Yo digo lo que me da la gana: Using Spanglish Translational Strategies to Redefine Puerto Rico in the Poetry of Raquel Salas Rivera

Abstract

As a former colony of Spain and a present-day colony of the United States, Puerto Rico’s centuries-long history of exploitation under colonialism and imperialism lies at the core of its precarious financial and sociopolitical climate. In the last two decades, the archipelago has been slowly collapsing under political corruption, illegal debt crises, fiscally-imposed austerity measures resulting in the mass privatization of public resources, and severe gentrification at the hands of tax-exempt American investors—all exacerbated by the devastation that Hurricane María left in its wake in 2017. Writing from this context, Puerto Rican poet and translator Raquel Salas Rivera employs varying methods of self-translation between Spanish and English to portray the ways in which colonial relations of power converge and play out in definitions of Puerto Ricanness, excavating the points of tension between languages, identities and perspectives. This thesis delves into three of Salas Rivera’s most recent poetry books: while they sleep (under the bed is another country) (2019), x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación/poems for the nation (2020) and antes que isla es volcán/before island is volcano (2022). Throughout these books, he embeds layers of cultural and linguistic opacity, ambiguity and ambivalent equivocation within Puerto Rican cultural specificities to deny transparent access to colonial suffering, combat the homogenization of a static Puerto Rican identity, and harness the power found in daring to imagine potential futurities for Puerto Ricans and by Puerto Ricans. Overall, this thesis focuses on refusals to translate, untranslatabilities and translational equivocations as strategic de/anticolonial knowledge production that encourages Puerto Rican audiences to problematize what it means to be Puerto Rican while urging outsider audiences to understand the limits of understanding.