Rising in the Magic Kingdom: The Erasure of Puerto Ricans in Contemporary Florida Youth Literature

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

Abstract

Puerto Rican childhoods in youth literature as whole mostly memorialize Puerto Rican New York, though New York is no longer the central story-scape for vast amounts of children of the Diaspora, especially since the 1990s. Florida, with its legacy of Spanish empire, has played a significant role in the Caribbean imagination- it is also where a majority of Puerto Rican children have experienced childhood and schooling for at least four decades. For Puerto Ricans, the Sunshine State's entire peninsula represented dreams of land and home ownership, job security, and raising a family steps away from Walt Disney's empire of childhood dreams. Indeed, especially after the decisive 2000 election, the US media and politicians fixated on Florida Puerto Ricans and the so-called "Puerto Rican vote." Yet, Florida's historical treatment—as written by textbook writers and other storytellers for young people—of this important Latine community often includes conflating them with other perhaps more affluent Latine migrations or completely ignores them. This paper weaves together the stark erasure of Puerto Ricans from Florida’s textbook narratives, such as Heinemann’s People of Florida (2003) with sociological analysis of what Jorge Duany calls the “Mickey Ricans,” and pamphlets from the NASA and Walt Disney company’s recruitment of Puerto Ricans laborers and scientists. I analyze corporate metaphors of exploration and lands of tomorrow with the Puerto Rican communities long association in US rhetoric with resilience and as a bridge to tomorrow.

Author

• Marilisa Jimenez Garcia, Rutgers University-Camden