TOWARDS A POST-NUYORICAN LITERATURE


the Nuyorican rubric, I agree with Flores' assessment that the term
"Nuyorican" has become anachronistic (2000: 186) for a variety of reasons.
As with the label "Boricua," I am also concerned with how the term
"Nuyorican" resonates in the Puerto Rico context. Though 1960s Puerto Rican
activists and artists in New York recuperated the term "Nuyorican" as a badge,
it still carries connotations in Puerto Rico in some contexts as a pejorative,
denoting difference and separation, or as a denial of their Puerto Ricanness,
or to mark their affiliations as suspect (Efrain Barradas et al. 1980: 14; Jos6
Lorenzo-Hernandez 1999: 988-1013; Arnaldo Cruz-Malav6 1985:45-51; Duany
2002: 28-31), though of course the valence of the term in Puerto Rico is in
flux, as in the way co-owner of the Old San Juan hotspot Nuyorican Cafe,
Juanra FernAndez, has conceptualized the term, and as the undeniable fact
that more Puerto Ricans today live outside the island hits home. In addition,
maintaining "Nuyorican" as a fixed term in the U.S. context ignores important
shifts that have occurred for the stateside community and its literary history.
 I am using the labels outlined so far with the full recognition that they are
slippery, because they allow me to foreground concerns that cannot be
essentialized by mere knowledge of authors' ethnic backgrounds, such as
their range of class positions, or developments in experimental writing.
However, none of these concerns in themselves is the determining factor for
what counts as post-Nuyorican. Rather, the possibilities for examining hidden,
excluded or unusual texts produced by a constellation of economic and
historical conditions are opened up to suggest the internal instability of such
canonical formulations. I am not suggesting a cohesive Post-Nuyorican
movement; in fact the category may be provisional as a plethora of writings
emerge from writers that warrant examination through this lens. The cohesive
traits and parameters of the Nuyorican tradition, however, is put in relief by
this move, even as the Nuyorican tradition undergoes its own innovations
and permutations, such as island-based poets Jos6 Ra6l GonzAlez, or
"Gallego," and Guillermo Rebollo-Gil's conscious engagement with the
Nuyorican school, as well as that of the island-raised but now New York-
based UrayoAn Noel, whose web site identifies the eclectic location of his
anothologized poems as "of the Boricua, neo-Nuyo, post-Rican, and deadpan-
Caribbean variety."
 Among the phenomena recorded by 1990s diasporic literary productions
are more far-flung locations and the growing importance of other Northeast
cities, as well as a broader range of class affiliations. For example, more
than half of the nine stories in Alba Ambert's The Eighth Continent (1997) are
either set in Connecticut, depict a Puerto Rican from Connecticut as the
central character, or portray Puerto Ricans from Boston as main characters.
All but a third feature middle class and professional Puerto Rican
protagonists, including an MIT linguist; a film student in Manhattan; a female
U.S. district judge; a bilingual educator; a genteel, return migrant retiree;
and underground Leftist intellectuals. Ambert's own trajectory casts a wide