Writing Out of the Obituary: Puerto Rican Indebtedness and Poetic Learning in the Work of Pedro Pietri

This essay argues that Puerto Rican Obituary, as part of an anticolonial project, makes a critical link between social resilience and pedagogical resistance and the ongoing effects of US colonialism on the Puerto Rican community. In the poetry of this collection, Pedro Pietri identifies a pedagogy of indebtedness as a racial capitalist tool for the cultural, economic, and physical death of Puerto Ricans. While Pietri was cultivating the linguistically innovative and multimodal poetics of Puerto Rican Obituary within the larger Nuyorican poetry movement, he was engaged with the praxis of intellectual liberation on the ground with the Teachers and Writers Collaborative (TWC), a radical pedagogical organization. I affirm that this contemporaneity invites us to read his poetry alongside the correspondence and TWC material that he saved, now stored in the archives of the Hunter College Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños. In doing so, I propose that Pietri’s poetic articulation of, and resistance to, indebtedness can be read beyond the page and into communal spaces of learning; the poetic resistance Pietri imagines through Puerto Rican Obituary extends into an afterlife of praxis in classrooms. As we cultivate new understandings of resilience within the Puerto Rican debt crisis, reading Pietri’s work through this pedagogical relation helps us identify ways that artistic, embodied knowledge takes formation and becomes a site of persistent resistance to the technologies of racial capitalism.