Women in Puerto Rican Literature: A Critical Survey
By Ana Cristina López | Originally published 2011 | El Cuarto del Quenepón Archive
Editor’s note: This survey, originally published in our special issue on Puerto Rican women writers, has been widely assigned in university courses across the United States and Latin America. We present it here as part of our digital archive.
The history of Puerto Rican literature has been, until recently, a history written by men. The anthologies, the prize committees, the university curricula—all controlled by men who determined which voices would be heard and preserved. Yet women have always written. From the nineteenth-century poets who published anonymously or under male pseudonyms to today’s internationally recognized novelists, Puerto Rican women have produced a literary tradition of remarkable depth and power.
This survey traces that tradition, examining how women writers have engaged with the intersecting demands of gender, nation, and artistic innovation.
The Nineteenth Century: Writing in Shadows
Puerto Rican women began publishing poetry and prose in the mid-nineteenth century, though often under constraints that limited their recognition. Alejandrina Benítez de Gautier (1819-1879) is generally credited as the first Puerto Rican woman to publish poetry, though her work appeared without her name attached. Lola Rodríguez de Tió (1843-1924), author of the revolutionary poem “La Borinqueña” (which would later be adapted as Puerto Rico’s national anthem), achieved fame but spent much of her life in exile due to her political activism.
These early writers faced a double bind. To write at all was to transgress gender norms; to write about national identity and political freedom was to invite persecution. Many chose the safety of sentimental poetry—love, nature, domestic scenes—that authorities found unthreatening. Others wrote boldly and paid the price.
The constraints of the period make evaluation difficult. How many women wrote but never published? How many published anonymously and were never identified? The archive is incomplete, shaped by the same patriarchal forces that limited women’s participation in public life.
Julia de Burgos: The Founding Mother
No figure looms larger in Puerto Rican women’s literature than Julia de Burgos (1914-1953). A poet of extraordinary lyrical power, de Burgos lived a life of poverty, displacement, and ultimately tragedy—dying alone and anonymous on a New York street, her body unclaimed for days.
Her poetry transcends these biographical facts. Poems like “Río Grande de Loíza” and “A Julia de Burgos” combine sensuous imagery with feminist consciousness in ways that still feel revolutionary:
Ya las gentes murmuran que yo soy tu enemiga porque dicen que en verso doy al mundo tu yo.
Already people murmur that I am your enemy because they say that in verse I give your self to the world.
De Burgos wrote about female desire, bodily autonomy, and the constraints of social expectation with a frankness her contemporaries avoided. She was also a nationalist, associating the colonization of Puerto Rico with the oppression of women—both forms of domination, both demanding resistance.
Her influence on subsequent generations cannot be overstated. Every Puerto Rican woman writer works in her shadow, whether embracing her legacy or pushing against it.
The Generation of 1950: Institution-Building
The mid-twentieth century saw Puerto Rican women enter literary institutions as never before. Nilita Vientós Gastón (1903-1989) founded and edited Asomante, a literary journal that published major Puerto Rican writers regardless of gender. Margot Arce de Vázquez (1904-1990) became a leading literary critic and university professor, helping to shape the canon.
These women were often more influential as editors, critics, and teachers than as creative writers—a pattern that reflects both their achievement and the barriers they faced. They could participate in literary culture, but on terms set by men; they could promote others’ work more easily than their own.
The writers who emerged from this institutional infrastructure—Rosario Ferré, Ana Lydia Vega, Carmen Lugo Filippi—would transform Puerto Rican literature in the 1970s and beyond.
The Boom Generation: Breaking Silence
The 1970s and 1980s produced a remarkable flowering of Puerto Rican women’s writing. Rosario Ferré (1938-2016) published Papeles de Pandora (1976), a collection of stories and poems that addressed women’s experience with experimental form and biting social critique. Her story “La muñeca menor” (“The Youngest Doll”) became one of the most-taught works of Caribbean literature.
