Between Two Shores: The Evolution of Puerto Rican Poetry
By José Manuel Torres | November 2024 | 10 min read
Puerto Rican poetry has always been a literature of displacement. From the nationalist verses of the early twentieth century to the Nuyorican poets of the 1970s to today’s boundary-crossing voices, Puerto Rican poets have grappled with the fundamental questions of their condition: What does it mean to be from a place that is neither fully independent nor fully incorporated? How do you write in a language—or languages—that carry the weight of colonial history? Where is home when home is scattered across an ocean?
Contemporary Puerto Rican poetry doesn’t answer these questions so much as inhabit them. The poets working today have inherited multiple traditions—the island’s literary heritage, the Nuyorican movement, Latin American poetry, American confessional verse—and synthesize them into something new.
The Nuyorican Legacy
Any discussion of contemporary Puerto Rican poetry must begin with the Nuyorican Poets Café. Founded in 1973 by Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero, the Café created a space where Puerto Rican poets—largely working class, largely self-taught, largely ignored by mainstream publishing—could develop their craft and find audiences.
The Nuyorican aesthetic was oral, urgent, political. It drew from street speech, from salsa, from the rhythms of New York’s Puerto Rican neighborhoods. Poets like Piñero, Pedro Pietri, and Sandra María Esteves forged a tradition that was explicitly diasporic, claiming both Puerto Rican identity and New York as home ground.
Pietri’s Puerto Rican Obituary (1973) remains one of the foundational texts of Nuyorican literature:
They worked They were always on time They never spoke back when they were insulted They worked They never took days off that were not on the calendar
The poem’s litany of labor and death—cataloging Puerto Rican migrants who sacrificed everything for a American Dream that never materialized—established themes that Puerto Rican poets continue to explore.
Language as Battleground
Contemporary Puerto Rican poetry is marked by its relationship to language. Many poets write in Spanish, others in English, and increasingly, poets move fluidly between languages within single poems—a practice sometimes called “Spanglish” but more accurately understood as code-switching, a literary technique as deliberate as any other formal choice.
The poet Raquel Salas Rivera, winner of the 2019 Ambroggio Prize from the Academy of American Poets, writes primarily in Spanish but often presents their work in bilingual editions, with English translations facing the original. This format isn’t merely practical—it visualizes the doubled experience of diaspora identity, the constant translation between worlds.
From lo terciario / the tertiary (2018):
no he dejado de sentir que pienso en un idioma cuya forma no es la forma de lo que se quiere
i have not stopped feeling that i think in a language whose form is not the form of what is wanted
Salas Rivera’s work explores transness, Puerto Rican identity, and political economy—how bodies and languages and debts are intertwined. Their poetry is demanding, theoretical, uncompromising in its politics.
The Island’s Voices
While diaspora poets have often received more attention from mainland publishers and literary institutions, Puerto Rico’s island-based poets continue to develop distinctive traditions. Mara Pastor, who writes in Spanish from San Juan, has emerged as one of the most significant voices of her generation.
Pastor’s poetry engages with everyday life on the island—its landscapes, its economic precarity, its absurdist colonial bureaucracy—with a tone that balances tenderness and rage. Her collection Falsa heladería (2014) established her as a major voice; subsequent work has grappled with Hurricane María and its aftermath.
Nicole Cecilia Delgado, another San Juan poet, works in performance and page, creating poems that explore feminism, the body, and Puerto Rican popular culture. Her work often incorporates reggaeton lyrics and street language, claiming vernacular speech as material for serious poetry.
New Directions
The youngest generation of Puerto Rican poets is perhaps the most difficult to characterize—which may be the point. Poets like Yara Liceaga-Rojas, Carina del Valle Schorske, and Xavier Valcárcel move easily between academic and activist contexts, between English and Spanish, between the page and the stage.
What distinguishes this generation is its refusal of easy categories. These poets are not choosing between “island” and “diaspora” identities, between Spanish and English, between political and personal subjects. They are writing from the messy reality of Puerto Rican experience, where such distinctions often don’t hold.
Carina del Valle Schorske’s The Other Island (2023)—part memoir, part translation, part essay collection—exemplifies this boundary-crossing approach. The book weaves translations of Puerto Rican poets with autobiographical reflection, creating a work that is neither poetry nor prose but something between.
The Future of Puerto Rican Verse
Puerto Rican poetry today exists in multiple registers simultaneously. There are academic poets publishing with university presses, spoken word artists performing in community centers, Instagram poets building audiences one post at a time. There are poets writing in Spanish for Spanish-language readers, poets writing in English for diaspora communities, poets deliberately making translation and code-switching central to their practice.
This diversity is a strength. Puerto Rican poetry does not need to resolve its contradictions—to choose one language, one location, one tradition. The poetry is most alive when it holds these tensions, when it speaks from the middle of the ocean, belonging fully to neither shore.
As Salas Rivera writes:
we do not need their words to exist we have never needed their words to exist existence is not predicated on legibility
Puerto Rican poetry exists. It has always existed. And it will continue to exist—adapting, translating, code-switching, insisting on being heard—long after the categories used to contain it have crumbled away.
José Manuel Torres is a poet and literary critic based in Chicago. His collection Isla Invisible is forthcoming from Graywolf Press.