Obra de teatro representada en tres actos que cuenta las vicisitudes de una familia que emigra de Puerto Rico a Nueva York, más concretamente el Bronx. La familia está compuesta por el abuelo, que se niega a marchar, Doña Gabriela, Luis, Juanita y Chaguito. Es un contraste entre la educación tradicional y el atractivo de la ciudad.
la car reta rene marques pdf 11
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Considered one of the highpoints of twentieth-century Puerto Rican literature, Rene Marques's 1952 play La carreta has nonetheless come under withering criticism from Latinx critics due to its negative representation of diasporic Puerto Ricans. This essay opens up the possibility for a revised estimate of the politics of Marques's play by arguing that the English translation of La carreta (The Oxcart) obfuscates the Spanish original's early articulation of U.S. Afro-Latinx experience. In effect, the sole published English translation, which has served as the basis for theatrical performances and supplied the text for major anthologies, purposefully and systematically elides La carreta's complex treatment of race, Afro-Latinidad, and Puerto Rican--African American solidarity. This essay delineates these racial erasures and reconstructs the genesis of the racially suspect translation through archival research. Building on these discoveries, the essay argues for a new reading of La carreta that restores the play's vigorous, early representation of Afro-Latinx experience in midcentury New York and, in the closing section, considers the implications of the mistranslation of La carreta for the constitution of the canon of Latinx literature in English. [Keywords: Rene Marques, La carreta, The Oxcart, translation studies, Afro-Latinx, race]
In his introduction to The Oxcart (La carreta), the 1969 English translation of Rene Marques's classic play of Puerto Rican migration, the translator, Charles R. Pilditch, comments on a racially tinged incident that occurred at an outdoor, English-language staging of the play in New York City. After the actress playing Juanita remarked that the Puerto Rican section of the South Bronx was "better than Harlem," a "Negro youth" in the audience shouted back at her, "like hell it is!" (Marques 1969, v). Pilditch terms the black youth's outburst an "example, with more serious implications" of an "audience reaction provoked by The Oxcart" (1969, v). But what he doesn't say is that his translation of La carreta, and its publication in abridged form by Charles Scribner's Sons, in 1969, is tailor-made to create this kind of cross-ethnic dissension and racial rivalry between New York City African Americans and Puerto Ricans in a way that appears to intentionally misrepresent the more affirmative racial politics found in the Spanish original.
Although much Latinx literature written in Spanish circulates, like The Oxcart, in English-language translations, these translations have too often been taken at face value, rarely receiving adequate scholarly scrutiny. (1) Responding to Laura Lomas's call to study and practice translation to "help reverse epistemic violence, or at least make it a visible object of critique" (2016, 161), this essay provides a compelling example demonstrating why such scrutiny of Latinx literature in English translation is warranted. I will show that the sole published English translation of Marques's La carreta--which has served as the basis for English-language theatrical performances and which has supplied the text for the major anthologies of Latinx literature--purposefully and systematically erases the Spanish play's complex treatment of race, Puerto Rican--African American solidarity, and what we would today call a discourse of Afro-Latinidad. In reconstructing the history of this racially suspect, deeply troubling translation, my essay analyzes the translated play's expunging of Afro-Latinx scenes and performs archival work to determine the likely motives for these erasures. Building on my archival discoveries, the essay argues for a new reading of La carreta that recuperates the play's largely ignored yet unmistakable, vigorous, early representation of Afro-Latinx experience in midcentury New York. In its final section, the essay asks how the glaring translational distortions of Marques's play could for so long go unnoticed among critics. For despite the passage of fifty years since the translation's publication, the wholesale erasure of Afro-Latinidad from The Oxcart has elicited almost no comment. I argue that this curious failure to identify and critique these suppressions, for a play that has been so widely read and discussed in the literature, in both English and Spanish, has wider implications for Latinx literature, so much of which is reliant upon translation for transmission, teaching, canonization, and study.
