In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam

Introduction - Nuyorican Counterpolitics

​I n t r o d u c t i o n ​Nuyorican Counterpolitics you knew how to sing before you was issued a birth certificate turn off the stereo this country gave you it is out of order your breath is your promiseland —Pedro Pietri, “Love Poem for My People” (Obituary 78) What does it mean to belong? This question is central to contemporary figurations of social identity in a variety of cultural and artistic productions, and it has recently acquired a renewed urgency in the United States in light of the nation’s changing demographics and the nativist backlash surrounding such issues as immigration and national security. This question is also at the core of a variety of Puerto Rican poetics that emerged, in print and in performance , in 1960s NewYork City, coalescing someyears later in and around the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and eventually helping define a certain performative and multicultural sensibility in American poetry.1 Many of these founding poets were the children of the postwar Great Migration to the continental United States, encouraged by the federal government as an alternative to Operation Bootstrap, a series of ambitious yet only partially successful industrialization projects in Puerto Rico.Given their xiv I ntroduction dual status as U.S. citizens and colonial subjects, these poets were uniquely positioned to explore the complexities of identity and belonging at multiple levels: family, community, city, nation, and beyond. In fact, from Miguel Algarín’s “A Mongo Affair” (1975) and Tato Laviera’s “AmeRícan” (1985) to Mariposa María Teresa Fernández’s “Ode to the Diasporican” (1993) and Edwin Torres’s “A Nuyo-­ Futurist’s Manifestiny” (2001), Nuyorican poems have creatively and critically staged, on and off the page, the complexity of identity across and along sometimes competing communal, national, and transnational contexts.2 There has been some ongoing debate within the field of Puerto Rican studies as to whether this postwar mass migration constitutes a diaspora, with Juan Flores most notably arguing for a diaspora-­ centric approach to New York Puerto Rican expressive cultures and emphasizing Afro-­ diasporic vernacular practices.While this study does not pretend to settle the question of what should and should not be considered a diaspora, it does look to diaspora studies scholarship—most obviously, to Stuart Hall’s “counter-­ politics of the local” and to Brent Hayes Edwards’s The Practice of Diaspora—to map the complex nonlinear movements of Nuyorican poetry, between performance and print, street and classroom, mainland and island, local and global. In doing so, it seeks to highlight how Nuyorican poets have developed a performance poetics, readable on and off the page, that rethinks the terms of visibility and representation. Following performance studies scholars such as Peggy Phelan, I argue that performing a problematic visibility might in fact be an essential part of a poetics of Nuyorican visibility. This book is not envisaged as a straightforward history, and it is in fact committed to close reading, both as an analytical tool and as a means to generate new imaginaries, to highlight affinities between diverse poetics and politics. While it aims to represent the breadth and diversity of Nuyorican poetry over the span of more than four decades, it does not pretend to be exhaustive, and it devotes particular attention to a dozen or so poets that, in my view, seem essential to the project. For the most part, these are the poets who have received the most critical attention and who are represented in Miguel Algarín’s defining anthologies Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings (coedited with Miguel Piñero, 1975) and Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (coedited with Bob Holman, Introduction xv 1994), forming a loose canon of Nuyorican poetry. Nonetheless, I have made it a point to also analyze poets who have rarely been thought of as part of the Nuyorican tradition (Frank Lima), or who are considered as such but have not received sufficient critical attention (Jesús Papoleto Meléndez, Lorraine Sutton), as well as poets who have emerged since the 1980s and whose relationship to the foundational poets is sometimes complicated yet undeniable. Although not a history in the conventional sense, in the juxtaposition of various poetics this book seeks to tell a story about the changing roles of poetry, from the social movements of the 1960s to the market movements of the 1990s and beyond...