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Introduction |
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Nuyorican
What is ‘Nuyorican’? The label Nuyorican was born of the Puerto Rican immigration wave into the U.S., specifically New York, during the Great Migration of the 1950s. In 1953 alone, 75,000 people left Puerto Rico and entered the United States. New York City was flooded with Puerto Rican immigrants, and the neighborhoods of El Barrio (Spanish Harlem), Loisaida (The Lower East Side), the Bronx and Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue became central loci for Puerto Rican immigrant communities. As Professor Eugene Mohr outlines in his book, The Nuyorican Experience:
People from everywhere in the Caribbean flowed into New York in greater numbers, in fact, than any other city in the world. But Puerto Ricans have been the most conspicuous: they started earlier and migrated on a more massive scale than any other group; furthermore as legal immigrants they did not have to hide, and as American citizens they could apply for all sorts of government services.1
Despite their legal status as citizens of the United States, Puerto Rican immigrants confronted many difficulties upon arrival; they faced a language barrier, poorly paid jobs and extensive, harsh discrimination as a result of the cultural divide between Puerto Ricans and Americans. Many Puerto Rican immigrants, upon entering New York, began to identify as Nuyorican. The Nuyorican identity is defined by Miguel Algarín, founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café, in the introduction to his book, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café:
Nuyorican (New York + Puerto Rican) 1. Originally Puerto Rican epithet for those of Puerto Rican heritage born in New York: their Spanish was different (Spanglish), their way of dress and look were different. They were a stateless people (like most U.S. poets), until the Café became their homeland. 2. After Algarín and Piñero, a proud poet speaking New York Puerto Rican 3. A denizen of the Nuyorican Poets Café 4. New York’s riches.2
This rich, evocative definition points to the nature of the Nuyorican identity. It is hybridized—borne of New York and Puerto Rico. Spanglish is a signifier of this identity, and Nuyoricans are ’denizens’ of the Nuyorican Poets Café. What, then, is Nuyorican poetry?
Nuyorican Poetry
The writing and performance of Nuyorican poetry began in the late 1960s and persists to this day. Nuyorican poetry, the oral, performative poetry produced as part of the Nuyorican movement, is largely exchanged at the Nuyorican Poets Café. The Café originated in Miguel Algarín’s living room before moving to its current location on 3rd Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1974. The Café was closed in the early 1980s, and reopened in 1987 with the help of spoken word poet Bob Holman, as a venue for spoken word performances, poetry slams, stand-up comedy, jazz performances and theatrical productions. The break in the history of the Nuyorican Poet’s Café separates Nuyorican poetry into two periods. Vintage Nuyorican poetry was created and performed between the start of the Nuyorican movement in the 1960s and the closure of the Café in 1980. Post-Nuyorican Poetry was created and performed after the reopening of the Nuyorican Poets Café in 1987, and continues to be written to date. These classifications are not simply historical; I will argue that whilst a certain Nuyorican aesthetic persists in the poetry over time, there are significant artistic differences between the poetry of the two phases. While Vintage Nuyorican poetry is marked by prominent usage of Spanish-English code switching, Post-Nuyorican poetry exemplifies a code-switch by incorporating other genres into the poetry, such as elements of music or theater. Vintage Nuyorican Poetry is typically concerned with the poor experience of life on the New York City streets for the Puerto Rican and thus demonstrates a political thrust. On the other hand, Post-Nuyorican poetry typically addresses themes of everyday life, and thus demonstrates a more universal, often playfully subversive aesthetic. Of course classifying poetic aesthetics according to time periods and sweeping thematic labels is never precise—some Vintage Nuyorican poets continue to write today in the Vintage mode; similarly some Post-Nuyorican poets write politically charged poetry. However, for the purposes of offering a trace of the central aesthetic trope of Nuyorican poetry over time, some over-generalizations must be afforded. How can we best understand this aesthetic trope?
