An Inconceivable Indigeneity? The Historical, Cultural, and Interactional Dimensions of Puerto Rican Ta

Abstract

This dissertation examines the historical, institutional, and interactional dimensions of Taíno activism in Puerto Rico. Particularly, I consider how the presumed extinction of the Taíno in Puerto Rico has served to limit their claims to indigeneity as well as the role that they can play in public policy debates concerning the management of indigenous human remains and sacred sites. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in Puerto Rico, I argue that Taíno activists address and reconfigure widespread historical narratives within everyday interactions. I propose that Taíno activists seek to reposition the histories that erase them by focusing particularly on three factors: (1) the incongruity between the life stories and documents that inform prevalent historical narratives premised on the Taíno extinction and the personal and filial trajectories that inform current claims to being Taíno, (2) the ensuing discrepant interpretations of ambiguous terms in historical documents, and (3) the repair of Taíno erasure through the active reclamation of Taíno identity in cultural and linguistic terms. I examine how these incongruities, ambiguities and repairs materialize at various levels of social action: within discursive and interactional realignments, through recruitment encounters, in the socialization of novices, in the course of creating a Taíno script, throughout the manufacture of Taíno speech forms, and in bureaucratic encounters. The dissertation shows how these social dimensions have been involved in the recent public emergence of Taíno as an increasingly visible social identification in Puerto Rico.