The Love of Neighbors: Rosario Ferré’s Eccentric Neighborhoods/Vecindarios excéntricos

Abstract

Daughter of the governor, one of Puerto Rico’s premiere feminists, and one of its most prolific novelists, Rosario Ferré pens iconic literary critiques of Puerto Rico’s “free association” with the United States and paints compelling portraits of women who resist Puerto Rican patriarchy. For many years, Ferré’s novels bound the freedom of women with the independence of the island.1 But as they struggle to disengage the binary structures of colonial patriarchy that constrain them, the women of Eccentric Neighborhoods/Vecindarios excéntricos (1998/1999) walk in on possibilities rarely admitted in Ferré’s extensive body of work: English, statehood, and desire between women. In the convergence of linguistic, national, and erotic (re)configurations in Eccentric Neighborhoods/Vecindarios excéntricos appears an ideal of intersectional complementarity, a nonhierarchical order of mutually inclusive possibilities.