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Este ensayo examina el poemario Huracanada (2018), de la escritora puertorriqueña Mayra Santos-Febres, desde una perspectiva ecocrítica. Específicamente, estudia cómo estos poemas resaltan en qué medida la devastación que provocó el huracán María en Puerto Rico en 2017 no debe atribuirse simple y simplistamente al poder de las fuerzas naturales, sino también a un desquilibrio profundo y sistémico en la relación entre seres humanos y la naturaleza, tanto en la isla como globalmente. Este desequilibrio ha contribuido a la intensificación de fenómenos como los huracanes—algo que la literatura científica sobre los efectos del calentamiento global antropogénico señala enfáticamente—y a los catastróficos efectos de estos eventos sobre las poblaciones más vulnerables del planeta. Más aún: el poemario muestra cómo, tras este tipo de desastres, los justificados intentos de asegurar la sobrevivencia y la prosperidad de diversas poblaciones—incluyendo las más vulnerables—frecuentemente implican la colaboración con un sistema económico, industrial y tecnológico que es cómplice del problema que se intenta resolver. En mi lectura, Huracanada es una invitación a transformar el paradigma del desarrollismo tecnológico-industrial que domina globalmente, y a sustituirlo por modelos sostenibles de subsistencia y comunidad.

Benigno Trigo. Malady and Genius: Self-Sacrifice in Puerto Rican Literature.

In her first novel, situated in “this soup of islands stewed in hunger and the desire to be someone else” (Sirena Selena 211), Santos-Febres explores the world of transvestites and young male prostitutes following the trajectory of a new star, bolero-singer and seductive diva “Sirena Selena,” from the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico, to rich audiences in the Dominican Republic. The novel shows feminine characters that resist shame and humiliation by narcissistically focusing on themselves as a means of survival, adhering each to different rigid ideals of femininity permeated by normative systems of value focusing on appearance, financial solvency or ambiguous desire. Their tactics are deployed against a background where the social geography of the islands appears hierarchically ordered with Haiti at the bottom, the Dominican Republic and Cuba in the middle, and Puerto Rico at the top. The novel alludes to the social/political/economic hierarchies that organize migrations among islands in the Caribbean, always against the powerful backdrop of the United States. Sex tourism is recreated as a profitable industry that relaxes strict machista prejudices and allows for sexual experimentation of those who pay and some degree of social mobility of those whose bodies are for hire.

Puerto Rican literature from the mid-1970s onwards has offered incisive ways to think through shifting socio-ecological realities under neoliberalism, which it arguably registered through an intensifying aesthetics of socio-ecological degradation. The chapter will draw on texts from the different periods within neoliberalism, starting with Luis Rafael Sanchez’s La guaracha del Macho Camacho (2007 [originally published in 1976])—a text that coincided with the crisis of oil-fuelled “Operation Bootstrap” and the amendment of Section 936 of the Inland Revenue Code—and ending with an analysis of Rafael Acevedo’s eco-dystopian Al otro lado del muro hay carne fresca (2014)—a novel that speaks strongly to the post-2006 crisis. Following Ayala and Bernabe, who posit that “the pulse of the world capitalist economy” has been particularly evident in Puerto Rico due to its close and subordinated relation to United States since 1898 (2009: 3), I argue that Puerto Rican literature could be seen as an often highly self-conscious example of world-literature (defined by Warwick Research Collective [WReC] as the literature of the world-system). And since the world-system is also a world-ecology (Niblett, Green Letters 16 (1): 15–30, 2012), it is possible to read these texts as not only world-literary but also critically world-ecological. The chapter seeks to read some of the aesthetic shifts—often discussed under the rubric of “postmodernism”—in relation to world-ecological change.

In her article “A Sinful Reaction to Capitalist Ethics in No quiero quedarme sola y vacía (2006)” Celina Bortolotto analyzes how Lozada’s characterization of the main character, La Loca, questions the ideals of free agency offered by consumerist capitalism and the urban gay male ideal under the promise of a liberating gay lifestyle in a social context defined by identity politics. The novel is a fictionalized autobiographical account of Puerto Rican author Angel Lozada’s misadventures in the early 2000s gay scene in New York. This essay plays with the punitive sense of the word “capital” in the seven capital sins as a thematic thread to invite a reflection on the concepts of virtue and value constructed under U.S. Protestant capitalism: the former as emancipatory guilt; the latter as the specific status society grants to objects, practices and people creating, in turn, subjects whose value is purely economic versus those whose lives are deemed (morally) valuable in themselves.

