Name changes, usually from the original Spanish to an anglicized version, signal a symbolic transition from one culture into another.  As a shift in clothes or outward appearance can reflect an inner change,[50] a name change often suggests some form of identity modification.   Deaver cites four young Cubans in Raining Backwards who, on route to "The American Dream," anglicize their names: "Jacinto becomes Keith, Consuelo becomes Connie, Joaquin becomes Quinn, and Miguel becomes Michael" (Deaver "Raining" 115).  The street youths of Abraham Rodriguez's Spidertown are equally oblivious to the organic essence of a mythical island paradise.  They, like the characters in Rechy, Fernandez and Mohr identify themselves ethnically only as a recognition of community, a sense of belonging to a certain group marginal to the labyrinthine urban society.  Subverting the police, members of drug gangs change their names to simplistic symbols of their underground reputations: "Firefly" (a pyromaniac) and "Spider" (a drug dealer who climbs walls).  Surrounded by people named Toasty (119), Domino (118), Boom (126), and Flyboy, the protagonist, Miguel, has little connection to his Puerto Rican heritage.  Though these Latinos seek support from group identity, they see the rituals connected with the island as extraneous. The youth of Alberto Rios's stories similarly nickname themselves after animals: "Sapito" ("The Iguana Killer"), "Pato" (His Own Key").  In one story, a boy from Guatemala calls himself Usmail and another boy is named Usnavy -- identity becoming dependent more upon U.S. institutions than upon family, culture and individuality.  This is how Faulkner debunked his Snopes: Montgomery Ward Snopes and Wallstreet Panic Snopes in The Town, and, by inference, lamented  the decline of southern society into materialistic capitalism.  A black Mississippi mother in La Maravilla, in search of a name for her daughter, is "not overly fond of the new urban black predilection for naming the child after the first thing the new mother sees in her hospital room after delivering the child. 'Visine Robinson' did nothing for her, nor did 'Aspirina,' 'Chlorina' or 'Sylvania" (91).  Ultimately, she chooses the name Boydeen, after a Harlem waitress, a "beautiful Liberian girl named after her great grandfathers, both former slaves.  Vea, like Faulkner, suggests the necessity of linking one's name and, consequently one's identity to something of greater value than material objects.  For Rodriguez's protagonist, distance from adults like his own absent, negligent father, his older sister who abuses her daughter (126), his on again/off again mother or Amelia's traditionally moral, old world father (188) constitutes a separation from island myth.  Though gang members refer to themselves as "Boricua," there is no intentional reminiscing, or longing, or belief that anything in Puerto Rico holds value for them.  In fact, Miguel's ability to escape the underground world of gangs and drugs is to some extent dependent upon his being outside the clique of Puerto Rican allegiance.  He relinquishes his "Boricua" self by refusing some "empanadas"(238); he doesn't like "Gloria fucken Estefan" (read Gloria fucking Stephen - 279) and unlike his political friend, he has little use for island philosophers like Betances or independence minded revolutionary heroes like Albizu Campos.  In these respects he resembles the older son of Alejo Santinio in Our House in the Last World, Horacio, who rejects Cuban cuisine as "too greasy" and "boring" (83).  Most importantly, in a novel almost entirely dialogue, Miguel reads books and thinks about becoming a writer.   Like his more famous Latino predecessor Richard Rubio from Villareal's Pocho,  he is caught in the basic tensions of immigrant life; in Jose David Saldivar's words, he must "either assert an Americanized individuality, or succumb to the burden... imposed upon him by his father and his community" (Dialectics 110).  This is essentially the problem for the narrator of Rodriguez's story "The Boy Without a Flag" around whom the mythic revolutionary figures of 20th century, Puerto Rican political history have metamorphosed into a group of accommodating weaklings.  From Jose Marti we now have Miss Marti, a militaristic assistant principal with "a battlefield for a face and constant odor of chicklets" (13), with the "mouth of a lizard" (19) and "reptile legs" (25).  "You're nothing," she tells the narrator, "You're not worth a damn" (19).  From Filiberto Ojeda Rios, one of the founders of the Puerto Rican revolutionary group "Las Macheteros,"[51] we get Mr. Rios, a man with "rodent features" having an adulterous affair with a woman named Miss Colon (read Columbus).   "You're just a puny kid," (24) he declares to the young man.   Even the boy's father fails to live up to the revolutionary ideals of Pedro Albizu Campos,[52] the very same ideals he has struggled to instill in his son.  When the boy refuses to pledge allegiance to an American flag and not become what his father calls, a "Yankee flag-waver," there is no one around to support his small rebellion.  The glorious political rebels of Puerto Rico's past fade into irrelevancy and it is up to this Nuyorican teenager to compromise, to make "peace with The Enemy" (29).  Somewhat didactically, Rodriguez ends the story with boy accepting the U.S. flag in recognition that through his "Americanized individuality" and not through his father's political rhetoric ("once so rich and vibrant" - 28) will he find his "own peace, away from the bondage of obedience" (30).   He winds up "without a flag" between worlds.   

            An allegiance to an Edenic vision of  "Borinquen" (the indigenous name for the island of Puerto Rico) is not, for Nicholasa Mohr, a healthy reality, but rather a restrictive force against Nuyorican achievement.  Mohr has spoken against the "mythic vision" of  PR as a paradise, claiming that such ideas have "little or nothing to do with Puerto Rico, its inhabitants, and the reality of that culture" ("Puerto Rican Writers" 114), and her younger generation Puerto Rican characters seem to reflect that view by their frequent intolerance of their parents' nostalgia.  Judith Cofer's characters suggest a similar mistrust of the nostalgic paradise of the island.  In Line of the Sun, the recent immigrants gather in "EL Building" -- that "bizarre facsimile of an Island Barrio" (220) -- to reminisce about Puerto Rico.  Feeling "safety in numbers," they grow "misty and lyrical in describing their illusory Eden"(174),  yet their peaceful nostalgia will be shattered by a fire (the "horrible disaster" 279) which destroys their fragile sanctuary.   Nuyorican Miguel Algarin, in his poem "A Mongo Affair," bluntly sums up the younger generation Puerto Rican's anti-nostalgic attitude: "don't fill me full of vain / disturbing love for an island / filled with Burger Kings."