The Puerto Rican Literature Project

By Rojo Robles

Translated by Gerardo F. Cárdenas

Modernism

Modernism in Puerto Rico emerged vigorously in the second decade of the 20th century, establishing itself through literary magazines such as Puerto Rico Ilustrado and Revista de las Antillas. Although precursors to the movement date to the late 19th century, it flourished within a context of socioeconomic transformation marked by the rise of the bourgeoisie, the growth of the printing press and the media, and the acceleration of daily life through technological and domestic advances. This poetic movement falls within the hemispheric Modernist wave, using Rubén Darío’s work as a model, and developing features that respond to the realities of the island and the Antilles.

One of the distinctive features of Puerto Rican Modernism is its renovating spirit, which differs from previous movements, such as Romanticism and Naturalism, through its more flexible poetic language and expanding its thematic horizons. Fascination with nascent cities and mythical Greco-Roman sceneries coexist in Modernism, while maintaining a foothold in its insular identity. The experience of travel, the exploration of the exotic, and the intersection of time and space are constant in its aesthetics, reflecting the mobility of the intellectual class between Puerto Rico and Europe.

Modernism also incorporates new sounds and musicalities, adopting rhythms influenced by industrial changes and progress in communication and transportation. Poetry becomes a space for experimentation with neologisms and archaisms, as well as a vehicle for exalting nature as the poet’s spiritual reflection. In its most cosmopolitan aspect, Puerto Rican Modernism celebrates the figure of the flâneur, the adventurer, and the passionate lover, while also exploring the vitality of the city, its technology, its turmoil, and the movement of its working masses.

Together with its urban and sensual dimensions, island Modernism also affirms identity in the face of US colonization. While satirizing outdated models of the Criollo aristocracy and questions ecclesiastical morality, it reaffirms the centrality of the Spanish language and Iberian cultural heritage as a defense against imperial hegemony. Its point of view, however, is not exclusively Eurocentric; it links the realities of the archipelago with epic and libertarian imaginaries from across the Americas. Ultimately, Puerto Rican Modernism is a movement that combines the aesthetic with the political, envisioning a future where beauty and poetic innovation go hand in hand.

Criollismo

In the first quarter of the 20th century, the intellectual and poetic Criollista generation arose as a literary response to the socio-political transformation derived from US imperialism and military incursions in the Caribbean and Latin America. Faced with US hegemony and the expansion of agricultural capitalism, Criollista writers configure a poetry that exalts the island landscape and its rural culture, establishing a symbolic “counter-territory” of resistance. Through odes to the Antillean flora, fauna, and geography, Criollista poetry not only affirms the characteristics of the Caribbean space, but also participates in a transnational movement that crosses all of the Spanish-speaking Americas, articulating a discourse of identity in opposition to imposed, colonial narratives.

With regard to fiction, Criollismo addresses the living conditions of Puerto Rican laborers and peasants in a context of latifundism and agricultural exploitation that recalls the remnants of slavery. Novels and short fiction explore the industrialization of haciendas, the expansion of monoculture–particularly sugar cane, coffee, and tobacco–and the resulting loss of land by the peasantry. The figure of the native is vindicated as a symbol of resistance. Mulatez, recognized as part of the Puerto Rican cultural profile, is represented with ambiguity, oscillating between pride and racial prejudice. In this framework, Criollista literature not only describes the identity crisis derived from modernization and colonialism, but also reflects the first labor movements, union organization, and emerging feminist discussions, often promoted through orality and the circulation of pamphlets and political manifestos.

Within this Criollista aesthetic, land and nature acquire a human and identitarian character, becoming metaphors for the nation in dispute. The boundary between the urban and the rural blurs, favoring the peasant as the most authentic embodiment of Puerto Rican culture. However, the Criollista gaze is also traversed by a telluric and patriarchal eroticism, where women and the land merge in a poetics of possession and domestication. This literary period is testimony to the workers’ struggles. It was also an attempt to consolidate cultural citizenship in Puerto Rico, which, although politically subordinate, sought to assert itself as a distinct entity in the Caribbean and Latin America.

Afro-Antillanism

The Afro-Antillan poetic movement in Puerto Rico included various stages, which reflected both the cultural and racial dynamics of the island, as well as transnational influences on the construction of the Afro-Boricua identity. From the Negrismo of the 1920-1930 period, to contemporary antiracist poetry, poetic production has oscillated between festive exaltation, social denunciation, and the affirmation of the Black genealogy in the Caribbean.

The first period, known as the Negrismo of the 1920s-1930s, was dominated by non-Black Criollo poets who explored Afro-descendant orality as a source of aesthetic innovation. This literary movement was characterized by its emphasis on musicality, rhythm, and the sonority of words of African origin, often used without semantic meaning to generate a percussive effect. This poetry represented street festivities, rumba, and the sensuality of Black or Mulatto women who, through dance, seduced both the poet and the collective imagination. However, although this poetic production made African heritage visible in Antillean identity and challenged bourgeois moralism, it also perpetuated colonial stereotypes, exoticizing the African continent, reproducing 19th century racist imaginaries, and opposing a poorly conceptualized Black “primitivism” to European high culture.

From the 1930s to the 1970s, the Cancionero Puertorriqueño Negro (Puerto Rican Black Songbook) emerged as a vibrant poetic tradition deeply rooted in Afro-Caribbean musical genres such as bomba and plena. This poetic voice reflects the experiences of the Black working classes, addressing contemporary issues, social critique, and political resistance through humor and irony. Afro-Caribbean cuisine and body movements expressed through music become powerful metaphors for identity and rebellion, fostering a collective poetics grounded in enjoyment and sabor. Additionally, this period saw increased internationalization of Afro-Caribbean poetry, with the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York and other US cities serving as dynamic spaces for cultural exchange and dissemination.

The third period, the Afro-Antillanism of the 1960s through the 1980s, delves into the historicity of Blackness, moving away from the exoticism of the initial negrismo. At this time, poetry intertwines with the rhythms of salsa and Afro-Cuban genres, incorporating a greater number of Black poets, musicians, and critics. Afro-Caribbean spirituality ceases to be represented as primitive “magic” and is revalued as a form of cultural recovery. At the same time, there is an examination of the plantation system and its implications for class structure, highlighting the exploitation of Afro-descendant populations. The historical perspective gains prominence, and for the first time, initial explorations of cimarronaje are introduced as a model of resistance and liberation.

In the contemporary period, Afro-Antillean poetry acquires a markedly anti-racist and activist tone. Blackness continues to be considered constitutive of Puerto Rican identity, transcending the limits of nationalism to insert itself into a broader discourse of the African diaspora in the Americas. The recovery of the Afro-Boricuan archive becomes central, emphasizing the dignified representation of Black figures that were rendered invisible. In turn, poetry incorporates Black feminist perspectives, questions racial criminalization and the prison-industrial complex, and revisits cimarronaje as a model of current social action with the possibility of generating futures of liberation. Topics such as food sustainability, the narratives of enslaved people (particularly Black women), and LGBTQI+ experiences also find a place in this new state. In addition, Afro-Boricuan knowledge is institutionalized, with a greater presence in academia and community-based projects, thus consolidating a dynamic poetic movement in constant dialogue with history and the present.

Atalaya de los Dioses

The poetic movement Atalaya de los Dioses emerged in the Ateneo Puertorriqueño as an initiative of young writers who sought to take the avant-garde to new levels after the dissolution of their European counterparts. Influenced by the currents of historical and Latin American avant-garde movements, Puerto Rican poets set out to consolidate and expand the principles of aesthetic experimentation, challenging traditional literary structures and the bourgeois culture they considered stagnant. From their perspective, poetry needed to be a radical search for the renewal of language and poetic images.

The group shared a fascination for movement, speed, and technology with other avant-garde movements, rejecting the rigidity of the past and confronting the cultural institutions that, according to them, stifled local poetic production. They viewed tradition as a mummified body, an inert structure that had to be demolished to give way to a new form of expression. Their poetry did not seek the mimesis of outdated realities, but rather the creation of new worlds, embracing creationism as a guiding principle. In this sense, they proclaimed themselves the first truly innovative poetic group in Puerto Rico, surpassing previous, brief avant-garde experiments, such as Noísmo.

Atalaya’s concept of poetry transcended the literary sphere: they saw it as a spiritual peak, a poetic gospel, and an intellectual fortification, which explains their name. Their verses were an affront to traditional poets. They advocated a poetics of the irrational, embracing eclecticism and the dissolution of logic, distancing themselves from Romantic and Modernist structures to immerse themselves in a universe of unexpected images and fantastical settings. They experimented with the fragmentation of time and space, as well as with multiple points of view, which distanced them from any form of linear narration.