This dissertation analyzes the representation of sugar plantation societies in nineteenth and twentieth century Puerto Rican literature. Using an interdisciplinary approach, I study the socio-historical, political, and economic development of the sugarcane industry in Puerto Rico as represented in the literary works of Manuel Zeno Gandia, Enrique A. Laguerre, Rene Marques, and Rosario Ferre. Scholars have tended to examine their works separately; however, I study how these writers from different literary generations develop a cohesive literary project, reshuffling the periodization of Puerto Rican literature by their focus on the sugar industry. Consequently, the literary works intersect with each other to provide a complete picture of the evolution and decline of the sugar plantation and its effects on the social imaginary of Puerto Rico. I use this term to mean both social practices of Puerto Rican society as well as its class stratification and political struggles. My theoretical approach is based on Antonio Benitez Rojo, The Repeating Island : The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (1992), where the sugar plantation is defined as the principal unifying entity across the Caribbean, repeated continuously through time and space. I also rely on socio-historiographical approaches developed by Ramiro Guerra, Francisco Scarano, and Angel Quintero Rivera, whose analyses of the sugar cane industry in the Caribbean shed light on class conflicts, primarily between the sugar oligarchy and factory workers. This dissertation suggests a homology between the socioeconomic structure of the sugar plantation and the Puerto Rican literary canon. I conclude that Puerto Rican writers have recoded the imaginary of the plantation in response to political events and economic

This chapter offers an account of the rise and institutionalization of queer literature in the contemporary Puerto Rican literary field during the last quarter of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. To do so, it charts and studies three key moments in the field’s history of positions and positionings—the twin birth of the contemporary Puerto Rican state and literary field in the 1950s and its elaboration of a heteronormative and homophobic cultural grammar; the rearticulation of the literary field in the 1970s by the members of the literary magazine Zona. Carga y Descarga and Manuel Ramos Otero, who were responsible for the expansion of the field’s horizons of the possible; and, finally, the constitution of a local queer literary space during the 2000s and the cultural life of Luis Negron’s short story collection Mundo cruel (2010), arguably the most successful book in the island in recent memory.

This chapter analyzes Gean Carlo Villegas’s 2013 novel, Osario de vivos, as a retelling of Manuel Zeno Gandia’s La charca, (1894). A panoramic view of the topic of violence—social and/or gendered—illustrates the trajectory of the colonialist experience in Puerto Rico. Therefore, the role of women in Osario de vivos is approached within the possibility of them being modern-day Silvinas (La charca). This retelling of La charca is in dialogue with other expressions of violence in Puerto Rican literature, for example, the one depicted in Rene Marques’s La carreta (gendered-sexual-familial), and the one portrayed in Mayra Santos Febres’s “Hebra rota” (social-racial). Thus, Osario de vivos emerges as a novela-instalacion, examining the colonial “mundo enfermo” that Zeno Gandia had denounced in the late-nineteenth century.

Given Puerto Rico’s long colonial history, Puerto Ricans both on the island and in the diaspora have had to grapple with contested notions of nationhood. Having been described as a “divided nation” and a “commuter nation” due to the geographical divides between the island population and those who have migrated to cities in the United States, Puerto Ricans have deployed literature to forge and re-imagine a space for belonging and community informed by the experiences of living in between the island and New York, in between Spanish and English, and in between racial notions of skin color, social class, and gender and sexualities. Challenging and unsettling the foundational discourses of national identity on the island, “Diasporican” literature proposes alternative imaginaries that resist power inequalities. This essay argues that Diasporican literature has come into its own, contributing new understandings of the fissures of Puerto Rican national, ethnic, and cultural identities. Puerto Rican writers in the United States have textualized their experiences of migration and transnationalism through their poetry as well as fiction, memoirs, and autobiographical narratives. They have contested traditional notions of home and have explored the failures and limitations of a sense of belonging. Rejecting both the island of Puerto Rico as the geographical site for Puerto Rican authenticity and the dominant urban imaginaries of New York City that have long excluded their working-poor communities, Puerto Rican writers in the United States have represented el barrio as an urban space that offers them a sense of community despite the mainstream notions of hyper-masculinity, violence, and illegal practices. Afro-Boricua and Diasporican writers have also reflected on the fissures of racial belonging, as their dark skin color is not always integrated into dominant notions of the Puerto Rican and U.S. national imaginaries. Their deployment, in poetry, of English, Spanish, and “Spanglish” speaks mostly to the centrality of orality and sounds in the formation of nationhood, while challenging the homology of Puerto Rican nationality to Spanish. Exploration of the ways in which female, feminist, and queer Diasporican writers grapple with issues of belonging, gender, and sexuality foregrounds how these categories of identity continue to go against the grain of traditional masculine narratives of nationhood. It is essential to acknowledge the geographic dispersion of Diasporican voices away from New York and the transcultural alliances and global identities that are being produced in Morocco, Hawaii, and other far regions of the world. A short discussion of Lin Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights” focuses on an example of staging a return home to New York, in a performance that celebrates community, family, and the neighborhood for second- and third-generation Puerto Ricans among other Latino and Latina groups. The multiple and complicated ways in which Diasporican literary voices, from poetry to theater to fiction, textualize notions of home, belonging, and community are examined within the larger frameworks of nationhood and ethnicity.

