Central Park Rumba: Nuyorican Identity and the Return to African Roots
NUYORICAN POETRY: IDENTITY AND REPRESENTATION
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Transcript of NUYORICAN POETRY: IDENTITY AND REPRESENTATION
NUYORICAN POETRY: IDENTITY AND REPRESENTATION
A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS
IN
LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES OF EUROPE AND THE AMERICAS (SPANISH)
AUGUST 2009
By André H. Alt
Thesis Committee:
Joy Logan, Co-Chairperson Lucía Aranda, Co-Chairperson
Benito Quintana
ii
We certify that we have read this thesis and that, in our opinion, it is
satisfactory in scope and quality as a thesis for the degree of Master of
Arts in Languages and Literatures of Europe and the Americas (Spanish).
THESIS COMMITTEE
_______________________________
Chairperson
_______________________________
_______________________________
iii
ABSTRACT
Written Nuyorican poetry reveals a strategy of communication founded on orality and
performance. Its overall sense of revision and rebellion situates Nuyorican poetry
contiguously to writings from the post civil rights movement era, and especially adjacent
to a Caribbean intellectual movement of decolonization. First, I review the theme of race
versus culture within a framework of multiculturalism in the United States, and then I
revisit Puerto Rican immigration to New York City through the lens of Fernando Ortiz’s
concept of transculturation. Next, I compare foundational Nuyorican texts with essays
from the Caribbean. After considering the poetry’s development of the theme of identity,
I allude to a strategy of communication that denotes a Nuyorican poetic praxis or set of
reflective postures on the making of poetry which invites other voices on the theme of
identity to be expressed within the community.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iii
Table of Contents............................................................................................................... iv
The Concept of Race in Academia, in Popular Culture, and in the Context of Multiculturalism.................................................................................................................. 1
Multiculturalism and its Critique........................................................................................ 5
Racism, Multiculturalism, and Nuyorican Poetry............................................................. 10
Race as a Category............................................................................................................ 13
Race in the United States .................................................................................................. 18
Race in Latin America ...................................................................................................... 20
Race and Culture............................................................................................................... 23
Race, Culture, and Identity ............................................................................................... 25
Poetry and Identity............................................................................................................ 27
Nuyorican Poetics ............................................................................................................. 31
The Spanish Era ................................................................................................................ 36
The American Era ............................................................................................................. 38
The Great Depression and Inverted Migration Flow ........................................................ 42
World War II and Economic Boom.................................................................................. 44
Air Travel and the Great Migration .................................................................................. 45
Organized Resistance and the Nuyorican Movement.......................................................48
Nuyorican Poetry and its Protesting Character................................................................. 49
Nuyorican “Founding Poems” and Caribbean Discourse................................................. 53
Intertextual Dialogs........................................................................................................... 60
“AmeRícan” and “Our America”...................................................................................... 77
“Nigger-Reecan Blues” and Poetic Performance ............................................................. 96
Performance, Mimesis, Diegesis, and Nuyorican Poetry ............................................... 103
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 110
Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 113
1
The Concept of Race in Academia, in Popular Culture, and in the Context of
Multiculturalism
After a twentieth century marked by the civil rights movement in the United
States in the 1960s and a similar movement for Caribbean decolonization culminating in
the same decade, at the beginning of the twenty-first century it is unsettling to realize that
race, instead of culture, remains a commonly used notion in the organization of a wide
range of public and private issues both in the United States and in Latin America. The
history of the concept of race in the United States, in the last fifteen years has been the
focus of many scholarly publications that, from both diachronic and synchronic
perspectives participate in the study and revisionism of the concept in view of both its
history and its current state in the tradition of Western thought. For instance, Richard A.
Jones develops a thorough investigation of the transformations that the ontology and the
politics of race have suffered in the last two decades in the United States (629). Jones
examines the concept of race in the history of human sciences and in some aspects,
mainly through lexicology, delves into the state of the public discussion on the subject of
race in the United States. His study spans from W.E.B. Du Bois’ conceptualization of the
existence of a “color line” separating and defining white and black America to the present
criticism over the practicalities of multicultural politics instituted in the 1970s after the
civil rights movement of the 1960s.
An important argument raised by Jones in his metacritical study of the social and
political ontology of race in the United States and Latin America is the potential impact
of “changing scientific (i.e., DNA and Human Genome Project) and political (i.e.,
2
changing definitions for purposes of the 2000 census) paradigms to alter present
conceptions of race” (612). In ultimately concluding that “race is a fiction of definition”
(630), Jones situates the potential for change within the domain of culture, which is what,
in his opinion, allows human beings to keep reproducing this complex and influential
idea.
Jones’ sociolinguistic take on the investigation of the perpetuation of the concept
of race in United States society is a very descriptive approach to the study of the question
in the country. In fact, a revisionism of race has been present in a number of previous
scholarly journal articles illustrating a large interest in many social and scientific
disciplines, such as cultural studies (Wade 1993), genetics (Templeton 1998),
anthropology (Apter 1999), sociology (Martin and Yeung 2003), and geography (Greene
et al. 2006), in setting the bases for understanding race in the United States and Latin
America. Indeed, the trend of reviewing race today illustrates more than a decade of cross
disciplinary study, even extrapolating the field of the humanities into the life sciences,
with the importance of genetics, a discipline of biology which allows deconstructing the
culturally reproduced concept of race based on the notion that there is no subspecies –
which is what corresponds to race in biology– for our species as argued by Alan R.
Templeton in 1998. Even if academia has been able to successfully foment revisionism
through diachronic and synchronic studies of the concept of race, still, in light of the state
of twenty-first century United States society it remains within the domain of popular
culture to eventually reformulate the concept.
3
Faye Harrison reminds us that besides its diachronic aspect, to which Jones
comprehensively alludes and investigates, there is also a very important synchronic
aspect of race that should be accounted for in the dialectics of revisionism that all other
previously mentioned articles, besides Jones’, incorporate in their conceptualization of
race in the United States. The synchronic aspect of race to which Harrison alludes finds
its best expression in popular culture. Keeping Harrison’s ideas about the source of
fresher and potentially more politically charged discourse on race in mind, it becomes
easy to locate examples or comments on the matter within the realm of current popular
culture. Some of these discourses, for their very public nature and the personal credibility
of those voicing them, might even sometimes cause a noticeable level of public uproar,
particularly when disseminated by the national media. Such is the case of the inaugural
speech of Eric Holder as the first Attorney General appointed by President Barak Obama,
in February of 2009. The following is a transcript of the story as reported by the
Associated Press and reproduced on the Fox News website:
In a speech to Justice Department employees marking Black History
Month, Holder said the workplace is largely integrated but Americans still
self-segregate on the weekends and in their private lives. “Though this
nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things
racial we have always been and I believe continue to be, in too many
ways, essentially a nation of cowards.” (“Holder Calls U.S. ‘Nation of
Cowards’)
4
Even though the reprimands of Attorney General Holder on the unwillingness of
Americans to transfer the good workplace relations among races to daily life were rather
harsh, the media response amplified the scope of the discussion generating some
significant, yet transitory, media uproar. The public reaction given to this story
characterizes the vitality of the theme of race in United States popular culture. Moreover,
it is remarkable how pervasive the concept of race proves to be in the United States
culture in general. For instance, from university demographics to presidential elections,
from the political correctness of serious news casting to the irreverence of televised
stand-up comedy, race is indeed a prevalent issue in polite speech or even in parody.
These few examples serve to illustrate the vitality of the theme of race in popular
culture. They also remind us, such as in Holder’s remarks about the dichotomy between
office and civil life, that the present state of the public discussion of race might denote, in
some aspects, the presence of a certain criticism of the incapacity of state-fomented anti-
discriminatory policies to affect racial politics in popular culture.
Holder’s message really becomes clear if contrasted to a famous quote from
Martin Luther King, Jr. from his 1963 WMU speech: “At 11:00 on Sunday morning
when we stand and sing and Christ has no east or west, we stand at the most segregated
hour in this nation.” It is clear that by comparing the public sphere of the workplace to
the private character of weekend reunions there are differences in attitudes towards race
that call for a sincere revisionism of the concept. The Attorney General’s criticism refers
to voluntary segregation still in practice to some extent in private instances of American
culture, in spite of the advancements brought by multiculturalism to the legal system. In
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this aspect, his calling Americans “cowards” equals to acknowledging that the legal
egalitarian framework that is the culmination of the efforts of the civil rights movement
can only do so much to promote equality. It seems Holder is reprimanding Americans for
their reluctance to embrace in their daily life the values that lay at the base of
multiculturalism as a progressive institutional framework of policies in their country.
Multiculturalism and its Critique
Tariq Modood asserts that the term can be defined in a two-fold manner according
to the region where it is currently articulated. In Europe, and particularly in Great Britain,
multiculturalism has a “restricted meaning” (2) delimited to the population pressure
exercised by immigration and the relatively new sets of “European legislation created to
accommodate the minorities formed by immigration to Western countries from outside
the prosperous West” (5). In contrast, in the Americas, particularly in the United States,
Modood situates multiculturalism within the historical process of the recuperation of
African American pride expressed in the civil rights movement its “related ideas of
humanism, human rights and equal citizenship” (1) that eventually made possible the
political polarization and promotion of certain concepts, such as ethnicity, femaleness
and gay rights (2).
Setting aside the particularities of its European version(s), multiculturalism in the
United States legal system, refers to a set of rules dealing with local, state or federal
government affirmative action policies of anti-discrimination in many instances of public
life, such as in the educational system and in the case of employment. Some examples of
6
government intervention to ensure equality of opportunity are mentioned in the text
entitled “Federal Antidiscrimination Laws:”
The Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C. §§ 2000e and
following), that prohibits employers from discriminating against
applicants and employees on the basis of race or color, religion, sex, and
national origin; the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA)
found at 29 U.S.C. §§ 621-634, that prohibits discrimination based on age
against employees who are at least 40 years old; The Americans with
Disabilities Act (ADA) that can be found at 42 U.S.C. §§ 12101-12213
and prohibits employers from discriminating against people with
disabilities in any aspect of employment, including applications,
interviews, testing, hiring, job assignments, evaluations, compensation,
leave, benefits, discipline, training, promotions, medical exams, layoffs,
and firing. The Equal Pay Act (29 U.S.C. § 206(d)) requires employers to
give men and women equal pay for equal work. The Immigration Reform
and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) can be found at 8 U.S.C. § 1324. IRCA
prohibits employers from discriminating against applicants and employees
on the basis of their citizenship or national origin.
As can be deduced from a rapid examination of this comprehensive list,
antidiscrimination laws provide an important asset to the protected minorities in the
United States. This set of protective legislation is a major political achievement towards
the implementation of an egalitarian and multiculturalist legal framework, especially if
7
we take into consideration the tradition of reduced government intervention in regulating
private or individual matters in the country. In spite of the steady progress of a
multiculturalist legal framework in the United States from the 1970s on to the present, the
predisposition of the State in protecting underrepresented individuals’ rights has
sometimes faced resistance in the United States, especially from the political right.
For instance, the ideas of Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Benjamin Tucker,
Lysander Spooner, Max Stirner and others on race and racism lay the foundation for an
individualist –as opposed to government-initiated– critique of racism and
multiculturalism. John F. Welsh in After Multiculturalism: the Politics of Race and the
Dialectics of Liberty dedicates a chapter to Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, whose
individualist-liberal character opposed what was perceived as governmental
interventionism in the form of legal acts such as those implemented by the Voting Act of
1964 and all the other antidiscrimination laws I previously mentioned. Rand, who in 1979
published the Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, developed a critique centered in
the belief that it lays uniquely within the responsibility of the individual, not the
government or any other collectivity, to fight exclusion and grant his/her own way to
equality in all instances of social life.
Early responses to the implementation of multiculturalism were not exclusively
uttered by liberal theoreticians. In the realm of popular culture, there was not such a
theoretically structured and specialized critique of the theme of the individual versus
government, which is a central characteristic of Rand’s objectivism. For instance, in the
Nuyorican literature of the 1970s and 1980s, the implementation of multiculturalism is
8
seen, contrarily to Rand’s negative assumptions, with a certain dose of positive criticism
towards the civil rights movement’s implementation of the promises of egalitarianism.
Concerning the Nuyorican reaction on the matter of multiculturalism, Frances R.
Aparicio exemplifies its effects on the self-portrayed identity of the community:
[Tato] Laviera’s last collection of poetry, a thin volume entitled
Mainstream Ethics (1988), continues to develop an ontology of America,
and the ensuing transformations that are beginning to take place as a result
of its newly recognized multiculturalism. “We are the mainstream,” shouts
Laviera in his characteristic joyful tone, and this “we” is articulated
through a polyphony of voices that is rarely seen in mainstream American
poetry. (46)
Aparicio exemplification of Tato Laviera’s poetic voice who, in contrast to Rand,
is confident of the potential of the individual to achieve inclusion in “mainstream” United
States society through multicultural policies, serves to illustrate how within two very
different political spheres, conservative and liberal, opinion makers were considering the
effects of the implementation of multiculturalism in the 1970s and 1980s. Furthermore,
such polarizations illustrate the amplitude of the debate on multiculturalism, whose
popularization, as illustrated in Aparicio’s remarks on Laviera, was expanding during
these two decades.
All this interest very possibly occurred because during the 1970s, when
multiculturalism was being gradually implemented through laws such the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, both ends of the political spectrum were aggressive in voicing their
9
contradictory opinions which diverged about the effects of legislation on an individual’s
capacity to act in his/her own behalf to dismantle racism1. Bearing in mind the essentially
discordant principles of Rand’s individualism and the satisfaction of Nuyoricans with
what was perceived as a manner to provide an inclusive and active defense of the
individual, it is remarkable to see that for a moment both right and left expressed concern
about the effectiveness of multicultural-inspired legislation to provide individuals with
the perspective of equality, especially in view of the promise of a multiculturalist legal
framework to reduce the effects of exclusion due to racism. This convergence of criticism
towards multiculturalism is also seen in Canada where multiculturalism is well founded
in legislation since the early 1970s. There, like in the United States, both right and left
clashed, as Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Daiva Stasiulis point out:
Since the mid-1980s, diverse criticisms of the federal multiculturalism
policy have emerged from various sources. While ethnic minorities have
faulted the policy for its inefficacy in redressing issues of racism, and for
its ghettoizing of minority concerns, the Reform Party, the Conservative
Party and the Citizens’ Forum have all treated multiculturalism as a source
of division in the national unity debate. (365)
Abu-Laban and Stasiulis identify a central point of the criticism of
multiculturalism in the inefficiency of the legislation in mitigating racism and exclusion.
In Canada, where in 1992 there was a plebiscite addressing the autonomy of the province
1 A right-wing attack on the Civil Rights Act said that “it mystifies or obfuscates
individuality and personal bonds” (Welsh 190).
10
of Quebec, multiculturalism was being deemed a factor in the weakening of national
unity since the 1980s by sectors representing all political denominations in the country.
Both in Canada and in the United States multiculturalism has been criticized by a
similar concert of political opinion-makers who point their finger at the inefficiency of
egalitarian legislation in solving the problem of racism and exclusion. The similarities of
opinions towards multiculturalism among these groups only converge in the criticism of
its slow pace to implement changes in racism and exclusion. While the centrist and the
leftist critique of multiculturalist legislation focus on specific changes and adaptations to
the legislation, the right, such as for Ayn Rand, would rather see multiculturalism
altogether banished, leaving to the individual the burden of fighting inequality in a
growingly complex world.
Racism, Multiculturalism, and Nuyorican Poetry
Nuyorican poems thematically expand and allude to racism as a process of
cultural resistance from mainstream American culture towards new immigrant groups
with roots stretching into the American Colonial era. By cultural resistance I mean that
racism is interpreted in Nuyorican poetry as a form of resistance voiced by mainstream
United States cultures –polarized in white and black– which serves the purpose of
resisting the assimilation of other cultures such as the Asian or the Latino ethos into their
stable and supposedly homogenous society.
In the representation of Nuyorican poetical voices which culturally resist racism,
there are hints about how the mental framework of this old colonial idea may impair the
11
individual in feeling part of the communities that s/he should belong to. The denunciation
of genetic or racial bias in the “traditional” black and white America, when done by
“racial minority” groups, clearly insists on the necessity of reviewing identity politics in
order to establish culturally inclusive –and not exclusive– terms, as race has been
traditionally perceived.
When it comes to literary theory, E. San Juan Jr. tackles the effect of
multiculturalism in literary representation in the twenty first century. His comments on
the keynote address at the Presidential Forum of the 1992 MLA Convention explain that:
Despite claims to the contrary, the national imperative to include courses
on cultural diversity (non-Western material) into the general education
core curriculum in many colleges and universities springs from a
conjunctural crisis. Multiculturalism may be conceived as the latest
reincarnation of the assimilationist drive to pacify unruly subaltern groups.
It can be interpreted as a strategic response to the deterioration of the
social fabric of the country in the decade after the early seventies when
progressive policies and institutional reforms gained by the Civil Rights
struggles of the sixties were severely eroded or wiped out. (60)
As San Juan reminds us, the societal crisis from the 1960s germinated a debate
that was prematurely ceased and, after the 1970s was too quickly turned into a series of
acts of law characterizing multiculturalism. In a sense, for San Juan it means that only
twenty years after the civil rights movement the country systematized into law a
discussion on race and racism that was supposed to extrapolate the legal aspect into more
12
engaged and society-driven initiatives of change. San Juan’s critique of the legalization
of multiculturalism is based on the assumption that this State-driven initiative only served
to postpone a more serious discussion about race, which in his opinion never took place
in spite of the civil rights movement. In a way, this critique is understandable if one does
not take for granted the fact that race, racism, and political correctness –a set of complex
but popular rules that demarcate race in polite speech– are to the present days thriving in
popular culture. For instance, examples of the vitality of those themes survive all around
our present lives, such as in the 2009 presidential candidates’ reluctance to comment on
race, or even in televised stand up comedy when George Lopez or Margaret Cho satirize
political correctness. Bearing that in mind it is possible to say that the critique of
multiculturalism that grew in the 1970s and 1980s continues to this day, proving that
even if the laws implemented were not sufficient to cease racism, the will for a change
still persists in popular culture.
When the critics of multiculturalism try to prove its inefficiency through the
demonstration of the persistence of race as a structural concept in United States culture
they take for granted that such conceptual changes cannot be institutionalized overnight.
In the case of Ayn Rand’s objectivism, it is unrealistic to expect that individuals can
promote any change in a world that is highly stratified in legal, social and other
hierarchies. In such a complex reality, individuals per se lack objective power to engage
in change. As for San Juan’s take on the issue, it is counterproductive to voice an opinion
against the advancements of egalitarian legislation in the United States for their
inefficiency in generating a public debate on race. Since racial conceptualizations persist
13
as an operational category in United States culture, equal opportunity laws should be
regarded an achievement of the civil rights movement that serves as a repository of
principles that ought to guide a debate on race in this country as well.
Race as a Category
The governmental “minoritization” of some groups, as also reflected and
denounced in poetry of the Nuyoricans, serves more the purpose of perpetuating pre-civil
rights movement assumptions on race and identity than allowing for multiple cultures to
merge symbolically as legitimate contributors to the socio-cultural fabric of the United
States. All in all, it appears that as a collective experience, in the last four decades
multiculturalism has provoked a popular debate on the historical role race has played in
American culture by promoting merely the external rules of socially-acceptable behavior
towards it. Again, if in reality political correctness euphemistically distracts the attention
of the public from discussing race outside of the workplace and other formal settings, as
Attorney General Eric Holder suggested in his statement, there are enough satires of it in
current popular culture to agree on the existence of a certain level of criticism towards the
artificiality of political correctness in private settings. For instance, in televised stand up
comedy there are many examples of satires of political correctness on the subject of race.
