Family Matters: Puerto Rican Women Authors on the Island and the Mainland

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. El Monumento al Jíbaro Puertorriqueño, sculpted by Tomás Batista and located on Autopista Luis A. Ferré in Puerto Rico, performs a similar function given that it also portrays a Puerto Rican family. Buscaglia’s monument, however , proved to be controversial in its depiction of the family for various reasons, including the central position of the male/father figure. 2. For a recent commentary on the Puerto Rican population in Hartford, see Jorge Duany’s essay “Jálfol,” published in the newspaper El Nuevo Día, April 14, 2010. 3. For more details on Pérez’s case, see Debra Bogstie’s “Eddie Pérez to Serve 3 Years in Prison,” NBC Connecticut, September 14, 2011; www.nbcconnecticut .com/news/local/WATCH-LIVE-Eddie-Perez-Sentencing-102857264.html) (accessed November 25, 2011). Pérez was succeeded by Pedro E. Segarra, Hartford ’s second Puerto Rican and first openly homosexual mayor. 4. Here I subscribe to Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s definition of colonization as a “predominantly discursive one, focusing on a certain mode of appropriation and codification of scholarship and knowledge” (“Under Western Eyes” 255). Although she specifically refers to scholarship “about women in the Third World through the use of particular analytic categories employed in specific writings on the subject that take as their referent feminist interests as they have been articulated in the United States and Western Europe,” I employ the term to speak about the scholarship and knowledge produced on the island about the Puerto Rican diaspora (255). 5. The terms First World and Third World have recently been called into question. Talpade Mohanty affirms that the term Third World is “inadequate in comprehensively characterizing the economic, political, racial, and cultural differences within the borders of Third-World nations” (“Women Workers” 7). 6. The title of José Trías Monge’s book, Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World (Yale UP, 1997), is reflective of this posture. 7. U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin: 180 Notes to Pages 7–16 2010,” 2010 Census Briefs, 2010, p. 3, www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs /c2010br-02.pdf (accessed June 7, 2011). 8. Frances Aparicio points out, “The need to examine the structures of colonialism among U.S. Puerto Ricans, as well as internal colonialism among Chicanos , has awarded Latino studies an important role in the development of the postcolonial. In fact, the gaze toward foreign countries and the so-called Third World that predominates in postcolonial studies has denied or forgotten the existence of colonialism within the countries of the First World, marginalizing these spaces that are so significant” (“Latino” 12). 9. Magnarelli reminds us that this “definition/image of family . . . was brought from the Old World to the New and imposed on the native populations (along with monogamy, property rights, and so on) as part of the Conquest and the European colonization of the New World during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and even eighteenth centuries. It is also a definition/image that continues to be perpetuated today by means of what we might call a global neocolonization that is being effected by mass media and international commerce” (19). 10. Rúa makes a clear distinction between latinidad, as she sees it, and Felix Padilla’s concept Latinismo, which is situational and politically determined. In Rúa’s opinion, “By conflating identity and behavior, Padilla’s Latinismo disconnects the very lived historical experiences of Latinos in Chicago from the process of negotiating a ‘Latino identity,’” which is precisely the focus of her own research (122). 11. For instance, this is evident in the inclusion of writers such as Rosario Ferré and Ana Lydia Vega in U.S. Latino/a literary and critical anthologies such as Alvina Quintana’s Reading U.S. Latina Writers: Remapping American Literature (2003) and Padilla and Rivera’s Writing Off the Hyphen (2008). 1. The Literary Canon and Puerto Rican Culture 1. In the original: “Hay muchos Puerto Ricos, unidos por una cinta de Moebius que entra y sale de nuestra variada conciencia nacional. El Puerto Rico del que se da testimonio en la literatura producida en la Isla es muy distinto del que se produce en el continente. Ninguno es más o menos auténtico; la combinación de los dos es lo importante, porque da la imagen completa de nuestro pueblo” (“Mientras” 113). 2. In the original: “La búsqueda de la identidad es sin duda el paradigma...