From the documents that I have received from the organizers of this meeting, I gather that their principal concern is the image and identity of the Puerto Rican as it is reflected in literature. I also note that the agenda of the conference could be divided into two parts. The first and most important one is the clarification of the topic. The second refers to more practical matters, which although they can help shed light on the major theme, depend greatly for their analysis on the previous clarification of the topic. Such is the case with the theme of our panel: Puerto Rican literature in the school curriculum.

This article proposes an analysis of Wilfredo Mattos Cintron's seventh noir novel (novela negra), Las dos muertes de Catalino Rios (2012), and a comparison of its poetics with that of Manuel Zeno Gandia's La charca (1894). The article questions the naturalist label often applied to Zeno Gandia's novel and instead views it as a nascent hardcore detective novel (proto novela negra). In comparing the two novels, it validates both Mattos Cintron and Zeno Gandia as initiators of the noir thriller in Puerto Rico.

The story of Vieques, a small territory off the east coast of Puerto Rico, ecologically abused for years by US naval presence, illustrates the oppression Puerto Ricans experience and the hope that comes through the process of resistance by “speaking truth to power.” This chapter situates the reader within the current socio-economic and political climate of the Puerto Rican community in the United States (island and Diaspora) which calls for a theological response to the loss of identity, overwhelming presence of suffering, and forfeiture of hope. Employing interdisciplinary methodology, the author demonstrates how Puerto Rican literature and Puerto Rican theology are prophetic voices calling out for the liberation of a suffering people, using personal Puerto Rican family/community stories as an authoritative contextual reference point. Topics: The death of David Sanes Rodriguez and US naval presence in Puerto Rico. Social movement for justice in Puerto Rico with Vieques as a catalyst. Divide between island and diaspora Puerto Ricans has led to silence. Literature/theology dialogue as an authentic and consistent decolonial methodology.

Resumen: A lo largo de la siguiente entrevista, el profesor, historiador, crítico e investigador la de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, el catedrático en literatura puertorriqueña don Fernando Feliú Matilla, nos permite establecer una visión histórica de la génesis artística llevada a cabo en la Isla a través de los diferentes contextos socio-políticos que han tenido lugar en la misma desde la aparición de una literatura puertorriqueña propia y distintiva hasta la anexión de Puerto Rico a los Estados Unidos de América como Estado Libre Asociado en 1952 y su impronta en la génesis isleña. Si bien la entrevista tiene como objeto principal la literatura boricua, también se debaten en la misma el falocentrismo cultural presente en la cultura puertorriqueña, las relaciones políticas entre San Juan y Washington D.C., la influencia de los textos diaspóricos en la producción isleña o la situación del panorama artístico actual en Puerto Rico.Palabras clave: Literatura hispanoamericana; Literatura puertorriqueña; Estados Unidos; emigración; política. Abstract: Throughtout the following interview, professor Fernando Feliú Matilla, who holds a chair in Puerto Rican Studies and Literature, offers his personal point of view after years of research about Puerto Rican literature written in the 20th century. The interview is developed from a historical perspective, which means that it starts right from the moment Puerto Rico was still a Spanish colony in the Americas, until the present day, being Puerto Rico a Free Associated State of the United States of America (also known as American Commonwealth of Puerto Rico). Besides the literature, professor Feliú Matilla also gives his opinion about the absence of female writers in Puerto Rican literature, the relationships between San Juan and Washington D.C., the cultural movements that Puerto Rican literature written nowadays is influenced by, and many other different topics such as Caribbean literature written in the United States and its connection with Puerto Rican art.Keywords: Hispanic Literature; Puerto Rican Literature; USA; immigration; politics.

