TOP 5 PUERTO RICAN NOVELS
Spoiler Alert: I’m Puerto Rican. My mother is from Puerto Rico (I was born in the United States), and my father is not from the island. Like a lot of us descendent (and native) Puerto Ricans living in the contiguous United States, we’ve tended to live in particular geographic locations, primarily New York (where my mother grew up and where my family lived for years—where we’re known as “Nuyoricans”!), Philadelphia, Newark and Jersey City, Hartford and New Haven, Chicago, Cleveland, Orlando, Tampa, and other large cities. As a writer, I’ve notice not only the lack of, and imbalance between, Hispanic writers and literature and the literature of, well, “White” literature. As a descendent of Puerto Ricans, it’s bothered me that I’ve never come across a “Puerto Rican novel,” however much a random teacher or professor has thrown one into their syllabus. So, I thought I’d list some out, partly as a reminder to myself of what’s out there but also, hopefully, to communicate what’s out there for other writers and readers who may be interested in learning more of Puerto Rican novels and literature and the subject matter that drove Puerto Rican authors to write what they did.
While I’ll be diving primarily into Borinquen (or Boríquen or Boríken)—which is the Taíno and Kalinago name for Puerto Rico—novels, I want to make clear that there is a lot of important literature (essays, verses, poetry, reporting and editorials) that discuss, explore, and analyze the trials and tribulations and suffering of the peoples living on an island initially conquered by Spain and later coming under control of the United States in 1898 during the Spanish-American War. Contrary to what a lot of Americans believe, Puerto Rico is a U.S. commonwealth territory. Puerto Rican currency: U.S. Dollar. And the big question? Are Puerto Ricans Americans? YEP!
As always, top “X” lists of anything are either biased or not what other writers/readers/educators/critics might consider the best representations of particular lists, in this case the top 5 Puerto Rican novels. I myself am always weary about what others consider the best of anything—novels, short stories, vacation destinations, movies, even burgers and politicians. In the case of Puerto Rican novels, I’ve tried to do my best to cover various perspective (novels that take place and concern the politics and life on the island, novels that exemplify what life is like as a Nuyorican and other city-based Puerto Ricans, a memoir or two for you memoir writers, and historical novels). Again, this is my top 5—you may have a completely different list that includes none of the novels on my list. And that’s fine. Hopefully, however, this list of books mentioned here can at the very least expose you to novels for future reading.
While there are plenty of Puerto Rican authors, both born in Puerto Rico and elsewhere, some of the more prominent writers (of fiction and otherwise), include: Father Diego de Torres Vargas (a historian of Puerto Rico), poet and journalist Francisco Gonzalo Marín, who wrote about the Spanish Crown, Jesús Colón, recognized as the father of the Nuyorican Movement, Eugenio María de Hostos, a fiction writer who focused on Puerto Rico’s Caribbean identity, Edgardo Vega Yunqué, author of Omaha Bigelow and Blood Fugues, who fictionalized the experience of those displaced, primarily to the U.S., and Giannina Braschi, whose Yo-Yo Boing! explores the tension between White culture and Hispanic culture. While I list My list of the top 5 Puerto Rican novels, please feel free to list yours in the comments. As I always say, the enjoyment of literature is subjective. What you enjoy might not necessarily be what I enjoy, and vice versa. But exposure to what are considered “good” works of literature is never a bad thing, no matter where that exposure comes from, be it a recommendation, a class text, or, even, pulled from the dollar bin of your local bookstore.
Here are my top 10 Puerto Rican Novels:
La Charca (The Pond) or the “stagnant” pond, by Manuel Zeno Gandía. Personally, I’m fond of firsts, and La Charca is considered the first Puerto Rican novel. If you’ve paid attention over the last many years, you know how brutally the island has been hit by nature, but also by a lack of political assistance from U.S. leadership. La Charca explores the bleak existence and misery suffered by coffee plantation workers in Puerto Rico’s mountains (if you’ve ever been to PR’s mountains, you immediately have a picture in your mind of lush, verdant terrain). La Charca, published in 1894, fictionalizes ignorance, poverty, and the plight of the diseased coffee plantation workers who live in squalor, often in huts.
