TOWARDS A PosT-NUYORICAN LITERATURE


(Abraham Rodriguez Jr.); New York City-based writers who refute stock
literary performances of ethnicity (Edgar Vega Yunque); return migrant
perspectives (Victor HernAndez Cruz); vanguard literature that defies
established political stances, genres and linguistic aesthetics (Giannina
Braschi); claims to mixed heritages (Aurora Levins Morales, Ukrainian-Jewish/
Puerto Rican; John Leguizamo, Colombian/Puerto Rican, whose scripts are
published; San Francicso Bay Area spoken word poet Aya de Le6n, African
American/Puerto Rican); writers of mixed heritage who have predominantly
identified as Puerto Rican (Sandra Maria Esteves, Puerto Rican/Dominican),
and novelists whose subjects and settings are not Puerto Rican (Sandra
Benitez, whose novel Night of the Radishes, 2003, is set in Oaxaca; earlier
novels, A Place Where the Sea Remembers, 1993, and The Weight ofAll Things,
2000, are set in Mexico and El Salvador, respectively), to offer a list not meant
to be exhaustive. Notions of outside/inside New York are further complicated
by the class markers implied by rural and suburban locations, degree or
differing type of linguistic hybridity, and political stances that are not engaged
in oppositional dissent. I am interested here in what the terminology of
"Nuyorican literature" makes invisible, namely the internal contradictions
that suggest the limits or instability of such a category. Along with linguistic,
class, geographic and political divergences, a mutation of genres is also worth
charting, such as the experimentalism of Giannina Braschi.
 A key question then, is can a post-Nuyorican analysis remain politically
committed to the legacies of the '60s and '70s, while engaging works that
some critics condemn as accommodationist? Should diasporic Puerto Rican
literary works not overtly demonstrating a working-class ethos, not marked
by a refusal of linguistic standardization, or by authors not advocating Puerto
Rico's independence be considered part of the literary history of the Puerto
Rican diaspora? Not all 1980s and '90s U.S. Puerto Rican literary productions
fit such descriptions, though some do definitely bear those characteristics.
What are the marks of a post protest era 1980s and '90s literary productions
that are nevertheless still political?
 For a full and open accounting, the privileged locations and thematics of
certain diasporic Puerto Rican writers, as divergent as Esmeralda Santiago
and Giannina Braschi, warrant consideration as part of a diasporic Puerto
Rican corpus. Their works focus on New York, but with an ethos that favors
greater Manhattan over El Barrio, and current class allegiance that bespeak
a post-Nuyorican rubric, which is here loosely defined, not just by locations,
but also by internal departures and complexities such as those of class,
language, and politics. I am not arguing that post-Nuyorican literature is
middle class per se, but it is not grounded in an aesthetics, poetics and politics
of the barrio. Certainly, the underprivileged rural and barrio backgrounds of
Esmeralda Santiago and Alba Ambert cannot be dismissed simply because
they have published narratives of uplift. Rather, their literature demands a
class analysis that interrogates their positions, while recognizing that such