Puerto Rico (United States) / All works
Short stories
Spiks
Pedro Juan Soto · 1956
Synopsis
The collection gathers seven stories and six miniatures, brief sketches, on the Puerto Ricans of New York in the middle of the twentieth century. We meet a Harlem prostitute, a failed painter who draws a Christmas scene on the bathroom wall, young Puruco or a possessed woman; all struggle against poverty, the language barrier and discrimination, and take refuge in dreams and nostalgia for the island.
Context
The collection appeared in 1956, a year after the author's return to the island, and was in its ninth edition in 2001. According to Juan A. Pastoriza, its characters are drawn from people Soto had known in New York. Monthly Review Press published the English translation in 1973. Josefina A. Seda Carrero sees in 2025 in its miniatures a forerunner of Puerto Rican microfiction, and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel has studied displacement and patriarchy in it.
Who it is for
For reading, in very brief narratives, the Puerto Rican emigration to Manhattan in the middle of the last century.
Prizes and reception
Kirkus Reviews, in 1973, judged the stories too brief and too schematic, and their English translation awkward.
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