Boricuas: Influential Puerto Rican Writings - an Anthology

American Visions, April, 1996 by Dale Edwyna Smith

Boricuas: Influential Puerto can Writings--an Anthology edited by Roberto Santiago (One World/Ballantine. 1995. $15)--The title roughly translates as "brothers." Boricua originally meant "brave lord," and that bravado is at the heart of what Santiago sees as the Puerto Rican dilemma--"being a little bit of three races and not enough of any one." His and others' revelations on Puerto Rican identity demonstrate the commonality Of human experience. "By the time I was fourteen, I had grown tired of my curly hair being called `nappy,' passas (raisins), or pelo malo (bad hair)," writes Piri Thomas in "The Konk." Through the poetry of Willie Perdomo in "Nigger-Reecan Blues" or Martin Espada's "Nigger Lips," plays and novel excerpts, and short stories, such as "The Konk" and Judith Ortiz Cofer's "The Story of My Body" (which dissects the crucifixion of color, gender and class), art rises from the universality of shame, poverty, urban stress, adolescence, lost love and illness to transcendence. And all point finally to Aurora Levine Morales' conclusion: "I am not african, not [Indian], not european. ... I am new. History made me. ... I was born at the crossroads and I am whole."

Dale Edwyna Smith is an assistant professor of American history and Afro-American history at Washington University in St. Louis whose reviews have appeared in Southern Review and Belles Lettres. Her last article for American Visions, "Recent and Relevant History Books," appeared in the February/ March issue.