Luis Muñoz Marín

Abstract This chapter reads the 1920s fiction, verse, and journalism of Luis Muñoz Marín, written two-plus decades before he became the first democratically elected governor of Puerto Rico. Jonathan Ezra Goldman explores the crucial contexts of these works, including the passing of the Jones-Shafroth and Merchant Marines acts (1917, 1920) that granted US citizenship to Puerto Ricans but without full political rights; the complex racial politics of Puerto Rico in relation to US Jim Crow practices; and Muñoz Marín’s immersion in US avant-garde and bohemian cultures. Goldman argues that Muñoz Marín’s 1920s English writings in particular engage with and comment on modernist aesthetics of fragmentation and irony in order to articulate the liminal position of Boricuas in the US mainland.