Cosas que no se Mencionan: Poetics and Politics of Spectrality in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico

Throughout the nineteenth century and up until the 1898 transfer of sovereignty to the United States, Puerto Ricans sought the restoration of Spanish constitutional protections to the island, suspended by the 1837 peninsular Courts. The metropolis, for its part, endlessly delayed the proclamation of even the special laws that were supposed to take the place of the Constitution. It considered the constant fight for reform a cover for separatism, and met it with fierce political repression and censorship. In this situation, Puerto Rican intellectuals (writers, politicians, and writer-politicians) found in Kardecian spiritism a polyvalent tool: a non-Catholic spiritual value system that made their claims imaginable and morally legitimate; an organizational infrastructure allowing them to effect social action and resistance; a metaphor for living in a circum-Atlantic world, where an unseen Other was the source of power but the meek could still be destined to prevail in a life as yet to come. Against this context, in this presentation I outline the spiritist sojourn of Manuel Corchado y Juarbe--Puerto Rican representative to the 1871-74 Spanish revolutionary Courts (where he co-authored a bill for the inclusion of spiritism in Spanish school curricula), longtime resident of Catalonia (a hotbed of “political spiritism”), poet, and short-story author--as an example of the uses to which the “great beyond” was put in the Puerto Rican construction of a nationality without a state, under the metropolitan aegis. Taking a lesson from spiritism’s role in incipient Catalan nationalism, Corchado appropriates it as a political weapon against late imperialism.