In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam

Three - Embodied or Incorporated? From Nuyorican Poetry to U.S. Latino/a Literature

​C h a p t e r T h r e e Embodied or Incorporated? From Nuyorican Poetry to U.S. Latino/a Literature The early 1980s were a transitional time, as New York City struggled to recover from a financial crisis and as the countercultural movements and outlaw poetics of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to the age of Reagan and the AIDS crisis.These tensions and transitions would prove to have a significant impact on the Lower East Side. In Selling the Lower East Side,Christopher Mele analyzes how, in the Reagan era, “the (few remaining) Great Society urban programs and policies were subject to extensive criticism, disavowal, and ultimately blame for the lack of private growth in the central city” and were replaced with a focus on development fueled by “an aggressive entrepreneurial and pro-­growth ideology ” (Mele 237). Mele notes that the terms “the East Village” and “Alphabet City,” both initially associated with the countercultural arts scene of the 1960s and 1970s, were appropriated by real estate brokers and developers in an effort to rebrand the neighborhood, and he analyzes how renaming eventuallyallowed thesedevelopers to attract a newcadreof—mostly white, well-­ educated, and comparatively affluent—tenants, selling them on the “allure of downtown” (237) while symbolically erasing the Lower East Side’s ethnic and working-­ class history (xi–xii). Seemingly emblematic of this transitional time was the closing of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in 1982, as short-­term repairs turned into an extended hiatus that would last until the end of the decade. As products of the movement era, the Cafe and its poets emerged from and tapped into the social 84 Chap ter Th r ee energies of the city, and it was not obvious how their poetics and politics would translate to a changing urban landscape. At the same time, though, Nuyorican poetry was making an impact well beyond New York City, largely as part of an emerging U.S. Latino/a literary canon. Fueled by the creative and political energyof the Chicano and Puerto Rican Movements, journals and magazines such as Nicolás Kanellos’s Revista Chicano-­Riqueña (founded in 1973 in Gary, Indiana, and later renamed the Americas Review) and Gary Keller’s Bilingual Review (founded in 1974 in New York) documented, in English and Spanish, a variety of U.S. Latino/a literaryand cultural productions from an inclusive perspective circumscribed neither by national identification (Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, etc.) nor by aesthetic differences. In 1979, Kanellos moved the Revista to the University of Houston and founded Arte Público Press, to this day one of the few nationally visible presses (Keller’s Bilingual Press is another) focused on U.S. Latino/a literatures and cultures. Arte Público’s first title, La Carreta Made aU-­Turn (1979) by Tato Laviera, would become one of the most influential and best-­ selling Latino/a poetry collections and its author the subject of significant Latino/a studies scholarship.The press would go on to publish other important books of Nuyorican poetry such as Piñero’s La Bodega Sold Dreams (1980), Algar ín’s On Call (1980) and Body Bee Calling from the 21st Century (1982), and Esteves’s Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo (1990) alongside a wide variety of titles by Chicano/a and other Latino/a authors. Much of the foundational Latino/a studies scholarship that emerged in the 1980s sought to connect thedecolonial Puerto Rican and Chicano Movement literatures of the 1960s and 1970s with emerging multiculturalist critiques of canon formation, and the Nuyorican poetry collections Arte Público published were incorporated into this struggle. Around the same time, works of Nuyorican poetry were being sporadically published in Puerto Rico. Nuyorican poets had alreadyappeared in little magazines such as the groundbreaking Zona de carga y descarga (Loading and Unloading Zone, 1972–1975), which also published island poets living in New York.1 Books soon followed, with the publication, by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, of translations of Pietri’s Puerto Rican Obituary (1977) and José-­ Angel Figueroa’s Noo Jork (1981), and, by Ediciones Hura- Embodi ed or Incorporated? 85 cán, of a bilingual edition of Pietri’s poetic prose text Lost in the Museum of Natural History (1981). The circulation of the work of Nuyorican poets on the island was aided by the publication of anthologies such as Efraín Barradas and Rafael Rodríguez’s...