Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora (review)

Lisa Sánchez González's Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora is a clearly polemical addition to the growing corpus of literary and cultural studies projects on the Puerto Rican Diaspora in the United States. The author describes her approach as "Latina studies as academic guerrilla warfare" (136), with an explicit mission to "fight and scream in print" (6).

Boricua Literature is a well-organized book consisting of an introduction and six tightly defined chapters. The first four focus on what Sánchez González proposes as key texts in her rewriting of "Boricua" (as she questionably prefers to call U.S. Puerto Rican) diasporic literary history, one which she believes should be read as independent of and not linked or subordinated to island-centered Puerto Rican literary history. Her position goes against other long-standing trends which favor understanding transnational links, as in Asela Rodríguez de Laguna's Images and Identities (1987), or Efraín Barradas's Partes de un todo (1998), crucial volumes Sánchez González ignores. The author elaborates on her methodology, particularly her archival work, in an auto-ethnographic way, and discusses the theoretical and ideological underpinnings of her approach: issues of race, gender, and class. Her selection of texts corresponds to specific criteria about what constitutes a valid socio-political contribution; texts that do not follow her general prescriptions are labeled as deficient.

The first four chapters offer a sustained look at greater and lesser known authors, including Luisa Capetillo, William Carlos Williams, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, Pura Teresa Belpré, Piri Thomas, and Nicholasa Mohr. The fifth chapter offers an analytic summary of Latina feminist theory and denounces what she sees as apolitical or self-serving bourgeois texts by three women writers (Carmen de Monteflores, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Esmeralda Santiago), while the sixth offers a sharp departure by reading contemporary musical forms in the light of a novel by Luis Rafael Sánchez (La guaracha del Macho Camacho) and providing a model for further analytic interventions ("p'acá y p'allá dialectics") which, in fact, favors transnational views.

In her introduction and first chapter, Sánchez González goes to great lengths to argue that Boricua literature should be considered as part of canonical American literature and not part of the Puerto Rican literary tradition. She particularly assails essays by Yanis Gordils and Juan Flores to boost her position, which generally follows the line of 1970s Nuyorican poets Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero's poetic manifestos, precursors she does not mention. She states that "no complete study of our literature has ever been published" (1) and unfairly disqualifies in a footnote the contributions of Flores and Eugene Mohr, stating that their works are eminently "sociological studies of Puerto Rican identity with references to Boricua literature" (191).

The literary genealogy that Sánchez González assembles shows gender parity although it strongly favors women authors in its appraisal, particularly ones who convey certain feminist messages. This explains her election of Capetillo as the "most apt foundational figure" (40), to the exclusion of better-known authors such as Bernardo Vega or Jesús Colón. Her reading of Williams and Schomburg is tense because of its double valence; she is keen on recuperating them, given their prominence in Anglo- and African-American Modernist canons, but also faults them for what she perceives to be their sexist male bias. Belpré is celebrated in this paradigmatic model for being a community activist and writer; Thomas and Nicholasa Mohr are exalted as exemplary writers from the civil rights era who convey profound political views.

Sánchez González's election of Capetillo as the key "foundational figure" of Boricua literature is not unproblematic. Capetillo only lived in the U.S. for four years; all of her books were published in Puerto Rico; she does not discuss the migrant experience in the passages Sánchez González quotes. The argument privileging...