Abstract
This article analyzes the attempt to redefine Puerto Rican diasporic identity through personal memoir exhibited in Getting Home Alive, by Aurora Levins Morales and Rosario Morales (1986). The book's interwoven narrative and poetry poses a key questioning of the historical literary process most commonly described by critics, and challenges accepted notions of puertorricanness by exploring the nature of displacement and the creation of a new collective identity through biauthorial writing. Departing from the nuyorican aesthetic and the “barrio bildungsroman,” Morales and Levins Morales’ story is set in multiple locations, alerting us to the need to understand the variety of ethnic, experiential and genealogical origins of the neo-rican, the diverse motives of migration and its connection to histories of exile. The text thus becomes a reflection – before the 1990s era of “new Latino narrative” – on the internal diversity and hybridity of the Latino/a experience. This exploration may allow us to move beyond the impasse that the stark distinction between nuyorican literary production of the civil rights era, and writing in post-nuyorican times has created.
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Notes
Some critics, such as Caren Kaplan (1996), consider displacement to be the determining characteristic of our time and see the twentieth century as “a time when increasing numbers of people have become disengaged or dislocated from national, regional and ethnic locations and identities” (102).
In From Bomba to Hip-Hop, for example, Flores outlines the shift from one generation to another after the 1960s, identifying the 1980s and 1990s as “new times, marked off socially from the previous, properly ‘Nuyorican’ years,” a period of transition from the aesthetic of the “barrio” to that of the “spidertown,” referring to the novel by Abraham Rodríguez (1993) as post-nuyorican. To illustrate this period, he only discusses that novel as representative of post-nuyorican literature and briefly mentions the poetry of Willie Perdomo or María Fernández (Mariposa). Aurora Levins Morales and Rosario Morales are absent throughout the volume. Analysis of other studies by Edna Acosta-Belén (1992), Arlene Dávila (2001) or Sánchez González (2001) shows the reproduction of the same critical history in which the 1980s seem to be the “lost decade” or at least the great unknown in recent New York literature. Even Dalleo and Machado Sáez's revealing revision of critical studies like those previously mentioned (2007) centers its commentaries on the comparison of nuyorican literature with the literature of the 1990s in order to propose a different relationship between these two generations.
See, for example, Puerto Rican Obituary by Pedro Pietri (1973); Tropicalizations by Victor Hernández Cruz (1976); La carreta made a U-Turn by Tato Laviera (1979); La Bodega Sold Dreams by Miguel Piñero (1985); or City of Coughing and Dead Radiators by Martín Espada (1993).
New York's gregarious street life and the identity that it could have generated seems to be transformed by cultural contact and the modification of the accent, as when the author confesses, for example, that she was trained by her teachers to lose her childhood Hispanic accent (19–20).
For her, the geographic source of the nostalgia that she has inherited from past generations is New York. She identifies herself as “born on the island with first-hand love and the stories of my parents’ Old Country – New York” (25–26).
“All the cities through which my people have passed […], Granada of the Moors … Barcelona … Jerusalem … Cairo, Damascus … Odessa, Liverpool, Bristol, Lisboa, Marseille, Cadiz, Amsterdam, Abidnjan, Accra, Lagos …” (90). The list goes on, enumerating port cities, large entry and exit points, multicultural cities of the Americas from Buenos Aires to Halifax, passing through New Orleans or San Juan.
Flores notices a change in sensibility that he attributes to the growing Latino diversity in New York City. He also admits that the term post-nuyorican is not appropriate owing to the demographic dispersal of the diaspora throughout the entire country (2000, 187). To this end, he recalls Tato Laviera's AmeRícan, but does not mention Morales and Levins Morales’ text from the same year.
Anti-Oedipus in 1972, and Mille plateaux in 1980.
See, for example, writings like those compiled in the conference “The Nature and Context of Minority Discourses” (Berkeley, 1986) in its two editions (1987 and 1990).
