Spaces for Congregation and Creative Play: Martín Espada’s and Victor Hernández Cruz’s Poetic Plazas

This essay argues that contemporary Puerto Rican poets Martín Espada and Victor Hernández Cruz conceptualize Latin American plazas as transactional public spaces where various social actors encounter the economic and political structures that constrain and empower them. Espada’s many poems set in plazas dramatize contests for the symbolic and material control of space across the Americas, while Cruz’s poems represent plazas as spaces for linguistic play and historical reinterpretation. Although Espada and Cruz use vastly different poetic languages to depict plazas, both poets imagine them as sites for performing linguistic and cultural exchanges that undermine plazas’ traditional uses for reinforcing hegemonic power. Their poems represent plazas as spaces for interrogating the collaboration of state and market forces in displacing people from public space. Together their poetic plazas fashion a flexible place-based consciousness that facilitates congregation and creative play while also locating Puerto Rico in the interface between North and Latin America and their divergent types and uses of public space.