Nuyorican Cartographies: Welcome to Boogie Rican Boulevard

• In Event: From Cafés to Conflagrations: Re/Mapping NuyoRico Beyond Los Barrios

Abstract

The historical struggle to articulate the spatial and cultural dimensions of a Puerto Rican national identity in the twentieth century is an ongoing effort. Nuyorican artists of the seventies, such as Sandra Maria Esteves, Pedro Pietri, and Adal Maldonado, often write about a dual sense of home, in which they constantly migrate between Puerto Rico and New York. Esteves has strong ties to Puerto Rico and understands her identity as living between here and there. As she puts it in her poem Here: “I am two parts / a person.” While a sense of duality is significant to understanding Nuyorican identity, the musical Boogie Rican Boulevard (2009) written by La Bruja offers an alternative map of Puerto Rico. Rather than living in-between, she anchors herself in a place where the contours of Puerto Rico and the Bronx intersect, and where there is a cultural reciprocity between the Bronx and Puerto Rico. Boogie Rican Boulevard “ain’t New York and it ain’t Puerto Rico”; it is its own location, with its own coordinates. This essay explores the ways La Bruja maps Puerto Rico in the Bronx and complicates notions of Nuyorican identity. I argue that her work suggests that migration does not manifest in the movement of bodies from one place to another, but in superimposing the geographic and cultural boundaries of Puerto Rico and the Bronx. This cartographical shift weaves the enduring history of Puerto Ricans living in the U.S. into the fabric of the Bronx and, by extension, American history.

Author

• Patricia Herrera, University of Richmond