San Juan: Memoir of a City (THE AMERICAS)

     San Juan: Memoir of a City conducts readers through Puerto Rico's capital, guided by one of its most graceful and reflective writers, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá. No mere sightseeing tour, this is culture through immersion, a circuit of San Juan's historical and intellectual vistas as well as its architecture.      In the allusive cityscape he recreates, Rodríguez Juliá invokes the ghosts of his childhood, of San Juan's elder literati, and of characters from his own novels. On the most tangible level, the city is a place of cabarets and cockfighting clubs, flâneurs and beach bums, smoke-filled bars and honking automobiles. Poised between a colonial past and a commercial future, the San Juan he portrays feels at times perilously close to the pitfalls of modernization. Tenement houses and fading mansions yield to strip malls and Tastee Freezes; asphalt hems in jacarandas and palm trees. "In Puerto Rico," he muses, "life is not simply cruel, it is also busy erasing our tracks." Through this book—available here in English for the first time—Rodríguez Juliá resists that erasure, thoughtfully etching a palimpsest that preserves images of the city where he grew up and rejoicing in the one where he still lives.  Best Books for Regional General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians and the Public Library Association

Travel

Rodríguez Juliá, Edgardo

Caribbean

University of Wisconsin Press

Since the publication of 'The Country Girls', Irish writer Edna O'Brien has been celebrated and maligned. This book situates her in Irish contexts that allow for an appraisal of her contribution to Irish women's literary tradition while attesting to the potency of writing against patriarchal conventions.

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

Todo el paisaje de mi infancia ha desaparecido . . . Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá is an expert and lyrical guide to the history, inhabitants, and culture of his native city of San Juan, recalling scenes from his childhood while chonicling the social and physical changes in the city. Though superhighways have replaced the winding lanes and Puerto Ricans remain socially and politically divided, Rodríguez Juliá also evokes picturesque imagery and the melancholy sweetness of remembrance as he leads readers through his Ciudad Sonada, his city of dreams.

San Juan: Ciudad Sonada (THE AMERICAS) (Spanish Edition)

World Literature

Cortijo's Wake / El entierro de Cortijo

A bilingual edition of a renowned work of Puerto Rican literature, Cortijo’s Wake/El entierro de Cortijo is novelist Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s vivid description of the funeral of legendary Puerto Rican musician Rafael Cortijo. El entierro de Cortijo became an immediate bestseller following its original publication in Puerto Rico in 1983. An unparalleled Afro-Puerto Rican percussionist and bandleader, Cortijo (1928–1982) revolutionized the country’s musical culture. His band, Cortijo y Su Combo, captivated Caribbean and Latin American audiences as it emerged in the mid-1950s. Immensely popular across Puerto Rican social classes, the band both “modernized” the traditional vernacular forms of bomba and plena and forcefully reestablished their African and working-class roots. The group’s innovations have been integral to salsa since the 1960s. Winding through the streets of working-class San Juan with Cortijo’s funeral procession, Rodríguez Juliá’s autobiographical chronicle provides a rare portrait of the impoverished society from which Cortijo’s music emerged. Along with detailed renderings of grief-stricken mourners—including Cortijo’s childhood friend and fellow musician, the celebrated singer Ismael ("Maelo") Rivera—Rodríguez Juliá records his feelings as he, a light-skinned, middle-class writer, confronts the world of poor black Puerto Ricans. The author’s masterful shifting of linguistic registers, his acute sensitivity to Puerto Rican social codes, his broad knowledge of popular music, and his sardonic ruminations on death and immortality make this one of the most widely read books of modern Puerto Rican literature. Well-known critic and cultural historian Juan Flores has provided a scrupulous translation of Rodríguez Juliá’s text and an introduction situating the book in relation to Puerto Rican music and culture and the careers of Cortijo and Rodríguez Juliá.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Duke University Press Books

