What caught her attention was that, along with the performance, the music, and the soundscape, she could hear laughter, children screaming and playing and crying, audience members talking back, shouting in support or interrupting the performance if they were not satisfied.

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Patricia Herrera’s Nuyorican Feminist Performance provides a descent into this absent presence; she delves into the aesthetic theories and practices created by what she terms Nuyorican feminist performas. In doing so, she argues that these performas performed a radical rupture themselves within the spoken word and hip hop theater world in general.

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Herrera’s text, as the first full-length project examining women’s roles at the Café since its inception, provides a much-needed intervention, filling voids in Latinx studies broadly and Puerto Rican studies specifically. Particularly significant is her interrogation of how masculinist narratives of the Café, in which only cis men are positioned as foundational figures, are undergirded by the Puerto Rican cultural nationalism of the Nuyorican movement.

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As the book reveals, this work is intrinsically tied to notions of identity, gender, citizenship, and belonging. Accordingly, Herrera positions the work of these women within a definitively Nuyorican feminist aesthetic. Herrera defines Nuyorican feminist aesthetics as cultural production by Latina artists that is used “to raise consciousness, generate collective knowledge-making forums, and cultivate healing practices.”

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