Ana Lydia Vega is a Puerto Rican writer. Vega was a professor of French literature and Caribbean studies at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras.
Background
Ana Lydia Vega was born on December 6, 1946, in Santurce, Puerto Rico, to Virgilio Vega, a grocery store owner and María Santana, a teacher.
Vega was influenced as a child by her father. He was an oral poet who invented “decimas,” or improvised poems recited in competition with other poets. This form is characteristic of Caribbean and Latin American cultures, and although Vega did not become a poet, she retained her interest in popular themes of oral tradition and storytelling. She grew up in a pivotal time in Puerto Rican history when the island went through a political transition, and like many other Puerto Ricans, dreamed of one day having a nation independent of the United States and linked to the rest of the Caribbean and Latin America.
Education
Vega became interested in French language and culture as a young woman, and traveled to France to study; she eventually earned a Ph.D. in French and wrote her doctoral dissertation on the myth of King Christophe in Haitian literature.
In the early 1980s, Vega joined her friend Carmen Lugo Filippi and collaborated on a collection of short stories that mocked many assumptions about women. They both took pseudonyms: Vega became “Talfa Cuervo” and Lugo Filippi became “Scaldada.” The book, Virgenes у nuirtires, was a great success. The text was an open performance, an erotic dance and cultural striptease, and its success resulted from its exploration of women’s worlds in Puerto Rican culture: beauty salons, motels, tourism, weddings and divorces, soap operas, the street, office, home, married and single women, the dominated and the independent, as well as the many expectations society places on women.
Buoyed by the success of Virgenes у nuirtires, Vega published another collection, Encancaranublado у otros cuentos de naufragio, which received the prestigious Casa de las Americas award in Cuba. The book explores the simultaneous unity and diversity of the Caribbean, which has similar elements among all its cultures but which is divided by language and political isolation.
In 1989, Vega won a John S. Guggenheim scholarship that allowed her to take time off and spend several months on the south coast of Puerto Rico, where she collected local lore and wrote another story collection, Falsas cronicas del sur, based on the history and oral tradition of that region. In addition to stories, Vega has also written essays. In Esperando a Lold у otros delirios de generacion, which she dedicated to her daughter, she writes about her experiences as a professional woman, a mother, and a writer in Puerto Rican society.
Ana Lydia Vega is one of the most important and popular of the new generation of Puerto Rican writers.
She received Emilio S. Belaval Award for short story "Pollito Chicken" (Little Chicken Chicken, 1978), Circle of Iberoamerican Writers and Poets award (1979) for short story "Puerto Principe Abajo" (Down Puerto Principe), Casa de las Américas award for Encancaranublado y otros cuentos de naufragio (Encancaranublado and Other Stories of Shipwreck, 1982), and Juan Rulfo International Award (1984).
In her work, Vega focuses on Puerto Rican language and culture and incorporates humorous, parodic, and ironic elements.
Ana Lydia Vega recognizes the obstacles and literary traditions she and other Puerto Rican authors face. Writing, she professes is “hopelessly intertwined” with the reaffirmation of cultural roots, the recognition of political identity, and the reconciliation of ethnic bonds. Although some may wonder about the African vestiges in the color of her skin, the color in her works is poignant, pervasive, and polymorphous. Vega not only acknowledges but also creatively brings to the forefront, African aspects of the island’s ethnic and cultural background, while emphasizing social and political issues relevant to Blacks and mulattoes in her homeland and in all the Caribbean. To borrow a phrase from Antonio Tillis, Vega’s works add further to the “darkening of Latin American fiction.”
Her texts, renowned for their innovative style, creative content, and biting social commentary depict a noteworthy presence of characters and themes related to people of African origin. The collection of short stories in Encancaranublado y Otros Cuentos de Naufragio (1982) contains many stories that depict African-ancestored protagonists in Caribbean settings, including Puerto Rico. She also wrote Pasión de Historia y Otras Historias de Pasión (1988).
In El tramo ancla (1988), Vega and a number of other national writers presented a series of articles originally published in 1985 in the weekly Claridad. As Vega points out, the first and last essays of hers within the collection deal primarily with Blacks: immigrants from Haiti and festival participants from Martinique. The stories in Falsas Crónicas del Sur (1991) take place on the southern coast of Puerto Rico, in Arroyo, the native region of the author’s mother and, a pueblo mulato as Vega states in the introductory pages of the book. In this work, she adds fiction to local history, daily occurrences and popular legends, while always providing a core of social criticism.
Quotations:
“First of all, I believe that everything we are affects our writing. My being Puerto Rican shows up in my writing. If I’m black, it will be in my writing. If I am a woman, it will be there, too. All that we are is in our writing; and it frames the perspective from which we write, whether one is aware of it or not.”
Connections
Ana is married to Robert Villanua, a French poet. They have a daughter, Lolita.
