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PUERTO RICAN NATIONHOOD, ETHNICITY, AND LITERATURE

Frances R. Aparicio

Both on the Island and the U.S. Mainland, Puerto Ricans stand out as a rich and

complicated example of a contested nation. Given its long colonial history under Spain’s

and the United States’s imperial policies, Puerto Rican nationhood as an autonomous

state has been deferred politically; yet strong enactments of cultural nationalism have

been deployed as gestures of resistance and reaffirmation of a dispossessed cultural

identity. Puerto Ricans have struggled against colonialism by reaffirming a national

identity through language (Spanish), food, music, folklore and the arts, and by insisting

on the primacy of the island as the territory of the National. Thus, national imaginaries

between the island and the mainland have emerged fraught with conflict and

incoherence. Puerto Rican diasporic literature has grappled with reaffirming a cultural

identity, an ethnoracial one, that does not correspond to that of the national island. If

literature serves to forge a national imaginary, as Benedict Anderson proposed in

Imagined Communities​, the formation of a literary canon that textualizes the power

struggles in the construction of Puerto Rican culture and identity cannot be

underestimated within this colonial framework. At a moment in history when Puerto

Ricans in the United States outnumber the island population, an analysis of Puerto

Rican nationhood, ethnicity and literature calls into question traditional notions of

nationhood and foregrounds the increasing visibility and agency of diasporic literary

voices in producing alternative national imaginaries.

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This essay critically examines the fissures of nationhood that have characterized

Puerto Rican literature in the United States and its radical function in destabilizing

traditional imaginaries of puertorrique​ñ​idad through race, gender, sexuality, class, and

hybridity. If for decades ideologies of cultural nationalism on the island fueled the

disavowal of the literary texts produced by Puerto Ricans outside the national territory

for not being deemed authentically or fully Puerto Rican, by 2016 the Diasporican

literary corpus has its own history and traditions. As Lisa Sánchez González has argued

in ​Boricua Literature, U.S. Puerto Rican literature cannot be fully absorbed as part of the

U.S. literary imagination nor as an appendix to the Puerto Rican literature on the island.

Puerto Rican literature in the United States grapples with issues of colonialism, identity,

race, gender, sexuality, social class, and language. Written mostly in English and in

Spanglish, these literary texts –whether poetry, fiction, memoirs, or theater—constitute

a verbal performance of the life experiences of Puerto Ricans in the United States.

Authors from Chicago and California, and as far away as Hawaii and Morocco are

challenging Diasporican literature by extending its geographical boundaries beyond

New York. If the pioneering voices of early writers such as Bernardo Vega and Jesús

Colón documented the struggles of Puerto Rican workers in New York since the 1920s,

by the new millennium Puerto Rican authors, poets, novelists, and playwrights are
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creating rich, heterogeneous works and genres that textualize inter and transcultural
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exchanges, thus inserting themselves into larger, global discourses.

PUERTO RICAN NATIONAL IMAGINARIES:

FROM THE DIVIDED NATION TO THE DIASPORICAN

From the 1960s until the 1990s, Puerto Rican writers on the island and on the

mainland faced rigid boundaries that kept them at a distance, separated by strong

ideologies about language and national identity, about race, and about social class. If

New York Puerto Rican writers were considered too assimilated because they wrote

mostly in English, they were also seen as transgressors of the purity of Spanish when

they mixed English and Spanish. If the foundational figures of Nuyorican writing were

self-taught, had not had formal education, and had grown up in working-poor families,

their literary creations were deemed inferior based on the elite standards of the Island

intelligentsia who did not find colloquial English or Spanglish acceptable as literary

languages. These divides, encapsulated in the notion of Puerto Rico as a “divided

nation”, (Acosta-Belén; Zimmerman, 50, see also Barradas and Rodriguez in Herejes y

mitificadores) were clearly informed by the lack of knowledge on the Island about the

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​As Marc Zimmerman has noted, current writers are informed by “a concern with

forging a literature that is cosmopolitan and transnational even as it continues to focus

on social concerns of colonialism, racism, stereotyping, and so forth as found in the

literature of the Nuyorican.” (55)

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struggles of Puerto Ricans on the mainland, by dominant notions of national identity that

dismissed hybridity and the inbetweenness of border lives in the diaspora, by class and

racial prejudices, and, ironically, by discourses of cultural nationalism that circulated as

ways of resisting U.S. colonialism on the Island.

The territorial privileging of the Island as the exclusive site for Puerto Rican

authenticity was central to this disavowal. Puerto Ricans who left their home country

were deemed traitors within narratives that dismissed the role of the state in structuring

these migrations. Projects of modernization led by Governor Luis Mu​ñ​oz Marín since

the 1940s, coupled with population control, industrialization, and Operation Bootstrap,

fueled the migration of thousands of families into New York and the East Coast. As

Tato Laviera writes in his poem “Nuyorican”:

“me mandaste a nacer nativo en otras tierras,

Por qué, porque éramos pobres, verdad?

Porque tú querías vaciarte de tu gente pobre,”

[you made me be born a native in other lands,

Why, because we were poor, right?

Because you wanted to get rid of your poor people] AmeRícan, 53)
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As a response to the island discourses and narratives that informed the disavowal of

Puerto Ricans in New York, Laviera’s “Nuyorican” situates these migration flows as a

result of state strategies for population control and for modernization.

The strong boundaries erected by these exclusionary national imaginaries were

unrelenting for decades. They produced resentment, anger, and virulent conflicts

among writers on both sides. In contrast to the acceptance of visual arts and salsa

music on the island, Marisel C. Moreno has argued that the rejection of Nuyorican

literature on the island “can be explained in part on linguistic grounds.” (25) Since Salsa

music has been sung mostly in Spanish, and visual arts do not rely on verbal language

for communication, these two other art forms have been much more easily accepted on

the Island than their literary works.

The long-standing conundrum regarding language and its symbolic value for

representing national identity is clearly illustrated in the 1980s controversy between

Bronx-based writer, Nicholasa Mohr, author of ​Nilda, and the Island-based fiction writer,

Ana Lydia Vega. Highly critical of Ana Lydia Vega’s characterization of the Nuyorican

protagonist, Suzie Bermúdez, in her short story “Pollito Chicken”, Nicholasa Mohr

explained in her article, “Puerto Rican Writers in the U.S., Puerto Rican Writers in

Puerto Rico: A Separation Beyond Language” (1989), her own location as a New York

writer of Puerto Rican descent and the differences between both communities in

“language, thematic concerns, and the working class diaspora experience” that create

“irreconcilable differences that mark a rupture between insular and diaspora literary

productions.” (Moreno 28) Mohr’s piece distinguished how colonialism had translated
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into different social identities for each: if the Island writers tended to belong to the elite

and upper-middle class, in the diaspora most writers were working-class or

working-poor. If the Island writers articulated an “obsession with race, class, Spain,

and the use of baroque Spanish” (92), Nuyorican writers addressed the racial prejudices

against them for their dark skin color. If the Island writers privileged Spanish as the

language of the Puerto Rican nation, in New York writing in English and experimenting

with Spanglish became a political form of resistance that reclaimed their hybrid identities

against the Island literary canon that insisted on defending the purity of Spanish. In

brief, as Efraín Barradas and Rafael Rodríguez proposed as early as 1980, U.S. Puerto

Rican poets are fueled by an “insatisfacción radical” [radical insatisfaction] (21) that

informs a critical positioning vis a vis mainstream society and its values. Thus, these

diasporic voices, which should be considered part of “our collective reality” (29), can be

considered “herejes y mitificadores” [heretics and mythmakers] (22) because they are

conscious of their cultural legacy and they adopt or reject the diverse myths that inform

their national culture.

Nicholasa Mohr’s arguments, however, dismissed the central role that

Island-based writers such as José Luis González and Luis Rafael Sánchez had had in

acknowledging the validity and importance of Puerto Rican writers outside the island. If

in his essay, “El escritor y el exilio”/The Writer in Exile” (1976) González called for an

early acknowledgement of Puerto Rican literature in the United States as one more

artistic sector who produced a national identity outside of the Island, Luis Rafael

Sánchez textualized the migratory routes and circulation of Puerto Ricans between the
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Island and New York in his groundbreaking essay, “La guagua aérea.” (1983) In this

humorous narrative that described the experiences of Puerto Rican migrants as

passengers in the flight from San Juan to New York since the 1950s, the author remaps

New York as a Puerto Rican city, cementing Puerto Rican identity as “una nación

flotante entre dos puertos de contrabandear esperanzas” [“a nation floating in between

two ports that counterfeit hopes”] (30). He clearly proposes as early as 1983 what

Maritza Stantich later would coin as “un Puerto Rico extendido”/a Great Puerto Rico”
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(211). Along with other phrases, such as “brincando el charco” ​ [“jumping the puddle”]

and “”nation on the move” (Duany 2002) , the title, “La guagua aérea”, “the air bus”,

would go on to become a central signifier that referred to the back and forth flows of

Puerto Ricans between the Island and the mainland. According to William Burgos, who

examines the shifts from Puerto Rican to Nuyorican to Diasporican, “La guagua aérea”

is one of the first texts that “foreground the dynamism of the diaspora itself and its

impact on Puerto Ricans’s sense of themselves.” (137) In addition, the shift from

Nuyorican to Diasporican reflects the expansion of Puerto Rican communities outside of

New York, the foundational urban site for historicizing Puerto Rican lives. According to

William Burgos, “the diasporan perspective is to take into account the full range of

geographies and the rich complex of racial and cultural mixtures that define

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Queer Puerto Rican scholar and filmmaker, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, titled her

autobiographical film about sexuality and national identity among Puerto Ricans,

“Brincando el charco”, thus cementing the popular refrain that had circulated for

decades in reference to migration.

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puertorrique​ñ​idad.” (138) If these two major writers situated with the insular literary

tradition exhorted the acknowledgement and recognition of the diaspora writers, the US

Puerto Rican literary voices reflect compellingly on the stories of migration and

transnational flows between the two islands –Puerto Rico and Manhattan—, ultimately

destabilizing traditional notions of home, belonging, and nation. As Lisa Sánchez

González, in ​Boricua Literature (2001), has argued, we need to conceptualize the

Diasporican literary corpus as a “Boricua” artistic space that resists fixed notions of

national and cultural identity. Ramón Soto Crespo also proposes that by the new

millennium Diasporican literature needs to be examined within its own tradition as a

literature of resistance and opposition, as a decolonizing tool, in brief, as “an experience

of contestation”. (137) Indeed, Puerto Rican writers in the diaspora, in the “Puerto Rico

extendido”, situate themselves as crucial voices in the literary production that grapples

with global migratory displacements, the crossing of national borders, the instability and

uncertainty of home(s), linguistic hybridity and code-switching, racially-subordinated

identities, mixed-race and ethnic families, and non-heteronormative sexualities.

BRINCANDO EL CHARCO:

TEXTUALIZING MIGRATION, TRANSNATIONALISM, AND HOME

Nuyorican poet Tato Laviera’s first poetry collection, ​La Carreta Made a U-Turn,

published in 1984, rejected the derogatory discourses about migration that were

prevalent on the island and mythologized in René Marqués’s play, ​La Carreta, since

1953. This play enacted in a dramatic tragedy the dislocations of one Puerto Rican
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family from the countryside to San Juan and eventually to New York as a gradual

descent into physical death, stagnating poverty, and family dissolution, concluding with

their redeeming return to the island rural region. This dystopic vision of migration

became “sociologic commonplaces and media stereotypes that at times fed islanders’s

already tarnished image of their “acculturated” countrymen who were living stateside.”

