Jennet Rodriguez Betancourt

glimpses of the past; whereas, a reading or re-visiting of the stories, will surely shed
significant light on the prevalent colonial conditions of the times. To have masqueraded
using the marginalized jíbaro as trope was perhaps Alonso’s only and finest way to carry
out his project.
“De la entraña nativa le salían los humores aconsejados por el ingenio; y su
inconformidad solía despistar a la censura porque iba a su trabajo montada en
ocurrencias. Sus escritos en general llevaban la música por dentro como todos
los puertorriqueños. A poco de levantar el manto de donaires se verán en su
obra la índole pedregosa de nuestra situación; y la única manera que teníamos
entonces para exponerla sin peligros” (Pedreira 157).
Because of Puerto Rico’s colonial status, the island has always exhibited a cultural
struggle and this condition has always been present in its literature. It is through this
valuable tool that testimonies, histories, cultures, and the narrations of a nation are
recorded.
El gíbaro de Manuel A. Alonso Pacheco definitely offers an invitation to visit or
revisit the texts of other Puerto Rican writers who have included the topic of the jíbaro in
their narrations. Guerra states that Alonso documented jíbaro culture as he saw it, while
the writings of Zeno Gandia and Salvador Brau in the 1880s and 1890s “sharply
criticized and degraded it” (56). Sociologists Miguel Meléndez Muñoz and Jose
Colombán Rosario researched jíbaro culture and both have offered valuable contributions
for further study. This topic has especially awakened an interest not only in the jíbaro
representation, but more so in the representation of the Puerto Rican jíbara.
In Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican, the author calls the
autobiographical protagonist of her memoirs (Negui) a jíbara. Her stories are full of
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