one in which her constructed public self thrives while her private other
me languishes, Santiago is also fundamentally engaged in what Kwame Anthony
Appiah (2005) calls the ethics of identity. Her decisions about what life to live
are intertwined with the materials history and culture have given her, a gendered
community where men played at being sinvergenzas, women were confined to
house work and child rearing, and children did what they were told.
Santiagos struggle to craft a life, to be an individual, free and independent of her
family and cultural conditions, is an ethical project. In Appiahs view, her project
is fundamentally ethical as opposed to moral to the extent that it is more about
what Santiago believes she owes to herself than about what she thinks she owes to
others. Drawing on Dworkin (2000), Appiah tells us that ethical projects concern
individual convictions, moral ones collective principles. Constructing a life
is ultimately about choosing the life one is convinced is worth living because it is
believed to conform to what one cares about and values. Such an ethical construction
is principally an individual and existential struggle culminating in what Appiah calls
an ethical self. He describes the process as follows:

To create a lifeis to interpret the materials that history has given you. Your
character, your circumstances, your psychological constitution, including the beliefs
and preferences generated by the interaction of your innate endowments and your
experience: all these need to be taken into account in shaping a life. They are not
constraints on that shaping; they are its materials. As we come to maturity, the
identities we make, our individualities, are interpretive responses to our talents and
disabilities, and the changing social, semantic, and material contexts we enter at birth;
and we develop our identities dialectically with our capacities and circumstances,
because the latter are in part the product of what our identities lead us to do. A
persons shaping of her life flows from her beliefs and from a set of values, tastes and
dispositions of sensibility, all of these influenced by various forms of social identity: let
us call all these together a persons ethical self. (Appiah 2005: 163)

Appiah would also say that Santiago makes a life through identification. While
surely not the first to associate identity formation with identification (see, for
example, Stuart Hall 1990), Appiah applies the notion to characterize the way in
which individuals shape their projectsincluding their plan for their own lives
and their conceptions of the good lifeby reference to available labels, available
identities (2005: 66). Santiago became what she became, according to this
perspective, because, as she made her life, she allowed the labels and identities
circulating around her world to influence what she made of herself. It seems right
to call this identification, writes Appiah, because the label plays a role in shaping
the way the agent makes decisions about how to conduct a life, in the process of the
construction of ones identity (2005: 66).
In Puerto Rico, much of Santiagos material for fashioning an ethical self was
contained in the cultural construction jbara, the name for the Puerto Rican country
dweller celebrated in Puerto Rican literature and music, and what in the city of
Santurce, Santiago discovers, no one wanted to be. She comes to know about
and identify with jibarismo mostly through poetry, which she learns not only from

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her father, a poet, but from listening to the radio, which during her childhood was
tuned each morning to The Day Breakers Club, a program dedicated to jbaro
traditional music and poetry.

SANTIAGO BECAME WHAT SHE

BECAME, ACCORDING TO THIS
PERSPECTIVE, BECAUSE, AS SHE
MADE HER LIFE, SHE ALLOWED
THE LABELS AND IDENTITIES
CIRCULATING AROUND HER
WORLD TO INFLUENCE WHAT
SHE MADE OF HERSELF.
Santiago wanted to be a jbara more than anything in the world. She believed
that is what she should do, live as everyone around her in Macn lived. Although
the life of a jbara was typically painted in stark terms, as a life of struggle and
hardship, she was taken by the virtues such a life represented: independence and
contemplation, a closeness to nature coupled with a respect for its intractability, and
a deeply rooted and proud nationalism (Santiago 1993: 12).
Her mother wanted something far different from her, however. She scolded
Santiago for wishing to be such a thing, rapping her knuckles on [her] skull, as if to
weaken the intelligence she said was there. She could not be a jbara, her mother
objected, because [she] was born in the city, where jbaros were mocked for their
unsophisticated customs and peculiar dialect (1993: 12). When at fourteen Santiago
leaves rural Puerto Rico for New York City with her mother and siblings, she feels
the jbara identity she was fashioning for herselfin spite of a mothers scolding
and the hypocrisy among those she saw celebrating people everyone looked down
onerased.
In Brooklyn, the cultural and historical materials she encounters are radically
different. They consist mostly of the Americanized life images her mother instructs
her to avoid so she could retain her Puerto Rican identity. She does not come to
know these images from her mostly dark-skinned and poor neighbors. She looks,
instead, to the comic book world of Archie, Veronica, Betty, Reggie, and Jughead.
These are the only American teenagers she comes to know in Brooklyn, and longs
to replicate. She imagines these characters as living in a bright shadowless world,
much more peaceful than her own chaotic and troubling one. She describes this
Eden-like place as follows:

