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Segment 1: Vintage Nuyorican Poetry |
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Setting the Scene: The Political Backdrop
Vintage Nuyorican poetry was born as part of the Nuyorican political movement, protesting against the poor living and working conditions for Puerto Ricans in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s. In order to understand the social context which led to the development of Vintage Nuyorican poetry, and thus more effectively engage with the poetry itself, I shall briefly provide some historical context. The Nuyorican political movement was, according to Nuyorican expert, Professor Frances Aparicio:
Mostly constituted by social and political poetry which loudly belied the myth of the American dream and denounced the subhuman conditions to which Puerto Ricans have been submitted since their massive arrival in the 1940s: the lack of adequate living conditions in New York City and other major urban areas, the attacks against their use of Spanish in schools and the concomitant silencing, discrimination in the workplace, the lack of economic opportunities and the conditions of utmost poverty and marginalization for many.1
Using their legal rights as US citizens following the Jones-Shafroth act of 1917, thousands of Puerto Ricans migrated to New York City where they tended to occupy low-income manufacturing jobs. With the decline of the manufacturing industry in the late 1950s, as Sonia Perez of the National Council of La Raza explains, poverty indicators such as unemployment rates, divorce rates and the number of single parent families rose throughout the 1960s and 1970s.2 Nuyoricans found themselves in a state of socioeconomic deprivation, leading to the rise of the Nuyorican political movement which protested these impoverished living conditions. Nuyorican poetry and the Nuyorican political movement contributed to other activist programs of the time which shared their plight—the Young Lords, for example. Colombia University’s website, entitled “Social Justice Movements” examines the commonalities between the Nuyorican and Young Lords movements:
The Young Lords and other Nuyorican arts and activists saw that generations of Puerto Ricans were being taught they had no history, were alienated from their culture, and had no national identity aside from second class citizenship.3
Examining the activities of the Young Lords more closely, the following excerpt from the Newsreel film, “El Pueblo Se Levanta”, demonstrates the type of political activism which the Young Lords were concerned with, including the fight against racial and ethnic discrimination.
As well as street-protesting the discrimination against Puerto Ricans, the Young Lords attempted to use the space of the First Spanish Methodist Church in El Barrio—an area of dense Puerto Rican population—to run a breakfast program for impoverished inhabitants of the neighborhood. When the Church ignored the request for use of the space and subsequently used police force to counter the Young Lords, the activists responded by taking over the church. The following film clip, again from “El Pueblo Se Levanta”, shows documentary footage from this takeover:
An example of poetry in action…
The seize of the First Spanish Methodist Church presents an important example of the way in which Vintage Nuyorican Poetry served a political purpose. Pedro Pietri’s poem, “Puerto Rican Obituary”, published in 1974, was performed at the takeover of the Church by the Young Lords in 1969, as the following clip documents:
As is evidenced by Pietri’s performance of the poem, the conversational diction, combined with the element of repetition render this a powerful, evocative poem. A closer analysis of the following extract will highlight some of the important themes of Vintage Nuyorican poetry in terms of the activist struggle:
Juan
In this section of the poem, Pietri uses stereotypically Hispanic names to create imaginary Puerto Rican personas. These characters become the face of the Nuyorican struggle, most poignantly in their deaths: ‘all died yesterday today/ and will die again tomorrow’. The repetition of their names represents the incessant nature of the oppression felt by the Nuyorican, and emphasizes the commonality of their struggle. The Nuyorican plight, according to Pietri’s poem, is the attempt to become affluent and live as ‘gringo’ Americans, such that the immigrant might enjoy a ‘Puerto Ricanless scene’. In this exploration of the Nuyorican experience of the American dream, Pietri uses language as the indicator of identity, as evidenced by the closing line of the stanza, identifying the Puerto Rican by his usage of the Spanish phrase ‘Que Pasa’. This Spanish phrase is paradoxically ’sacred’ and that which the Puerto Rican attempts to leave behind. Language is presented here as a source of struggle in the Nuyorican condition. At the same moment, language is used in this poem to express the communal struggle, emphasizing the importance of poetic expression in simultaneously understanding the Nuyorican plight, and fighting it. By refusing to adhere to the U.S.-prescribed value of monolingualism in his poetry, Pietri both expresses the condition of the Nuyorican as existing between two locales and languages, and reacts against the societal pressure to conform to the accepted U.S. standard of ‘clean cut lily-white neighborhoods’ and ‘thirty thousand dollar homes’. Miguel Algarín, the founding father of the Nuyorican political movement, Vintage Nuyorican poet and founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café comments on the power play implicit in the usage of language for the Puerto Rican in New York City:
The Puerto Rican has a very special position among other immigrants because of his citizenship… he does not have to reject his Spanish language or his way of eating or his culture. He can keep them because he does not have to renounce his flag or his citizenship.5
By keeping his ‘language [and] his way of eating [and] his culture”, the Nuyorican preserves his ties to Puerto Rico. In this act of honoring his roots, Algarín points to the source of the Nuyorican struggle: the Puerto Rican immigrant is culturally displaced when living in New York, but his is not displaced according to official governmental standards. This is symbolized in the act of crossing the border into the United States—the Puerto Rican is not required to renounce his Puerto Rican passport, but instead to use his U.S. passport to enter the country. Existing in this condition of liminality whilst suffering the harsh realities of impoverishment gave rise to the activism of the Nuyorican Political movement.
