Kalman Silvert Award Selection Committee
Latin American Studies Association
4338 Bigelow Boulevard
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Dear Members of the Award Committee:
It is my honor to nominate Professor Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones for the Latin American Studies Association’s Kalman Silvert Award. Few living scholars are more deserving of this distinction than Díaz-Quiñones, the Emory L. Ford Professor of Spanish, Emeritus, at Princeton University, and one of the most consequential figures in the study of Caribbean literatures from the second half of the twentieth century through the early twenty-first. Alongside his impressive and influential trajectory, both as an academic and a public intellectual, Díaz-Quiñones has also been a truly extraordinary teacher—a Maestro who has trained multiple generations of prominent scholars across virtually every area of Latin American literature—and one of the most tenacious institution builders in our field, with decades of sustained commitment. In what follows, I will sketch the contours of this lifetime of exceptional contributions spanning over half a century, and I trust that you will agree that he truly merits this recognition.
Beginnings
Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones received a B.A. (1961) and an M.A. (1963) in Hispanic Studies from the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras and a Ph.D. from the Universidad Central de Madrid in Spain (1968). Shortly after completing his doctoral studies, he returned to Puerto Rico to teach at his alma mater. He also immediately drew notice as among the most brilliant and alert minds of an emerging generation of scholars poised to radically transform the intellectual landscape of the country—one associated with the Centro para el Estudio de la Realidad Puertorriqueña (CEREP) and with what is known in Puerto Rican intellectual history as the Nueva Historia. Comprised mostly of social scientists, the researchers affiliated with CEREP renewed the methodological tools for historical and social analysis by drawing on a rich set of new theoretical sources, particularly the Annales School and a wide range of neo-Marxist thought, putting into question (and, indeed, displacing) the positivist paradigms that had dominated historical inquiries in the country throughout most of the twentieth century. Within CEREP, Díaz-Quiñones was the figure most responsible for opening up its work to the particularities of cultural production, performing the first significant syntheses of the hermeneutic concerns of social analysis and those of literary studies. He ensured that literature was part of “la realidad puertorriqueña” that deserved scholarly attention. His co-authored book, Conversación con José Luis González (1976), was his first major attempt in this direction. Through a long conversation with González, a renowned Puerto Rican fiction writer, Díaz-Quiñones explored myriad issues related to the interpretation of Puerto Rican history and culture, most specifically, the key categories of “the national” and “the colonial.” One could say that Díaz-Quiñones accomplished for Puerto Rican Studies what Antonio Candido did for Brazil—the sociological analysis of literature without subordinating its aesthetic specificities.
His first published essays date from these years and were devoted to major figures of the twentieth-century Puerto Rican literary canon: the poets Luis Lloréns Torres and Luis Palés Matos, and the playwright and novelist René Marqués. Later collected in his first book, El almuerzo en la hierba (1982), these essays remain obligatory references—not only for the study of these authors but also for understanding the relationship between literature and society in Puerto Rico. Díaz-Quiñones’ analyses of Lloréns’ and Marqués’ works, in particular, illuminate the specific aesthetic modes through which literature articulated the crisis of the criollo hacendado class in the early decades of the twentieth century, following the expropriation of their land by the large American sugar corporations that came to dominate the island’s economy after the U.S. invasion of 1898. Likewise, in his readings of Palés Matos, Puerto Rico’s foremost exponent of Afro-Caribbean poetry, he convincingly argues that tropes often regarded as complicit with the reproduction of racist stereotypes are, in fact, emphatic affirmations of the power of Black culture in Caribbean history, resignified as counter-discursive devices against nationalist ideologies of whitening. These essays retain both their freshness and their polemical relevance and, methodologically, stand as exemplary models of the historically situated analysis of literature.