Newness
In his 1975 essay, “Nuyorican Language”, Miguel Algarín wrote:
Newness in language grows as people do and learn things never done or learned before. The experience of Puerto Ricans on the streets of New York has caused a new language to grow: Nuyorican…We come to the city as citizens and can retain the use of Spanish and include English…The mixture of both languages grows. The interchange between both yields new verbal possibilities, new images…3
Here Algarín emphasizes bilingualism, or code-switching between English and Spanish, as that which allowed the Nuyorican language to express the experience of Puerto Ricans on the streets of New York. By blending the two codes, the Nuyorican language became a fertile mode of communication, allowing for more flexible, dynamic expression than English or Spanish could have offered in isolation. This bilingual trend, representative of what I will call Nuyorican Newness, is prevalent at the time when Algarín wrote this critical essay, during the Vintage Nuyorican Poetry phase. I will argue on this website that the experimental spirit of Nuyorican Newness is the central aesthetic trope which has pervaded Nuyorican poetry over time. I assert that the concept of Newness does not simply refer to language, but to the poetry and the movement as a whole—“Newness...grows as people do and learn things never done or learned before.”4 During the Vintage Nuyorican phase, as has been mentioned, this experimental trope was expressed through bilingualism as a creative response to social oppression—this is discussed in Segment 1. During the Post-Nuyorican phase, as illustrated in Segment 2, Nuyorican Newness is represented, not by the blending of languages, but by the blending of genres which challenges the categorization of art forms. Nuyorican Newness has transgressed the boundaries of the printed poem since the beginning of the Nuyorican movement through the emphasis on the performance of poetry in the Nuyorican tradition, as is discussed in Segment 3. The poetic experimentalism, representative of Nuyorican Newness, extends to other elements of the Nuyorican movement; Nuyorican Newness is both an aesthetic trope represented in the poetry and an ideology represented in the movement more broadly. Nuyorican Newness, then, firstly challenges the authority of monolingualism. Secondly, Nuyorican Newness challenges the genre boundaries we draw between art forms. Thirdly, it challenges the authority of the printed poetic word over oral poetry. The ideology of Nuyorican Newness also presents challenges to the definition of what poetry is, as it constantly and dynamically challenges the aesthetic status quo. If Nuyorican Newness challenges all the established boundaries of poetics, what experimental art form can be considered to be not representative of Nuyorican Newness? Is the ideology inviolable, assuming that the performance in question is not an exact mimicry of a previous performance? If Newness can be conceived of as ever-expansive, is it meaningful? As is discussed in Segment 4, the Nuyorican Poets Café serves as a consistent, physical base upon which this aesthetic counter-culture can take root, serving as an anchor to the expansiveness of the aesthetic. I suggest that the Café has become symbolic of alternative artistic production, and its legendary status facilitates the thriving continuation of the artistic exchange which occurs in the Café to date.
Key Terms
I employ the following key terms throughout my work: Vintage Nuyorican poetry, Post-Nuyorican poetry, the Nuyorican movement and the Nuyorican political movement. It is important to position these terms in relation to the existing critical literature on this topic. Frances Aparicio, arguably the scholar who has given the most comprehensive account of the Nuyorican tradition, writes the following in The Handbook to Hispanic Cultures in the U.S, published in 1994:
Within a decade [1970s], the Nuyorican movement grew from an immediate, urgent political gesture to a cogent literary force...One may speak of Post-Nuyorican poetry as a group of poets whose own, unique voices and style represent a continuity with and a departure from the original Nuyorican program. This continuity is illustrated in the central importance of their poetry as denouncement and as an expression of cultural resistance…5
Here Aparicio observes the transition from Nuyorican resistance poetry to the poetry of the ‘Post-Nuyorican’ phase. To clarify her terms, she uses ‘Nuyorican movement’ to address the phase of politically charged poetry in the late 1960s and the 1970s, and ‘Post-Nuyorican’ to address the poetry of the 1980s. Aparicio’s observation that Post-Nuyorican poetry continues to ‘[express] cultural resistance’ is in line with my own findings concerning Nuyorican Newness—both Aparicio and I observe that throughout the production of Nuyorican poetry over time there exists an undercurrent of cultural resistance. Whilst our views align on this important observation, as Aparicio’s account was published over 15 years ago I have found it necessary to re-claim the terms which she employed and adapt them to my own usage, given the new time frame within which my analysis functions. Firstly, whilst Aparicio uses Nuyorican movement to address the politically charged poetry of the 1960s and 1970s which was part of political resistance presented by Nuyoricans, I shall use Vintage Nuyorican poetry to address this phase of the poetry. I shall use the term Nuyorican political movement to address the political resistance the Nuyoricans forwarded. Separating these terms distinguishes between the art and the political purposes for which the art was often employed. Secondly, I shall extend Aparicio’s Post-Nuyorican poetry to include poetry being created to date. Aparicio’s usage of Post-Nuyorican in was originally limited to a time phase ending in the 1990s. However I feel that her term encapsulates the concept I want to express today—the idea of new poetry which is an extension of the original Nuyorican poetic trope. Thirdly, I shall use the phrase Nuyorican movement more inclusively than Aparicio. Nuyorican movement will not only address the early political poetry, but will encapsulate all the poetry, places and events associated with Nuyorican poetry from the birth of the movement to date. Using this term to address the entire corpus of Nuyorican poetry and its associated cultural artifacts reflects a divergence between my perspective and Aparicio’s. Whilst Aparicio emphasizes the core of the Nuyorican movement as being political poetry, I claim that the political poetry was a phase—albeit an important one—in the scope of the Nuyorican poetic movement as a whole. Aparicio thus focuses on the political implications of Nuyorican poetry, while I demonstrate an interest in examining the aesthetic trope of Nuyorican poetry over time. Why do I diverge from Aparicio’s opinion?
