After graduating from Princeton University in 1988, María Elena Rodríguez Castro became a professor in the Department of Comparative Languages and Literature in the School of the Humanities at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus. Rodríguez Castro has written several essays investigating cultural and political aspects of Puerto Rico during the early decades of the twentieth century, including: “Divergencia: De Ciudadanos a Espectadores Culturales” [Divergence: From Citizens to Cultural Observers] and “Listening to the Reader: The Working Class Cultural Project in Cuba and Puerto Rico.” Working with the professor, Silvia Alvarez-Curbelo as coauthor, Rodríguez Castro wrote the book Del Nacionalismo al Populismo: Cultura y Política en Puerto Rico [From Nationalism to Populism: Culture and Politics in Puerto Rico] (Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1993). The poet, novelist and journalist, José de Diego Padró (1896–1974), is considered the founder (along with Luis Palés Matos) of Diepalismo (Die=De diego, palismo=Palés), an avant-garde literary movement in Puerto Rico introduced in the 1920s. Padró, who spent the 1930s writing about the situation of Puerto Rico, was a contemporary of the writer, Antonino S. Pedreira (1899–1939). Both sought a literary form of expressing the social and cultural changes that were affecting Puerto Rico. Pedreira’s most famous book, Insularismo, [Insularism] proposes a consolidation of a national identity formed by Spanish, Taino and African roots, all keeping their distance from U.S. influences. The 1930s in Puerto Rico can be characterized by social and economic changes such as the transition of production from an agrarian to an industrial capitalism influenced by the sugar corporations and the crisis that profoundly affected the coffee and tobacco markets.