novelists-from-puerto-rico

"I am always glad to express gratitude to the library, I spent my youth there, reading Nancy Drew mysteries, Jack London novels, and the works of Fenimore Cooper. But I never read about myself or about black people. Eventually, at 14, I discovered Howard Fast and that was quite wonderful."

"The island of Puerto Rico is a small but complicated place. It's the only place in the world, I think, where you have a Latin American culture and you're an American citizen. I wrote a paper published by the University of Oklahoma's Department of Psychology about Puerto Ricans being like adopted citizens. I describe myself as an adopted citizen, much like a child who has been adopted by a family. He or she doesn't look like that family and longs to know who his or her parents really are. I was taught in the schools that Americans adopted Puerto Rico, it is not a real country. So, am I supposed to be forever grateful because someone adopted us and took us in? The Spaniards first, and then the United States? How does a child, then, form an identity?"

"I tackle that reality, how the children of Puerto Ricans who go back to the island are surprised when they find that what their parents talked about is a myth, that it no longer exists."

"I feel a citizen of the world. I'm not really a Nationalist. I'm very fortunate; I can embrace any culture in the world and feel quite at home. That's a joy for me. New York gave me a sense of belonging that is not constricted by nationalism."

"Nicholasa Mohr has proclaimed, over and over again-in her writings, in her words-her great love for New York, the city in which she was born and raised. She is a "Latino" New Yorker whose great warmth and openness, whose wide, welcoming smile embody the best of Puerto Rican social culture in that city."

"I never strongly identified with Puerto Rican writers from Puerto Rico. My writing comes from a different sensibility. However, we do share ethnicity. What some of them write about doesn't necessarily hold that much interest for me. It's also a question of social class. There is a certain classism in all of this. We are different because we write in another language. We are not living in a void. Some of their writing, as I said in my essay Puerto Rican Writers in the United States, Puerto Rican Writers in Puerto Rico: A Separation Beyond Language, is very baroque. I find that hard to relate to. I might have more in common with people writing in places like Prague or Ecuador. I have, however, read and liked very much Julia de Burgos and José Luis González and Magali García Ramis. But things are changing now. Now we have some Puerto Rican writers writing in English, like Rosario Ferré. That seems to indicate change."

"it was poetry and literature that led me to understand that to stifle someone else's emotional life is almost immoral, that you have to let people continue to live, and that grief is one of the great shackles. If you let grief hinder you, you can become trapped in it."

"I think that poetry, in general, after a certain point in a poet's life, has to do with the acknowledgment of mortality. And even the most joyful poems have to do with, "Yes, let's not forget that life is brief." Once I started dealing with grief in poetry, I discovered that I had found my way to poetry. I think that so many young poets are only writing about the joy of love and that sort of thing and don't understand that the great poetry, like Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle" and like Wordsworth's "Intimations" and "Tintern Abby," has all been a moment when the poet realizes that "this is my time to express what I have gathered in this brief life.""

"I guess I went from writing poetry as self-expression to writing poetry as self-discovery when I got a grasp of my own mortality. I think it may have to do with the death of my father, who died at a very early age."

"I feel the poet does write on memory but... Wasn't it Aristotle who said the historian keeps the factual record of mankind and the poet writes the emotional history of mankind? I think you can read a history of Vietnam and know that so many men under the age of twenty were killed, or you can read Tim O'Brien and you can "feel" those deaths. O'Brien is preserving the emotional history of Vietnam. A historian is preserving the facts."

"I'm from the Emily Dickinson and Flannery O'Connor school of writing, where you write about your Amherst backyard or about a farm in Milledgevilk, and then you're actually writing about everything it means to be human."

"I was born a white girl in Puerto Rico but became a brown girl when I came to live in the United States."

"I had discovered that I needed stability more than social life. I had brains for sure and some talent in writing. These facts were a constant in my life. My skin color, my size, and my appearance were variables-things that were judged cording to my current self-image, the aesthetic values of the times, the places I was in, and the people I met. My studies, later my writing, the respect of people who saw me as an individual person they cared about, these were the criteria for my sense of self-worth that would concentrate on in my adult life."

