SOURCE: "Some Early Readings of Motivos de son," in Romance Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 2, May, 1992, pp. 221-30.

In the essay below, Mullen examines various critical interpretations of Motivos de son in order to show "the multiplicity of ways in which the same poem becomes a radically different object in the context of different critical approaches."

When Nicolas Guillén died on July 16, 1989, he left behind an enormous obra, much of which has gone unstudied. His work, which had celebrated Cuba's multiracial and ethnic mix, had garnered for him in recent years wide recognition in the Latin American community. There is little doubt, however, that of all that he wrote, his starkly realistic portraits of black urban life in Havana—Motivos de son—occupy a privileged place in his writings. Guillén's Motivos de son not only represents a clear rupture in a continuous tradition but shares a relationship with...