TOWARDS A POST-NUYORICAN LITERATURE 117

 The capitalist systemic interpellation of the largest post-war Mufoz-era
migration forged a working-class identification crucial to the criticism about
and literature by diasporic Puerto Ricans. However, the continued arrival of
Puerto Ricans to the United States, along with the "growing dispersion and
return migration" of the 1980s and '90s, has included significant middle-class
migration (Glasser 1995: 54; Duany 2002: 62; Torres 1998: 21), with scholars
noting the influence of quality of life issues, including the crime wave of the
early '90s (Frank Bonilla 1994, Virginia E. Sanchez Korrol 1983; Rivera-Batiz,
et al. 1994). Current professional flight from the Island, in fields such as
nursing and engineering, have received recent press coverage, including a
celebratory August 2004 ElNuevo Dia feature picturing a group of professional
Puerto Ricans on the cover of the Sunday Portfolio section, which represents
them in acceptably (for some perhaps) blanquito terms. Also, further
complicating the rubric "Nuyorican literature" is return migration, which
began as early as the 1930s (Maldonado-Denis 1976: 66), and grew to
constitute the majority of immigration to Puerto Rico by the end of the 1970s.
Along with the many canonical Puerto Rican authors who have spent
significant time in New York, complicating the discrete situating of writers
here and there, is the migration/return migration/migration back to the United
States referred to as "circular migration." Ambert's novel A Perfect Silence
(1995) performs such circular migration, following its protagonist from San
Juan to New York, back to San Juan and, finally, to Massachusetts.
 Hence, a 1960s Nuyorican writer who has relocated within the United States
and has returned to the Island, such as Victor Hernandez Cruz, cannot so
easily be called a Nuyorican writer any longer and in fact publicly denies the
label. Cruz first published in New York City in the 1960s, moved to the San
Francisco Bay Area for eighteen years, and in 1989 returned to Puerto Rico,
where he writes from his birthplace Aguas Buenas, though he currently
divides his time between Puerto Rico and Morocco, exploring issues of
Moorish influence on Spanish in his poetry. Migrant literature becomes return
migrant literature in this case, and the Nuyorican poet is now local at least
part time. When he eschewed identifying as a Nuyorican poet in a talk at
UPR-Rio Piedras in 2003, Hernandez Cruz defined "Nuyorican" as a
sociological term denoting a particular generation and location. Moreover,
he has suggested in a published interview that his first book being written
partly in Spanish will anchor him in the Island's literary tradition (Cabanillas
1995). Here the terms "migrant," "return migrant," "Nuyorican" and
"California-rican" accurately describe phases of Hernandez Cruz's trajectory.
 Such a complex "field of broader trajectories" in part contributes to pan-
Latin and new or newly visible inter-ethnic alliances as well as "more complex
genealogies," all helping to historicize a phase of literary production that
supercedes the category "Nuyorican." As the figures of the first U.S. Census
to allow mixed race and ethnic identifications intimate, "mixity" complicates
the categorization of literary production strictly along ethnic lines. While