Caribbean Matters: It’s Puerto Rican Heritage Month. Let’s salute the Nuyorican Movement

Posted On Nov 20, 2021 By admin With Comments Off

We learn so little about Caribbean history, culture, and politics in our colleges and via mainstream media. Is it any wonder when we don’t even know much about Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, which are Caribbean “territories” of the United Nation and whose inhabitants are U.S. citizens?

November is typically celebrated as Puerto Rican Heritage Month in mainland areas that have large Puerto Rican people. Harmonizing to 2020 Census guess, more than 5 million people mark as Puerto Rican or are of Puerto Rican pedigree are living below the neighboring United Nation. One would think that this group of Americans would be a part of national social studies programme or their work included in the teaching of literature or the arts. Sadly, that inclines not to be the case. New York City, dwelling to the nation’s oldest and largest concentration of Puerto Ricans in one place, does have much more to offer K-1 2 students. Still, even there, far too many Puerto Rican contributions to our ethnic mosaic lead unheralded and untaught.

I was singularly anointed to grow up in New York City, during a period when a distinctly New York Puerto Rican identity was developing, particularly among craftsmen and activists. This came to be known as the Nuyorican Movement; though I am not Puerto Rican, I was there at the movement’s birth and weigh many of the progenitors and those they aroused as friends and comrades.

Caribbean Matters is a weekly sequence from Daily Kos. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean.

In “A Brief Guide to Nuyorican Poetry, ” the team at Poets.org describes the genesis of the movement, which comprised primarily of poets and included playwrights, graphic artists, photographers, musicians, and political activists in 1960 s-7 0s New York City.

Not unlike the Harlem Renaissance, the Nuyorican movement was born out of a period of migration. After the United Nation consulted commonwealth status onto Puerto Rico in 1950, Puerto Rican migration to New York City increased, establishing pockets of Puerto Rican communities in neighborhoods like the Lower East Side and East Harlem. Many of the Nuyorican columnists were part of this group of first-generation New Yorkers, who were either the children of immigrants or who themselves arrived at New York City at a young age.

Originally a pejorative period, “Nuyorican, ” a mixture of “New York Puerto Rican” or “Neo-Rican, ” was used by native Puerto Ricans to identify Puerto Ricans from New York City as distinct from those from the island. The Nuyorican movement, nonetheless, came to represent not only the fight Puerto Ricans is now facing working-class New York City, but too the dignity they had in their own languages, culture, and Afro-Caribbean and indigenous Caribbean names. While the songs criticize the raging discrimination they faced in schools and workplaces, the lack of economic opportunities, poverty-stricken living conditions, and the general marginalization of their community, they too tell legends of disobedience, fighting, and strength in the midst of these struggles.

Nuyorican poet and scholar Nancy Mercado writes :

In my discussions with friends and collaborators( from both now and small island developing) viewing what it is to be Nuyorican, throughout the years I’ve come to understand the shapeshifting quality of the period. I came into the “Nuyorican” picture in 1978 when as a student I met Miguel Algarin who had just taken over the chairmanship of the then, Puerto Rican Studies Department at Rutgers University. We became friends and I’ve been part of the movement and around my person poets, since.

Initially, the expression Nuyorican … was meant to offend which it did, for a while at least. But then, like African-Americans who converted the revile; “Black, ” into a description of beauty and influence, so did Puerto Ricans from the mainland transform the insult: “Nuyorican.”

Latino USA released an occurrence just this week, hosted by correspondent Maria Hinojosa and exploring the legacy of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

Together, the Nuyorican poets undermined obstructions: Miguel Pinero’s “Short Eyes” became the first to be followed by a Latino writer to run on Broadway, and Pedro Pietri’s songs, including his opus “Puerto Rican Obituary, ” became critical accusations of the so-called “American dream.”

The Nuyorican literary movement too led to the creation of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe–a vital haven for Black and Latinx writers and performers since its inception. The cafe began as an informal literary shop in Miguel Algarin’s living room, one of the movement’s founding poets. But soon after, Algarin and his comrade writers realized that they needed to expand to accommodate the growing roster of creators who frequented the infinite. They moved into a brand-new venue nearby, and by 1981, they relocated again to the Nuyorican’s current locating in New York City’s Lower East Side.