Their rebellion was not just aesthetic; it embodied a profound dissatisfaction with the cultural and political landscape of Puerto Rico in the 1920s and 1930s. They saw themselves as precursors of the nationalist movement led by Pedro Albizu Campos, sharing his anti-colonial stance and his call for cultural and political sovereignty. Through poetry, they denounced colonization as a confusion that clouded Puerto Rican identity and proposed an autonomous literature.

The group’s transgressive attitude was not limited to writing: they embodied their rebellion through their lifestyle, with long hair, unusual clothing, and the use of popular media, such as radio, to spread their message. At times, they sought a solidarity connection between the poet and the reader, but at other times their stance was aggressive, seeking shock and confrontation. Their rejuvenated language, redemptive assertions, and eagerness to establish a new poetic religion led them to be seen as a response to the conformism and apathy of youth, an alternative to a culture sickened by political and literary inertia. Atalaya de los Dioses left a resounding mark on Puerto Rican literature, a testament to poetic insurgency and the struggle to renew art and national identity.

The 1930s Generation

The 1930s in Puerto Rico represented a period of profound political, economic, labor, and discursive crises. In this tumultuous context, the Nationalist Party, under the leadership of Pedro Albizu Campos, launched an insurgent struggle against the United States’ colonial regime. At the same time, labor and student movements played an active role in shaping a cultural nation. The University of Puerto Rico became an intellectual epicenter, where writers and academics, especially those aligned with Hispanism, debated the essence of Puerto Rican identity. Hispanism promoted the reaffirmation of ties with Spain as a form of resistance against assimilation imposed by US rule, thus establishing discourses that defined dominant interpretations of Puerto Rican identity.

One of the fundamental texts of this period was Insularismo (1934) by Antonio S. Pedreira, which encapsulated the generation’s anxieties surrounding national identity. His discourse, however, revealed the prevailing xenophobia and latent racism among the dominant intellectual classes. Pedreira presented a pathological metaphor to describe Puerto Ricans, which described them as disoriented subjects, products of African docility, indigenous frailty, and the Spanish grandeur that was supposed to be preserved. Pedreira’s proposal for progress and civilization was anchored in a European ideal, perpetuating the colonial narrative that infantilized the nation and justified a paternalistic and anti-black approach for its development.

The poetry of the 1930s generation emerged in response to thai ideological framework as a site of aesthetic experimentation and cultural affirmation, engaging in dialogue with the 20th century avant-garde and Hispanic poetic traditions. In their lyrical work, the poets of the 1930s articulated a collective poetics that oscillated between celebrating criollo identity, metaphysical introspection, and denouncing the country’s social realities. The literary movement of Negrismo opened new, albeit debatable, possibilities for representing the African presence in Puerto Rican culture, while nationalist poetry turned lyrics into a vehicle of struggle against colonialism. On the other hand, intimist and subjective exploration poetry expanded the horizons of poetic language. These poetics, far from being homogeneous, coexisted and intertwined, configuring a literary imaginary that sought to express the tensions of a nation in crisis, affirming its identity and opening new paths for Puerto Rican literature.

The 1950s Generation

The intellectual and poetic generation of the 1950s in Puerto Rico is characterized by its aesthetic diversity and a profound questioning of the colonial and modernizing order imposed by the Estado Libre Asociado (ELA, Free Associated State). Multiple poetic currents coexist in this generation: one marked by a strong social commitment and a strong criticism of US exploitation in Puerto Rico and Latin America, and another one, influenced by transcendentalism and avant-garde movements, experimenting with alternate realities and abstract poetics. These currents emerge in a moment of political and social transformations, in which the modernization promoted by Luis Muñoz Marín’s Popular Democratic Party reinforces a structural dependence on the United States, concealed under the euphemism of the ELA. Despite the cultural nationalistic rhetoric promoted by the government, the colonial structures remain intact, generating friction with global decolonization movements, particularly in Africa and the Caribbean.

The rise of the División de Educación a la Comunidad (DIVEDCO, Division of Education to the Community) is another fundamental aspect of this era. Through its campaigns, this project promoted accessible art to rural communities and marginalized sectors, establishing artists and poets as managers and workshop facilitators in community action. However, DIVEDCO also operated within the framework of the ELA, modeling citizenship and public participation aligned with the official discourse of the State. In parallel, the nationalist insurgency manifested itself strongly in the archipelago and Washington, DC, driving struggles for armed decolonization, resulting in harsh governmental repression through the Gag Law, censorship, and the persecution of independentist militants.

In the literary field, French Existentialism, post-World War II US American literature, and avant-garde movements impacted a new generation of writers, particularly in playwriting and short fiction. This literature expresses a marked pessimism towards socio-economic changes, including the massive migration of Puerto Ricans to US cities, especially New York. It critiqued the process of assimilation, the irruption of English, and labor and social exploitation in US industries.

Although patriarchal models remain in effect, women’s discourse gains ground in the literature of the time. A tragic vision of the Puerto Rican identity is consolidated through poetry and essays, charged with nostalgia for the loss of Spanish and Criollo values and the apparent docility of the people in the face of colonialism. In opposition to this prevailing vision, however, an openly anti-colonial and socialist artistic movement emerges that challenges the cultural hegemony of the ELA and proposes a more radical resistance to the imposed colonial modernity.

Guajana

The Guajana poetic movement arose in Puerto Rico during the 1960s, mainly among students and professors of the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Puerto Rico. Since its founding, Guajana took a critical and committed stance toward Puerto Rican history, culture, politics, and society, establishing a poetics intertwined with the country’s social struggles. Its members conceived literature as an anti-colonial discursive weapon, relying on a knowledge of history to question power structures and narrate the experiences of the marginalized.

This movement was characterized by the search for a collective poetic voice, marked by an epic and iconoclastic patriotic zeal. Writers challenged canonical Puerto Rican literature, proposing a fierce revision of official narratives and rejecting the untouchable figures of poetry and academia. Its name, Guajana, alludes to the sugar cane flower, evoking the plantations as a symbol of the colonial order imposed by Spain and perpetuated under US rule. Thus, the journal that housed the movement became a site of literary and political struggle, with a rebellious attitude and a revolutionary purpose: poetry for radical social change.

Amid industrialization and ELA consolidation, Guajana denounced Puerto Rico’s modernization as problematic, highlighting the processes of transculturation and Americanization that, far from signifying progress, reaffirmed Puerto Rico’s colonial condition. Moreover, it paid special attention to internal migrations from the countryside to the city and the massive emigration to the United States, focusing on the experiences of the working classes, displaced after the fall of the sugar industry and monocultures. Guajana’s criticism also reached the Puerto Rican elites, whom they accused of being bourgeois and complicit with US imperialism.

From an aesthetic point of view, Guajana promoted poetics anchored in social consciousness and left-wing political criticism. Their mostly freestyle verses adopted a colloquial and even street-style language without renouncing a broad and multivocal register. The group has maintained its commitment to a constantly evolving poetry, always in conversation with Puerto Rican reality, throughout its 50-plus years of existence. Their literary project distances itself from “official” culture by claiming its own space where literature and poetry are envisioned as transformative tools and where poets see themselves as shapers of the future.

Neovanguardism

Between the 1960s and the 1980s, Puerto Rican poetry experienced a neovanguardist turn, characterized by aesthetic radicalization and the expansion of formal and thematic limits. The Neovanguardist movement resumed and transformed the strategies of 20th-century avant-gardes, adopting collage as a poetic model and establishing the fragment as a structuring principle. The poetry of this period opened spaces for polyphony, linguistic hybridity, and intertextuality through the superimposition of textures, voices, and slang.

Acting in dissent against the domesticity imposed by the patriarchy, poetic discourse incorporated an exploration of the body and sexuality in their transgressive dimensions. Women and queer poets challenged hegemonic canons, making previously invisible experiences visible. At the same time, poets disrupted tone by incorporating humor, sarcasm, and comic absurdity, unsettling the gravity of lyrical tradition and approaching forms of antipoetry.

Neovanguardist poets constructed a new proletarian heroism amid uneven modernization and economic crisis. Poetry not only documented labor and working-class struggles but also amplified the voices of Puerto Rican immigrants in the United States living in conditions of systematic poverty. In this sense, Spanglish was consolidated as an expressive tool that reflected the linguistic and cultural displacements of the diaspora, incorporating the influences of Black radical poetry and the New York Spoken Word movement. The tension between the island and the diaspora increased, generating debates about identity and belonging in transnational Puerto Rican communities.

Puerto Rican Neovanguardism oscillated between aesthetic experimentation and socially and politically committed poetry, in tune with socialist and independentist ideologies. Neovanguardists evoked the memory of state censorship and violence against national revolutionary movements, denounced the United States imperialist wars, and took Cuban revolutionary poetry and the Nueva Trova songbook as key influences.

