Edgardo Vega Yunqué and the Comedy of Race

ALBERT SERGIO LAGUNA

The fact that the general public and few literary critics have taken up the work of Edgardo Vega Yunqué is indicative of his “success” in continually pushing back against those markers of legibility that would have brought him more attention.1 Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, in 1936, he arrived in New York City in 1949 at the age of thirteen, where he spent the rest of his life, passing away in 2008. His prolific writing career began in the 1970s, and he remained active until his death, resulting in four published novels, two published short story collections, and more than a dozen unpublished manuscripts.2 These works consistently center on the experiences of Puerto Ricans in New York City, but Vega Yunqué was fiercely critical of attempts to place his work in a racialized box. When Ballantine wanted to publish what eventually became his most successful novel, No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain’t Never Coming Home Again, under the One World “multicultural imprint” in the 1990s, Vega Yunqué accused the press of wanting to “ghettoize” the novel. Tensions eventually resulted in Ballantine killing the book deal.3 But his anger was not limited to the publishing industry. He also took aim at Puerto Rican writers in his community for recycling tropes about life on the “mean streets” while pointing to what he saw as the limits of cultural nationalism and resistance narratives: “Identity and dignity and pride has [sic] to be a little more than a few buttons, some slogans, and a scowl” (Comeback 472). A curmudgeonly iconoclast of the first order, Vega Yunqué positioned himself as an outsider willing to take on the perceived limits on his literary imagination by corporate, political, and artistic forces inside and outside the Puerto Rican community.4

Unhappiness among writers of color regarding the racialized constraints they feel are placed on their art is not new. What makes Vega Yunqué’s work different is the central place these constraints had in his fiction and how he went about engaging them. Of his six major works, three are comic approaches to the politics of race in relation to the literary. In these texts, Vega Yunqué demonstrates his career-long commitment to staging what I call “the comedy of race” to probe how people of color, specifically Puerto Ricans, are racialized inside and outside their communities and how it affects artistic representation.5 Why are comic forms particularly useful for this work? As Alenka Zupančič explains, comedy “is extremely adept at showing how something functions—that is to say, it is adept at showing the mechanisms, in the present, that allow its functioning and perpetuation” (178). The comedy of race is a staging of the mechanics of racialization through a “self-reflexive theatricality” (Dolar 588) that emphasizes itself as representation. In this formulation, race is not only a topic for comedy but also a concept that functions much like comedy at the level of form. Race becomes an idea to be played with and explored through the magnifying excess that is endemic to comedy.

If race functions as a norm within the social broadly, and literary representations specifically, Vega Yunqué uses comedy “as a procedure that carries the (human) norm itself to its extreme point; it [comedy] produces and displays the constitutive excess and extremity of the norm itself” (Zupančič 193). The excessiveness of race, its tendency to do “too much” in the social as a concept that assigns circumscribed meaning and value to people, can be highlighted especially effectively through comedy because it too hinges on an excessive narrative economy marked by exaggeration, or more precisely, the isolation and amplification of single traits. By emphasizing the formal commonalities in how race and comedy produce meaning through excess, the general, and a focus on the body, Vega Yunqué’s work sheds light on how race as a norm becomes “normal” through a process of racialization that depends on physical features and cultural expectations. His comic narratives, drawing on satire, parody, the absurd, and grotesque exaggeration of the material body with an emphasis on “the lower stratum” (Bakhtin, Rabelais 21) continually reflect on how racialization confers legibility on communities while simultaneously pointing to the different stakeholders in those narratives of legibility. The result is a collection of comic texts exploring the relationship between race, ethnicity, and the evolving politics of visibility.

Equally important to include in the discussion of Vega Yunqué’s comedy of race is the arc of his career in relation to the publishing landscape for writers of color. Because Vega Yunqué was active from the 1970s through the 2000s, it is possible to discern how racialized expectations around Puerto Rican and Latinx fiction did and did not evolve across the decades that saw an explosion in ethnic literature in the United States. In works written in the 1980s, Vega Yunqué takes up the question of what it means to produce literature as a Puerto Rican in New York in the context of a Nuyorican arts scene that emphasized the political potential of art as resistance. His comic works in the 1990s and 2000s are more focused on interrogating the category of “Latino literature” when it was becoming the dominant sign under which writers of Latin American descent were published and marketed to an increasingly receptive national audience. Across these texts, the author’s comedy of race acts as a critical pause button inviting readers to question how these narratives of legibility were cohering and who was being left out.

Vega Yunqué’s use of comedy has not helped the circulation of his work among scholars. Why? First, there is the long history of ambivalence about comedy as a deserving area of inquiry within literary studies. As David Daniell has noted, “[t]he history of literary criticism is also the history of attempts to make an honest creature, as it were, of comedy” (102). But the question of scholarly engagement becomes more fraught when race becomes a factor. As noted, race and comedy are similar in how they produce meaning, relying on generalities, typologies, and a kind of semantic excess. At its heart then, comedy brings with it precisely the formal representational repertoire that scholars and artists interested in the politics of race have historically been wary of. The use of stereotypical representations and grotesque clichés to imagine and denigrate people of color has been central to the comic imagination in the United States from minstrelsy to internet memes. Institutionally, scholars—many of them people of color—working on the cultural production of racialized subjects face the added burden of having to prove their intellectual rigor and that of their respective fields. Since their inception, fields like African American and Latinx studies have had to battle for institutional recognition as legitimate areas of academic inquiry. On the surface, the study of comedy could be seen as running counter to that project. This reality, further compounded by the fact that “minoritized individuals bear higher evidentiary loads for propriety” (Cheng 530), has contributed to the scant attention to the comic mode by scholars and writers of color. In addition, the use of comedy by these writers often means they must play with fire by using the very racist stereotypes they are expected to debunk. For some, the use of stereotypical characterization and inflammatory language can be seen as an affirmation of racist beliefs rather than a deconstruction of them—especially when the audience does not have the necessary context to understand the comic sleight of hand.