Political and Aesthetic Implications
Nuyorican poetry is a marginal topic of academic study. A search for ’Nuyorican’ in the Harvard Library system solicits 22 books related to this topic. These texts, Aparicio’s included, are largely concerned with the political aspect of the Nuyorican movement—questions of personal and national identity following exile, the experience of Puerto Rican immigrant life in the New York City diaspora, the contribution of the Nuyorican movement to the larger civil rights movement of the 1960s and so forth. These are, of course, important explorations of the Nuyorican movement. An examination of the aesthetic value of this poetic movement, however, has been largely omitted in favor of the political implications of Nuyorican artistry. It is remiss to only consider Nuyorican poetry in terms of its political function. My work here is to reveal the Nuyorican movement and Nuyorican Poetry as important contributors to American literary culture on an aesthetic level. More specifically, Nuyorican poetry has played a part in the burgeoning spoken word tradition that exists in America and around the world today. Additionally, I assert that the flexible ideology represnted by the aesthetic of Nuyorican Newness has broad and far reaching implications for how we consume, understand and critique performance art. If considered in these terms, I believe that the implications of the Nuyorican aesthetic can be a fertile topic for critical debate, and that this topic may be in fact more compelling than the political implications of Nuyorican poetry.
What’s at Stake?
Nuyorican poetry presents an aesthetic which is uniquely Nuyorican in its Newness. In presenting this aesthetic, Nuyorican Poetry challenges our conceptions of what poetry is and can be. The aesthetic qualities of the poetry itself also beg fundamental questions about the way in which we categorize art and personal identity. This challenge extends to the movement as a whole, as the labels, ‘Nuyorican’, ‘Poetry’, ‘Poets’ and ‘Café’ are flaunted for their inadequacy as descriptors, prompting us to question our insatiable appetite for denomination. The Nuyorican refusal to be defined except through the experimentalism of Newness allows the Nuyorican movement to persist over time while remaining agile and reactive, producing fresh and relevant art which challenges the boundaries of what poetry is, in turn prompting questions concerning the value of definitional boundaries themselves. These questions are penetrative and important, and ever more relevant in our globalizing age. My analysis cannot address such questions in full. Rather, I hope to illustrate that this topic is a fertile area for critical engagement which has resonance today concerning multi-lingual or transgeneric literature or art, thereby provoking further scholarly debate. Nuyorican Poetry and the Nuyorican movement are important contributors to American literary culture, and my goal is to position them as such. ________________________________________________________________________________________________
1:Eugene Mohr, The Nuyorican Experience, (Greenwood Press, New York 1982), 43. 2:Miguel Algarín, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, ed Algarin and Holman, (Holt Paperbacks, New York, 1994), 5. 3: Miguel Algarín, “Nuyorican Language” in Survival Supervivencia (Arte Público Press, Houston, 2009) 9. 4: Ibid. 5:Frances Aparicio, Entry on Nuyorican Poetry in The Handbook of Hispanic Cultures, ed. Kanellos, Weaver and Esteva-Fabregat, (Arte Público Press, Houston, 1994), 28. |
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“Newness...grows as people do and learn things never done or learned before…”—Miguel Algarín |