Critics often describe Judith Ortiz Cofer's work as straddling two cultures: the Puerto Rican one of her parents and ancestors, and the American one of her peers and her adolescence (Ortiz Cofer, "MEL US" 84). Although this is a common trope for understanding US multicultural writers, Ortiz Cofer has challenged publishing companies' desires to categorize her work. For example, she quotes one publisher as saying, "We don't know where to put Judith Cofer. Judith Cofer is writing in standard English, and she lives in Georgia"; Ortiz Cofer herself admits: "Until recently, I was somewhere in limbo. I'm not a mainstream North American writer, but I publish in mainstream North American journals. I'm not an island writer" ("Speaking" par. 27). Also, she claims that she is not part of the Nuyorican writer's literary legacy: "The Nuyorican writers have nourished me in the sense that it is good to know that they are completing the mosaic of Puerto Rican literature in the United States, [but] there is not just one reality to being a Puerto Rican writer. I am putting together a different view" ("Puerto Rican" 45). This "different view" valorizes feminine spaces and characters that Nuyorican writers neglect and writes an almost tangible and intense return to the island of Puerto Rico. In addition, Ortiz Cofer is bound by the parameters of geography that have isolated her culturally. She notes: "Although I lived in Paterson, it is not the same as living in New York City, in the barrios and in those large communities where there is support and confirmation of culture and literature" ("Puerto Rican" 45). As a result of what Juan Bruce-Novoa calls her double otherness--displaced from the homeland, yet being located neither in New York nor in Puerto Rico--Ortiz Cofer embodies a migrant consciousness, representative of a people who are in a continual pendulum movement between two homes. Bruce-Novoa posits that because she is part of a broader Puerto Rican diaspora, her "definition of a new Puerto Rican cultural identity demands constant movement which ultimately places that identity in the act of movement itself" (61). (1) In her novel The Line of the Sun (1989), Ortiz Cofer explores how identity formation occurs through movement when the limits and boundaries of narrative voice, autobiographical strategy, and sexual and gendered deviance are crossed and re-crossed. The novel is transgressive, enacting and depicting challenges to the regulatory paradigms of identity and narrative that society upholds in order to write a new and more productive space of home. The Puerto Rican town of Salud provides the setting for the first half of the novel; the second half takes place in an urban immigrant neighborhood in New York City. The novel spans the early 1940s to the 1960s and tells the story of Guzman, following his adventures in Salud as a young boy, his exile to the US, and his return to Puerto Rico. His niece Marisol is his "secret biographer" (282) who writes the story, then recounts her experiences as a bicultural teenager growing up in New York. The novel is layered with transgressions, addressing the limits between history and the present moment, the narrative of the US mainland and the island, fiction and autobiography, and between different kinds of narrators. I use the concept of transgression as Michel Foucault does; Foucault defines transgression as "an action which involves the limit, that narrow zone of a line where it displays the flash of its passage, but perhaps also its entire trajectory, even its origin; it is likely that transgression has its entire space in the line it crosses" (33-34). Building on Foucault, Juan Flores adds that transgression, rather than negating the limit by crossing it, instead foregrounds and mediates contrasts; transgression illuminates the spaces on either side of the limit (343). This suggests that acts of transgression have an enabling limitlessness inherent in them and that they somehow collapse time, making history (the "origin") and the future ("its entire trajectory") visible at once. …

I consider myself Un negrito, and I also have blood of the Taino, as well as the blood of the conquerors, the Spanish, and Other Europeans along the way. Piri Thomas In New York City's Spanish Harlem--el barrio--in the 1960s and 1970s, guessing was the only way Puerto Ricans could figure out their culture and history. In his introduction to Boricuas (1995), Roberto Santiago points out that school was the place where they learned about everyone else except themselves. They learned about the Fourth of July and how the United States was founded by English people who proclaimed that, in this nation, all men were created equal. They learned about how the Europeans shared dinner with the Indians on Thanksgiving. They learned about Christianity and how people who hold Christian values treated one another with love and respect. They learned about the environment and how important it was to keep the air and water clean. But who they were as a people was never a consideration; it was a question that seldom entered their minds. Every other group - the Italians, the Irish, the Jews, the African-Americans - seemed to have an idea who they were (xiii-xiv). By looking for an idea of what a Puerto Rican is, Down These Mean Streets (1967) is the journey of Piri Thomas, a black-skinned Puerto Rican, from hatred of everything white or white-like to a more complex understanding of race. Down These Mean Streets is a hybrid text of testimonial and imaginative literature, initiating the Nuyorican stage of continental Puerto Rican writing. In this novelized autobiography, Thomas deals with many of the issues society stereotypically associates with Latino minorities: poverty, educational failure, gang membership, drug addiction, welfare, petty crime, sexual perversity, and prison life (Sanchez 118-19). Thomas tells the reader not only how poverty in the ghetto leads him to drugs, youth gangs, and a series of criminal activities for which he will serve seven years in prison, but also how he faces a racism that he does not understand. Thomas's autobiographical account corresponds to the category of radicalized African-American works, such as Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcom X (1965) and Elridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice (1967), emerging at the time as a reaction to the perceived shortcomings of the non-violent Civil Rights Movements of the fifties and early sixties (Hiraldo 88). Besides the African-American literary tradition, Down These Mean Streets is also a book claimed by other literary traditions, such as U.S. Latino/a literature or Hispanic literature of the U.S. and Puerto Rican literature written in English. (1) The categorization of Thomas's literary production as an African-American, U.S. Latino, or Puerto Rican exceeds any classification, making the reader consider it as something more universal that transcends borders, literary traditions, and time as it might present or deal with issues concerning these societies back then or today. (2) The aim of this paper is to study Chapter 18 ("Barroom Sociology") of Down These Mean Streets as a subtext that constructs Piri Thomas's autobiographical account rhetorically. In this chapter, Thomas writes of an encounter among three men - including himself - in a nightclub in the South: Gerald Andrew West is a college-educated light-skinned African-American from Pennsylvania who is passing for a Puerto Rican to make, he says, "the next step to white" (191). He complains that whites allow him to be "Negro," but "Negroes" do not allow him to be white. The second man, Brew, is a dark-skinned African-American from Harlem who talks the talk of an angry black nationalist of the 1960s. He asks Gerald, "[W]hat kinda Negro is yuh?" (187). The third man, Piri, an angry and confused dark-skinned Puerto Rican from Spanish Harlem, is passing for "Negro," accepting the gaze of a social system that blackens him. By narrating "Piri's" encounter with Gerald in his trip to Dixie, I will show that this chapter frames the writing of Thomas's autobiography both at a formal level and a content level, since Thomas ends up writing the story that Gerald proposes to write: a book on the situation of black men (or Afro-Caribbean men, in the case of "Piri") and of his experience in the South (or in New York City). …

This study discusses the literary and theatrical portrayal of corpses in Cuban-American Roberto G. Fernandez's Raining Backwards, Puerto Rican Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican, and Miguel Pinero's Short Eyes. In dialogue with various critics of communitarian and nationalistic thinking (Nancy, Balibar, Joseph, and Anderson), the author reflects upon the problematics of community, its sense of project and destiny, its vehement impulse toward domesticating difference, and its program for hegemonizing subalternity. From this perspective, the cadaver is discussed as an ontological void in Latino/a communitarian articulation and as a recurrent topos in this group's cultural production. This study proposes that the dead body needs to be considered critically in order to disrupt meta-narratives of hybridization that guide Latino communitarian thinking and the production–consumption dynamics within the US multicultural nation. “Cadavers encountered” advances a model for critically un-reading more commercial/hegemonic Latino products and for underscoring counter-pedagogic thinking in less commercial/alternative ones. In the process it suggests a variety of cultural commodities that could be studied in fashions similar to the work of Fernandez, Santiago, and Pinero.

[spa] La literatura de Manuel Abreu Adorno representa un quiebre respecto al uso de las metáforas de identidad nacional, de las cuales se habría apropiado la literatura del canon puertorriqueño. A lo largo de su obra literaria observamos cómo las relaciones entre el individuo y una identidad estable pierden el papel protagónico que le habría otorgado la literatura nacional. Mientras la literatura nacional se preocupa por una definición homogénea de la identidad, la literatura posnacional se centra en plantear construcciones identitarias más apropiadas ante los cambios que ha producido la globalización en el mundo contemporáneo. En esta tesis estudiaremos cómo se lleva a cabo esta ruptura en la obra de Abreu Adorno y de qué formas las teorías de literatura posnacional se convierten en un espacio de reflexión para obtener una interpretación más amplia de su proyecto literario., [eng] Manuel Abreu Adorno's literature represents a change in the use of the national identity metaphors, of which would have appropriated the Puerto Rican literary classics in the past decades. As proof, within his writings we see various characters who are not anchored to any specific territory. Because of this, the search for a homogeneous identity looses the prominence that has in national literature. Instead, post national literature, a phenomenon that emerged in the late XIX and early XX centuries, presents identity constructions related with the changes resulting from globalization in the contemporary world. In this article we will study how post national tradition establishes a dialogue with the work of Abreu Adorno and in what ways it becomes a reflection space for a broad interpretation of his literary project.

