Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, and: The Wounded Heart: Writing on Cherrie Moraga (review)

Lisa Sánchez González's Boricua Literature is the first literary history of the Puerto Rican colonial diaspora, but it is also much more. Beginning with such influential figures as Luisa Capetillo and Arturo Schomburg, Sánchez González charts the intellectual, political, and literary paths of the Puerto Rican diaspora from early migrants to contemporary Boricua writers such as Esmeralda Santiago and Judith Ortiz Cofer. Throughout the work, Sánchez González pays close attention to the positions of the subaltern figures in both U.S. and Puerto Rican contexts—women, dark-skinned Boricuas, and working-class people.

Locating Arturo Schomburg and William Carlos Williams in a modernist context, Sánchez González asserts that both writers, like the Boricua community as a whole, fractured the U.S. color line. Sánchez González notes that contemporary critics continue to exoticize Williams's Puerto Rican heritage, using adjectives like "dark" to describe his "alien Spanish heritage" (61). She also brings up a seldom reported incident in which W. E. B. DuBois opposed Schomburg's appointment to oversee his (Schomburg's) Harlem collection at the 135^th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, instead supporting the appointment of the African American librarian Catherine Allen Latimer. Sánchez González reads this incident as a display of "both insular Puerto Rican disrespect for [Schomberg] as a Black researcher and his African American colleagues' disrespect for him as a Puerto Rican researcher" (66).

Another highlight of Boricua Literature is a discussion of works by contemporary Boricua writers Carmen de Monteflores, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Esmeralda Santiago. Sánchez González regards these authors and their texts as "mainstreamed," a term that identifies the growing appreciation for Latina(o) writers but that also reflects the nonconfrontational nature of their texts, especially in their descriptions of Puerto Rican and Boricua life. Sánchez González claims that the novels Cantando Bajito/Singing Softly, The Line of the Sun, and When I Was Puerto Rican "narrate personal experiences of the feminine condition to the near total exclusion of a collective predicament that entails growing problems within racism, poverty, reproductive rights, education, and colonial maldevelopment" (140). In other words, these writers create protagonists for whom all obstacles and triumphs appear as individual or familial anomalies rather than indications of greater social ills, especially of what Sánchez González terms "racism-sexism." Thus, Sánchez González ultimately names these works failed "Boricua feminist allegories" for, among other shortcomings, the inability of the protagonists to save anyone's lives but their own (158–59).

Sánchez González closes by venturing outside literature to explore Boricua salsa music. She points to the importance of music as a "social cohesive," claiming that popular music has perhaps been "the only genuinely inclusive national articulation in Puerto Rico's history" (165). Sánchez González proposes an "epi-fenomonal" approach capable of critiquing "ideologically induced conventions and categorical concepts such as monolingualism, the novel, [and] elite canon formation" (166). She considers it necessary to move beyond conventional categories and understandings of cultural production to reach a fuller understanding of the rhythm and lives of Puerto Rico's diasporean community. This move beyond literature into areas such as salsa music, Sánchez González suggests, will allow critics to understand that "print articulation cannot fully represent the co-motion of culture" (190).

Another first of its kind, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano's The Wounded Heart is the first book-length study to focus exclusively on the work of poet, essayist, dramatist, and public intellectual Cherr'e Moraga. The Wounded Heart...