"Whats Wrong with this Picture": Ana Lydia Vega's "Caso Omiso"

Abstract

Writing out of an acknowledgement of "the distortions and contradictions of traditional values and the absurdities of colonialism and Puerto Rico's consumer-oriented lifestyle"¹ Ana Lydia Vega chooses a parodic intertextual foray into pop culture as it is practiced in urban Puerto Rico. Her novellas in the collection, Pasión de historia, are themselves parodies of popular genres such as the thriller and whodunit. The image of contemporary Puerto Rican society that humorously emerges from these stories is one of a multiplicity of "texts" pasted together reminiscent of the process of (post)colonialism itself. Due to Puerto Rico's unique political, cultural, and economic connection to the U.S., its culture is the site of competing cultural discourses. Both social satire and thriller, the novella "Caso omiso," alludes to the confluence of various texts— pop culture in the U.S., the world of U.S. film, the genre of the detective novel, and the obscured, yet implicit, text of boricua culture still "present" in traces planted along the way in the story and suggested by its very "absence."