No one was ever born or died in Archies world, no one shared a bed with a sister,
or bathed in the kitchen, or mourned an absent father. I wanted to live in those
uncrowded, horizontal landscapes painted in primary colors where algo never

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happened, where teenagers like me lived in blissful ignorance of violence and crime,
where no one had seven sisters and brothers, their grandmothers didnt drink beer
late into the night and mothers didnt need you to translate for them at the welfare
office. (1998: 278)

Making a hybrid life out of the Puerto Rican jbaro and American models at her
disposal is for Santiago an ethical journey riddled with uncertainty, fear, anguish, and
shame. She becomes conflicted about her material conditions and where her life is
headed. Her mother sees her life changing, becoming Americanized, believing she
deserved more and was better than everyone else. Santiago admits to the change.
She was right. I had changed, she says, because I wanted a different life from the
one I had. What she finds troubling, though, is why her mother resents her, as if
[she] had betrayed her, as if [she] could help who [she] was becoming (1998: 58). The
life her mother sees unfolding is not entirely under her control. She invents with the
materials she knows. Consider the scripts she deploys in fabricating the good woman
she imagines being.

MAKING A HYBRID LIFE OUT

OF THE PUERTO RICAN JBARO
AND AMERICAN MODELS AT HER
DISPOSAL IS FOR SANTIAGO AN
ETHICAL JOURNEY RIDDLED WITH
UNCERTAINTY, FEAR, ANGUISH,
AND SHAME.
She grows up believing all good women have buenos modales, good manners.
Buenos modales comprised the jbaro ethics that governed ones public conduct
and reduced to dignidad, dignity or self-respect. Santiago interpreted the label
in reciprocal terms to mean something individuals conferred on each other.
One also displayed dignidad if one refrained from gossip, tattle, or tease, never
stared, never stood too close to people youd just met, never addressed people
by the familiar t until they gave you permission, and did not swear or get angry,
particularly in front of strangers (1993: 30).
In the world of dignidad, adults and men were particularly privileged. Only adults
were right, especially if they were old. They were to be addressed as Don so-and-
so, and Doa so-and-so, except for teachers. Teachers were to be referenced as
Mister or Missis so-and-so. It was essential to the script that children not speak
until spoken tonot look an adult in the eyenot raise [their] voice nor enter or
leave a room without permission. And while men were free to relate to women in
any way they liked, women couldnt say anything to men, not even to tell them to
go jump in the harbor and leave them alone (Santiago 1993: 30).

[ 119 ]
 It was important that Santiago understand the script, for dignidad embodied
rules of conduct. To deviate from the rules would be to shame herself or her family,
particularly her mother. This meant that as a woman she had to avoid developing
into, or being perceived as, something like a jamona. As she had learned from her
father, there was no virtue or dignity in that label. It was an insult to be called or be
viewed as a jamona, an unwanted woman, old, alone, and unable to marry.
Neither could Santiago afford the fate of a calculating puta or a pendeja. She
became confident with age she would be no jamonaalthough as a child she often
imagined that ending up as a jamona would be far less painful than suffer the kind
of pain her mother endured as a consequence of her fathers infidelities. It was
between a puta and a pendeja that she was to position herself. A puta was a whore,
and a pendeja believed everything a man told her, or looked the other way while he
betrayed her (Santiago 1998: 15). Between a puta and a pendeja was the safe space
in which decent women lived and thrived and raised their families. That is where
you could find her mother, as well as her relatives and friends. But constructing that
virtuous space was superbly difficult. One false move, her mother warned, and
she ran the risk of becoming one or being perceived as the other (Santiago 1998:
15). As her mother knew well, the inherited script of dignidad guided both conduct
and perception, not only how women were to behave but also how others were to
construct them. It was not sufficient, therefore, that Santiago avoid being a puta or
a pendeja; it was equally crucial that she not be construed as either one. Both were
certain to invite shame.

