Nicholasa Mohr Writes Back

This chapter analyzes Nicholasa Mohr as a voice for those children of the Puerto Rican diaspora, born and raised in New York, who felt increasingly out of touch with the island described in Belpré’s folklore. Mohr underlines children’s literature as of utmost importance in terms of searching for representation in an imagined literary landscape. Here, through readings of Nilda (1973) and El Bronx Remembered (1975), this chapter shows how Mohr resists established Puerto Rican and Anglo iconography which had been established in children’s literature by the 1970s.