Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Life in Puerto Rico
Puerto Rican culture is a kaleidoscope with four constantly overlapping elements - Taíno
Indian, Spanish, African and American - and as such, the dynamic culture is incredibly hard
to classify simply. One side of the street looks like a neighborhood in the Bronx, where over-
sized SUVs roll through a Burger King drive-thru, the other side is all Latin America, where
freshly hacked bunches of bananas are sold out of the back of a truck. And let's face it, that
same dichotomy might exist anywhere in the age of globalization.
Welcome to Puerto Rico
www.welcome.topuertorico.org
is a website set up by a Puerto Rican currently based in Georgia, USA.
It provides an excellent in-depth look at the island's culture, history, geography and ecology.
A commonwealth of the United States of America, Puerto Rico is a semi-autonomous ter-
ritory whose constitutional status has long been a political oxymoron. The island's cultur-
al manifestations are similarly ridden with contradiction. Puerto Ricans love big American
cars, but follow loose traffic laws; they serve in numerous foreign wars under the stars and
stripes, yet share a closer historical identity to communist Cuba; they export over half of
their ebullient population to the east coast of the United States, but still exhibit a fierce loy-
alty to island they will always call home.
READING UP ON PUERTO RICAN CULTURE
»
Down These Mean Streets,
Piri Thomas - Peppered with the street slang of Spanish
Harlem, this classic narrative takes a cold and sober look at the challenges of violence,
drugs and racism during the first wave of Puerto Rican immigrants to New York City.
It's a gritty classic.
»
Boricuas: Influential Puerto Rican Writings - An Anthology,
edited by Roberto San-
tiago - This collection of essays and stories presents an incredibly diverse and wide-
ranging insight into Puerto Rican authors, many of whom are scarcely translated into
English. If you read one book to sample Puerto Rican writing, this is it.
»
The Disenchanted Island - Puerto Rico and the United States in the Twentieth Cen-
tury,
Ronaldo Fernández - Required reading for Latin American studies students, this
chronicle of the island's struggle for independence is passionately told, putting the re-
lationship between Puerto Rico and the United States under a microscope. Fernández
showed up on FBI watch lists for his other book,
Macheteros,
which championed the
extreme edge of the Puerto Rican separatist movement.
