Defending Their Own in the Cold: The Cultural Turns of U.S. Puerto Ricans

Preface

Preface This book brings together a group of texts drafted at different moments over the past several years that constitute much of what I have come to understand about U.S. Puerto Rican culture and literature in the twenty-some-odd years I have been privileged to live among Puerto Ricans both in Chicago and on the island, with some excursions to New York and elsewhere. As the introduction to this volume indicates, I am a secularized “left-leaning” North American Jewish student of Latin American and Latino culture who has had several unique opportunities to experience U.S. Puerto Rican life, letters, and culture, though always from outside, always as a beginning student, as a non–Puerto Rican—always with a certain sense of humility. Married to a Puerto Rican woman and part of a Puerto Rican family for years, I have had that privileged inside/outside place that has enabled me to observe and, hopefully, understand at least some aspects of Puerto Rican life; I have experienced family tragedies that are very much part of the Puerto Rican diasporic experience and its effects; I have had abiding friendships and commitments. What I present here modestly is a group of essays (two of them written for specific occasions , the others representing efforts to come to grips with a field others have developed) that, taken together, give some sense of a range of understandings and that, over time, have come to constitute a book. In the introduction, I explain something of the occasions that brought forth different texts. Here in this preface, I simply wish to indicate the sources for the essays that are here reedited, updated, and published. I include the following list, with thanks to the diverse publishing outlets: Chapter 1: “Erasure, Imposition and Crossover of Puerto Ricans and Chicanos in U.S. Film and Music Culture,” Latino Studies 1, no. 1 (March 2003): 115–23. i-xxx_1-202_Zimm.indd 9 7/14/11 10:43 AM x P R E F A C E Chapter 2: “Puerto Rico 98: One Hundred Years and Three Artists,” Que Ondee Sola 26, nos. 4–5 (1998): 14–32—with some extrapolations from Marc Zimmerman . Sueños de los pueblos/Village Dreams and Dreamers (Chicago: LACASA /Collage de las Américas, 1998). A translation of my contribution to the section on Ramón López also appeared as “Ramón López: Tejiendo una plenitud /Trazando una invasión,” Catalog supplement for the artist’s one-man show at Galería de las Américas, San Juan, Puerto Rico, April 1998. Part 1 of the essay also involves some extrapolations from MZ, “Isla más isla: Puerto Rico, Vieques , y la descolonización cultural: Un collage montado con la ayuda de Elías Adasme, Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, y Agustín Laó-Montes,” a paper presented at a panel on Puerto Rican Art and Decolonization at the Viequethon, Vieques, Puerto Rico, May 2002. Chapter 3: “U.S. Puerto Rican Literature in Evolution,” Puerto Rican Studies Association Conference, Chicago, 2003—updated and with extrapolations of the Puerto Rican materials from my book, U.S. Latino Literature: An Essay and Annotated Bibliography (Chicago: MARCH/Abrazo Press, 1992). Chapter 4: “Poetas puertorriqueños en Chicago,” Puerto Rico Caribe: Zonas poéticas del trauma, ed. Juan Duchesne Winter, in Revista Iberoamericana 5, no. 229 (Oct.–Dic. 2009): 1003–36. Updated/revised Spanish-language version of “Defending their Own in the Cold: Puerto Rican Poets in Chicago,” Latino Studies Journal 1, no. 3 (DePaul University) (September 1990): 39-58. Chapter 5: “Dancing from Puerto Rican New York to Anglo Illinois: The Poetry of Carmen Pursifull,” an expanded version of “Carmen Pursifull” in Kanellos, ed., 2008, 940–42. Chapter 6: “Miguel Barnet and La vida real.” Paper presented at a panel on Miguel Barnet chaired by Elzbieta Sklodowska, Latin American Studies Association conference, Washington, D.C., September 1995. Acknowledgments I wish to thank Esther Soler, her daughters Nancy, Jeannette, and Pilar, and her brother Samuel, as well as other relatives and friends, for showing me how to at least begin understanding Puerto Rican representation, and for putting up with my efforts. My thanks to the Latin American and Latino Studies program of the University of Illinois at Chicago for helping me get started, and offering me the opportunity to teach Puerto Rican texts and themes to Chicago Puerto Rican and Latino students; and of course to the students, who taught me so much. Thanks also to...