Ramón E. Soto-Crespo

On his book Mainland Passage: The Cultural Anomaly of Puerto Rico

Cover Interview of September 13, 2009

Editor’s note

Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline

“A cultural history of a departure from conventional political and national forms.”

We highlighted two quotes.

On the first page:

“As a new form of political belonging, the borderland state combines attributes from conventional political forms (such as the sovereign nation-state and the federated state), but refuses to be either.”

On the second:

“The borderland state challenges the idea of nation-state or political nationalism as the only possible venue for the creation of a collective entity.”

sovereignty / literature / law / political science / new york city / state / migration / latinoa heritage / anzaldua gloria / puerto rico /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009