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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.

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.

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.