This seems to reflect the existence of a public urge for opening a forum to address race in
private settings in spite of the advancements of multiculturalism in matters of racial
equality in public settings as it was proposed by the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
14
Apart from conjectures on future developments of the cultural perception and
construction of race within the framework of multiculturalism, research in genetics has
recently invalidated the assumption of the existence of human subspecies that would
underlie a genetic path to the confirmation of race. After comparing genetic variation
through geographic distribution, Alan Templeton concludes that as far as science is
concerned there is no justification for the existence of human subspecies or races:
The genetic data are consistently and strongly informative about human
races. Humans show only modest levels of differentiation among
populations when compared to other large-bodied mammals, and this level
of differentiation is well below the usual threshold used to identify
subspecies (races) in nonhuman species. Hence, human races do not exist
under the traditional concept of a subspecies as being a geographically
circumscribed population showing sharp genetic differentiation. A more
modern definition of race is that of a distinct evolutionary lineage within a
species. The genetic evidence strongly rejects the existence of distinct
evolutionary lineages within humans. The widespread representation of
human “races” as branches on an intraspecific population tree is
genetically indefensible and biologically misleading, even when the
ancestral node is presented as being at 100,000 years ago. (646)
In view of the inexistence of a genetic justification for subspecies or races among
humans, it becomes curious to observe how by simplifying difference and promoting tag
generalizations such as “Hispanic” or “Latino,” government administrators and other
15
opinion makers have projected less than descriptive and more racially-polarized
categorizations for some human groups. Even if this trend persists in some segments of
opinion-making instances, such as in politics, (i.e. the projections for the Latino vote in
elections, the annual demographic minority report, etc.) and in popular culture, (i.e. the
treatment of ethnicity in stand up comedy), other sectors, like sociology and anthropology
are currently reviewing their use of “race,” as John Levi Martin and King-To Yeung
point out. Their collected data indicate that over a sixty-two year period, the use of race
as a category in sociological scholarly articles was “broader but shallower.” This leads to
the conclusion that “the recent periods show a dramatic increase in the proportion of
cases in which race was not really central to the question at hand but was taken into
account anyway, perhaps simply because it was there” (538). This situation represents a
thematic shift between disciplines, from ethnic studies, which considers the category of
“ethnic minority,” to cultural studies, which examines matters of ideology, nationality,
ethnicity, social class, and/or gender. The change is better than the previous model at
facilitating the consideration of the multiple influences among collectivities that relate in
cultural terms from the margin to the center.
Even if it is known for a fact that race is untenable in genetic and evolutionary
terms, like Alan Templeton contends in his 1998 study “Human Races: A Genetic and
Evolutionary Perspective,” it continues to thrive as a force in the real world. In regards to
the existence of racism at the time, Harrison implies that it was unsettling to observe that
the concept of race still persists in spite of the advancements of the present era in
16
technologies and communication. “Race” and racism remain a long lasting bad cultural
habit in a “tightly integrated” world:
[I]n this age of globalization in which sophisticated telecommunications,
an accelerated mobility of capital and labor, and rapid flows of
commodities and culture compress both time and space across fractured
technoeconomic, geopolitical, and sociocultural landscapes differences in
cultural and “racial” identities are being produced and/or reproduced with
heightened intensity. (Harrison 609)
Harrison goes on to say that the resurgence of race-focused scholarship in
anthropology marks the interest of the discipline in reinitiating the debate left over from
the 1960s before multiculturalism started to gain ground. It is fair to say that one of the
first and most important steps towards causing a significant change in the present attitude
toward race is to understand its very nature.
Peter Wade in “Race, Nature and Culture,” explains what lies behind the concept
that for so many years allowed for segregation and, even after the end of the Jim Crow
system, still prevails in the mind of many Americans as an active instrument of
marginalization. For Wade, race does not relate to the domain of nature, but to that of
culture. In reality, as Wade puts it, what we perceive as race would simply be the
aggregation of attributes, a cultural operation, to a set of phenotypical variations that
occur in the natural world:
The potency of ‘race’ lays not so much in the fact that it involves physical
features as in the particular history of European colonial encounters that
17
have focused on certain features and given them such powerful and deeply
rooted meanings. It is not a question of belittling the oppression of, say,
blacks in the United States or South Africa, but of stressing that such an
oppression stems from particular colonial histories rather than from the
fact that ‘phenotypical variation’ itself is involved. (26)
From the explanation of how human groups invest symbolic value upon
phenotypical elements, even sometimes creating intermediate racial categories based on
ancestry, appearance, dress, behavior or class status (Bonilla-Silva 226) Wade proceeds
to recall the efforts of French, U.S., and Brazilian scholars in the 1950s to understand
“Brazilian racial democracy.” The research fell short of supplying a real model for the
post-World War II world since it found that contrary to the initial assumptions the myth
of cordial coexisting of races was indeed just a myth and there was also racism in Brazil.
What was really accomplished was the understanding of how the concept of race is
organized differently in Latin America as compared to the United States and Europe:
Yet overall an important divide was retained between the USA and Brazil.
Some analysts saw race as an idea on the decline in Brazil. Others saw
race as frankly peripheral. Due to mixture, racial categories were not
clearly identifiable and this made US-style segregation impossible: it was
not clear who was to be segregated. It was noted that in Brazil, a person’s
racial identity was defined by ancestry, appearance, dress, behavior, class
status – in a word, as much by culture as by biology. In contrast, in the
USA, racial identity was defined primarily by biological ancestry. Brazil
18
came out as a society where class was more important than race in
defining people’s lives. (Wade 190)
The differences of the concept of race in the United States and Latin America, as
Wade contends, can be better understood in context of the mixing of races. For him, this
is the factor that differentiates not only the local characterization of race but also the very
stability of the concept within the aforementioned regions. In view of the recent data2
which identifies people of mixed blood as the fastest growing sector of the United States
population, it is fair to consider the Latin American concept of race as one of the possible
future scenarios for the issue of race in the United States.
Race in the United States
The deeper causes of the survival of race as an important ontological category in
United States culture have to do with the fact that segregation has been a historically
reiterated idea in the country in spite of the advancements of multiculturalism since the
1970s. Indeed, race is still traditionally viewed in the United States, after thirty years of
multiculturalism and political correctness, predominantly in genetic terms. In fact, the
infamous notion of the “the drop of blood” contains a clear judgment of value in its own
enunciation, allowing for elaborations of purity and impurity that are derogatory to the
formation of an individual’s sense of self or collective identity, to say the least.
2 In “Multiracial Americans Fastest Growing Demographic Group” the Fox News
website reports on the 2008 United States Census estimates which indicate a raise of 3.4 percent in the sector of the population described as Americans of multiethnic background as compared to previous Census numbers. Americans who describe themselves as being from mixed races account for 5.2 million, according to the 2008 Census.
19
Sociologist Audrey Smedley explains that “in the United States, race became the main
form of human identity, and it has had a tragic effect on low-status ‘racial’ minorities and
on those people who perceive themselves as of ‘mixed race’” (691). Paradoxically, after
Claude Lévi-Strauss’ book The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) it became
accepted in human sciences that the dawn of human culture and the very step that
separated the first human groups from their close primate relatives is the ban on
intermarriage. For Lévi-Strauss, exogamy or the choice of marrying outside of an original
human group allowed for the free circulation of techniques and principles that ultimately
sealed our collective destiny as a species bound for the creation of civilization.
Considering Lévi-Strauss’ remarks on the central role of exogamy in the transition of
Homo sapiens from the state of nature to that of culture –in which civilization was
possible– the idea of a race-segregated marriage in view of the notion of impurity
conveyed by the notion of the “the drop of blood” in the present seems very retrograde
and counterproductive. Nonetheless, to a certain extent, “intermarriage between non-
Black men and Black women remains relatively rare” (Crowder and Tolnay 806). Had a
ban on intermarriage existed from early times it is likely humans would not have
flourished into civilization. Perhaps as proposed by João Ubaldo Ribeiro in Viva El
Pueblo Brasileño, until individuals feel unobstructed by social taboo to genetically merge
the debate on the significance of race will remain unfinished.
Turning the page on multiculturalism is felt by many as the final act on overruling
color-blind ideology (Bonilla-Silva 227). It entails the understanding that racism and
discrimination have not disappeared with the institutionalization of equal opportunity and
20
that upward mobility of a number of individuals on the social scale does not necessarily
mean that they did not encounter, within themselves or from the outside, cultural
resistance in the form of racism. Curiously, the latest developments of American society
under multiculturalism appear to be engendering an intermediate category in the original
bi-racial system. Black/white America is “slowly but surely becoming “tri-racial,” just
like Latin America and South Africa (Bonilla-Silva 230). Bonilla-Silva predicts the
paradigm change will occur due to demographic projections which foresee a jump from
minorities in the United States from a current 30 percent to more than 50 percent in 2050.
The effect, in the opinion of Bonilla-Silva, allows for the possibility of a shift from a bi-
racial system to one that situates a middle-ground category between black and white of
“honorary white” to some groups such as Asians and Latinos that to this day are still
regarded as minorities.
Race in Latin America
Like the Nuyorican poems analyzed here, my own experience with the concept of
race is informed by Latin American as well as by North American input. Recent years
have seen an increase on scholarly articles in the field of anthropology elevating to
analytical consideration the very inscription of the researcher’s experience in fieldwork,
side by side with the matter studied. This idea reflects two historical aspects of the word
praxis. First, in the Aristotelic sense, it establishes ethos, credibility or rhetorical trust for
revealing the mindset of the researcher; second, in the meaning given by Antonio
Gramsci to the Aristotelic dimension of the concept, praxis properly becomes a
21
meditation on the assumptions, facts and presumed consequences of one’s practice.
Deborah Reed-Danahay explains the consequences of praxis for the ethnographer in
relation to the subject of study: “We learn not just with our minds, but also with our
bodies and through our actions. Therefore, the participant role of the ethnographer is
equally vital to the acquisition of ethnographic knowledge as is that of observer” (221-
222). Since further learning can be achieved by the afterthought given to the fieldwork,
the process is beneficial for both the ethnographer and the reader. Keeping in mind the
autoethnographic3 stance Mary-Louise Pratt postulates in “Fieldwork in Common Places”
I want to concentrate now on my own praxis around and about the concept of race.
Traveling outside my country to pursue a graduate degree caused me to be
uprooted from a comfort zone I had in Brazil as a white person to suddenly becoming the
other in the United States. Here I learned that even the palest of my ancestors, Italian and
Portuguese, are very problematically considered Caucasian for they are the fruit of
thousands of years of Mediterranean cross pollination with their olive skin and dark curly
hair strongly contrasting with the people who arrived from more northern latitudes.
Coming to the United States and being confronted with a new cultural paradigm
towards race, one that categorizes me as non-white, over time made me aware of the big
role that social nurturing plays towards the notion of being branco or white, in Brazil.
Here in the United States I was told that whether I liked it or not I was a Latino, a tag that
meant little more to me than Hispanic, both being umbrella terms that fail to describe my
specific Latin American origins either through race or culture. When recently applying
3 A personal or autobiographic narrative that especially addresses matters of
cultural difference.
22
for doctoral programs in five different universities in three states, I was asked to fill in a
special form that had the following fields for me to choose from: “Caucasian, Asian,
Hispanic, other.” To be sincere, I marked Hispanic, although I feel that tag really tells
little about who I am, where I am from and the diversity of the Brazilian cultural
matrixes. I would be much more content if I could express my difference without feeling
imprecise to mark “Hispanic” or totally being left out with choosing “other.” As a matter
of fact, it would be altogether better if I did not have to see this kind of questionnaire. For
me, what it creates is an incongruous sentiment of not belonging anywhere. In short, it
allows for exclusion and the clear notion that one is objectifying me as a racial other.
This simple example of a routinely seen procedure might remind a Caucasian that they
are on the top of the scale, while for any of the “minorities” this is an unnecessary
reminder that the policies implemented after the institutionalization of multiculturalism in
the United States, race is still considered a very important factor in the making of who
anyone is regardless of the nation’s political spheres.
In contrast, as a Brazilian, like Peter Wade observed regarding Latin America, I
used to imagine my racial affiliation more through socioeconomic class than by genetic
association with whiteness (Wade 30-31). That is to say, even if I never saw myself as a
Caucasian I still saw myself as branco because I was part of middle-class Brazil. The
experience of a different definition of race based on genetic lineage rather than by class
association made me aware of how much I was told in both instances, in Latin America
and Brazil, of what race should be. Because of the gregarious nature of humans we all
ideally covet an affiliation with a group. This is a crucial move in the quest for collective
23
and personal identity. After my own experience in the United States I would go a further
step to say that in modern times the negotiation of Latin American identity in the United
States juxtaposes much more than just a set of cultural practices towards race that
originated in each region’s peculiar colonial era to arrive in our time after being
reformulated in the period of national ideology formation of the nineteenth century.
Mestizaje as a colonial Latin American by-product, beyond any national ideology
or romanticized ideal, characterizes how peculiar a Latin American take on identity can
appear to the untrained eye. Latin American culture fits no simple or classical category of
classification. Geographically and racially it is neither African nor European, yet it is
deeply rooted in both. Neither is it Native American, although Latin American cultures
thrive in territories that were exclusively occupied by autochthonous populations before
colonization. Latin American cultures are a product of the phenomenon of colonization
and therefore the very aspect of its ethos towards questions of individual or collective
identity has to be reviewed through the optics of colonization. The mixing of bloods is a
process that left its mark not only in the fashioning of the physical appearance of Latin
Americans, but also in the way that they conceive their collective and individual
identities in regard to race.
Race and Culture
If race is a set of cultural assumptions that is inculcated into the individual by
social practice, for those who are not at the top of the pyramid there is only one recourse:
to search for their own identity themselves. This is exactly what a group of poets of
24
Puerto Rican origin did starting in the 1960s. They became known as Nuyoricans, a word
that very precisely situates their cultural standpoint, in the cross between their place of
residence, New York City, and the place of their origin, Puerto Rico. It is remarkable that
even in places which experienced a lot of miscegenation like Latin American countries
and, to a much lesser degree, the United States, race, or the idea of grouping people by
genotype is still deeply rooted in cultural practice. In the United States race is very
idealistically defined in much stricter genetic terms than in Latin America, but in reality,
just like in Brazil, race serves the specific purpose of creating hierarchy and ultimately
discerning who belongs to an epitomized “cream of the crop” from those who are said to
be inferior.
In spite of my personal experience and the conclusion that the concept of race is a
social construct that draws separation lines between imagined communities, it was very
clear to me that both in Brazil and in the United States race is ineffective in describing
the population and more important to what group a single individual belongs. One of the
most infamous malfunctions of race as a common denominator in the United States can
be gauged when it is superimposed on certain populations that are strongly multiracial
and rather culturally unified, such as, for instance, individual immigrant groups of Latin
American origin living in the United States.
Even though abandoning race altogether for culture as a global discerning
criterion constitutes an abrupt change of paradigm, it is very necessary to breach the gap
that divides rather than unites the people of a country along a more realistic description of
who they are. The promotion of culture instead of race does exactly that. It gives
25
autonomy to groups and individuals, which can ultimately lead to a society that describes
itself as a horizontal set of different cultural groups united among them by other sets of
cultural similarities, rather than as a pyramid whose apex is occupied by an imagined
group with a uniform phenotype and the assumption of a genotype perpetuated by family
lore and other cultural practices.
Race, Culture, and Identity
When used for equating the contribution of different human groups for the
formation of Western societies, the prevalence of race in lieu of culture appears largely
denounced in texts from certain cultural groups of Latin America. Such is the case
among Chicanos and Nuyoricans, whose poetry shares similarities in the representation
of individual or collective identity quests involving a necessary critique of the use of race
in mainstream American culture.
Chicano and Nuyorican identity representation in poetical texts relates to the
impasse of being legally American without being perceived as contributors to the
American culture. In this country in which they are citizens and whose political history
they also share, they are met with racism and estrangement, in other words, with cultural
resistance (Duncombe 374). In order to deconstruct the arguments encountered in this
hostile environment and fight back, Chicanos and Nuyoricans have produced cultural
documents of resistance. This resilient aspect can be fully contemplated in the careful
examination of poetical texts from both cultural groups. There, as the reader can easily
infer, Chicanos and Nuyorican authors reserve a special rhetorical locus for disputing
26
exclusion by mainstream American culture, embedding in their texts a clear urge for
cultural resistance against racism, sexism and other factors of marginality.
In the poetical meeting point of culture, identity, and resistance, Nuyorican poetic
voices bring about not only the dissection of racism from the American cultural matrix
but also tackle racism in the other part of the Nuyorican cultural matrix, Latin America.
The result is a protest of the harshness of migrating to America and encountering an
unwelcoming cultural paradigm, and it also is the group’s only review of their Latin
American-bred racism. The resulting provocative discourse is enhanced by a sense of
performative essentialism brought about by the use of popular/vernacular language. So,
in the matter of the theme of identity, Nuyorican poetical voices insist on the same idea
that Latin American decolonization writers tackled in the 1960s and that was also found
in the civil rights movement in the United States: culture should assume the place of race
in the definition of self and collective identity.
In 2008, the election of the first non-white for the extremely symbolic role of
United States president poses a question for the twenty-first century: to what extent is
White America now willing to negotiate national identity? Will the integrality of African
and Latin American cultures finally be acknowledged to American culture? Will the
years of enslavement, colonial enterprise or even legal migration finally serve to gain for
the symbolically excluded an imaginary right as well as a real place in American society?
The process is not simple. It promises to reopen deep wounds, but the debate should
focus on the present and not take for granted the promise of a stronger bond among all
who call themselves American. Provided that the coming generations apprehend the
27
mode of union leaving behind the sectarianism that the deterministic promotion of race as
a tenet of American culture generates, the prospects are indeed positive.
The dialectic of culture versus race initially calls for the United States to fully
take notice of the presence of a wide variety of human groups in American society. In the
case of the Nuyoricans, who are the descendants as well as the new arrivees from the
United States Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the discussion of identity involving the
dialectic of culture versus race, accounts for indelible stigmas that become part of the
migrants’ psyche. This is also known as marginalization. These stigmas, over three
generations and particularly in view of a culture of resistance to the last tenets of
colonization developed both in the United States and the Caribbean, influenced the
development of Nuyorican poetry in the 1960s as a counterpoint to marginalization.
Since then, the fight not to be locked or defined by marginalization has not only created a
corpus of poetry on the theme of culture versus race in defining identity, but also has
given voice to other themes concerning identity construction, especially masculine,
feminine and queer identities.
Poetry and Identity
In the present work, I will delve into the poetry of an American minority, the New
York City Puerto Rican migrants that over time culturally morphed into Nuyorican. My
main concern is to bring up and examine Nuyorican poetic texts that criticize the central
role given to race instead of culture in the definition of self or collective identity. My goal
is to revisit Nuyorican poetic voices whose take on identity involves a desire to be
28
incorporated into United States society through their culture, instead of through their
race. This is, in my opinion, a legitimate way to promote connections with American
culture avoiding the century-old sectarianism that framing cultures by race may promote
within and outside of the Nuyorican community.
