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In April of 1983, Puerto Rican author and intellectual Luis Rafael Sánchez gave a performative lecture at Rutgers University that would later be published as the short story "La guagua aérea" in the Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, newspaper, El nuevo día. Since then, the story has been translated into English multiple times; it has been reprinted in various anthologies, including a 1994 eponymously-titled compendium of essays, thus complicating its designation as a short story; and, in 1993, the text was adapted into the feature-length film La guagua aérea, directed by Luis Molina Casanova. The story has even been converted into installation art, as Puerto Rican artist Antonio Martorell was commissioned to make it life-sized in 1991. Martorell, whose "round-trip, frequent flyer" life between Puerto Rico and New York embodies Sanchez's story, created a multi-room piece entitled "La casa de todos nosotros" for an exhibit at El Museo del Barrio in New York (Roulet 18). Moreover, significant literary analysis has been dedicated to "La guagua aérea," and critics have cited its polyvalent genre, linguistic potency, and cultural complexity as a counterpoint to contemporary publications that often sought to pin down the Puerto Rican identity. This study revisits Sánchez's "La guagua aérea" (1983) in order to consider the history of the Puerto Rican diaspora throughout the twentieth century, as well as to ask how Sánchez's short story and Puerto Rico's political status-not quite a U.S. state, not quite an independent nation- can inform an increasingly globalized, postnational world.