Vega Yunqué did not share these concerns. Instead, he consis-tently staged the comedy of race in his fiction by holding up a funhouse mirror to the literature of minoritarian experience and presenting recognizable genre and thematic elements—concern about stereotypes, the novel of the “mean streets,” protest and social justice, and magical realism—in a comically grotesque way. Like Hortense J. Spillers’s insight into Ishmael Reed’s satirical parody of the fugitive slave narrative in Flight to Canada (1976), Vega Yunqué provides “a reconstruction of the politics of enunciation—who may speak, under what conditions, and how such speaking has been enabled” (199). And, I would add, disabled. In what follows, I argue that Vega Yunqué’s “reconstruction of the politics of enunciation” through the comic mode allows him to stage and disrupt how race and ethnicity as normalized categories produce and constrain meaning and, crucially for literary studies, shape opportunities for writers of color—especially Latinx writers. While scholars have exam ined the satirical work of African American writers like Percival Everett, Mat Johnson, and George Schuyler who have taken up the absurdities and constraints of race narratives inside and outside their communities, I have found few examples of scholars taking up the comic mode within Latinx literary studies.6 In addition to contributing to scholarship examining race and comedy broadly conceived, my readings of Vega Yunqué in Puerto Rican and Latinx literary contexts clarify the particular complexities around Latinx racialization within specific communities and in response to outside market forces and the evolving narrative of the inherently ambiguous sign of “Latinx literature.”7

The first section examines how Vega Yunqué looked inward at the New York Puerto Rican community to comically represent resistance and unity as political and artistic projects with an absurd send-up of a fictional protest by Puerto Rican residents of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I complement this analysis in the final section with a reading of how his comedy of race was particularly effective at animating the racialized expectations publishers had for Latinx authors in the 1990s and 2000s, particularly in relation to genre. Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai explain, “Always crossing lines, it [comedy] helps us figure out what lines we desire or can bear” (235). Together, these sections demonstrate how Vega Yunqué deployed the unruly energy of the comedy of race to make visible the deeply entrenched markers of racialized legibility, those “lines” in the publishing world, literary criticism, and within communities of color themselves that affect who and how we read.

Protesting Puerto Ricans

Vega Yunqué wrote during and in the decades following El Nuevo Despertar of the late 1960s and 1970s, “The New Awakening” of Puerto Rican radicalism in cities with large Puerto Rican populations such as New York and Chicago inspired by local and international leftist political movements and causes. This movement left behind an “institutional legacy” (Torres 18) that continues to resound today and shape historical narratives and contemporary politics of the Puerto Rican community. El Nuevo Despertar also had a profound influence on the literary scene. A recognizable thread throughout Nuyorican poetry (and, I would argue, Nuyorican literature broadly defined), as Urayoán Noel and other scholars have noted, is “a continued though evolving investment in [the] poetics of resistance” (xxiv). Resistance became a way to market the fiction of Nuyorican writers and functioned as a means to gain visibility within a political and artistic community that valued an explicit connection between art and activism.

Vega Yunqué was sympathetic to Puerto Rican organizing in New York City.8 He served as a community activist and was one of the founders of the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which showcases art produced by New York’s Puerto Rican and Latinx communities. But Vega Yunqué wanted to tell stories about Puerto Ricans that differed from the inner-city coming-of-age novel and narratives of political resistance represented in works like Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets (1967) and a great deal of Nuyorican poetry. He addresses this explicitly in the introduction to The Comeback: “The whole street scene scared the hell out of me. Some of the stuff that happened to Piri didn’t happen to me, so I can’t give you the great American immigrant story full of ethnic color, sociological significance and soul-bearing reality. It would be a lie. Not a fiction, but a lie” (xx). Vega Yunqué grew up in a middle-class home, the son of a Baptist minister in the Bronx in a mostly Irish neighborhood. He attended New York University and completed his degree in 1969.

Wary of knee-jerk coupling of art and ethnicity with a single unitary narrative, Vega Yunqué used comedy not only to insist on the diversity of Puerto Rican experience in the city but also to render ridiculous the pressure he felt from within the community to perform a particular kind of activist narrative around a Puerto Rican identity to achieve the goals of political unity and visibility.9 This relationship between art, politics, and identity formation can be understood in relation to what Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas calls “national performances” of a Puerto Rican identity “as defensive self-racialization in response to the State’s historical criminalization of Puerto Ricans and ‘Puerto Rican’ spaces” (34). While Vega Yunqué consistently demonstrated an understanding of how US racism and imperialism on the island affected the lives of Puerto Ricans every where, he was more interested in exploring the flip side of the coin—how this politically inflected “defensive self-racialization” constrains the artistic imagination. To be sure, as Noel points out, “foundational Nuyorican poets were already writing and performing poems that questioned the limits of self, nation, and community, across and along institutional contexts” (88). Vega Yunqué is also not the only Puerto Rican writer to draw on the ludic in his work.10 What differentiates him is how he largely saw himself as outside of the Nuyorican literary movement and his use of the comic mode to consistently magnify what he believed were the limits of movement politics and the aesthetics of protest throughout his career.

Vega Yunqué turns his attention to the relationship between art and the politics of protest and unity in “The Monument,” published in his short story collection Mendoza’s Dreams. The story begins with Mendoza, the fictional Puerto Rican writer and narrator, interrupted in the midst of writing by the Fonseca brothers and their cousin, Pucho, who had come to Mendoza for help. Their elderly uncle, Domingo, was standing outside the window of an old flame from Puerto Rico named Amparo Mantilla, in the words of Enrique Fonseca, “Like a friggin statue. Left hand on his crotch and his right hand up in the air, holding up that damn middle finger” (172). Domingo had begun to adopt this pose when Mantilla refused his advances in New York City because of a falling out they had in Puerto Rico on account of his infidelity. Afraid that the police will haul their uncle away, the Fonseca brothers ask Mendoza to intervene in hopes that he can get Domingo to stand down. Panicked at the sight of police ready to pounce, Mendoza calls his friend “Potatoes Rivera, the dean of street poetry.” It is a decision he describes as “one of the biggest mistakes of my life” (176). Potatoes quickly mobilizes community leaders and organizers, who repackage Domingo’s vulgar gesture at a former lover into a defiant statement against the oppression suffered by the Puerto Rican community at the hands of the United States. Committees are established and after months go by, funding is secured from the National Endowment for the Arts to support a monument to “commemorate the people’s struggle” in the form of Domingo’s lewd pose, “thirty feet high with a ten foot base and a plaque with the names of the people who struggled and sweated and screamed to be released from bondage, and a mini-park with a groundskeeper, a curator and guards to prevent vandalism” (181). The absurd story ends with the monument realized and Mendoza receiving another call from the Fonseca brothers. Domingo was at it again, this time mooning people in a vacant lot. Mendoza hands Pucho a quarter and a piece of paper with Potatoes’s phone number on it.