In recent years various Puerto Rican cultural studies have exposed the paternalism and classism that lie behind the island's hegemonic nationalist discourse since the 1930s. They have also exposed the fundamental role of the essay form in this canonic discourse. These studies read Puerto Rican literature as if it were an autonomous discursive field. Few critics have pointed to the similar literary products published in different parts of Latin America—a similarity made striking given the still difficult communications among intellectuals in the region. Among the works occasionally compared are those produced beginning in the 1960s by the Mexicans Elena Poniatowska and Carlos Monsivais and those published in the 1970s by a group of Puerto Rican writers referred to as the los francotiradores, "the gunmen"—an allusion to their well‐evidenced ambition to “murder” the national myths created by their putative fathers two generations before. Edgardo Rodriguez Julia and Ana Lydia Vega are among these writers.

Although Puerto Ricans had been migrating to the United States for decades before the Spanish-American War (or more correctly, the Spanish-Cuban-American War) of 1898, when Puerto Rico became a colonial possession of the United States, until the late 1960s, the literary production of stateside Puerto Ricans was written predominantly in Spanish. Works written largely by first-generation Puerto Rican migrants were either published by small presses and not well publicized, or remained scattered in many of the Spanish-language newspapers of different communities. Moreover, writers from this generation rarely published in English. The Puerto Rican population in the United States in 1910 was only around two thousand people, and significant migration growth did not begin to occur until after 1917, the year when Congress decreed US citizenship for island Puerto Ricans. Thus, early literary expressions were largely ignored by the US literary establishment and were little known within the primarily working-class Puerto Rican communities—the largest one in New York, and a few other smaller ones in cities across the country. A literature primarily written in English that offered firsthand portrayals of the coming-of-age experiences and unprivileged lives endured by most US Puerto Ricans did not emerge until the late 1960s and early 1970s. Galvanized by the civil-rights movement and the militant and socially transforming outlook prevalent during these decades, Puerto Ricans and other US minorities strived for equality, inclusion, and the cultural survival and empowerment of their communities. The literature of this period also gave voice to these struggles, concerns, and experiences. Spanish Harlem, the Lower East Side (renamed by writers as Loisaida), and the Bronx stand out as the most-emblematic settings for the first wave of autobiographical narratives, poetry, prose fiction, and theater that eventually came to be identified as Nuyorican literature (see Introductory Works, Anthologies, and Genres). The label was derived from the fact that the majority of Puerto Ricans, to date, have resided in New York, and was popularized by a group of performance poets who gathered around the Nuyorican Poets Café, founded in 1973. Initially, the term Nuyorican was a derogatory label coined by island Puerto Ricans to distance themselves from the marginal conditions experienced by their migrant fellow citizens and from the negative stereotypes imposed on them by mainstream US society. It was later adopted by the Nuyorican poets as a marker of a distinctive hybrid or “borderland” cultural identity and the Spanish/English bilingual practices, mixing of languages, and code switching that occurred among US Puerto Ricans. The geographically confining nature of the term Nuyorican has led some critics and writers to try out other labels, such as Diasporican, Boricua, Chicago Rican, Orlando Rican, and others, to refer to stateside Puerto Ricans in general or from a particular geographic location other than New York. As of the early 21st century, no comprehensive literary histories of US Puerto Rican literature are available, but there have been some attempts to introduce and characterize the emerging body of literature that began to flourish in the 1970s and 1980s. Most recent critical studies and anthologies of this literary corpus have tended to focus on a particular theme or group of writers (e.g., women, gay, and lesbian) or movements (e.g., Nuyorican Poets Café, autobiographical narratives). Migration continues undeterred in the present, to the extent that the stateside Puerto Rican population of about 4.7 million in 2010 is now larger than the 3.6 million population of Puerto Rico. The strong transnational connections that Puerto Ricans maintain with the island account for reciprocal influences between both communities, which are most evident in their literature and other cultural expressions (see General Overviews). Hence, literary activity and other forms of cultural production continue to be shaped by Puerto Rican contact with mainstream US society, other ethnic and racial groups in different urban settings, and a rapidly growing Latino population that by 2010 included over fifty million people whose ancestry is linked to twenty different Spanish-speaking countries (see Anthologies and Literary Criticism).