The ideology behind Nuyorican poetic voices pushes them to denounce, from
both within and outside their community, the manifest inconsistencies of a discourse that
carries pernicious misconceptions on the subject of race. This criticized insistence on race
closely exposes to criticism a nineteenth century nation-state consolidation ideology
which portrayed racial uniformity as beneficial for an independent Puerto Rico or for the
United States. Harrison reviews a series of studies that dealt with national ideology and
race and pointed out that:
[I]n the context of U.S. race relations research the category of ethnicity
was formulated to elucidate and accept as normative the experiences of
European immigrants. Even more recently than Mullings, in an extensive
review essay Williams (1989) examined ethnicity and race as different yet
interrelated dimensions of identity formation in projects of nation
building. Indeed, she argued that “race making” is, and has been, integral
to nationalisms. (613)
On the same page of the theme of racial unity for the benefit of state, there was
another corollary, or nineteenth-century industrial Western nation modus operandi, which
concerns the United States, Puerto Rico and other Caribbean nation states: imperial
expansion. Although inarguably Puerto Rico remains to this day a state associated to the
29
United States or “a colony,” as Rubén Berríos Martínez (100-14) dubs it, colonization
does not specifically figure as a recurrent theme in Nuyorican poetry. I take the absence
of the direct criticism of colonization in Nuyorican poetry as a distancing from current
island affairs and as indication of the political bond the Nuyoricans have with the United
States, one that is manifest in texts such as Tato Laviera’s “AmeRícan” and Emmanuel
Xavier’s “Americano.” On the other hand, the bond with the island remains alive from
the cultural matrix that carries into Nuyorican texts the faint reminiscence of a colonial
caste system based on race that is being revived by the very discussion of race and social
exclusion in the United States.
In the effort to contextualize the Nuyorican postulation of culture instead of race
as the lens through which one should look at self and collective identity, I will also search
for a contrastive look into a geographically close but nationally broader group of texts
that specifically portrays political resistance against colonization. These texts which I
refer to as “Caribbean texts,” are a series of important socio-cultural essays produced in
the Caribbean region circa 1960, about which Édouard Glissant has coined the term
“Caribbean Discourse” (4) in the homonymous text. Their central theme is
decolonization, which refers to the achievement of independence by various Western
colonies and protectorates in Asia and Africa following World War II. This associates
these texts to the intellectual movement known as post-colonialism.
For Nuyoricans colonization is not a central concern, unlike for other populations
in the Caribbean, even for island Puerto Ricans. Since Nuyoricans see themselves as a
migrant community with cultural bonds to Puerto Rico, but even stronger political bonds
30
to the continental US, the similarities between decolonization and Nuyorican texts exist
specifically through the development of the theme of the recuperation of self and
collective identity via a review of attitudes towards race and culture.
Decolonization texts speak to the posture one should assume towards self or
collective identity, and race requires a constant monitoring of attitudes to implement
initial change. Ultimately, for the Caribbean decolonization writers, modification is
equated to the liberation of their own minds from the colonially-instituted imaginary of
racism.
As for the Nuyoricans, both at a deep cultural level, the process of colonization by
Spain and the patent social and economical marginalization that met the diaspora to the
United States left marks similar to those that motivated many of the Caribbean texts of
decolonization. The history of displacement, plus the double paradigm of racism from the
two cultures that merge into the Nuyorican, produced a series of texts that in general
contextualize rebellion against exclusion.
I believe the similar treatment given to the theme of culture versus race as being a
better manner to convey individual or collective identity might indicate continuity
between Caribbean discourse and some Nuyorican texts. Although retracing the exact
routes of this possible relationship is not my primary concern, it is still important to
establish a common ground that is to some extent historical and, most certainly, stylistic.
31
Nuyorican Poetics
My selection of the Nuyorican poetic texts is based on the availability of a
significant corpus of published work, such as the 1994 anthology, Aloud: Voices from the
Nuyorican Poets Café and Boricua, respectively edited by Miguel Algarín and Roberto
Santiago. Also, the continuation since the 1970s of slam poetry in the Nuyorican Poets
Café situated in the Lower East Side of Manhattan marks the vitality of two
characteristics that directly concern my work. First, in Nuyorican poetics race and culture
figure as hallmark themes associated with the questioning, affirmation or negation of
identity. Second, the focus on the performative aspect of Nuyorican texts from the past,
as well as those from the present, allows me to address stylistic resources and go far
beyond the pure analysis of cultural cohesion in face of migration and adaptability in this
study. Ultimately, certain stylistic traits in Nuyorican poetry, such as the intermingled use
of Spanish and English and the treatment of the themes of biculturalism and assimilation
in United States society allow some of these texts to be appreciated through the lens of
transculturation. Fernando Ortiz, a Cuban anthropologist, first coined this term in 1940 in
his important revision of Cuban culture contained in the book, Cuban Counterpoint:
Tobacco and Sugar. Ortiz explains the use of his neologism as follows:
I am of the opinion that the word transculturation better expresses the
different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another
because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which is
what the English word acculturation really implies, but the process also
necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which
32
could be defined as a deculturation. In addition it carries the idea of the
consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be called
neoculturation. (102)
The phases of deculturation and neoculturation that Ortiz posits as part of the
process of transculturation function as a good descriptive instrument to access the phases
of transformative interaction among cultures. Instead of insisting on the loss of a culture,
as acculturation does, transculturation underscores their interaction and subsequent
mutual transformation. In this manner, it serves as a valuable investigative tool to
understand the experience of migrants and other sorts of population shifts.
At this point it would be beneficial to examine some facts of what was dubbed by
Lisa Sánchez González “a subaltern colonial diaspora” (167) in her research about the
literary history of the Puerto Rican migration. The history of Puerto Rican migration can
be pinpointed and better understood in view of the phases Ortiz highlighted in the
production of transculturation in order to contextualize the analysis of the themes of race
and culture in Nuyorican poetry.
With respect to the question of race versus culture, by observing the composition
of the Nuyorican population, one can see a particular human group that originally is
racially mixed but culturally homogenous. Bonilla-Silva remarks that those particular
characteristics are shared with other populations of Latin American or Caribbean origin
that are gradually becoming more prevalent in the composition of the social fabric of the
United States of America (224). For that reason, it is likely that the reflections by
33
Caribbean and Latin Americans about identity in the United States will produce similar
thematic choices in the conception of cultural representations.
In literary expression Nuyorican poetry has found a way to overcome inner
disparity related to skin pigmentation by exerting a dialogic practice that celebrates the
cultural bond across the community. In identity-construction in Nuyorican poetry and/or
performance, cultural similarities developed through survival in a new inhospitable
environment are accounted for as much more important than shades of skin tone or race.
The Nuyorican poetic practice, for that reason, has brought forth a consistent manner of
addressing identity which is nowadays virtually open to endorsing the expression of other
excluded groups, sometimes even within the Nuyorican community itself, as is the case
of the emergence in recent years of a significant queer Nuyorican or QueeRican body of
literature.
But before any further discussion about the stylistic openness of Nuyorican
poetical practice itself, I would like to briefly allude to how prevalent the ideas of race
are attached to the discussion of identity for Nuyoricans in general. Part of this tradition
is to be found in the place of origin, the island of Puerto Rico. As a Nuyorican himself,
Victor Hernández Cruz related in an interview in Puerto Rican Voices in English:
Puerto Rico is a Spanish-speaking Caribbean country, and its literature is
in the language brought by the Spanish that was transformed here into
something that tastes like guava and has the rhythm of African drums.
Spanish is a language that accepts words from many quarters and mixes
them in […]. It is a mulatto. (Hernández 65)
34
The analogy between language, literature and music drawn by Victor Hernández
Cruz is anchored in his voluntary experience of reversing the migratory flux in order to
look for his own cultural roots in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. The notion of
miscegenation and multiple interferences of cross pollinating races in identity
construction actually contain in its subtext two intertwined layers. The first, historic,
relates to the colonial enterprise and its systems of castes based on race. The second layer
of meaning relates to the twentieth-century idealized valorization of mestizaje which was
especially brought about in a systematic manner by José Vasconcelos in Raza cósmica:
misión de la raza iberoamericana (110). The resulting idea, which Victor Hernández
Cruz synthesizes in the portrayal of Spanish as a malleable and mixed language, appeals
metonymically to the fact that a Nuyorican poetic grasp on the treatment of identity
should also be so. Indeed, Nuyorican poetic practice has shown to be quite embracing of
diverse Latino voices. A poetical correspondence exists between the Nuyorican and other
Latino poets in the United States since the 1970s.This can be traced back to linguistic and
cultural backgrounds that motivate Nuyorican and Puerto Rican and Chicano joint
collaborations in scholarly journals such as the Revista Chicano-Riqueña. An example of
the Chicano/Nuyorican poetic connection can be appreciated in Miguel Algarín’s
introduction to the book Aloud. There, reminiscing about the death of the dramatist poet
and co-founder of the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, Miguel Piñero, Algarín remembers that in
1984 Piñero insisted that he participate in a poetry symposium in the University of New
Mexico in spite of Piñero’s declining health. For Piñero, as Algarín recounts, enlarging
35
the scope of visibility for Nuyorican poetry in the symposium was a reason important
enough for sending Algarín to participate instead of retaining him in New York (4).
In fact, openness, as metonymically portrayed by Victor Hernández Cruz through
the symbol of Spanish, beyond a cultural patrimony uniting different Latin American
communities in the United States, becomes as much a vehicle for affirmation of a cultural
identity as a criticism towards the estrangement and unwelcoming face of mainstream
American culture. This is not to say that multiple interferences did not occur, on the
contrary, as transculturation posits a tug-of war effect and both sides end up exerting
some change on the other. And of course, the pressures on the migrating community were
certainly stronger than those that the mainstream culture received from the Nuyoricans.
In this way, I think that the engaged tone of Nuyorican poetry is a stylistic device that
pretends to level the gap between the communities of speech. In this aspect Nuyorican
poetry itself can be an instrument of transculturation.
All in all, while the generation born from the migrants that came from 1917 to
1930 founded the “barrios” or neighborhoods, their descendents would elaborate the
uprising of voices that in the form of poetry would protest and denounce the racial and
economical marginalizations faced by themselves, their parents and the rest of the
migrant community.
In the United States, the migrants, that over time became the Nuyoricans, found a
totally diverse set of customs and practices towards language, race and culture. As
different as Puerto Rico and urban America were, those two places and their sets of
cultural practices towards race and culture had to come in contact through the
36
contingencies of the displacement of a significant population. The adaptation to the new
cultural paradigm, in many ways, shaped what would become a totally new identity,
forged through a process of transculturation: Nuyorican.
In the Nuyorican case, transculturation occurred rapidly. The period from the time
Puerto Ricans were granted United States citizenship (1917) to the period of great influx
of migrants due to air travel (1950s) was very short if compared to 400 years of the
formation of Latin American cultures. Yet, the relevance of the Puerto Rican migration
and its ties with United States history and economy entitled it to a comparison with
several other diasporas. In this case, considering its location, Puerto Rican migration was
an urban diaspora that bears in its cultural components a special relation to Latin America
and through it, with the African diaspora. This cultural legacy which can be analyzed in
terms of their significance to revealing a common aesthetic sense and a treatment of a
series of themes can clarify the literary relevance of issues related to code switching, the
election of primary and secondary languages of expression, and last but not least,
reflections on race versus culture in the Nuyorican texts that I will later analyze.
The Spanish Era
As an important harbor since the English colonization, New York was a busy hub
in the triangular commerce with Africa, South America and the Caribbean from colonial
times up to the present. Since the island of Puerto Rico lies at the edge of this favored
commercial route linking the Caribbean islands with many United States Atlantic harbor
cities, the presence of Puerto Ricans in New York City during the maritime trade era,
37
consequently was not uncommon. However, it was transitory as they came as crew
members or travelers on the way to Europe.
In spite of the arrival of occasional travelers and crews from the islands it was not
until 30 years before the end of Spanish rule in 1898 that a small Puerto Rican colony
was founded on American soil. This first small, but significant presence of a Puerto Rican
population appeared around 1850 in Manhattan. It was composed of upper middle class
families who objected to Spanish rule.
The major importance of this exiled enclave accounts for the political history of
Puerto Rico. Among them were Ramón Emeterio Betances and Segundo Ruiz Belvis
founders of the Revolutionary Committee of Puerto Rico that, from its headquarters in
New York planned El Grito de Lares, a revolt against Spain which they commanded and
failed in Puerto Rico on September 23, 1868. Later, in 1892, also present in New York
was Francisco Gonzalo Marín or Pachín Marín, the designer of the Puerto Rican flag.
Although the presence of these important historical personalities in New York
characterizes the special place the city occupies in the historical dynamics of Caribbean-
American history, this segment of migrants was composed of a handful of families from
the upper middle class whose status of political asylum somewhat differs from the
subsequent waves of Puerto Rican migration that occurred during the United States
governance of Puerto Rican territory (1898 to the present). Therefore, at this first period
of Puerto Rican presence, it would be problematic to attempt to characterize it as the
foundation of transculturation between Puerto Ricans and the American mainstream. The
transitory character of these migrants and their limited numbers did not posit pressure for
38
significant adaptations. Their accomplishments have great historical, but no socio-literary
relevance, to the dialectics of culture and race as a definer of identity in modern
Nuyorican poetry.
The American Era
In the 1898 Spanish American War, Puerto Rico came into the sphere of influence
of the United States. One year after this political overturn, on August 8, 1899, a
catastrophic hurricane named San Ciriaco destroyed most of the islands crops. Stuart B.
Schwartz points out that “urban properties were destroyed, planters lost their crops, the
coffee-producing areas were totally compromised and the rural poor were left without
housing or food for an extended period” (304). The total damage was estimated in 3000
lives and 20 million dollars4.
The political annexation of 1898 and the destruction of the island’s infrastructure,
two events separated by less than two years, were definitive in starting a migratory flow
from the recently annexed island to the new industrial metropolis. The population
displacement was thoroughly reinforced by the 1917 approval by Congress of the Jones-
Shafroth Act which extended to Puerto Ricans the rights and duties of citizenship.
The elimination of any migration restriction by the citizenship granted by Jones-
Shafroth Act facilitated the massive Puerto Rican migration which lasted from 1917 to
1930 that was directed especially to the East Coast of the United States. The major part of
Puerto Ricans leaving the island settled in New York City. Also, dating from this period
4 It was this hurricane that served as one of the catalysts for the 5000 Puerto
Ricans who migrated to Hawai‘i in 1900-1901.
39
is the concentration of migrants in certain neighborhoods created “barrios” or areas
densely populated by Puerto Ricans. The existence of such largely, initially, monocultural
areas sets the cornerstone for the negotiation of the transition from a rural to a urban
world, from a monocultural island to a multicultural island, and from a Spanish-speaking
background, to an English-speaking final destination for the Puerto Ricans migrants from
1919 to 1930. Through the investiture on the new cityscape, and particularly on the
“barrios,” of the marks of their presence, Puerto Rican migrants embarked on the early
steps of transculturation. And as the model of Fernando Ortiz predicts, the gradual signs
of Puerto Rican presence generated an adaptative response on the part of adjacent
different populations as well.
The location of Puerto Ricans in small “barrios” within the larger areas of the
Bronx, Brooklyn and East Harlem created a commune that started communication with
other enclaves of immigrants or the general population primarily by means of commerce,
innocuously as in a classical emporium or market situation (Davila 54). In the 1920s, the
Spanish language became visible on merchandise labels. Also, through commerce a
series of products could have their use reinterpreted by any appropriating adjacent
culture. As Joanne R. Reitano points out in her book The Restless City:
Puerto Ricans developed a community called El Barrio that would soon
extend from 96th to 112th Streets between Fifth and Third Avenues.
Distinguished by the use of Spanish and their retention of close ties to
Puerto Rico, the new settlers seemed very different from the established
Jews and Italians who then dominated East Harlem and its economy.
40
Some vendors learned enough Spanish to sell the items Puerto Ricans
wanted. Others saw the newcomers as a threat, especially when they
opened businesses to serve their own community. (140)
In fact, it is easy to imagine the very presence of such signs of a different cultural
identity serving to establish the first imaginary frontlines between adjacent but differing
cultures. Indeed, in such a close knit and well determined territory such as the “barrios”
that are set on a grid of numbered streets and avenues5 in Manhattan, such as the Spanish
Harlem, it is likely that transculturation worked swiftly to produce a first generation of
bilingual poets born from the families that came between 1917 and 1930. At this point in
the 1920s the newly arrived Puerto Ricans must have walked those lines of change and
changed themselves in response to the incursions of foreign stimuli.
Transculturation might also have occurred abruptly, as was the case in the years
of the great Depression when conflicting interests opposed the Puerto Ricans to other
cultural groups. In 1926 East Harlem experienced riots between guilds of Puerto Rican
and Jewish workers (Monti 42). The form of labor organization, the guild, and the form
of clash, the riot, were experienced by these populations in the context of the competition
for scarce manual labor positions. This situation shows how permeable cultures are even
to macroeconomic events. The stagnancy leading to the crash of the stock market in 1929
stimulated the creation of labor associations which was in essence a transculturally-
acquired new practice with profound impact on Puerto Ricans. Bringing together large
5 Danny Lee contends that the present day configuration of East Harlem in much
more complex than in the 1930s. Gentrification has fomented the election of different areas for New York Puerto Ricans to reside.
41
numbers around the cause of labor became a model of organization to fight the burden of
racism, poverty and lack of government assistance in the years to come. Benjamín
Márquez and James Jennings situate this in terms of the acquisition and transformation of
worker culture political strategy into other forms of fighting oppression, like writing:
For Puerto Ricans, who were active as leaders and nonelite participants in
community and labor movements in New York City [. . .] during the
decades before and after the Second World War [. . .] [an example of]
political participation in social movements during this period is available
in the classic work, Memorias de Bernardo Vega, an autobiographical
account of a Puerto Rican labor activist in New York City. (544)
The importance of new worker associations for the migrants who would be
coming in large numbers from rural areas in Puerto Rico and having to adapt to American
culture was such an important model that its outset even inspired a book of poems.6 This
experience of adaptation would be further developed in East Harlem where the Puerto
Rican migrants virtually established a colony that was a fulcrum from where the ensuing
generations would negotiate a new identity and its expression in the literary form, one
that strongly insisted on the dialectics of culture versus race.
The assortment of specific new products to cater to the taste of a newly arrived
community were the initial step in marking the cultural dialogue that would gradually
develop between the established Jews, Italians, whites, blacks and the newly arriving
Puerto Ricans. In terms of transculturation, since changes take place on both sides of the
6 In La Carreta Made a U-turn, Tato Laviera writes poems on the vicissitudes of
migrant life and the issues of ethnicity, cultural identity, and the assimilation process.
42
groups in contact, as Mary-Louise Pratt describes in her 1992 essay “Arts of the Contact
Zone,” one can posit that transculturation, although in its early steps, was already slowly
starting to show its signs in the 1930s foundations of the “barrios.”
The 1930s are also the time frame in which the first Nuyorican writers were born.
Piri Thomas was born in “El Barrio” in 1928; Jack Agüeros was also born there in 1934;
and Nicholasa Mohr in 1935. In the work of these writers there is a frequent reference to
the early days of “El Barrio,” registering in poetry the personal accounts from the life in
the newly founded enclave in which these poets grew up.