In those early years, Díaz-Quiñones not only revolutionized the practice of literary criticism on the island—vindicating the place of literature within the analysis of society and vice versa—but he also became a central figure in the creation of major editorial projects that provided fora for both urgent political debates and innovative trends in literature and the arts. Among them were the journals La escalera, Avance, and Zona de carga y descarga, and the pathbreaking Sin nombre, founded by the legendary Nilita Vientós Gastón. Simultaneously, he maintained a vigorous presence in other popular venues—such as El Reportero and El Mundo, two of the country’s leading newspapers at the time—where he regularly published literary reviews for general audiences. Between 1979 and 1988, he also directed the collection La nave y el puerto, and co-directed their series on Clásicos, for Ediciones Huracán, one of the most important publishing houses in Puerto Rican history, which would shape historical and humanistic studies on the island and in the Caribbean for decades to come. No significant intellectual initiative of that period in Puerto Rico is without the imprint of Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones’ vision.
In this account of Díaz-Quiñones’ beginnings, I would be remiss not to mention his fundamental roles as a public intellectual and as president of the Puerto Rican Association of University Professors (Asociación Puertorriqueña de Profesores Universitarios, APPU) during 1970–71 and 1972–73. The dates are significant: they mark the height of protests against the Vietnam War and of revolts against the U.S. Obligatory Military Service in Puerto Rico (Servicio Militar Obligatorio, SMO), as well as struggles to protect the autonomy of the university and to advance its reform. Those years were marked by violence and by the repressive response of the Puerto Rican colonial state against dissidents. Díaz-Quiñones was involved in all of these conflicts, both as a public intellectual and as a representative of the professorial body—resisting the militarization of the institution, advocating for its democratization, and defending students’ rights. He embodied the ethical responsibility of the intellectual as a critical conscience of society in polarized times—when it is most needed.
Díaz-Quiñones taught at the University of Puerto Rico from 1969 to 1982. In little more than a decade, he contributed to shifting the hermeneutic paradigms for literary and cultural studies in the country; helped foster one of the major interdisciplinary research institutions in the contemporary Caribbean—CEREP—which would shape the agendas of myriad scholars in decades to come; shouldered the development of a multifront editorial infrastructure, comprising journals and a major publishing house, that disseminated innovative scholarly endeavors and compelled a revision of inherited knowledges; positioned himself as a crucial critical voice in the university and the local public arena; and produced some of the most enduring and refined pieces of scholarship on key figures of the Puerto Rican literary tradition, questioning the very operative principles of the national canon and opening a whole set of unexhausted problematics that remain vital today. And this was just the beginning.
Not surprisingly, students took note of the presence of such a professor in their midst, as they would continue to do in the coming decades. And so did Princeton University, an institution to which he had been affiliated in various capacities since 1972, and that he ultimately made his academic home in 1983 as a professor of Latin American and Caribbean literatures. A new era of his life was about to begin at a place that offered him an enhanced platform for his research, greater possibilities for expanding his intellectual networks, and for positioning Puerto Rican and Caribbean Studies within new interdisciplinary discussions and debates. What was to come was no less rich and consequential for the study of Latin America than his beginnings.
A Caribbeanist in US-American Academia
There is no doubt that, throughout the last four decades, Díaz-Quiñones has established himself as one of the foremost scholars of Caribbean intellectual history and cultural studies. The author of nine books, five critical editions, four edited collections, and countless essays, his work is essential for anyone interested in studying the colonial dynamics of the Caribbean during the first half of the twentieth century and, more specifically, the cultural responses to the new imperial politics that defined the region around Spain’s defeat in the War of 1898 and the rise of the United States as a new hegemon. Taken as a whole, his scholarship traces a comprehensive map that extends from the end of the nineteenth century—with the works of thinkers such as the Puerto Rican autonomista Salvador Brau (pioneer of sociological and modern historical studies in the country) and the Cuban revolutionary José Martí—to the emergence of Hispanism as a cultural ideology in the early twentieth century (in the literary scholarship of the Spaniard Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo and, with some ambivalence, in that of the Dominican Pedro Henríquez Ureña); to the relationships between the articulation of discourses on national identity and the domination of local economies by absentee sugar trusts in the 1930s and 1940s (in the works of the Cuban Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez and the Puerto Rican Antonio Pedreira); and to his reflections on the cultures of colonial developmentalism in Puerto Rico during the 1950s (as in his beautiful autobiographical meditation “La vida inclemente” in La memoria rota of 1993) and on the politics and aesthetics of historical memory under the Cuban Revolution (in his no less forceful Cintio Vitier: la memoria integradora of 1987). His work has also fostered a more nuanced understanding of the politics of race, particularly in Cuba and Puerto Rico, through his critical edition and analyses of Tomás Blanco’s El prejuicio racial en Puerto Rico (1985) and, most counterintuitively, in his examination of the intellectual genealogies of Fernando Ortiz’s theory of transculturación and its links to Allan Kardec’s spiritism. Díaz-Quiñones’s book Sobre los principios: los intelectuales caribeños y la tradición, originally published in 2006 and honored in 2024 as one of the pieces of scholarship of interest across all fields of Latin American Studies—thus distinguished as among the first published in the newly launched LASA Research Commons—can be seen as the synthesis of the many threads that have shaped his thought throughout his long intellectual trajectory. It is indeed a classic in our field.
