Resumen de ‘Hermosamente posible’: Challenges to the heteropatriarchal narrative of ‘la gran familia puertorriqueña’ in the work of Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro

Sarah Simpson

• This article explores representations of family within a selection of prose works by Puerto Rican author Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro. These characters’ race, sexuality and gender place them outside of the heteropatriarchal conceptualization of ‘la gran familia puertorriqueña’, a concept which has run through Puerto Rican society and literature for over a century and which constructs the family and the nation as mutually constitutive. Finding themselves excluded from this hegemonic family structure, Arroyo Pizarro’s characters renegotiate the meaning of family and explore possibilities for how it could be reimagined.