Where, What and Who is Nuyorican?

 

The Nuyorican Poets Café has been critically important to the continuation of the Nuyorican Poetry tradition as a physical anchor-point to the movement. Nuyorican Newness is characterized by its dynamic, fluid subversiveness. Today the Nuyorican label is not limited to referencing the New-York dwelling Puerto Rican, as it had been in the Vintage Nuyorican phase. Nuyorican Newness evades definition—arguably it is an un-locatable concept. The ideology of the movement evades totalization. This is underlined in the 2004 exhibition by visual artist Adál hosted by the David Rockerfeller Center at Harvard University, which was entitled Out of Focus Nuyoricans. The exhibition consisted of 16 of photographic images of Nuyorican poets and artists, two of which were images of Pedro Pietri and Miguel Algarín:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The images take the form of identity photographs with their mug-shot quality, however they are un-focused, representing the evasive quality of the moniker ‘Nuyorican’. Each image is clearly labeled with the name of the featured individual, their artistic occupation, and the title ’Out of Focus Nuyorican’. By entitling each individual’s image as an, ’Out of Focus Nuyorican’, Adál implies that this phrase has some relevance as a descriptor of the image. However, the title simply re-states the information the viewer gleans from the title of the exhibition and the image itself, alluding to the futility of adding this label to the image. At the same moment as Adál undermines this phrase as a descriptor, in the accompanying comment to the exhibition, Pietri explicates the value that is gained from having an ‘out of focus’ identity, literally represented in the blurriness of Adál’s photographs. Pietri explains that there is a benefit to remaining uncategorized, as this liminality leaves the individuals free to understand how to write their own narrative. In the interview with the artist which closes the exhibition catalogue, Adál explicitly addresses the resonance of the out of focus photographs:

 

… [the viewers] are requested to learn to appreciate them [the subjects of the photographs] in their opacity, because just as Rev Pedro Pietri proclaims in the accompanying text to this catalogue, The Out of Focus Nuyoricans are proud “not to be figured out”, ever. In that way, the pristine blurriness in visual terms does not imply translucent subjectivities. The unsettling fuzziness of these portraits becomes the best antidote to the spectator’s possible distortions in their blind quest for figuring them out, for controlling the image.¹

 

Here Adál explains that it is not the personal ‘subjectivities’ of the artists that are translucent. Rather, the blurriness points to the spectator’s failure to categorize the identities of the featured artists according to common labels, with the visual blurriness representing the incapacity of the eye in de-coding the image. Therefore it is not the identity of the Nuyorican which is out of focus, but the mechanism of seeing that identity which is flawed. The Nuyorican identity, as presented by Adál here, challenges the mechanisms by which identity is categorized. How does this representation of Nuyorican Newness in the out of focus identity to the Nuyorican artists, which is un-locatable according to aesthetic and demographic labels, relate to the fixed, locatable space of the Nuyorican Poets Café in the Lower East Side?

 

Nuyorican Space

 

During the Vintage Nuyorican phase, the city space was integral to the construction of the Nuyorican identity. Lopez in his essay, “Nuyorican Spaces: Mapping Identity in a Poetic Geography” argues that Vintage Nuyorican poetry had an intimate relationship with the Lower East Side of Manhattan:

 

It constructs its surrounding space not as the setting of where the events of their poetry occur, but as the reason Nuyorican poetry happens.²

 

During the Vintage Nuyorican phase, the Lower East Side was densely populated by Puerto Rican immigrants. Their life in the city was the topic of Vintage Nuyorican poetry, as discussed in Segment 1. The city space, as Lopez argues, was therefore integral to the poetry. However, I will argue that as the city has a profound effect on the poetry, the poetry also changed the city space, rendering the poetry and a space complicit in a mutual relationship. Nuyorican poetry has affected the city space aesthetically, both physically in the mural art and the re-naming naming of a street in the Lower East Side, and metaphysically by contributing to the aesthetic tradition of the space. How can this permanent, physical relationship with the specific locus of the Lower East Side of Manhattan be reconciled with the inclusive ideology of Newness, as the Nuyorican artistic identity is extended beyond those people who are Puerto Rican living in New York City? Given the agile, morphous nature of the Nuyorican challenge to categorization, how can we understand the role of the Café space in this movement? Does the permanence of the space itself pose a challenge to the  nimble aesthetic and ideology of the movement? On the contrary, does the physical space of the Café provide a nucleal location from which un-locatable and un-totalizable concepts can take root? I will argue that the Nuyorican Poets Café serves as a base upon which Nuyorican rituals can be performed, acting as a foundation upon which the Nuyorican identity, aesthetic and ideology can be constructed. The importance of the Nuyorican Poets Café as a site is emphasized by the mural art and street names in the Lower East Side, rendering the Café a symbolic center for the Nuyorican movement as a whole. 

