Joseph F Delgado

The Evil Banality of Racism Joseph F Delgado

THE EVIL BANALITY OF RACISM: Puerto Rico Before and After Tapia y Rivera's La cuarterona examines the social tapestry that has resulted from African slavery in Puerto Rico and Cuba since the sixteenth century. Its starting point is the rhetorical space created by abolitionist drama La cuarterona (The Quadroon), by Puerto Rican playrwright Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (1826-1882). The essay is a deep analysis of racist attitudes, documented objectively as well as from the author's own experience, and the heritage of internalized prejudice it produces in the object of racial bias that persists into the twenty-first century equally, if subtly, in the Republic of Cuba, among the Cuban exile diaspora and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, despite affirmations to the contrary. The analysis surveys the use of the quadroon as stock character in American and Spanish American literature to evaluate the contribution Tapia y Rivera made to the subject of racial interaction.