Essaying the Puerto Rican Nation: Jose Luis Gonzalez, Luis Rafael Sanchez and Ana Lydia Vega.
- Resource Type
- Theses
- Authors
- Rengel, Patricia L.
- Source
- Dissertation Abstracts International; Dissertation Abstract International; 73-10(E)A.
- Subject
- Literature, Latin American
- Language
- English
Summary: In Chapter One, Jose Luis Gonzalez initiates this aperture with "El pais de cuatro pisos" as he denounces what Michel Foucault calls "sources of power" in order to incorporate the Afro-Puerto Rican. Read from a perspective of power and representation this essay succeeds at challenging racism but falls short in representing the popular Afro-Puerto Rican. The second chapter examines how Luis Rafael Sanchez's essay "La guagua aerea" disrupts the tenor of previous essayists with an image of a working class and diasporic nation. Interpreted as a theatrical text, I explore how Sanchez undoes "Puerto Rican docility" and the authoritarian voices of previous essayists. Concepts of detour, retour and oraliture inform the analysis of the "thresholds" in this essay. The final chapter examines how Ana Lydia Vega shuns the metaphors of Gonzalez and Sanchez and brings the essay back to a local front. With two essays "Vegetal" and "De bipeda desplumada a Escritora Puertorriquena (con E y P machusculas)" I examine how she questions patriarchal and hegemonic discourses. Vega effectively unravels traditional essayistic forms and voices with "polyrhythmic" essays that imitate popular musical structures. I conclude with recent essayists Carlos Pabon and Ruben Rios Avila demonstrating how the metanarrative of nationhood continues to disintegrate, but without popular culture as a creative or symbolic force.