ABSTRACT
Often called the oldest colony in the western hemisphere, Puerto Rico has been a colony of the United States since 1898, and today more Puerto Ricans reside outside the island of Puerto Rico (primarily on the US mainland) than on it. Boricua literature refers to the writing of this stateside Puerto Rican community. Boricua is derived from the Taíno word – Borikén – for the island now called
Puerto Rico. It is a popular term of self-affirmation within Puerto Rico’s colonial diaspora; using it to describe the diaspora’s literary tradition represents the acknowledgement that the stateside Puerto Rican community is a distinct constituency in the United States, one that has self-consciously produced its own body of knowledge, based in its own specific assessment of its own unique predicament as a US community of color. Asserting the term “Boricua” (as opposed to Puerto Rican) represents a critical response to the neglect of this body of writing in both US and insular Puerto Rican narratives of national literary canon formation. The term “diaspora” (a community formed by a forced exodus) is also used to underscore the history of colonialism, especially US federal government policies and programs designed to cause large-scale migration from the island to the states. The term likewise underscores the organic ties between the broader African diaspora and this diaspora in the Spanish Caribbean, as well as the processes of racialization that Boricuas have experienced as a distinct US community “of color.”