"the poem I wrote for my daughter is a warning that to deny your heritage is to deny half of your humanity."

"I don't write poems that address the social issues in a very overt or propaganda-driven way, but I feel every poem that I write is political because if you write and you're engaged with life, where you write about people who suffer as a result of societal problems, then in fact it is political."

"God is supposed to understand all languages. But it's like "silent dancing"-if everyone is acting like they don't understand you when you don't speak the language of the mainstream,"

"what's the difference between regional being the Southwest and regional being the South if the story is brilliant enough to be universal? Does it matter that Faulkner's universe was little? When he finished Absalom, Absalom, it wasn't about Mississippi; it was about the cosmos. So if a book like that is written by a Puerto Rican or a Native American, why should it continue to be taught as ethnic literature?"

"That's the problem with categories. Once you're labeled, you have a hard time breaking out."

"one year I was teaching world literary masterpieces, and I was beginning to feel frustrated because everybody had a speaking part except the women. Salome was the one who, shall we say, changed the life of John the Baptist, but she didn't get to speak. Neither did Judith. And why? How did they feel? I wanted to know."

"I don't mind categories, but these publications are keeping me from being seen as I really am, which is a student of world literature and interested in many countries."

"You can call me anything you want, but don't keep me from doing anything I want."

"In the United States, I was considered a Puertorriqueña; on the island, I was considered a little gringita."

"So my work is actually a response to the idea, like if you read my short story "Nada"-my mother's generation always had this idealized concept of the island as home and the only place where you could really be happy, like, "Oh, we were poor there, but at least we had the sun, or we had this and all this." Of course, I went back year after year, and of course I saw the sun, and it is a gorgeous island, but life was hard, difficult. So actually I don't have a nostalgic yearning for the island. I write about the dream of the island as opposed to the reality of the island."

"I think it was a couple of years after Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel Prize and the so-called Latino boom began. All of a sudden people said, "Hey, these guys may have something important to say.""

"for two years the manuscript was circulating around New York, and my agent was getting rejections like, "It's beautifully written, but who wants to read about poor Puerto Ricans?”"

"When you're an exotic and no threat, you're an interesting thing to have around; when there's a lot of you and you pose a problem, like "we don't want you in our neighborhood" or that sort of thing, the prejudice level rises. That's the basic thing I've learned in my lifetime."

"No matter how American I may feel-and I feel that culturally I'm more an American woman than a Puerto Rican woman, just having lived in this country for so long-I'm always reminded that people do not see me that way. And basically you are really not only a product of who you think you are but of how other people see you. So if you always have to trace your ancestry for other people, then you're not exactly feeling like part of the group. I don't see that as a problem, but I also see it as determining or defining the new race issue in the United States. When the Germans and the Irish first started coming to the United States, for one generation people asked about their accents. The next generation blended in. There is no way that I'm ever going to blend in, even if I start speaking English with a southern accent. So the color issue is always present there, for Asian Americans, for Native Americans, for blacks, for Latinos-there is no blending in, no melting into the melting pot."

"in my role as a teacher, I know who I am. But, of course, I look very Latina; I have an accent, and sometimes when I go places, people don't automatically assume, "Oh, an American citizen, probably an English professor." The first question is, "Where are you from?" And they're not satisfied if I say, "Athens, Georgia." That happens with great frequency."

""Silent dancing" to me is reminiscent of the immigrant or migrant situation, where you are trying desperately to live your life fully, but you're silenced many ways because you are not seen or heard. That to me was an appropriate way to see our lives then. We were part of a silent and invisible group of people."

"Now, as a more mature person, I realize that keeping my Spanish was a great gift."

"it was a difficult thing for a child growing up to remain fluent in two languages and to dwell in two completely different worlds at once."

"One of my favorite quotations from Emily Dickinson is: "Tell truth / But tell it slant.""