(Nicolás Kanellos, iii, in ​La Carreta Made a U-Turn). Indeed, if Marqués’s narrative

about migrating to New York was articulated as “total disaster and defeat, as exile from

sacred land, as loss of family identity and integrity” (Zimmerman 58), Laviera’s poetic

textualization of life in el barrio celebrated and affirmed “the existence of a culturally and

psychologically whole people that is strong enough to bring together two languages, two

experiences, two worlds.” (Kanellos iii), while simultaneously denouncing the

institutional racism, exclusions, violence and abandonment by dominant institutions of

working-poor Puerto Ricans in New York. If in Marqués’s play the Puerto Rican family

returns to the rural areas of the Island, Laviera invites his readers to do a “U-turn”,

returning to a New York urban community whose people are resilient, joyful in their oral

traditions and popular music, and full of hope despite the dire conditions in which they

live. If the collection’s first section, “Metropolitan Dreams”, denounces the social and

economic stasis of Puerto Ricans in New York –as in “papote sat on the stoop/of an

abandoned building/he decided to go nowhere”—(4), the other sections, “Loisaida

Streets: Latinas Sing” and “El arrabal: El nuevo rumbón”, articulate the expressive and

healing creativity of the community through memory, oral traditions, popular music, and

urban arts. In particular, the cultural politics highlighted by sounds –from the drumming
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of congas on the street to the voices of chisme, from dancing to salsa music to the

circulation of Spanglish—become a central site for celebrating Puerto Rican New York.

(Urayoán Noel; Aparicio). The closing pages of the book pay homage to Ismael Rivera

and Jorge Brandon, thus reaffirming the dignity and integrity of Puerto Rican men who,

despite their difficult lives with the justice system, became local heroes for the

community given their artistic and musical contributions. Again, this poetry collection by

Laviera, while informed by the previous Nuyorican performance poetry (Urayoán Noel)

of denouncement, anger, and interlingual textures, inaugurated a celebratory,

life-affirming poetic tradition that uplifted those at the very bottom of U.S. society and

returned to them, at least symbolically, the dignity and humanity they had been robbed

by a country and government that colonized and exploited their bodies and their lives in

the name of imperial, economic profit.

Diasporican literary fiction, autobiographical narratives, and memoirs have also

been centrally deployed to narrate the challenges of migration from the Island to New

York. Informed by the compelling potential of testimonios among U.S. Latino/as as a

form of speaking back, and the critical politics of memory as a rhetorical strategy for

reclaiming our historical agency, stories about arriving in New York and settling down in

an urban center so foreign to families coming from rural communities in Puerto Rico not

only documented the histories of Puerto Rican migrants in the United States, inserting

their experiences into the public discourse, but also contextualized the political economy

behind these migratory flows. From the early writings of the tabaqueros Bernardo Vega

and Jesús Colón --Vega, who arrived by boat to the urban metropolis in 1916 with
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“castillito en el aire” (22) [castles in the air}, with hopes and dreams of a better life and

opportunities-- to the more current narratives like Marisel Vera’s ​If I Bring you Roses

(2011), which narrates the love story between Felicidad and Aníbal and their migration

to Chicago, these stories of displacement and hope continue to serve as critical

discourses that highlight the social injustices and systematic inequalities that led to

migration to the North as well as the resilience of Puerto Ricans in making a new home

away from home.

The family stories abundant in literary fiction critique the colonial and imperial

frameworks that inform the displacements of Puerto Ricans from the island to New

York, framing them both intimately and historically. Esmeralda Santiago’s memoir,

When I was Puerto Rican (1993), highlights the dire poverty of her childhood and the

colonial presence of the United States in the rural communities of the Island as

systematic factors that led to her mother’s decision to move to New York. In textualizing

her own process of constructing a hybrid identity as both a Puerto Rican Islander and in

New York, Esmeralda Santiago documents these migratory displacements in her own

family and highlights the personal and emotional consequences of these family moves.

When I was Puerto Rican begins with a move to a small house in the rural community of

Macún, then on to Santurce and back, then to El Mangle, and eventually to New York

City. (Rivera, 6) Not only are these displacements the result of the systemic poverty in

which she and her family lived, but also of the gendered inequalities between her father

and her mother. During her father’s prolonged absences, the mother was responsible

for all of the children.

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While the title of this book was very polemical among island readers who

denounced Santiago’s denial of her Puerto Rican identity as a preterite fact –the “was”

became the target of criticism and excluded her from the insular national imaginary—it

is fascinating that in the chapter entitled “The American Invasion of Macún” Santiago

captures the everyday ways in which U.S. imperialism colonized the diets and the

schooling of rural Puerto Ricans on the Island. In her compelling description of the

workshops offered to rural mothers like hers, the author clearly illustrates the ways in

which Empire produce new markets, thus “educating” the mothers to buy powdered

eggs and milk instead of consuming the fresh, local tropical fruits freely available in their

natural surroundings. Brilliantly documenting and tracing the relationship between the

U.S. presence and the colonized daily practices of Puerto Rican Islanders, this chapter

is ironically produced by a writer from the diaspora who was displaced from her

birthplace. In addition, Santiago’s three memoirs or autobiographies –​When I was

Puerto Rican, ​Almost a Woman, and ​The Turkish Lover- narrate not only the

ambiguities and contradictions of a hybrid cultural identity for the author, but also the

gendered inequities and ideologies that sexualized her as a woman of color in the

United States. Santiago’s voice, in this context, needs to be interpreted within the

longer tradition of female and feminist Puerto Rican and Latina writers in the United

States that include Julia de Burgos, Sandra María Esteves, Luz María Umpierre, Judith

