"Cumbanchero" by Antonio Broccoli Porto,
http://www.studioporto.com/
The literature by Puerto Rican women writers in the
United States has grown significantly since the 1970s, though many of
these writers live or were raised in places other than New York City.
Nicholasa Mohr is one of the best-known writers of prose fiction for
adults as well as young adults and children. Mohr's novels and short-story
collections include Nilda, El Bronx Remembered, In Nueva York, Felita,
Going Home, Rituals of Survival: A Woman's Portfolio, and Growing
Up Inside the Sanctuary of My Imagination. Sandra María Esteves has
achieved recognition as a poet, authoring the poetry anthologies Yerba
Buena, Tropical Rains, and Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo.
Outside of New York City, writers such as Judith Ortiz Cofer, Carmen de
Monteflores, and Esmeralda Santiago have produced important
autobiographical accounts of the migrant experience. Ortiz Cofer's The
Line of the Sun, Silent Dancing, and The Latin Deli have
received critical acclaim. Her poetry includes the collections Terms
of Survival and Reaching for the Mainland. Monteflores's
autobiographical novel Cantando bajito/Singing Softly and
Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican have made their mark on
readers, who are expecting more from these emerging talents. Aurora Levins
Morales and her mother, Rosario Morales, have poignantly captured in their
poetry and prose collection Getting Home Alive the multiple
borderland identities and struggles experienced by Puerto Rican women, and
their solidarity with other women of color.
The wide spectrum of Puerto Rican women's writing in
the United States also includes those writers who write primarily in
Spanish and who are frequently better known among Puerto Rican literary
circles. In some cases their works have been translated into English.
Names such as Julia de Burgos, Iris Zavala, Luz María Umpierre, Etna Iris
Rivera, Rosario Ferré, Giannina Braschi, and Brenda Alejandro also part of
the complex dynamic that constitutes the Puerto Rican migrant experience.
U.S. Puerto Rican women writers share with other Latina
writers a strong panethnic Latina consciousness that incorporates elements
of solidarity with other women's struggles in Latin America and the United
States. The adoption of the term women of color reflects a
recognition of the diverse oppressions faced by women worldwide based on
race, class, gender, or sexual orientation. A literary discourse has
emerged as a result of the cultural subjectivity of being a Latina, which
recognizes the shared experiences at individual, collective, and
interethnic levels, but also transcends national origins in its solidarity
with the liberation struggles of women and other oppressed groups.
(by Edna
Acosta-Belén from reader's Companion to US
Women's History)
There are few critical books on
Puerto Rican Literature in the US and just one published book on Puerto
Rican women writers in the United States: