Mothers from Mayagüez, New Jersey Knowledge(s), and Classes Caught in the Middle: Stories from the Four-Storied Burning Boricua Building

Abstract

Puerto Rican New Jersey is rooted in the island’s Great Migration of the 1940s–1960s. While distinct in terms of class and racialization, it is entangled with the earlier “pioneer” generation of Puerto Ricans in the New York Tri-State area to which William Carlos Williams’s mother, Elena, belonged. Puerto Rican New Jersey was a result of Operation Bootstrap, defined here as the state strategy of exporting extreme poverty and the exploitation of vulnerability. Taking a personalized approach that uses hometown experiences as a scholarly axis, this article asks: What is it like to imagine Mayagüez from Puerto Rican New Jersey, with a mother from Mayagüez? How did experiences in New Jersey, as part of a Great Migration of poverty, shape relationships to Puerto Rico, the Spanish language, and family history there? What unique contexts do these experiences provide for studying Williams? How does Puerto Rican New Jersey, representing the embodiment of knowledge(s) of the four stories of Puerto Rican colonial history, relate to Williams’s writing at its most personalist? On such a semi-biographical contextual base, this article reviews Yes, Mrs. Williams, In the American Grain, and his collected early experimental works, Imaginations, with some autobiographical writings, to illuminate these connections.