Nicholasa Mohr in the “Nuyorican Movement”

As one of the many Puerto Rican writers who were born in the United States, Nicholasa Mohr is consider a prominent writer, if not the “mother” of the Nuyorican Movement. She was among the first Nuyorican writers who depicts the role of woman of Puerto Rican background in their social environment in New York City (Heredia, 1). She was born in the Bronx in 1935, she came from a Puerto Rican family, one of many that immigrate to New York City during the Great Depression, in the 20th century, looking for opportunities and a better quality life, the “American dream”.  Her life and experiences as a Puerto Rican in the United States, was presented in her first published novel, Nilda. Nilda, is written as an autobiographical fiction, belongs to the genre of the Bildungsroman “--the coming of age narratives which often fictionalize autobiographical experiences to describe the author’s journey from childhood into adulthood”. The novel focuses on the life of a Puerto Rican girl growing up in New York’s El Barrio (Spanish Harlem) during the 1940s, as she discovers the complexities of a surrounding hostile environment, plagued with poverty and racial discrimination endured by many Puerto Ricans in U.S. society (Acosta).

This genre of the Bildungsroman it was often used by some of the other writers from the Nuyorican Movement “a combining of autobiographical and imaginative modes of community portrayal is clearest perhaps in the prose fiction” Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets and Nicholasa Mohr’s Nilda… are closer to the testimonial novel than to any of the narrative works of previous years (Flores). In an interview conducted by Roni Natov and Geraldine DeLuca, Mohr was asked if she considers her novel an autobiography, to which she replied: “there is a lot of autobiographical material in that novel. But...the story is actually quite different from my life. There is as much material that’s made up as there is autobiographical material in that book” (Natov and Deluca).

Michael J. Meyer, in his book Literature and Ethnic Discrimination, refers to Nicholasa Mohr as a writer who stands out because of her “treatment of ethnic memories which include a close examination of gender a racial discrimination” (189). Through her writing, especially talking about her first published novel Nilda, she shaped the socio-cultural signs of the Puerto Rican and “Neorican” life in the United States. Mohr places her main character in a “Latino barrio” in the United States, confronting sociological issues because of her Puerto Rican identity “within the conflictive zones of Puerto Rican and American cultures” (189). The nature and reasons because the Puerto Ricans  immigrate to the United States, is presented in the developing discourse of Nilda; “females characters face specific historical incidents that determine their own adaptation to America mainstream society , which is also experiencing radical changes at the time of World War II” (194). Through the memories of Nilda is presented all the abuses that confronted Nilda and her family, in representation of all the Puerto Rican citizens, from the American society; such as, job discrimination, gender and ethnic discrimination, and how these turn into limitations of opportunities to her and her family.