Through the poetics of everyday life, literature captured the contradictions of the modernization process, addressing the premature obsolescence of development projects and persistent social inequalities. Writers narrated history from non-institutional angles, prioritizing liminal voices and the stories of popular sectors.

Narratives of the lumpen class and experiences of the economic and socially marginalized gained prominence. Writers intertwined narcotic perspectives and criticism of sensory and biopolitical control regimes with literary experimentation, revealing a poetics of transience and swing.

Literary magazines such as Alicia la Roja, Zona de carga y descarga, Reintegro, and Armadura functioned as sites for the establishment of aesthetic practices and the dissemination of new trends. Poetry expanded beyond the written page, connecting with graphic art, political posters, and concrete art. Visual elements, drawings, and photographs turned poems into hybrid and multimedia pieces.

The impact of media and audiovisual archives also marked poetic production. The use of narrative in poetry and the intensification of experimentation with orality generated new verbal games and heteroglossia, which questioned the limits of language through minimalism, hypertext, and poetic self-reflexivity.

Neovanguardist poets identified with cimarronaje, evoking African and Taino resistance through the poetics of areítos and the rhythmic musicality of words. Thus, a minor and deterritorialized literature emerged as a space where orality and translation functioned as bridges between the island and the diaspora.

Puerto Rican Neovanguardism established a poetry of rupture, marked by radical experimentation with language, cultural hybridity, and the politicization of form. In its dialogue with historical modernists, Afro-Caribbean poetics, and politically committed literature, this movement articulated an aesthetic imaginary where the word became a site of resistance, reinvention, and testimony.

Concretism

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, concrete poetry took hold in Puerto Rico as one of the most radical expressions of literary experimentation. Linked to a lineage of international avant-garde movements from the late 19th century, concretism revolutionized how the poem was conceived, transforming it into a visual, tactile, and spatial object. In its formulation, the word does not dominate the image, nor vice versa; both coexist on the page with equal importance, exploring the surface as a field of autonomous significance. The typographic arrangement, geometry, and interaction of the text with the reader’s gaze create a game of perception where poetry is designed as much as it is read.

Puerto Rican concrete poets found inspiration in ideogrammatic writing, calligrams, and graphic models from industrial design, architecture, and commercial printing. Influenced by the grid of newspapers and magazine formats and the aesthetics of comics, their proposals blurred the boundaries between the literary and the visual. The language of advertising, film titles, and commercial signs was appropriated and reconfigured in an exercise of synthesis and expressive forcefulness, decentering the authorial voice to privilege a collective and fragmentary poetics.

Beyond formal exploration, concretism in Puerto Rico also reflected on the body and its relationship with the urban environment, investigating both the organic forms and the structures of power that shape modern experience. Transit, the means of transportation, and the mechanical nature of industrial life appear in compositions not only as themes, but also as structural principles that are gestured through repetition and the rhythmic disposition of the text. Furthermore, concretism operated as a transdisciplinary counterculture that absorbed elements of dance, performance, and the performing arts, disintegrating the limits of the poem. However, this poetry finds its greatest challenge in orality: its graphic and spatial conception makes it difficult to reproduce aloud, reinforcing its object-like character. Puerto Rican concretism expanded poetic writing, proposing a new grammar of space and form where the reader and the poem interact in a visual territory of multiple potentialities.

Nuyorican

The Nuyorican poetic movement emerged in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a response to the social, political, and cultural conditions faced by the Puerto Rican community in the city. This movement is characterized by its connection to previous literary and artistic currents and its unique focus on the Puerto Rican and Afro-Caribbean experience in the United States.

Nuyorican poets show affinities with the Beat countercultural movement of the 1950s, sharing with it a poetics of orality marked by improvisation and the influence of jazz music. This poetics develops in urban spaces and is nourished by spontaneity and free expression. However, the Nuyorican movement is politically closer to the African American Black Arts Movement, which promoted the creation of insurgent cultural spaces to counter systemic marginalization and state violence in US cities.

The movement incorporates community and occupation struggles of the Young Lords revolutionary movement, as well as the issue of Puerto Rican independence and the human rights of Puerto Rican and Afro-Caribbean individuals in New York. Nuyorican poets criticize the exclusions of governmental and institutional systems that have historically marginalized the Puerto Rican community.

Nuyorican poetics is characterized by its focus on urban life. Poets use their voices to bring the community together and express their ideas about society and the hybrid identity of the children of the Puerto Rican immigrant generation of the 1940s and the 1950s. Disillusioned by the racism and violent treatment received, this generation rejected ideas of assimilation into white US culture and proposed a hybridity that drew energy from the margins.