"Every great book contains matter that could be termed poetry. The Bible is a perfect example. So poetry, even if it's not what I'm doing, is my teacher."

"Poetry teaches us how to deal with the economy of language, the concentration of language, the cautious use of metaphor."

"I would say that poetry is my first discipline."

"My personal goal in my public life is to try to replace the old pervasive stereotypes and myths about Latinas with a much more interesting set of realities. Every time I give a reading, I hope the stories I tell, the dreams and fears I examine in my work, can achieve some universal truth which will get my audience past the particulars of my skin color, my accent, or my clothes."

"The myth of the Hispanic menial has been sustained by the same media phenomenon that made "Mammy" from Gone with the Wind America's idea of the black woman for generations: Maria, the housemaid or counter girl, is now indelibly etched into the national psyche. The big and the little screens have presented us with the picture of the funny Hispanic maid, mispronouncing words and cooking up a spicy storm in a shiny California kitchen."

"Mixed cultural signals have perpetuated certain stereotypes-for example, that of the Hispanic woman as the "Hot Tamale" or sexual firebrand. It is a one-dimensional view that the media have found easy to promote. In their special vocabulary, advertisers have designated "sizzling" and "smoldering" as the adjectives of choice for describing not only the foods but also the women of Latin America. From conversations in my house, I recall hearing about the harassment that Puerto Rican women endured in factories where the "bossmen" talked to them as if sexual innuendo was all they understood, and worse, often gave them the choice of submitting to advances or being fired."

"Judith Ortiz Cofer, in her autobiography in prose poetry, Silent Dancing, uses the double vision of her nomadic life between Puerto Rico and New Jersey to explore the dangers and delights, bitterness and confusion of female sexuality in Puerto Rican culture."

"a prime fact of my life: you can leave the Island, master the English language, and travel as far as you can, but if you are a Latina, especially one like me who so obviously belongs to Rita Moreno's gene pool, the Island travels with you."

"Through her work, she has shown a remarkable commitment to maintaining the stories of Puerto Rico in boricua hands. “If we preserve our stories, then they belong to us,” she says."

"My own ancestors. I come from poor, landless peasants who left no records. And so I began to read the story of Puerto Rico, and the more I read the story the more I realized I would never find my own ancestors, but I could make my imaginary ancestors. And so the book emerges as a result of my trying to create them, to create the people that might have been."

"At a certain point, I gave up on the idea that I’m not enough for other people…You are enough for you if you believe that you are enough for you. Whatever they say — you’re not Latina enough, or feminine enough or smart enough, you know ... just say ‘fuck you.’ That’s their problem."

"I thought, 'I have been through this process before’…When I was 13 years old I came from Puerto Rico to the United States not knowing any English. What I did at that time was I went to the public library, and I would go to the children’s book section where there would be alphabet books and everything would be illustrated. So it was very easy to connect the words to the images. I said, ‘I’m just going to do the same thing. If I did it once before, I can do it again.’"

"How can you know what you're capable of if you don't embrace the unknown?"

"“I learned you pay for your happiness. That's why I don't expect to be happy all the time. I'd rather be surprised by one moment every so often to remind me that joy is possible, even if I have to pay for it later.”"

"“I didn’t leave Puerto Rico. A mí me sacaron,” she tells me, referring to her exodus from Puerto Rico as a girl from San Juan. “I think nobody would prefer to leave that way.”"

"Edmaris Carazo, who the author says is one of her favorite talents from Puerto Rico at the moment...For Santiago, the impetus to develop a new tradition of Puerto Rican authors comes from her beginnings in literature, back in her childhood when she spent time in the backyard of a family member’s house in el campo. There, she listened to relatives tell trovas – oral tradition in rhyme. She also credits her dad’s love for poetry and Puerto Rican authors Julia de Burgos, Manuel Alonso, and Luis Palés Matos with sparking her interest."

"For me, the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created."

"I wondered if men ever talked like this, if their sorrows ever spilled into these secret cadences."