ABSTRACT |
Since
the early years of Puerto Rican migration to the United States, Puerto
Ricans have struggled against racial and cultural categorization.
From the first stages of Puerto Rican migration to the United States,
the urban barrios, especially in New York, represented the new
existential space for the Puerto Rican Diaspora.
From
the sixties to the present, a long tradition of Puerto Rican Urban
narratives present different representations of urban Puerto Rican
experience in a hostile environment where issues of race, gender,
culture and nationalism constantly emerge.
This
essay explores the development of urban narratives analyzing the works
by Piri Thomas, Ed Vega and Ernesto Quiñonez. These narratives provide
new insights to questions of Puerto Rican racial, national and cultural
identity and help to describe the experience of the Puerto Rican
diaspora in all its complexity. In most of them the barrio becomes a
microcosm, a world of daily struggles and deception but it is also where
their dreams and expectations for a better future emerge. A socially
constructed public space where the ethnic difference is contained and
reinvented, the barrio represents a figurative borderland between the
past and the future, a re-appropriated transitional space of complex
internal transformations.
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