EDITOR'S NOTE IX

both of whom lived and worked on the Island and in the U.S. and were very
influential in their communities. Carmen Rita Centeno studies the literary
expressions of union leaders and workers who lived during changing times
that educated and organized thousands of workers in the sugar, coffee,
and tobacco industries. Rosa Guzmin also focuses on writers marked by
class in her study of autobiographical works that range from that of a prison-
gang leader to that of a member of a prominent Puerto Rican family.
 Josefa Santiago Caraballo rereads Nicholasa Mohr's Nilda within the
context of a historical reality seldom included in literary analyses: the
impact of war on the members of a migrant family. Ivette L6pez revisits
Julia de Burgos's early poetry -poetry that centers on the ideology of
independence for her homeland- to trace the recovery by the rebellious
nationalist poets of the 1960s of a defiant Julia who faced poverty and racism
in both Puerto Rico and New York. Francisco Cabanillas' interdisciplinary
approach to Puerto Rican identity includes music, graphic arts, and
literature, using an outside/inside look that situates culture in various
scenarios. Maritza Stanchich and Juanra FernAndez look closely at the
particularities of the accepted, rejected, and debated term "Nuyorican"
and contextualize it within the realities of the interplay of local and global
tensions and influences in today's diverse cultural, artistic, musical, and
literary expressions.
 Although reserved for last here, this issue begins with two essays by
professors who teach literature in English (Carmen Hayd6e Rivera) and in
Spanish (Maribel Ortiz MArquez). This section presents a critical and
historical view of Puerto Rican literature written in English or Spanish in
the United States. It examine poems, stories, memoirs, novels, and essays;
including works written during the twentieth century and since 2000, writers
from working and middle-class origins, themes that address issues of
intimacy but also public debates, and reflections on gender that are open
and non-exclusive. As these introductory essays demonstrate, our spoken
words are scattered across different languages, accents, and rhythms, at
times giving the impression that the guagua area is somehow
dissatisfactory, unstable, or "caught in between." Today expressions of
collective outrage sound out from this floating homeland. They reject and
condemn the U.S. Navy's appropriation of land and its nearly sixty years of
bombing on the islands of Culebra and Vieques. More recently, they
denounce the FBI's ambush and assassination of independence leader
Filiberto Ojeda Rios on September 23, 2005. These voices punctuate the
ways in which we live a shifting geography and narrate how our years of
sharing such experiences shape "la patria flotante."


Maria Cristina Rodriguez, Issue Editor
 June 2006