Instead of accepting resistance as an untroubled point of departure to engage with the oppressor, Vega Yunqué shifts attention to the act of protest with an absurd satire meant to pause and reflect on what is lost or obscured when the politics of resistance and unity are invoked and go unexamined. One of his most prominent targets is that which makes the protest spectacle possible—an appeal to the unity of the people. In The Trouble with Unity, Cristina Beltrán explains how the concept of ethnic unity has been largely praised as a means for visibility and empowerment, while internal dissent has been perceived anxiously as a potential threat to progressive politics. Within the comic mode, the sacredness of resistance, solidarity, and the seriousness that often accompanies it are ripe for jabs, especially when unity is often an illusion. Vega Yunqué was deeply suspicious of the herd mentality and the rhetoric of pride around performances of Puerto Rican nationalism that he saw as taking the place of practical discussions about how to improve life for Puerto Ricans. He folds this critique into the world of “The Monument” in his description of how activists came to narrate Domingo’s protest. When the activist committee came together, they quickly decided that the real reason for his protest, “being spurned as a lover,” would not fly (178). Potatoes Rivera “explained to everyone that Fonseca was protesting the treatment of the people by the U.S. government and it was our responsibility to show solidarity with him by supporting him in his courageous stand against oppression.” Dripping with sarcasm, the key phrase in this sentence is “our responsibility to show solidarity” and speaks to what Beltrán has called the tendency “to conflate identity and political agreement” (10). Those in the community who are against the idea of a statue are not given the time of day by Potatoes and his activist friends. Here, the comedy of race dramatizes a perhaps cruel irony pointed out by George Lipsitz: “The sense of sameness that holds ethnic groups together, builds organic solidarity, and makes ethnic mobilization logical and desirable can also encourage us to suppress differences and demand uniformity within our own groups” (297). By juxtaposing the constant call for solidarity with the true reason for Domingo’s crude protest, Vega Yunqué creates a productive comic incongruity that asks us to think about the stakeholders in the protest and what is lost in the spectacle: a lack of attention to Domingo’s described mental instability, space to question the logic underpinning the protest, and time and resources spent on a monument that will do little to help anyone.

Setting up Domingo as the center of the story and the unlikely hero of this latest protest “action” allows Vega Yunqué to construct what Sonnet Retman calls a “modernist burlesque, a kind of satire that occupies its subject from the outside in by pushing its most theatrical and technological elements to spectacular excess” (5). In her book Real Folks: Race and Genre in the Great Depression, Retman explains how the “folk” as a trope was used as a means to confer authenticity in the art and political culture of the 1930s. Vega Yunqué, like African American satirist George Schuyler, who Retman discusses in her book, is wary of the tendency among the Left to “romanticize the folk” (36) within cultural production as an example of all that is good. Vega Yunqué is keen to show how this desire to romanticize “the people” leads to flattening the community’s political and artistic diversity. His means for levying this critique is a “burlesque” of “spectacular excess” foreshadowed in the story’s title—”The Monument” erected to honor Domingo Fonseca, who comes to represent the people’s resistance against a general, amorphous oppression. In the world of the story, the statue’s literal excess at a towering thirty feet embodies the comic spirit of the text as a reminder of how protest can lose its meaning when it becomes less a tool for demanding equity and more a way to define a community ethos.

Though Domingo and the construction of the monument are key for understanding the satire of unity rhetoric, the story zeroes in on the role of the artist in this context. The strongest jabs land with the character of Potatoes Rivera, “dean of street poetry” and orchestra-tor of the mass mobilization of the community to stand with Domingo. To galvanize the crowd who had come to support Domingo, Potatoes reads “his now famous anti-Reagan poem: ‘Oye, Ronnie, Baby, What Really Went on Between You and Juanito Gwayne?’” (178). The reference to Potatoes Rivera is a not-so-subtle dig at one of the most highly regarded Nuyorican poets at the time of this story’s publication, Tato Laviera. Mendoza includes the text of the aforementioned poem, excerpted here:   Yes, Youand Juanito Gwayne, that dubious symbol ofNorth Amerikan imperialistmanhood, were playing with each other’speepeesbetween takes andthat you letJuanito Gwayne inseminate you with hisSTAR SPANGLED BANANAin that nether region where the sun don’tshine,so that you could become pregnant with powerand go on to so called greatnessand oppress the people,Ronald Reagan,you  Madreflaca!(Vega Yunqué, Mendoza’s Dreams 179)

The poem is a pitch-perfect parody of Tato Laviera and the Nuyorican poets more broadly through the use of wordplay, Spanish (the spelling of John Wayne as it might be pronounced with a Spanish accent: Juanito Gwayne), the use of capitalization, and even the spacing of the lines meant to signal the print aesthetics and cadence of Nuyorican poetry. The targets of the poem, John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, as broader symbols of the masculinity that characterizes the imperialist project, align with the political vision of much Nuyorican poetry of the time. Simultaneously, the emphasis on Reagan and Wayne in the poem, when coupled with the statue of Domingo holding his crotch, points a comic finger at the rightfully criticized masculinist tenor of movement politics.11

Potatoes’s performance of the poem had the crowd “whipped up into a froth” in keeping with Vega Yunqué’s emphasis on the relationship between art and activism in the Nuyorican context (179). As arguably the most famous poet at the moment, Tato Laviera would have been an ideal target for Vega Yunqué’s satirical address. Laviera’s poetry collection, La Carreta Made a U-Turn (1979) was a critical success and was selling extremely well, reprinted multiple times by 1987 when “The Monument” appeared in Mendoza’s Dreams. Laviera’s brand of poetry influenced a generation of artists and brought him a great deal of visibility. Representing Tato Laviera as Potatoes was a way of satirizing the emphasis on protest by Nuyorican writers through the self-reflexivity and excess of the comic mode.12

For Vega Yunqué, the success of poets like Laviera was more a product of their politics than their aesthetics. In the story itself, one can almost feel Mendoza rolling his eyes when he describes Potatoes’s most famous poem: “‘Dig Those Dudes Sitting on the Stoop,’ in which he goes out on a limb and attacks not only the lack of employment opportunities facing the people, but also the passive attitude with which they confront their own diminution of power” (Vega Yunqué, Mendoza’s Dreams 176–77). Sour grapes for an author who never received the same critical acclaim or attention of his contemporaries? Quite likely. A reductive representation of Laveria’s poetics with a touch of condescension? Without question. At its excessive heart, comedy is more sledgehammer than scalpel. But through this exaggerated, comic representation, Vega Yunqué is able to magnify the formal and thematic kernels at the heart of the representational repertoires that have long made Puerto Rican literature, and literature by people of color more broadly, legible and viable inside and outside the communities from which it emanates. Of course, this use of comedy makes nuance difficult, but exaggeration can lead to a “perspective by incongruity” that allows for questioning “the habits of mind that we may fall into as we critique race” (Carpio 6).13 Having the narrator intervene in an absurd, comic situation with qualifications would strip it of impact and distract from a primary goal—to be provocative and unsettle the reader.14

Protest fiction and its legibility provide not only cultural capital in the community but also operate as a kind of currency outside of it. This is most clearly represented in the story when Potatoes is able to use his cultural and artistic capital as the “dean of street poetry” to bring in funding for the monument. Here, Rey Chow’s theorization of the relationship between the politics of ethnic recognition, capital, and protest is instructive: contemporary articulations of ethnicity as such, much like the articulation of class consciousness, are already firmly inscribed within the economic and ideological workings of capitalism, replete with their mechanisms of callings, opportunities, and rewards. In this context, to be ethnic is to protest—but perhaps less for actual emancipation of any kind than for the benefits of worldwide visibility, currency, and circulation. Ethnic struggles have become, in this manner, an indisputable symptom of the thoroughly and irrevocably mediatized relations of capitalism and its biopolitics.(48)

