6 CARMEN HAYDEE RIVERA

el Barrio. Nicholasa Mohr represents the strongest woman's voice of this
generation, rendering the barrio experience from the perspective of young
and mature women in her fiction, Nilda (1973), El Bronx Remembered (1975),
In Nueva York (1977), and Rituals of Survival: A Woman's Portfolio (1993).
 Abraham Rodriguez's work continues this Nuyorican urban narrative
 tradition with his collection of short stories, The Boy Without a Flag (1992),
 and his two novels Spidertown (1993) and The Buddha Book (2001). Ernesto
 Quifionez's Bodega Dreams (2002) represents another contemporary
 addition, most notable for its metafictional understanding and appreciation
 of its predecessors. Ed Vega's fiction offers another vision of latino urban
 life.16 His work, which continues to develop and change, focuses more on
 the consequences of bi-cultural life in the city and less on crime and violence.
 During this stage, elements of both Puerto Rican culture and Anglo
American culture thrive and merge in both places (Puerto Rico and the United
States). The Latinization of American society is increasingly visible in the
insertion of Puerto Rican customs, traditions, food, music, and celebrations,
as well as in those from other Caribbean and Latin American countries.17
Likewise, Puerto Rico has also undergone a social and cultural
metamorphosis produced by over a hundred years of contact and interaction
with the United States. Contemporary Puerto Rican life and society are very
different from those left behind in Bernardo Vega's migration. Transnational
ties, once debilitated by time and space, are now enhanced and prosper
through the use of telecommunications, air travel, and technological
advances.
 Esmeralda Santiago, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Aurora Levins Morales, are
among the writers who capture the evolving nature of the Puerto Rican
experience during the latter part of this third period of settlement. Santiago's
autobiographical works, When I Was Puerto Rican (1993), Almost a Woman
(1998), and The Turkish Lover (2004) delineate the stages of her life in and
after Puerto Rico, her experience of migration to the United States, and her
acculturation process into Anglo American society. Ortiz Cofer's writing, The
Line of the Sun (1989), Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto
Rican Childhood (1990), and The Meaning of Consuelo (2003) artistically evoke
incidents in her life as a "cultural chameleon" learning to adapt and co-exist
in two different cultural contexts and linguistic codes. Ortiz Cofer also
questions antiquated expectations and patterns of behavior, particularly
those related to gender, in essays such as "The Story of My Body" and "The
Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria" that appear in her
prose and poetry collection The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women
(1993). Levins Morales's collaborative collection, Getting Home Alive (1986),
which she co-wrote with her mother, Rosario Morales, presents the
authenticity and acceptance of a hybrid self, one that celebrates cultural
heritage while also welcoming new elements and possibilities of multicultural
existence.