MARITZA STANCHICH


net in terms of geography and class, from San Juan's El Fanguito; to barrios
in the Bronx; returning to working and middle class neighborhoods in
Santurce; to attending Harvard; to working as a bilingual education scholar
and activist in Hartford; to becoming an author in Greece, where she moved
with her university president husband; and, last I checked, as a writer-in-
residence at Richmond College, England.
 In another example, Judith Ortiz Cofer has advocated in recent interviews
the need for a more nuanced range of Puerto Rican disaporic literary
representations. Yet another is the Puerto Rican-born, New York-raised and
Kansas City-based poet Gloria Vando, whose work deals with both the return
to Puerto Rico, and the return to New York, a layering of exile within exile,
from both class and geographic locations, evoked, like Ortiz Cofer, in scribal
poetics, rather than performance poetry:

 But I am home, home, I tell myself.
 Home from the wheat and the corn
 of Middle America, where whole-
 someness grows so tall you cannot
 see the poverty around you, grows
 so dense the hunger cannot touch you.
 -from "New York City Mira Mira Blues" (1993: 65)

 As we know, in diachronic terms, such dispersal has long been a fact of
the Puerto Rican diaspora. Between 1940 and 1950, the tendency to spread
out from New York City was already established, with migration to states
other than New York increasing by 443 percent. Since the early 1900s, Puerto
Ricans have been living in 39 states in the United States (Padilla 1958: 21). A
descendant of the 1900-1914 migration of 10,000 Puerto Ricans spurred by
sugar interests in Hawai'i (Maldonado-Denis, 1976: 60-61; Ed Vega, 1997, xi-
xii; Carr, 1987; Haas, 1998), Honolulu-based Puerto Rican writer Rodney
Morales revisits a trans-regional imperial history of the diaspora in Hawai'i.
The story "Ship of Dreams," which opens his 1988 debut short story collection
Speed of Darkness, explores early twentieth-century Puerto Rican, Japanese
and Native Hawaiian cultural interaction. In addition, Morales' 2002 debut
novel, When the Shark Bites, features a main character named Hank, who
ruminates about his real name, Enrique, and being called "borinkee" in a
1970s context (82-3). Copiously deploying Hawaiian Creole English, Morales'
work points to a different local language hybridity, suggesting that Spanglish
and bilingual code switching can also no longer be construed in monolithic
terms. In addition, Morales' local engagements foreground deeply historical
and contemporarily pertinent shared struggles, with parallels, for example,
between his portrayal of the struggle to end U.S. Navy bombing of Kaho'alawe,
which is central to the novel, and Vieques, as well as the history of 1970s
movement politics shared with New York and other cities.