Puerto Rico en Nueva York: escritura, desplazamiento y sujetos migrantes en cuentos de Manuel Ramos Otero

Abstract

This reading analyzes several short stories by Manuel Ramos Otero, paying attention to the recurrent and, at times dramatic and paradoxical, presence of a migrant subject who embodies different roles, nuances and meanings. In Ramos Otero's fiction, several journeys dramatize the paradigmatic voyage of Puerto Rican emigrants between the island and New York City, but his texts include as well foreign and wandering characters who stand out by their cultural, ethnic and linguistic otherness. Also, on several occasions the writer and the migrant coincide and intercept each other; the character who travels is also a narrator who performs as a "cuentero" (a creator of stories) in several narrations characterized by an emphasized self-reflective gesture. The process of writing these fictions is dramatized as a practice whose main organizing principle is the journey, and this practice displays the situations and material conditions that threaten the subject who writes. This article studies these issues in a selection of texts from two books by Ramos Otero: El cuento de la Mujer del Mar ( 1979) and Página en blanco y staccato (1987).