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cultural imaginary that cannot be denied. While I do not mean to collapse
the terms for literary canons or writers with those for communities, I keep
both in mind, as well as both locations, in national as well as extranational
contexts.
 This paper argues that the label "Nuyorican" is in flux in part because
writers and migrants test its limits as traveling subjects who may move back
and forth, living in both locations for long stretches, or in some cases,
maintain dual residences or live outside the hemisphere altogether, as is
the case of England-based author Alba Ambert, who published two of her
four books of poetry while living in Greece, in bilingual English and Greek
editions. Indeed the neologism Diaspo-Rican speaks to these more complex
dispersals, which are not necessarily fixed to a metropole/periphery model
and which are hardly exceptional to Puerto Rico in terms of the Caribbean
region as a whole, which shares a similar degree of diasporic exodus. The
term "Diaspo-Rican," coined by spoken word poet Maria Fernandez, has been
deployed by several critics to signify just such a conceptualization (La6-
Montes, 2001: 208-209; 1997:176-178), while others ponder this term but don't
fully deploy it (Flores 2000: 187). Of the several terms that have been bandied
about, "Diaspo-Rican" seems to be sticking at the moment, as suggested by
paper titles at the 2002 and 2004 Puerto Rican Studies Association
conferences and as discussed in the forthcoming collection Writing Of(f) the
Hyphen: New Critical Perspectives on the Literature of the Puerto Rican Diaspora
(Jos6 Torres-Padilla and Carmen Haydee Rivera, eds.). "Diaspo-Rican" works
well in describing the geographic situating of Ambert, for example, or to
address the phenomenon of circular and return migrations.
 While "Diaspo-Rican" may usefully describe contemporary diasporic
Puerto Rican literature, aptly emphasizing more complex geographical
dynamics, I selectively use the term "post-Nuyorican" to tease out and
historicize particular internal dynamics of such a corpus, namely shifting
class, linguistic, political and genre affiliations. Though Juan Flores
discourages adopting the term "post-Nuyorican" for its lingering geographic
specificity and hackneyed prefix, he acknowledges its pertinence to the
generational relation it bespeaks (2000: 187). The term "post-Nuyorican"
acknowledges its literary debt to early Nuyorican trailblazers and continuing
Nuyorican prose and poetry, and remains critically committed to their
political legacy. While the prefix may be tired, "post-Nuyorican" also denotes
the importance of previous post prefixes. Again, an analysis of 1980s and
'90s diasporic Puerto Rican literature that goes beyond Nuyoricanism does
not insinuate that the Nuyorican literary movement is over anymore than
postcolonialism does so for colonialism.
 By refusing the term "Nuyorican" as the catchall phrase, I will use the
term to denote specific historical, geographic and literary contingencies. In
historicizing the term "Nuyorican," this essay delineates a variety of
puertorriquehidades in literature of the Puerto Rican diaspora. In complicating