| Sumario: | This paper argues that corruption and anti-corruption narratives are discursive frames assembled to reproduce class power in Puerto Rico’s colonial political economy. To assert that argument, I trace the formation of the archipelago’s hegemonic group since the end of Spanish colonialism (1860-1898) until the first two decades under US occupation (1898-1917). Accused as corrupt by colonial officials, the Criollo bloc developed anti-corruption narratives to justify their self-appointed vocation as the historically chosen class with ruling capacity in Puerto Rico. To validate their ability for self-rule, corruption narratives were mobilized against the laboring masses, represented as indecent and morally inferior, but correctable by the careful tutelage of the Criollo elite. Corruption is a flexible narrative historically mobilized to define, inscribe, and perpetuate the racial-sexual hierarchies that legitimize dispossession and differential access to administrative power under colonial and imperial conditions.
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