An Inconceivable Indigeneity: The Historical, Cultural, and Interactional Dimensions of Puerto Rican Taino Activism

This dissertation examines the historical, institutional, and interactional dimensions of Taino activism in Puerto Rico. Particularly, I consider how the presumed extinction of the Taino in Puerto Rico has served to limit their claims to indigeneity as well as the role that they can play in public policy debates concerning the management of indigenous human remains and sacred sites. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in Puerto Rico, I argue that Taino activists address and reconfigure widespread historical narratives within everyday interactions. I propose that Taino activists seek to reposition the histories that erase them by focusing particularly on three factors: (1) the incongruity between the life stories and documents that inform prevalent historical narratives premised on the Taino extinction and the personal and filial trajectories that inform current claims to being Taino, (2) the ensuing discrepant interpretations of ambiguous terms in historical documents, and (3) the repair of Taino erasure through the active reclamation of Taino identity in cultural and linguistic terms. I examine how these incongruities, ambiguities and repairs materialize at various levels of social action: within discursive and interactional realignments, through recruitment encounters, in the socialization of novices, in the course of creating a Taino script, throughout the manufacture of Taino speech forms, and in bureaucratic encounters. The dissertation shows how these social dimensions have been involved in the recent public emergence of Taino as an increasingly visible social identification in Puerto Rico.