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does shed light on the circumstances that provoked such narratives,
which interrogate the sense of outsidership of young Boricuas within
the American colonial context, characterizes their desire for communal
relation, and reveals an alignment with anticolonial authors of Africa
and the Caribbean. Sanchez-Gonzalez emphasizes the emergence of a
Puerto Rican "novel of becoming," in which characters create alterna-
tive spaces of being not prescribed by the U.S. color line or its gender
relations but informed by "hombre" and "womanist" hermeneutics.
 Sanchez-Gonzalez additionally offers the works of Carmen de
Monteflores, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Esmeralda Santiago as examples
of attempts to write difference into Latina feminism within a discur-
sive space that fails to completely express that difference. While
Sanchez-Gonzalez places their narratives in the Western tradition of
novels of awakening and notes their reinterpretation of that tradition
through Latina difference, she does not overlook the ways in which
they seem to feed "a certain hegemonic thirst (and market demand)
for the subaltern woman's acceptance -even celebration- of colo-
nial paternalism" (159). As she notes, these narratives maintain a fault
of Boricua feminist allegories that still remains perplexing to many
Boricua feminists: the representation of Puerto Rican women as ac-
cepting of their infantilization and marginalization.
 In her final and most innovative chapter, SAnchez-GonzAlez explores
the music of salsa as an "epi-fenominal" site to be read for "more poeti-
cally and politically engaged forms of Boricua self-representation" (160)
and as a living social text in "co-motion" with other communal forms of
expression. Critiquing the music of Juan Luis Guerra (Dominican), Willie
Col6n (Boricua),and Ruben Blades (Panamian), Sanchez-Gonzalez notes
how salsa engages Boricua identity, Afro-Caribbean traditions, and his-
torical displacement, migration, assimilation, and resistance -a type of
here, there, and everywhere ("p'aca y p'alla") dialectics that offers a
communal exchange between listener/reader and artist. Though criti-
cal of the American appropriation of salsa, she does view the music as
grounded in a Boricua musical tradition and representative of audiences
within the Latin diaspora, though she could have more explicitly alluded
to the transnational context in which salsa is situated. While she does
regard her reading of salsa as experimental, it points to a viable conclu-
sion: "that published texts alone do not suffice to make sense of the
experience of the Puerto Rican diaspora" (189).
 Well-written and accessible, this work outlines the literary and cul-
tural productions of the Puerto Rican diaspora in revealing its accom-
plishments and challenges. In focusing on both known and relatively