1898 (1998)

The road that leads from 1898 to our national and post-national 1998 is long and winding. An emblematic year, 1898 appears like an undisputed historical marker, a crucial turning point, but its meaning is quite elusive. It is still surrounded with obscurities and with elaborate deceptions centering on questions of empire, nationality, race and religion. Undoubtedly, the wars in Cuba (1895-1902), as well as other U.S. interventions in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Panama, generated a new cartography for business and military purposes, as well as an impressive array of institutions in the fields of health and education. There is no aspect of Spanish, Cuban, Filipino, Puerto Rican or North American life that was not marked by the geo-political and cultural consequences of ’98, from the history of a new displacement and mobility of workers to the development of nationalist historiographies in the former Spanish colonies and of ”Latin American” studies in the United States. How to return to 1898 from our own 1998? There is no perfect road. Instead, the centennial incites us to ponder a new labyrinth of segmented images, a puzzle and a set of paradoxes whose significance cannot be penetrated completely: it depends in some measure on the present and on new projects. It is the story of different points of view, positions and evasions that do not necessarily coincide with the space of the “nation.”

Díaz-Quiñones, Arcadio. “1898.” PLAS Boletín (Program in Latin American Studies, Princeton U), Winter 1998, pp. 1,2, 5. (Republished in The Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 78, no. 4,1998, pp. 577-81, www.jstor.org/stable/2518419).