Artists React: Vintage Nuyorican Poetry
Having briefly examined the social condition of Nuyoricans and having seen an example of Vintage Nuyorican poetry being used in this political context, let us turn more specifically to the discussion of Vintage Nuyorican poetry. Ernesto Quiñonez, celebrated Puerto Rican novelist writing from Spanish Harlem, explains the impetus for the birth of Nuyorican Poetry in his introduction to Miguel Algarín’s Survival Supervivencia:
This book [the Nuyorican poetry anthology Aloud] told me that when a people lack representation then that’s when it’s time for them to create their own mythology…. and so it was time to invent, to create what Miguel Algarín called “Newness”, a brand new mythology overflowing with its own codes, terminology, laws, and thus the Nuyorican was born.6
Newness is described here as a ‘mythology’ which was simultaneously constructed and expressed by Nuyorican poets in response to their Nuyorican condition. Nuyorican poetry can be seen as one of the many contributory factors toward the creation of this mythology, as one example of the ‘codes, terminology and laws’ working to create Nuyorican Newness. Algarín, in fact, made direct comment on the role of the poet in constructing this Newness in his 1975 essay “Nuyorican Language”:
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…7
Algarín here gives voice to three of the major themes which shall be discussed in this segment. Firstly, the poetry shall be examined as a product of the ‘experience of Puerto Ricans on the streets of New York’; why is the poetry an important reaction to the Nuyorican condition? Secondly Nuyorican language shall be examined in terms of Newness, according to Algarín’s definition; which characteristics of the poetry exemplify Newness? Lastly, the effects of code-switching in the poetry will be examined; how is bilingualism used in the poetry to create Newness?
A Reaction to the Nuyorican Condition—Street Talk; Street Poems
The adverse circumstances in which the Nuyorican poet found himself were the impetus for Vintage Nuyorican poetry, as Pietri’s poem exemplified. Like Pietri, other Vintage Nuyorican poets performed their work in public places, including the Nuyorican Poets Café, to the Puerto Rican immigrant community who all suffered these conditions. Literary critic Carmen Dolores-Hernandez, in the introduction to her collection of interview with Puerto Rican writers, Puerto Rican Voices in English, highlights the role of Vintage Nuyorican poets in expressing the condition of the community:
…New York Puerto Rican poets were expressing – in a different literary idiom – the incongruities between the myth of the American Dream and the harsh realities encountered by their families upon migrating.8
This new ‘idiom’ employed by the poets explored the in-between experience of the Nuyorican. The Nuyorican population was not simply existing in-between English and Spanish, but between the dream of a prosperous life in America filled with opportunity, and the darker reality of the Nuyorican experience. Hernandez continues:
They were literally as well as figuratively ‘beat up’ by their place in the city’s lowest socioeconomic rungs as the children of poor, uneducated immigrants who knew no English. Their protests took a literary turn, but they referred to a concrete situation. They also found America’s established values wanting, but not because of surfeit of exhaustion, but because of privation. It was a time of solidarity against the perceived “enemy”.9
Here Hernandez explores the under-privileged position in terms of Vintage Nuyorican poetry. She describes the poetry as ‘protests’, providing a mechanism to present ‘solidarity’. The ‘concrete situation’ which the poetry referred to, as well as evoking the street life shared by the Nuyoricans, was precisely this ‘privation’ of the American Dream which Nuyorican suffered. Pedro Pietri’s poem, “The Broken English Dream”, published in 1974, expresses the Nuyorican experience of the unfulfilled American dream:
To the united states we came
The bitter irony of replacing ‘America’ with ‘installment plans’ in the phrase ‘united states of…’, underlines the sense of discontent Pietri is expressing with the reality of life in America for the Puerto Rican. It was commonplace to purchase items on ‘installment plans’ due to the low income of the average Puerto Rican at this moment. He challenges the powerful associations we have with the phrase ‘The United States of America’ by substituting the last word, undermining the tie between the U.S. and the American dream. Once again, Pietri grounds his protest in language as he aligns English and Spanish translations of simple nouns, mirroring the process of basic language learning that many Nuyoricans had to engage in. The audience is subjected to the same sense of frustration suffered when learning a new language, at the same time as being patronized by the childish simplicity of the rhyme between ‘Pen’ and ‘Hen’. This poem presents the American Dream as a naive idea, engaging the Nuyorican community in their shared disappointment concerning the reality of their lives in New York City. Why was it important that the Nuyorican poets highlighted the Nuyorican struggle if in fact it was simply the shared reality of the Nuyorican condition? Was there a need for publicly performed art addressing what was simply quotidian reality? Hernandez explains what would have been the significance of silence in the Nuyorican circumstance:
Silence, in this case, could be equivalent to nonexistence, oblivion and forgetfulness because there would be no other record of the impact of their lives and feelings and of the identity that they were collectively forging.11
Hernadez here points to Vintage Nuyorican poetry as a mechanism of identity formation for Nuyoricans, as a record of the feelings shared by many Nuyorican individuals in their lives in New York City. Algarín goes beyond the implications of Hernandez’s statement to emphasize the formative, not simply reactive, role of the poet in this moment:
Writers become especially relevant in such a situation. They must help the nascent community to re-imagine itself through new perspectives. Having re-claimed a distinctive path through their texts, they must define, in imaginary terms, their present and project the future.12
Algarín suggests that rather than poetry simply serving as an outlet for expression, it was actively constructing the Nuyorican project. In attending a performance of Vintage Nuyorican poetry, the ’nascent’ community is simultaneously united and directed by the poetry’s call to action. Algarín, in an interview with Hernandez, explains how Nuyorican poetry acts as a tool for communication between people:
…what we were doing was very much in the tradition of bringing poetry into its popular mode and returning it to the people. Poetry has always been an art of heightened communication between people, and I don’t mean between readers of poetry but between people.13
Algarín here explicates the capacity of poetry to facilitate dialogue. He distinctly differentiates ‘readers of poetry’ from ‘people’, and therefore highlights the ‘popular’ quality of Nuyorican poetry. Tato Laviera’s poem, “asimilao”, which was published in 1985 presents a Vintage Nuyorican aesthetic addressing themes of rejecting cultural assimilation through accessible language and forging the connection ‘between people’ through poetry. The title of the poem is an anglicized pun on the Spanish verb asimilar, ‘to assimilate’. The absent ‘d’ of the correct Spanish conjugation of the past participle, ‘asimilado’, emphasizes the authority of the auditory version of this poem, and privileges the listener over the reader. The Spanglish speaker immediately understands this word upon hearing it, whilst the educated Spanish reader stumbles as it diverges from correctly written Spanish or English. In privileging the listener over the reader, Laviera renders the poem most suitable for sharing with the Nuyorican in performance and therefore addressing not the solitary reader but an audience community. It was through these performances that, in Algarín's words, the ’nascent community re-imagined itself’. The opening two lines of the poem read:
assimilated? qué assimilated,
The lack of standard capitalization in this poem, coupled with the use of ‘brother’, immediately denotes the colloquial quality of the diction. The poem’s language, on the surface, seems casual and quotidian, yet this colloquialism shrouds its complex meaning. The Spanish ‘qué’ preceding the English verb ‘assimilated’ points to the insufficiency of the English word to describe the diasporic condition: in the following line Laviera Spangli-cizes the verb, rendering it ‘asimilao’. Laviera thus personifies the Nuyorican condition in this hybridized word. The poem, then, presents a linguistically complex exploration of the Nuyorican condition, which is simultaneously comprehensible and pertinent to the ‘everyday’ Nuyorican listener. At the moment of performance, the Nuyorican audience is engaged in and united by this exploration of their condition. Both Pietri’s and Laviera’s works, then, address the Spanglish-speaking, Nuyorican community on the theme of the shared, everyday Nuyorican experience, often using bilingualism in order to render the poetry accessible and meaningful to the public. I shall now argue that the usage of bilingualism in their poetry also represents the experimental Nuyorican aesthetic of Newness.
Nuyorican Language and Newness
Newness, the generation of ‘...new verbal possibilities, new images…’ through the blending of English and Spanish, is achieved through much Vintage Nuyorican poetry. Even the title of Tato Laviera’s 1978 volume AmeRícan exemplifies Newness in its surprising use of bilingual interchange. The label ‘American’ is fused with the last word of the Puerto Rican identity, resulting in the label ‘Ame-Rícan’. This title is further complicated as the sounds of the word phonetically spell “I’m—a—Rican”, perhaps denoting the poet’s sense of identification with his homeland. However, this is undermined by the inclusion of the acute accent on the ‘i’, which is not used in ‘Puerto Rican’, denoting a sense of misplaced association with Puerto Rico, perhaps. By titling his poem with this hybridized word, Laviera signals the Nuyorican condition the thematic content of the volume as well as representing the aesthetic of Newness. In this single title Laviera poses questions of the value of monolingualism in literary expression, and underlines the insufficiency of the use of either English or Spanish in isolation to describe the Nuyorican experience. In his poem, “Ver-sion/cíon”, published in 1982, Victor Hernández-Cruz provides an example of linguistic Nuyorican Newness in Vintage Nuyorican poetry. The poet horizontally aligns words of an un-punctuated sentence in English with the literal Spanish translations adjacent. The reader’s must to move down the page to read the whole sentence in one language or another, so instead the reader is implored to experience the horizontal pairings of the words in the two languages:
EACH LITTLE CADA PORE PORO HAS A LIGHT TIENE UNA LUZ ….. … YOU SHINE TU BRILLAS ONE HALF UNA MITAD GREEN VERDE THE OTHER Y LA OTRA BLUE AZUL15
The juxtaposition of the Spanish and English words results in Newness, ’new verbal possibilities’, by forcing the reader to examine the words themselves more closely. The reader is implored to experience the slightly different connotations of a word in the two languages through the incessant code switching: ‘cada’, literally meaning ‘each’, is aligned with ‘each little’, implying that the English lacks the implication of the diminutive which the Spanish carries. However, it could also be argued that ‘cada’ is shaped by the addition of ‘little’ after the word ‘each’ in English. As Juan Flores—an esteemed critic of Puerto Rican literature and culture in the United States—asserts, code-switching is oft-employed by Spanish speakers in the United States, “Language itself, of course, is the most obvious site of Latino inventiveness.”16 Is this ‘inventiveness’ a reaction to the hybrid condition of Latino existence, or a generative, aesthetic choice by the bilingual speaker?
What is it about the code switch?
As Victor Hernández Cruz emphasizes in an interview with Hernandez, in many cases the linguistic code switch is performed out of a desire for fuller expression on an artistic level:
So I made a decision that the moment was a bilingual moment. Neither Spanish nor English was sufficient for the opportunity. And as a colloquial poet, neither Spanish nor English was sufficient for the situation in which I found myself.17
It seems that Cruz here gestures towards his aesthetic dissatisfaction with the use of one language, instead of the inadequacy of monolingualism to represent a politically charged moment. The repeated use of the first person in his description of why he uses the code-switch underlines the highly personal nature of Cruz’s choice to use bilingualism to describe the moment; the linguistic code switch is described here as a poetic or rhetorical tool at the disposal of the ‘bilingual poet’. Could the linguistic code-switch be seen as an oratory device, then? Is bilingual expression an intellectual exercise for the poet? Pedro Pietri suggests in his interview with Hernandez that bilingualism in poetry is a sign of intelligence:
Spanglish is what we use. We mix both languages, and that’s not the sign of an inferior mind but a sign of an advanced mind. Being chauvinist about a language, that’s not very intelligent.18
Pietri describes the mixture of both languages as a ‘sign of the advanced mind’. It seems, then that bilingual expression represents an advancement of the intellect. Is the use of the linguistic code-switch an example of the poet pushing the boundaries of expression for their own sake? Perhaps, then, one can understand Spanglish as an aesthetic exercise as well as a politicized one. Tato Laviera’s 1978 poem, “nideaquinideallá” arguably presents such an aesthetic. Laviera’s poem explores many familiar themes, however his usage of inter-lingual constructions is highly aestheticized:
my first name is de aquí
The first cuplet presents a familiar aesthetic to other Nuyorican poems; the use of a predominantly English phrase interjected with Spanish words. However, the word in the third line is not from any language: Laviera has condensed the Spanish phrase ‘ni de aquí ni de allá’ to read as one long word. This word is playful to the Spanish or English reader—in fact, even the Spanglish reader is taken aback. By incorporating an unknown word into the poem, Laviera’s experimentation stretches the aesthetic boundaries of bilingual expression. He presents a semi-mirroring of this linguistic structure in the next line with the phrase ‘yet-to-be’; the dashes between the words help the reader decode ‘nideaquinideallá’. Here Laviera toys with the reader’s intellectual and linguistic capacity, transcending the politicized bilinguality of the poem and presenting Spanglish as an aestheticized mode of expression. This play is emphasized in the last line which describes the poetic language he employs in this stanza; ‘evolucionario hybrid’ is not static in a monolingual or bilingual form, but ever-changing. Professor Doris Sommer writes of the effects of this type of code-switching in her text Bilingual Aesthetics. She suggests that, “Good code switchers will produce surprise effects, even if it means resorting to monolingualism where a code switch has become standard.”20 The ‘surprise effect’ that the reader experiences in Laviera’s poem is due to precisely this creativity in code switching—in fact through the very structure that Laviera builds around the code switch he points to his creative tricks. The purpose of the code-switch, then is to provide a certain level of excitement to the reader, even a sense of estrangement in the Shklovskian sense of the word. The code-switch induces an aesthetic experience, and therefore becomes an aestheticized oratic gesture. Sommer goes on to say:
Code-switching prefers the surprise element of an estranged (literally foreign) expression to the predictability of one legitimate language; it values artistry over stable identity, and it invites an acknowledgement of aesthetic agency over a politics of cultural recognition.21
Here Sommer clearly points to the importance of creativity and flexibility to the effective usage of the code-switch. While she acknowledges that the ‘politics of cultural recognition’ is a motivating force for the code-switch, as well as the search for ‘stable identity’, she emphasizes the value which is placed on the ‘artistry’ and the ‘aesthetic agency’ of the linguistic trick. Given this perspective on the functionality of code switching, perhaps it is an opportune moment to reflect upon Miguel Algarín’s original definition of the Nuyorican language usage. His term, Newness, is suggestive of precisely this sort of expressive creativity:
Newness in language grows as people do and learn things never done or learned before…The mixture of both languages grows. The interchange between both yields new verbal possibilities, new images…22
Bilingualism, specifically Spanglish, was used by Vintage Nuyorican poets to provide this sort of Newness. However, as Sommer suggests, bilingualism may not continue to be aesthetically surprising to the reader after some time, and therefore the sort of code switch that Laviera employs also becomes representative of this Newness. This moment calls for a redefinition of terms. Until now, bilingualism has been used as a synonym for a linguistic code-switch. However it seems that the code switch, according to Sommer’s definition, is a more flexible term than ‘bilingualism’ accounts for. In Vintage Nuyorican poetry the linguistic code switch is the practice of bilingualism, giving rise to Newness. However, while Spanglish bilingualism is a prominent feature of Vintage Nuyorican poetry of the 1970s and early 1980s, this is not the only code-switch which presents Nuyorican Newness. As Professor Cruz Malavé explains of Post-Nuyorican poet Edwin Torres:
He doesn’t move away from the essence of bilingualism which is the code switch, he just uses different, multiple codes...as well as Spanglish there is the visual code of the typeface, the inclusion of different genres and so on…23
At this moment, then, we see how it is possible to account for the inclusion of non-Spanglish poetry as generative of Nuyorican Newness.
Al fin, entonces….
Vintage Nuyorican poetry was a creative reaction to the impoverished way of life for Puerto Ricans in New York City. By code-switching in the poetry, the Vintage Nuyorican poets rendered it comprehensible to their audience—their fellow Nuyoricans. The Spanglish usage in the poetry also presented a surprising linguistic aesthetic, embodying Newness. The aspects of the poetry which present Nuyorican Newness represent the core essence of Vintage Nuyorican poetry—the bilingual code switch was the central aesthetic trope of Vintage Nuyorican Poetry, as well as the poetry’s source of political resistance as a tool for communicating with the Spanglish speaking Nuyorican. The shift away from bilingualism being the central code-switch and therefore source of Newness in Nuyorican poetry occurs between Vintage Nuyorican Poetry (of the 1970s and early 1980s) and Post-Nuyorican poetry (of the late 1980s to today), where the latter exhibits a transgeneric code-switch rather than a linguistic code switch. These changes in the aesthetics of the poetry coincided with a subsidence of the Nuyorican political activism, as activism took a heavily racial turn through groups such as the Black Panther Party. Whilst the relationship between Nuyorican poetry and the activism of the Black Panthers is an extremely interesting topic for debate, it is beyond the scope of my work here to engage with this question. It shall simply be noted that the shift away from the politicized, bilingual aesthetic in the poetry of the 1980s also coincided with the quietening of the Nuyorican political movement, and the rise of the polyphonic, transgeneric code switch in Post-Nuyorican poetry. ________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1:Frances Aparicio, “The Nuyorican Movement” in The Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Literature and Art , ed Lomelí, (Arte Publico Press, Houston 1993), 26. 2:Mireya Navarro, “Puerto Rican Presence Wanes in New York” in The New York Times, February 28, 2000 Retrieved 11/22/09 at Puerto Rican Herald http://www.puertorico-herald.org/issues/vol4n09/PRPresenceWanes-en.html 3:Social Justice Movements: Entry on the Young Lords. Retrieved 11/22/09. http://socialjustice.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/index.php/Legacy:_from_the_Island_to_the_Bronx 4:Pedro Pietri, “Puerto Rican Obituary” in Puerto Rican Obituary, (Monthly Review Press, 1974, New York), 3. 5:Interview with Miguel Algarín in Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers ed Carmen Dolores Hernandez, (Prager, 1997, New York) 45. 6:Ernest Quinonez, “Introduction” in Survival Supervivencia by Miguel Algarín, (Arte Público Press, Houston), xi. 7:Miguel Algarín, “Nuyorican Language” in Survival Supervivencia (Arte Público Press, Houston, 2009) 9. 8:Carmen Dolores Hernandez, “Introduction” to Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers (Prager, 1997, New York: 5. 9:Ibid, 6. 10:Pedro Pietri, “The Broken English Dream” in Puerto Rican Obituary, (Monthly Review Press, 1974, New York), 13. 11:Carmen Dolores Hernandez, “Introduction” to Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers (Prager, 1997, New York) 9 12:Interview with Miguel Algarín in Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers ed Carmen Dolores Hernandez, (Prager, 1997, New York) 45. 13:Ibid, 44. 14:Tato Laviera, “asimilao” in AmeRícan (Arte Público Press, Houston, 1985 (2003)), 54. 15:Victor Hernandex Cruz, “Versio/cion” in By Lingual Wholes (Momo’s Press, San Francisco, 1982). 16:Juan Flores, Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity (Arte Público Press, Houston Texas, 1993) 219. 17:Interview with Victor Hernandez Cruz in Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers ed Carmen Dolores Hernandez, (Prager, 1997, New York) 82 18:Interview with Pedro Pietri in Puerto Rican Voices in English: Interviews with Writers ed Carmen Dolores Hernandez, (Prager, 1997, New York)115 19:Tato Laviera, “nideaquinideallá” in mixturao (Arte Público Press, Houston 2nd edition 2008), 5. 20:Doris Sommer, Bilingual Aesthetics (Duke University Press, Furham 2004) 33. 21:Ibid, 37. 22:Miguel Algarín, “Nuyorican Language” in Survival Supervivencia (Arte Público Press, Houston, 2009) 9. 23:Interview by Elizabeth Brook with Arnaldo Cruz-Malave, July 25th 2009. |
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“Newness...grows as people do and learn things never done or learned before…”—Miguel Algarín |