It should also be emphasized that, alongside its originality, erudition, depth, and rigor, Díaz-Quiñones’s work stands out equally for its exquisite and elegant writing style. His prose is exemplary. Even his most conventionally scholarly writings are crafted with the same care and aesthetic flair as his more personal or speculative essays, such as his piece “De cómo y cuándo bregar” (in El arte de bregar, 2000). This essay unfolds as a poetic flight through the different uses of the word bregar, a term idiosyncratic to Puerto Rican Spanish. Moving across a wide map of social, artistic, and literary scenarios—at times taking the form of Baroque variations—this exploration becomes a sustained meditation on what the meanings of this word reveal about the Puerto Rican condition. It is a signifier that condenses both the traces of a history and a peculiar mode of existing (and of surviving) in the world. His attentiveness to the many sites where the word unexpectedly appears, and the refined acuity of his ear in registering these uses, is truly dazzling. Dazzling, too, is the beauty of his prose when conveying these ideas. Here is just a brief example of the concision and cadence of his writing and of his poetics of scholarly citation. This is taken from a discussion of verses by Palés Matos that, in his view, touch upon the meaning of la brega:
La danza, el son del tambor secreto, es un cerco protector de las historias paralelas contenidas en el ten con ten. Como en la brega, hay una clara dimensión erótica. La verde antilla apostrofada [in Palés’ poetry, my note] es el espacio, la tierra fértil donde afluyen las corrientes hispánicas y africanas, los piratas y los esclavos. Es también un cuerpo que se desplaza y baila, la ágil bayadera. Es preciso recordar lo dicho por Michel de Certeau: “Cada sociedad tiene ‘su cuerpo’, igual que su lengua, constituido por un sistema más o menos refinado de opciones entre un conjunto innumerable de posibilidades”. Y a Palés le interesó la hibridación del cuerpo y la palabra ambigua, ambos con sus secretos y opacidades. (Díaz-Quiñones 2000)
As a meditation on the Puerto Rican condition, this piece fits within the tradition of the Spanish and Latin American “essay of national interpretation”—a genre to which works such as Antonio Pedreira’s Insularismo, Samuel Ramos’s El perfil del hombre en México, Octavio Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad, and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada’s Radiografía de la Pampa, among many others, belong. Though on a different scale (it is a concise essay rather than a full book), “De cómo y cuándo bregar” has become part of this canon. Nothing demonstrates that status more clearly than its imprint on popular culture and the fact that it has already been activated as a Puerto Rican self-descriptor beyond academia. One example of this is La Brega, a bilingual podcast produced in collaboration with New York Public Radio (WNYC), featuring Puerto Rican stories from the island and the diaspora, which was named one of the ten best podcasts of 2021 by the New York Times. Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones was, of course, the main guest in the first installment of a program, which has circulated widely across quite varied audiences.
Throughout his forty-year career at Princeton University, Díaz-Quiñones launched an impressive research agenda, establishing the university as one of the foremost hubs for the study of Caribbean literature in the United States. True to his own beginnings at the University of Puerto Rico, he also became a tenacious institution builder in the broadest sense. During his six-year tenure as director of the Program in Latin American Studies (1988 to 1994), he was widely recognized by both the university and his colleagues for transforming the program into one of the strongest in the country—a vibrant center of Latin American intellectual exchange, marked by continuous conferences and colloquia, visiting professors and guest lecturers from across the hemisphere, and a robust library collection of Latin American and Caribbean materials in multiple media, including the visual arts. Likewise, Princeton’s excellent Spanish and Portuguese program owes much to Díaz-Quiñones’s vision since, years ago, he fought for its autonomy as an academic unit and guided the recruitment of a stellar faculty and student body, among them the late Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia. In all these ways, Díaz-Quiñones ensured that Latin American Studies would hold a powerful and enduring place at Princeton, projecting itself into the world.
For Díaz-Quiñones, intellectual endeavors are not only about the what but about the how; not only about content, but about form and style, about a manner—be this in the aesthetics of writing or in the fostering of intellectual communities. Perhaps this is one of the most difficult aspects to convey about his half-century of contributions to Latin American Studies. In his scholarship, as in his teaching and public engagement, it is also a question of sensitivity and perspective, a distinct way of seeing and perceiving—whether the layered meanings of a text, the nuances of a historical scenario, or the unstated beauty of a conversation. Perhaps these ineffable qualities may be tangible only in his extraordinary legacy as a teacher.
Arcadio, maestro
Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones is a maestro de maestros, for whom the classroom is the highest and most intense space of intellectual engagement. I know this well, having had the privilege as an undergraduate student of taking the last regular class he taught at the University of Puerto Rico (in 1982), and shortly thereafter becoming his student and dissertation advisee at Princeton University. His seminars were true spaces of debate—laboratories for the exploration of ideas—where nothing was ever a given. He was a teacher unafraid of the unpredictability of thought, ready to pursue and shepherd the intuitions and dim illuminations that students often bring to class, guiding them through insights and errors. In Arcadio’s classes, one always felt challenged to the limits and aware that the world of knowledge is a universe in permanent expansion, an unending provocation.
Over the past half century, Arcadio has trained generations of students from across the hemisphere and in every area of Latin American cultural and literary studies. In the best of Latin American intellectual traditions, though his main area of research is the Caribbean, his erudition is not confined to a narrow specialty. It would be impossible to list here all the students—now scholars—who owe so much of what they currently are to Arcadio. A few come to mind: Julio Ramos, emeritus, and Daylet Domínguez (UC-Berkeley); Juan Gelpí, Malena Rodríguez-Castro, and Noel Luna (UPR-Río Piedras); Juan Carlos Quintero (University of Maryland); Florencia Garamuño (Universidad de Buenos Aires); Alvaro Fernández Bravo (CONICET, Argentina); and Paula Cortés Rocca (Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Argentina). In 2010, Arcadio received the Princeton President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, the highest recognition the university bestows for pedagogical excellence.
A Lifetime…
Throughout his career, Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones has received numerous awards and recognitions, including the previously mentioned Princeton President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching (2010); the title of Humanista del Año from the Fundación Puertorriqueña de las Humanidades (2016); the Pace Center for Civic Engagement’s Faculty Service Award (2019); and two Doctor Honoris Causa degrees—one from the Universidad del Turabo in Puerto Rico (2015) and, most recently, from Princeton University (2023). The latter distinction attests to the extraordinary regard in which he is held across disciplines within the institution to which he devoted the greater part of his life.
There is no aspect of the profession in which he has not served with the highest distinction and with the greatest impact in the field. His career has been a true lifetime of commitment to the study of Latin America and the Caribbean in myriad capacities: as a scholar, as a teacher, as an administrator and promoter, as a founder of editorial projects and research centers, as an activist, and as a leader in the profession. For these reasons, I am honored to nominate him for the Kalman Silvert Award.
As requested, I am enclosing an abbreviated version of Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones’s curriculum vitae with this nomination letter. Please let me know if you need further information, and I will be glad to provide it.
Sincerely yours,
Agnes Lugo-Ortiz
Associate Professor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies
Co-Coordinator, Working Group on Slavery and Visual Culture
The University of Chicago