'Free From the Fatal Contagion of Prudery': Reading Wilde in Puerto Rico. Issue 3 (3rd July 2019) - Rodríguez Navas, Ana
Abstract : In the Americas, early responses to Oscar Wilde were frequently shaped by reactions to his transgressive appearance and personal scandals, which often eclipsed his critical merits. A significant exception is the Puerto Rican statesman and critic Miguel Guerra Mondragón, who from the 1910s championed Wilde's critical thought and established a place for his ideas at the centre of Puerto Rican modernismo and the island's anticolonial discourses. As an editor of the Revista de las Antillas and a widely read translator of Wilde's works, Guerra mocked the macho preoccupation with Wilde's transgressive persona as mere posturing, urging Puerto Ricans to engage instead with Wilde's critical thought, which he believed deeply salient to the island's struggle to forge a cultural identity in the face of US colonialism. Through Guerra's efforts, and his success in bringing Wilde to the attention of other prominent intellectuals, Wilde's thought left important but largely unacknowledged traces in Puerto Rico's literature and politics. As author of the first legislation seeking to establish Puerto Rico as an Estado Libre Asociado, Guerra Mondragón stands as a tantalising bridge between aestheticism, often considered to be politically barren, and efforts to conceptualise Puerto Rican cultural and political autonomy in the early twentieth century.