by Luis Rafael Sánchez

Luis Rafael Sánchez was born on November 17, 1936, in Humacao, Puerto Rico. Sánchez spent his childhood in Humacao and his adolescence and youth in San Juan. After receiving a bachelor’s degree from the University of Puerto Rico and a master’s degree from New York University, Sánchez went to Spain where he obtained his Ph.D. from the Complutense University of Madrid. Having established himself as one of Puerto Rico’s most prominent intellectuals and successful playwrights during the 1960s and 1970s, Sánchez first ventured into novels with Macho Camacho’s Beat, which breaks away from earlier Puerto Rican texts in its experimental form and exploration of the island’s sociopolitical conflicts. It achieves this largely through a focus on the role of mass media (radio, cinema, television, advertisements) and on...