Writing Off the Hyphen: New Critical Perspectives on the Literature of the Puerto Rican Diaspora

7. Literary Tropicalizations of the Barrio: Ernesto Quiñonez’s Bodega Dreams and Ed Vega’s Mendoza’s Dreams

Ernesto Quiñonez’s Bodega Dreams and Ed Vega’s Mendoza’s Dreams ANTONIA DOMÍNGUEZ MIGUELA ---------------------------------------------------------------rom the first stages of Puerto Rican migration to the United States, the urban barrios, especially East Harlem in New York, represented the new existential space for the Puerto Rican diaspora. Early writings by and about Puerto Ricans in New York, like Jesús Colón’s A Puerto Rican in New York and Bernardo Vega’s Memorias de Bernardo Vega, already described the barrios as a space constantly transformed by the arrival of a growing number of Puerto Ricans.1 The massive migration in the fifties established “the barrio” as the predominant space of arrival for Puerto Ricans. It was also in the forties and fifties when conditions in the barrio helped to develop a negative vision of this new ethnic ghetto. Island authors were aware of the situation and destiny of thousands of Puerto Rican migrants, as evidenced by the publication of works dealing with Puerto Rican lives in the northern barrios: Guillermo Cotto-Thorner’s Trópico en Manhattan; René Marqués’s La carreta, Pedro Juan Soto’s Ardiente suelo, fría estación and Spiks.2 During the sixties and seventies, a group of Puerto Rican activists, poets, and playwrights living in the barrio began to describe that Puerto Rican experience from inside and from a critical perspective. They developed what would be called a Nuyorican aesthetics and literature deeply concerned with the community’s living conditions and its daily fight for survival. With the Young Lords, a community-oriented organi165 7 LITERARY TROPICALIZATIONS OF THE BARRIO F ANTONIA DOMÍNGUEZ MIGUELA zation which also denounced the poor living conditions of Puerto Ricans in the barrio, the Nuyorican group tried to uplift the community by redefining the term “Nuyorican” as a positive one that described a new experience and a language for the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York. Nuyorican writers were the poetic troubadours of a time when the barrio ’s social and political life gained much significance for the community. As an omnipresent geopolitical space for a community of people who were trying to establish a new home in the United States, the barrio was usually represented in ambivalent terms, being at the same time a refuge and a trap for its inhabitants. Much of the literature written in the sixties and seventies about the barrio followed the tradition of African American works that depicted the ethnic ghettos as alienating spaces of social ostracism and discrimination . Well-known examples of this tradition are Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.3 This literature gained much popularity in the sixties, especially after the publication of Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land,4 which soon became a classic. Manchild addressed important issues similar to those we find in Puerto Rican urban narratives, like the neighborhood ’s miserable living conditions and the disappointment with a trip north that had meant freedom and prosperity but that had led only to a dehumanizing space of poverty and segregation where the American Dream was only available for whites. Though showing a negative vision of the city, the black writer’s perspective also considered the urban ghetto as a village within the city. As Toni Morrison comments, although the city was depicted negatively, the characters’ nostalgia for certain aspects of “urban-village” life provoked an identity crisis: urban life is lovable when the “ancestor,” traditionally identified with the village, is there. Therefore, Harlem was also perceived as a positive place where joy and protection could be found within the clan.5 Morrison’s emphasis on the importance of community is a key issue in my analysis of the works by Ernesto Quiñonez and Ed Vega, who, though belonging to different generations, provide interesting representations of the barrio. Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets recounts urban Puerto Rican experiences in the tradition of African American urban narratives.6 Dealing with the experience of crime, poverty, and racial discrimination by a Puerto Rican black, Thomas’s story has strong similarities with 166 Antonia Domínguez Miguela Brown’s Manchild. Harlem and the barrio were sites of constant struggles for survival and self-definition, and both works present a shocking culture of violence that was morbidly attractive to mainstream audiences . Besides the negative description of the physical neighborhoods, these works also represent...