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Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora

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Like its provocative cover --Basquiat's "Arroz con Pollo"-- this book is a rare combination of "the raw" and "the cooked." It navigates a treacherous and booby-trapped passage through the entire 20th century to the birth of a distinct Boricuan literary tradition!

Boricua Literature highlights the literary creativity of Puerto Ricans living in the mainland United States. The author focuses on recuperating "minor literature" by Boricua writers who often fall and disappear into the cracks between disciplinary boundaries and too-rigidly defined cultural and political spaces. She offers useful insights into contemporary cultural studies, focusing especially on gender and race.

Reading Boricua Literature introduced me to several remarkable literary figures, and the approach in the book was a colorful quilt of critical concepts. The way the author challenges political orthodoxies and literary canons without dismissing scholarly rigor is edifying. Sanchez-Gonzalez' style reminds one of Zora Neale Hurston's famous phrase "going a piece of the way with them," i.e. not "all the way" uncritically.

Each chapter spends a good deal of time reframing and re-negotiating theories and identities with sharp feminist and critical race questions. The author bestows on Luisa Capetillo --a turn of the 20th Century anarcho-feminist writer-activist-- the position of The founder of Boricua Literary tradition. In another chapter, Sanchez-Gonzalez recuperates children's stories written by Pure Belpre, a librarian at the New York Public Library, whose work on behalf of children remains alive in libraries throughout the U.S. today. One chapter is on Salsa lyrics and performances by Boricuas at the end of the 20th century where tropes in performance theory are utilized for analysis of lyrics. At the same time, the book focuses on more canonical figures such as Arturo Schomburg and William Carlos Williams. Sanchez-Gonzalez argues that scholars have often erased the Boricua formative experiences of these major intellectuals. Shomburg is known for his great achievements in establishing the most prestigious archives of Black history in New York. Moreover, William Carlos Williams is rarely read or studied as a Latino or Boricua poet. Anyone who knows James Clifford's admirable essay "Pure Products go Crazy," in Predicament of Culture, will be very surprised to read Sanchez's critique leveled against Clifford in this book! Students and writers of other diasporic communities in the United States, whose distinct literary and cultural production --performances, poetry, music, and fiction-- have not received proper attention as a discrete area, will find this book invaluable. It is well crafted, theoretically dense, yet impassioned and non-elitist.

But for the most part, it is satisfying to read a critical history of the not-so "minor literature" --indeed formidable literature-- of diasporic Puerto Rican artists and intellectuals. Their role in shaping the literary history of United States is not appreciated, and their works are still viable today. Boricua Literature re-acquaints us with these neglected writers-artists so we can better catch their drift!