Taking Up the White Man's Burden: The Cinematic
 Representation of Manifest Destiny on
 Caribbean Shores in The Americano [1916]

 Diane Accaria Zavala
 University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras


 They have the power of description and we succumb to the pictures
 they construct.
 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

 We have not come to make war upon the people of a country that for
 centuries have been oppressed, but, on the contrary, to bring you
 protection,.. to promote your prosperity and bestow upon you the
 immunities and the blessings of the liberal institutions of our
 government. This is not a war of devastation, but, one to give you all,
 within the control of its military and naval forces, the advantages and
 blessings of enlightened civilization.
 General Nelson A. Miles, Official Proclamation
 to the People of Porto Rico [1899]

 Beauty's the answer. Beauty is my fetish. I don't care what anyone
 says to the contrary. Beauty is what every human being is searching
 for .... Beauty is the one road to righteousness.... War is hideous,
 but it can be made the background for beauty, beauty of idea.
 D. W. Griffith, New York Mail and Express [March 13, 1915]

At the first light of the twentieth century, the world would see two

 phenomenally defining advents loom together-one, in fact,
 empowering and promoting the other into a newly found existence.
Indeed, as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have stated, the business and drama
of motion pictures and the business and drama of empire "which reached its
apogee at the beginning of the twentieth century" were, at times, the same
(100). Shohat and Stam have further stated that this coincidental twin