ABSTRACT
It is said that the industrialization process in Puerto Rico in the decades of the 1940s and 1950s brought a disturbance in all orders, and that the short stories that appear during these years by the so called Generation of 1940 properly attest to this. Treatment of this new theme demands new techniques and stylistic recourses that will adjust to the chaotic and confused nature of the urban world. The fringe areas, the comer bar, the newsstand, the house of prostitution, the Latino barrio in New York, the battlefield in Korea serve as settings for the stories of José Luis González, René Marqués, Pedro Juan Soto, Emilio Díaz Valcárcel, and the people connected with these places- the unemployed, the alcoholic, the prostitute, the spik, the handicapped veteran-are called marginal beings. The drug addict, the so-called tecato (junky) is not included in this group since drug addiction is not perceived as one of the great social calamities of the aforementioned period. I think that it is with “Que sabe a paraíso” by Luis Rafael Sánchez that the character and theme of the drug addict begin to take on real importance in the Puerto Rican short story. 1
