Jennet Rodriguez Betancourt

ehind varied discursive masks. So this time the determined writer focused on the spirit
and way of life of the inoffensive, modest inhabitants of the mountains.
According to Brau, El Gibaro was already categorized as “libro sospechoso”; and
therefore, it would be detained and carefully examined at the port. It was Alonso’s
connection with San Juan’s bishop, Gil Esteve, which redeemed the book of its sins and
helped it enter the island with the church’s blessings of the Catholic Church. Lopez
Adorno states that the literary production of Puerto Rican writers continuously
confronted political, institutional, and ideological obstacles that did not permit it to attain
a larger readership nationally and abroad (Making the decolonized visible 7). Flemming
Brahms affirms that “As a group the Commonwealth nations, however different they may
be, share the experience of colonialism and its subsequent developments. Their histories
vary, but they always need to be understood in terms of a dependence upon the imperial
centre and a later movement towards independence” (66). Brahms further agrees that
these countries exhibit a sense of urgency and an enthusiasm to re-create both their social
and cultural self-hood and many times an obsession with cultural identity is observed.
(66)
The jibaros, one of Alonso’s main themes, were the deprived people from the
countryside or mountains. A jíbaro or gíbaro is an expression meaning hill or forest
people, commonly used to refer to mountain dwelling peasants in Puerto Rico. Francisco
A. Scarano relates in “The Jibaro Masquerade and the Subaltern Politics of Creole
Identity Formation in Puerto Rico, 1745-1823” that the jíbaro initially appeared in
writings during the Spanish colonial period in which elite writers hid their political ideas
behind discursive disguises using the uneducated, inoffensive peasants who lived in the
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