ABSTRACT
Puerto Rico has produced a complex literature that defies simplified, reductionist discussions. Originally a free island inhabited by Arawak Indians, Borinquen became San Juan Bautista and then Puerto Rico, a Spanish colony for four centuries and one of the many outposts of African slavery. Despite the proliferation of American culture, commercialism, and industry on the island over the last century, the influence of the Catholic church is stronger. The American's white house resembles both a master's Big House overlooking the African and Taino field slaves as well as the White House metaphorically overseeing its imperial expansion that culminated in the 1898 takeover of the island after the Spanish-American War. By exploring the spaces in between fiction and nonfiction, male and female, "macho" and "maiden," American and Puerto Rican, oppressor and oppressed, Ortiz Cofer blurs boundaries and envisions a world beyond these binary restrictions.
