Event Highlights: “Raíces y alas”: Puerto Rico y el archivo transnacional de Juan Ramón Jiménez
This virtual lecture (in Spanish) by Laurie Garriga, Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of the Holy Cross (MA), took place on Thursday, February 10, 2022.
Garriga’s research analyzes the Spanish Nobel Laureate poet Ramón Jiménez’s transatlantic path and his relationship to Spain, the United States and Puerto Rico as expressed in his archival practices from 1916 (his first trip to the U.S.) until his death in 1958. Jiménez went into permanent exile in 1936, when he and his wife Zenobia Camprubí fled from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). During the war and subsequent dictatorship of Francisco Franco, Jiménez would live in Cuba, Coral Gables, Baltimore and Washington before settling in Puerto Rico in 1951. In Madrid, supporters of Franco broke into his residence and ransacked his papers, books and personal items—his carefully-kept life’s work—which would take many years to recover only partially. Jiménez never returned to Spain. He died in Puerto Rico in 1958, not only writing new poems but rewriting, recreating and “reliving” his poems and prose, labors for which he had always depended upon his personal archive. Before his death, Jiménez destined his Nobel Prize earnings to the institutionalization of his archive (Sala Zenobia-Juan Ramón Jiménez, University of Puerto Rico) and to a museum (Casa-Museo Zenobia/Juan Ramón Jiménez) located in his childhood home in the Andalusian town of Moguer. Garriga presents Jiménez as a steward of memory across borders and studies how the partial recovery of his papers and the establishment of his Sala in the University of Puerto Rico—one of the very first examples of the acquisition of a major writer’s papers in the U.S. or Puerto Rico—coincides with the formation of a national, cultural narrative and with archival practices heavily dependent upon a shifting national conception of Puerto Rican identity. Jiménez was attempting to reconstruct and preserve his work on an island still struggling to establish national, educational, cultural and archival institutions and to recover from the dispersal of its historical documents throughout Europe and in Washington, D.C. Garriga examines Jiménez’s archive in the context of Puerto Rico’s loss and repossession of its colonial archive and modernization of its own archival practices.
Garriga holds a PhD in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures from Boston University. Her research focuses on Transatlantic Studies, Exile and Archive, Puerto Rican Literature and Caribbean Studies. She has published articles on Juan Ramón Jiménez, Federico de Onís, Pedro Salinas and Francisco Matos Paoli, and is a frequent collaborator in cultural journals on the Puerto Rican archipiélago and its diaspora.