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Chapter 4 Puerto Rican Poets in Chicago To the memory of Salima Rivera and Rane Arroyo (RIP) Where are the Latin poets? Maybe at the neighborhood tavern, like the rest of the Latins drowning their thoughts on American beer or wine. Thinking about back home where the land is warm. Yes, thinking about mi viejita. Wine is fine when the mind unwinds thoughts such as, why? Sleeping in the snow when our country is so warm, where are the Latin poets? I don’t know, maybe sleeping in the snow or vacationing down at Cook County Jail. In an article published several years ago (Zimmerman 1989, 77), I cite the above poem published in the late 1970s by a then-young Chicago Puerto Rican, Alfredo Matías, that bears the provocative title, “Where are the Latin Poets?”1 Today, after so many years of Latino literary development, we may feel we no longer have to ask Matías’s question. Latino literature has fully emerged as a significant minority presence that has forced some critics to redefine the U.S. literary canon, and has even impacted social scientists as they have attempted to understand Latinos and their importance for the United States as well as the Americas as a whole. Indeed, even focusing on the specifically Chicago dimensions implicated in Matías’s question, the record, though far from spectacular, is at least beginning to change. There are not many Chicago Latino writers with a large national standing and exposure; but, yes, at least four are considerable voices in the overall U.S. constellation: there’s Carlos Morton, the playwright; Laurence Gonzales, a prosewriting mainstreamer; and, of course, the best known figures: Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros. Nevertheless, a central aspect of Matías’s question still holds. All four of the writers mentioned are of primarily Mexican origin, and there are many other important Mexicano and Chicano writers in Chicago. The question then remains , “Where are the Puerto Rican poets?” And what is their contribution to the Chicago Latino and overall U.S. Puerto Rican and Latino scene? i-xxx_1-202_Zimm.indd 80 7/14/11 10:43 AM 81 To approach this matter from a different angle: some years ago, in his introduction to an anthology of U.S. Puerto Rican poetry cited in chapter 3, Efraín Barradas (1980, 11) went to great lengths to point out the lack of continuity and community between Nuyorican and Island writers. The Chicago Puerto Rican writers have been cut off from both sectors, and only one of them appears in the anthology cited. So, where have these writers been and what has their work meant? What follows in this chapter is a look at the emergence of Chicago Puerto Rican poetry in function of a developing Latino world. My assumption is that it is impossible to understand Chicago Puerto Rican writing without a sense of the larger context. And indeed, this need for a broader Latino perspective is true for the overall Midwest and Chicago Puerto Rican social context, as well, as Félix Padilla (1985) argued cogently. Inversely, of course, a Chicago Puerto Rican perspective is also necessary for an understanding of the overall national Puerto Rican and Latino reality. With reference to the Chicago scene, it may well be that the ability of Carlos Morton to go beyond his specific ethnic and geographic origins is related to his effort to pass as a “puertorican” (Morton, 1971, 4).2 The constructions of Latina liberation in Ana Castillo (1988) and Sandra Cisneros (1988) also benefit from alternative Latina models, often Puerto Rican ones. The Chicago Puerto Rican writers almost always refer to their specific roots, but they also relate them and their experience of oppression to African American and Mexican or Chicano orientations. From the beginning, Chicago Puerto Rican poets were to speak of Latin or Latino identity, Latin or, increasingly, Latino poetry. Indeed, perhaps for their smaller numerical size as a population (or as a tiny writer/artist subculture, and perhaps also for the fragility and difficult-to-specify character of their sense of nationhood ), they, more than their Mexicano counterparts, tended to decenter or go beyond national identifications to Latino and third world/minority ones even to the degree that they affirmed their particular parameters of identity. It is no accident that the major Chicago-area contribution to the developing national Latino scene was Revista Chicano-Riqueña, headed by U.S. Puerto Rican Nicolás Kanellos. Thus...

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