Emergent scholarship on Jesus Colon intersects fruitfully with how literature of the Puerto Rican diaspora has become increasingly important on the island in the past two decades, as the intelligentsia continues to deal with the ways in which previous formulations of national culture neglected class, race, gender, sexuality, and, of course, the diaspora itself. Now that the critical mass of Puerto Ricans in the U.S. mainland has superseded the population on the island, and migration from the island today seems heading toward another historic peak, it has become increasingly untenable to exclude the history and literature of the Puerto Rican migration from formal local considerations.1 Indeed diasporic Puerto Rican literature, broadly construed historically and geographically, often overtly addresses national discourses on the island, even as it was being excluded from consideration there. By drawing distinctions in particular between racial discourses in the United States and a country of the Hispanic Caribbean, literature of the Puerto Rican diaspora profoundly interrogates and exposes the naturalized and reified historical, social, and political discourses in Puerto Rico that have enshrined notions of racial democracy, despite major interventions of the past.2

Although Puerto Rican and other Caribbean diasporic writers have been publishing in the United States, especially in New York City, over a century, it is during the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s that Puerto Rican literature in the United States in English received national literary recognition. Piri Thomas’ novel Down These Mean Streets (1967) and Nicholasa Mohr’s bildungsroman Nilda (1973) are works that express the concerns of the Puerto Rican diaspora regarding adequate education, employment, and health rights.1 During this period, writers in the United States, like Thomas and Mohr, identified as Nuyorican, a cultural and political self-designated term used by Puerto Ricans who are born or predominantly raised in New York City, after World War II, when waves of working-class Puerto Ricans began to migrate from the island to U.S. cities in the East and Midwest in search of better opportunities for themselves and their families. According to Marta Sanchez, it is no small coincidence that, due to close geographic proximity and similar socioeconomic conditions, Puerto Ricans such as Thomas formed close social alliances with African Americans in Harlem, New York, and thus, became highly influenced in linguistic code, ideological outlook, and consciousness of the social inequalities in their environment.

Puerto Rican literature and culture earned its place within Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean Studies after a long, and sometimes heated, debate. This debate centered around the ambiguous nature of Puerto Rican claims to nationhood, based on a cultural discourse that has produced a strong definition of a national identity without having some of the basic and traditional elements of a sovereign status.2 Given its close contact with the United States, Puerto Rican cultural practices were not, simply put, considered to be strictly “Latin American” or “Hispanic” by scholars of these disciplines.

El artículo reseña varias novelas escritas en Puerto Rico por la llamada "generación del setenta". Aquí se trata de la anexión de Puerto Rico a Estados Unidos como un tema literario que hurga en la identidad y nacionalidad de los habitantes de la isla. Autores como Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá o Luis López Nieves retratan ese crucial momento, y crean, en el caso de este último, una versión ficticia que tiende a redimir la historia por medio de héroes desconocidos. The article reviews several novels written in Puerto Rico by the so-called "Generation of the Seventies". The annexation of Puerto Rico to the United States is dealt with here as a literary theme that delves into the identity and nationality of the inhabitants of the island. Authors such as Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá or Luis López Nieves portray this crucial moment and they create, in the case of the latter, a fictitious version that tends to redeem history by means of unknown heroes.

Francisco Font Acevedo is one of the outstanding writers of twenty-first-century Puerto Rican literature. His work contains two currents, equal in strength but different in nature. One is anti-real...

The Big Apple seems to be the central axis for the readerly and writerly "I" in El imperio de los sueños ( Empire of Dreams ), by Giannina Braschi. Readers can easily realize that the text is not just about New York, but that it actually journeys through praise and blame, drinking and dancing, talking and perversing many other cities and landscapes. El imperio is a space of bohemia with streaks from the Latin American Quarter in Paris, the barrio chino barcelonés , the zaguanes of Borges's Buenos Aires, from colonial houses in Old San Juan; it evokes dandy places, the Madrid of the Profane Comedy , also, of course, an Empire State full of shepherds and other poetic voices. This textual geography, intertwined with socio-political maps and blueprints of different cultural systems and manners, leads to a boiling pot of literary references. In sync with its new maps of New York, Russia, Puerto Rico, Spain, and Latin America, El imperio represents Spanish as a strong and vivid character chiseled after many national and communal forms and frames of meaning; nothing along the lines of a preformulated vehicle for Braschi's narrative and/or poetic acts. The text displays an endless mix-and-match of Puerto Rican idioms—both from the Island and from the Spanish spoken in New York by Puerto Ricans—with expañolismos, argentinismos , and other renditions of Spanish. The tongue of Spain, the madre patria , thus multiplies its performative potential and expands the role of translation. In El imperio Spanish is not just a process to move meanings beyond its lettered confinements, out of its "grammatically correct" boundaries, into another—or foreign—language, but a way to show off its own capacity for otherness.

On more than one occasion Puerto Rican American writer Judith Ortiz Cofer has been questioned about her use of standard American English to express the bicultural experiences of the immigrant Puerto Ricans featured in her poetry and prose fiction. The suggestion that her linguistic selection renders suspect her ethnic identity as well as the authenticity of her literary accounts is never far from the surface of such inquiries. Ortiz Cofer's response, however, has been consistently unapologetic. In a recent interview conducted by Rafael Ocasio, she speaks forcefully about the "varied and ever changing" character of the Puerto Rican experience ("Infinite Variety" 735), asserting, "I want my work to be recognized as coming out of the Puerto Rican tradition, even though it sounds different" (734). An earlier interview reports her theorizing even more plainly on the subject: "There is not just one reality to being a Puerto Rican writer. I am putting together a different view" (Ocasio, "Puerto Rican Literature" 45). Ortiz Cofer's response is significant not only because it rejects facile definitions of cultural identity, definitions based almost exclusively on linguistic proficiency, but more importantly, because it challenges writers and scholars to adopt a more nuanced approach in their investigation of Latin peoples. As Eliana Ortega and Nancy Saporta Sternbach argue in their essay on contemporary Latina literature, it is incumbent upon those in the field of Latin American studies to consider more carefully the ways in which race, class, gender, linguistic affinity, and other social and material circumstances contribute to a more complex, more diversified account of what it means to be a person of Latin origin (7-8). Such is the defining issue at stake not only in Ortiz Cofer's status as an English-dominant Latina writer, (1) but a defining issue at stake in much of her work as well, most notably in her cross-genre autobiography entitled Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood. In addition to being a text that affirms the cultural ethos of an author who "sounds different" from her Spanish-speaking contemporaries, Silent Dancing breaks new ground in Latino/a literature by speaking specifically about the bicultural experience of Puerto Rican Americans, and by demonstrating the way in which this experience is fundamentally distinct from that found in Chicano/a literature. The purpose of this paper is to chart the nature and source of these differences. In particular, I borrow from Gloria Anzaldua's theories of border identity to argue that the cultural reality encountered by the characters in Silent Dancing is neither random nor monolithically shared, but one that is shaped instead by the unique physical reality that divides these characters from their homeland. Unlike the US Texas-Mexican border which functions prominently in the formation of what Anzaldua calls the "new mestiza consciousness" of Mexican Americans, the Puerto Rican American border is not a land formation, and hence it has an entirely different psychic impact on those who traverse it. This notion is one of the most compelling insights of Ortiz Cofer's work. Silent Dancing thus not only troubles the indiscriminate application of Anzaldua's mestiza consciousness to all border culture Latino/as, but, in a much broader sense, it troubles the conclusions of any cultural analysis that would deny the "infinite variety" of the Latino/a experience. As complex as Silent Dancing is in its alternating combination of poetry and creative nonfiction essay, (2) the story itself is simple: Ortiz Cofer narrates the events of her childhood in a series of chronologically-ordered vignettes that detail her experience as a young girl shuttled back and forth between her grandmother's casa in a small Puerto Rican village and her family's American home in Paterson, New Jersey. Ortiz Cofer's father works in the Navy shipyards of Brooklyn Yard, a job that requires him to take leave of his family for months at a time. …

Williams' admiration for Brueghel's landscape is coded in structural and stylistic correspondences between the poem and the painting. Structures in the poem have effects analogous to the use of devices of color, line, foregrounding in the painting. The poem, like the painting, presents a «neutral» scene but subtly insures the reader's involvement. Further, Williams draws a visual statement so that graphic features suggest a global image isomorphic with the motif of descent. Features of the poem, such as line and clause length, syntactic construction, semantic coherence, are discussed as factors that contribute to rapid glancing and increase readability. A study of readers shows their sensitivity to graphic features including the poem's shape, and corroborates the importance of stylistic features.