Chow’s intervention is explaining how ethnic protest is in keeping with the broader “spirit of capitalism” theorized by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Chow’s theoretical insights get at the heart of Vega Yunqué’s critique in “The Monument.” Potatoes and his community mobilization campaign equate Puerto Ricanness with resistance to achieve “visibility, currency, and circulation” while conversations about “emancipation” fall to the wayside. In addition, the example of acquiring federal funding for the monument speaks not only to the visibility of protest but also to the broader point made throughout Vega Yunqué’s comic fiction regarding the commodification of “resistance” in the literary marketplace. Elena Machado Sáez describes this in the context of the academy: “For instance, if academics who teach postcolonial or ethnic literature courses display a purchasing preference for texts deemed ‘resistant,’ publishers are responsive to those market demands” (4). This leads to a market-driven cycle involving aesthetics, politics, the conferral of awards, and finally, who gets rewarded with contracts and visibility in the literary marketplace. This market reality, in addition to the tendency of academics to privilege teaching and writing resistance in race and ethnic studies, has contributed to the legibility of authors like Tato Laviera and Piri Thomas but a lack of attention to Vega Yunqué, whose comedy stages how resistance itself can inform a (self) racialization project that constrains.15 I say this not to somehow position Vega Yunqué as against resistance but to explain how his comedy of race makes the intersection of politics, aesthetics, and legibility grotesquely visible.

Although protest and resistance are often framed as liberating practices meant to promote social justice, Mendoza continually reminds the reader how he is not free to write. When Domingo’s nephews first come to him for help, he is writing a “historical saga of the Flying Batatinis”—an aerial act that toured Puerto Rico for six generations (Vega Yunqué, Mendoza’s Dreams 169). He tries to get back to his writing but is constantly sucked back into the spectacle of protest around Domingo’s vigil. Conscripted to serve on the committee by Potatoes Rivera and other community activists to help Domingo, Mendoza explains, “I could no longer work, my time taken up by meetings and press conferences” (179). When Mendoza finally settles back into his apartment, with Domingo’s marble head outside of his window, he is looking forward to getting back to work on the Flying Batatinis. But it’s not to be. He is interrupted again by Pucho Fonseca with news that Domingo was mooning people in an empty parking lot. Resigned to what comes next, Mendoza advises him to call Potatoes Rivera and wonders “how many empty lots there were in New York City, Philadelphia, Newark, Boston, Hartford, Chicago, Gary and all the other places where the people struggled and sweated and cried and fought to extricate themselves from the bonds of oppression” (182). Potatoes and the resistance machine would no doubt be activated again in a seemingly endless cycle, ensuring that poems in the style of Laviera, parodied by Vega Yunqué with “Oye, Ronnie, Baby, What Really Went on Between You and Juanito Gwayne?,” remained in the spotlight. Meanwhile, Mendoza’s Flying Batatinis and Vega Yunqué’s broader work (comic and noncomic) continued to languish and struggled to find traction among readers broadly, and the Puerto Rican community in particular.

Perhaps most critically, Vega Yunqué ends the story where it began in a way that calls to mind the cautionary words of Richard Iton: “Resistance, once it becomes routine and recognized, can be anticipated and welcomed by dominant authorities, and fetishized and folded into the broader process of institutionalizing dominant hegemonic understandings” (102). With “The Monument,” Vega Yunqué asks an important question: What are we left with once the monument is finished? He leaves us with a thirty-foot marble statue of a man with his hand on his crotch that serves less as commemoration of the Puerto Rican struggle against oppression and more as an invitation to consider the aesthetic and political dead-ends that can arise when the politics of protest, unity, and the visibility they grant are not themselves questioned sufficiently.

The Parodic Excess of The Lamentable Journey

The reader is introduced to Mendoza in the first story of the collection, called “Back by Popular Demand,” in his New York City apartment in El Barrio, where he had “just finished touching up Mrs. Pantoja’s dream of her daughter’s wedding” (Vega Yunqué, Mendoza’s Dreams 5). At that moment, a group of men arrive from what we later learn is the Layton Publishing Company. Their job was to forcibly take Mendoza to the company’s offices downtown, where he would abandon writing “dreams” for people in his neighborhood and again produce the books that had made the publisher so much money: I had given them Up From the Ghetto, 185 pp. of a drug addict’s harrowing journey from the degradation of his habit to the respectability of a social work degree; Down to the Ghetto, 256 pp. of a father’s desperate search for his wayward teenage daughter, only to find she has become a beatific figure in a religious cult; Return to the Ghetto, the 457 pp. odyssey of an upwardly mobile, suburban family’s obsessive concern with their roots; plus ten other minor works.(11)16

Mendoza no longer wants to write works that conform to the public’s desire to hear “the same old things about the people. ‘Drugs, jails, prostitutes, and gangs’” (9). Larry, one of the men charged with restraining Mendoza, explains that it was necessary for him to write like this because “the public was entitled to the reality. ‘It makes them feel safer,’ he [Larry] said, and added that I had to reassure the reading public so they could take precautions against the reality” (9). Mendoza prefers to write the “dreams” of the community, to function as a vehicle for the fantasies of the people in his neighborhood. But it’s not to be. He is taken downtown and led to his writing studio “in the display window of Layton Publishing Company,” enclosed by a wall of glass: “but I would not be able to see through it. Beyond this wall, on the other side, would be the street and the public; . . . needing to know how I live. . . . Every word typed by me would be projected on the large screen outside, for the public to keep tabs on my work” (12).

“Back by Popular Demand” is a not-so-subtle introduction to Vega Yunqué’s consistent attack on the publishing industry and the place of Puerto Ricans in the US popular culture imaginary. In this story and others, the author focuses on what he sees as the spatial and thematic racialized containment of Puerto Ricanness and pressures to present an “empirical,” textbook-like narrative to the reader about Puerto Rican New York. Vega Yunqué represents this containment by speaking to the logic of the market, specifically Layton Publishing Company, and their demands that his writing represent “the ghetto” so that readers “could take precautions” and “feel safer.” Like Mendoza in his studio at Layton, Vega Yunqué resented the idea that he and his fiction would be put in a box (literally, in the world of the story as the writing studio) that would enrich a publisher and meet the expectations of a readership familiar with stereotypes about Puerto Ricans in the ghetto and the form these often take, captured in the list of Mendoza’s “ghetto works” above: narratives of overcoming drug abuse, uplift through hard work, religious themes, and a focus on reconnecting with one’s roots. Mendoza attests to having written “ten other minor works” in this vein, which captures what Vega Yunqué saw as the dominance of these themes in representations of Puerto Ricans in the literary marketplace and the limited space authors like him had to operate outside of them.

