Memory is an Act of Love: Poetics of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic in Puerto Rico

In recent years, scholars have been interested in the representation of health and disease in Latin American literary texts. Although sickness is a phenomenon that takes place in the present and affects a particular body, patients look back to their past in order to confer purposeful meaning to their suffering. Similarly, when a particularly deathly disease disturbs a community, the collective memory can work as a means to understand the current situation and to lighten the struggles of the present, as it is depicted in Inmunología poética (2010) by Moisés Agosto-Rosario (Puerto Rico, 1965). In this paper, I explore how Agosto-Rosario's book challenges a common framework that understands the HIV/AIDS epidemic through a closed linear narrative that hides the epidemic's onset because it is full of images of gay transgressive sexuality. Instead, the poetic speaker represents a queer poetics of the HIV/AIDS epidemic by relying on gay memory and Latino cultural perspectives. In the poems that I analyze, memory, community, and love work together to resist the hegemonic view of the HIV/AIDS epidemic that highlights containment, oblivion, and death.