Authorship and Doubt the Memiors of Bernardo Vega

Truth and Fiction:

The Disputed Authorship of the Memoirs of Bernardo Vega

The Memoirs of Bernardo Vega detail the early 20th century immigrant experience of Bernardo Vega, a cigar-maker who immigrated to New York in 1916 and was an eyewitness to the rise of the socialist and labor movements of the era. Although cigar making might seem like a blue-collar occupation, at the time it was considered an art within the Puerto Rican community and the pride of Vega's life. Vega also worked as an editor, bookkeeper, and in other white collar occupations and was an influential intellectual amongst his people throughout the duration of his life. In many ways, Vega's life and career challenge the traditional white-collar/blue-collar divide even though he was very active in the union movement.

Cigar rollers were traditionally read to as a way of passing the time and Vega is recorded as substantially adding to his wealth of knowledge by listening to the various texts read to him. This formed a significant chapter in his intellectual development as a radical and as a prominent thinker. The book is presents itself as less of a personal memoir than as a chronicle of the Puerto Rican community during that era. Like many immigrants, Vega is portrayed as coming to America with a very idealistic view of the possibilities inherent in the new world. Gradually over time he becomes radicalized, particularly in the context of the Puerto Rican community where he settles. The America of the book is very clearly a mosaic both of ethnicity and social class versus the melting pot experience of so many other immigrant groups.

The authorship of the memoirs has been contentious for a long time. "We do not know whether the novel accurately reflects the ideas and words of Vega himself or Cesar Andreu Iglesias, the self-appointed editor of the original manuscript. The genesis of the Memorias is cloaked in mystery" (Kevane). This has caused critics such as Bridget Kevane to question the stated authenticity of the manuscript as a real presentation of Vega's life. Vega in her view is used more as a lens upon the wider community; the book is clearly not a memoir of self-exploration in the traditional sense. Psychology on a personal level is less important than narrating a collective history and giving a picture of an era. Affirming the existence of Puerto Rican history becomes a vital component of affirming the contribution the community has made to shaping America. Vega is like a droplet of water standing in for the larger ocean of Puerto Rican experience and rather than an extraordinary man (although he did many extraordinary things), it is the ordinary aspects of his existence which make him equally as interesting.

Kevane also suggests that Iglesias' role as an editor is far more heavy-handed than might be suggested by the title and a better way of understanding the book may be to think of it as a hybrid text: "part autobiography, part fiction, ethnography, cartography, political history" (Kevane). The book "also maps the first Puerto Rican communities, inter-ethnic and racial relationships, and the stirring political and civic organizations of the time as well as the struggle for Puerto Rican autonomy" (Kevane). Cesar Andreu Iglesias was well-known as a political novelist and his 1956 Los Derrotados (The Vanquished) featured as its main protagonist a man named Marcos Vega, "a traveling salesman who spent five years in jail for his activities as a member of the Nationalist Party" (Cruz). Iglesias thus even used the name 'Vega' in his own explicitly fictional work as a stand-in for his own narrative identity. Iglesias, like Vega in the memoir, was a political radical active both in the Puerto Rican nationalist movements and in the communist movement (Cruz). He served as "trade union secretary, chairman and general secretary of the Puerto Rican Communist Party (PCP)" and like Vega, he was also an editor for a radical newspaper (Cruz). As well as his work to promote communism and national independence, he also served on the boards of a number of labor unions (Cruz).

This is not to undercut the value of the Memoirs of Bernardo Vega as a historical document. It clearly provides an important window upon the history of the Puerto Rican community during a very dynamic era of its history. Moreover, given that the community's intellectual life is seldom given great prominence in mainstream media cultural portrayals, it is an important window on the extent to which radical intellectuals made a major contribution both to America's ethnic heritage and to its burgeoning labor movement. The impact of cigar makers is particularly interesting given this is hopefully a dying art in today's health-conscious era, yet Bernardo Vega's personal pride in the craft and the way in which he used the act of listening to gain an education for himself is testimony to the complexity of the lives and also the class structure inherent in the profession.