From the study of knowledge production and intellectual history. About the book Illusion and Ruins: Left-wing Imaginaries in Puerto Rico since the 1960s by historian Carlos Pabón Ortega

Abstract

Review of the book Ilusión y Ruinas: imaginarios de izquierda en Puerto Rico desde la década de los sesenta (Illusion and Ruins: Left-Wing Imaginaries in Puerto Rico since the 1960s), by historian Carlos Pabón Ortega. The book is an intellectual history of the so-called new struggle for independence in Puerto Rico, from the emergence of the Pro-Independence Movement (MPI) in 1959 to the present. Pabón Ortega analyzes how the discourse and imaginaries of this socialist and Third-Worldist movement were constructed and eventually disappeared. The historian examines what the imaginaries of the Puerto Rican left were; which ideological debates shaped it; how these debates were addressed; why and how its independence project failed; and how its imaginary of socialist independence dissolved. Pabón Ortega argues that, despite the influence of Marxism, the Puerto Rican left was fundamentally a nationalist movement, which contributed to its failure. For Enrique J. Laboy Vázquez, this claim may rely on a substantialist notion of Marxism, as if it had a monossemic core—something that, according to him, disregards the plurivocal and polysemic character of Marxism, whose meanings must be understood within the context of specific semantic struggles.