Writing Belonging: An Antillean Conversation Between Luisa Capetillo and Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta

This essay comparatively reads the intellectual contributions of Luisa Capetillo and Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta. I argue that Capetillo and Rodríguez Acosta offer unique and under-appreciated perspectives on what I term the assemblages of belonging that resist the regulatory normalization of sexuality and the reduction of the maternal body as the source of home and place making in the context of Puerto Rico and Cuba respectively. As the paper demonstrates, what it means to belong, in the context of Antillean women writers, is not entirely tied to a particular place or the identity of people. Rather, belonging is assembled through tactics that are always already decentered given the status of womanhood and its interpellations in the Caribbean at the turn of the 20th century, which was performatively accomplished through the acts of writing and reading. I argue that Capetillo and Rodríguez Acosta assemble notions of belonging through performative mechanisms that place them at the cross-roads between the affective, embodied, and relational dimensions of what it means to belong in a place that is not and continues not to be for any(body). Thus, they both betray the idea of being on one side or another.