by Nicholasa Mohr

Nicholasa Mohr was born to Puerto Rican parents in 1935 in a neighborhood of New York City known as El Barrio, or Spanish Harlem. She grew up in the Bronx in New York during the Great Depression, facing economic and social challenges associated with the time, the place, and her ethnicity. Mohr used adversity to fuel her creativity and imagination, first as a visual artist, painting the community scenes that she saw around her, and then as a writer. Her novel In Nueva York portrays the lives of several families living in the Puerto Rican neighborhoods of the Lower East Side of New York City around 1970. The eight vignettes that comprise the novel look at the community from several perspectives, bringing into relief both its cruelties and its joys.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

Puerto Rico: A brief...