Looking to get up to speed on Puerto Rican literature? Take a peek at this list of books, courtesy of What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez author Claire Jiménez. From poetry to memoir, you’ll no doubt find something as rich as it is rewarding. After you wander through the below, check out the Page and Pairing guide to Claire's debut novel, here.
What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez
by Claire Jimenez
A powerful novel that's "hilarious, heartbreaking, and ass-kicking" (Jamie Ford), of a Puerto Rican family in Staten Island who discovers their long-missing sister is potentially alive and cast on a reality TV show, and they set out to bring her home.
NOVELS AND DRAMA
When We Make It: A Nuyorican Novel
by Elisabet Velasquez
Sarai is a first-generation Puerto Rican question asker who can see with clarity the truth, pain, and beauty of the world both inside and outside her Bushwick apartment. Together with her older sister, Estrella, she navigates the strain of family traumas and the systemic pressures of toxic masculinity and housing insecurity in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn. Sarai questions the society around her, her Boricua identity, and the life she lives with determination and an open heart, learning to celebrate herself in a way that she has long been denied.
Velorio
by Xavier Navarro Aquino
Camila is haunted by the death of her sister, Marisol, who was caught by a mudslide during the huracán. Unable to part with Marisol, Camila carries her through town, past the churchyard, and, eventually, to the supposed utopia of Memoria. Velorio – meaning “wake” – is a story of strength, resilience, and hope; a tale of peril and possibility buoyed by the deeply held belief in a people's ability to unite against those corrupted by power.
Carmen and Grace
by Melissa Coss Aquino
Carmen and Grace have been inseparable since they were little girls – more like sisters than cousins, survivors of a childhood marked by neglect and addiction and a system that never valued them. For too long, all they had was each other. That is, until Doña Durka swept into their lives and changed everything, taking Grace into her home, providing stability and support, and playing an outsize role in Carmen's upbringing too. As tough and tender as its main characters, Carmen and Grace will grab readers from the first page with its raw beauty, depth of feeling, and heart-pounding plot. A moving meditation on the choices of women and the legacy of violence, it's a devastatingly wise and intimate story about the bonds of female friendship, ambition, and found family.
Sirena Selena
by Mayra Santos-Febres
Discovered by Martha Divine in the backstreets of San Juan, picking over garbage, drugged out of his mind and singing boleros that transfix the listener, a fifteen-year-old hustler is transformed into Sirena Selena, a diva whose uncanny beauty and irrisistable voice will be their ticket to fame and fortune. Auditioning for one of the luxury hotels in the Dominican Republic, Selena casts her spell over Hugo Graubel, one of the hotel's rich investors. Graubel is a powerful man in the Republic, married with children. Silena, determined to escape the poverty and abuse s/he suffered as a child, engages Graubel in a long seduction in this mordant, intensely lyrical tragi-comedy – part masque, part cabaret - about identity (class, race, gender) and “the hunger and desire to be other things.”
Water by the Spoonful
by Quiara Alegría Hudes
Somewhere in Philadelphia, Elliot has returned from Iraq and is struggling to find his place in the world. Somewhere in a chat room, recovering addicts forge an unbreakable bond of support and love. The boundaries of family and community are stretched across continents and cyberspace as birth families splinter and online families collide. The play Water by the Spoonful is a heartfelt and poetic meditation on lives on the brink of redemption and self-discovery during a time of heightened uncertainty, "as startling and innovative and human on the page as on the stage" (Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-Winning author). Hudes's cycle of three plays began with Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue (Pulitzer Prize finalist) and concludes with The Happiest Song Plays Last.
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Love War Stories
by Ivelisse Rodriguez
Puerto Rican girls are brought up to want one thing: true love. Yet they are raised by women whose lives are marked by broken promises, grief, and betrayal. While some believe that they'll be the ones to finally make it work, others swear not to repeat cycles of violence. This collection documents how these "love wars" break out across generations as individuals find themselves caught in the crosshairs of romance, expectations, and community.
Now We Will Be Happy
by Amina Gautier
Now We Will Be Happy is a prize-winning collection of stories about Afro-Puerto Ricans, U.S.-mainland-born Puerto Ricans, and displaced native Puerto Ricans who are living between spaces while attempting to navigate the unique culture that defines their identity. Amina Gautier's characters deal with the difficulties of bicultural identities in a world that wants them to choose only one. Crossing boundaries of comfort, culture, language, race, and tradition in unexpected ways, these characters struggle valiantly and doggedly to reconcile their fantasies of happiness with the realities of their existence.
When Trying to Return Home: Stories
by Jennifer Maritza McCauley
Profoundly moving and powerful, the stories in When Trying to Return Home dig deeply into the question of belonging. A young woman is torn between overwhelming love for her mother and the need to break free from her damaging influence during a desperate and disastrous attempt to rescue her brother from foster care. A college student grapples with the space between chivalry and machismo in a tense encounter involving a nun. And in 1930s Louisiana, a woman attempting to find a place to call her own chances upon an old friend at a bar and must reckon with her troubled past. Forming a web of desires and consequences that span generations, McCauley's Black American and Afro-Puerto Rican characters remind us that these voices have always been here, occupying the very center of American life – even if we haven't always been willing to listen.
MEMOIR
Ordinary Girls: A Memoir
by Jaquira Díaz
While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Díaz found herself caught between extremes. As her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was supported by the love of her friends. As she longed for a family and home, her life was upended by violence. As she celebrated her Puerto Rican culture, she couldn't find support for her burgeoning sexual identity. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico's history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Díaz writes with raw and refreshing honesty, triumphantly mapping a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be. Reminiscent of Tara Westover's Educated, Kiese Laymon's Heavy, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, and Terese Marie Mailhot's Heart Berries, Jaquira Díaz's memoir provides a vivid portrait of a life lived in (and beyond) the borders of Puerto Rico and its complicated history – and reads as electrically as a novel.
Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood
by Judith Ortiz Cofer
Silent Dancing combines poetry and prose to form an innovative and deeply personal narrative that explores Judith Ortiz Cofer's memories of her childhood spent between Puerto Rico and New Jersey. Winner of the 1991 PEN/Martha Albrand Special Citation for Nonfiction. "This book is a treasure, a secret door opening onto memories locked away long ago" – San Francisco Chronicle.
A Puerto Rican in New York
by Jesus Colon
A Puerto Rican in New York makes invaluable reading for anyone who would gain a closer understanding of labor and immigrant history, ethnic and racial relations, and the centrality of Caribbean-U.S. affairs in the present-day workings of world imperialism. Jesus Colon throws open a window through which all can hear an intelligible and sympathetic Puerto Rican voice.
When I Was Puerto Rican: A Memoir
by Esmeralda Santiago
In a childhood full of tropical beauty and domestic strife, poverty and tenderness, Esmeralda Santiago learned the proper way to eat a guava, the sound of tree frogs, the taste of morcilla, and the formula for ushering a dead baby's soul to heaven. But when her mother, Mami, a force of nature, takes off to New York with her seven, soon to be eleven children, Esmeralda, the oldest, must learn new rules, a new language, and eventually a new identity. In the first of her three acclaimed memoirs, Esmeralda brilliantly recreates her tremendous journey from the idyllic landscape and tumultuous family life of her earliest years, to translating for her mother at the welfare office, and to high honors at Harvard.
Down These Mean Streets: A Memoir
by Piri Thomas
Thirty years ago Piri Thomas made literary history with this lacerating, lyrical memoir of his coming of age on the streets of Spanish Harlem. Here was the testament of a born outsider: a Puerto Rican in English-speaking America; a dark-skinned morenito in a family that refused to acknowledge its African blood. Here was an unsparing document of Thomas's plunge into the deadly consolations of drugs, street fighting, and armed robbery – a descent that ended when the twenty-two-year-old Piri was sent to prison for shooting a cop. As he recounts the journey that took him from adolescence in El Barrio to a lock-up in Sing Sing to the freedom that comes of self-acceptance, faith, and inner confidence, Piri Thomas gives us a book that is as exultant as it is harrowing and whose every page bears the irrepressible rhythm of its author's voice.
POETRY
The Crazy Bunch
by Willie Perdomo
Willie Perdomo, a native of East Harlem, has won praise as a hip, playful, historically engaged poet whose restlessly lyrical language mixes "city life with a sense of the transcendent" (NPR.org). In his fourth collection, The Crazy Bunch, Perdomo returns to his beloved neighborhood to create a vivid, kaleidoscopic portrait of a "crew" coming of age in East Harlem at the beginning of the 1990s. In poems written in couplets, vignettes, sketches, riffs, and dialogue, Perdomo recreates a weekend where surviving members of the crew recall a series of tragic events: "That was the summer we all tried to fly. All but one of us succeeded."
Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy
by Andrés Cerpa
These quiet, descriptive poems blaze with an inferno of lamenting and loving muses as a son helplessly watches his father suffer from a debilitating illness. The inquisitive voice of the speaker gently paints an emotional landscape ranging from childhood to the present, while trying to find glimpses of happiness in the imminent sorrow.
Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple
by Malcolm Friend
In Our Bruises Keep Singing Purple, Afro-Jamaican-Boricua poet, Malcolm Friend, has gifted us with a collection that is politically charged and culturally woke. Crafted in rhythmseasoned Latinx dialect, emerging from ancestral roots, replanted in the urban spectrum of hip-hop and rap, Friend's voice is heart-inspired, soul-empowered, new-wave griot, a fearless weapon forged from South End Seattle, Puerto Rico, and Pittsburgh. Friend creates personal and family stories that connect communal tragedies and national consciousness in expressions of rage, affirmation and self-determination, confronting the brutal realities of being Black and young while caught in the colonial grip of America, enlisting the vibrations of sound masters like Ismael Rivera, Cheo Feliciano, Tato Laviera and Bob Marley. Malcolm Friend coasts the curvature of the blue note, revealing in his brooding, songful, and formally masterful verse heritages that pull from the ancestral into the vibrancy and violence of this moment.
black god mother this body
by Raina J León
black god mother this body explores the divine, the ancestrally aligned, the natural rhythmed black woman in her embodied reality, particularly as mother. glorification of whiteness is death. this is a healing meditation, an extended song, an experimentation in augmenting reality that constantly threatens black mothers and children. it is also a covert communication in the hidden ways of trees. león invites defiant and collective flourishing. this book integrates biomimicry, technology, afrofuturist practices and afrosurrealist revelations, and generational engagement even across human and nonhuman worlds. it boldly encounters the horrors of (digital) lynchings in the murders of black and brown peoples in spirit and in body while also uplifting new radical dreams. what we know to be true started as a dream; what is a nightmare can be countered boldly in communal power. here we find visual poems, halos in augmented reality, sonnets alongside couplet sequences, reinventions in form and the subversion of the "i" in favor of the "we". we find audacity against fear.
La Carreta Made A U-Turn
by Tato Laviera
"A clear and refreshing note of affirmation, humaneness, joy and vigor in the face of poverty, alienation and oppression. Tato Laviera has produced a remarkably varied first book of poems".
– Explorations In Ethnic Studies
"The overall impression, despite the strategic shift from one language to the other, is one of almost undetectably fluid transition, and from the standpoint of either language tradition, of a qualitative expansion of idiomatic resources".