Though at work in all of his comic writings, this critique of the publishing industry’s spatial and thematic “containment” of Puerto Rican literature reaches its height in his 2004 novel, The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow into the Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle. If containment is the target, Vega Yunqué’s weapon of choice is not melodrama or a plea to the reader to see the “real” Puerto Rican community but an aggressive, overflowing narrative excess that gleefully aims to burst apart an all-too-neat bundling of Puerto Ricanness for mass consumption in the literary marketplace. The book was certainly timely, published in the early 2000s, when publishers were becoming increasingly interested in Latinx literature, as Dalia Kandiyoti points out.17 The narrative excess of the novel amounts to a scathing satire achieved through his deployment of stereotypes as the primary means of characterization and his parodic invocation of genres that have traditionally made literature by people of color in the United States visible.

To provide a capsule summary of The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow into the Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle is as difficult as trying to commit the full title of the book to memory. The titular character is a failed, white punk rocker and NYU film school dropout recently fired from his job at a copy shop. We learn at different stages of the book that he is a graduate of Yale and the illegitimate son of Bill Clinton. Omaha’s first and primary love interest is Maruquita Salsipuedes, a character that on the surface embodies every stereotype of the Puerto Rican “homegirl” complete with a poor command of “standard” English, highly sexualized, and stupid—a stereotype rendered grotesque under Vega Yunqué’s comic direction. Maruquita and the other female members of her family are accomplished “brujas” (witches) with what are described as “magical realist” powers they use to morph into animals, combat gentrification on the Lower East Side, and organize a Puerto Rican navy that will eventually force the United States out of the island. Maruquita falls in love with Omaha, makes him “her pet,” and helps him achieve his dream of a bigger penis through the magical powers of her family. When Omaha meets Winnifred Buckley—a rich, white Yale graduate from a landed family of the American aristocracy, the love triangle is complete. In between the evolution of the conflict associated with this love triangle, the narrator issues long tangents on subjects as varied as Puerto Rican independence, the sad state of literature, thinly veiled critiques of enemies from his time as director of the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, and gentrification—to name just a handful. In a number of metafictional moves, Vega Yunqué appears in the text as the author under the name “Vega” to communicate with characters about the progress of the book and with the audience to offer often contradicting ways for interpreting the literary and political significance of the novel.

The comedy of race in Lamentable features Vega Yunqué self-consciously mobilizing Puerto Rican stereotypes to demonstrate their power to contain meaning in the service of the literary marketplace. His description of one of the novel’s protagonists, the hyper-sexualized Puerto Rican “homegirl” Maruquita Salsipuedes, is a representative example of his use of stereotype as a primary mode of characterization in the novel: Maybe Omagaw Boogaloo wouldn’t like her fine J-Lo butt, which all the boys said was tremendous and spectacular. Maybe he liked them skinny-assed white bitches with their flat butts. She could change his mind big time. She could take him up into the mountains in the projects, and in the moonlight by the Rio Grande de Loiza she’d invite El Gran Combo to play, and she would dance naked for him, shaking her butt and her titties, and then he would get turned on and give her mucha cabeza in her tontón creek.(20)

Part of the comic effect of this passage comes from the narrator’s matter-of-fact relation of Maruquita’s thoughts and desires for Omaha. The narrator’s staid tone alongside Maruquita’s sexually charged thoughts produce a comic incongruity. This effect is heightened by how Vega Yunqué is able to check off, in the space of four sentences, so many of the stereotypes associated with Puerto Rican femininity. It starts with an orienting physiology, namely, Maruquita’s “J-Lo butt”—a reference to Puerto Rican artist Jennifer Lopez. As Frances Negrón-Muntaner outlines in her study of the cultural politics of Jennifer Lopez’s rear, “A big culo does not only upset hegemonic (white) notions of beauty and good taste, it is a sign for the dark, incomprehensible excess of ‘Latino’ and other African diaspora cultures. Excess of food (unrestrained), excess of shitting (dirty), and excess of sex (heathen) are its three vital signs” (Boricua Pop 189). That excess is on full display in this description of Maruquita: references to musical groups, sex acts, a voluptuous body, and a marker of her unassimilable speech in how she pronounces Omaha Bigelow as Omagaw Boogaloo—a representation of Puerto Rican “street” English.18 Examples of excessive, grotesque representations of Puerto Ricans are found throughout the book, perhaps inspiring the nervous laughter of the politically incorrect. Here is exactly how we should not represent Puerto Ricans, yet there it is, easily recognizable as signifiers of Puerto Ricanness anyway.

But these representations bring the seeds of their own subversion. Deploying this stereotypical vocabulary in the service of describing every major character in the novel creates a dynamic whereby readers have very little investment in them. Because of the lack of character depth, we are left with a play of surfaces, of cartoonish, excessive bodies meant to call attention to themselves as stereotypes. This comic exaggeration is the point. These representations are legible as Puerto Rican for the reader, so Vega Yunqué’s approach is to inflate them so they are at the forefront of the narrative and not just subtext or normalized the way these stereotypical representations often circulate in popular culture. With the stereotype squarely centered in the narrative logic of the text, Vega Yunqué makes it difficult to simply see this as part of the character and their internal life. The stereotype is the character and its legibility and power to contain the signifying possibilities of Puerto Rican artists is the target.

Not content to comment on the stereotype as a means of containment solely through characterization, Vega Yunqué uses a more direct approach via metafiction. At various moments in the novel, he appears in the text as Vega to have conversations with Maruquita. In the example that follows, Maruquita is at the “bohango” (penis) enlargement ceremony being performed on Omaha in a ritual invoking the indigenous population of Puerto Rico, the Taínos. In this moment of narrative fantasy, Omaha complains that he doesn’t understand the language being spoken at the ceremony, which prompts the exasperated Maruquita to produce a cellphone from under her loincloth and place a call to Vega: “Vega?”“Yes?”“It’s Jennifer Gómez.”“J-Go!”“Never mind all that J-Go hype nonsense. Don’t try to get me out of character.”(97)

After making her unhappiness about Omaha’s character known, Jennifer Gómez, who we now know is “playing” the character of Maruquita Salsipuedes, says: “Where the fuck do you get these people? Vega, will you tell him that this is a friggin book?”“Sure, it’s a book. I’m writing it, and don’t think it’s easy.”“Oh great, Vega! Pull that retrograde ‘I am an author’ Nuyorican Poets Café, East Village literary bullshit on me.”“Don’t get insulting and start with your Hunter College Drama Department method esthetic okay? I suppose you’d rather have me write some degrading, icky, when I was, spidery, mean-street, ghetto novel, right?”“I didn’t say that either. But this is some weird shit, Papa. It’s like some kind of derivative Gabriel García Márquez magical-realism crap.”“Let’s say I’m paying homage to a tradition.”(98)

