Minority Studies, Cultural, Sociology 

The experience of growing up Puerto Rican has produced some of the most conflicted, political and poignant writing of the past century. Now, GROWING UP PUERTO RICAN brings together twenty stories by some of the most important Puerto Rican writers and several by provocative new authors. Each in his or her own style uses personal experience to portray vividly the problems that beset the passage from childhood to adult. Growing up in the United States as a member of this ethnic group often presents contradictions in personal identity within the unsettling condition of being neither here nor there: Am I black or white? Is my primary language Spanish or English? Am I Puerto Rican or American? For he Puerto Rican child, these answers are never simple, yet they are always imbued with the universal joys and tensions of coming of age. A collection of writings that explores pain, love, youthful passion, and confusion, this anthology creates a broad spectrum of writing and of experiences, with selections ranging from the fond recollection of a peaceful atmosphere at the corner bodega to the chilling account of a girl witnessing the Ponce Massacre in 1937, or the poignant struggle of a grammar school boy living with his father's ethics a half century later in the South Bronx. In GROWING UP PUERTO RICAN, we are privy not only to the experiences of the young Puerto Rican, but to the coming of age of a literature, a culture, and a country with its visage fixed firmly on its own future. - from Amzon