Manuel Ramos Otero
Manuel Ramos Otero, born Jesús Manuel in Manatí, Puerto Rico, was a prominent Puerto Rican writer and theater director known for his explorative and bold approach to themes of identity, sexuality, and marginalization. He pursued his education in sociology and political science at the University of Puerto Rico, graduating in 1968. Disillusioned by the homophobia prevalent in Puerto Rico, he relocated to New York City, where he studied under acclaimed director Lee Strasberg and founded the experimental theater company Aspasguanza, which produced Puerto Rican dramatic works. Ramos Otero gained significant recognition for his literary contributions, particularly through his short story collection "Concierto de metal para un recuerdo y otras orgías de soledad," which delves into homoeroticism and loneliness.
Throughout the 1970s, he actively published literature that challenged societal norms and edited literary journals, while also establishing a small press. He later became a professor and served as the director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College. His work includes poetry and short stories that often confront themes of death and identity. Ramos Otero's legacy is significant as he was the first openly gay Puerto Rican author to address taboo subjects related to sexuality and societal marginalization. He died at the age of forty-two from complications related to AIDS, leaving a lasting impact on Puerto Rican literature and LGBTQ representation.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Manuel Ramos Otero
Puerto Rican-born writer and poet
- Born: July 20, 1948
- Birthplace: Manatí, Puerto Rico
- Died: October 7, 1990
- Place of death: San Juan, Puerto Rico
Known for his innovative and imaginative verse, short stories, and novels, Ramos Otero was the first Puerto Rican author to speak about his homosexuality openly and to discuss homosexuality directly in his literary works. Many of his works are compelling and sexually charged explorations of the meaning of being gay and being Puerto Rican. Through his complex, passionate, and challenging writings, Ramos Otero brought the anguish of living ambiguous identities and experiencing the suffocating American political and cultural hegemony over the Puerto Rican people to literary life.
Early Life
Born Jesús Manuel to José Ramos Robles and Carmen Ana Otero Campos in Manatí, Puerto Rico, Ramos Otero (RAH-mohs oh-TEH-roh) received his primary education at Immaculate Heart School in his native town. In 1955, the family moved to Río Piedras, where Ramos Otero attended various Catholic schools. Later that year the family moved to San Juan, and the boy enrolled in the Junior-Senior High School of the University of Puerto Rico (1960-1965). He graduated in 1965 and began undergraduate studies at the University of Puerto Rico. Ramos Otero was awarded his bachelor’s degree from the Faculty of Social Sciences in 1968, with a major in sociology and a minor in political science.
Life’s Work
Exasperated with the homophobia in Puerto Rico, Ramos Otero moved to New York City in 1968, where he hoped to study theater and film. A protégé of director Lee Strasberg at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, Ramos Otero founded in 1970 his own experimental traveling theater company, Aspasguanza, which produced Puerto Rican dramatic works. Earning great critical acclaim for its innovative techniques, daring themes, and engaging personal style, the company toured the United States over the next three years. In 1971, Ramos Otero published one of his finest collections of short stories, Concierto de metal para un recuerdo y otras orgías de soledad (Metal Concert for a Memory, and Other Orgies of Solitude), which gathered together several award-winning short stories that he had written over several years, such as “Concierto de metal para un recuerdo” (1967), “Happy Birthday” (1969), “Alrededor del mundo con la Señorita Mambresí” (1970), and others. In this collection, for which he won the prize for best literary work of the year from the Puerto Rican Atheneum, Ramos Otero explores the themes of homoeroticism, loneliness, and sexual tension.
Anxious to share his ideas about literature and explore the dimensions of his identity more deeply, Ramos Otero began to publish more actively around the mid-1970’s, and he was invited to edit two editions of the literary journal Zona de carga y descarga (Zone for Loading and Unloading). He founded a small press in 1976, the Editorial Libro Viaje, with the support of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña and the New York Foundation for the Arts and through which he published his highly creative and challenging work La novelabingo (The Bingo Novel) in that same year. His collection El cuento de la Mujer del Mar (1979) contains the controversial short story “La última plena que bailó Luberza” (1975), a provocative piece of fiction based on the life of Isabel Luberza, the famous owner of a brothel in Ponce.
Ramos Otero was awarded a master’s degree in Spanish and Hispanic American literature from New York University in 1979, following which he served as an instructor of Spanish and Puerto Rican literature and history at various institutions of higher learning, including Rutgers University, LaGuardia Community College, John Jay College, and York College. Accepting a full-time position at Lehman College as a professor of Spanish and Puerto Rican literature and culture, Ramos Otero was soon named the director of the university’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies. Two books of poetry, El libro de la muerte (1985) and Invitación al polvo (1991), take up the theme of death, as does his short-story collection Página en blanco y staccato (1987). Ramos Otero began doctoral studies at New York University but never finished, dying from complications of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) at the age of forty-two.
Significance
Ramos Otero was the first gay Puerto Rican author to discuss his identity freely in public and to explore what had always been taboo themes: homoeroticism, the struggle to live an openly gay lifestyle, the anxieties of living and working as a marginalized member of society, the homophobia one experienced in Puerto Rico, and the racial prejudice suffered by Puerto Ricans in the United States.
Bibliography
La Fountain-Stokes, Lawrence. Queer Ricas: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. A fine consideration of Ramos Otero’s significance as a gay Puerto Rican writer, this study situates him well within the life and work of other gay writers in the Hispanic tradition.
Padilla, José Torres, and Carmen Haydee Rivera, eds. Writing off the Hyphen: New Critical Perspectives on the Literature of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. This study contains a brief but important discussion of Ramos Otero’s work and his significance in the Puerto Rican literary canon.
Ríos Avila, Rubén. “Caribbean Dislocations: Arenas and Ramos Otero in New York.” In Hispanisms and Homosexualities, edited by Sylvia Molloy and Robert McKee Irwin. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. One of the first important studies of the life and work of Ramos Otero, contrasting the significance of his time in New York City with that of the gay Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas.