LITERATURE OF THE PUERTO RICAN DIASPORA: AN OVERVIEW


 The ever-evolving work of poet Victor Hernandez Cruz demonstrates how
writers of his generation may proceed with handling familiar themes.
Hernandez Cruz focuses on recuperating Taino, Spanish, and African heritage
in ways that reveal continuity and connection to contemporary multicultural
experience of Puerto Ricans living in the United States. The poems "Areyto,"
"African Things," and "Geography of the Trinity Corona," along with others
collected in Maraca: New and Selected Poems (2001), explore the contextual
implications of a Puerto Rican historical and cultural legacy. He also
addresses the complexities of linguistic hybridity and expression in the
poems "Dimensions of a Linguist," "Lunequisticos," and "Entro." Finally,
HernAndez Cruz celebrates the whimsical delight of quintessentially Puerto
Rican things in poems such as "Ajonjoli" and the picaresque and sarcastic
humor found in "Scarlet Skirt" and "The Problem With Hurricanes."
 This overview of Puerto Rican writers in the United States is by no means
exhaustive. Yet, it offers insight into the precept that the literature of the
Puerto Rican diaspora ultimately involves an understanding of how the
process of migration and the socio-political and economic relations between
Puerto Rico and the United Sates complicate the rendition of hegemonic
notions of cultural and national identity as the writers come to terms with
their bilingual, bicultural, and transnational realities. Reading these authors'
works entails a movement away from insular conceptions of nationality
towards a more integrated awareness of a hybrid self constantly shifting
between historical time and geographic spaces which perpetuates the "Flying
Bus" metaphor so accurately coined by Luis Rafael Sanchez and restated by
Jorge Duany's book title, Puerto Rican Nation on the Move.18 It is a literature
that celebrates the multifaceted dimensions of its people in ways that
challenge monolithic concepts of identity. Perhaps this view is best captured
in the words of Aurora Levins Morales' poem "Child of the Americas:"

 I am a child of the Americas,
 a light-skinned mestiza of the Caribbean,
 a child of many diaspora, born into this continent at crossroads.

 I am new. History made me. My first language was spanglish.
 I was born at the crossroads
 And I am whole.19

 As writers like Levins Morales and others begin to articulate the diasporic
experience through their work, it is not surprising that the criticism of this
literature has initiated explorations into how its literary production operates
within its present socioeconomic matrix. Critics are increasingly interested
in how Puerto Rican writers represent the diasporic subject across gender,
class, racial, and sexual lines. Critical foci continue to be hybridity, specially
the linguistic type, questions related to identity, and the importance of