During the first half of the 20th century, the literary production of the Puerto Rican population in the United States, which lived mainly in New York City in those decades, was quite limited.
In the Tibes area of Ponce is one of the oldest indigenous archaeological sites in the Caribbean. It consists of 12 stone structures, including ceremonial plazas, bateys and foundations, of which only nine have been restored.
Among the performing poets of the Nuyorican movement, a popularized coined term to identity a New York Puerto Rican, adopted by these writers, and which led to the founding of the Nuyorican Poets Café in 1975, Tato Laviera was one of the best known.
The increased speed and size of the merchant ships of the late 19th century allowed the spread in Puerto Rico of a little-remembered pandemic, the bubonic plague.
He was one of the first second generation Puerto Rican writers of the diaspora to publish an autobiographical novel about his experiences as a black Puerto Rican, born and raised in New York’s El Barrio (Spanish Harlem) during the years of the Great Depression.