Ortiz Cofer, Aurora and Rosario Levins Morales, and Carmen de Monteflores, among

many others.
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The intersections between genre, gender, and ethnicity are powerfully articulated

in the literary writings of Judith Ortiz Cofer. Born on the Island but having grown up in

between Paterson, New Jersey and Hormigueros, Puerto Rico, Cofer’s canonical

autobiographical narrative, ​Silent Dancing, (1990), has been understood not only as a

postmodern reflection on the fissures of memory, but likewise as a feminist critique of

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Puerto Rican society and of U.S. racism against families of color. ​ Here I want to

highlight Cofer’s documentation of the circular migration that structured her family

history during her childhood and youth. When her father was stationed in the Navy in

the East Coast, her mother would live with her own mother in the “Casa” in

Hormigueros. When her father was off duty, he would rent an apartment in El Building

in Paterson, New Jersey, where they had to adjust to the racial, social, cultural and

linguistic dominance of norteamericanos yet simultaneously a refuge where so many

other Latino/a families lived. While the book embodies the hybridity of genre (a

combination of poems, stories, and essays), it textualizes stories about family, the role

of women, religion, race, language, and the power of folklore and cautionary tales, all

elements that constitute a feminist stance. While the circular migration of Cofer’s

childhood is not equal to the transnational flows so profoundly established today in our

analysis of U.S. Latino/a communities, it is essential to highlight the historical

importance of Cofer’s narratives since the 1990s in documenting this vaivén, the back

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The book anticipates the more recent publication of multiple memoirs by well-known

Puerto Rican women in the United States: Sonia Sotomayor, Sonia Nieto, Sonia

Manzano and Rita Moreno.

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and forth of the guagua aérea that was informed by the father’s participation in the U.S.

Navy but also by the mother’s youth and affective resistance to being displaced away

from home. Not only have Diasporican writers articulated the displacement and

migration to New York in the framework of family stories, highlighting the consequences

of these moves on the formation of hybrid cultural, racial and gender identities, but by

2016 it is clear that the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States has had significant

impact on political issues on the Island, from the demilitarization of Vieques in the late

1990s to their solidarity and advocacy for the Island population during the U.S.

Congress deliberations on the government debt.

EL BARRIO:

URBAN SPACE, COMMUNITY AND MASCULINITY

In contrast to many migrant writers like Vega and Colón, Nuyorican poets and

writers such as Pedro Pietri, Miguel Algarín, and Miguel Pi​ñ​ero, either were born in New

York or migrated as young children to the city. As second-generation Puerto Ricans,

their socialization, schooling, cultural and racial identities were clearly marked by their

experience in el barrio. Thus, authors like the Nuyorican poets and fiction writers like

Piri Thomas, Nicholasa Mohr, and Abraham Rodríguez, all deployed metaphors,

images, and an urban aesthetics that reaffirmed the central role of urban space in their

literary imaginings of home. References to tar, trash, cold buildings, and bleak

surroundings, common in the works of the foundational Nuyorican poets, also populate

fictional writings. In the postcolonial framework of global migrations, home is plural,

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fractured, and socially constructed. Given the global circulations of bodies and families

who are displaced from their home countries due to wars, hunger, authoritarian

regimes, systemic violence, and social death, today the reality of home is no longer

consonant to the traditional notion of home as safe, stable, and as permanent

protection. Puerto Ricans in New York and other U.S. urban centers, such as

Philadelphia, Chicago, and most recently, Orlando and Texas (destinations for the more

recent massive exodus of Puerto Ricans due to the economic and financial crisis on the

Island), have all grappled with how to create a home away from home, with both the

limitations of displacement as well as with the hopes and promises of a new life. If “all

fiction is homesickness”, as Rosemary Marangoly George has written (1), authors like

Piri Thomas and Abraham Rodríguez continue to grapple with issues of (non)belonging

in these narratives of brown masculinity in urban spaces. From the canonical literature

of Piri Thomas, whose autobiographical narrative, ​Down These Mean Streets (1967),

narrated his troubled youth in Harlem as a black and Puerto Rican young man, to the

novel, ​Spidertown, by Abraham Rodríguez, who writes about Puerto Rican and brown

youth, masculinity, drug use, violence, and survival in the Bronx, male writers use fiction

to claim the spaces of el barrio as their own, to insert themselves in history, as well as

to ponder on the lack of opportunities for young men of color.

If “imagining a home is as political an act as is imagining a nation” (Marangoly

George, 6), the constant movement on the streets, their parties, the drug dealings and

use, becomes, for young Puerto Rican men like Miguel in ​Spidertown and Piri in ​Down

These Mean Streets, their own search for belonging to a community. Piri struggled to
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find himself in the interstices of U.S. blackness and a Puerto Rican national and family

identity associated with whiteness, and leaving his home in suburban Long Island and

returning to the streets of Harlem was his way of creating a sense of family for himself.

Miguel’s final decision to walk away from Spider both allows him the power to reimagine

himself in the future as well as accepting a sense of loss for that alternative family

structure of Spider and the drug network. Ecuadorean/Puerto Rican author Ernesto

Qu​iñ​ones, in ​Bodega Dreams, also frames his story as an urban narrative where the

buildings, streets, and locations in el barrio become central characters to the novel. For

Piri, for instance, the streets become a home away from home until he ends up

participating in an armed robbery, gets arrested, and ends up in prison for six years.

Thus, even for those second-generation Puerto Ricans who only knew the home

country, or the island, through the nostalgic narratives of their parents, they end up

reproducing the experience of displacement and constant flux of their own parents given

the instability of, and the impossibility of, belonging to the U.S. as a nation. Yet the

streets, roads, and buildings simultaneously become part of their journey, as Solimar

Otero has argued. The sense of “belongability” displayed in Nuyorican writing “contains

all the complexities of verbal contradiction through itinerancy as language” (289) and

the ways in which these writers inscribe the “significance of movement in making home”

(278) are informed by ancestral Yoruba values. (Otero)

Acknowledging his own social marginality, Nuyorican poet Miguel Pi​ñ​ero

proclaims the Lower East Side as his home, as the only place of belonging in “A Lower

East Side Poem”: “there’s no other place for me to be”/”this concrete tomb is my
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home”/to belong to survive you gotta be strong”. He asks his ideal reader to “scatter my

ashes thru/the Lower East Side.” (7-8) This construction of an urban identity rooted in a

specific neighborhood can be contrasted to the multiple sites and locations that are

associated with belonging in Aurora Levins Morales’s ​Getting Home Alive, a

mother-daughter authored text that expands the definition of the Puerto Rican diaspora

to California, where Aurora lives and works. For Rosario, the mother, and Aurora, the

Puerto Rican Jewish daughter, home is multiply inflected. It is not only California, Puerto

Rico, Chicago, and rural Indiera on the island of Puerto Rico, but also as close as the

kitchen and as far away as Africa, Jerusalem and the Palestinian liberation movement.

The title of this hybrid, autobiographical text, ​Getting Home Alive, redefines home not

only as a process, but also as destination and survival, albeit a differently gendered one

than the urban masculinity of Piri or Miguel. If immigrant fiction is usually associated

with the loss of home, with homelessness and dislocation, and with the possibility of

becoming whole again through the construction of a new sense of belonging in the new

country, for second-generation Nuyorican male writers home is the urban turf where

masculinity is produced and where violence and social marginality become central to

their everyday lives. Yet el barrio is also where diasporic subjects can reconstruct

community.

RACIAL BELONGINGS:

In his canonical, decolonizing poem, “Puerto Rican Obituary”, Pedro Pietri

concluded his scathing critique of Puerto Ricans in New York as colonized subjects by

proposing a utopian space, marked by an “aquí”, a “here” that is characterized by self

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love, communal solidarity, and racial equity: “here to be called negrito is to be called

LOVE.” (126) This line suggests Nuyorican poets and writers’ critical stance against the

racial myths from the Island regarding the conflation of racial mestizaje and whiteness

as the social norm and ideal. Thus, mestizaje is also associated with the ways in which

the deployment of a Puerto Rican national identity trumps dark skin color, an experience

clearly described by Piri Thomas in​ Down These Mean Streets. His struggle with

non-belonging, even among his siblings and parents, had to do with his blackness

among siblings who were lighter than him. He disavowed of his Afro-Puerto Rican

father since the son perceived him as a coconut who denied his own racial identity. If

Thomas’s family is seen as a microcosm of Puerto Rican society, both on the Island and

on the mainland, then the reaffirmation of the Afro-Boricua subject becomes even more

imperative within the decolonial politics and poetics of Nuyorican literature. If ​Down

these Mean Streets narrates the struggles that Piri experienced to find himself and a

community like him, perhaps in the interstices between African American culture and

Puerto Rican culture, it is imperative that race and skin color be understood as one of

the identity factors that continue to be undermined in the social construction or dominant

imaginaries of the Puerto Rican nation. In addition to Pedro Pietri, Nuyorican poets

such as Sandra María Esteves, in “My name is Maria Cristina”, another classical text

that verbally performs the presence of an afro-boricua/latina female voice at a time

when a Latino/a literary canon was not visible or publicly acknowledged, and Willie

Perdomo’s “nigger-reecan blues”, address the interstitial spaces of non-belonging that

limit Puerto Rican subjects from acknowledging their blackness. Tato Laviera, whose
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poetry collections celebrate the Afro-Puerto Rican identity, musical traditions, and

popular culture, including Ismael Rivera, bomba and plena, clearly critique the

systematic erasures of blackness in traditional paradigms of cultural identity on the

Island. In ​The Saints also Dance the Mambo, Marta Moreno Vega, like Laviera, frames

her family’s blackness within the rich repertoire of mambo dancing in the Palladium Club

in New York during the 1950s as well as in the spiritual traditions and rituals of santería

exercised by her grandmother. If Afro-Puerto Rican writer Amina Gautier in ​Now we will

be happy reconstructs family and race through daily rituals such as music and cooking,

slam poet Mayda del Valle, an Afro-boricua who grew up in the South side of Chicago,

still remind readers and listeners that: “the world thinks brown girls are nada.”

(REFERENCE OR WEB SITE LINK)

LANGUAGE, NATION, AND HYBRIDITY:

Given the multiple forms of resistance to the U.S. imperial presence on the island

of Puerto Rico since 1898, Spanish has historically become a site for reaffirming Puerto

Rican national identity. English, politically deemed the language of the yankees, the

colonizers, and a foreign imposition on Islanders, has clearly not been included in the

Puerto Rican national imaginary. Just the opposite: it has been constructed as the

language of the Other. For second-generation writers who grew up in New York and

received their schooling in the United States, English is the language of their intellectual

formation, despite their different individual experiences with Spanish at home and within

domestic spaces. As Judith Ortiz Cofer once responded to the recurrent question, “why

do you write in English?”,Diasporican writers, despite speaking Spanish informally with

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family members and friends, English was the only language where she had enough of a

lexical repertoire for her to be able to produce metaphors, similes, and imagery.

Indeed, Diasporican subjects who grew up and were educated in the United States, like

other Latino minority groups, socially interact with both English and Spanish, mixing

them as Spanglish and experimenting poetically with both languages as part of their

Latino/a aesthetics. Language mixing, then, becomes not only a site for resisting and

contesting the traditional homology of Spanish with Puerto Ricanness, but also a site for

reaffirming the cultural hybridity of the Diasporican identity.

Pedro Pietri’s brief but powerful poem, “Tata”, which romanticizes the lack of

English of his abuela in New York, clearly suggests that speaking Spanish in the United

States is a gesture of opposition to the assimilating pressures embodied in English.

Yet, for the grandson and those second-generation U.S. Puerto Ricans, the exclusive

use of Spanish is not tenable in order to survive and grow socially, humanly, and

intellectually. That English is the language for writing not only separates these writers

from those on the Island, but it also situates them within the larger Latino literaryscape

within the United States.

Spanglish, then, becomes a linguistic mode that resists both its insertion into the

Puerto Rican national imaginary as well as its Anglo counterpart. Spanglish allows

Diasporican writers to forge their own space of inbetweenness, of non-belonging, of

self-reaffirmation. When Tato Laviera ironically deploys Spanish and English in “my

graduation speech”, he masterfully performs the ways in which Spanglish implies a

profound knowledge of both languages, rather than an alingual condition that equates
 21

speaking both languages with a lack of knowledge of both. The difference as deficiency

paradigm, commonly articulated for decades against young Puerto Rican and Latino

youth and children who speak both Spanish and English, is powerfully deflated in

Laviera’s poem. Seemingly fashioned as a celebration of public education, the poem

pokes fun at the dominant discourses that take away the bicultural knowledge of young

Puerto Rican students in New York while critiquing schooling policies that domesticate

the rich repertoire of language mixing. If the poem concludes with a statement that

acknowledges the lack of speaking abilities in both languages, the poem itself, as

artifice, is clearly produced by a poetic voice that easily moves in between both Spanish

and English. All of Laviera’s poetry collections celebrate the inbetweenness of

Spanglish, reveling in the new rhythms created by the juxtaposition of both Spanish and

English as well as in the original and unique metaphors, language play, and sonic

patterns created by both.

Mayda del Valle’s slam poem, “Tongue Tactics”, expands on the ways in which

her predecessors creatively deployed Spanish and English as gestures of resistance.

Denouncing the subordination of Puerto Rican and Dominican Spanish as “lazy” and

grammatically incorrect, the ChicagoRican slam poet enacts dynamic and fast-rhythm

verses that reaffirm the articulation between her diasporican identity and her spoken

language. She takes ownership of her grammatical mistakes, emphasizing the

“illegitimate union between past and present”. At the end of the poem, she declares “a

state of language revolution” that prides itself in the marginality of her speech. The

thread between Laviera’s poetry and del Valle’s is clearly perceived in the common
 22

defense for the autonomy of the hybrid languages that Puerto Rican diasporic poets

inherit and inhabit.

The legacy of the Nuyorican Movement, as poetry embodied in performance,

lucidly examined by Urayoán Noel, is clearly exemplified in the younger generation of

slam and def poets such as Del Valle. If orality is an example of “”an embodied

counterpolitics” (Noel xxiii), this element in Diasporican poetry allows poets and

audiences alike to question the superior normativity of print, of written language, and of

reading, the concomitant subordination of live performances, and the ephemerality of

listening. Tato Laviera’s articulation of “asimilao” in the eponymous poem stands out as

a major signifier that performs the articulation between sounds, in this case,

pronunciation, and the politics of cultural and racial identity among Puerto Ricans.

Urayoán Noel suggests that “recasting the traditions of Puerto Rican music and oral

poetry” serve to produce “a self-reflexive performance idiom.” (Noel 103). He identifies

how Laviera creatively delivers and enacts the rich oral traditions that inform his work.

From “the comically overmodulated, often savoring syllables and stretching out word

endings” (Noel 103), to the numerous alliterations, rhythms, and translingual puns,

Laviera’s poems celebrate, albeit in critical ways, the profound meanings of racial

crossings, conflicts, and violence that are hidden behind the aspiration of the “d” in the

signifier, “asimilao.” Not only is orality and popular music a discourse that resuscitates

the hidden presence of blackness in Puerto Rican cultural identity, but it was also

deployed by Laviera as a political rhetorical device “in order to articulate an AmeRícan

 23

project that could break through the historic impasse between the island and the

diaspora.” (Noel 104).

GENDERING THE DIASPORICAN SUBJECT:

FEMINIST AND QUEER VOICES

Sandra Maria Esteves’s poem, “My name is Maria Cristina”, a foundational text in

the rich literary genealogy of Puerto Rican feminist voices in the diaspora, not only

reaffirms her life, her body, and her female experience within the larger patriarchy of her

local and national community, but clearly reclaims the central role of women in the

making of the nation: “I am the mother of a new age of warriors”, referring to a new

generation that will be prepared to continue the struggle against racism and social

oppression. She also asserts her racially subordinated position as an Afro-Boricua

woman: “Our men…they call me negra because they love me/and in turn I teach them
4
to be strong.” ​ Since Esteves’s early incursions into poetry, a rich and diverse group of

See Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, ​Queer Ricans, pp. 73-75, for a discussion of the

poetic responses that Esteves’s poem triggered. Lesbian Puerto Rican poet, Luz María

Umpierre, responded to “A la Mujer Borinquena” with her own “In Response”, accusing

Esteves of “acquiescing to patriarchal exploitation and abuse.” Esteves responded with

yet another poem, “So your name isn’t Maria Christina”, and Umpierre’s “Musee

D’Orsay” followed. This chain of poetic responses illustrates well the contested legacies

of the early Nuyorican writings.

 24

feminist and queer literary voices have enriched the Diasporican literary corpus and

canon, critiquing and challenging the patriarchal exclusion of women and lesbian and

gay writers and subjects from their literary texts, but also reclaiming a countermemory

that highlights the central role of women and queer subjects in the radical project of

reimagining Puerto Ricanness. Gender, sexuality and race are integral to our

understanding of national and ethnic identities. In the case of Diasporican literature,

early writers such as Luisa Capetillo and Julia de Burgos, the prose of Judith Ortiz Cofer

and Esmeralda Santiago, the transcultural and radical writings of Aurora Levins Morales

and Rosario Morales, the lesbian poetry of Luz María Umpierre and the gay protagonist

in Justin Torres’s ​We, the animals, all constitute a brilliant group of writers who radically

contest the patriarchal and mysoginist discourses undergirding the Puerto Rican

national imaginary. Yet these unique voices each contribute particular textualizations of

gender and sexuality in the un/making of Puerto Ricanness.

The poetry of Julia de Burgos, whose years in New York justify her inclusion in

the diasporican corpus, has made her “an early figure of sexile.” As Vanessa Pérez

discusses in ​Becoming Julia de Burgos, “sexile” has been expanded to refer not only to

the exile from the home country motivated by the marginalization and demonization of

alternative sexualities, such as lgbtq, but also for heterosexual women who, like Burgos,

left the island to escape the “gossip and prejudice” against her lifestyle and

relationships. (Pérez 47). Not only were Burgos’s erotic poems considered a threat to

the patriarchal status quo, but her poems also articulated nomadism and gendered
 25

migration as experiences of displacement. Indeed, the lesbian subjectivity proposed by

Luz María Umpierre in ​The Margarita Poems () is clearly inspired by Julia de Burgos’s

own sexual rebellion and displacement as it is metaphorized in water imagery, As

Yolanda Martínez San Miguel has proposed, “sexile” allows us to “think about the

configuration of alternative communal identities based on recent narratives that go

beyond the heteronormative and homonormative matrixes.” (814).

In prose, narratives that are structured around the three generations of women in

the family story function precisely to propose a countermemory or alternative

his(her)story. These not only facilitate the construction of a feminist genealogy that

inserts women in the larger history of the nation, but it allows the writers to reflect on the

diverse modes of gender resistance and female survival within patriarchal societies.

In ​Silent Dancing, Ortiz Cofer’s hybrid, postmodern text that narrates the bicultural and

interstitial spaces between the island and the mainland, the narrative and poetic voice

reflects on the heterogeneous locations and self-constructions that females embody in

her own family. In the chapter entitled “Silent Dancing”, Ortiz Cofer reflects on three

women in her family –the novia who had recently migrated from the Island, her mother,

and the Nuyorican cousin—and the ways in which their bodies performed femininity

differently in response to the patriarchal and masculinist tenets dominant at the time.

By unveiling the hidden history of the cousin’s abortion and her return to the Island as a

form of disciplining her for dating a married and older man, Ortiz Cofer highlights the

gendered inequities that prevail and that perpetuate the sexist ideologies of the female

body as the possession of the father and the family, not of the woman herself. Even the
 26

author’s reflections about her own mother’s sexuality, expressed in her curvaceous

body, her dressing style, and the ways in which she triggered men’s attention on the

street, (“The Way My Mother Walked”, 99), constitute critical feminist reflections on the

relationship between the female body, autonomy, freedom, and authority for Puerto

Rican women. Remembering her grandmother’s own practices of what I would call

vernacular feminism –that is, her decision not to sleep with her husband anymore so

that she could live longer and enjoy her children and grandchildren, a form of birth

control before its time—reveals the tactics of survival of previous generations of women

within patriarchal societies recovered by the granddaughter’s writing. Most significant in

Silent Dancing is the role of storytelling within the family as a way of offering cautionary

tales to the children and the postmodern treatment of countermemory as a literary

feminist strategy. These themes and narrative frameworks allow the Diasporican

female subject to belong to a longer feminist genealogy within the nation that excludes

her.

Following La Fountain-Stokes legacy of queer critical analysis in Queer Ricans,

where the author examines the intersections of queer sexualities, migration, and culture,

a more recent text such as Justin Torres’s ​We, the animals (2011), needs to be

recognized. Torres’s writing troubles the traditional narratives about Diasporican

subjectivities through the perspectives of the gay narrator/protagonist who describes in

vivid poetic vignettes his experiences as one of three brothers living in upstate New

York in a mixed race family with very poor and young parents. The emotional violence,

laced with moments of true parental love and hope, disturbs the romanticization of the
 27

Puerto Rican family in el barrio, as seen, for instance, in Nicholasa Mohr’s ​Nilda. The

fact that only one vignette focuses on the performance of their Puerto Rican heritage

through the figure of the black Boricua father dancing mambo in their small living room

clearly questions the more canonical and normative discourses around Puerto Rican

identity and belonging. This queer narrative critiques the disciplining efforts of society

toward alternative sexualities, an alternative gender politics that Torres shares with

other Queer Rican writers, such as Luz María Umpierre, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Frances

Negrón-Muntaner, Manuel Ramos Otero, and Elizabeth Marrero, among others. (La

Fountain-Stokes) How do we understand Puerto Ricanness as a trace rather than as

identity? How do we give meaning to the increasing prevalence of mixed-race and

mixed-ethnic subjectivities within the Puerto Rican diaspora in their intersectionality with

alternative sexualities? These questions also emerge in Torres’s intensely affective,

poetic prose.

TRANSCULTURAL AND GLOBAL FLOWS:

Bernardo Vega’s ​Memoirs (1961) conclude with a passing reference to “chicanos

and all Hispanic and Latin American sectors of our population” (274), anticipating the

increasing significance of Latinidad by the new millennium. Indeed, the increasing

global migratory circuits so prevalent in the literary production of the new millennium

emerge more systematically since the 1980s. Tato Laviera’s Chicano-Rique​ñ​o poem,

“vaya, carnal”, carved a new poetic space that built bridges between Puerto Ricans in

the East Coast and Chicanos on the West Coast. While its masculine language limited

the potential of the poem to include women and queer subjects, it suggests that writers
 28

and poets were already grappling with an emerging Latinidad that proposed exploring

the analogies and parallel subjectivities produced by the U.S. Empire. Likewise,​ Getting

home alive also decentered the dominance of New York for the Diasporican and

expanded it geographically to include Chicago and California, even establishing global

connections.

As scholars and critics aim to expand our notion of Diasporican literature,

authors like Rodney Morales, a Puerto Rican voice from Hawaii, challenge the New

York-based bias that has overshadowed Puerto Rican writings in other geocultural

regions. Morales’s opening story, “Ship of Dreams” in ​The Speed of Darkness (1988),

serves as an early introduction to interethnic families as the narrator tells the story of

Japanese Hawaiian Takeshi’s romantic desire for Puerto Rican, Borikee, Linda. The

setting of a community dance and musical event, which eventually embraces Takeshi

playing the g​ü​iro, constitutes a literary performance of the analogies and parallelisms

among national and ethnic cultures. The g​ü​iro symbolizes the intersection of both local

Hawaiian and Puerto Rican ways of life, yet the story does not fully dismiss the social

tensions at play between both communities, as the beginning sentence refers to the

stealing of the squash by two Puerto Rican young men and the ensuing tensions. As

Maritza Stantich has written, Rodney Morales’s fiction “revisits a transregional imperial

history of the diaspora in Hawai’I” (203) and thus “contributes to pan-Latin and new

inter-ethnic alliances as well as more complex genealogies, all helping to historicize a

phase of literary production that supersedes the category “Nuyorican.” (204)

 29

The transcultural relations, solidarities, and new hybrid identities between the

Puerto Rican and the Arab worlds constitute a dynamic and politically compelling theme

in Diasporican literature. In his 1987 short story, “Belisheva the Beautiful: A Tale from

a Refugee Camp”, Ed Vega explored the potential solidarity and alliances between a

Palestinian woman and the Puerto Rican radicals who were being persecuted as

terrorists. Dionisio Rosa, a doorman in an elite apartment building, meets Elisheva

Horowitz, whose identity as a would-be terrorist is gradually revealed to the reader. Yet

by the end of the story, Vega has reaffirmed the commonalities between both Puerto

Ricans and Palestines in terms of the colonized occupation of their territory. “We’re the

same people”, comments Dionisio, a statement that reclaims the urgency of the political

violence that was being enacted since the 1970s by nationalist organizations such as

Los macheteros on the island and in New York. If Dionisio realized that Elisheva, who

was later identified as Rowaida Said, and later as Aida Sánchez, could be considered a

terrorist, he also understood that she was a “freedom fighter” (188) who eventually

taught other Puerto Ricans in New York “a lot” (190) about how to resist U.S. imperial

practices of subjugation. Yet the ending of the story, contradictorily, seems to

emphasize the cultural and linguistic differences between Palestinians and Puerto

Ricans after suggesting the imperial politics that both communities have had to oppose.

By the new millennium, however, Arab identity, culture, and language are being

integrated within the longer genealogies of Puerto Rican cultural identity proposed by

the Diasporican poet, Víctor Hernández Cruz. His 2011 poetry collection, ​In the

Shadow of Al-Andalus, not only proposes Puerto Rican identity as one more
 30

configuration of an “imagined history” (xiii), a historical agency and participation of

Arabs in Andalucia as our ancestors from Southern Spain (51) during the conquest and

settlement of the Americas, but also as a cultural element in the hybrid families such as

his. The dedication of the book to his Moroccan wife and his Puerto Rican/Moroccan

son, reveal that the migratory circuits of Puerto Ricans such as Hernández Cruz have

accorded this community a global dimension in the domestic space of home and family.

The poet, thus, reaffirms the “Latino-Arabico-Afro-Taíno” sensibility (xiv) that constitutes

Puerto Rican culture, redefining the “jibaro” as Arabic (90) through the sonic signifier, “la

le lo lai,” and poeticizing the ways in which cod, “bacalao”, becomes a site for the

global intersections that integrate the Portuguese and the Basque with Orchard Beach

in the Bronx. (71) The ways in which poetry functions as a site for a shared memory

and for reimagining an alternative history occluded by Western and Eurocentric canons

are clearly revealed in this poetry collection. As Marisel Moreno asks, “What does it

mean that one of the most important and recognized contemporary US Latino poets is

drawing inspiration from the Arab world and publishing poems in the United States,

where Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiments have intensified since 9/11? (Swimming

in Olive Oil, 301) The poet’s goal of transforming the Arab presence from foreign to

domestic, from a Cultural Other to a shared history of kin and family bonds, constitutes

an alternative and radical discourse in the post 9/11 world, what Moreno defines as

“subversiveness”. (301)

RETURNING HOME: PUERTO RICAN LATINIDAD

 31

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s ​In the Heights, a celebration of the Puerto Rican and

Latino community set in Washington Heights, situates itself within the longer history of

theater that has racialized Puerto Ricans in the United States. A compelling alternative

response to the foundational racializing discourses of Puerto Ricans in ​West Side Story,

In the Heights tells the story of a Latino/a community --Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and

Cubans-- in New York from the inside out, capturing the strong sense of community

and collectivity that characterizes the spaces of Latinidad emerging in urban areas. It

also highlights Latino artistic creativity through its hip hop soundtrack, music, and script.

Orality as home goes back to the early social meanings of Nuyorican poets from the late

1960s and 70s whose performances embodied the struggles of reconstructing a

Diasporican identity from scratch and who grappled with reclaiming the barrio as home.

Washington Heights, in fact, faces the prospects of gentrification in a musical that

exhorts its audience to value generosity and sharing of resources, as Usnavy does after

his grandmother’s death, as well as to resist being displaced. The musical celebrates el

barrio as communal home while still expressing strong affective bonds with the home

country of the parents and grandparents. While in the new millennium the Nuyorican Lin

Manuel Miranda has captured the mainstream popularity and visibility only accorded to

a select few, one cannot but read ​In the Heights as a return home that reaffirms the

historical agency and presence of Puerto Ricans in New York and throughout the United

States through the collective framework of Latinidad. Puerto Rican literature in the

United States constitutes, then, a powerful site from which to understand the
 32

experiences of displacement, belonging, and the multiple constructions of home that

colonized subjects and racial minorities have had to reimagine in order to survive.

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