The contradictions and complexity of the human being, in constant social interaction, dynamic and conflicting, are some of the themes present in this writer’s poetry.
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.
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.
In the early 1970s, Nicholasa Mohr became one of the pioneers and most notable voices among a growing group of Puerto Rican writers born or raised in the United States.
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.
The publication of her autobiographical memoir When I was Puerto Rican (1993) immediately gained Esmeralda Santiago critical attention as a talented and deliberate narrator of women’s oppressive experiences in a sexist cultural and social environment.
The name of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (better known as Arthur A. Schomburg in the U.S.) is probably better known to the African American community than among Puerto Ricans.