Emphasizing embodiment and radical performance, while incorporating elements of confrontation that sometimes bordered on illegality, the movement has been integrated into Puerto Rican and US cultural narratives thanks to the efforts of individuals such as professor, editor, and poet Miguel Algarín. Algarín founded the Nuyorican Poets Café in his living room and then moved it to Lower East Side bars, all while co-editing three iconic anthologies.

In his introduction to the 1975 Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feeling anthology, Algarín describes Nuyorican poets as word jugglers and risk-takers who present themselves as masters of the urban environment. According to Algarín, Nuyorican poetry is a force in the streets, characterized by a disorderly, tense, and informal bilingual communication, offering visions of the future.

In his essay, “Nuyorican Literature,” Algarín highlights three principles of Nuyorican aesthetics: bilingual orality communicating the Puerto Rican condition in psychological, economic, and historical terms; creation of systems of mutual aid and protection through a language enabling survival in the city; and the creation of spaces where people can come together and share their writings.

However, Nuyorican aesthetics surpassed Algarín’s ideas, something that needs to be understood in connection to Black Surrealisms and Dadaisms, punk aesthetics, Afro-Caribbean cultural affirmations, Pan-African decolonial poetics, and the emerging feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements. These elements broadened the movement’s scope, integrating multiple forms of cultural resistance and exploring new areas of identity and artistic expression.

Postmodernism

The postmodernism movement arose in Puerto Rico during the 1990s and 2000s, amid a profound structural crisis of the Estado Libre Asociado (ELA, Associated Free State), marked by the exhaustion of the great political narratives of the 20th century, urban decay, and the consolidation of late capitalism mediated by consumer culture. This period is characterized by writers’ immersion in economic and cultural processes that placed them in a relationship of dependence on transnational markets, altering their capacity for agency. Media technoculture, including the expansion of the Internet and multiple virtual platforms, acts as a catalyst for semantic changes, modifying the forms of writing, subjectivity, and the experience of time.

More than a break with modernity, postmodernism represented its evolution, as it continued to explore urban life and accelerated living in a context where the symbolic structures that organized community life had been weakened. A type of poetics developed that confronted the saturation and juxtaposition of contradictory discourses, while distancing itself from the anticolonial liberation projects promoted by the traditional left. The destabilization of the imperial order did not disappear, but gave way to less grandiose forms of resistance, inscribed in infrapolitics and the possibility of mutual aid networks.

In this period, the unified subject began to deconstruct, becoming a deterritorialized, ephemeral, and fluid entity. Multiple textualities took center stage, traversed by a heteroglossia in which transnational perspectives coexisted simultaneously. Rather than affirming a national identity, postmodernism emphasized hybrid identities, processes of nomadism, and forms of multiculturalism that overflew the island and the US territories. In this context, national identity was understood as a commodity, while patriotic discourse became the subject of questioning and resistance.

Through poetry and essays, postmodernism became a site for criticism and deconstruction of canonical textualities. The performativity of social spheres became a central axis, articulating hybrid and technologically mutant bodies. The experience of the city–with its shopping malls, abandonment, and decay–translated into poetics of detritus, anti-poetry, and la quedadera (lingering). The proliferation of magazines such as Posdata, Nómada, and Bordes exemplified this cultural and political decline, serving as key venues for theoretical and literary experimentation.

In summation, the Puerto Rican postmodernism of the 1990s and 2000s represented an evolution of modernism, introducing new forms of thought and creation in a context of crisis and transformation. Postmodernist writers were intellectuals trained in post-Marxist and post-Structuralist currents, with transnational experiences allowing them to break away from provincialism and the humanistic formation of Hispanist origins. Their project was not one of national redemption, but rather the articulation of itinerant discourses, which challenged the confines of national and imperial settings, and the exploration of new forms of subjectivity, textuality, and cultural resistance.

Contemporary Poetry

Contemporary Puerto Rican poetry has maintained a marked anticolonial character, reflecting Puerto Rico’s historical and sociopolitical struggles. During the final decades of the 20th century, this drive intensified in response to events such as the 1992 commemoration of the Quincentennial of the Spanish colonization, when the official narrative of “The Encounter of Two Worlds” was rejected by poets and writers who denounced the continuity of colonialism on the island. Likewise, the struggle for the expulsion of the United States Navy from Vieques in the late 1990s influenced a generation of writers who articulated a poetics of resistance, addressing the urgency of confronting imperialism from literary and grassroots movements.

