Abstract:
With his first short-story collection,
The Boy Without a Flag: Tales of the
South Bronx (1992), Abraham Rodriguez
established himself as one of the leading
Latino writers of his generation, part of a wave
of successful authors who emerged in the late
1980s and 1990s that includes the Dominican
Junot Diaz, the Cuban American Achy Obejas,
the Chicanos Diego Vazquez Jr., Yxta Maya
Murray, and Dagoberto Gilb, and the Nuyorican
Ernesto Quinones. Rodriguez's reputation
was consolidated by the publication of the
novels Spidertown (1993) and The Buddha Book
(2001). Both texts confirmed Rodriguez as an
uncompromising and decidedly unromantic
chronicler of the disenfranchised Nuyorican
youth of New York's South Bronx, or El Bronx,
and a gifted transmitter of Nuyorican English.
Mainstream publishing success and laudatory
book reviews in major U.S. newspapers and
magazines, and the inclusion of his fiction in Puerto
Rican, Latino, and American literature
courses in schools and universities across the
United States and beyond, also attest to
Rodriguez's reputation. Alongside these
achievements, however, Rodriguez's confrontational
representations of El Bronx, and his
public comments on his literary elders, have
embroiled him in a highly charged debate about
the sociocultural validity and political impact of
Nuyorican literary and cultural productions.
Despite the significance of that debate,
Rodriguez's writing has to date attracted surprisingly
little academic attention, perhaps a reflection
of a general critical resistance to the author's
outspoken public persona and his unapologetic
characterizations of an embattled and violence prone
inner city.