This interruption of the plot comes with the revelation that Vega is essentially “staging” the action of the book with characters who, to varying degrees, are aware of their presence as actors. The stereotypes invoked in the book really are types in the sense that they are being played by characters who themselves have an ambivalent relationship to their performances. Jennifer Gómez has trained at the Hunter College Drama Department and is familiar with the Nuyorican art produced in New York City, calling Vega back down to Earth from any literary pretensions he may be suffering from—a not-so-subtle jab at the self-seriousness he has taken up in his writing for decades, including his previously discussed short story, “The Monument.” Vega pushes back against that characterization by using a dismissive shorthand to refer to classic literary works in the Nuyorican canon written by Esmeralda Santiago, Abraham Rodríguez, and Piri Thomas, respectively. By referring to them, Vega Yunqué sets up the novelistic tradition he is parodying and the pressure he feels from the publishing industry to conform, much in the same way he targeted Tato Laviera and the Nuyorican poets through the character of Potatoes.

On the other side, Jennifer Gómez is playing the part of Maruquita, a reference to the kind of roles available to Puerto Rican artists. Through Maruquita, Vega Yunqué shows how Puerto Rican artists—writers and actors in this case—can get work and become legible in a mainstream culture that expects a particular narrative of Puerto Ricanness.19 Crucially, Vega Yunqué does not whitewash Jennifer Gómez when she speaks after breaking character. She still uses words like “friggin” and slang like “Papa” to refer to Vega. The difference here is that these characters are very much aware of how they circulate and that self-reflexivity is part of the subversive potential of comedy, the gaze outward toward the audience meant to highlight their expectations. By using a self-reflexive comic mode in the context of narrator and character, Vega Yunqué claims the comic as an essential part of the humanity of racialized subjects. Israel Reyes explains, “for a long time humor was thought to belong exclusively to the well-bred races of the North, while those of lower-class origins and from southern climes lacked this more advanced quality of self-reflexivity and sympathy in their laughter” (12). Though considered low, comedy and the laughter it inspires have been seen as markers of humanity by philosophers going as far back as Aristotle. Part of denying the comic is in keeping with how racialized subjects have long been denied the psychic complexity that underpins the human.

In moments like the exchange detailed above, Vega Yunqué stages the stereotype not simply as “untrue”—a weak critique of the stereotype—but in a way that demonstrates how stereotypes actually do work in the world and structure reality in meaningful ways through a “coercive” logic directly tied to visibility. Rey Chow defines “coercive mimeticism” as the expectations that marginal subjects “resemble and replicate the very banal preconceptions that have been appended to them, a process in which they are expected to objectify themselves in accordance with the already seen and thus to authenticate the familiar imagings of them as ethnics” (107). In the case of Jennifer Gómez and Vega, coercive mimeticism affects how their artistic labor is received in the market by dictating what kind of work they can get (Gómez as the stereotypical Rican homegirl) and the pressure Vega Yunqué feels to chronicle life on the “mean streets.” His navigation of the pressure is best captured at the end of their exchange in this scene, when Jennifer asks, “You think they’re gonna publish this thing?” and Vega replies, “I don’t know, but I gotta write it” (99).

Lamentable draws on comedy to stage how this coercive mimeticism functions. But it is in the way mimesis is enacted (through an excessive narrative approach) that Lamentable offers an alternative through the language of change and possibility. When Jennifer Gómez complains to Vega about putting her “through a lot of changes” (99) in the chaos of a novel, where she is not only “changing” into her character of Maruquita but also into a monkey, cat, and pigeon (among other animals), Vega responds, “I’m supposed to do that. Otherwise we’re gonna end up with some silly ass Puerto Rican ghetto story.” Indeed, change is a theme throughout the novel, with characters like Omaha going from Yale graduate and failed punk rocker to performing a stereotype of Puerto Ricanness by growing a mustache, dyeing his hair, and changing his speech while living in the projects of the Lower East Side to avoid arousing suspicion of “belonging” there, to Jennifer Gómez petitioning for more control of her character’s life and transforming into a graduate of Harvard and Annapolis Naval Academy to lead Puerto Rican military forces against US imperialism. The constant throughout is less a narrative of change as “progress”—from seemingly uneducated to educated—and more a comment on the logic of containment, the means of visibility, by foregrounding change through a comic excess communicated in the number of possibilities available to the novel’s protagonists.

Change is also a major feature in the novel by way of representing the shifting demographics of the Lower East Side. Vega Yunqué takes time to outline the history of various ethnic groups in the neighborhood and how rapid gentrification has pushed out people of color. Among these changes is a constant reminder of the Puerto Rican presence on the Lower East Side signaled in the title—The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow into the Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle. “ Loisaida,” a Spanish rendering of “Lower East Side” popularized by Nuyorican poet Bimbo Rivas in 1974, in the title points to a Puerto Rican presence in danger of disappearing and as a way for Vega Yunqué to tip his hat to the Nuyorican literary community that was so instrumental in advocating for Puerto Ricans in the neighborhood. It is important to stress that we ought not to read his comic satires and parodies of Nuyorican literature as complete disavowals. Instead, Vega Yunqué wanted to use comedy’s provocativeness to magnify the excesses of those aesthetic and political strategies and how their dominance has left writers like him interested in exploring other aspects of Puerto Rican life on the outside looking in.

Stereotypes, spatial representations, and metafictional encounters with characters do not occur in a vacuum. Vega Yunqué is also interested in parodying the literary modes and genres through which writers of color become marketable and legible. Francisco Goldman speaks to the genre expectations foisted on Latinx writers in an article published just five years before Lamentable about how Latinx fiction was being conceptualized by the public and the publishing world as sharing “certain traits” that distinguished it as an “‘authentic’ Latin American and Latino approach to fiction: magical realism, a certain exuberance and sensuality, accessible story-telling, and, in the case of the U.S. writers in particular, a certain quality of sometimes bereft nostalgia for the homespun and/or folkloric aspects and flavors of life in former homelands.” These narrative characteristics and formal expectations also function as a means of racialized containment that Vega Yunqué singles out in his comic address.