Throughout the 21st century, Puerto Rican poetry has expanded its frames of reference, moving away from strictly nationalist visions and traditional discourses of the institutional left. In its place, a plurality of voices has emerged, integrating intersectional and multisectoral perspectives. Postmodern thought has also played a key role, providing critical tools to question hegemonic narratives about identity, nation, and culture, opening up to poetic expressions previously relegated to the margins.

The economic collapse of Puerto Rico, exacerbated by the end of the tax incentives of Section 836 and the growing dependence on the US market, led to a deep crisis officially recognized since 2006. This situation has had a significant impact on poetry, giving rise to infra-political perspectives that question the dominant narrative of the ELA and reevaluate the function of art in a context of economic strife and declining political models. At the same time, the massive Puerto Rican emigration to the United States and other countries has strengthened the ties between the diaspora and the island, dismantling stereotypes of betrayal and assimilation that historically weighed on Puerto Ricans abroad.

In this new landscape, neoliberal globalization and the transnationalization of the media, especially the Internet, have facilitated the emergence of poetics that integrate cultural and activist references of global scope. These same poetics, nevertheless, look warily upon hegemonic cultural markets, prioritizing alternative discourses and strategies. Likewise, the 21st century has brought a growing interest in making historically marginalized communities visible, not only by colonial structures, but also by protest movements with patriarchal, heterosexist, and purist tendencies at a linguistic and anti-diasporic level.

The impact of 1980s-1990s hip hop , Spoken Word, underground, and reggaeton–the latter criminalized by the government–has been fundamental in the configuration of new poetics. These genres have opened up sites of expression for the racialized, surveilled, and massively incarcerated popular classes, providing a language of resistance against state repression. Poetic forms vindicating sexuality and the body as tools of subversion against the status quo, sometimes articulating discourses from queer, feminist, and decolonial aesthetics, have emerged from those movements.

Editorial projects that operate from a logic of self-management, cultural resistance, and community collaboration have emerged since the late 20th century and throughout the 21st century. In a context of economic crisis and precarity in the publishing industry, these initiatives have allowed the production and distribution of books outside the dominant commercial circuits. In addition, they have contributed to the creation of transnational networks of writers, poets, and artists, facilitating exchanges with other Latin American, Caribbean, and US literary groups.

Digitization and access to social networks have also enhanced the impact of these publishers, allowing the distribution of texts, performances, and poetic events beyond the archipelago. A more dynamic and inclusive literary ecosystem has emerged through strategies such as handcrafted editing, crowdfunding, and the organization of readings in alternative spaces, enabling contemporary poetics to flourish without reliance on traditional institutional validation.

Contemporary Puerto Rican poetry has broadened its thematic and formal spectrum, centering feminist, LGBTQIA+, Afro-Caribbean, and diasporic voices. This process has enriched the literary panorama, opening new possibilities for poetic expression in crisis, migration, intermediality, performance, and cultural transformation.

Contemporary Poetry After Hurricane Maria

On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria swept through the Puerto Rican archipelago, marking one of the most destructive and deadly weather events in the island’s recent history. Its devastating winds, massive floods, and landslides transformed the landscape into ruins, but it was the long recovery process that turned the catastrophe into a greater nightmare. Institutional neglect, economic degradation, and bureaucracy imposed by local government and federal entities deepened the crisis, highlighting the fragility of infrastructure and the lack of protection for the population. Among the most significant consequences of the hurricane was the longest blackout in the archipelago’s history since the installation of its electrical system in the 20th century. The resulting darkness not only represented the lack of energy but also the disruption of essential services, the collapse of the hospitals, and a hike in mortality rates.

In this context of disaster and abandonment, contemporary Puerto Rican poetry emerged with renewed force, becoming a space for resistance, denunciation, and symbolic reconstruction. Activists, academics, artists, and poets made visible the colonial legacy of Puerto Rico and the cabotage laws that perpetuated its economic dependence to analyze not only the immediate consequences of the hurricane but also its long-term effects. Researchers such as Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol Lebrón coined the phrase “aftershocks of disaster” to describe the socio-political and cultural impact that continues to emerge years later. In the field of poetry, writer and transgender translator Roque Raquel Salas Rivera articulated the phrase “there is no post-hurricane world,” an idea that served as the thematic axis for the first exhibition of Puerto Rican art in 50 years at the Whitney Museum, which explored interdisciplinary poetics about disaster, survival, and protest.

