La Monoestrellada

Walking down the streets of Harlem’s Eastside Barrio, one becomes immediately aware of the esthetics and ethos that in part make up Puerto Rican cultural identity. The iconic colors of red, white and blue, like their Motherland’s counterpart flag, play the role of unifier, identifier, and resonate with undertones of nationalistic principle. The stars and stripes of Puerto Rico, mirroring those of the Cuban Independence party, may partly have lost some of their meaning but have remained the singular most identified icon of identity. The reproduction of the flag on goods or the ritual practice of its use on clothing, altars, etc. etc; serves a dual purpose. One is role of symbolic unifier of a people, whose historic sense of “nation”, continues to play out even while paradoxically under a quasi-democratic colonial rule. In another sense, the symbol of Puerto Rican culture denotes an island that is struggling to preserve its identity of nation, culture and community vis-à-vis imperialistic rule and the overwhelming introduction of commodified goods and culture of the ruling elite.

So if the flag can be displayed on any miniscule object; can it begin to lose its nationalistic importance? Can it/ should it become a symbol that automatically equates to fashion, objectification or even harmless desecration? Why would a “nation” of people “el pueblo”, come together and object to the desecration of their national emblem when Madonna once decided to rub it against her sexual extremities during a concert or when burned on a W.A.S.P. owned television sitcom? (Seinfeld) Does the flag in of itself not read as text and invokes a history of struggle, oppression, freedom, and of social experience? An academic once asked an important question: Are Puerto Ricans actually perpetuating a process of “propelling the national flag into the open and out of its restricted political and ideological field of significance?” (Flores, pg 32) Should they be more interested in blaming “the sway of the global marketplace and mass consumption for stripping the paramount national symbol of its traditional spiritual aura?” (Flores, pg 32) Have they forgotten the struggle or the once fought for battle of national, not neo-colonial, identity?

My answer to that question is, No. The ongoing organized movements of both the Puerto Rican proletarian and the educated elite will always continue. Historically the dissemination of nationalistic ideology lives on in the form of for example the Young Lords Party and more recently, Vieques anti-booming and grass root movements, universities, and all those who chose to remember, and not forget history nor ignore the present. So fret not, Puerto Rican identity has not been diminished to a one day a year parade or fashionable flags swaying in the wind on the back of an Escalade. The ongoing collective consciousness clearly shows that many Puerto Ricans have not traded their sense of nationalism for that of a “state ideology and market culture.”

La monoestrella (lone star) has fallen pray to commercialization, colonization, objectification, oppression, recession, Protestant reformation, bomb-ification, non-voter-isation, but there still remain those Puerto Ricans who have not lost sight of the underlying significance of their not-yet-a-nation, national symbol or the multitude which constitutes the Puerto Rican experience.