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Puerto Rican Literature

What constitutes “Puerto Rican literature”? This question is as literary as it is political, to a greater degree than it would be when considering the canon of a sovereign nation. Two reasons may be given to account for this exceptionality: (1) Puerto Rico has been the colony of two successive empires, Spain and the United States, and (2) more than half its people live in the United States, as part of a diaspora shaped sometimes by choice and, more often, by colonial (political, economic) pressures. Scholars interested in the literature of this Puerto Rican majority, which is the diaspora in the United States, should consult Edna Acosta-Belén’s entry in Oxford Bibliographies, as the present entry limits itself to criticism about literature in Spanish that has predominantly circulated within the confines of the island(s) of Puerto Rico. In fact, this geographic and linguistic split (mainland is to island, as English is to Spanish) had conditioned scholarly approaches to Puerto Rican literature throughout most of the 20th century and only began to be questioned in the 1980s by daring scholars such as Acosta-Belén herself. Moreover, this linguistic, geographic, and political split between English and Spanish reflects one of Puerto Rican literature’s most persistent topics: the call for independence from the United States, a feature that sets Puerto Rican literature apart from other literatures in Spanish. More broadly, from the 19th century onward, Puerto Rican authors have been concerned with the question of national identity within a colonial context. Only after the 1970s does this question cease to be the guiding concern of Puerto Rican authors, a rupture (and a new beginning) driven by the voices of women, queer, and Afro-Puerto Rican authors, who continue to insist on the expansion of the literary canon. While the question of national identity still exists, many contemporary authors refuse to join in this totalizing search, and prefer to write about spaces, characters, and situations that have been traditionally marginalized by the heteropatriarchal, Hispanophile literary establishment.