The impact of Maria was a turning point in Puerto Rican poetry, creating new routes of thematic and aesthetic exploration. Post-Maria poetry is characterized by an incisive critique of colonial capitalism, the climate crisis, and the structural inequalities that affect Puerto Rico. It denounces human rights neglect, systematic inequalities against women and LGBTQIA+ individuals, institutional racism in the United States, the unpayable debt imposed by the Fiscal Control Board, the vulnerability of health systems, school closures, and the precarity of education. In addition, it highlights the morbid media coverage of Puerto Rican suffering and the forced migrations caused by climate disasters.

It is within this panorama that direct and community support networks in the archipelago, as well as the diaspora, have stepped in to provide aid in the State’s absence. Poets, critics, writers, and editors have used digital media, print publications, performances, and literary artifacts to narrate social and economic precarity, massive displacement, and the sense of displacement in US cities. Poetry has taken on an urgent and immediate role, manifesting a literate intensity marked by courage and rage. From insularity and the diaspora, words have become a tool of combat and memory, a way to imagine alternatives to a present fractured by negligence and the coloniality of disaster.

The critical weight of post-Maria poetry found an immediate echo in the massive protests of the summer of 2019 that culminated in then-governor Ricardo Roselló’s resignation. The same concerns that poets had articulated in the years after the hurricane–government corruption, institutional neglect, economic crisis, and the precarity of life–triggered an unprecedented mobilization. In this sense, poetry and cultural activism played a crucial role as vehicles of resistance and collective expression. Performances, graffiti, slogans, and verses took to the streets, intertwining poetic denunciation with popular indignation. Thus, post-Maria poetry documented the crisis and contributed to imagining and demanding a fair nation, free from the colonial and neoliberal structures perpetuating Puerto Rico’s vulnerability.

Interventions via Translation

Contemporary poets have brought their diasporic experiences to the practice of translation, addressing displacements, returns, and linguistic frictions that traverse its production. Through personal experience and poetry, they embody the transnational Puerto Rican practices and movements between the archipelago, the United States, Latin America, and Europe.

Working as translators, educators, and cultural promoters, their various labor informs their poetics and allows contemporary poets to explore translation as a process in which the political, the sociocultural, the philosophical, and the linguistic intersect and strain. Aware of systemic exclusion and erasures in the publishing industry, particularly in the United States, many contemporary poets consider translation as a means of linguistic and cultural legibility, as well as a practice shaped by the logics of capital. Faced with this exploitation, some turn to illegibility as a form of resistance.

These poets make visible the frictions of language, foregrounding stories of imperial and colonial domination. They do not seek to hide the hierarchies and hegemonies of colonization, racialization, and the gender binary, but rather confront and reinscribe them in their writings. From this perspective, languages are neither neutral nor objective, but reflect social and political relations marked by inequality.

The most prominent strategy is the use of idiosyncratic translation, in which the translator acts as a creative agent to rewrite the text, thereby revealing political and sensitive processes that the original might hide. Another approach is the creation of bilingual texts that expose the impasses of translation, making visible the differences between languages in contact or conflict. In such translations, idiomatic expressions, place names, and cultural references are kept in the original language, highlighting the opacity of language and its resistance to complete assimilation and commodification.

Self-translation is another central practice in poetic intervention. By taking on the translation themselves, poets denaturalize the linguistic transit and reveal the performativity of translation itself. Although delicate, self-translation can serve as a model of linguistic and cultural sovereignty, in which the poet-translator’s voice is positioned at the threshold of languages and their tensions. 

Poetic practices grounded in translation highlight the fractures of colonial discourse and envision new ways of situating subjectivity within diasporic and migratory experiences.

References

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Padua, Reynaldo Marcos, editor. Antología de la poesía atalayista. Los libros de la Iguana, 2020

Sánchez González, Lisa. Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. New York University Press, 2001. 

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Vásquez, Carmen. “Guajana poesía y manifiesto (Puerto Rico, 1962). Polémicas de una juventud desgarrada”. América, 1998, pp. 95-102. 

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How to cite this essay:

Robles, Rojo. “Puerto Rican Poetic Movements.” Translated by Gerardo F. Cárdenas, Proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña/Puerto Rican Literature Project, 2025, https://plpr.uh.edu/s/es/page/movimientos-poeticos-puertorriquenos.