PIONEERING POLITICIAN JUAN FLORES 1943-2014

Tuesday, December 9, 2014   6:00 AM - 8:00 AM

The following is a memoriam written by Ed Morales who WBAI welcomes as Morning Show Host on Thursdays from 6-8am.

Translating is a dangerous act of resistance, and Juan knew that danger all too well, but never stopped striving to avoid losing anything in that translation.

One of my favorite essays of Juan Flores’s was “La Carreta Made a U-Turn,” which was his postmodern redux of René Marques’s seminal play “La Carreta,” the one that made the case for returning to Puerto Rico from New York as the only sane and moral thing for a Puerto Rican migrant to do. It was from a book called Divided Borders, a collection of essays that in some ways helped form the basis for my own investigation of bilingual bicultural identity.

The key revelation of Juan’s essay was that yes, it was true that Puerto Ricans were being “Americanized,” but the way that it was happening had nothing to do with what people thought of as assimilation. He championed the way the popular classes of Puerto Rican migrants had created a bilingual identity that was at once a survival mechanism and an assertion of difference that would never fade. “Puerto Rican bilingualism,” wrote Flores, “seems to resist both political forces and scientific readings that indicate assimilation.”

Read the rest at nacla.org