On this episode, Yvette and Pedro Rolón, Puerto Rican academic and longtime friend discuss his dissertation research exploring how Puerto Ricans have utilized literature as a means of political identity building dating back to the 19th century. They unpack the ways in which Eugenio María Hostos’ novel “La Peregrinación de Bayoan” perpetuates a mythical origin story of a “new man” that parallels the anti-Blackness in mestizaje discourses across Latin America and how subsequent authors like Manuel Ramos Otero and Angela Maria Davila expanded and imagined the contours of the Puerto Rican condition such that it has existed and continues to exist “without, within, and beyond the postcolonial scheme.”

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