An Intractable Foundation: Luis Munoz Marin and the Borderland State in Contemporary Puerto Rican Literature

Soto‐Crespo, Ramón E.

doi:10.1093/alh/ajl016

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…The critical reception of Santiago's memoirs differs immensely depending on whether they come from Boricua intellectuals and scholars or mainstream readers or advocates of multiculturalism or cultural pluralism. For example, while her first two memoirs When I was Puerto Rican, and Almost a Woman and her novel America's Dream (1996) have gained critical praise from most scholars as life stories that honestly portray the difficulties and hardships of the Puerto-Rican woman migrant in-transit -either as coming to terms with her bicultural/hybrid (Mayock, 1998;Suero-Elliot, 2008), non-national hybrid (Soto-Crespo, 2006) or multiple (Echano, 2003) positionalities--they have been critiqued by Boriquan scholars to be assimilationist and unrepresentative (Szadziuk, 1999;Gonzales, 2001;Cruz, 2006). Moreover, Santiago's memoirs have been criticized for overlooking the escalating collective poverty of Puerto-Rican diasporas, especially, of Boricua women and children and for negating the genuine messages given by most Nuyorican novelists -the importance of an organic Boricua cultural citizenship 5 and a resistant North American identity (Gonzales, 2001: 10-11).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From “Jibara” to “Chiquita”: Confessions of Dis-Belonging in Esmeralda Santiago’s Memoirs

Çoker¹

2018

Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi

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This paper by focusing on the intersection of race, gender and identity as reflected in the three memoirs of the Puerto-Rican American writer Esmeralda Santiago, When I was Puerto Rican (1993), Almost a Woman (1998) and The Turkish Lover (2004), attempts to read into the complex dynamics of the Puerto-Rican migrant female experience. Esmeralda Santiago's memoirs that intertwine the problem of transculturation with that of male dominance and cultural patriarchy rest on her desire to find and sustain a stable point of reference in a world marked by mobility, transitivity, discontinuity and fragmentation. The feelings of vulnerability and invisibility that she constantly experiences within her Puerto-Rican culture and later with her Turkish lover lead her to resist rather than accept a gendered and racialized self. However it also leads her to forge an identity "distinct from" and "in conflict with" the significant Others around her. In When I was Puerto Rican, she is the black jibara "Negi" highly critical and at odds with her Puerto/AmeRican island heritage; in Almost A Woman, she is the lost young female Esmeralda trying to rise above her mother, family and Nuyorican community; and in the The Turkish Lover she is the Esmeralda Santiago who learns to judge her own self and others through the social and racial categories and cultural standards of American society. This paper asserts that unlike many women autobiographical writers, Esmeralda Santiago can achieve to create a sense of belonging in her life only through an assertion of difference and later through the contestation of her Puerto-Rican female identity.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From “Jibara” to “Chiquita”: Confessions of Dis-Belonging in Esmeralda Santiago’s Memoirs

Çoker¹

2018

Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi

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Decolonial refusals: Ethnographic writing from the postperiphery

Stephens

2024

Anthropology & Edu Quarterly

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Decolonial refusals theory, forged through fieldwork in Puerto Rico, is used to question “conceptual disjunctures” in binary views of center‐periphery relations. Grad students here are not merely voices from the margins, as seen from the imperial north. Their autoethnographies may be dispatches from the frontlines of an epistemic rebellion. But seen from the south, their writings are regenerative forms of refusal. Their arc of refusal, rooted in a characteristic el vaivén modality (back‐and‐forth), begins by critiquing the mimicry of public English usage, and the coercive loss of voice they experience in English departments. Refusal to be pinned on the periphery opens to narrating fluid subjectivities, which challenge national and linguistic binaries. This project furthers the “ethnographic imperative” which Brian Street saw as key to reimagining interdisciplinary Writing Studies and cultural analysis.

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“Music for Progress”: A Study of Pau Casals’s Music Institutions in Puerto Rico as an Extension of US Neocolonialism

Lazo¹

2017

Latin American Music Review

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An Intractable Foundation: Luis Munoz Marin and the Borderland State in Contemporary Puerto Rican Literature

Cited by 3 publications

References 19 publications

From “Jibara” to “Chiquita”: Confessions of Dis-Belonging in Esmeralda Santiago’s Memoirs

From “Jibara” to “Chiquita”: Confessions of Dis-Belonging in Esmeralda Santiago’s Memoirs

Decolonial refusals: Ethnographic writing from the postperiphery

“Music for Progress”: A Study of Pau Casals’s Music Institutions in Puerto Rico as an Extension of US Neocolonialism

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