Literature of the Puerto Rican Diaspora in the United States

Writen by Liany S. Mercado Matute

After the United States granted the American citizenship to the people of Puerto Rico in 1917, a wave of talented and aspiring Puerto Ricans migrated to the states in search of a better life. This diaspora marked a significant point in the Latin Community, for this was the start of ‘Nuyorican’ literature. Authors such as Bernando Vega, Ana Roqué Duprey, and Joaquín Colón made their appearance, but it wasn’t until the end of World War II, that the Puerto Rican voices began to arise in the midst of the tragedies.

Soon enough more families began to exchange the beautiful lands of Puerto Rico for the loud, brick walls of the city of New York, where a new community of Puerto Ricans was born, whose life was not the same to those on the island. They grew up in a place where they constantly fought to prove themselves, cast aside and divided from the rest, they began expressing their voices through literature.

Joaquin Colon’s work “Pioneros Puertorriqueños” details about the struggles faced by the first generation of Puerto Rican immigrants, just like Puerto Rican author, Judith Ortiz Cofer, writes about cultural differences she experienced as a Puerto Rican immigrant in her memoir “Silent Dancing: A partial emembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood.”

     Authors like Ortiz and Colón present the cultural influence that swept over the streets of New York and New Jersey with new sounds, new thoughts and new perspectives as a community. A cultural legacy contributed to the bases of a social constructs that to this day dictates the ways of being a ‘Nuyorican’. 

     Today the descendants of those first brave Puerto Rican pioneers, have a different social reality that those on the island, some even being third or fourth generations of interethnic families. One of those being Xochitl Gonzalez, known author of “Olga Dies Dreaming”, a second-generation daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and a Mexican father.

The book talks about the struggles that the relatives of Puerto Rican families had to endure after the tragedy that was the hurricane Maria in 2017, offering us a new perspective of what the Puerto Rican culture truly signify. It doesn’t matter if you’re a ‘Nuyorican’ or a live-on-the-island Puerto Rican, we stand together with our struggles, ideals, strength and aspirations. And the diaspora that commenced in 1917, laid the groundwork of a social movement inside the American literature that challenged and changed the way the world saw the Puerto Rican culture.