Ana Lydia Vega (b. 1946) brought humor and linguistic playfulness to feminist themes. Her stories, often incorporating Spanglish and popular culture references, captured the texture of Puerto Rican life with satirical edge.
Carmen Lugo Filippi (b. 1940) collaborated with Vega on Vírgenes y mártires (1981), a landmark collection that announced a new generation of women writers unwilling to be polite.
These writers shared certain commitments: to representing women’s experience in all its complexity, to formal innovation, to political engagement that included but was not limited to gender. They created a space in Puerto Rican literature that had not existed before—and that has remained open for those who followed.
Nuyorican Women: The Diaspora Voice
While island-based writers were transforming Puerto Rican letters, diaspora women were creating their own tradition. Sandra María Esteves (b. 1948), Luz María Umpierre (b. 1947), and Aurora Levins Morales (b. 1954) wrote from the particular experience of Puerto Rican women in the United States—the double displacement of gender and migration, the negotiation between Spanish and English, the construction of identity in hostile territory.
Their work is often more explicitly political than island-based writing, reflecting the urgency of life in mainland America. Esteves’s poetry addresses racism, labor exploitation, and the erasure of Puerto Rican culture with directness that island writers, perhaps cushioned by local community, could avoid.
The relationship between island and diaspora women writers has sometimes been tense. Island writers have occasionally dismissed diaspora work as inauthentic, too American, linguistically compromised. Diaspora writers have responded that authenticity is a trap, that Puerto Rican experience encompasses both locations. Recent generations have largely abandoned this debate, recognizing that both traditions contribute to a single, complex literature.
Contemporary Voices
The past two decades have produced a wealth of Puerto Rican women’s writing that defies easy categorization.
Mayra Santos-Febres (b. 1966) has written novels that explore African-Puerto Rican identity, sexuality, and history with lyrical density. Her Fe en disfraz (2009) examines the slave trade through a contemporary academic’s discovery of historical documents—formal innovation in service of historical memory.
Mara Pastor (b. 1980) has emerged as one of the most significant poets of her generation, writing in Spanish about everyday life in Puerto Rico with precision and wit. Her work avoids the grandiose nationalism of earlier periods in favor of the specific, the local, the intimate.
Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro (b. 1970) centers African-descended Puerto Rican experience in fiction and essays, recovering histories that official culture has suppressed.
In the diaspora, Raquel Salas Rivera (b. 1985) writes bilingual poetry that explores transness, colonialism, and language itself. Their work represents a new direction—formally experimental, politically radical, refusing the categories that previous generations navigated.
Persistent Themes
Certain themes recur across generations of Puerto Rican women’s writing:
The body: Women’s bodies as sites of pleasure, violence, reproduction, and resistance. The control of women’s bodies as continuous with colonial control of territory.
Language: The politics of Spanish versus English, formal versus vernacular, silence versus speech. The particular challenges of writing as a woman in a male-dominated literary tradition.
Nation: The relationship between feminism and nationalism—sometimes allied, sometimes in tension. The question of whether women’s liberation is possible without national liberation, and vice versa.
Diaspora: Movement between island and mainland, the construction of identity in displacement, the maintenance of culture across distance.
These themes do not exhaust Puerto Rican women’s writing, which encompasses far more than gender politics. But they represent the specific contribution that women writers have made—the perspectives and experiences that would have been lost had men continued to dominate the literary field.
Conclusion
Puerto Rican women’s literature is no longer marginal. It is taught in universities, published by major presses, recognized with awards. This mainstreaming is a triumph—but also a potential danger. As women’s writing becomes canonical, it risks losing its critical edge, becoming just another variety of respectable literature.
The best Puerto Rican women writers resist this domestication. They continue to make demands—on readers, on institutions, on Puerto Rican society. They refuse the false choices between feminist and nationalist, between literary quality and political commitment, between island and diaspora. In their refusal, they keep the tradition alive.
Ana Cristina López teaches at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Her book on Rosario Ferré received the Casa de las Américas prize for literary criticism.