To use my art as a bridge between my cultures. Unlike my parents, I was not always straddling. I began crossing the bridge, traveling back and forth without fear and confusion. I had heard about the dispute between Puerto Rican nationalists and the Nuyoricans . My view is that these young people mixing English and Spanish are energizing the language.
Writers do what teenagers do, taking on and changing the language.
It happens that I write in standard English. I am not Nuyorican. I was educated in Paterson, New Jersey, schools, and am now writing in Georgia. I use Spanish in the way I learned it. But it takes a different art to do code switching.