The Great Depression and Inverted Migration Flow
From 1917, year of the Jones-Shafroth Act, and through the twentieth century, the
Puerto Rican community in New York grew and consolidated in spite of the Great
Depression and World War II. Problems in the United States economy were felt well
before the crash of the stock market in 1929. For the Puerto Rican population in New
York City, 1926 was a sad year. The scarcity of jobs and competition between Jewish and
Puerto Rican laborers in East Harlem or “El Barrio” turned into riots between parties of
unemployed men. The early 1930s, especially for those migrants that had come after
1917 and had already set roots in New York, was a hard time that even motivated some to
give up the life in the continental United States and return home to Puerto Rico.
But it would not be long until the Great Depression spread from the United States
to the rest of the world. And in the years following 1930, the domino effect affected
Puerto Rico. Since the island’s economy was and still is dependent on that of the United
43
States, it suffered the effects of the disintegration of the American economy. For many
island Puerto Ricans once more, a large increase in unemployment and the facility to
legally enter the United States again motivated them to migrate from Puerto Rico to New
York, even in spite of those returning from the United States in 1930. After this
continuous come and go movement of people between Puerto Rico and the United States
the very process is to the present day known as el vaivén (coming and going). The
migration from the 1930s to the 1950s would put onto this pendulum a large contingent
of Puerto Ricans especially from the rural interior of the island.
The hardship of the consolidation of the Barrio life days can be found in the song
“Puerto Rican Lament” (known throughout Latin America as “El jibarito”) by Puerto
Rico’s most celebrated popular pre-salsa7 composer, Rafael Hernández. Angel G.
Quintero-Rivera and Roberto Márquez point to the socio-historical accuracy of
Hernandez’s music:
Hernandez wrote the piece while living as a mulatto (im)migrant worker
in New York in 1929, at the height of the Depression. While the chorus
repeats, in a tone of uncertain longing, “Oh, when will we see justice
come?,” the soloist reaffirms the certainty of the desired utopia’s coming,
“My man, you’ll see, / I’mma [sic] make you dance guaracha/when that
day finally comes, / everything’ll be just fly. / Justice will come to us all!”
(212)
7 As commonly asserted, salsa developed in the 1970s.
44
Indeed it would take years of adversity for these incoming rural migrants,
spanning the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who took office on March 4,
1933, to recover the trust necessary to rebuild the American economy. The set of policies
instituted by Roosevelt to move the country out of the Great Depression became known
as the New Deal. Putting into perspective the consequences of the New Deal for Puerto
Rico, S. L. Descartes states in his 1943 article “Land Reform in Puerto Rico” that the
island saw its own set of recuperation programs headed by a newly-instituted Puerto Rico
Reconstruction Administration from 1935 to 1937. Also, land reform took place and there
was some help in setting up farm cooperatives and organizing the local industry.
Nonetheless, the economically-motivated migration from Puerto Rico to the United
States during the length of the Great Depression and its recuperation was never halted. In
reality the migrating trend would continue well into World War II (1939-1945) when
demand for manufacturing jobs was high again. That is to say that the pendulum effect or
the vaivén would stay as a firm trend all throughout World War II and after it. As the
period around and after World War II develops, in Puerto Rico the exodus does not halt.
The migrants continue to travel from San Juan to New York, from rural to urban and
multinational, in ever larger numbers.
World War II and Economic Boom
Since a large portion of the male population of the United States was sent to war,
there was a sudden need of working positions to support the war effort. Puerto Ricans,
both male and female, found themselves employed in factories and ship docks, producing
45
both domestic and warfare goods. The years of the War were beneficial to the migrants
who had decided to brave the Great Depression in the United States. One of the
achievements was that many of the new migrants coming from rural areas were initially
unprepared for immediate factory work, but were immediately trained in the working
skills necessary to promptly supply the War (Aranda 620). The newly acquired skills
would also certainly help them find a job after the conflict ended.
This laborer generation from the 1940s was the one from which many poets, who
would later be called Nuyoricans, emerged. Miguel Algarín was born in Santurce, Puerto
Rico in 1941 and moved to New York in 1950. Pedro Pietri was born in Ponce in 1943
and moved to New York in 1947. Louis Reyes Rivera was born in New York City in
1945. In their work, just like in the generation of 1930, there is an outcry for acceptance
in terms of culture, a symptom that the problems that they denounced had not been
properly solved yet. Also there is a clear critical portrayal of the poverty and racism that
for many continued to define life in “El Barrio.”
Air Travel and the Great Migration
The third great wave of migration from Puerto Rico came after World War II. It is
estimated that from 1946 to 1950 there were 31,000 Puerto Rican migrants in New York
and 58,500 in 1952-53 (Vega 225; Sánchez-Korroll 212). The advent of air travel
provided Puerto Ricans with an affordable and faster way of travel to New York.
The one thing that all of the migrants had in common was that they wanted a better way
of life than was available in Puerto Rico. Although each held personal reasons for
46
migrating, their decision generally was rooted in the island’s impoverished conditions, as
well as in the failed public policies that sanctioned migration.
The most notorious of the failed state-planned intervention to enhance local
infrastructure on the Commonwealth was the 1960 Operation Bootstrap. It was an
ambitious project that aimed at attracting American capital and industry, but it failed in
creating sufficient jobs (Ricketts 376). At the same time an acute population growth and
an increasing concentration of urban areas created a surplus labor force whose frustrated
quest for jobs led them to migrate to the United States.
The sheer numbers of these economically-motivated migrants from the 1950s
were met with ever-growing discrimination in New York. In the imaginary of the general
population, Puerto Ricans were characterized by stereotypes related to drug use and gang
activity. The perception of Puerto Ricans by the general American population in the
1950s was tainted even more by a failed attempt by the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party to
assassinate United States President Harry S. Truman and pursue an attack on the House
of Representatives. As Rubén Berríos Martínez states:
Albizu Campos, released from federal prison after seven years, led a
Nationalist uprising that was accompanied by armed attacks on Blair
House in Washington, where President Truman was then living, in 1950
and on the U.S. Congress in 1954. […] The police (with the active
collaboration of U.S. intelligence agencies) compiled a huge blacklist of
independence supporters, who were then discriminated against and
harassed. The practice continued until 1988, when the Puerto Rican
47
Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional and ordered the release of
more than 100,000 files in 1992. The Puerto Rican electorate had been
driven away from independence by terror. (106)
By then, in the general public’s conception, besides criminals, Americans viewed
Puerto Ricans as anti-American and discrimination against them became even more
widespread. This view was prevalent in the 1950s and, as the 1960s advanced, very few
efforts were made to safeguard the rights of Puerto Ricans living in the United States
from sheer misconception. In view of the process of cultural assimilation that is expected
from immigrants into mainstream American culture, Jorge Duany situates the particular
case of the Nuyoricans in the context of cultural hybridization:
The process of transculturation –or better still, hybridization– has
advanced swiftly, especially in the second and third generations of the so-
called Nuyoricans. Still, diasporic communities in New York and other
places in the United States construct their identities at least partly as
Puerto Rican and imagine themselves as part of the Puerto Rican nation
[…]. Nuyoricans have redefined Puerto Rican identity away from an
exclusive reliance on the Spanish language in order to incorporate
monolingual English speakers with family ties to the Island. (22-23)
Even though the Nuyoricans have to a good degree embraced English, in their
writing, Spanish is frequently used as a manner of conveying cultural concepts. The
occurrence of code-switching, according to Miguel Algarín, summarizes the conflict
Nuyoricans see themselves into in regard to their use of Spanish and English: “Languages
48
are struggling to possess us; English wants to own us completely; Spanish wants to own
us completely. We, in fact, have mixed them both” (“Nuyorican” 90). In this manner, as
Algarín’s testimony implies, the intermingled use of the two languages allows for a
discursive strategy of affirmation of a distinctive cultural identity. Although language is a
prominent aspect of Nuyorican’s effort to display cultural uniqueness there are also other
instances where it can be exalted.
Organized Resistance and the Nuyorican Movement
As a manner to publicly display cultural identity starting in 1958 Puerto Ricans
organized a parade in “El Barrio” in Manhattan. The parade was organized as a show of
Puerto Rican pride. The very concept of a parade has a long transcultural history, having
migrated from classical Rome to the Americas. For instance, Lauren H. Derby
demonstrates when discussing Trujillo’s regime how well parades showcase much more
than the glory of a government, also purporting models of behavior for women and men.
With that in mind it is possible to see that in general a staple in the conception of the
parade is the display and celebration of cultural symbols. In this manner it is possible to
foresee how Puerto Ricans living on Manhattan adapted the concept of popular V Day,
Thanksgiving, and Christmas parades to create their own event, conserving the idea of a
public display of pride in a very American way.
Indeed, the large concentration of Puerto Ricans in New York City, 600,000 by
1960 (Hernández-Alvarez 44) sets a precedent for collective cultural concern. Also, the
advances of the civil rights movement in the 1960s inspired the quest for cultural
49
awareness and pride as a way to fight against racial prejudice and other forms of social
marginalization. In the 1960s in the Caribbean the voices of decolonization also rose
against the damages of social ostracism and in New York City Puerto Rican writer Jesús
Colón founded an intellectual movement involving poets, writers, musicians and artists
who were Puerto Rican or of Puerto Rican descent. This group became known as the
Nuyoricans. Its main concern was to establish an artistic forum to address the adversities,
such as racial discrimination and life in the ghetto, that were considered the main
hindrances to the full development of their community. In 1980, Puerto Rican poets
Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero and Pedro Pietri established the “Nuyorican Poets Café”
on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (236 E 3rd Street, between Avenues B and C) from
where still to this day a Nuyorican poetic practice is alive in a rich weekly program that
includes poetry slam competitions (Somers-Willett 59).
Nuyorican Poetry and its Protesting Character
In The Nuyorican Experience, Eugene V. Mohr reminds us that “Hispanics are
still very much at home with the concept of poetry as a popular art” (91). Mohr goes on
to link the “sentimental” and “impromptu recitals” common to Latin American popular
cultures to the materialization of a new Latin American diasporic or migrant ars poetica
that still manifest those characteristics in a very peculiar use of language in New York
City. Mohr also alludes to the fact that Miguel Algarín was the Nuyorican poet who
identified his own New York Puerto Rican cultural experience with the formation of a
Nuyorican dialect and its contribution for poetry. For Algarín, the forging of a Nuyorican
50
identity walks hand in hand with the development of a particular mode of expression that
nonchalantly borrows from and subverts both Spanish and English. The term “new day”
coined by Algarín in the 1975 book Nuyorican Poetry, corresponds to the formation of a
new language that contains in its core the resilience and irreverence of the Nuyorican
identity put into representation in poetry.
In an essay entitled “Other Latino Poetic Method,” David Colón retraces certain
epistemological traits common to the poetic tradition of several Latin American diasporic
communities in the United States. On the subject of the Nuyoricans, Colón reveals that
for many Nuyorican poets the utterance of a new language is in itself an affirmation of a
new identity. In view of this remark, I think that Algarín’s notion of “new day” comes
across as the utterance of an identity at the moment that it first starts to show signs of
autonomy. This commitment to the manifestation of an identity in the making reinforces
the notion of language as a performative act that in my opinion is crucial in
understanding the standpoint of the Nuyorican poetical voice. In fact, as Colón puts it:
As a language, Nuyorican is a reformulation of standardized codes of
language, of Spanish and English, but in the context of migration. It is
politically charged. And it fosters a voice of agitation, as evidenced in the
poetry.
Nuyorican poetry is a movement revolutionary to both poetic
convention and cultural identity. […] the communicative premises of
Puerto Rican language are ones of insinuation and logical disjunction.
(272-4)
51
What Miguel Algarín characterizes as “a new day” is rightfully represented by the
continuous acts of subversive speech that, for him, not only are the core of a real
Nuyorican dialect, but also ought to be considered as manifestations of a Nuyorican
voice. This voice comes forth as a critically charged address of important themes
perceived from the community as well as outside of it, such as migration, racism,
institutional disregard, self and collective identity, etc. In my opinion, Miguel Algarín’s
“new day” stands for a posture of cultural awareness that can be easily translated into the
representational character of the poetic voice and its stylistic bent of soliciting the
political right to protest. That is to say, if Nuyoricans are to act in a state of self-
affirmation of their identity through acts of speech in any communicational situation, the
same poignancy ought to be evidenced by the very voices that characterize Nuyorican ars
poetica.
My principal intention in analyzing Nuyorican poetic voices comes specifically
from the observation of a series of stylistic markers that together allow for the enactment
of an authoritative standpoint from which to exert a protest in the form of poetry. The
construction of this particular type of voice and its mise-en-acte seems to project the
existence of a tacit agreement between the voice and the rest of us on the reception side.
As I will demonstrate in the next sections, both Algarín’s concept of a Nuyorican identity
constructed through language, and the very use of language as a stylistic instrument are
important characteristics of Nuyorican poetry. Also, it is significant to notice that the
utterance of a contestatory poetic voice that is authorized by its very existence is not a
self contained or exclusivist strategy. On the contrary, the most essential epistemological
52
remark when considering cultural texts related to the Latin diaspora, as David Colón
correctly remarked, is that “Latino poetics are conducted in otherhood” (284).
I believe that the enactment of an authoritative voice, particularly when founded
on the matter of social exclusion, made it possible that this stylistic resource came to be
the arm of choice in Nuyorican poetry. Authoritative speech, for the sake of its own
textual validity and maintenance as a key element of Nuyorican poetry almost
automatically could not ever take the whole arena for itself and therefore allows other
contestatory voices, namely the feminine, the queer and the new immigrant to be uttered.
This is particularly the case in competitive poetry slams, where the authenticity of the
performance becomes as important as the text itself. This blurs the separation –not of
what is– but rather of what is perceived as reality versus representation, as I discuss in the
last section of this text. As a phenomenon of recent years, popular culture poetry slams
and self and collective characterization, in Nuyorican poetry, relate immediately to
themes that pop out of the urban landscape:
The new poetry, or rather the poetry of the nineties, seeks to
promote a tolerance and understanding between peoples. The aim is to
dissolve the social, cultural, and political boundaries that generalize the
human experience and make it meaningless. The poets at the Café have
gone a long way towards changing the so-called black/white dialogue that
has been the breeding ground for social, cultural, and political conflict in
the United States. It is clear that we now are entering a new era where the
dialogue is multi-ethnic and necessitates a larger field of verbal action to
53
explain the cultural and political reality of North America’ Poets have
opened the dialogue and entered into new conversations. Their poems now
create new metaphors that yield new patters of trust, creating intercultural
links along the many ethnic groups that are not characterized by the
simplistic terms black/white dialogue. (Algarín, Aloud 9)
One of the most important characteristics of Nuyorican poetry of the present, as
Miguel Algarín declared in this excerpt from his introduction to Aloud, is its valorization
of inclusion and diversity. This open posture concerns the themes of identity, race and
culture as it promotes inclusiveness and diversity. In the reference Algarín makes to the
expansion of the poetical dialogue beyond the limits of the black/white dichotomy it is
possible to visualize the historical trajectory of Nuyorican poetry from the civil rights era
to the present era of globalization.
Nuyorican “Founding Poems” and Caribbean Discourse
Papiros de Babel: antología de la poesia puertorriqueña en Nueva York (1991)
edited by Pedro López-Adorno, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café (1994),
edited by Miguel Algarín and Henry Holt, and Boricuas: influential Puerto Rican
writings (1995) edited by Roberto Santiago, are good examples of the way Nuyorican
poetry was diffused in the 1990s. The sequence of publishing dates: 1991, 1994, and
1995, as well as places of publication, Río Piedras, PR and New York City, NY, indicate
a synchronic rise in interest for Nuyorican poetry both in Puerto Rico and the United
States in the 1990s. In the diachronic appreciation of Nuyorican poetry, collectively, the
54
poems in these anthologies cover a time span from the 1920s to the 1990s. However,
there seems to be an agreement among the different editors about the importance of the
work of some poets who were publishing in the 1970s and 1980s. In all four anthologies
selections from the poetry of the period are considered exemplary and are set apart. Pedro
López-Adorno creates a separate section “Versiones originales de poemas escritos en
inglés” (“Original version of poems written in English”) where he places texts by Sandra
Maria Esteves, Miguel Algarín, Pedro Pietri, Tato Laviera and Martín Espada8. The
publication of their texts in the original Spanish and English version allows for the full
expression of the hybrid character of Nuyorican poetry, which López Adorno defines in
the introduction as the “empresa polífona” (“polyphonic enterprise”: 2) of Nuyorican
poetry. In Aloud, editors Miguel Algarín and Henry Holt conspicuously gather under the
title “founding poems” (xiii, xiv, xv) texts by mostly the same authors that Pedro López-
Adorno included in his special section of original English/Spanish and English poetry. In
Boricuas, dealing with the same group of poets, Roberto Santiago mixes poetry, theater
and narrative under thematic approximations that constitute chapters entitled “identity
and self-esteem,” “anxiety and assimilation” and “urban reality” (ix, x, xi).
What we can see from both diachronic and thematic views of the editorial choices
concerning Nuyorican poetry in the early 1990s is the existence of a group of texts from
the 1970s and 1980s that are reputed to have set the general tone and thematic scope for
Nuyorican poetics in the late twentieth century. Among these “founding texts,” as
Algarín and Holt have called them, a categorization also implied by the editorial choices
8 All translations are mine.
55
of López-Adorno and Santiago, there is a guiding theme that emerges. In the context of
the poetic quest for self and collective identity a very specific historical and communal
background is represented. The contextualization of self and collective identity, in many
of the founding Nuyorican texts is closely related to an experience of migration and
subsequent adaptation to a new urban setting far away, in more ways than one, from the
place of origin. This evocation of identity articulates the theme on which my study is
based. I refer to the fact that Nuyorican texts often discuss a clash of two historically
different views towards race. One, Latin American, is more class-oriented than fixed in a
discourse of purity of blood. The other, the United States take on race is more based on
phenotype and was even legally enforced until the mid 1960s, but continued de facto
much longer (Wade 30-31). These differences in world views came face to face in the
process of the Puerto Rican migration to New York City, a complex movement that even
includes periods of reverted migratory flux to Puerto Rico. In general, the vaivén or
pendulum movement that characterized some periods within the time frame of the
migration can be metonymically associated with the cultural hybridity of these poetic
texts that grapple with race and culture in the search for self or collective identity.
Therefore, a recurrent theme in the poetry from the 1970s up to the 1990s, the
transformation of personal and collective identity often denotes a debate between the
notions of race and culture, with the latter traditionally seen as more appropriate than the
former to convey self or the collective identity of their community by Nuyorican poets.
Miguel Algarín, Sandra María Esteves, Victor Hernández Cruz, Tato Laviera, Pedro
Pietri, Miguel Piñero, among others, are authors from a generation closely interconnected
56
with the processes of migration and directly implicated with the negotiation of personal
and communal identity in the New York City’s “barrios.” That is why these authors,
whose poetic voices dialogue with many of the texts that Algarín, Holt and Santiago
selected in their anthologies, all deserve Algarín’s “founding texts” attribute.
Identity, assimilation, and urban life, aspects Santiago detected in his editorial
choice of poems, apply to a number of selected texts each editor included in their
anthologies. In the promotion of the idea that identity is better understood at the personal
and collective level through culture rather than by race, Nuyorican texts from the 1970s
up to the 1990s virtually opened a poetic forum for the discussion of other self and
collective identity themes, such as the feminine, the masculine, and the queer. Nowadays,
Nuyorican poetic texts on identity from the 1970s and 1980s still inspire an art form that
shows its vitality through competitive poetry slams that take place weekly in the
Nuyorican Poets Café in the Lower East Side of Manhattan every Friday at 10pm. If
continuity alone keeps a poetic practice alive, Nuyorican poetic art has a well
documented ongoing tradition of more than thirty years.
The contiguity of the issue of race in the United States and the tortuous process of
post migration minority adaptations converge to characterize the representation of
individual or collective identity in Nuyorican poetic texts from the 1970s up to the 1990s.
This well known body of literature relating to the Puerto Rican experience of migration in
reality reflects an intellectual resurgence and revision of the theme of identity that took
place in the 1950s and 1960s during the decolonization of the Caribbean.
57
The appearance of a series of texts in many different islands of the Caribbean
promoting revisionism of cultural attitudes adopted during colonial times towards history,
language, nation, and identity, set new parameters for a subversive and ambitious re-
founding process. These texts, essays, for the most part, suggest revisionism, or a process
of “discourse on discourse” specifically aimed at the relationship of individual to
community in issues that include cross-cultural imagination in the wake of colonialism
(Glissant 12).
Édouard Glissant, a poet, novelist, and philosopher from Martinique, today a
department of France observes the similitude among the themes of decolonization across
the Caribbean, first in the French speaking ex-colonies and then in the rest of the region.
This is a situation quite similar to the present status of Puerto Rico with the United States.
In Poetics of Relation, Glissant recounts the details of post-colonialist Caribbean reality
within the context of a complex vision of a world in transformation. In his analysis, the
Caribbean is an enduring showcase of historical anguish, but also a place where unique
interactions can inspire the rest of the world to review themes inherent in the expansion
of Western civilization beyond Europe and its less than obvious consequences for the
colonized. The acknowledgment that “the West is not in the West. It is [both an aesthetic
and a political] project, not a place” (Glissant 32). Glissant defines “poetics of relation as
a transformative mode of history, capable of enunciating and making concrete a French-
Caribbean reality with a self-defined past and future. In Glissant’s view, we come to see
that relation in all its senses is the key to transforming mentalities and reshaping societies
58
through revisionist history that is telling, listening, connecting, and the parallel
consciousness of self and surroundings.
As a counterpart to French Caribbean decolonization explained by Édouard
Glissant in Poetics of Relation, a similar historical revision was going on in other parts of
the Caribbean. Antonio S. Pedreira and Tomás Blanco in Puerto Rico, Jorge Mafiach,
Fernando Ortiz, José Lezama Lima and Antonio Benítez Rojo in Cuba, and in the
Anglophone Caribbean, Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott, among many
others (Heller 391), tackled problems that characterize the negotiation of collective and
individual identity. The work of all those authors resonate with what Glissant suggests as
a true Caribbean discourse in his 1989 homonymous book, composed of many essays that
addressed in the same way as many of the above mentioned authors’ articles, the
problems of self and collective identity left to be solved by the newly independent
Caribbean peoples after decolonization. Many of these texts share thematic similarities
with the Nuyorican texts. This approximation suggests a very possible intertextual
connection and certainly a similar response to sociopolitical forces that inform both the
postcolonial Caribbean and the problems found by Nuyoricans when confronting the
remnants of colonialism in the United States of America.
The split cultural influences, the Latin American, the European through
colonization, and the American, as a destination of Puerto Rican migration, chart the
territory of Nuyorican poetics largely into the search for individual and collective identity
within a framework of cultural hybridity. Similar to Glissant’s concept of creolization or
“the unknown awareness of the creolized” (136), the quest of self and collective identity
59
as portrayed by Nuyorican poetic voices, particularly those from the 1970s to the 1990s,
allowed for a search for historical consciousness that ultimately extrapolated the
Nuyorican locus of enunciation from the thematic sphere to the formal one. According to
Somers-Willet, the theme of the search for identity denotes a growingly personal style
that characterizes the clearly performative character of Nuyorican poetry in the 1990s
(54-5). Eventually, this shift would allow the welcoming into the arena of a Nuyorican
poetical creation of performative texts that include especially the queer, as I allude to in
the last part of my text. For now, I would like to use the Nuyorican poetry of the
“founding period” of the 1970s along with some essays that illustrate what Glissant
characterized as “Caribbean discourse,” in order to better understand and demonstrate
how the Nuyorican texts focused on the quest for their split cultural identity.
In the following section I juxtapose Roberto Fernández Retamar’s “Caliban”
(1971) and Eli Morales “Rebirth of New Rican” (1994). I contrast the theme of the quest
for individual identity, from Eli Morales to the very ingenuous strategy of Fernández
Retamar who avoids the nineteenth century notion of race as “the monstrous racial
criterion that accompanies the United States since its beginnings until the genocide in
Vietnam” (Fernández Retamar 124) and brings the discussion of identity to the arena of
culture.
In comparing Tato Laviera’s “AmeRícan” (1981) to José Martí’s “Our America”
(1891), I point out the similitude among the poetics of the construction of an inclusive
Nuyorican identity in Laviera and Martí’s postulation of a polyvalent matrix of identity
deeply formed in Latin American cultural history.
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Last, in Willie Perdomo’s “Nigger-Reecan Blues” (1994), I examine the difficulty
of the character of Willie has in acknowledging the opinion of the poetic voice about his
cultural identity. I also discuss the dialogical form in which the poem is written with
regards to the issues of orality and performance.
Intertextual Dialogs
In his seminal essay “Caliban” (1971) Roberto Fernández Retamar seeks to put an
end to the Eurocentric doubt of whether “there is a Latin American culture.” For this,
Fernández Retamar denounces the European and American myths of racial superiority as
founded in a politically-motivated strategy of colonial control through the establishment
of a hierarchy.
In 1971, Fernández Retamar, a renowned Cuban intellectual, decided to review
Rodó’s assignment of roles taken from Shakespearian characters. Fernández Retamar
agrees with Rodó’s thesis regarding the danger of American imperialism, nonetheless he
decided to recast the role picked by Rodó for the United States from The Tempest. He did
this in order to address the question posed to him by a European reporter who was
uncertain whether or not “¿Existe una cultura latinoamericana?” (“Is there a Latin
American culture”: 124).
In “Caliban” Fernández Retamar relates the etymology of Shakespeare’s
character’s name choice with the words “caribe/caníbal” (“Caribbean/cannibal”: 126). He
also reviews a series of other texts that have taken characters from Shakespeare’s The
Tempest to project archetypes of Latin America and the United States. Fernández
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Retamar is especially concerned with the famous 1900 essay Ariel by the Uruguayan
Modernist writer José Enrique Rodó, that incites Latin American youth to “win liberty
and life through its increasing intellectual activity” (Rodó 231). In Ariel, Rodó warns
Latin America of the danger represented by “nordomanía” or the emulation of North
American culture, a force he exposes as pernicious. Rodó’s remarks on geopolitics,
disguised in the warning to Latin American youth to educate itself, reflect a
preoccupation that the utilitarianism and materialism characteristic of United States
culture could have a hegemonic influence over the Western Hemisphere. For Rodó the
situation was historically alarming, especially in view of the times in which Ariel was
written. The United States had just defeated Spain in Cuba and Puerto Rico in the
Spanish American War of 1898. Therefore, in his intertextual allusion to Shakespeare’s
The Tempest, Rodó metonymically associates the rowdy and overtly sensual
Shakespearian character of Caliban with the menacing force of American colonialism
lurking over the rest of Latin America.
In Fernández Retamar’s quest to review and update the pernicious influences that
the United States has had in Latin America, he switches Rodó’s association between
Shakespeare’s Caliban and the United States to Prospero and the United States. The
change is justified by Fernández Retamar by the different temper of Shakespeare’s
characters in The Tempest. Rodó had chosen Shakespeare’s Caliban to represent the
United States due to the character’s hot temperament, an allusion to war, and his
utilitarian sense of reality, a reference to American neo-imperialistic coveting of Latin
America after the Spanish-American War of 1898. In Fernández Retamar’s 1971
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reworking of Rodó’s association with the United States, the allusion to the imperialist
expansion of this country is made through Prospero who in The Tempest is a slave master
full of grandiose aspirations. Unlike Rodó, Fernández Retamar does not see an image of
the Unites States in the role of Caliban, the supposedly brutal and actually rebellious
servant. Instead, Fernández Retamar identifies the opposition of Caliban against Prospero
as a symbol of Latin American resistance to colonization. “Caliban learns the language of
the colonizer and uses it to curse him” (Fernández Retamar 126). Thus the slave, Caliban,
utters a double-fold insult to his owner, first by defying his authority, then by using his
master’s own language against him. In this act the slave questions his supposed
subhuman treatment by using language as an instrument of insurgence. In short,
symbolically through the use of language Caliban destabilizes the dichotomy of
civilization and barbarianism.
This metaphorical fight, for Fernández Retamar, mirrors a necessary move
towards the substitution of the idea that “the colonizer unifies us” or makes who we are
(127). Indeed, for Fernández Retamar, the recognition of Latin American cultural
autonomy is conditioned by its own existence that is anchored in multiplicity. Latin
American cultures, for Fernández Retamar, are a legitimate synthesis of three different
cultural matrixes in spite of imperial colonialism. Also, in Fernández Retamar’s
reinterpretation of Rodó’s Shakespearian intertextuality, Ariel, or the character that
represents the utmost moral standards but remains subdued to the master Prospero in
spite of his “enlightened spirit” –as Rodó sees it– cannot symbolize Latin America.
Instead, for Fernández Retamar, the rebellious Caliban should represent the Latin
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American that refuses to take the position of “an apprentice or poor copy of Europeans,”
including among them the caste of native Latin American whites that Martí called “the
American Europe” (Fernández Retamar 129).
It is important to note that the scholarship on Shakespeare nowadays recognizes
the importance The Tempest assumed in the discussion of the representation of Latin
American civilization in modern times and across disciplines. Nonetheless, so far, the
specialists on Shakespeare’s oeuvre consider that there is no conclusive evidence linking
any aspect of The Tempest to a deliberate and particular representation of anything
American. Alden T. Vaughan in the 1988 article “Shakespeare’s Indian: The
Americanization of Caliban” discusses the various appropriations of the character of
Caliban from The Tempest:
Shakespeare’s contemporaries and their descendants for nearly three
centuries did not associate The Tempest’s savage with American Indians.
If an intentionalist reading is insisted upon, and if early interpretations of
Caliban are taken into account, his principal prototype was probably the
European wild man of Renaissance literature and iconography. (153)
In light of the explanations that Vaughan offers on the current exegesis of the
Shakespearean text, one might be moved to disavow the Uruguayan Modernist José
Enrique Rodó’s or even the Cuban organic intellectual Roberto Fernández Retamar’s
intertextual appropriation of Shakespeare’s drama. Nonetheless, it is irrefutable that
Shakespeare, in representing alterity, be it a European wild man or a ferocious Caribbean
native, establishes it negatively as a ground for interpreting who the master is. And in this
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case, both in the original version and in the metaphoric readings of The Tempest,
European identity is never put into question in the text until Caliban addresses Prospero
using the master’s language as an instrument of revolt. Much to the benefit of a
postcolonial reading of The Tempest and its reinterpretations, Vaughan concludes that “an
interdisciplinary and multi-generic Caliban” is a possibility for future interpretations of
Shakespeare’s seminal theatrical text.
While other considerations of intertextual connections between The Tempest and
Latin American matter are tied to the future, common thematic lines can already be
drawn between Fernández Retamar’s “Caliban” (1971) and other texts dealing with Latin
American and United States political and cultural issues. Especially with respect to the
theme of race, in his essay “Caliban,” Fernández Retamar deliberately condemns the
myth of racial superiority embedded in European and American programs of
colonization. It is interesting to observe that Fernández Retamar highlights the racism of
Spanish colonizers in Cuba during the War of Independence and clarifies his association
of Caliban to Latin Americans:
Al proponer Calibán como nuestro símbolo, me doy cuenta de que
tampoco es enteramente nuestro, también es una elaboración extraña,
aunque esta vez lo sea a partir de nuestras concretas realidades. [. . .] La
palabra más venerada en Cuba –mambí– nos fue impuesta
peyorativamente por nuestros enemigos cuando la guerra de
independencia, y todavía no hemos descifrado de todo su sentido. Parece
que tiene una evidente raíz africana. (133)
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In proposing Caliban as our symbol, I realize that it is not completely ours.
It is also a foreign creation even though it is based upon our concrete
realities. [. . .] The most venerated word in Cuba –mambí– was imposed
upon us by our enemies in the War of Independence and we have not yet
deciphered all its meaning. It seems to have an African root, and implied
for the Spanish colonialists the idea that all pro independence fighters
were black slaves.
In view of the subaltern status that the Spanish colonialists intended to fix on the
Cuban pro-independence fighters with the use of the derogatory word mambí, Fernández
Retamar draws an association with the subversive use of language in The Tempest.
Because “the independentistas, both black and white made theirs with honor what
colonialism wanted as an injurious adjective” (133) the reworking of the colonizer insult
as an instrument of pride and identity in the fight denotes an operation similar to the
verbal upheaval of Caliban against Prospero in The Tempest. As Fernández Retamar
remarks: “They call us mambí, they call us negro to offend us: but we reclaim as a mark
of honor to consider ourselves as descendents of mambí, descendents of free black men,
cimarrones, independentistas, never descendents of slave drivers” (133). This is a
historical example of how colonial discourse that uses race as an instrument of
implementing socio-political exclusive agendas was once deconstructed during Cuba’s
Independence War against Spain. The refashioning of the meaning of the colonizer’s
derogatory epithets for the independentistas by the forefathers of nascent Cuban national
identity in fact constitutes an operation similar to the one Caliban exerts upon Prospero
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through the use of the dominator’s language to subvert the polarity between Caliban and
Prospero in The Tempest. It is so, since the Cubans maintain intact the sequence of
sounds or signifier –mambí– while assigning to it a new signified or meaning. In
Saussurean Linguistic terms, through this operation, mambí comes out as a new linguistic
sign.
Even though the Cuban case presented by Fernández Retamar singles out the
irony of discussing the equality of Cuban culture as opposed to Spanish culture using the
ex-colonizer’s own language, this is not the only implication that can be assumed
between the use of a colonial language in the demand for recognition in an environment
perceived as hostile to its own cultural presence. In the case of the migrated community
that eventually became the Nuyorican, unlike the case of monolinguism in which Cubans
intellectually defied their detractors by switching the tone in their same language, the
same operation –resistance through discourse– actually took place within a different
paradigm: bilingualism.
The same mechanism used by Caliban in The Tempest, also the one which
allowed for the cultural recasting of the word mambí by Cuban independentistas, has
found its way into Nuyorican poetry. In light of the importance of the role of language in
the negotiation of a subaltern culture’s claim to authenticity, integrity and deconstruction
of its place in a hierarchy, some remarks can be made about the use of language in
Nuyorican texts. Particularly in the case of bilingualism, the articulation between English
and Spanish is actively explored in Nuyorican poetry to promote a sense of political
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rebellion at the same time as it underscores the uniqueness of Nuyorican familiarity with
cultural hybridity. Examples abound in Nuyorican poetry from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Ed Morales’ “Rebirth of New Rican” (1994)9 is a text that embodies a
conversation between a poetic voice, represented simply as “I,” and Eddie Figueroa, a
poet very active in the organization of events in the Nuyorican Poets Café up to this day.
The initial scene is set in the poor sector of East Harlem, geographically identified as “the
projects on 114th and Madison” (98, 1-2)10. Upon the recognition that Eddie is in that
location “gasping for breath” (98, 1) there occurs an anagnorisis, or a clarifying insight.
In this revealing moment, the poetic voice grasps that Eddie, possibly a mentor, through
his teachings was “passing a living tradition” (98, 3) a notion developed metaphorically
by the poetic voice in the association between the essential or vital act of breathing and
the very historically symbolic street and avenue coordinates where this vision takes place,
Spanish Harlem or “El Barrio:”
As soon as I found you, gasping for breath in the projects on 114th and
Madison
I knew you were passing a living tradition on to me
“We are a deep, dark story,” you groaned. “Our people are a secret unto
themselves” (98, 1-5).
9 All in-text citations from “Rebirth of New Rican” are listed by verse number,
not page number. Although the original version makes no allusion to verse numbers, since I reproduced the text line by line in accordance with the original, I will refer to a line through the word “verse.” For this poem, all references will follow the format of page number and line number.
10 I have assigned a consecutive numbering for the verses in “Rebirth of New
Rican.”
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The location could not be more paradigmatically significant, as the site of the
major collective settling of Puerto Rican migrants in New York City after East Harlem
was the Lower East Side (Sánchez-Korroll 136). Hence, the place and the people
associated with the narrated experience acquire an organicity reflected in the affective
involvement of the poetic voice with the cause for the rebirth of New Rican. These
establishing initial verses underscore the importance attributed to Nuyoricans and to “El
Barrio” for situating the intended discussion on the community’s identity. Arlene Dávila
explains that East Harlem keeps its historical significance to this day in spite of
gentrification and commercialization that has changed the neighborhood in recent years.
In spite of all the pressures represented by rising prices of real state and the new
population of young professionals in search of lower rents, much like in Piri Thomas’
1964 book Down These Means Streets, East Harlem or “El Barrio” still stands for much
more than simply a crossroads in the map of Manhattan. Besides the Lower East Side or
“Loisada,” it is still considered the hinterland of Nuyorican identity, the very place where
the migrants from the 1930s up to the 1960s fashioned a new urban and multicultural
community:
The nostalgically celebrated home of Puerto Rican fiction writers and the
site of transnationally important Puerto Rican festivals and landmarks [. . .]
This place is an important site of images of “urban” Latino culture, often
appropriated by the media as background to Jennifer Lopez music videos or
Sports Illustrated modeling shoots. (Dávila 51)
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So, it is the vision of his/her mentor, while casually standing in such a
paradigmatic place for Nuyorican experience, that triggers in the poetic voice the right
setting to conceive what exactly would be included in the intended process of “rebirth.”
In spite of the difference in the plot and the circumstances through which Caliban
resists Prospero and the poetic voice in the poem come to terms with a liberating process,
in “Rebirth of New Rican,” just like in “Calibán,” there is a process of anagnorisis or
perception of one’s personal role in promoting change in the status quo. Both in
Fernández Retamar’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and in “Rebirth of
New Rican,” the characters that occupy the role of pupil, respectively Caliban and the
poetic voice that quotes Eddie Figueroa, realize the power that their own actions might
have through the use of language in response to stimuli from the external environment.
The similitude lies upon the fact that both can now achieve some level of liberation
which in their previous state of ignorance would have been impossible.
In verse four the poetic voice quotes Eddie Figueroa revealing what the voice sees
as a mystery in the core of the rebirth process; “Our people are a secret unto themselves.”
(98, 4-5). The poetic voice seems to rely on the retrieval of Nuyoricans’ “secret […] dark
story” in order to make out the nuances of future times because the mystery needs a code
to be solved.
