Sotero Rivera Avilés (b. 1933 in Añasco, Puerto Rico) is mostly associated with the Guajana Generation. Alongside Carmelo Rodríguez Torres and Jorge María Ruscalleda Bercedoniz, he founded the literary group Mester de poetas and the literary journal homónima (1967). His early works include various poetry books: Nostalgia (1957), Abandonos (1958), Elegía mayor a la tierra: una estampa que debe leerse en tierra seca (1968), and the unpublished typewritten manuscript El Pueblo Obscuro y una puerta la jardín (unknown date), as well as a journal titled 1963. In 1974, Rivera Avilés won the Premio Ventana for Cuaderno de tierra y hombre. More than a decade later, it was followed by the publication of Nada pierdes, caballo viejo (Faena de remedios). In 1993, he finished his first and only novel, Con premeditación y alevosía: (Radiografía de un crimen)

Much of his poetry dealt with being a disabled veteran living in a small town while teaching at the nearby Mayagüez Campus of the University of Puerto Rico. In writing about being a post-war veteran in a rural Puerto Rican town and the broken promises of Luis Muñoz Marín’s populist modernization projects, he demystified the jíbaro archetype of the naïve, but good-hearted field laborer saved by mass migration to urban centers, such as San Juan and New York. He wrote openly about his disabilities, delved into the seldom described experience of post-war return migration, and left a record of regionalisms from a world that no longer exists. His is some of the only poetry written about Humatas, and the breadth of his work never overshadowed the importance of the life he led before acquiring a formal education.