The literary heritage of Puerto Rico is indebted to its history as an intersection of pre-Hispanic Indian settlement, Spanish colonialism, importation of Africans in the slave trade, and, most recently, American imperialism. The oral history of the Indians and Africans from throughout the Caribbean predate the arrival of the Spanish in 1493. The encounter between the Spanish conquistadors and the Taínos who inhabited the island during the 1500s gave rise to a wave of letters, annals, and poems in Spanish, reporting on the newly discovered place and people. Spanish became the primary language of Puerto Rico, but was enriched and expanded by the Indian vocabulary, which, according to Arturo Morales Carrión in Puerto Rico, A Political and Cultural History, "give[s] the Spanish language of the conquistadores a touch of Indian color and a new vision of.....
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