Remembering Abuela: Memory, authenticity and place in Puerto Rican Orlando

Abstract

This article is one piece of a larger work that looks through the case of Puerto Ricans in Orlando, Florida, to examine heterogeneity and political presence in an emerging Latino diaspora community in the US Sunbelt. At issue is the tension between the political appeal to “sameness” as a basis for collective action and the reality of difference. Through an examination of a series of Puerto Rican cultural representations, the article looks at Puerto Rican and Latino political community formation in the Orlando area, and in particular, at the challenges posed by: (i) the racial and class-based lines of exclusion implied in the distinction between island-born and diaspora-born Puerto Ricans, and (ii) the pressure to adopt a whitewashed, middle-class version of Hispanidad, which emerges from Orlando’s post-civil rights era neoliberal multiculturalism.