The untold story of La carreta's mistranslation is remarkable in no small part because the literary work it distorts is so celebrated. First published in full in 1952, with its world premiere taking place the following year in New York City, Rene Marques's third play has long been considered, especially by island-based critics, as one of the masterworks of twentieth-century Puerto Rican literature. (2) In three acts, the play recounts the devastating migration of a sharecropping family from the Puerto Rican countryside to the La Perla slum of San Juan, and then to the Bronx. At each of these destinations, the family experiences a series of heartrending calamities: In San Juan, Juanita is impregnated through sexual assault, has a backroom abortion, and attempts suicide; her younger brother, Chaguito, is arrested and sent to reformatory school. Later on, in New York, Juanita leaves the family to support herself partly through prostitution, while her mother, Dona Gabriela, declines in health, and her other brother, Luis, is killed in a workplace accident. The carreta, or oxcart, of the play's title refers to a model oxcart that Juanita's hometown boyfriend gives her after they leave the Puerto Rican countryside. As a symbol of direction, directionlessness, and mobility, the oxcart recalls the conveyance the family left the campo in and contrasts, in its primitive method of transportation, with New York City modernity. But most of all it gets at the question of agency. Who is driving the oxcart?, the play asks at several key junctures. Who, of the migrants, if any, is in control of his/her destiny? At the end of the play, after Luis's death, the oxcart becomes the symbolic vehicle of return migration to Puerto Rico, where the fractured, chastened family will try to regroup, taking control of its destiny by accepting that the Puerto Rican agricultural life it left behind in Act 1 is its destiny.
Given the play's bleak verdict on the Puerto Rican migrant experience in New York City, La carreta has come in for withering criticism from U.S.-based Latinx critics and writers. Partly countering the high value placed on the play on the island, these critics have challenged La carreta's negative representation of diasporic Puerto Ricans, its essentializing linkage of puertorriquenidad with insular rural life, and its author's Hispanophilic elitism. (3) Juan Flores puts this view efficiently in Divided Borders when he writes that "in La carreta, the entire migration experience is presented as a process of abrupt moral and cultural deterioration" (1993, 169). The family is so damaged by their New York City sojourn that "their only hope for salvation is in return to the Island and the resumption of peasant life on the land" (1993, 169). As Flores and others show, however, the Puerto Rican migration to New York is not merely a story of cultural degradation, injury, and loss, but also one of renewal and invention. In rejecting La carreta's once-hegemonic negative portrayal of the Puerto Rican diaspora, Latinx critics like Flores have found a formidable ally in New York Puerto Rican cultural production, especially the work of Nuyorican poet Tato Laviera. Laviera's ingeniously titled La Carreta Made a U-Turn (1979), published in the year of Marques's death, enacts an intricate intertextual subversion of Marques's play, one that explicitly renounces the Siren-like balm of return migration and--through its linguistic inventiveness and embrace of blackness--stands as a kind of poetic proof of the vitality of diasporic Puerto Rican culture.
While this Latinx critique has done much to enlarge our understanding of Marques's play, it has oddly failed to capture the significance of Afro-Latinidad to the work, let alone detect its glaring effacement in the racially suspect English translation. By analyzing the racial politics of the play's translation and specifically exploring its effaced representation of Afro-Latinidad, my essay will make a case for a more nuanced view of La carreta's representation of mid-century Puerto Rican New York. Indeed, I wager that the almost reflexive tendency today to associate Marques's play with an oppressive vision of diaspora may be responsible for blinding us to La carreta's salient treatment of race, a blindness accentuated, perpetuated, and--in cases where the English playtext is used to make critical arguments--even created by the fact that the English translation willfully erases the Spanish original's racial messages. That benign racial politics may be found in La carreta at all will, of course, surprise readers accustomed to thinking of Marques--the author of the reprehensible tract "The Docile Puerto Rican" (1962)--as a racial retrograde. This essay does not seek to rehabilitate Rene Marques as a racial progressive, but it does open up the possibility for a revised estimate of the politics of Marques's play by arguing that the English translation of La carreta has obfuscated the Spanish original's early, complex articulation of U.S. Afro-Latinx experience.
The single, most stunning illustration of racial erasure in Charles Pilditch's translation of La carreta occurs in the scene in which a young, unarmed, dark-skinned man is shot dead by the police. (4) This scene, representing a classic topos of the black experience of institutional racism in the United States, takes place in Act 3, set entirely in the South Bronx. While inside their apartment, the Puerto Rican migrant family hears the shouts of bystanders and police, followed by the sounds of running and gunshots. Luis goes out to investigate. When he returns, the women in the family anxiously inquire about the shooting victim's identity. Pilditch's English translation reads as follows: 2ff7e9595c
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