MARITZA STANCHICH


the much ballyhooed introduction of such a category in the 2000 Census
denies "mixity" as a historical reality as old as the nation itself, with Thomas
Jefferson's living African-American relatives as perhaps the most salient proof,
the new census category nevertheless implies trends worth noting for Pan-
Latin identifications. According to the 2000 census reports the category
"other Hispanic" grew considerably from 1990, which could be a sign of
emerging Pan-Hispanic identity. And the fact that three times more children
than adults were identified this way indicates the potential boom of this
category.
 Much has been made of diasporic Puerto Rican alliances with African
Americans, Chicanos, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Arab
Americans (Flores 2000, Cruz Malav6 1985, Sanchez Korrol 1983). However,
contemporary writers are noting new alliances. In the short story "You Ain't
Black You Ain't White You Ain't Shit," from Ambert's The Eighth Continent
(1997), a young Puerto Rican woman who grew up in Boston recalls her best
childhood friend from India, and how the friendship was forged by a shared
sense of racial limbo. In the coming-of-age memoir Almost a Woman (1998)
as well as her new The Turkish Lover (2004), Esmeralda Santiago's personal,
romantic and professional relationships with Jewish New York and Israeli,
Indian, German and Turkish immigrants, are more predictably crucial to her
early adulthood than relationships with African Americans or Latinos outside
her family. The main protagonist of Edgardo Vega's hilarious first novel, The
Comeback (1985), is a confused professor who creates a new identity as a
Puerto Rican-Eskimo hockey player, and his most recent novels deeply engage
inter-ethnic relationships to New Yorkers of Irish descent. Not that this is
necessarily anything new. Sandra Maria Esteves' identification as Puerto Rican
and Dominican (in the 1995 poetry collection Paper Dance, for instance), is a
fact of increased importance as Dominican influence in New York continues
to grow exponentially. While Esteves' poetry does not take pains to illustrate
such a genealogy, this fact points to the limits of these kinds of ethnic
literature categories. As the paradigmatic example of William Carlos Williams
implies (Marzan 2001, Sanchez GonzAlez 2001), resetting the parameters of
diasporic Puerto Rican writing puts into relief the problematic of defining a
literary corpus strictly along ethnic lines. Or any artistic genre for that matter,
as the late painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and the R&B performer Maxwell,
both Haitian/Puerto Ricans, illustrate.
 Hence a contemporary historicizing of diasporic Puerto Rican literature
complicates the geographical contingency of "Nuyorican" literature by taking
into account writers outside New York City (Judith Ortiz Cofer in Georgia;
Gloria Vando in Kansas; Martin Espada in Massachusetts; Rodney Morales
in Honolulu; Alba Ambert in England; Diana Rivera in suburban New York,
previously rural Pennsylvania; Esmeralda Santiago in suburban Westchester
County with a recently stated interest in writing about Orlando); works in
the thematic tradition of Nuyorican literature, but set apart generationally