Bitter-sweet Diasporican : a fictional novel

Abstract

Bitter-Sweet DiaspoRican is a contemporary fictional novel written to portray the process and experience of being a young woman part of the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York. The piece explores the fields of gender studies and Puerto Rican diasporic studies. It engages in a woman’s search of identity and belonging with the aspiration of awakening the self by overcoming the obstacles of objectification, social construct, built discourse, stereotypes, and trauma gender roles and migration can create. Other different aspects and people in her life will also become impediments, yet vital components, when achieving this awakening of self. Authors such as Jane Austen and Louisa M. Alcott have provided me with the starting point for a general understanding of women’s background and history regarding built gender roles and society’s construct of women. Others like Kate Chopin and Terry McMillan have helped me understand the process of self-discovery and growth, having freedom and liberation as their only north. The recent work of Xavier Navarro offered insight into literary experimentation with contemporary literary techniques like code-switching, imagery, symbolism, and lyrical tone. An emphasis on diasporic Puerto Rican writers such as Tato Laviera, María “Mariposa” Fernández, Sandra María Esteves, Pedro Pietri, and Esmeralda Santiago was crucial to my understanding of the diasporic experience and its trauma. In studying the work of Edna Acosta-Belén and Carlos E. Santiago, Puerto Ricans in the United States: A Contemporary Portrait, and Jorge Duany’s The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and the United States, there is a better comprehension of the colonial history of Puerto Rico, its diaspora, and the experience they have had regarding trauma by a dual identity. Without inspiration, this piece would not have been created. Poet Julia De Burgos was my main inspiration. Her persona, experience, poetry, and way of writing are the reasons for this piece and its main character. The following themes are explored within my fictional novel: a woman’s search for identity and belonging, the rejection of constructed gender roles in society, women's objectification, stereotypical constructs regarding ethnicity and gender roles, the ephemeral trauma of migration, and the duality of an identity that later on is born into a hybrid one.