The Puerto Rican Literature Project

Sotero Rivera Avilés was born in in 1933 in Añasco, Puerto Rico. He wrote in the lyric style that characterized the Grupo Guajana. Alongside Carmelo Rodríguez Torres and Jorge María Ruscalleda Bercedoniz, he co-founded the group Mester de poetas and the literary journal homónima (1967). His early works include various poetry books: Nostalgia (1957), Abandonos (1958), the unpublished typewritten manuscript El Pueblo Obscuro y una puerta al jardín (unknown date), and a journal titled 1963.

In 1974, Rivera Avilés won the Premio Ventana for Cuaderno de tierra y hombre (Editorial Cultural, 1975). Two years later he published the critical study, La generación del 60: Aproximaciones a tres autores (Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1976). It was followed by the publication of Nada pierdes, caballo viejo (Faena de remedios) in 1989. He completed his only novel, Con premeditación y alevosía: (Radiografía de un crimen), in 1993, and passed away the following year. His body was cremated and his ashes were scattered over the mountains overlooking Humatas. The Rust of History (Circumference Press, 2022), translated by his grandchild, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, is the first selection and translation of his work. 

Rivera Avilés' writing is key to understanding how previously excluded black and impoverished Puerto Ricans gained access to written literature through educational reforms, such as the G.I. Bill, as well as how this inclusion was ultimately conditional. Unlike other writers of his generation, he also wrote about being a postwar veteran in a rural Puerto Rican town and the broken promises of Luis Muñoz Marín's populist modernization projects. He demystified the jíbaro archetype of the naive, but good-natured field-worker, saved by mass migration to urban centers such as San Juan and New York. He wrote openly about his disabilities, delved into the rarely described experiences of post-war reverse migration, and left a record of regionalisms from a world that no longer exists. His is some of the only poetry written about Humatas, his childhood barrio in Añasco, and he always insisted that the breadth of his work could never eclipse the importance of the life he led before acquiring a formal education.