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Borderlands and Linguistic Mestizaje in US Puerto Rican Literature
Abstract
The effects of neocolonialism, multilingualism, and forced migration on the United States Puerto Rican community have produced notable literary expressions that merit further study for their use of code-switching and hybridization. Using Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the “Borderland” as a framework, this paper explores “Nuyorican” poetry as well as the bilingual, bicultural reality for Puerto Ricans in the United States who cross both physical and metaphorical borders and who find liberation living in between languages and cultures.
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In her review of Yo-Yo Boing!, Jean Franco praises Giannina Braschi's virtuosity at switching between English and Spanish. In the prologue to the novel, Doris Sommer and Alexandra Vega-Merino distinguish between the use of English, Spanish and Spanglish, noting that these are the alternating linguistic realities of the narrative. Yet, what if these, in fact, are not alternations? In this essay, I will begin from a standpoint in which spaces of contact may lead to translingual practices, and where languages constitute a continuous reality in which bilingualism translates into translingualism and languages into translanguage. My contribution adopts an analytical strategy based on the text itself.
From this standpoint, the thesis which I intend to propose is basically twofold: On the one hand, that the work under consideration is a translingual narrative, in its formal essence. On the other, that the work might be characterized as “liquid” in its content. For the first proposal, I will build on the contributions made over the past ten years regarding the notion of “translanguaging,” a concept emerging from the field of learning and language acquisition, but which has expanded to encompass a far greater scope and a far more powerful explanatory capacity. For the interpretation of Yo-Yo Boing! as “liquid” literature, I rely on the hypothesis of the Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman (2006), although I will offer my own specific approach to the “liquid” in this particular application. According to Bauman, interpersonal relationships in the contemporary world are no longer rigid, stereotyped or structured, but, rather, flexible, adaptable, multiform and unpredictable; in other words, liquid.
Nuyorican poetry is written and/or performed by New York Puerto Rican poets affiliated with or in the tradition of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a performance space and cultural center on the Lower East Side of Manhattan founded by Miguel Algarín and others circa 1973. Although heterogeneous in form and content, many Nuyorican poems explore the limits of the page and the performed word, often mixing English and Spanish and animated by an irreverent and decolonial sensibility. Its boundaries are porous, as the earliest Nuyorican poems predate the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and as it has influenced a range of contemporary performance-oriented poetics (such as slam poetry). Nuyorican poems and poets were central to the Puerto Rican Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and to the formation and evolution of Latina/o studies. More recently, they have been crucial to the emergence of diaspora and Afro-latinidad as key terms in Latina/o studies through the widely influential work of the late Juan Flores: a poem such as Felipe Luciano’s influential “Jibaro/My Pretty Nigger” (1968) spans these contexts, having been performed in the film Right On! The Original Last Poets (1970) and on Eddie Palmieri’s Live at Sing Sing album (1972) and excerpted in Flores and Miriam Jiménez Román’s The [email protected] Reader (2010). Ultimately, the history and legacy of Nuyorican poetry also involve poetry’s intimate relationship to music, theater, visual art, fiction, and other expressive cultural forms in mapping the complex and evolving spatial politics of the Puerto Rican diaspora. In essays such as “Nuyorican Literature” (1981) and in his introduction to the foundational Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings (1975), coedited with Miguel Piñero, Algarín develops a sophisticated poetics and cultural politics of survival and struggle, of a community’s evolution and its modes of resistance and healing. Algarín argues for a poetics that can “verbalize the stresses of street experience” (“Introduction” 14), documenting urban struggle in a way that creates a new reality instead of simply reflecting the current one, as is the case with the term “Nuyorican,” which was used pejoratively on the island of Puerto Rico to refer to the supposed inauthenticity of New York Puerto Ricans, but which is reclaimed by Algarín, Piñero, and their peers in an act of poetic and political revisionism (Hernandez 39-40).
Over the last hundred years, Puerto Ricans have transformed the debate on national identity from one focused on founding a nation through political practices—a present impossibility—into one of cultural expression. Language has been at the center of this national debate, weaving together a discourse of cultural authenticity that equates being Puerto Rican with speaking the standard variety of Spanish, a register that eludes most Puerto Ricans, including code-switchers, nonnative speakers, “Spanglish” users, bilinguals and monolingual users of nonstandard varieties. While the legislative tug-of-war over “Official Language” policies and laws occupies most of the debate, less remarked is the fact that Puerto Rican Spanish is not the stable practice some imagine.
Mariposa, born Maria Teresa Fernández in 1971, is an Afro-Puerto Rican poet who was born and raised in the Bronx, New York. She gained popularity within the Puerto Rican and Latino communities for her spoken word performances and published poems. Her most well-known poem, “Ode to the DiaspoRican,” has influenced many and catapulted her to social media notoriety when young Latinas began posting their own renditions of the poem on You Tube. Fernández’s poetry is published in numerous publications including Breaking Ground: Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York 1980-2012 (2012), The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2010), The Afro Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (2010), CENTRO Journal, and Def Poetry Jam’s Bumrush the Page (2001). She performs nationally and internationally and has graced the stage at the Nuyorican Poets Café. Additionally, her spoken word poetry has been featured on HBO, BET, and PBS. Her poems address a variety of themes, including those related to the transnational experience of mainland Puerto Ricans, the racial identity of Afro-Latinos and the historical influence of Puerto Ricans in the U.S. © 2015, Hunter College Center for Puerto Rican Studies. All rights reserved.
In The Diaspora Strikes Back the eminent ethnic and cultural studies scholar Juan Flores flips the process on its head: what happens to the home country when it is being constantly fed by emigrants returning from abroad? He looks at how 'Nuyoricans' (Puerto Rican New Yorkers) have transformed the home country, introducing hip hop and modern New York culture to the Caribbean island. While he focuses on New York and Mayaguez (in Puerto Rico), the model is broadly applicable. Indians introducing contemporary British culture to India; New York Dominicans bringing slices of New York culture back to the Dominican Republic; Mexicans bringing LA culture (from fast food to heavy metal) back to Guadalajara and Monterrey. This ongoing process is both massive and global, and Flores' novel account will command a significant audience across disciplines.
Puerto Ricans maintain a vibrant identity that bridges two very different places - the island of Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland. Whether they live on the island, in the States, or divide time between the two, most imagine Puerto Rico as a separate nation and view themselves primarily as Puerto Rican. At the same time, Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens since 1917, and Puerto Rico has been a U.S. commonwealth since 1952. Jorge Duany uses previously untapped primary sources to bring new insights to questions of Puerto Rican identity, nationalism, and migration. Drawing a distinction between political and cultural nationalism, Duany argues that the Puerto Rican "nation" must be understood as a new kind of translocal entity with deep cultural continuities. He documents a strong sharing of culture between island and mainland, with diasporic communities tightly linked to island life by a steady circular migration. Duany explores the Puerto Rican sense of nationhood by looking at cultural representations produced by Puerto Ricans and considering how others - American anthropologists, photographers, and museum curators, for example - have represented the nation. His sources of information include ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, interviews, surveys, censuses, newspaper articles, personal documents, and literary texts.
Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings
- Miguel Algarín
- Miguel Piñero
Algarín, Miguel, and Miguel Piñero. Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican
Words and Feelings. Morrow, 1975.
“A la mujer borrinqueña.”
- Sandra Esteves
- Maria
Esteves, Sandra Maria. "A la mujer borrinqueña." Yerba Buena. Greenfield Press, 1980,
pp. 63.
“La Carreta Made a U-turn: Puerto Rican Language and Culture.”
- Juan Flores
Flores, Juan, et al. "La Carreta Made a U-turn: Puerto Rican Language and Culture."
Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity, edited by Juan Flores, Arte Público
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“Interview with Carmen Dolores Hernandez.”
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Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico
- Ed Morales
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Bold Time Books, 2019.
Journal of Literary Multilingualism 1 (2023) 184-199
“Puerto Rican Discovery #3: Not Neither.”
- Sandra Esteves
- Maria
Yo-Yo Boing! Latin American Literary Review Press
- Giannina Braschi
“My Graduation Speech.”
- Tato Laviera
Laviera, Tato. "My Graduation Speech." The Norton Anthology of Puerto Rican Literature, edited by Ilan Stavans, Norton, 2011, pp. 1400.
Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World
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- Trías
Monge, José Trías. Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World. Yale University Press, 1997.
Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America
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Morales, Ed. Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America. St. Martin's,
2002.
Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers
- Tato Laviera
Laviera, Tato. "Interview with Carmen Dolores Hernandez." Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers, edited by Carmen Dolores Hernandez, Praeger, 1997,
pp. 77-84.