René Marqués and La Carreta: migration on stage

René Marqués, who lived from 1919 to 1979, was a playwright and short-story writer, and a member of the influential literary circle known as La Generación del 50, alongside Francisco Matos Paoli, Francisco Arriví, Abelardo Díaz Alfaro, and Lorenzo Homar. His best-known play, La Carreta, or The Oxcart, follows a rural Puerto Rican family that moves from the countryside to the slums of San Juan and then to New York in search of a better life, and ends in the disillusionment and longing for the island they left. It is, in effect, a staged version of the same migration story this site tells in another lesson through census figures and neighborhood names.

The play premiered in New York City in 1953, staged at the Church of San Sebastián in Manhattan under director Roberto Rodríguez, and premiered in San Juan the following year, cementing Marqués's reputation on both sides of the migration he portrayed. Its success had a lasting institutional effect: Miriam Colón and Roberto Rodríguez later founded El Círculo Dramático, "The Dramatic Circle," widely considered the first Latino theater group in New York, working from a modest sixty-seat theater.

Marqués was no quiet observer of the politics around him. He clashed frequently in public with Governor Luis Muñoz Marín, criticizing him for accepting continued U.S. sovereignty over the island even as Marqués himself firmly believed in Puerto Rico's full independence. That disagreement was not incidental to his art; it sits beneath the disillusionment his own characters feel in La Carreta, people who leave home chasing a promise and find it only half fulfilled. An Off-Broadway English production of The Oxcart opened in 1965, again with Miriam Colón in the leading role, bringing Marqués's migration story to an entirely new audience more than a decade after its premiere.

Sources: René Marqués. See Sources. Freeze 2026-08-22.