“The Two Ephemeral Wings of the Angel of Love”

Abstract

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel proposes a reinterpretation of Rodríguez de Tió’s classic text by offering a “juxtaposed reading” of two short stories, “Página en blanco y staccato” (1987) by the Puerto Rican Manuel Ramos Otero, and “Los fundadores: Alfonso” (1972), by Lourdes Casal. These stories “project a queered imaginary of Cuban and Puerto Rican imaginaries” by decentering the Hispanophile and Creolist definitions of national identity, highlighting the black and mulatto elements of that identity, and creating Asian and queer characters as emblematic of the Hispanic Caribbean. In many ways, both Casal and Ramos Otero were writing to compensate for the absence of Afro-Asian voices within the historical archives as well as the national literature of their countries during the 1970s and 1980s. Martínez-San Miguel concludes her essay with a discussion of how archipelagic themes and diasporic themes present in these tales undermine traditional nationalist narratives about Cuba and Puerto Rico.