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Abstract

This paper examines Zora Moreno’s play Coquí corihundo vira el mundo (1981) as an alternative to the identitarian investment in the patriarchal myth of the gran familia puertorriqueña. I argue that by offering a feminist rewriting of Adolfina Villanueva through the protagonist Anastasia, Moreno combats the privileging of Puerto Rican identity as a light-skinned, male figure. Moreno critiques these colonial vestiges of racial discrimination through her interrogation of the spatial politics of home. Coquí corihundo vira el mundo problematizes the construction of a Puerto Rican identity that would erase Afro-Puerto Rican identity and thereby replicate a racialized hierarchy. Thus, in the act of remembering Adolfina/Anastasia, Moreno uses memory as an act of resistance that demonstrates the contemporary effects of myths of identity on the local community. Furthermore, the lasting performance of Adolfina/Anastasia as traumatic social memory redefines the centrality of Black women’s experience to the marginalization of the Afro-Puerto Rican community at large

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