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I had the opportunity to sit with Ana Celia Zentella and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel in April 2013 at the Hilton Hotel in Newark, New Jersey. The previous day we had attended a one-day conference held by the Rutgers University Newark-New Brunswick Caribbean Studies Dialogue. The theme, "Revisiting Images and Identities: Thirty Years of Puerto Rican Literature," was a commemoration of the groundbreaking 1983 conference held at Rutgers Newark: "Images and Identities: The Puerto Rican in Literature" organized by Asela Rodríguez de Laguna. It was a brilliant homage with keynotes by Magali García Ramis and Ana Celia Zentella. Panels of authors and academics, such as Marisel Moreno, Rubén Ríos Ávila, and Urayoán Noel, spoke about the complexities and dynamics of poetry, prose, and plays by Puerto Rican writers. Throughout the day Aravind Adyanthaya, Mariposa (Maria Teresa Fernández), Urayoán Noel, and Pedro Cabiya offered electrifying performances.
While the performances and speakers represented a wide variety of authorship and expertise, language and canonicity were two of the underlying tensions throughout the event. Some time was spent on critiquing the limits of the concept of "la gran familia puertorriqueña" and discussing new trends in Puerto Rican literature, that is to say, written on the island and in contemporary Spanish.1 The emphasis on Spanish-language Puerto Rican literature was reflected in the linguistic choice of many of the speakers and panelists, who offered their commentaries and performances in Spanish. Ana Celia Zentella's afternoon keynote, however, marked a permanent shiftin the unspoken conversation between the literatures and language practices of Nuyorican (or U.S.) and island Puerto Rican writers and literary critics.2
Zentella brought into the fold another kind of language politic: one that positioned Nuyorican Spanish as a valid speech in academic settings. At that moment in the conference, Zentella's talk acted as a conciliatory script-the audience and participants engaged with the singular text of her speech. They welcomed the shiftin tone, and a few audience members approached her afterward and thanked her for opening the dialogue. In this way, Zentella extended the criticism of the limitations of "la gran familia puertorriqueña," whose goal was to constrain Puerto Rican poetics to particular Eurocentric and patriarchal norms. Zentella's keynote implicitly critiqued this kind of dislocating-politic, often marked by speech, and highlighted the continual...