The House on the Lagoon by Rosario Ferré. A finalist for the National Book Award, Lagoon, which was translated from the Spanish by Ferré herself, is a multi-generational narrative about how politics damages and destroys families. Some members of the family in the novel believe others are changing the reality of what’s occurred politically, causing a rift between family members, in particular husband and wife, Isabel and Quintin.
What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez. I was born in Miami, but I grew up between Miami and Brooklyn, NY, as well as a couple years in Long Island. Puerto Ricans were everywhere. What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez is about a family living in Staten Island (a borough that, for me, was like Queens—growing up I knew it was one, i.e., a borough, but I didn’t view it in the same way as I did Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx). Sorry for the aside (and don’t hate me if you’re from Queens or Staten Island!). Anyway, Ruthy, at thirteen, disappears. Twelve years later, Ruthy’s sister believes she’s seen Ruthy, changed a bit but with the same beauty mark beneath her left eye, in a fight on a reality TV show. The women in the Ramirez family go on in search of Ruthy, and in the process discover the pain of being the other and everything that that means, historically as well as culturally and generationally. And if the first line doesn’t pull you in, I don’t know what would: “Afterwards, sometimes, as a teenager, I would stand at the bus stop where my sister went missing . . ..”
Las Madres by Esmeralda Santiago. While Esmeralda Santiago’s When I was Puerto Rican sits prominently on my bookshelf, Las Madres touched me from the first lines, because, like some of my favorite writers, Santiago has a gift for playing with words that provide insight into some of the things I think of when writing and reading in Spanish. Like many Puerto Ricans, the novel deals with identity and loss, in this case driven by an accident in Puerto Rico that kills our narrator Luz’s parents. Luz can’t remember the accident at all, but her friends (and four decades later her daughter, Marysol) try to help fill in the gaps of Luz’s life. Secrets are discovered, themes of family, trauma, and homecomings affected, both literally and figuratively, in this rich (and familiar to me as a Puerto Rican) novel.
Yo-Yo Boing! by Giannina Braschi. Published in 1998, Yo-Yo Boing! is considered one of the first major Spanglish novels. Like many (most?) of contemporary Puerto Rican novels, the setting is the good old NYC. The title is named after the Puerto Rican comedian Luis Antonio Rivera (which, coincidentally, is the name of my uncle, now deceased, and who was a hysterical guy himself). The novel is divided into three sections and focuses on the difficulties between Anglos and Hispanics in the United States. While considered “experimental” for many topics (colonialism, domestic violence, Puerto Rican independence, censorship and many other difficult subjects) are communicated not only in Spanglish (which, if you don’t speak or understand Spanish can be extremely trying), the narrative has a certain music to it, which is something us writers strive for and which I personally endeavor to create in my own writing. If you’re up for a challenge, I highly recommend Yo-Yo Boing!
As I mentioned above, I’m Puerto Rican, and have lived many of the experiences detailed and explored in these (and other) novels, even though I was born in the U.S. Naturally, my mother, who was born in Puerto Rico, and who is a woman, share many of the difficulties, trials and tribulations, that the women (and men) in these fictions have gone through, both on the island of Puerto Rico and, once they jumped on a plane, here in the U.S. But this is what it means to be Puerto Rican. We—Puerto Ricans born in Puerto Rico and us descendants of them born in the U.S.—know what it’s like to live in cities that separate us and our families from what is known as (and considered) the monoculture of mainstream America. Yes, this has obviously changed dramatically with regards to immigration from across the globe. But at least we get an understanding through Puerto Rican fiction of what it’s like to experience our little part of what it’s like to be Boricuas in a land where we’ve carved our own space, our own histories, our own personal stories.
Cully Perlman is author of a novel, THE LOSSES. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com
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