Lamentable parodies the novel of minoritarian experience by presenting its most recognizable formal elements—realism, the bildungsroman, protest, the magical, and politics—in a way that emphasizes not any fundamental problems with these genres but how they become the kind of “coin of the realm” in a world where visibility and capital are intimately connected. In Bakhtin’s understanding of literary parody, he explains that the result of a parodic take on the sonnet, for instance, is not a sonnet at all but the “image of a sonnet” (Dialogic 51). Through parody, Vega Yunqué gives us an image of the various genres and conventions writers of color are expected to mobilize and asks us to think about Lamentable as an object one holds in one’s hands—a thing in the world that exists within a system of capital and commodification. In drawing attention to that fact, the comedy of race extends to the formal attributes that have historically made racialized fiction marketable—the narrative packaging that delivers the experience of people of color for a mainstream audience interested in how the other half lives.

Once again, the weapon of choice for engaging the containment strategies is a jarring comic excess. If, as Goldman suggests, “accessible story telling” is a hallmark of how Latinx fiction was being marketed at the turn of the century, Vega Yunqué cleverly satirizes that logic with a comic excess that can be measured in page numbers. Lamentable exhausts its audience with more than 300 pages filled with tangents, digressions, and explanations that seem “unnecessary” to the world of the plot. It is sometimes exhausting. But this excess cannot be read outside of the book’s satirization of the mainstream reading practices often brought to bear on fiction by writers of color. Vega Yunqué is well aware of the desire to read fiction by racialized writers as sociology, as a kind of textbook for understanding the ethnic. He frustrates this reading practice with elaborate digressions that move us completely out of the Lower East Side, where the novel takes place: two and half pages dedicated to the relationship between Martha and George Washington with special attention to George’s sexual inadequacy; a tangent about US military imperialism and a minor character’s interest in taking baseball to the Middle East; and the similarities between CNN and the tale of Oedipus—to name just a few examples. In addition to being comic in their own exposition, these digressions serve as interruptions continually frustrating the desire to read for an accessible plot. Vega Yunqué is quite conscious of the potentially maddening digressive turns of the novel: “I don’t want to use this word [asshole] for those people who might complain that I should be concerned with advancing the plot, and forget attempting to create literary references and use the novel to advance knowledge” (213). Using digressions turns the spotlight back on reading practices, the desire for accessible storytelling, while simultaneously functioning as a means to gesture outside of the Lower East Side and the logic of containment that has been used literally as a means for herding Puerto Ricans into “ghetto spaces” and metaphorically as a logic by “dominant literary and political institutions . . . that transforms a diaspora place into a site with a fixed identity determined primarily by those outside of it looking in” (Kandiyoti 167).

Vega Yunqué not only takes on the demands for an accessible story of the “Puerto Rican experience” but also plays with how magical realism can project a kind of legible “Latinness” in the literary world. Magical realism is often deployed, as Kirsten Silva Gruesz explains, as an unproblematic “marketable signifier of ‘ethnic’ fiction” (58), and Vega Yunqué once again uses comedic excess to disrupt the market logic of Latinx “magic.” For instance, one of the distinguishing traits of texts that use a magical realist style is that instances of the “marvelous” or “magical” are narrated as perfectly normal occurrences. Vega-as-narrator, on the other hand, describes the novel as having an “urban-magical-realism structure” (331) and frequently points out how moments like Maruquita’s many transformations are “magical realist.” For the white characters in Lamentable, this magical realism is very alluring, as illustrated by a conversation between Omaha and his friend Richard: “She’s [Maruquita] really nice, Richard. And she can do all kinds of magical-realism shit.”“Get the fuck outta here. A Puerto Rican girl that does magical-realism shit. No way. I don’t want to diss nobody, but the fucking people can barely make change, man.”“I’m not joking.”“Wait, man. Magical realism? Like in García Márquez, with fucking butterflies in the whole town and seafood walking outta the sea and going into people’s houses and shit?”(67)

Richard’s recall of García Márquez as exemplar of magical realism and his reductive understanding of his work point to the vaulted place of the broad category of magical realism in the popular imagination and how the texts that deploy it are often read as “happy folkloric ‘exotic’” texts (Goldman), stripping the genre of its aesthetic and political complexity. Introducing magical realism also confers the kind of legibility that Vega Yunqué is invested in warping throughout the text. García Márquez, and magical realism more broadly, function as a shorthand when describing writers from the Américas. But Vega Yunqué also satirizes the dynamic of “authentic” writing and how Latinx artists are often seen as “less than” their literary counterparts south of the United States. When Richard expresses surprise at Maruquita’s magical realist capabilities, the surprise is in keeping with understandings of Latin American magical realism written by “timeless masters,” while Latinx authors can only produce narratives of the local or poor facsimiles of works by writers like García Márquez. Lamentable at once holds up the power of magical realism as a legible narrative of Latinness and how Latinx writers can be seen as poor ambassadors of a form given their place in the US social hierarchy—less authentic because of life in the United States.20

Vega Yunqué’s comic representations of the legible markers of Puerto Rican and racialized fiction produce the disorder he is intent on sowing in the novel. Those formal categories, genres, and (stereo) types that confer legibility on fiction function less as a means of conveying a traditional plot than as the comic beginning and end. Works like Lamentable and “The Monument” are examples of the comedy of race Vega Yunqué staged throughout his career to have a conversation about “the politics of enunciation” (Spillers 199)— how artistic work is recognized and made visible inside and outside one’s community. He didn’t have much success in his time; he unfailingly faced difficulties in placing his work with publishers, and scholars paid him little attention.21 But as the landscape of literary and cultural studies shifts to engage comedy more deeply, scholars will find that Edgardo Vega Yunqué’s iconoclastic comedies and unconventional career have much to say about the intersections of race, aesthetics, and the politics of visibility.

Footnotes

  • Albert Sergio Laguna is assistant professor of American studies and ethniticy, race, and migration at Yale University. He is the author of Diversión: Play and Popular Culture in Cuban America and has published articles on stand-up comedy, radio, and the transnational circulation of popular culture between Cuba and the United States. He is writing a monograph titled “The Comedy of Race.”

  • 1 Though his writings have been featured in some smaller anthologies (Kanellos, Short Fiction; Christie and Gonzalez), his work is notably absent from the two most expansive Latinx literature anthologies of the twenty-first century: Stavans, Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2011), and Kanellos, Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States (2002). Aside from some interviews and mentions in passing, I have only been able to find three published pieces of secondary criticism on Vega Yunqué’s fiction (Christie; Domínguez Miguela; Rivera Monclova), and only Christie engages humor, albeit lightly.

  • 2 Novels include The Comeback (1985, published under the name Ed Vega), No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain’t Never Coming Home Again (2003), The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow into the Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle (2004), and Blood Fugues (2005). His short story collections are Mendoza’s Dreams (1987, published under the name Ed Vega) and Casualty Report (1991). His papers can be consulted at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York.