BETWEEN A PUTA AND A

PENDEJA WAS THE SAFE SPACE
IN WHICH DECENT WOMEN
LIVED AND THRIVED AND RAISED
THEIR FAMILIES.
There was another matter to consider in constructing the good woman: that
it would be shameful for a woman to live with a man without being married to
him. Married women always looked down on those who werent and typically
dismissed them with a wave of the hand and a disgusted expression (Santiago
1998: 33). That is why her mother sacrificed herself and brought her to New York:
to keep her chaste. Santiago needed protection from men, from sinvergenzas,
as her mother called them, so she could leave her house married in a white gown
and veilwith a walk down the aisle of a church, a priest, bridesmaids in colorful
dresses and groomsmen in tuxedos (1998: 34). That was custom, what dignidad
called for. What could be more glorious than that? What happiness, she recalls
her mother saying, to see a daughter walk down the aisle in a long white dress and
veil! (Santiago 1998: 34).
But leaving her mothers house chaste and married with a non-sinvergenza is
not to be. Santiago leaves home at twenty-one almost a woman, somewhat short
of what her mother imagines. She leaves as the improvised lover she fashions, and

[ 120 ]
with the man, Ulvi Dogan, a Turkish filmmaker, who, through deception, finally
accomplishes what other men had tried and failed at doing: overcome her resistance
to seduction and claim her virginity. Even at twenty-one, she cannot face her mother
with this unplanned turn in her life and resorts to secrecy, much as she had done
when she was younger, so as not to disappoint her. Lacking the courage to say
goodbye in person, fearing perhaps she would be perceived as a puta and a pendeja,
she stuffed in the mailbox a letter addressed to [her mother] in which [she] said
goodbye (Santiago 1998: 2). How does she get to this crossroad, feeling she had
crossed dignidad, had disappointed herself and her family, and must now take leave
of her mother in a state of shame as opposed to virtue?
As we saw in the earlier examples, there appears to be no clear and deliberate
course in Santiagos trajectory to the day she decides to leave her mothers home. She
tends to rely mostly on her own agency and the historical and cultural material she
inherits and from which she is constrained to draw. What her reported path seems
to show until she leaves Brooklyn is that she appears to have been more spontaneous
in playing out the scripts she inherits than calculating. Had I stopped to think about
my future, she reminds us, I would have been afraid. Consider how she loses her
virginity in seeming opposition to the code of dignidiad.
After making love for the first time to Ulvi Dogan, whom she later calls her
Turkish lover, Santiago is unable to explain why. As she lies naked, wrapped
around Ulvi, she can only pose the question: Why had I not resisted, had in fact
joyfully thrown off my clothes on the black leather chair? (1998: 272). Losing her
virginity was no part of a life plan or the result of conscious and deliberate decision-
making. The ethical questioning of the act arises later. The conduct itself, however,
occurs serendipitously and spontaneously, as a chance and seemingly innocent
improvised rendition.
Santiago meets Ulvi Dogan by happenstance, just a man whod peeked into the
phone booth at a Fifth Avenue Woolworth, where she stopped to call her mother
and a job agency. He introduces himself as a filmmaker in search of a leading actress
for [his] movie, and she agrees to a screen test (1998: 267). The screen test is to take
place at Ulvis apartment, and she dresses in her best outfit. When she arrives,
however, no signs of a screen test are evident. She finds no cameras in the apartment,
no lights, no film crew, and no script. Ulvi claims the film crew is on its way and
suggests they talk while waiting. They converse for thirty minutes, mostly about his
filmmaking and his few words of Spanish. But in the process, she is captivated by his
features. She is struck by the huge, very dark brown pupils; straight, fine, black hair;
a high forehead. She also notices the deep linesfrom his nostrils to his lips, which
seemed drawn on his face, their shape precise, flat. She discovers that his nose made
a straight line with his forehead, flared to a wide base, and then imagines him like a
museum fresco of an Etruscan horseman or a Mesopotamian king, with the majestic
air swirling about him enhanced by his movementsslow, studied, as if he had to be
careful or hed knock something over (1998: 270).
Although flattered that Ulvi sees her as having star potential, Santiago cannot
resist thinking they are alone in an apartment decorated with posters of women
masturbating. Arty or not, she writes, it was impossible to look anywhere in the
apartment without [her] eyes landing on a nipple, an inverted navel, pubic hair
(1998: 271). So with no film crew in sight, she stands and motions to leave. I should
go, she says. But she surrenders instead to Ulvis suggestion: that they walk and talk
until the film crew arrives.

[ 121 ]
 Santiago recalls the parade on Fifth Avenue as they strolled. What she cant
remember, however, is the exact time during that parade when Ulvis real intentions
began to take hold. She wonders at which point during the parade he took my hand.
Or why, as a float went by filled with Polka dancers, he put his arm around me. Or
how it happened that, when the Middletown Police Athletic League band marched
by playing the version of Winchester Cathedral, my face was against his chest, and I
smelled his skin, clean, a nonscent really, captivating (1998: 272).

