The Repeating City: Urban Space in Hispanic Caribbean Literature

Abstract

Writing about the Caribbean archipelago, Antonio Benítez-Rojo explains that “…one can sense the features of an island that ‘repeats’ itself, unfolding and bifurcating until it reaches all the seas and lands of the earth, while at the same time it inspires multidisciplinary maps of unexpected design” (Benítez-Rojo 1996: 3). The same thoughts can be applied to the fascination of the Hispanic Caribbean in writing about the city. Unfolding and bifurcating into compelling images, the Hispanic Caribbean city repeats itself, thereby dissolving any sense that the culture can be spoken of in totalizing terms. Since the discovery of the New World, colonial literary production has documented the city diligently, but mainly as a city-fortress or a city-port, as a transit and commerce site, a meeting point of peoples and cultures. Its literary foundation starts in the nineteenth century with the publication of several novels in which the city claims its role as a setting for events, once and for all. However, the city also states its protagonist pretensions, fully realized in the twentieth century, at the time of the explosion of urban literature. The representations of Havana (Cuba), San Juan (Puerto Rico), and Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) in the twentieth century combined the various methods of walking, experiencing, and inventing the city—as a Utopia, a real space for a living community and an imaginary construction—in different historical contexts that influence and transform the urban cultures of isolated societies. Many Hispanic Caribbean writers have analyzed how, in real and imagined ways, urban spaces offer different accounts of unequal development, power negotiations, and repression. Others have focused on the intersections of urban imaginaries with memory, desire, nostalgia, national history, and international community. This essay, therefore, examines the representation of Havana, San Juan, and Santo Domingo in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature.