Queering Puerto Rican Women's Narratives: Gaps and Silences in the Memoirs of Antonia Pantoja and Luisita López Torregrosa

While in the last decades there has been a proliferation of writings by Latina lesbians who theorize issues of intersectionality, missing still are the voices and analyses of Puerto Rican lesbians who articulate the specificity of Puerto Rican sexual, racial, national, and class dynamics. It is within this context that I examine Memoir of a Visionary (2002) by Antonia Pantoja and The Noise of Infinite Longing (2004) Luisita López Torregrosa; I consider how these recent memoirs engage with intersecting issues in the lives of Puerto Rican women and suggest how shame implicitly conditions the articulation of Puerto Rican identity.