In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam

One - The Unseen Scene: Movement Poetics and the In/Visibility of Diaspora

​C h a p t e r O n e The Unseen Scene Movement Poetics and the In/Visibility of Diaspora Puerto Rican poets were at the forefront of the (counter)cultural ferment of 1960s New York City and, as epitomized by Pedro Pietri’s epochal performances with the Young Lords, they were central to the Puerto Rican Movement . From the mid-­ 1960s to the mid-­ 1970s, Puerto Rican poets were also involved in a varietyofartistic and activist initiatives—from poetic and musical performances and community theater to collaborations with nationalist, antiwar, community, and student organizations—and their workwould help shape emerging third world, decolonial, feminist, and other political horizons . Yet even as Puerto Ricans were visible participants in the artistic and political countercultures, to the larger culture they mostly remained either invisible or else visible in all the wrong ways. From the musical West Side Story (1957) to anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s La Vida; A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York (1966), New York Puerto Ricans were too often represented as an underclass, as abject or violent as it was colorful. In this chapter, I read the work of New York Puerto Rican poets between 1964 and 1974 as a meditation on the complexities ofdiasporic Puerto Rican visibility/invisibility, and I trace the outlines of a poetics, readable on and off the page, attuned to this problematic visibility. Influenced by Puerto Rican expressive cultures—including syncretic and largely African-­derived musical styles and spiritual practices—and by various breath-­ based postwar Ameri- 2 Chap ter One can poetics, these poets use a range of formal devices, of print and performance strategies, to represent the complex spatialities and temporalities of diaspora: from the synaesthesias of Victor Hernández Cruz’s Snaps (1968) and the inversions and run-­ on lines of Pedro Pietri’s Puerto Rican Obituary (1973) to a number of lesser-­ known print and performance works by Piri Thomas, Frank Lima, Jesús Papoleto Meléndez, Sandra María Esteves, Felipe Luciano, and José-­ Angel Figueroa. I examine how such poets develop poetics strategically positioned against both institutional invisibility and abject hypervisibility, complicating existing politics and poetics of resistance and representation. By insisting on poetry in its various forms as a means of institutional critique and communal engagement, these poets urge us to rethink the terms of identity and belonging. The struggle with a problematic visibility already haunts Piri Thomas’s autobiographical novel Down These Mean Streets (1967), a foundational text of Nuyorican literature wherein, as Arnaldo Cruz-­ Malavé has noted, the protagonist’s identity, his masculinity in particular, is framed by a brutal struggle with the “spectral” (“Web” 136) state of abjection. Down These Mean Streets is unlike the conventional bildungsroman in that the protagonist ’s attempt to escape the barrio leads back to the awareness that the barrio is grafted onto his raced, classed body, so that the black Puerto Rican body is marked as radically excluded in a Kristevan sense. Identification, as either an unmarked American or an unmarked Puerto Rican, is compromised by the (young, black, urban, male) protagonist’s hypervisibility; as Monica Brown argues, the novel underscores how “the visible markers of race can supersede the privileges of any national identification” and how race cannot be considered independently of class (13). As fictionalized in Down These Mean Streets and retold in the 2003 documentary Every Child Is Born a Poet, Thomas, the darkest-­ skinned son of a dark-­ skinned Cuban father and a light-­ skinned Puerto Rican mother, was born in El Barrio (East Harlem), but his parents moved the family to Long Island during his teenage years. As a young man, Thomas went to prison for the attempted robbery of a Greenwich Village nightclub; he began writing in earnest while in prison, inspired by the work of contemporary African American writers, among them the novelist John Oliver Killens, a key forerunner of the Black Arts Movement. As documented in the Piri Thomas The Unseen Scene 3 Papers at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Thomas eventually affiliated with Killens’s Harlem Writers Guild, and he adopted its ethos of politically engaged community outreach, doing poetry readings and community theater and offering writing workshops in East Harlem and in prisons, schools, and community centers across the region. After the unprecedented commercial and critical success of Down These Mean Streets, Thomas became an important...