Nuyorican Movement

After the Hispanic-American War, in 1898 the United States colonized Puerto Rico. This colonization produced a massive migrations from the Puerto Ricans to the United States through all the 20th century. From this history of colonization and these massive migrations emanated the “Nuyorican Movement”.  The Nuyorican Movement involves poets, writers, musicians and artists who are Puerto Rican or of Puerto Rican descent, who live in the United States; it emanated as well, from “the local needs of Puerto Rican living in New York who simultaneously maintained and interacted with a Puerto Rican national discourse” (Herrera, 49).  This movement had grown up alongside the radical organizations of the late sixties and were influenced by and connected to the Black Arts Movement, it “offered the possibility of cultural unity and collaboration, pushing forward the Despertar Boricua in a different language than that of the political organizations preceding it” (Thomas, 247).

The Puerto Rican Literature it’s recognized since the Puerto Ricans begun writing about the new changes and experiences that they were living because of the conquest of United States. “The deep transformations” that the island suffered with the acquisition of Puerto Rico as a colony by the United States, such as; the creation of the Estado Libre Asociado, the island industrialization, the decline of rural economy, cultural and linguistic assimilation policies and the growing migration to the United States, were the subject of the writers of the Puerto Rican Literature (Dominguez, Puerto Ricans Literature). A new generation of novelists and short story writers continued dealing with these issues in the sixties and seventies but they showed new literary techniques that left behind the previous realist tradition to explore a more experimental writing closer to the magical-realist Latin American tradition (Dominguez, Puerto Ricans Literature). From 1940’ there is a distinction in the Puerto Rican literature since is divided in the literature of insular writers and the literature of writers who were born or raised in the United States; but, “it is not until the 1960s and 1970s when a consolidated literature written by and about Puerto Ricans in the United States can be found”.  This new literature, widely described by many critics as NUYORICAN LITERATURE, has a deep concern for the social and economic situation of Puerto Rican immigrants and also explore the identity crisis that emerges for second-generation Puerto Ricans in the United States. (Dominguez, Puerto Ricans Literature). Because of “the annexation of Puerto Rico, and its subsequent status as U.S Commonwealth, Puerto Rican often struggles between two or more national identities- American, Puerto Rican ad Nuyorican” (Herrera, 48).

Nuyorican creative expression effectively draws together the firsthand testimonial stance of the “pioneer” stage and the fictional, imaginative approach of writers of the 1950s and 1960s. This combining of autobiographical and imaginative modes of community portrayal is clearest perhaps in the prose fiction (Flores). The creation of Spanglish, the use of poetry and oral tradition as a political strategy as well as the fusion of sounds, gestures and way of being from the urban environment were distinctive local elements that help develop a Nuyorican discourse (Herrera, 49).