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

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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

_______________________________

_______________________________

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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.

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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.,

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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.

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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’)

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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).

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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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