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Chapter 3 U.S. Puerto Rican Literature To the memory of Pedro Pietri (RIP) Some years ago, in his introduction to an anthology of U.S. Puerto Rican poetry, Efraín Barradas (in Barradas and Rodríguez 1981, 11) went to great lengths to point out the lack of continuity and community between Nuyorican and Island writers. One of the most difficult tasks in explaining U.S. Puerto Rican writing, he argued, is to distinguish between island-oriented literature (even when it is written in New York and/or is about the U.S. diaspora), which is a branch of Caribbean or Latin American literature, and continental U.S. Puerto Rican writing, which, no matter where written, at least tends to be a U.S. ethnic literature. In attempting to make a bridge between island and continental expression, we cannot overlook the differences, which have been felt so keenly by those on both sides of the divide. Because of his concern with unity, Barradas refuses to evade the differences and their bases in fact. Above all, he notes the tendency of “Nuyorican” writers toward heretical demystifications and/or mythmaking constructs with respect to Puerto Rican culture and national identity. The reasons for these constructs lie in the root causes for the migration of Puerto Ricans to New York: the island’s colonial status and the economic upheaval caused by efforts of modernization, and of course the very negative and demoralizing circumstances most Puerto Ricans have encountered in the United States. So we have a mythifying of the island and a search for alternative role models and identifications; and we have, above all, the assertion of an injured, denied, and hence defiant sense of national and cultural pride. At times, continental Puerto Ricans have resisted identifying themselves as a U.S. minority, because to do so would seem to imply a negation of a focus on their island’s colonial status. Even as unemployment, poor housing, drug and welfare dependency, gang and school dropout rates, and so forth, became increasingly i-xxx_1-202_Zimm.indd 50 7/14/11 10:43 AM 51 endemic in the Puerto Rican community, such problems could only be seen as legitimate to the degree that they were subsumed in function of the situation of Puerto Ricans as a colonized people. And the entire migration process, seen from the island intelligentsia’s struggle to preserve a fragile, jeopardized national identity, could only be construed as loss. This sense of loss, felt in the very bones of those having their base in a U.S. enclave, and unable to recapture fully their island roots, has led to sometimes extreme alternatives—from a full-blown romanticism with respect to the island, to a rejection of the island and a search for other worlds.1 Indeed, perhaps for their smaller numerical size as a population (or as a tiny writer/artist subculture), and perhaps also for the fragility and difficult-to-specify character of their sense of nationhood, U.S.-based Puerto Rican writers, more than their Chicano counterparts, tended to decenter or go beyond national identification to Latino and third world/minority identifications, even to the degree that they affirmed their nationhood. So, the first Puerto Rican writers in the United States learned to project their visions of island independence in terms of union with Cuba and the broader Caribbean world. And, in this century, it is no accident that in the Chicago area, where the Puerto Rican population exists in the context of a much larger Mexican presence, a major contribution to the developing national scene was Revista Chicano-Riqueña, cofathered by U.S. Puerto Rican Nicolás Kanellos. Though recent Chicano writers have attacked, abandoned, or transformed the Aztl án construct as the armature for their poetic explorations, the problem for Puerto Rican writers has been the elaboration of a series of partial, fragmented mythologies in the face of a lack of an abiding and binding Ur-myth that could give depth and unity to the epiphenomenal thematics of their work. So the occasional and topical feel and at least appearance of much U.S. Puerto Rican writing, and also the tentative and melancholy nature of the writers’ heresies and mythologies; so the apparently more limited volume and elaboration of U.S. Puerto Rican literature compared with the Chicano counterpart. This is the viewpoint articulated rather arrogantly in Bruce-Novoa’s RetroSpace. But if there is some truth in this contrast, stemming as it does from...

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