Editor's Note


While doing research on migration literature and later writing What

 Women Lose: Exile and the Construction of Imaginary Homelands
 in Novels by Caribbean Writers, I encountered a number of
impressive essay collections, anthologies, and critical studies on Puerto
Ricans, their literature and culture -whether on the Island or in the United
States- that spanned from the 1970s to the first years of the new
millennium. The writers came from Puerto Rico and the U.S., thus including
recent as well as multi-generational residents, Spanish-dominant as well as
English or "Spanglish" speakers. In one way or another, all attempt to look
at Puerto Ricans as one people that belong to a "nation" that is variously
defined but not geographically constrained. Whereas the issues of race,
class, gender, and party affiliation seem intent on stressing differences and
fomenting divisiveness, institutions such as the Center for Puerto Rican
Studies (Hunter College-CUNY) and the Puerto Rican Studies Association
(PRSA) bring together scholars and writers interested in building bridges
that counter factionalism and exclusions in the problematic discourse of
Puerto Rican national, transnational, or diasporic identity.
 In the 1970s, the Young Lords, the PALANTE! newspaper, the SEEK
Programs of the City University (CUNY) system, the exodus of island
intellectuals and independence militants, and the celebration of the Puerto
Rican Congress for the independence of Puerto Rico in Madison Square
Garden gave New York City a pregnant sense of cultural and political urgency
and vitality -everything seemed possible. In the 1980s, anthologies and
critical texts such as Borinquen, edited by Maria Teresa Babin and Stan
Steiner, and Images and Identities: The Puerto Rican in Two World Contexts,
edited by Asela Rodriguez de Laguna, made no distinction between
literature written in Spanish or English or by writers residing in Puerto
Rico or the United States. In the 1990s, Arcadio Diaz Quifiones' La memorial
rota, Boricuas, edited by Roberto Santiago, Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin
Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures, by Frances Aparicio, and the
powerful book of literary interviews Puerto Rican Voices in English, by
Carmen Dolores HernAndez, focus on language -especially the use of