Puerto Rican Obituary
144 Off Campus: Seggau School of Thought 6 Monica Cristiana Irimia Repressed Culture and Otherness in “Yo Soy Joaquín” and “Puerto Rican Obituary” Abstract This paper provides an analysis of two poems, Yo Soy Joaquin and Puerto Rican Obituary, which stand as manifestos for two radically sociopolitical engagements, the Chicano/a movement and the Nuyorican movement. Both texts deal with the inferior status of minorities in the US and reflect upon issues such as racism, oppression, cultural survival, cultural pride, diversity, ethnic pluralism. This article explores the similarities between two texts that come from rather different cultural areas. The paper also analyzes the stylistic devices involved in the making of the poems. Both poems are elegies for asserting one's cultural heritage and acknowledging one's true identity. Suggested Citation: Irimia, Monica Cristiana. “Repressed Culture and Otherness in ‘Yo Soy Joaquín’ and ‘Puerto Rican Obituary’.” Radical (Dis)Engagement: State – Society – Religion (Off Campus: Seggau School of Thought 6), edited by Murray Forman, Erlis Laçej, Frederick Reinprecht, and Kim Sawchuk. 2020, pp. 145-153, DOI: 10.25364/25.6:2020.11. Keywords: hybridity, identity, oppression, manifesto, survival Peer Review: This article was reviewed by the volume’s editors and professors of the GUSEGG Summer School. Copyright: © 2020 Monica Cristiana Irimia. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CCBY 4.0), which allows for the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Off Campus: Seggau School of Thought 6 145 Monica Cristiana Irimia Repressed Culture and Otherness in “Yo Soy Joaquín” and “Puerto Rican Obituary” The purpose of this essay is to discuss two poems, “Yo Soy Joaquín” and “Puerto Rican Obituary,” by establishing the similarities and differences between them from an ideological and a stylistic point of view.
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