‘An Island Like You’: Representing the Puerto Rican diaspora in the short stories of Nicholasa Mohr and Judith Ortiz Cofer

The short stories of Nicholasa Mohr and Judith Ortiz Cofer, two of the most prolific ‘Rican’ writers living on the US mainland, have received little critical attention. Connecting her work with global postcolonialism, Mohr has called herself a ‘daughter of the Puerto Rican Diaspora’. Mohr’s El Bronx Remembered – a collection of stories set in the first wave of migration (from 1946 to 56) – focuses on people living in what Mohr has called a ‘village within a city’ and ‘a colonized space’. Ortiz Cofer’s collection An Island Like You focuses on the period after the Great Migration. Adapting and refashioning scripts inherited from both European and American literature, Ortiz Cofer’s work raises issues of both postcolonial representation and transatlantic exchange.