Afro-Puerto Rican Identity in the Poetry of Mayra Santos-Febres and Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro

• In Event: Discourses and Counter-Discourses of Gendered Race

Abstract

This paper examines Afro-Puerto Rican identity in two distinguished writers. In her essays collected in Sobre piel y papel, Mayra Santos-Febres distances herself from the folkloric, nostalgic view of a lived African past and claims that blacks are culturally pressured to “turn their backs to the present.” Further, she asserts that black Puerto Ricans are trapped in a complex network of racist discourses traceable to criollos’ view of the U.S. as savagely racist and the Northern imperialist domination that constructed Spain as an impotent civilizing force in the Caribbean. In works such as Boat People, the poetic voice addresses those who traverse seas, or die, or change names, or live undocumented. Race in Santos-Febres participates in a web of signification that can only be understood in the context of Puerto Rican, Caribbean, U.S., and imperialist Spanish histories and cultures. Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, LGBTTIA writer and activist, uses intensely erotic images of black women in her poems to assert what she calls “sexodiversidad.” Virtually all her pubic talks concern Afro-identity, and poems such as “Raza” look at the impact of racism on a young girl. My analysis of Arroyo Pizarro's poetry searches for a black lesbian aesthetic that breaks boundaries, much as Santos-Febres has accomplished in her poetry and erotic prose.

Author

• Rosemary G Feal, Harvard University