This chapter foregrounds Muna Lee’s participation at the 1928 Sixth Pan-American Conference in Havana, Cuba as a delegate from the “National Woman's Party (Porto Rico, Branch)” and from the University of Puerto Rico in the context of Pan-Americanism and the role of Puerto Rico in U.S. diplomacy vis-à-vis the truncated version of U.S. citizenship allowed in this island. It offers a close reading of her speech at that event and by the Puerto Rican suffragists leading up to this hemispheric gathering. Muna Lee’s words and political interventions at this international conclave and its underlying and inevitable imperial context raises key questions about the significance, implications, and limits of what was then known as Universal Womanhood on both sides of the Atlantic. Among other things, the chapter dissect to what extent it was possible, in practice and under such [colonial and neo-colonial] circumstances, to distinguish between the advocacy for women’s voices in local politics in Puerto Rico opposite to the attempt to pursue solidarity by rendering these same ‘native’ women voiceless at the Havana conference. It also lays bare some of the related complexities of womanhood in Puerto Rico—in this case, North American white womanhood—during this period.

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“Our [Woman] in Havana”: Muna Lee de Muñoz Speaking for Puerto Rican Womanhood at the 1928 Sixth Pan-American Conference in Cuba

  • Gladys M. Jiménez-Muñoz

摘要

This chapter foregrounds Muna Lee’s participation at the 1928 Sixth Pan-American Conference in Havana, Cuba as a delegate from the “National Woman's Party (Porto Rico, Branch)” and from the University of Puerto Rico in the context of Pan-Americanism and the role of Puerto Rico in U.S. diplomacy vis-à-vis the truncated version of U.S. citizenship allowed in this island. It offers a close reading of her speech at that event and by the Puerto Rican suffragists leading up to this hemispheric gathering. Muna Lee’s words and political interventions at this international conclave and its underlying and inevitable imperial context raises key questions about the significance, implications, and limits of what was then known as Universal Womanhood on both sides of the Atlantic. Among other things, the chapter dissect to what extent it was possible, in practice and under such [colonial and neo-colonial] circumstances, to distinguish between the advocacy for women’s voices in local politics in Puerto Rico opposite to the attempt to pursue solidarity by rendering these same ‘native’ women voiceless at the Havana conference. It also lays bare some of the related complexities of womanhood in Puerto Rico—in this case, North American white womanhood—during this period.