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Pura Belpré's life and literary works continue to gain critical attention, yet a main hindrance restricting Belpré's critical assessment is the lack of scholarly inquiry into the cultural role of children and the place of children's literature within the Puerto Rican Diaspora. Puerto Rican, Latino/a, and children's literature studies have yet to fully understand Belpré within U.S. children's literature. As a storyteller, combining both literary and performance traditions, Belpré presented children with representations of the Puerto Rican "nation." Studying her legacy exposes the tensions among literature, performance, the past, and the present. Her subversive "archive of repertoires" provides children with revolutionary tools for resisting U.S. colonialism. However, we must still examine how Belpré represents Puerto Rican culture for children and how she locates her characters within an imagined Island of dreams. [Keywords: Pura Belpré, subversive, children's literature, Puerto Rican childhood, storytelling, performance studies]
the field of puerto rican studies, and subsequently latino/a studies, has recently tapped pura belpré as a historically significant figure worthy of recovery. Her ascent will perhaps gain further momentum as efforts like the documentary, Pura Belpré: Storyteller (2011) and Lisa Sánchez-González's recent book, The Stories I Read to the Children: The Life and Writing of Pura Belpré, the Legendary Storyteller, Children's Author, and New York Public Librarian (2013), continue to circulate.1 Even the recent picture-book by Lucia González, illustrated by Lulu Delacre, The Storyteller's Candle (2008), has memorialized Belpré as a heroine in her own American fable. Considering the seminal, though scarce, scholarly work on Belpré, including Julio Hernández-Delgado's "Pura Teresa Belpré, storyteller and pioneer Puerto Rican librarian" (1992), Sánchez-González's chapter "A Boricua in the Stacks" in Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora (2001), and Victoria Nuñez's "Remembering Pura Belpré's early career at the 135st New York Public Library" (2009), it seems that the greatest hurdle when approaching Belpré is attempting to historicize her sixty-year career while also juggling her seemingly innumerable roles (i.e. librarian, author, folklorist, etc.). What we have established is that Belpré is a woman whose revolutionary efforts in children's literacy and activism directly influenced Puerto Rican and Latino/a culture from the 1920s to 1980s. What we have yet to do, among many things, is theorize the role of children's material and...