Getting Home Alive is published by a minority, feminist publishing company with a radical reputation (Firebrand Books), committed to publishing queer literature, that has also published feminist authors such as Audre Lorde, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Leslie Feinberg or Marcia Freedman.
“The problem of time and time consciousness as a constitutive element of progress and social development comes to an uneasy rest in the tropes of departure and return, travel and encounter, grounded as they are in a material and cultural phenomenon that links here and there, past and present in a community of interchangeable travelers and dwellers, islanders and exiles” (Paquet, 2002, 79).
Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, for example, advocated in 1988 for explicitly historical theoretical practices, “attuned to the cultural specificity of different societies and periods and to different groups within societies and periods” (“Social Criticism,” 101). In 1989, the group volume The Empire Writes Back initiated exploration into the relationships between colonizing and colonized centers, an investigation continued by Paul Gilroy in his study of trans-geographical, paranational and polyglot culture waves in The Black Atlantic (1993). His approach is not far from the call for analysis of neocolonial conditions, of new labor relations, of the influence of AIDS and of counter-modern narratives, including historical indigenous narratives, proposed by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994).
See, for example, the studies by Mary Louis Pratt (1992), Grewal and Kaplan (1994), Kaplan (1996), or Chela Sandoval (2000), who, also conscious of the dangers of metaphor in theory, speaks of a social and political “nomadic morphing” when exploring the differential consciousness of the feminists of Third World North America. One of the moments that motivated this change, according to Rosa Linda Fregoso, was the United Nations’ World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993, whose influence shows in the work of feminists like Fregoso, Romany or Wing (Fregoso, 2003, 23).
Linda Martín Alcoff has focused her philosophical investigation on the role of racial notions in the construction and perception of national identities, analyzing the conditions and corporealization of the racialized subjects (US-Latinos, Latin Americans, blacks, whites, Asian-Americans …) Carole Boyce Davies (1994), on the other hand, in Black Women, Writing, and Identity, talks about “migratory subjectivities,” referring to the subjects of transnational and translocal cultures, and proposes an identity model similar to Sandoval and Alarcón's theory of provisional identities. In Questions of Travel (1996), Caren Kaplan develops her own criticism of the metaphorization and romantization of the nomad and of discourses that promote nomadism and liminality in a metaphoric sense (as in Baudrillard (2001) or Deleuze and Guattari (1986)), showing how these are not as different as they claim from the master narratives that we consider colonial and modernist.
The metaphors for the theorization of displacement in Mille plateaus, for example, imply for Kaplan (1996) a romanticized, exotic view of the desert, a type of Eurocentric orientalism that hails the nomad as a metaphor for the subject capable of avoiding the state or bourgeouis society's designs (66). This is particularly revealing because of its repercussions in the neocolonial United States’ cultural space, where historical reality and racism have gone hand in hand with cultural practices of tropicalization, which run the risk of surviving under the disguise of supposed multicultural progress.
Kaplan's approach attempts to redefine the dichotomy between marginal and central. She explains a poststructuralist, postcolonial duality that attributes to deterritorialized subject a metaphorically “central,” internal, hegemonic subjectivity, authorized and accepted as national, and to the subordinate, colonized, immigrant, or nomadic subject a real, and not necessarily critical, marginal subjectivity. This duality reduced the postcolonial landscape to one that perpetuates the notions of “center” and “periphery” that correspond to the modernist distinctions between metropolis and colony, excluding from the authorized critical and cultural field subjects considered “authentically” subordinate or displaced in political, geographic or cultural terms (102).
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* Emerging in the context of the civil uprisings in the Humboldt Park area of Chicago, the term diasporican (or diaspoRican) has been used more widely starting in the 1990s to refer to the Puerto Rican experience in the North American diaspora. See Mariposa's poem “Ode to the Diasporican (pa mi gente).”
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Lara-Bonilla, I. Getting Home Alive (1986): Urgency and polyphony in the figuration of the “diasporican”. Lat Stud 8, 355–372 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2010.33
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2010.33