Puerto Rican Diasporas and the Queer Politics of Mobility in Young Adult Literature

• In Event: Puerto Rico, Empire, and Children’s Literature

Abstract

Queer YA literature centered on the experiences of teens in Puerto Rican diasporic settings engages peculiarly with spatiality and geography. While feelings of displacement often characterize Puerto Rican diasporic narratives, these feelings are further amplified and compounded as teen characters grapple with their mutable bodies and desires—further pushing these characters to feel out of place and time. This presentation examines how contemporary YA novels implement the concepts of mobility and spatiality to critique the normative ideologies and tensions that haunt representations of queer youth in Puerto Rican diasporas. Building upon Sara Ahmed’s assertion that spaces transform, contain, and empower certain people at the expense of those who do not fit the norm (157), I focus attention on the interdependent relationship between bodies and spaces. I highlight the significance of mobility and movement in shaping a queer countercultural narrative that challenges normative frameworks present in YA fiction. Even more so, I focus on how queer teens channel mobility as a way of interrogating normative understandings of space and geography while also challenging misguided understandings of belonging, dwelling, and being.

In addition to examining the relationships between queerness, mobility, and diaspora, this analysis determines how narratives negotiate their countercultural aims with the broader frameworks and expectations that inform the creation and proliferation of YA literature—frameworks deeply entrenched in capitalism, imperialism, and whiteness. José Esteban Muñoz has reminded us that these forces are slippery because they involve a complex system of rules and mechanisms focused on universalizing and camouflaging human experiences (137). To what extent do these mechanisms challenge or thwart the political viability of queer diasporic literature? Wherein lies the queer potentiality of movement and mobility in texts that are imbricated in systems of literary production focused on assimilation, universalization, and monetization? To address these questions and issues, I explore how queer YA novels such as Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes a Breath and Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End use the tropes of movement and mobility to both understand and resist how dominant forces police their bodies, identities, and sexualities.

Author

• Angel D Matos, Bowdoin College