  • 3 See Richard Pérez’s interview with Vega Yunqué, easily the most wide-ranging conversation with the author available. Bill Bailey was eventually published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

  • 4 Critical attention to the constraints on the literary imagination of writers racialized as Latinx has grown quite recently within Latinx literary studies. Ralph E. Rodriguez “aims to unbind Latinx literature from those identity and thematic strictures and to use the category of genre to understand the literary corpus by authors known as Latinx” (Latinx Literature 18). Christopher González examines the narrow expectations that have limited the possibilities of narrative form for Latinx writers. What sets my study apart is its focus on how the comic mode is particularly well suited on a formal level for engaging with the constraints Latinx authors face inside and outside their communities.

  • 5 By using race and racialization in relation to Puerto Ricans and Latinxs more broadly, I seek to emphasize how “[r]acism can and has operated through a variety of physical features, cultural characteristics and origins, and status as ‘native’ or ‘nonnative’ to exclude groups from engendering empathic identification, or from deserving social inclusion and political representation” (Alcoff 117). Although there are visibly white Puerto Ricans, cultural differences are often the grounds for racialization, producing a whiteness that is “suspect and conditional” (Dávíla 18). It is also crucial to account for how Latinx communities experience race differently across the color spectrum and the racialization and discrimination that occurs within and between Latinx groups—a topic I take up in greater detail in the larger book project from which this essay is drawn. For more on this racial dynamic in the Puerto Rican and Latinx context, see Alcoff; Dávila; Torres-Saillant; De Genova and Ramos-Zayas.

  • 6 There is a much more significant body of work on comic modes in African American literature from scholars like Glenda Carpio and Darryl Dickson-Carr. More recently, an article by Kimberly Chabot Davis provides a succinct summary of satire in African American literature to frame her close reading of Mat Johnson’s “anti-utopian satire” in Pym and Loving Day. But scholars across fields in race and ethnic studies consistently point to the need for more work on comic forms (Carpio; Balce; Laguna). Scholarship is especially lacking in Latinx literary studies. Carl Gutiérrez-Jones speaks to this need for more scholarship in an article on Chicanx literary studies. Others who have spent time on comic forms in a Latinx literary context include Hernández, Chicano Satire; Noel; and Reyes. Kanellos (“Cronistas”) points out that satirical writings were popular in early twentieth-century Latinx newspapers. Although it is beyond the scope of this essay to explain why, for instance, African American studies has featured more studies on comedy than, say, Latinx or Asian American studies, I can point in a few directions for potentially understanding this disparity. First, African American studies has had a much longer history than those other fields. Second, language can also be a barrier to scholarship—especially when the nuances of comedy require a strong command of the target language and its cultural context. Primary texts in languages other than English can limit the pool of scholars able to work with them. Finally, while tracing a coherent African American comic tradition is possible (Watkins), such a project is more difficult in the context of pan-ethnic frameworks like Latinx and Asian American, where people come from different countries and cultures with their own comic practices.

  • 7 By “ambiguous sign,” I mean the broad racial, ethnic, national, and even generational formations that are collapsed under the category of “Latinx.”

  • 8 My use of “Nuyorican” is meant to capture generations of Puerto Ricans raised in New York City who began identifying with the increasingly popular term in the 1970s.

  • 9 In his noncomic works like Blood Fugues, Bill Bailey, and Casualty Report, Vega Yunqué explores marriage, tensions, and friendships between Puerto Ricans and Irish Americans; class dynamics within the Puerto Rican community; and the Vietnam War, among other themes. Inner-city New York is without question part of his narrative world in these novels, but it is rarely central in the same way as the literature he parodies.

  • 10 See Reyes for a book-length study of humor in Puerto Rican literature on and off the island. Noel spends time on the ludic in the work of Nuyorican poets like Pedro Pietri and Lorraine Sutton.

  • 11 For readings of the gender politics of the Puerto Rican movement, see Beltrán and Enck-Wanzer. Noel addresses the feminist politics of Puerto Rican women poets in relation to movement politics in In Visible Movement, especially in the context of Lorraine Sutton.

  • 12 Might there have been personal conflict between Tato Laviera and Edgardo Vega Yunqué? It is certainly possible given Vega Yunqué’s history of making enemies within the Puerto Rican artistic community (González, “Chronicler”). But for the sake of this essay, any possible tension between them is of little relevance because this and other lines of comic attack appear throughout his fiction often without reference to Laviera or any other Nuyorican writer in particular.

  • 13 Carpio taps Kenneth Burke’s concept of “perspective by incongruity,” with a detour through Ralph Ellison’s engagement with the phrase.

  • 14 Vega Yunqué made these qualifications throughout his career. In interviews, he praises Nuyorican writers like Miguel Piñero (Hernández, Puerto Rican Voices) while clearly communicating that his issue is not so much with how other Puerto Rican writers choose to represent the community but that his work gets little traction because it deviates from the political and thematic focus of Puerto Rican writers in New York. When Pérez asks him why he chose to write “about a wealthy Puerto Rican family when so many Puerto Ricans are working class and working poor,” Vega Yunqué tellingly responds, “I am going to say something catty: because Piri Thomas, Abraham Rodríguez, and Esmeralda Santiago already did that” (203).

  • 15 Rodriguez makes a similar point in the Chicano studies context when he explains that the search for “resistant qualities” can produce a situation where “[w]e are thereby destined only to find the opposition we presume in advance to exist in the texts under consideration” (“Chicano Studies” 188).

  • 16 This play on racialized publishing expectations is similar to African American writer Percival Everett’s strategy in Erasure, published fourteen years later in 2001. For an analysis of the commodification of African American fiction in relation to the institutionalization of African American literary studies, see Murray.

  • 17 Kandiyoti notes that the Association of American Publishers declared 2003 the “Year of Publishing Latina/o Voices in America.” Although there was certainly a great deal of interest in the early 2000s, it had been building since the 1990s, when a number of Latinx authors, including Julia Alvarez, Oscar Hijuelos, Sandra Cisneros, and Cristina García, received significant mainstream attention.

  • 18 Boogaloo is a reference to a musical genre popular in 1960s New York that combined Latin and African American rhythms. See Flores for an analysis of the genre.

  • 19 Focusing on the media, Negrón-Muntaner chronicles the persistence of stereotypes around Latinx criminality and the urban setting in “The Gang’s Not All Here.”

  • 20 Latinx authors have long engaged with the weight of magical realism. Though certainly less didactic than Vega Yunqué, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao nonetheless plays with audience expectations around the genre in his treatment of the Mongoose character (described at times in a magical realist register and others in the context of Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction) and explicitly in the preface when Yunior describes “zafa” as bigger in Macondo than in McOndo (7). Macondo is a reference to the literary imagination of García Márquez and McOndo to the Latin American literary movement of the 1990s, which sought to distance itself from magical realism and its dominance as a catch-all term for Latin American literature globally.

  • 21 His difficulties with publishers are chronicled in Pérez.

WORKS CITED