In the following verses the poetic voice names the collective experiences over
which socio-historical revisionism, perhaps the key the voice searches for, might affect
the future of the Nuyorican community:
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Eddie they might think you’re crazy but you taught me
What the New Rican destiny will be
Five centuries of miscegenation finally set free
The blood of time-traveling espiritistas and Yoruban existencialistas
Los moros que no se han matado and the Borinquen aesthetic comiendo
Bacalao. (98, 6-11)
Here, the poetic voice clearly relates the solution to the riddle it poses in verse
four, through the use of a metaphoric placing of the two elements at either end of an
imaginary weight scale, “people” and “secret.” By equating those two elements and
considering some very specific characteristics of the Nuyorican community, cited in the
following verses eight to ten, it is possible to perceive that the poetic voice relies indeed
on some level of applied historical revisionism to avail a process of cultural rebirth. A
process of revisionism as it is set, calls to the frontline of public discussion the burden of
past colonialism through the allusion in verse eight to the five centuries of the colonial
process in the Americas.
Also very important is the direct implication of colonialism in Latin America that
is evoked in the same verse eight by the word “miscegenation.” In Nuyorican poetry,
miscegenation is a theme treated sometimes in poems dealing with the search for self or
collective identity. It is so because in the United States, Puerto Ricans migrants were met
with a different cultural paradigm concerning phenotype and genotype that is “vaguer,
ambiguous and changing” in Puerto Rico, as opposed to “clear, definite and fixed in the
United States” (Wade 30). These different concepts of race in the United States and in
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Latin America many times caused confusion to Puerto Ricans in New York, especially
when some of them were not accepted as part of the American black community and
whites automatically labeled Puerto Ricans as nonwhite. The Nuyorican poet Louis
Reyes Rivera, in an interview with Carmen Dolores Hernández in the book Puerto Rican
Voices in English, summarizes the confusion this causes when one is inquiring about
his/her own identity and perception of communal identity: “I’ve always wanted to search
for understanding what I was and what it meant, and while I couldn’t understand the
differences people put on me, there are several moments in my life when the
contradiction was confronted or confronted me” (126).
In general, the way out of the racial paradox in the United States, for Puerto Rican
migrants, has simply been to say that they are Puerto Rican. But then, another very
disturbing fact is that when they are confronted with Puerto Ricans who still live on the
island, the offspring of the Puerto Rican migrants to the United States are not recognized
as legitimate Puerto Rican. Rosana Rivero-Marín, in the 2004 book Janus identities and
Forked Tongues, points to a significant difference in the reception of Nuyoricans by
Puerto Rican critics in Puerto Rico. She mentions that in Puerto Rican letters more
interest is dedicated for authors who represent “a revival of the black sector” like Miguel
Henríquez, and José Campeche than to the literary production of the Nuyorican diaspora.
In fact, Rivero-Marín attests to the existence of a real “animosity [from island Puerto
Ricans] towards Puerto Ricans in New York” (72).
This resistance in Puerto Rico to the reception of Nuyoricans is especially marked
by the monolinguism/bilingualism manifest in the use of Spanish and English and a
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chauvinistic reaction to it which is very traumatic to Nuyoricans (Hernández 114). Other
sources of cultural estrangement are perhaps much stronger at home in New York City.
This becomes patent through the cultural significance of bilingualism that arms an
individual with a tool of cultural belonging. It is from the standpoint of cultural hybridity
which is patent in the use of two languages at once that Nuyoricans observe with awe the
relativity of race. Since they share both a Latin American and an American concept of
race they are capable of perceiving not only their relativity but also their nature as a
cultural construct. The capacity of operating in the mode of awareness of cultural
hybridity is precisely what the poetic voice in “Rebirth of New Rican” characterizes as
the initial attitude necessary for availing the process of historical revisionism that can
reinstitute confidence in the community. This revitalizing process would take place and
also be inspired in the “Barrio.” The location of the initial scene in the Puerto Rican
neighborhood is symbolic and inspires the poetic voice’s cultural awareness of the
importance of Latin American culture as a source in the quest for a Nuyorican identity in
the United States.
The significance of Latin American culture to Nuyoricans via the African
diaspora caused by the colonial slave trade and the weight of the African cultural matrix
is represented in verse nine, where the voice evokes “blood of time traveling espiritistas.”
The setting of religion into the discussion following the allusion to bloodline suggests
that the poetic voice is situating the historical revisionism in the arena of culture and not
purely on genetics. The epithet “Yoruba existentialists” can confirm the prevalence of
culture in the process capable of causing the rebirth projected by the voice. It appears to
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not designate anyone in particular, but implies an attitude of reviewing one’s life. This is
expressed by the word “existencialistas” referring to those who ponder the condition of
individual existence. The idea that the projected rebirth depends on cultural process is
finally clarified at the end of verse ten, where the scope of the suggested consciousness-
raising process incorporates popular culture in the reference to Puerto Rican aesthetic and
even cuisine.
The series of epithets given by the poetic voice to Eddie Figueroa, who the voice
sees as a mentor, can further extend the assumption that “Barrio” culture is at the heart of
the projected renaissance, for “Young Lord agitator, Central Park acid dealer” (12)
anchor the “Rebirth of New Rican” to the counter culture of the 1970s, what is
underscored by the allusion to LSD and to the Young Lords, a neighborhood group that,
in its beginnings, advocated for self-determination for Puerto Rico, as well as for
neighborhood empowerment (González 118).
A process of collective consciousness based on culture can indeed be noticed as
the real focus of the poetic voice in the attribution from verses sixteen to nineteen, that
“our culture is the future / that we are no longer colonial subjects.” It is indeed a
confirmation that the projected “Rebirth of New Rican” is fully articulated around the
valorization not of a race but of a culture. The élan that denotes the poetic voice as a
manner to emphasize the importance of its cultural revival project can be fully felt in
verses twenty-two and twenty three: “The revolution is right here, man / The groove that
is in our hearts.” The placement of the epicenter for change emanating from the sound of
the heart leads the way for the last argument the voice utters in favor of change:
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Con esta situación, culturally unique
Tu [sic] sabes la cuestión de usar las dos lenguas
New and revolutionary communication
Comes into being
Porque only a multiculture pueblo can understand
El adentro y the outside of the dynamic. (99, 24-29)
In the verses above, the poetic voice lays out metalinguistically, through the use
of code-switching, the dynamic that can orient the desired cultural revival for
Nuyoricans. It is a very unique process, to which bilingualism in the poem appears not
only to refer to a particular Nuyorican linguistic situation but also to a relativistic,
dialogic mindset, which the poetic voice explicitly indicates in the last two verses as
capable of having consequences either adentro, in the community, as well as outside of it.
There is a thematic similarity between Morales’ “Rebirth of New Rican and the
essay “Caliban” by Fernández Retamar. On a broad scope, both texts encompass the
theme of valorization of cultures in culturally hostile environments. For Fernández
Retamar alterity is fixed by Western culture which makes self-identification for
Caribbean cultures a process of resistance and discovery. In a similar process Ed Morales
contextualizes the valorization and insertion of Nuyorican culture in a multicultural
dialogue with its African, Puerto Rican, and American roots. The similitude of both
processes lies in a necessary move that is declared possible, provided one manages to put
forth a rebellious revisionism in their attitude towards race and culture.
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The relativism of social roles attained by Caliban in response to the provocations
of his master Prospero in the master’s own language relates to the situation Latin
Americans faced during the 400 years of Spanish colonization. In Shakespeare’s The
Tempest, the revolt of Caliban is seen by Fernández Retamar as the moment of
empowering the colonized. Because language and patterns of cultural transformation are
related, the verbal irreverence of Spanish and English code-switching in Nuyorican
poetry promotes an awareness of cultural relativity, in contrast to a hierarchy. This is seen
in the use of elements of both Spanish and English, as the poetic voice represents in the
poem by generating significance through the device of code-switching.
Even if, for Fernández Retamar, the use of Spanish by Caliban marks the irony
that presents itself to the colonized, that is to say, to be only able to decolonize
him/herself in the language of the colonizer, this does not lower the importance of
Spanish for the formation of Cuban cultural identity. Likewise, Morales’ poetic voice in
“Rebirth of New Rican” identifies a positive aspect in the instant relativistic power
potentially contained in the use of both Spanish and English for the understanding of
Nuyorican culture. In Morales’ text, the use of language itself brings the discussion of
identity closer to the inclusivity of culture and away from the excluding notions of race.
After all, Nuyorican code-switching opens a perspective on the possibility of a linguistic
freedom that puts emphasis on the definition of identities, not on a race. This opposes the
polarization of American culture between black and white, to focus instead on culture, as
language is a marker that walks hand in hand with it.
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The poetic voice concludes with a combative rationale, announcing in Spanish
and English that this cultural empowerment process is the move that can “free us from
being aquí o allá, here, there, everywhere” (99, 34). In the last six verses, the poetic voice
makes a very important warning about the process evoking the concept of racism:
Mixed Race is the place
It feels good to be neither
It’s a relief to deny racial purity
We’re amused as America slowly comes to see
The beauty of negritude and the Native American attitude
We’ve been living it day-to-day since 1492. (99, 35-40)
The poetic voice’s remark has to do with race and the use of it in the United
States. The words suggest that the United States has had a glimpse into the process of
empowerment that occurred in post-colonial times in the Caribbean, in particular
inscribed in the text by the mentioning of the movement of Négritude, pioneered by the
Senegalese Léopold Senghor and the Martínique French Aimé Césaire (Camara 86).
The Négritude movement, continued by Franz Fanon in the Caribbean French
territory of Martínique, called for a cultural revival that included the use of cultural
revisionism as an ontological tool (Césaire 13). The ethos of Négritude is to address the
evils of colonialism for the individual and for the masses, proposing a cultural revival
through the facilitation of a necessary review of the resilient Afro-Caribbean identity due
to and in spite of the logics of colonialism. Négritude is a form of cultural resistance that
is dialectically opposed to another form of cultural resistance, racism (Drimmer 129).
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Furthermore the evocation of Négritude completed by the poetic voice in verse
five of “Rebirth of New Rícan,” juxtaposed to a reference to the year of the arrival in
America of Christopher Columbus, also the last word in the poem, encompasses a
criticism of the colonial system that does not discount its consequences in the form of
racism in the United States. Indeed, a symbolic reference not only to the personal but also
to the collective burden linked to colonialism in general is consistent with the poetic
voice declaring in verse forty that “We’ve been living it day-to-day since 1492.”
All in all, in a final gesture of cultural affirmation of an identity having the same
weight in terms of Négritude “and [to] the Native American attitude” (99, 39) the poetic
voice utters a rallying cry against the remainders of racism. It is a “[. . .] last call to gather
against the policy of ‘racial purity’” that has informed Nuyoricans both from their Latin
American cultural matrix as well as from their urban American one. The message is
indeed clear. The rebirth of New Rican predicates revisionism for the cultural use of race
as a form to convey identity for individuals and a community portrayed as in need of
recuperation.
“AmeRícan” and “Our America”
The noticeable uncertainty expressed in clearly evoking race, only to refer instead
to a series of matters linked to culture found its way into texts from the sixteenth century
to the present. The term race has been persistently present in the relativization of
European perceptions of culture and barbarianism in the Americas. It appears posited
along with extreme skepticism towards a Eurocentric exclusivist concept of civilization
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by Michel de Montaigne in the essay “On Cannibals” (1580), a text that further questions
the relativity of the assumption of the newly contacted people’s barbarianism.
The discussion of the Americas in terms of civilization and barbarianism
reappeared three hundred years later in the nineteenth century, and particularly informed
a series of essays addressing ideological and practical matters related to the period of
nation building in Latin America. Such is the case of José Martí’s much celebrated essay
“Our America” (1891).
Indeed, Martí in “Our America,” is indebted to a long tradition of enlightened
thought on cultural matters, which started with Montaigne and continued through the
egalitarian spirit of the writings of the eighteenth century in England and France. The
following passage from “Our America” shows intertextual connections with the ideas of
the Enlightenment. Here Martí is adapting European ideas to Latin America reality:
In America the natural man has triumphed over the imported book.
Natural men have triumphed over an artificial intelligentsia. The native
mestizo has triumphed over the alien, pure blooded criollo. The battle is
not between civilization and barbarity, but between false erudition and
nature. [. . .] The tyrants of America have come to power by acquiescing
to these scorned natural elements and have fallen as soon as they betrayed
them. The republics have purged the former tyrannies of their inability to
know the true elements of the country, derive the form of government
from them, and govern along with them. Governor, in a new country,
means Creator. (290)
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In this passage Martí alludes to the phases of constitutional theory posited by
Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws (1748). Montesquieu posits three kinds of political
arrangements to govern a state: republican, monarchical and despotic. Guiding each
classification of a political system, according to Montesquieu, must be what he calls a
“principle.” This standard acts as a spring or motor to motivate behavior on the part of
the citizens in ways that will tend to support that regime and make it function well
(Montesquieu 472). For democracies, and such is the case for the system of government
projected by Martí for Latin America, the motivating principle should be the love of
virtue, also defined by Montesquieu as the inspiration to put the interests of the
community ahead of private interests of its commanders. Tyranny is predicted by the
French Enlightenment philosopher as the result of the default of one of these
commanding principles.
In the passage of “Our America” quoted above, Martí balances the signification of
civilization and barbarianism in an analogous manner to what Montaigne did in
comparing the damages Europeans caused through colonialism as opposed to the
“supposed” docility of the American natives. Nonetheless, on this matter, Martí is not
commenting on colonialism in the manner of Montaigne, rather he is weaving
considerations about the nature of the governments that he sees as pernicious. In reality,
Martí condemns the corruption of Latin American governments that “the pure blooded
criollo” elite created in subservience to Europe. Instead, a democratic and autonomous
Latin American government, in Martí’s view, can only emanate from “the natural men”
which the Cuban writer promptly identifies with “the native mestizo”.
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The fatalism attributed by Martí to the decaying of Latin American post-
independence governments due to the inobservance to the “natural” characteristics of
Latin America, including the mestizo, falls hand in hand with the initial assumption that,
by evoking race, in reality, Martí is referring to complex cultural processes. Keeping in
mind that mestizaje can only be understood in its fullest as a cultural process, the attribute
of naturality Martí attaches to it does not, even remotely, refer to the same category
scientists from the nineteenth century, such as Cesare Lombroso and the racially-
deterministic theories of criminality, do. Contrarily to Martí, Shaller and other
nineteenth-century scientists considered the mixing of races as contrary to the laws of
nature (Livingstone 170). Instead, for Martí, the naturality of Latin American man has to
do with the recognition of a historical process in which they were generated and to the
“natural” attachment mestizos have to their land in opposition to the “artificial
intelligentsia” of criollos who are portrayed as capable of betraying their Latin American
origin and identifying with foreign interests. This idea corresponds to what Martí
skillfully illustrates in the carefully placed epithet “pure blooded criollos” as a scornful
and condemning reminder of criollo elitist racism that, after Martí, lies at the root of the
white Latin American many times turning their back on Latin America towards Europe, a
situation reputed by Martí as the cause for post-independence governments to decay into
tyranny.
Certainly, one can see reactions to racism adjoining the recognition of cultural
relativity when it is circumscribed to a strategy of defining self and collective identity,
cross culturally and through very diverse historic times. Such is the case for Fernández
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Retamar’s reinterpretation of an Elizabethan play’s significance with respect to the role
of Caliban, and its concordance with a strategy for cultural revival to counteract racism,
as I have described in Morales’ poem “Rebirth of New Rícan.”
A very important moment for understanding the dynamic between race and
culture in regards to the formation of self or collective identity is the time the ideology of
nation was in the making. The concatenation of nation-building discourses in nineteenth-
century Latin America has been historically marked by some attempts on addressing race
as one of its most important elements. Latin American critics, such as Martí, evoked the
issue of race in the nineteenth century only to expand on it in every manner possible to
identify it in cultural terms, which nowadays would be seen as the postulation of race as a
cultural construct. For instance, Martí in “My Race” condemns the concept of race as
morally irrelevant even though, it is only recently that it became clear, with the advent of
research in genetics, that it is also scientifically inexistent, since Homo sapiens has no
known subspecies (Templeton 640).
Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal revisits the Cuban intellectual and independence
hero’s writings on race and stresses their importance in informing Latin American
interwar discourses on nationalism and modernity. After reviewing two important essays
dealing with the subject of race, “My Race” and “Our America,” Martínez-Echazábal
refers to the fact that what Martí labels as “race” in these two texts, actually conveys
notions better understood nowadays as pertaining to culture. This accounts for the
preference of Martí in characterizing race historically and sociologically and his rebuke
of racist theories such as those of the Cuban historian José Antonio Saco (1797-1879)
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who called for miscegenation as a form to “neutralize [. . .] the terrible influence of the
three million Negroes surrounding us” (qtd. in Corbitt 455).
According to Martínez-Echazábal, Ortiz, in the article “Martí y las razas,” (1993)
examines Martí’s “Our America” (1891) and comes to the conclusion that “the social
problem regarding the blacks [for Martí] is more a problem of monies than of colors; it
has to do not with an incompatibility of bloods, but with economic conflict” (Martínez-
Echazábal 122). It appears clear that Martí’s reference to race in “My Race” and “Our
America” has indeed more to do with a socio-economical approach to race than a purely
genetic one. Martínez-Echazábal further specifies her perceptions of Martí’s use of the
word race in:
I am referring to the displacement from the notion of biological “race,” to
that of a historical and social “race,” as well as the alleged disassociation
of “race” from culture best illustrated in American anthropology by the
work of Franz Boas and his disciples at Columbia University, and in Latin
America by the writings of Gilberto Freyre and Arthur Ramos in Brazil,
and by the work of Fernando Ortiz himself in Cuba, among others. (121-2)
In Martínez-Echazábal’s opinion, Martí’s peculiar enunciation of race has to do
with the author’s support of an enlightened and egalitarian agenda for an independent
Cuba. As part of a projected nation Martí saw in the term Cuban a form to equate all
persons living in the country. After this proposed egalitarian ideology of the nation, Martí
supported that above any differences that there might be among them, all persons are to
be considered first Cuban. To corroborate Martí’s egalitarian notion of race, Martínez-
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Echazábal cites Ortiz in “Martí y las razas” (1993). There, Ortiz concludes categorically
that in Martí’s language “race means culture” simply because “that meaning of the word
was not yet current when Martí was writing 60 years ago” (121).
When referring to Latin Americans, Martí avoids references to the term race.