In this escapade of Latino USA, various artists step up to the mic for a converse history of the coffeehouse. Poet Jesus “Papoleto” Melendez remembrances his experiences from the early days of the Nuyorican literary movement, transporting listeners back to the days when poets assembled in Miguel Algarin’s apartment; Caridad De La Luz, the Bronx poet also known as “La Bruja, ” speaks about the cafe’s open mics and hosting happenings at the Nuyorican; playwright Ishmael Reed reflects on the cafe’s legacy of fostering Black and Latinx talent on and off stage; and artist and archivist Lois Elaine Griffith, who was involved with the coffeehouse for decades, discusses the urgency and importance of preserving the Nuyorican history for future generations.

I wrote about your best friend Pedro Pietri’s ground-breaking lyric, Puerto Rican Obituary, back in 2011. Pietri became the poet laureate of the Young Lords Party; we representatives all knew Obituary by heart. Pietri was also a member of the First Spanish Methodist Church, which we occupied in 1969, and he play-act Obituary for the first time there during the takeover.

Below, Pietri performs the poem again in the church, in the 1971 Newsreel film El Pueblo Se Levanta.

Pedro Pietri reading from his lyric Puerto Rican Obituary, in the opening sequence to Newsreel’s 1971 cinema El Pueblo se Levanta. my viewing for tonight. pic.twitter.com/ UgzdWXODuV

— Sade (@ atlajala) August 20, 2020

Pietri eventually published the rhyme in 1973. Here he is, reciting it again, in full.

YouTube Video

Puerto Rican Obituary is a long article, and while I won’t include the full text here, I encourage you to read it.

They ran They were always on time They were never late They never mouth back when they were insulted They acted They never made daylights off that were not on the calendar They never gone on strike without permission They drove 10 days a few weeks and were only paid for five They made They use They made and these men died They died flout They died owing They died never knowing what the breast enter of the first national municipal bank looks like Juan Miguel Milagros Olga Manuel All died yesterday today and will die again tomorrow passing their proposal collectors on to the next of kin All died waiting for him the garden of eden opening hours again under a brand-new administration All died dreaming about america waking them up in the middle of the night screaming: Mira Mira your honour is on the triumphing raffle ticket for one hundred thousand dollars All died hating the food market that sold them make-believe steak and bullet-proof rice and beans …

Pietri died of cancer in March 2004 as the result of being exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam. Before he died, he told his narrative in his own inimitable satirical form, while at the Oasis of Hope Hospital in Playas de Tijuana, Mexico.

I was born in 1898, during the climax of the Spanish/ American War. I say 1898 because that was the year that the U.S. attacked Puerto Rico, the year when they colonized us. Now, I was born again in’ 44 to my mother in Ponce, Puerto Rico and again in ’4 7, at the age of 3, when my tribes migrated to New York City through the epic of Operation Boot Strap. We’re all part of the casualties of the Inquisition, the American Inquisition.

I likewise say I was born in 1949, because that’s the day I went to the first theater with my grandfather, who felt fooled by Operation Boot Strap and dedicated hara-kiri, but I don’t think it was suicide. He was killed by the system that cheated him, information systems that concluded him sell his region in Borinquen. What happened was the disillusion. The articulations in his head were of the Central Intelligence, obligating him to sever his jugular vein. Think about his friends. There’s nothing to talk to , nothing to communicate with, and there’s nothing to go back to, but the industrialization of the island that had deluded so many people. So, that was the first theatre I went to, at Monje’s Funeral Parlor, in a dark-brown dres. Actually, that was my firstly learning, or my first awareness of Puerto Rican biography. Puerto Ricans die and go to a Puerto Rican funeral parlour. And Monje was a ghoul; he looked like a ghoul. How you going to have the word Monje, and be a proprietor of a funeral parlor? You’ll scare the customers away, but he didn’t scare us away.

There were five members of us, four people and one girl. My elder brother had a heart attack, and my younger friend disappeared joyriding one light, and I haven’t seen him since. So, there’s a total tragedy, because then there were only three of us. So then, we went back to Monje, and we remained going back to Monje for other people. Every week there was a different funeral, and after a while, I said,’ Let me just stay dressing in black.’

Nuyorican photographer Adal Maldonado captured this wonderful photo of Pietri. Known as simply Adal, he passed in December 2020.

ADAL was an imaginative pressure with a theoretical dream and decolonial diligence. He was a genuine futurist, a Coconauta. When I was revising Pedro Pietri’s Condom Poems @CUNYPoetics, he helped me to contextualize the project and collaborated with wonderful photos. Rest in Power! pic.twitter.com/ rn5IwMbwP3

— Dr. Rojo (@ RojoRobles) December 10, 2020

That same month, the heart and soul of the Poets Cafe, founder Miguel Algarin, likewise attached the poetry smash in the sky.

Coming of Age in NY as a young actor, there were few residences that defined an uninhibited platform of productivity, intensity, and rejoice as the Nuyorican Poet Cafe. The poem strikes were mythical. A contemporary of writers and performers originated out of that seat. Miguel Algarin was an icon. https :// t.co/ IXSxvlmwcV

— Wendell Pierce (@ WendellPierce) December 1, 2020

Puerto Rican scribe, Nuyorican poet, and columnist Ed Morales wrote this praise for Algarin for The New York Times.

Born in San Juan and heightened on the Lower East Side, Algarin attempted to merge the highbrow culture of his working-class parents with a Rabelaisian Everyman rebellion from below. He had a fearless sense of respect and was a champion of the underprivileged. The indignation for Shakespeare he exposed as a prof at Rutgers University seamlessly fused with the Africanist urgency of his own poetry, producing a body of work that wondered his fluid exploit of Spanglish and shifting sexual identity

[…]

Today, spoken word theater is universal, and the gift of Algarin and the generation that founded the Nuyorican Poet Cafe has extended across the globe.

In a sense, Algarin — who tested positive for H.I.V. in the late 1980 s, writing, “Can it be that I am the bearer of afflictions? ” in his 1994 lyric “HIV” — was the eventual survivor, outliving the majority of members of his peers, and maintaining a hushed attendance on the Lower East Side, even as the cafe became a nonprofit corporation with a brand-new board of directors. With a apparently inexhaustible look of varied sexuality, much of his labour centered on the body.

The day before Morales’ eulogy was published, Neil Genzlinger wrote his Times obituary .

His Lower East Side conduct seat has been an incubator for poets, playwrights and other artists, many of them not initially embraced by the mainstream.

In 1975, Mr. Algarin and Miguel Pinero, another founding poet of the cafe, published “Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings.” It included an introductory paper by Mr. Algarin that became something of a foundational report for the Nuyorican literary movement.

“The poems in this anthology document the conditions of survival: numerous roaches, many busts, numerous medicine poems, countless detest songs — countless, many lyrics of complaints, ” he wrote. “But the complaints are delivered in a new rhythm. It is a bomba rhythm” — a music and dance way from Puerto Rico — “with countless deepening slopes delivered with a fearless stress. The slopes vary, but the stress is always bomba and the vocabulary is English and Spanish desegregated into a new language.”

Keep an nose out for the Anthology.

Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings by Miguel Algarin, pic.twitter.com/ H9Fk9Wna4j

— Ove Poulsen (@ ove_poulsen) August 29, 2018

Sandra Maria Esteves is the matriarch of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a poet and craftsman who was born in the Bronx in 1948. Democracy Now! grown this budge action at the Young Lords 40 th Anniversary Celebration in 2009 at the First Spanish Methodist Church( The People’s Church) in East Harlem.

YouTube Video

Again, while I won’t post it here, I spur you to read the full text of Aguacero .

“Malo tiempo, yo no quiero que me traigan desarreglo, en mi soledad, Angel Divino, yo no quiero en mi camino la fatalidad…”

Growin’ up Puertorriquena/ Latina White/African/Brown In South Bronx, Loisaida, El Barrio parts of town Growin’ up announced Some slavemaster’s name Other people’s typecast Strange nicknames

Spic, cuchi-cuchi, I-no-speekie-eein-gle Pointy-toe-garlic-eatin’ Banana-boat adjectives

Growin’ up with descriptions Outta someone else’s mouth Not me , not mine Not definitions of myself

“Cuando veo el cielo Que se ta nublando Cuando veo el cielo Que se ta nublando Agua que va caer…”

In Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies’ facet, “Fourteen Women Poets on Being Nuyorican, ” Esteves territory 😛 TAGEND

In my early years I was a silent child who inclined towards the visual arts. In college I realized that messages could be a tool for innovative self-expression and began the process of exploring writing as another way of creating art. Then one day I discovered my singer as a poet on a wander that healed the silent child and empowered my consciousness. I predict my first rhyme to an audience at the Bronx Council on the Arts in 1973. Born and raised in the course of the Bronx, I emerged from the Nuyorican community. It is the community that understands and hugs my writing and that is viscerally is in relation to my being, culture and creative process.

Andrea Rivera Martinez and Pedro Perez de la Pena from the University of Puerto Rico started a webpage for Esteves and invited her questions via email. This query and response impres me 😛 TAGEND

I know that you are Dominican Boricua Nuyorican. Did you as a kid or even as an adult ever knowledge racial prejudice and did this influence your writing?

Yes and yes. Racial prejudice was always around me although I did not consciously know what this is until I was older. It existed within my family when my mother was considered “too dark” to be an acceptable marriage for my father. It exists in my house when one of my neighbours offering me with a pair of glowing skin-colored nylon stockings and indicated that they would acquire my legs gaze lighter. It existed in the boarding school I attended in the fifth gradation when school teachers, a nun, said she could tell I was “lazy and shiftless”( a disguised racial cliche) by looking at my hands.( Subsequentlies I gazed at my hands for hours trying to see what she saw .)

Segueing into one of the second largest generations of Nuyorican poets, Mariposa likewise addresses the issue of race. But in Broken Ends/ Broken Promises, the conversation is all about hair.

YouTube Video

Author Jill Toliver Richardson spoke with Mariposa in 2015 for CENTRO: Journal for the Center for Puerto Rican Studies.

Mariposa, bear Maria Teresa Fernandez in 1971, is an Afro-Puerto Rican poet who was born and raised in the Bronx, New York. She gained esteem within the Puerto Rican and Latino communities for her spoken word accomplishments and published rhymes. Her most well-known poem, “Ode to the DiaspoRican, ” has influenced numerous and catapulted her to social media notoriety when young Latinas began announcing their own portrayals of the song on You Tube.

[…]

JTR: Do you envision a distinction between the labels Nuyorican and DiaspoRican or between the Nuyorican Literary Movement and “post-1 990 s Puerto Rican poets”? Or do you examine them as a continuation of the Nuyorican tradition?

MTF: I think that scholars are making a distinction between Nuyorican as an identification. In many spaces I do identify as a Nuyorican. But I think that they’re looking at the Nuyorican movement in terms of the writers who were writing in the ‘7 0s: Pedro Pietri, and Jesus Papoleto Melendez, Miguel Algarin, Miguel Pinero, Sandra Maria Esteves. And there is a distinction, obviously, because we’re from different contemporaries. So we’re coming from different perspectives.

It’s because of that move that the word, Nuyorican, was born. But I think that it’s because of us, those columnists that came last-minute and continued that lore, that the word Nuyorican is in the dictionary. I do are of the view that those novelists that came later, that carried out under the institution, had something to do with that statement gale up in the dictionary. There’s a distinction between the period Nuyorican as an identification. I do identify as Nuyorican, but I also identify as being a Puerto Rican. And I don’t claim one over the other. I don’t think that it’s fair to lump us all together; we’re coming from different perspectives because we’re from different generations.

Daily Kos books may recollect Mariposa’s fundraising endeavours after Hurricane Maria, which I wrote aboutin October of 2017, one month after small island developing was devastated. Since then, Mariposa has become a member here, and I’m looking forward to her writing some floors for us soon!

I hope you’ve experienced this excursion into the Nuyorican Movement. Join me in the comments for even more poetry and for our weekly Caribbean news roundup.

Finally, glad Puerto Rican Heritage Month!

Read the first installment of Caribbean Matters here, and last week’s entry on the Dutch and Papiamento-speaking Caribbean here.