ACCORDING TO HER INHERITED

SCRIPT, SHE WAS EITHER A PUTA
OR A PENDEJA.
When they return to the apartment, she yields for the first time to a love making
that she likens to choreography. Afterwards, she wonders about what she appears
to have fortuitously and spontaneously become. As Ulvi confesses to her, he never
intended to use her in a film. He simply wanted her, and for himself, nobody else.
That is all he tells her, and she finds it hard to explain how it had happened. Not the
mechanics of sex, but how [she] went from fledgling movie actress to the directors
what? [She] couldnt name what [shed] become. According to her inherited script,
she was either a puta or a pendeja. Was she one or the other? Or was she both? Or
had she in fact by chance crafted her own safe space between these two visions: that
safe place in which decent women lived and thrived and raised their families.
Santiago does not tell us. Nor does she acknowledge deviating from the code of
dignidad, or venturing into how others would perceive and judge her. She confesses
only to becoming Ulvis lover. And as his lover, as his Chiquita, as he called her, she
came to a possible justification for her conduct. She found in Ulvi the father she
missed. Although Ulvi may have deceived her to seduce her, and had no intentions
of marrying her, Ulvi, who was thirty-seven, the same age as Mami, seventeen years
older than [she], was, like her father, no sinvergenza, as her mother would say.
There was dignidad in the man she found. So to perceive her according to script,
it seems, as a puta, a pendeja, or even both, would amount to misconstruing and
negating the life she had invented for herself, much as her mother and her father had
done before her. She was, after all, born out of wedlock.

Identification and opposition in Santiagos trajectory

It was suggested earlier that identification is important to understanding the life
of Santiago as she fashioned it: that the labels and models circulating around her
were sources of identity and influenced her conduct, and that this is clearly evident
in her early memoirs. Santiago is in many ways the outcome of the cumulative
effects (Lpez 2003) the labels and identities she inherits have on her. But so is her
opposition to those same labels and models. Santiagos identity was also fashioned
in much the same way Eysturoy (Annie Eysturoy 1996) suggests identities are made:
in opposition to the materials she encounters. Her process of self-creation through
identification is a dialectical one. Santiago becomes what she becomes as she
struggles with and against the cultural and political hegemony trafficked by the labels
and identities she challenges.

[ 122 ]
 The materials Santiago inherits were not just influences. Neither were they
materials she merely opposes. As we saw in the case of dignidad, Santiago uses and
refashions the images of sinvergenza, puta, and pendeja, much in the same way jazz
musicians use melodies and tunes to transform them in the process as they improvise
and invent new sound. As Paul Berliner tells us, jazz artists draw spontaneously
on their storehouse of old models, such as widely known and celebrated tunes,
melodies, and songs, and transform them into new ones (1994: 221).
Drawing on Puerto Rican gendered identities, such as the jbara, the jamona,
the puta, and the pendeja, Santiago invents her own kind of feminist vision, one
organized around a gendered jbarismo far more cosmopolitan in character than
the gendered and provincial jbarismo represented by her mother and other women
from Macn, her place of origin. Her opposition to the gendered labels ends up
reconstructing puertoricanism, to invoke Torres-Robless thesis (1998), as she rejects
not only the images of puta and pendeja, but also the model her mother imagined
for her: a woman happily married after walking down the aisle in a long white dress
and veil. How she derives that very personal script is reminiscent of how Paul
Ricoeurs plotting operates at the level of story. For Ricoeur, plotting is a narrative
tool available to an author. An author uses the tool to construct a coherent story
out of the disparate pieces of a lifes trajectory. The results, according to Ricoeur,
are a holistic and connected narrative with overarching sense, meaning, and logic, a
synthesis of heterogeneous elements (1986: 122).
Santiagos approach to life making is illustrative of Ricoeurs notion. Santiago
draws on the fundamentally different and contradictory jbaro and comic-book
images she experiences in Puerto Rico and Brooklyn to construct from them a sort
of synthesis or hybrid persona, an identity that seems emblematic of the identity
Appiah associates with a rooted cosmopolitanism (2006). Santiagos synthesis, in
other words, does not seem to come at the expense of valuing and respecting that
others matter, which is very much in keeping with what a rooted cosmopolitanism
would unquestionably urge. As a rooted cosmopolitan, Santiago never shies from
incorporating into her own identity values and other cultural materials different
from her own. Her posture composes an identity whose concern for others does
not necessarily trump her concern for herself and the concerns of those closest to
her by kinship, history, and culture. Her rooted cosmopolitanism celebrates not
only her narrative connections to her own world, but also her narrative connections
to the world of others. Consider her exchanges with Jaime, the New York-born
Puerto Rican actor who replaced her close friend Allan in the Childrens Theatre
International production of Babu.
Jaime felt he and Santiago should be fighting for Puerto Rican rights and
supporting Puerto Rican culture instead of playing Indian royalty in a childrens
play. Santiago admired Jaimes political activism, as well as the community-oriented
work of her cousin Corazn, her brother Hctor, and her sister Delsa. But she felt
no obligation to our people in the abstract. While she did not share her mothers
view of looting rioters as desordenados, she also did not identify with them. She
simply thought their looting behavior was funny. If she was weighed down by
anything, it was her duty to [her] people: Mami, Tata, my ten sisters and brothers.
And if she loved Indian dance, it wasnt because that devotion was somehow part of
a conspiracy to promote their civilization over Puerto Ricos (1998: 286). It was only
that she valued the dance, much as she valued the plena.
Santiago agreed with Jaime: Puerto Ricans had more of a struggle in the mainland