Indeed, in describing the forces that historically and culturally shaped the peculiarity of
the nascent Latin American republic, Martí exempts himself of conceiving mestizaje as a
racial construct. He is even far from celebrating it as others such as José Vasconcelos
would later do in The Cosmic Race (1925), or even further from attempts of constructing
a category to respond to a specific transcultural operational category such as Gloria
Anzaldúa’s “mestiza consciousness” posited in Borderlands /La Frontera (1987). What
Martí does is simply to offer in a very enlightened and open minded way, a category
formulated in opposition to “the pure blooded criollo” (290) in the context of the pre-
republican or colonial phase of Latin American history:
What a vision we were: the chest of an athlete, the hands of a dandy, and
the forehead of a child. We were a whole fancy dress ball, in English
trousers, a Parisian waistcoat, a North American overcoat, and a Spanish
bullfighter’s hat. The Indian circled about us, mute, and went to the
mountaintop to christen his children. The black, pursued from afar, alone
and unknown, sang his heart’s music in the night, between waves and wild
beasts. The campesinos, the men of the land, the creators, rose up in blind
indignation against the disdainful city, their own creation. We wore
epaulets and judge’s robes, in countries that came into the world wearing
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rope sandals and Indian headbands. The wise thing would have been to
pair, with charitable hearts and the audacity of our founders, the Indian
headband and the judicial robe, to undam the Indian, make a place for the
able black, and tailor liberty to the bodies of those who rose up and
triumphed in its name. [. . .] No Yankee or European book could furnish
the key to the Hispanoamerican enigma. (“Our America 293-4)
In this long passage Martí initially confirms the multitude of cultural influences in
the formation of Latin American countries. The totality of these references, especially in
the initial metaphor of the indian who christens his child on a mountaintop, the black who
performs a musical ritual into the night and the campesino rising up against the men of
the city, which in turn is represented by the image of city dwellers who pass by in a
collection of European incongruous clothing, points undeniably to a special character
peculiar to Latin America. In the middle of the passage we find that instead of the
multitude of superimposed European identities poorly represented in a collage of
European garments the narrative voice indicates Latin Americans ought to fashion an
identity out of Latin America itself. Martí seems to indicate a change is occurring and
instead of searching for an answer to the “Hispanoamerican enigma” in foreign lands, a
young generation is relying on the creation of a new identity. What is curious is that
although Martí mentions the concept of mestizaje he refuses to categorize it as an active
form of framing ethnocentric forms of resistance. All in all, it appears that Martí
considered the term as a form of explaining the cultural peculiarity of postcolonial Latin
America in the period of nation building. Instead of operating in terms of civilization and
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barbarianism Martí chooses the binary natural/artificial to frame Latin American identity.
In this way, natural, for Martí, has to do with cultural processes characteristic to Latin
America, while artificial refers to the bad habit of considering postcolonial Latin
American civilization through European or North American optics. All in all, “Our
America” in terms of the fashioning of a Latin American identity proposes a self-centered
process.
In spite of the fact that “Our America” addresses a very specific topic, the
political history of Latin America from the overthrow of the colonial system to the
lurking menace seen by Martí in the growing power of the United States, a nation that
“will demand intimate relations with [our America], though it does not know her and
disdains her” (295), the question of whether or not Latin America will maintain its own
character seems, to Martí, to be in direct relation to Latin American’s capability of
engendering strong identities as nascent nations. These new identities for Martí would be
stable and operative once they set their foundations in the real Latin America. The theme
of the quest for collective identity is also present in Nuyorican poetry.
Tato Laviera, in a poem entitled “AmeRícan,” expresses the same motivation as
Martí in “Our America.” Almost a hundred years later than Martí, Laviera also sketches
an identity in the process of creation. But unlike Martí who carefully avoids the uttering
of a romantic project of nation to characterize “continental soul” (Martí 296) which is left
by the forefather of Cuban independence as open, Laviera, in “AmeRícan” draws the first
evocation for Nuyorican identity directly from a nineteenth-century romantic mythology
of the nation.
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we gave birth to a new generation
AmeRican, broader than lost gold
never touched, hidden inside the
puerto rican mountains. (489)
In the poem’s first stanza11, the poetic voice bounds in an affective unison the
poem’s topic, inscribing itself organically into the generation which it wants to presently
describe. This is represented by utterance of the pronoun “we” to which, from now on I
will refer to as the poetic voice. In order to evoke the generation to be described, the
poetic voice makes a vague reference to Puerto Rico’s natural richness, gathered under
the clear symbolic allusion of “lost gold,” which can suggest a past of mining exploration
associated with the quest of the early stages of colonial rule in Puerto Rico. It appeals to
the logic of the colonial system, which determined that the gold and other raw materials
of the colony primarily benefited Spain and was “never touched” by most of the
population. Through the allusion to a natural splendor of the land that is as great as the
inspiration for the new Latin American nations this stanza also evokes the mid
nineteenth-century Latin American civilization and state building narratives. The
correspondence is metonymically reached through the grandeur attributed to the nascent
independent nations and the reference to their natural richness, as seen in stanza one. This
is in itself a topos traceable through the history of Puerto Rican literature which can be
11 For practical reasons I have divided the poem in stanzas. In the original there
are no references to lines, stanzas or verses. I have reproduced the graphic aspect of each stanza as close to the original as possible.
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illustrated by works such as the novel La palma del cacique (1852) de Alejandro Tapia y
Rivera, that tells a “historical legend” of the foundation of Puerto Rico.
Although Laviera appears to set the initial tone using a romantic key common to
nineteenth-century prose referring to the nation, his tone quickly changes to a less bucolic
and more urban one. In stanza two, the association of the richness of the land this time
corresponds to the vastness that the collective poetic voice “we” attributes to Nuyorican
experience. This concept comes across from the second stanza:
we gave birth to a new generation,
AmeRican, it includes everything
imaginable you-name-it-we-got-it
society. (489)
This vastness is effectively one that allows for the inclusion of
“everything/imaginable” which stands as an attribute of the society to which the poetic
voice belongs and describes. This society is significantly characterized by the complex
adjective “you-name-it-we-got-it/society.” Again, it appears that the reference to the
hidden riches of the mountains of Puerto Rico is indeed far away both in time and space.
This type of society which the poetic voice describes is definitely an urban, or a
cosmopolitan one. Indeed, an all encompassing society corresponds to the stage in which
human civilization is confident enough of its means to produce and create, and does not
shun celebrating this very realization, which is seen as an achievement in the ideology of
progress. So said, the reference to this stage of society evokes New York City as an
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international symbol of entrepreneurship. But the image created by the poetic voice might
also encompass other elements which inform this path of success.
we gave birth to a new generation,
AmeRican salutes all folklores,
european, indian, black, spanish,
and anything else compatible. (489)
In stanza three, which concludes the first of two parts in the poem, the collective
poetic voice, through the friendliness it declares towards all folklores, elevates the
receptiveness of the “AmeRícan” generation to many other cultural narratives expressed
in the artistic manifestations of several cultures, namely, “european, indian, black,
spanish.” In Martí’s “Our America,” there is an evocation to different peoples that does
not come from an association with the concept of race, but rather suggests that Laviera’s
poetic voice, like Martí’s narrative voice, establishes the poetic focus from a cultural
point of view. The ideal of cultural openness expressed in the welcoming call of
Laviera’s poetic voice towards other cultures, signals that for the Nuyorican, cultural
dialogue is a priori open.
The choice for the word “folklore” by Laviera is significant, since it evokes a
particular notion, as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett reminds us, of the dilemma her field of
knowledge encounters in the present, not only in the matter of its relocation within the
hierarchy of university disciplines, but also because “folklore continues to be in the
present without being fully of the present, in part because folklore, understood as oral
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tradition, tends to be defined over and against technology, first writing and print, then
recording and broadcast technologies, and finally digital media” (283).
The concept of folklore used by Laviera in “AmeRícan” seems to agree with
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s concept of popular culture which underscores the importance
folklorists attribute to oral tradition. Accordingly, the folklorist adds in favor of her
scientific field of knowledge, the opinion that “folklore persists, and is created, in spite
of, not because of [new technologies]” (283). The answer for Laviera’s collective poetic
voice’s definition of folklore will be made clear in the second part of the poem. Although
the theme of technology versus folklore is not expanded any further than music recording
in the 1930s in New York City, still his definition complements that of Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett’s. At the end of this part of the poem, represented by the first three four-verse
indented stanzas, the poetic voice inscribes folklore within the realm of cultural
achievements of various social groups, echoing Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s definition of
folklore as oral artistry.
So far, this enumeration of “AmeRícan” characteristics has cast symbols that
range from a brief and slightly ironic reference to a never received richness, to the
cosmopolitanism of the urban world in which Nuyoricans live in. These references are
consistent not only with the present of the Nuyorican community in New York City, but
also with the history and even the literature of their Puerto Rican forefathers, setting the
Nuyorican locus of narration in a general atmosphere of cultural hybridity and cultural
openness without fear of acculturation (Ortiz 97-102).
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The next three stanzas, numbered four to six, have individual different lengths.
Together, they can point to explain Laviera’s poetic voice’s own concept of folklore:
AmeRican, singing to composer pedro flores’ palm
trees high up in the universal sky!
AmeRican, sweet soft spanish danzas gypsies
moving lyrics la española cascabelling
presence always singing at our side!
AmeRican, beating jíbaro modern troubadours
crying guitars romantic continental
bolero love songs! (489)
Taking into consideration the concept of folklore produced by Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett and the references inscribed in the stanzas above by the poetic voice, it is
possible to notice some difference. The mentioning of Pedro Flores, a Puerto Rican
singer who moved to New York in 1926 and, who along with Rafael Hernandez founded
the “Trio Borinquen,” (Morales 130) end up inscribing the word “AmeRícan” into
popular oral culture of the present. That is inconsistent with the state of folklore in
academia given by Kirshenblatt-Gimblett because instead of “be[ing] defined over and
against technology” the poem’s allusion to “composer pedro flores’ [sic] palm trees high
up in the universal sky” contains a clear reference to dissemination of folkloric music
which does not exclude the new technologies of broadcasting available today. Also, after
a quick reference to the “Trio Borinquen” band’s hit, “Bajo un palmar” (“Under the Palm
Tree”), that suggests the universalization of Puerto Rican music, in the next two stanzas,
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the poetic voice makes reference to the popular and performatic Spanish tradition of
flamenco, through the allusion to “danzas gypsies.”
Finally, condensing the two popular cultural currents of “AmeRícan,” the poetic
voice, in stanza six, evokes the jíbaro or Puerto Rican rural mountain dweller that can be
compared, for illustrative effect, to the American “hillbilly” (Haas 35). Both iconic
images have a weight in respective regional cultures, but the jíbaro was taken a step
further in comparison to the hillbilly because, as early as the eighteenth century it served
the purpose of representing a Puerto Rican native identity (Scarano 1401). The
popularization of the jíbaro as an iconic form of Puerto Rican identity better corresponds
to what Manuel Peter Lamarche recounts as:
[The] white or mixed-race peasants who accounted for the vast majority of
the population until the 1930s, the jíbaros have been regarded as the
epitome of traditional Puerto Rican identity. In literature and song, they
have long been celebrated, however paternalistically and nostalgically, for
their legendary hospitality, individuality, self sufficiency and love of
simple pleasures of nature, coffee, fiestas, and homespun music.
Accordingly, jíbaro music has been regarded as a quintessential symbol of
island culture. (68)
Even though seen in a positive light as described by Lamarche, the jíbaro had
previously been caricaturized in the Saint James Festivals’ carnavallesque celebration of
Mojingangas. This fact is studied by Francisco A. Scarano who recounts that the image
of the jíbaro was repeatedly put in evidence in the Mojingangas from 1745 to 1823. What
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Scarano noticed was the fact that this native peasant of the Puerto Rican mountains was
actually being ridiculed during an essentially urban festival. In fact, in present day Puerto
Rico, to be called a jíbaro is still an utterance perceived as offensive, especially in urban
settings.
In light of these considerations, the allusion to the jíbaro’s musical tradition by
Laviera, in stanza six, may be understood as an attempt at rescuing the image of the
Puerto Rican mountain-dweller from scorn and oblivion. Deliberate attempts to recast
essentialized images of national identity are not strange to literature. For instance, this
sort of revisionism occurred in other parts of the Latin American world. In nineteenth-
century Argentina, the gaucho offered to authors such as Ricardo Güiraldes in Don
Segundo Sombra, a mean of portraying in a positive light an essentialized national icon
that had previously been regarded as unfitting to the image of nation, order, and progress,
noticeably by Domingo F. Sarmiento in Facundo: civilización y barbarie (Bowsher 111).
Also, in mid-nineteenth century Puerto Rico the use of the jíbaro as a form of
popularizing a discourse of national identity bears a resemblance to similar attempts in
Brazil where the image of the pre-colonial peoples was romanticized as a myth for the
nineteenth-century nascent nation. But while in Brazil indigenismo as literary currency
was abandoned in the nineteenth century, in Puerto Rico the analogue jíbaro myth
survived in local culture, mainly through popular music. Jíbaro music, in the twentieth
century even crossed other limits having adapted into the context of the phonographic
market in New York City in the early 1930s as the reference to Pedro Flores by Laviera
in 1981 suggests (Flores 347).
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“AmeRícan,” as the poetic voice declares in the poem, presents other cultural
influences beyond the jíbaro. The reference to Spanish “continental bolero” clarifies to
the reader that the identity Laviera attempts to establish is definitely related with popular
culture in a transnational way. Given the salutation to “all folklores” from stanza three,
verse two, and its subsequent expansion in stanzas four, five and six, the Nuyorican
identity that is inscribed by Laviera under the term “AmeRícan” definitely lies within the
domains of cosmopolitanism, although it remains closely associated with particular
Puerto Rican and Spanish influences. In fact, the very confluence of cultural elements
that characterizes cosmopolitanism serves to contextualize the importance of the
migration to New York City for understanding “AmeRícan” identity, as expressed in
stanza seven:
AmeRican, across forth and across back
back across and forth back
forth across and back and forth
our trips are walking bridges!
it all dissolved into itself, the attempt
was truly made, the attempt was truly
absorbed, digested, we spit out
the poison, we spit out the malice,
we stand, affirmative in action,
to reproduce a broader answer to the
marginality that gobbled us up abruptly! (490)
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In the very core of the definition that Laviera gives for AmeRícan lays the
movement of the migration, represented in stanza seven verses one to five by an allusion
to the episodes of reversed migration which historically occurred in the 1930s, el vaivén.
By evoking this expression Laviera links two loose ends or two different identities,
American and Puerto Rican. By so doing Laviera implies the existence of an intersection
within which the essence of AmeRícan can be established. More than a product of a
contact zone (Pratt 145), in stanza seven verses nine to eleven, AmeRícan is not only
being defined as an identity but also, by the reference to affirmative action, as a legally
protected aspect of diversity (Aparicio and Cruz 47). AmeRícan is a symbol which
Laviera’s poetic voice suggests as the initial point from which to start rallying against
exclusion. From stanzas eight to eleven, Laviera’s poetic voice defines itself in terms of
location, musical influences and use of Spanish and English. After doing so, in stanza
twelve, the poetic voice returns to the theme of inclusion and complements it with the rest
of humanity as follows:
AmeRícan, abounding inside so many ethnic English
people, and out of humanity, we blend
and mix all that is good! (490)
The theme of inclusion dominates the last three stanzas of “AmeRícan”
expanding the signification of what the poetic voice had established as a symbol for
resistance through affirmative action for Nuyoricans against marginalization (stanza
seven verse nine). This new definition of AmeRícan includes Anglo-Americans and the
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rest of the nationalities present in the urban setting of New York City in an attempt by the
poetic voice to project the desire for a new inclusive American identity:
AmeRícan, yes, for now, for I love this, my second
land, and I dream to take the accent from
the altercation, and be proud to call
myself american, in the u.s. sense of the
word, AmeRícan, America! (490)
In the last stanza of the poem the poetic voice declares its love and allegiance to
the United States. The last verse summarizes the desire of the poetic voice for a new
cultural attitude towards difference in the country. This is transparent through the
perception of the use of the imperative mode within one understanding of the neologism
AmeRícan (ame (Puerto) Rícans) in stanza fifteen verse five. This is a last call to incite
Americans in general, regardless of cultural origins to adhere to the inclusive modus
operandi that has been established all along the poem through the leitmotiv of
AmeRícan: accept diversity.
Similar to Martí in “Our America,” the identity Laviera desires for Nuyoricans in
“AmeRícan” avoids the essentialization of Nuyorican as a race. Instead, like Martí and
his postulation of a Latin American identity through culture, Laviera also proposes that
identity should primarily be defined by culture. Accordingly, he acknowledges that
differences will always exist among human groups. What can and ought to be changed is
the attitude Nuyoricans have towards themselves. In recognizing the trajectory of the
Puerto Rican migrants and the significance of the change acquired during the adaptation
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to their new homeland, the poetic voice in “AmeRícan” sees a great potential for
empowerment of Nuyoricans in overcoming the burden of marginalization. Ultimately, as
can be appreciated in the full length of the poem, the poetic voice undergoes this process
and comes out transformed. As the legacy of a testimony to its allegiance to the country,
the Nuyorican poetic voice proposes that all Americans unite in the appreciation of
difference. Such a tolerant and open attitude is portrayed by Laviera’s poetic voice not
only as desired, but essential, for achieving a more perfect union among all cultures
present in the United States of America and in the world.
“Nigger-Reecan Blues” and Poetic Performance
In “Nigger-Reecan Blues” Willie Perdomo simulates a dialogue between his
poetic self and an unidentified interlocutor. Throughout the initial part of the text, this
anonymous voice constantly challenges the self-identification of Willie as a Puerto
Rican:
Hey, Willie. What are you, man?
I am.
Boricua? Moreno? Que?
No, silly. You know what I mean: What are you?
I am you. You are me. We the same. Can’t you feel our veins drinking the
same blood? (111, 1-6)
In verse two, Willie’s answer “I am,” free of any syntactical complement,
underscores his preoccupation in ascribing his intransitive condition –in the sense of self-
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contained or simply existing– as a human being. Another interpretation to this rather
laconic answer might denote a sort of uneasiness or discomfort on the part of Willie on
the matter of unexpectedly discussing his personal identity in terms of culture and race.
In verse three, the questioning voice purposely uses the culturally charged words
“Boricua” and “Moreno” to incite a response on the part of Willie. In spite of the
provocation, Willie resorts to reticence. Instead of getting trapped in an uncomfortable
discussion, in verse five, Willie replies: “We the same.” This phrase, constructed in the
absence of the linking verb “to be,” returns the question of identity to the inquisitive
voice. By doing so, Willie resists elaborating on an issue that apparently makes him
uncomfortable, that is to say, the compulsory framing of his self-identity in terms of race
or culture. In such a short answer where the very verb that denotes existence is omitted,
the stylistic allusion to oral speech also allows for other interpretations. First, the length
of the utterance indicates Willie is not prone to elaborating on his identity in private.
Second, the very absence of the verb that denotes existence, which makes the rhythm of
speech faster and incomprehensible to eavesdroppers, also reiterates Willie’s
unwillingness to discuss such a personal matter in public. This observation appears
contradictory in the context of a text meant to be read for an audience. Nonetheless the
representation of Willie’s malaise with the theme of identity is what captivates the
spectator. Immediately the audience’s attention is seized by the manner Willie decides to
engage in a conversation with the poetic interlocutor who mockingly insists in convincing
Willie that, in reality, he is black. Since the first verse, the central theme of the poem, the
public explanation of a Nuyorican self-identity in regards to race versus culture, is bluntly
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established by the phrase “What are you, man?” Also, from the reinstatement of that
question, introduced in verse three by the phrase “You know what I mean: What are
you?” imparts a dialogical quality to the text, a characteristic that stylistically
approximates it to the domain of spoken performance, to which Nuyorican poetry is fully
akin (Somers-Willett 51-2). The exam of Frances Aparicio’s study of music in the poetry
of Victor Hernández Cruz confirms how performance and cultural politics are linked in
the context of Nuyorican poetry:
Puerto Ricans are still marginalized and excluded from economic power.
