Sobre la “peleíta monga” en la literatura puertorriqueña: Masculinidades inadecuadas en los cuentos de manuel abreu adorno y rafael franco steeves

Through an analysis of Manuel Abreu Adorno’s Llegaron los hippies (1978) and Rafael Franco Steeves’s Alaska (2007)—two authors that have been mostly overlooked by critics of Puerto Rican literature—the essay argues that there is a literary tradition interested on a representation of vulnerable heterosexual male bodies that embrace a performance of a mongo masculin-ity, that is, male bodies that use failure as a survival tactic. Therefore, these bodies exhibit the emptiness at the center of a letrado and popular discourse anxious about a colonial shame that has been associated with racialized and sexualized subjectivities, including what has been defined as a docile masculinity. Instead, the mongos choose life over the patriarchal imperative to dominate others. This literary analysis contributes to the discussion of masculinity studies in Puerto Rico by establishing a dialogue with previous scholarship on gender and sexuality phenomena in the island.