REVIEWS


their. Looking at the intersections of Blackness, gender, and Latinidad,
Sanchez-Gonzalez emphasizes the import of Boricua literary produc-
tion: to allow a subaltern community "to render itself visible" (3) in
the larger national and transnational cultural discourse.
 In chronicling the challenges and pleasant discoveries found in re-
searching archives and special collections, Sanchez-Gonzalez sheds
light on and sparks interest in rarely studied Boricua texts. She begins
with Luisa Capetillo, a workshop reader. Sanchez-GonzAlez notes her
exile to the U.S., a result of her written criticism of the role of the island's
institutions in perpetuating a hegemony that carried with it socio-po-
litical corruption and the masking of the oppression of Puerto Rican
females. While Capetillo's texts do not quite fit the postmodern frame-
work and are seldom studied, Sanchez-Gonzalez views her as founda-
tional to Boricua literary history, given her treatment of issues that
would motivate later writers to express themselves similarly.
 Arturo Schomburg and William Carlos Williams receive detailed treat-
ment, as SAnchez-Gonzalez accents the differences in American racial
and literary interpellation of the two men within the contexts of Ameri-
can modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. She further stresses the
archival and rhetorical strategies they implemented in their efforts to
nationalize the colonized discursive space of historical letters and to
address "the narrative predicament of the Puerto Rican diaspora:
paperlessness" (8). While her analysis is somewhat hindered at times
by overly theoretical digressions, Sanch6z-Gonzalez astutely empha-
sizes the importance of recognizing these authors as part of a Boricua
modernism, informed by issues of mestizaje and criollo-isms, which
must be distinguished from American modernist poetics.
 SAnchez-GonzAlez draws attention to another literary archivist, Pura
Teresa Belpr6, the first Boricua and Afro-Latina librarian in the New
York Public Library system. Citing the interspersed issues of national-
ism and mestizaje within the context of Belpre's work, SAnchez-GonzAlez
treats her archival essays recording the history of Boricuas in Harlem
and her celebration of the cultural and linguistic syncretism that nur-
tured underprivileged children of color. The elucidation of Belpr6's trans-
lations of Spanish Puerto Rican folktales into English and of her fiction,
often written as colonial allegories addressing slavery, colonization,
poverty, and sexual exploitation, further reveal the ways in which tran-
scription of orature may be used to preserve cultural memory.
 Focusing on Piri Thomas and Nicholasa Mohr, SAnchez-GonzAlez
historicizes authors of Boricua novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Though
she provides limited information about the authors, SAnchez-GonzAlez