This book undertakes the most comprehensive and theoretically rigorous examination to date of Luis Rafael S nchez’s work in the context of cultural politics in Puerto Rico, and of the international and regional dimensions of S nchez’s work in relation to the unique status of Puerto Rico as a commonwealth and colony. It explores S nchez’s ambivalent position as a member of an intellectual elite, a spokesman for el pueblo, and a Puerto Rican mulatto whose working-class background allows him to highlight unprecedented possibilities for political agency within popular and mass culture.

Through analyses of S nchez’s theater, prose, and essays, John Perivolaris examines continuing struggles to define Puerto Rican cultural identity. His detailed readings illuminate S nchez’s ironically humorous deployment of traditionally conservative paradigms of national and individual identity in his postcolonial critique of racialization, gender, sexuality, and Hispanism in the colony. This study fills a long-standing need for an introduction to the work of a major Caribbean and Latin American writer.