Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

Decolonial Puerto Rican Women's Writings pp 1–27Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Introduction

  • Chapter
  • First Online:

  • 176 Accesses

Part of the book series: Literatures of the Americas ((LOA))

Abstract

This introduction provides a cultural and historical overview of Puerto Rico’s and Puerto Rican women’s experiences with the US from the war of 1898, in which the island was ceded to the USA by Spain, to the present. This overview marks important dates and trends in this colonial relationship, and how nuanced language was developed to articulate the neo-/colonial relationship that the USA has with the island and its people. This context is foundational for understanding the experiences of Puerto Rican women, from coerced migration to the mainland US, to government-funded mass sterilization projects, to the silencing of domestic abuse, and to the complete revisioning of history by US scientists and scholars.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD   79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

References

  • Achteberg, Jeanne, and G. Frank Lawlis. Bridges of the Bodymind. Institute for Personality and Ability Testing, 1980.

    Google Scholar 

  • Acosta-Belén, Edna. The Puerto Rican Woman: Perspectives on Culture, History and Society. 2nd ed. Praeger, 1986.

    Google Scholar 

  • Acosta-Belén, Edna, and Carlos Santiago. Puerto Ricans in the United States: A Contemporary Portrait. Lynne Reinner, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alexander, Jeffrey. “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma.” Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by Jeffrey Alexander, Ron Eyerman, and Bernard Giesen. U California P, 2004, pp. 1–30.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alexander, M. Jacqui. “Remembering This Bridge, Remembering Ourselves: Yearning, Memory, and Desire.” This Bridge We Call Home, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating. Routledge, 2002, pp. 83–103.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New P, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Algarín, Miguel, and Miguel Piñero. Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings. William Morrow, 1975.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anzaldúa, Gloria. Making Face/Making Soul: Haciendo Caras. Aunt Lute, 1990.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “Now Let Us Shift.” This Bridge We Call Home, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating. Routledge, 2002, pp. 540–78.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 3rd ed. Aunt Lute, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Cherríe Moraga, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color. 4th ed. SUNY P, 2015.

    Google Scholar 

  • Burnette, Christina Duffy, and Burke Marshall, eds. Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution. Duke UP, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cabán, Pedro. “Industrialization, the Colonial State, and Working Class Organizations in Puerto Rico.” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 1, no. 3, 1984, 149–72.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Comas-Díaz, Lillian. “Spirita: Reclaiming Womanist Sacredness into Feminism.” Psychology of Women Quarterly, vol. 32, 2008, 13–21.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Martin Luther King Encounters Post-racialism.” Kalfou, vol. 1, no. 1, 2014, 15–26.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dolins, Francine, and Robert Mitchell. “Linking Spatial Cognition and Spatial Perception.” Spatial Cognition, Spatial Perception: Mapping the Self and Space, edited by Francine Dolins and Robert Mitchell. Cambridge UP, 2010, pp. 1–18.

    Google Scholar 

  • Doyle, John, and David Sims. “Enabling Strategic Metaphor in Conversation: A Technique of Cognitive Sculpting for Explicating Knowledge.” Mapping Strategic Knowledge, edited by Anne Huff and Mark Jenkins. Sage, 2002, pp. 63–88.

    Google Scholar 

  • Duany, Jorge. “Making Indians Out of Blacks: The Revitalization of Taíno Identity in Contemporary Puerto Rico.” Taíno Revival: Critical Perspectives on Puerto Rican Identity and Cultural Politics, edited by Gabriel Haslip-Viera. Markus Weiner, 2001, pp. 55–82.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States. U North Carolina P, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  • Espada, Martín. “Poetry Like Bread.” Zapata’s Disciples. South End, 1999, pp. 99–106.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eyerman, Ron. “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity.” Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by Jeffrey Alexander, Ron Eyerman, and Bernard Giesen. U California P, 2004, pp. 6–111.

    Google Scholar 

  • Flores, Juan. Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity. Arte Público, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  • Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  • García Muñiz, Huberto. “U.S. Military Installation in Puerto Rico: Controlling the Caribbean.” Colonial Dilemma: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Puerto Rico, edited by Edwin Meléndez and Edgardo Meléndez. South End, 1993, pp. 53–65.

    Google Scholar 

  • Godreau, Isar, Mariolga Reyes Cruz, Mariluz Franco Ortiz, and Sherry Cuadrado. “The Lessons of Slavery: Discourses of Slavery, Mestizaje, and Blanqueamiento in an Elementary School in Puerto Rico.” American Ethnologist, vol. 35, no. 1, 2008, 115–35.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Grosz, Elizabeth. “Inscriptions and Body Maps: Representations and the Corporeal.” Space, Gender, Knowledge: Feminist Readings, edited by Linda McDowell and Joanne Sharpe, Arnold, 1992, pp. 236–76.

    Google Scholar 

  • Haslip-Viera, Gabriel. Taíno Revival. Princeton: Markus Weiner, 2013.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. Race, Identity, and Indigenous Politics: Puerto Rican Neo-Taínos in the Diaspora and the Island. Latino Studies, 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hurtado, Roberta. “Transformative Expressions: Latina Third Space Feminisms and Critical Theory-Asethetic.” The Journal of Latina Critical Feminism, vol. 2, no. 1, 2019, 50–61.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  • Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Harvard UP, 1991.

    Google Scholar 

  • Levins Morales, Aurora. Medicine Stories. Blackwell, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  • Leys, Ruth. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 37, no.3, 2011, 434–72.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lopez, Iris. Matters of Choice: Puerto Rican Women’s Struggle for Reproductive Freedom. Rutgers UP, 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “Sterilization and the Ethics of Reproductive Technology: An Integral Approach.” The Scholar and Feminist Online, vol. 9, no. 1–2, 2010–2011, http://sfonline.barnard.edu/reprotech/lopez_01.htm.

  • Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Crossing, 1984.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lugones, María. Pilgrimages/Perigranejes. Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia, vol. 25, no. 4, 2010, 743–59.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mass, Bonnie. “Puerto Rico: A Case Study of Population Control.” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 44, no. 4, 1977, 68–81.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Matthews, Stephen, and David Phillips. “Minireview: Transgenerational Inheritance of Stress Response: A New Frontier in Stress Research.” Endocrinology, vol. 151, no. 1, 2010, 7–13.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Duke UP, 2011.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moreno, Marisel. Family Matters. U Virginia P, 2012.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moya, Paula. “Cultural Particularity Versus Universal Humanity: The Value of Being Asimilao.” Hispanics/Latinos in the United States: Ethnicity, Race, and Rights, edited by Jorge Gracia and Pablo de Greiff. Routledge, 2000, pp. 77–98.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nussbaum, Felicity. Torrid Zones. Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ortega, Mariana. In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self. SUNY P, 2016.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pérez, Emma. The Decolonial Imaginary. Indiana UP, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  • Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality and Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla, vol. 1, no. 3, 2000, 533–80.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2–3, 2007, 168–78.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rivera, Carmen. Kissing the Mango Tree. Arte Público, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rothschild, Babette. The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment. Norton, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sánchez González, Lisa. Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. New York UP, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schiebinger, Londa. “Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy.” Feminism and the Body, edited by Londa Schiebinger. Oxford UP, 2000, pp. 25–57.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French. Duke UP, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sheets-Johnston, Maxine. “Movement.” Spatial Cognition, Spatial Perception: Mapping the Self and Space, edited by Francine Dolins and Robert Mitchell. Cambridge UP, 2010, pp. 323–40.

    Google Scholar 

  • Silva, Alcino, et al. “Molecular and Cellular Approaches to Memory Allocation in Neural Circuits.” Science, vol. 326, no. 5951, 2009, 391–95.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Skoge, Monica, et al. “Cellular memory in eukaryotic chemotaxis.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States of America, vol. 111, no. 40, October 2014, 14448–14453.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sotomayor, Sonia. “Dissent.” Schuette v. Coal. Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigration Rights. U.S. Supreme Court. 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacrtics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, 64–81.

    Google Scholar 

  • Torres-Padilla, José, and Carmen Haydée Rivera, eds. Writing Off the Hyphen. U Washington P, 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tucker, Phebe, and Elizabeth Foote. “Trauma and the Mind-Body Connection.” Psychiatric Times, 1 June 2007. Web. 13 February 2015. http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/trauma-and-mind-body-connection.

  • Walters, Karina, et al. “Bodies Don’t Just Tell Stories, They Tell Histories: Embodiment of Historical Trauma Among American Indians and Alaska Natives.” Du Bois Review, vol. 8, no. 1, 2011, 179–89.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wise, Tim. Color-Blind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equality. Color Lights, 2013.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State University of New York at Oswego, Oswego, NY, USA

    Roberta Hurtado

Authors
  1. Roberta Hurtado
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Hurtado, R. (2019). Introduction. In: Decolonial Puerto Rican Women's Writings. Literatures of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05731-2_1

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation