Marta Moreno Vega’s When the Spirits Dance Mambo: Growing Up Nuyorican in El Barrio (2004): The Diasporic Formation of an Afro-Latina Identity

Abstract

Although Puerto Rican and other Caribbean diasporic writers have been publishing in the United States, especially in New York City, over a century, it is during the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s that Puerto Rican literature in the United States in English received national literary recognition. Piri Thomas’ novel Down These Mean Streets (1967) and Nicholasa Mohr’s bildungsroman Nilda (1973) are works that express the concerns of the Puerto Rican diaspora regarding adequate education, employment, and health rights.1 During this period, writers in the United States, like Thomas and Mohr, identified as Nuyorican, a cultural and political self-designated term used by Puerto Ricans who are born or predominantly raised in New York City, after World War II, when waves of working-class Puerto Ricans began to migrate from the island to U.S. cities in the East and Midwest in search of better opportunities for themselves and their families. According to Marta Sanchez, it is no small coincidence that, due to close geographic proximity and similar socioeconomic conditions, Puerto Ricans such as Thomas formed close social alliances with African Americans in Harlem, New York, and thus, became highly influenced in linguistic code, ideological outlook, and consciousness of the social inequalities in their environment.