Marta Traba characterizes the Puerto Rican art world as extremely eclectic. With the exception of Francisco Rodón whose work focuses almost exclusively on a gruesome sort of portraiture, many other Puerto Rican artists from the same period—Lorenzo Homar, Julio Rosado del Valle and Luis Hernández Cruz, among others—use a wide range of techniques and styles to address a breadth of themes. The result, despite the evident talent of many Puerto Rican artists, is production that seems somehow outdated. Equally eclectic is the high-flown criticism that plagues the pages of the major newspapers, and the approach of galleries and public and private collections, most of which display an absolute lack of selection criteria. This eclecticism may well be the result of relentless cultural aggression; it is furthered by the growing confusion gripping Puerto Rico, which Traba describes as “vacillating between natural ties to Hispanic culture, geographical location and West Indian ethnicity, on the one hand, and its artificial connection to the United States which clearly intends to limit the growth of a Puerto Rican style, on the other.”

This is one of the essays included in Propuesta polémica sobre arte puertorriqueño[Polemic Proposal on Puerto Rican Art], an essential source for the study of Puerto Rican art from the mid-20th century on. The volume contains a group of texts that had been published in the local press and other previously unpublished works resulting from the lectures and seminars that Traba gave at the Universidad de Puerto Rico (UPR). Marta Traba, along with her husband, Uruguayan literary critic, Ángel Rama, arrived in Puerto Rico in 1970 at the invitation of the Spanish Department of UPR, Río Piedras campus. Though her stay on the island was brief—just eight months—she had a decisive impact on the island’s art scene which, as Traba pointed out on many occasions, had been cut off from rigorous art criticism for some time. Indeed, she was instrumental to gaining a place for Puerto Rican artists in critical discourse from the region.    Marta Traba (1930–1983) published a substantial number of articles in the various countries where she lived. When she arrived in San Juan, Puerto Rico, she had previously lived in Bogota, New York, Paris, and Buenos Aires. From August 1970 through the summer of 1971, the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras engaged her to teach a course on Latin American art as well as the obligatory courses on the General Theory of Art History (201) and the History of Modern Art (213), among others, in the department of fine arts. In the summer of 1971, she taught a class on aesthetics. At the end of the summer, the University did not renew her contract. While she was living in Puerto Rico, Traba wrote books, and many newspaper and magazine articles, in which she expressed her views on Puerto Rican art, which prompted considerable response and criticism in art circles.