“I’ll be back”: The United States’ occupation of Puerto Rico and the Gothic

With the conquest of the Latin American and Caribbean territories, hierarchical relations were established between the colonizing subject and the colonized other: “The discovery of the Americas challenged long-standing hypotheses about the nature of the world and man’s place in it, and the New World became the arena for an exceptionally transformative encounter with monsters, real and imagined” (Braham 1). In other words, from that moment on, an imperial gaze (Pratt) was imposed on the new colonial possessions and their inhabitants, who were now defined as monstrous and threatening. This unequal vision was then manifested in the chronicles and travel narratives of explorers and conquistadors during the colonial period, but also in Gothic fiction, both in Europe and in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Caribbean, more specifically, “appeared as the backdrop to terror, whether in travelogues, where it was depicted as the site of the mysterious and uncanny, or in histories that underscored the violent process that led to its colonization” (Paravisini-Gebert 233). Therefore, travel and travel writing by Europeans not only created the “imperial order” imposed on the new parts of the world populated by a new “domestic subject” (Pratt 3), but it also contributed to setting the idea of “Otherness” in Gothic writing, which, according to Tabish Khair depends on “the presence, real or imagined, constructed or imposed, of difference” (5-6). In the particular case of Puerto Rico, this difference is established in two moments when the colonial journey initiates a process of invasion: the first, during Spanish colonization in the fifteenth century, and the second, during the US occupation in the nineteenth century that would end up defining the present-day political situation of the island.