[ 123 ]
if they were to maintain their cultural identities. She did not believe, though, that
working harder to retain her identity meant hustling to the nearest community
center to dance the plena. Her mother had always insisted she remain 100 percent
Puerto Rican. But she had found it hard to tell where Puerto Rican ended and
Americanized began. Was [she] Americanized if [she] preferred pizza to pastelillos?
Was [she] Puerto Rican if [her] skirts covered [her] knees? If [she] cut out a picture
of Paul Anka from a magazine and tacked it to the wall, was [she] less Puerto Rican
than when [she] cut out pictures of Gilberto Monroig? Who could tell [her]?
(Santiago 1998: 25). Why, she insisted, should [she] be less Puerto Rican if [she]
danced Bharata Natyam? Were ballet dancers on the island less Puerto Rican because
their art originated in France? What about pianists who performed Bethoven? Or
people who read Nietzsche? (Santiago 1998: 287).

WERE BALLET DANCERS ON THE

ISLAND LESS PUERTO RICAN
BECAUSE THEIR ART ORIGINATED
IN FRANCE?
While these questions made sense to entertain, she felt neither she nor Jaime
had satisfactory answers to them. So she was not fond of political argument and the
sort of ideological fervor favored by her friend Jaime. She preferred less strenuous
conversation and the company of other close friends like Allan, who had demanded
less and accepted [her] as [she] was (1998: 288).
Santiagos polemics with Jaime is not just illustrative of the rooted
cosmopolitan she comes to develop. The exchanges also show that Santiagos
inventions are not products of an imaginary that construes life creation as an
exercise in politics. As the early memoirs point out, her opposition to historical
and cultural material is not of the political sort. She was no Jaime. Unlike him,
her social conscience was pathetically underdeveloped. The improvised
inventions of Santiago, rather, are fundamentally exercises in oppositional ethics
than in ideological struggle. What she appears to be fundamentally asking
throughout her early memoirs is not what kind of life she owes to others, but
what kind of life she owes to herself. While she aims for authenticity in grappling
with the ethical dilemmas her questions pose, she often falls short of that effort,
and resorts to disingenuousness and outright deception to fabricate a simulated
reality, as she calls it, and fend off challenges to her vulnerabilities, individual
autonomy, and sense of who she is and longs to be.
In Santiagos early memoirs, readers will find no remorse or admissions of guilt
for her seemingly ethical lapses. She merely poses questions, much as she did after
losing her virginity. This Puerto Rican writer appears to construe her choices as the
necessary improvisations individuals are constrained to make when working with the
historical materials they are given in the cultural and political economies they are
forced to traffic and negotiate. At the end, she seems to be saying, individuals must
be measured against what they have imagined and improvised for themselves, not
against what others imagined for them and expected them to produce for others.

[ 124 ]
 Sculpting a life, Appiah reminds us, is not about finding an authentic self, of being
true to what we already are or could be in the absence of external forces. Neither is
the fabrication of a life about creating oneself ex nihilo, as if individuality is valuable
because only a person who has made a self has a life worth living (Appiah 2005: 17).
As the case of Santiago suggests, there is to the workings of individual flourishing far
more than the narratives of individuality, family, and structure by themselves have
power to tell us.

[ 125 ]
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For the generous contributions of all the reviewers who graciously agreed to read and
comment on this manuscript, I will always be grateful.

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