Of love and empire

I've fallen in love again. No, that doesn't mean I'm leaving my wonderful husband anytime soon. I'm actually in love with three dead men.

This last chapter of my Monster, my monstrito, if you will, is on José Martí, Ramón Emeterio Betances and José Rizal. A Cuban, a Puerto Rican and a Filipino. And not just any men among the many admirable men of those nations. They were all three awesome, brave, brilliant, revolutionary men.

It's hard to maintain a scholarly distance from your subjects when the more I read, the more I fall in love with all of them. Today I watched a few minutes of a 1998 movie on José Rizal, the first Filipino film I've ever seen, and what I saw was wonderful (I had to return the videotape to the library but I'll be taking it out on DVD soon to catch the rest of the 3-hour epic). The director, a woman, was as careful as a poet and the shots are sometimes breathtaking in their artistry, and often operatic in their drama. Rizal was a fascinating man.

Betances, of whom I knew very little when I started this project, also seems like a man I would've loved to have had a chat with over coffee (well, decaf for me, of course). My parents, who are my best (if unpaid) research assistants, found out that Betances had written some fictional pieces and we went on the hunt for them. Through the WorldCat (cool name!) worldwide library book-locator service, I found a copy of a short story but it was in French. That was no good since while I can read a little of that language, I can't really make sense of 11 tiny-print pages.

Enter my mami to the rescue. Dictionary in hand, my mami did honor to her bachelor's degree in French (I remember when, many years ago, she showed me her senior thesis all in French and how impressed I was!) and she translated the whole thing in one sitting. Thanks to her translation, I was able to find out that Betances not only mentions Benjamin Franklin in that story, but mocks Franklin's list of the required moral virtues. Absolutely fabulous!

And Martí. Well, what can be said about Martí that hasn't been said already? Martí gave his life for his patria, killed in battle in 1895. Rizal also died for his anti-colonial activities, mostly his furiously anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic novels. At a young age of 36, he was executed by Spanish authorities a year after Martí was killed. Betances, meanwhile, died in Paris in 1898, having lived long enough to see what all three feared and anticipated: the rise of the United States as an empire in both the Pacific and the Americas.

So you can see why I'm so psyched about writing this last chapter, because the subject matter is so entrancing and exciting and interesting. To have something so wonderful to research and to learn about and to contribute my own analysis to is simply a privilege. With that in mind, let me go now so I can go do more reading and fall further and further in love with my subjects.