However, cultural empowerment for this ethnic group is facilitated, among
other ways, through collective and individual acts of perception and
performance: for the musicians, composing and performing music; for the
poets, writing and reciting poetry; for the audience and the community,
listening to music, dancing, and speaking in the vernacular: Spanish, or
code-switching in their own English dialect. (561)
The resource to informal language and performance in Nuyorican poetry
constitutes a strategy of communication that allows for the expression of concern in the
matter of racial exclusion. In particular, when addressing the theme of race versus culture
in the definition of Nuyorican personal or collective identity, by mimicry, the mise-en-
scene of conversations, such as the one carried by Willie and the confrontational poetic
interlocutor in “Nigger-Reecan Blues,” recreates a situation which might be either
familiar or new to the spectator. In any case, either by curiosity or identification towards
99
the theme or by involvement in the performativity provided by spoken a dialect syntax
and a dialogic form, the audience’s interest is captured.
The markers of oral language mixed with written language, such as the use of the
vocative “man” in verse one, jointly with the literary intransitive use of the verb “to be,”
which denotes the theme of complexity of human existence, involve both Nuyoricans and
other possible non-Nuyorican audience members in a present experience. The resulting
effect is deeply founded in the motivation to inform and to transform the sensitivity of the
listeners to the theme of culture versus race in the characterization of Nuyoricans in the
United States. As Aparicio remarks, the use of Spanish and English, through the
phenomenon of code-switching, facilitates this process by introducing the elements of
diversity of language. This works together with the theme of identity to convey meaning
as well as a sense of reality and identification with a political cause in performative
Nuyorican poetry.
It is right in the intersection of music, performance, and written word where
Nuyorican poetry seems to have matured its ethos. The Nuyorican Poets Café, the iconic
stronghold of the revolutionary poets of the 1970s continues to promote the tradition of
the open microphone and competitive poetry slams since the early 1990s (Sommers-
Willet 58). The essence of poetry slams is to cause a good impression in the audience.
When personal or collective identity is the theme of the text represented, it is expected
that the performer be able to convey the intensity of his/her personal experience. When
put in practice in a competitive event, the art of representing authenticity to the spoken
word counts for a very important part of what is being judged:
100
In the “spiel” read before every bout at the National Poetry Slam, judges
and audience members are advised to give poems scores based on both
text and performance (“The Rules”). However, the subjective process of
judging is often guided by a more specific imperative. “Vague as it may
sound,” Maria Damon writes, “the criterion for slam success seems to be
some kind of ‘realness’-authenticity [. . .] that effects a ‘felt change of
consciousness’ on the part of the listener” (53)
As Sommers-Willet remarks for the judging directives in the National Poetry
Slam, the rules to evaluate this kind of performance can be very vague. After these rules
it is possible for the artist to obtain an advantage counting on the merit of his/her textual
creation. Nonetheless, there are other elements than words read or memorized which may
enhance an artist’s score in poetry slams. Noticeably, the representation of a credible
performance is strongly appreciated by the judges and audience. Those variables are
crucial to understand Nuyorican poetry from the 1990s, from which “Nigger-Reecan
Blues” is an example:
Damn! I ain’t even Black and here I am sufferin, from the young
Black man’s plight/the old white man’s burden/and I ain’t even
Black, man/a Black man/I am nor/Boricua I am/ain’t never really
was/Black/like me...
-Leave that boy alone. He got the Nigger-Reecan Blues
I’m a Spic!
I’m a Nigger!
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Spic! Spic! No different than a Nigger!
Neglected, rejected, oppressed and depressed
From banana boats to tenements
Street gangs to regiments . . .
Spic! Spic! I ain’t nooooo different than a Nigger. (42-53)
In these final verses of “Nigger-Reecan Blues,” after a series of reiterations of the
opposing poetic voice, Willie concludes that in fact he is a “Nigger.” Nonetheless he
refuses to agree with the concept of black man that the poetic interlocutor instigates him
with. In essence he does judge fair to reclaim the legacy of the African American
experience for himself. A close reading from verse forty-seven to verse fifty indicates the
nature of his likeness to the black experience in the United States. This is the moment in
the performance when the theme of self-identity pits the theme of rebellion against the
discourse of exclusion. This is so because, for the poetic subject of Willie is a “Nigger”
as much as he is a “Spic.” Those two much stigmatized epithets that the poetic Willie
assumes while exuding a high dose of pathos have in common the allusion to prejudice
and the status of marginalized citizens in which both African Americans and Latinos
encounter in the United States.
As for the evocation to the musical genre of blues in the text, there are some
aspects that serve to reinforce the central thematic and formal features of the poem. As a
musical genre, blues is usually defined as a song of lamentation that expresses
melancholy. As far as the identification between Willie’s personal identity and
characteristics that might associate his life experience to that of a black man, the allusion
102
to blues, in verse forty-six “-Leave that boy alone. He got the Nigger-Reecan Blues,” is
illustrative. The series of close-knit sentences that form verses forty-two to forty-five
closely emulate the cadence and the circular versification of a working song. It is
popularly accepted among musicians that blues itself originated in the songs the slaves
muttered while at work in the southern United States (Wallenstein 620). By saying that
Willie sings the blues, the poetic voice makes a last attempt to associate Willie with
African American culture. On a deeper level, the allusion to Willie’s own interpretation
of a traditional African American rhythm also underscores the cosmopolitanism that is a
part of Nuyorican community through its history of migration from Puerto Rico and
integration in the United States.
Although setting a complaint in a dialogical form constitutes a crucial part of
what Perdomo does in “Nigger-Reecan Blues” it is not the only motivational stylization
of the poem. In reality, by elaborating the poetic subject’s answer to the identity that the
poetic interlocutor tries to trope upon him, to the audience, as a character, Perdomo
affirms his peculiarity as a Puerto Rican without excluding the influences he receives
from the African American heritage in the United States. The intertextual artifice of
Perdomo’s bluesy response to the poetic challenger’s provocation constitutes a semi-
musical counterpoint that echoes in style the suffering of the black community in his
country as well as it reflects the “call and response” schemes present in Latin jazz and
salsa. Moreover, by employing the technique of the blues in his response, Perdomo sends
a twofold message; he is in fact a “Nigger” as much as a “Spic.” In that position he
speaks for the marginalized, be they African American or Latino. Also, as a Nuyorican
103
voice in action he cannot set apart the contribution Nuyorican culture has gained from
African –via Puerto Rico– and African American cultures in New York City. As for the
reproduction of a private dialogue that gradually becomes interspersed by episodic
rumbling and bluesy monologues, “Nigger-Reecan Blues” is the portrait of the uneasiness
that is common to human beings when confronted with the arduous chore of delimitating
their own identity. From the private dimension –expressed by Willie’s bluesy
monologues and dialogues with the poetic interlocutor– the text attains public breadth.
This is only possible through the element of performance.
Performance, Mimesis, Diegesis, and Nuyorican Poetry
Starting in the 1990s there was a continued interest in public poetic performances
in the main urban centers of the United States. In New York City, and particularly in the
Nuyoricans Poet Café, the phenomenon of poetry slams produced a corpus of texts that is
accessible to the general public and to literary critics alike (Sommers-Willet 52).
The poetic anthology Aloud, although not the only source available for Nuyorican
poetry from the 1990s, is a key text for surveying the most prominent aesthetic elements
of Nuyorican poetry in general:
This book dares state the obvious –RAP IS POETRY– and its
spoken essence is central to the popularization of poetry. Rap is taking its
place, aloud, as a new poetic form, with ancient griot [sic] roots. Hip hop
is a cultural throughline for the Oral Tradition. Word goes public! Poetry
has found a way to drill through the wax that had been collecting for
104
decades! Poetry is no longer an exhibit in a Dust Museum. Poetry is alive;
poetry is allowed. [. . .] “Content,” as they told me at MTV, “is making a
comeback. Meaning is going to be big in the nineties.” (2)
In this excerpt of the invocation to Aloud,12 Holman clearly manifests his
confidence in the potential of oral poetry in the 1990s. Through a reference to the chants
of African minstrels, the griots, Holman implies the rebirth or modernization of an
ancient tradition in the form of Rap. The reference to MTV is also symbolic and suggests
the speed in which the transformations around poetic performance were occurring in the
1990s. Curiously, when he quotes what he heard in MTV, the focus underscored is the
content or choice of themes, not the form or means of representation. Nonetheless, the
topicalization of “meaning,” in the last sentence underscores the belief in the rebirth of
the essence of words, and in particular spoken words. In reference to Rap and its
intersection with Nuyorican poetics, the term “meaning,” reveals yet another
characteristic which refers to performance and in particular to competitive poetry slams,
the value attached to authenticity:
[It] is important to note that although the proclamation of identity seems a
key part of a successful slam poem, the craft and execution of that
proclamation is just as important as the statement itself. Which is to say
that how slam poets perform their identities is just as important as what
they say about their identities. Performance, as one should expect in a
genre such as slam, is the instrument that makes the poem ring true or
12This invocation is entitled “Congratulations. You have found the hidden book.”
105
false with any given audience. In this respect, slam poetry has much in
common with its theatrical cousins, performance art and dramatic/comedic
monologue, because it engages the very same politics of identity that can
govern and arise from those expressions. (52)
The remarks of Sommers-Willet on the balance between representation and
content in competitive Nuyorican poetry slams raise the question of the politics of
Nuyorican performance. The sense of authenticity of the poet’s proclamation, as
Sommers-Willet reminds, is to a good extent subsidiary to the poet’s stage presence.
Thus, it is valid to compare Nuyorican poetry’s trajectory to theater and performance art.
In my opinion the remarks on the importance of performance to Nuyorican poetry
are also crucial to interpret it in written form. As I have discussed, Perdomo’s “Nigger-
Reecan Blues” is a good example of text in which performance complements meaning. It
is impossible for me, as a reader, to imagine a more realistic setting to discuss the theme
of identity than the dialogical form. In fact, in Holder’s remarks on the “the nation of
cowards” demanded exactly that the theme of identity be discussed and argued in public,
not in private, as a monologue stylistically implies. Other texts, such as Morales’
“Rebirth of New Rican” confirm the reliance of Nuyorican poets from the 1990s in
dialogical form and its effectiveness to impress an audience in live poetry without losing
much of the plasticity when written:
You are aware, I suppose, that all mythology and poetry is a narration of
events, either past, present, or to come? / Certainly, he replied. / And
narration may be either simple narration, or imitation, or a union of the
106
two? / [. . .] / And this assimilation of himself to another, either by the use
of voice or gesture, is the imitation of the person whose character he
assumes? / Of course. / Then in this case the narrative of the poet may be
said to proceed by way of imitation? / Very true. / Or, if the poet
everywhere appears and never conceals himself, then again the imitation is
dropped, and his poetry becomes simple narration. (253)
The importance attributed to performance in Nuyorican poetry relates to the
classic discussion between the importances of mimesis as opposed to diegesis in
representation. The latter, defined by Plato above as when “the poet everywhere
appears,” differs from the former which relates to “imitation.” In view of the meaning of
these classic terms in the discussion of representation in general and in Nuyorican poetry
in particular, it is possible to recognize within the domain of diegesis the characterization
of what Sommers-Willet mentions as “how slam poets perform.” It appears that in its
competitive form Nuyorican poetry relies a lot on diegetic aspects. As Sommers-Willet
remarks on the matter of the physical presence of the performer and the reaction of the
audience and judges:
If the precedents set by National Poetry Slam (NPS) rankings and
the attitudes of slam poets are any indication, the performance of certain
identities are more successful than the performance of others. Slammer
Eirik Ott (a.k.a. Big Poppa E) comments, “I love that ... someone, anyone
can get up on a stage and share their experiences of being gay or straight
107
or black or white or Filipino or Latino or Vietnamese or transgendered or
wussy boy or whatever, and folks will just leap to their feet in applause”
[. . .] His comments suggest that what is successful at slams (i.e., what
wins an audience’s approval) is the expression of identity on stage, but the
majority of his examples also suggest that particularly marginalized racial,
ethnic, gender, or sexual identities gain applause. His comments also
signal that slam poets and their audiences have, consciously or
unconsciously, come to rely on marginalized identities as authentic
narratives in and of themselves. That is, a poet performing a poem about a
marginalized identity may gain the reward of authenticity from a slam
audience not only for his or her writing and performance, but also for the
well-executed performance of a marginalized identity itself. (57)
Nevertheless, as seen in earlier poems, such as in Laviera’s “AmeRícan,” the
monologue form, which is maybe less prone to producing such an impact on a live
audience, has served to address the question of identity in Nuyorican poetry just as well.
It seems to me that, in discussing slam poetry’s focus on performance, Sommers-Willet
has grasped the move from mimetic to diegetic in the style of Nuyorican poetry of the
1990s. The indicators for such a change are aesthetic, such as the adoption of a tone of
protest, as well as a political tone, such as the denunciation of marginalization. In regard
to the written text, in spite of the detection of both dialogic (i.e. Morales’ “Rebirth of
New Rican” and Perdomo’s “Nigger-Reecan Blues”) and monologic texts such as
Laviera’s “AmeRícan,” it would be artificial to predict perfectly impermeable categories.
108
In reference to written text and the presence of stylistic characteristic that suggest
the many possible degrees of variation between a focus on performance and a focus on
representation, I propose a metaphor based on orbits and circularity. In the core of this
imaginary system stands the compromise of written texts with representation –the
reproduction of ideal or reality– and in its periphery are located the aspects relative to
text’s enunciation, such as the discursive characteristics that bring about performance. In
accordance with this metaphor it is possible to perceive texts as concentric or eccentric. A
concentric text, such as Laviera’s “AmeRícan” fluctuates towards the imaginary center,
because it has a compromise with the representation of a theme –the quest for conveying
culture as the vehicle of identity– which Laviera accomplishes through the use of a
leitmotif and a poetic voice that proclaims but barely identifies itself. In contrast,
eccentricity is a characteristic of texts such as Perdomo’s “Nigger-Reecan Blues” and
Morales’ “Rebirth of New Rican.” In these texts, although the proximity to the
representational core is still quite short, there are elements, such as the use of dialogue
which make them at times gravitate slightly towards dialogism and other effects of
enunciation. There other texts that, due to their resource to metalinguistic procedures,
such as pastiche and parody, would be situated in the very hypothetical center of the
imaginary system:
HUSTLER
WORK EXPERIENCE
Highly competitive retail environment, location scouting for
customer satisfaction, blowjobs, training potential hustlers,
109
using men to locate finances, distributing STD’s, protecting
territory from competition, penetration, ménage-à-trois
REASONS FOR LEAVING
Age limitations, adversity with Latino Fan Club. (Xavier 49)
In this text Manuel Xavier makes use of a popular and immediately recognizable
text format in the composition of the poem “Pier Queen for Hire.” This structure, the
classified advertisement, by itself conveys the meaning of simplicity and direct language.
Xavier makes use of these specific preceding structural characteristics to develop the
theme of the commodification of queer sexuality through prostitution. His criticism
extends to the very vehicle of advertisement and to the inaction of our role as readers to
express more than a transitory sense of awe in regard to the gruesome reality contained in
the daily news. Following my proposition of concentric versus eccentric in the
classification of written Nuyorican poetry, the procedure adopted by Xavier, parody,
strongly relies in the adopted format, therefore his text is strongly concentric.
In the realm of spoken performance, particularly as Sommers-Willet has posited
on the matter of competitive poetry slams, the concentric or eccentric aspects –which
directly relate to mimesis—are of little importance. In those live readings, the focus is not
only on the text but also on the performance. Since the credibility of the performer counts
as much as the performance itself (Sommers-Willet 53), in my opinion, we are faced with
an essential problem: can publicly performed Nuyorican texts –because of their focus on
diegetic elements of the performance– be considered a new form of rhetoric? If so, the
scholarly consideration of such texts better fits an interdisciplinary framework among the
110
fields of literature, rhetoric, political science, and if videotaped –as Algarín predicts for
the future of Nuyorican poetry– film studies.
Conclusion
From the historical events of migration that also contain episodes of return to
Puerto Rico, New York Puerto Ricans have developed a particular culture which stands
out when compared either to mainstream United States culture or to Puerto Rican culture.
Therefore, when looking for an answer to the question of identity, be it on a personal or
on a collective stance, New York Puerto Ricans have confronted both sides of their
cultural matrixes especially when the issue of race was brought to the discussion. The
emergence of the civil rights movement in the United States, as well as the real social
achievements consolidated in the form of a multiculturalist set of legislation throughout
the 1970s and 1980s, provided New York Puerto Ricans with a strong notion of
community empowerment. The creation of the Nuyorican Poet’s Café in 1973 stimulated
a surge in artistic verve. Throughout the 1980s and 1990’s a large number of poetic texts
emerged in the context of the Café: Nuyorican poetry was born.
The quest for identity in Nuyorican poetry has similarities with a series of texts
that were produced in the Caribbean. The theme of culture versus race as a definer of
identity is discussed both by Nuyorican and by Caribbean authors in very similar terms.
The conjugation of Fernández Retamar’s Caliban and Morales’ “Rebirth of New Rican”
demonstrates that language latently possesses the subversive quality of exposing the
fragility of a system while it is at work. Both in Fernández Retamar’s interpretation of
111
Shakespeare’s The Tempest and in “Rebirth of New Rican,” the characters that occupy
the role of pupil, respectively Caliban and the poetic voice that quotes Eddie Figueroa,
realize the power that their own actions might have through the use of language in
response to stimuli from the external environment.
In the comparison between Martí’s “Our America” and Laviera’s “AmeRícan” it
is possible to observe that similarly to Martí in “Our America,” the identity Laviera
desires for Nuyoricans in “AmeRícan” avoids the essentialization of a Nuyorican race.
Instead, as for Martí and his postulation of a Latin American identity through culture,
Laviera also proposes a categorization of identity through the lines of culture. And as
culture is extremely plastic, he recognizes that differences will always exist among
human groups. By admiring and emulating the resilience of the Puerto Rican migrants
and the significance of the change acquired during the adaptation to their new homeland,
the poetic voice in “AmeRícan” perceives in the historical revisionism a great potential
for empowering Nuyoricans against the burden of marginalization.
The analysis of Perdomo’s “Nigger-Reecan Blues” and its representation of an
encounter between an inquisitive poetic voice and a character, Willie, illustrate how the
use of informal language and performance in Nuyorican poetry constitutes a strategy of
communication that allows for the expression of concern in the matter of racial exclusion.
In particular, when addressing the theme of race versus culture in the definition of
Nuyorican personal or collective identity, by mimicry, the mise-en-scene of
conversations, such as the one carried by Willie and the confrontational poetic
interlocutor in “Nigger-Reecan Blues,” recreates a situation which might be either
112
familiar or new to the spectator. In any case, either by curiosity or identification towards
the theme or by involvement in the performativity provided by the syntax of a spoken a
dialect and a dialogic form, the audience’s interest is captured. This poem allowed me to
briefly discuss the question of performance, which led me to the consideration of the
phenomenon of poetry slams and its impact in the production and in the reception of
Nuyorican poetry in the 1990s.
The consideration of Nuyorican performative texts, noticeably in competitive
poetry slams, revives the classic question of mimesis versus diegesis in the field of Arts.
In the case of Nuyorican poetry this issue raises serious epistemological questions
concerning the critical analysis of an ever-growing corpus. The scholarly consideration of
such texts requires the application of an interdisciplinary framework uniting the fields of
literature, rhetoric, political science, and in the case of videotaped performances –as
Algarín predicts for the future of Nuyorican poetry– film studies.
If I was to further extend my investigation, the question of performativity would
lead me to closely consider the themes of gender, sexuality, and corporality in live or
recorded Nuyorican poetic performance.
113
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