A bilingual edition of a renowned work of Puerto Rican literature, Cortijo’s Wake/El entierro de Cortijo is novelist Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s vivid description of the funeral of legendary Puerto Rican musician Rafael Cortijo. El entierro de Cortijo became an immediate bestseller following its original publication in Puerto Rico in 1983. An unparalleled Afro-Puerto Rican percussionist and bandleader, Cortijo (1928–1982) revolutionized the country’s musical culture. His band, Cortijo y Su Combo, captivated Caribbean and Latin American audiences as it emerged in the mid-1950s. Immensely popular across Puerto Rican social classes, the band both “modernized” the traditional vernacular forms of bomba and plena and forcefully reestablished their African and working-class roots. The group’s innovations have been integral to salsa since the 1960s. 
Winding through the streets of working-class San Juan with Cortijo’s funeral procession, Rodríguez Juliá’s autobiographical chronicle provides a rare portrait of the impoverished society from which Cortijo’s music emerged. Along with detailed renderings of grief-stricken mourners—including Cortijo’s childhood friend and fellow musician, the celebrated singer Ismael ("Maelo") Rivera—Rodríguez Juliá records his feelings as he, a light-skinned, middle-class writer, confronts the world of poor black Puerto Ricans. The author’s masterful shifting of linguistic registers, his acute sensitivity to Puerto Rican social codes, his broad knowledge of popular music, and his sardonic ruminations on death and immortality make this one of the most widely read books of modern Puerto Rican literature. Well-known critic and cultural historian Juan Flores has provided a scrupulous translation of Rodríguez Juliá’s text and an introduction situating the book in relation to Puerto Rican music and culture and the careers of Cortijo and Rodríguez Juliá.

Breve episodios en la vida de algunos peloteros famosos de Puerto Rico

Peloteros/ Baseball Players (Spanish Edition)

History

Americas

Universidad De Puerto Rico

Presented through a series of lectures interspersed with letters and other historic documents, The Renunciation chronicles a pre-arranged marriage plotted to pacify the slave population and to save Puerto Rico from certain rebellion. The story of Baltasar Montanez, an eighteenth-century Puerto Rican hero and the son of a slave leader, unfolds deliberately, as the lecturer shares with his audience the details of Montanez's life. In 1753 Montanez renounced his own people and married the daughter of the secretary of state. Her hand was offered by the colonial government, with the backing of the Catholic Church, in an effort to create for the slaves an illusion of freedom and social mobility - and to ease growing tension between the two opposing classes. The plan worked, for a brief period, then backfired. This Caribbean Othello, who had so willingly adopted the social, cultural, and religious mores of colonial Puerto Rico's white society, was unable to sustain the charade. Montanez, whose insane visions increasingly preoccupied him, gave in to his consuming madness, abandoning his marriage and renouncing the position to which the marriage entitled him. As the final lecture draws to a close, the audience learns that this archetypal mad genius sided with neither the government and church, which gave him the power he so wanted, nor the slave revolters, whose bloody uprising in his defense brought the Puerto Rican government to its knees.

The Renunciation (UNESCO Collection of Representative Works)

Contemporary

Thunder's Mouth Pr

Tres vidas ejemplares del Santurce antiguo

Editorial Pre-Textos

Esta novela recrea un ficticio levantamiento de esclavos en el Puerto Rico del siglo XVIII; una historia que no fue pero pudo haber sido. Rodríguez Juliá adopta la forma de tres conferencias dictadas por el historiógrafo Alejandro Cadalso, en las que se describe a Baltasar Montañez, figura situada entre el mito y la historia. La narración va elaborando un falso siglo XVIII en el que se vislumbra el fin próximo del régimen colonial y de la esclavitud. Esta primera novela de Rodríguez Juliá, con su "falso siglo XVIII", es representativa de la actitud de su generación ante la historia: elaborar textos que recreen imaginativamente el acontecer histórico.

La renuncia del héroe Baltasar. Conferencias pronunciadas por Alejandro Cadalso en el Ateneo Puertorriqueño, del 4 al 10 de enero de 1938 (Spanish Edition)

Benjamín Torres Caballero

FONDO DE CULTURA ECONOMICA*

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Books by Rodríguez Juliá, Edgardo

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San Juan: Memoir of a City (THE AMERICAS)

San Juan: Memoir of a City (THE AMERICAS)

San Juan: Ciudad Sonada (THE AMERICAS) (Spanish Edition)

Cortijo's Wake / El entierro de Cortijo

Cortijo's Wake / El entierro de Cortijo

Peloteros/ Baseball Players (Spanish Edition)

The Renunciation (UNESCO Collection of Representative Works)

Tres vidas ejemplares del Santurce antiguo

La renuncia del héroe Baltasar. Conferencias pronunciadas por Alejandro Cadalso en el Ateneo Puertorriqueño, del 4 al 10 de enero de 1938 (Spanish Edition)