| Sumario: | A number of scholars have demonstrated important transnational connections among Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and the United States, which include the migration of populations inside the Caribbean and to the United States. The cultural flow within this tripartite transnational framework, over the past decades, has inspired a number of films made--and set--both in and outside the two Caribbean nations to depict facets of these islanders' migration, particularly to New York City. This essay explores how such cinematic depictions have variously engaged with socio-historical discourses about the connections among the three geographical-cultural spaces and in the process marked ways of conceiving the nation beyond geographic borders. The key texts under analysis--La guagua aérea (1993), El sueño del regreso (2005), Nueba Yol (1995), Nueba Yol 3 (1997) and Raising Victor Vargas (2002)--arguably seek in representing the experiences of Puerto Rican and/or Dominican migrants to the U.S. at once to engage narrratively with contested issues of national and cultural belonging and to succeed in marketing the works to both island-based and diasporic audiences.
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