 

Home for Nuyorican Poetry

 

In the introduction to Survival Supervivencia, Algarín comments on the necessity of securing space as property in order to be free:

 

To stay free is not theoretical. It is to take over your immediate environment. Who owns the building in which you live?³

 

In ‘owning the building’ and ‘tak[ing] over [ones] immediate environment’, the individual is allowed to ‘stay free’ in literal terms – the owner of a building is never asked to leave his residence as a tenant might be. However Algarín's claim also implies that the ownership of space might have some impact on metaphysical freedom—granted ownership of the building at 365E 3rd Street,  subsequently named the Nuyorican Poets Café, the poets were free to construct artistic and political identities at their own volition. The Café has existed on the same space since 1974. Perhaps, ironically, the permanent space of the Café is a necessary foundation for the promotion of Nuyorican Newness, which by nature is transient and un-locatable. The Nuyorican Poets Café provides a space where Nuyoricans could exchange their art, and in doing this promotes a sense of identity attached to this notion of Newness or experimentalism. Vanessa Knights argues in her essay on postnational identities, “Cultural practices provide a means of organizing diasporic identity through a sense of belonging and group solidarity.”⁴ The Café, then, becomes the location for this organization of Nuyorican identity, and attending the performances on its stage is the prompt for the audience’s sense of belonging and group solidarity. In addition to serving as a physical base for the construction of Nuyorican identity, the Nuyorican Poets Café became a symbol of artistic, experimental Newness, as Prof Cruz-Malavé emphasized:

 

If you want to somehow really connect with the kinds of experimentalism that was the underground, then this becomes the site to do it. And by experimentalism, really, I’m talking about going beyond any particular genre.⁵

 

I propose that the Nuyorican Poets Café has become the site upon which one can identify with both the Nuyorican identity and the Nuyorican aesthetic, providing a permanent base for the un-locatable concept of Nuyorican Newness. How has the Café space facilitated this?

 

A Space for Ritual

            

             If the poetry performances at the Nuyorican Poets Café serve as a mechanism for identity creation in a group setting, we might consider the Café as a ritual site for the Nuyorican poet and audience. The rhetoric of ritual is important to Algarín's description of the Open Room—the name for the poetry exchange hosted each Wednesday at the Café:

 

The Open Room had found its ceremonial master in Lobo…his Nuyorican chant has become an inspirational and practical way to move people into a space where self expression and poetry can take place...the Open Room contains an ambience so rich in the folklore of Loisaida…⁶

 

This quote describes the weekly open-mic night at the Nuyorican Poets Café, which is the only program that has been in existence as long as the Café itself. The words ‘ceremonial’, ‘chant’ and ‘folklore’ are suggestive of the ritualistic role that the space of the Café and this tradition of the Open Room plays in Nuyorican culture. The description of the MC’s—Lobo’s—chant underlines its role as a signal for the audience to transcend the everyday moment, and to become attuned to the creative ‘space’ where ‘self-expression and poetry can take place’. It is particularly notable that this transcendence is explained using a spatial metaphor, pointing to the importance of the Café’s space as a site of potential for this moment of engagement. The regularity of the Open Room event is another ritualistic quality it enjoys—every week any poet is free to sign up and perform. The importance of this regularity is underlined by Algarín as he goes on to say:

 

The Open Room simply must happen every week, since the opportunity to come back the next week is what gives the poets the impetus to write that next poem…⁷

 

From the perspective of the poet and the audience, the Open Room serves a ritualistic function—performing and returning to re-perform, or attending the performance and returning for the next performance becomes a ritualistic cycle.

             In the Open Room, both the experience of performance and entertainment have ritualistic qualities. As Schechner argues in his book on Performance Theory, both elements are essential to the ritual itself:

 

Performance doesn’t originate in ritual any more than it originates in entertainment. It originates in the binary system efficacy-entertainment which includes the sub-set ritual-theater. From the beginning, logically as well as historically, both terms of the binary are required.⁸

 

The audience and the poets both play an essential part in the ritual-performance ’binary’ of the Open Room. In this circumstance, the ’efficacy’ of the Open Room is for the poets to practice their performances, whilst the audience attends for the ’entertainment’. The Nuyorican Poets Café , however, is another essential component to this ritual, as it facilitates both a space at which this event can occur, as well as ensuring the weekly regularity of the event. Without the Café space, this ritual would not be possible.

 

Permanence, Memory, Symbols

 

Given the role that the space plays in facilitating ritual-performance, the Nuyorican Poets Café becomes the symbolic center of the Nuyorican movement. The exterior of the Café’s building itself, as well as the surrounding streets of the Lower East Side all pay tribute to the Nuyorican Poets Café. Pedro Pietri, the founder of the Nuyorican movement and a founding member of the Nuyorican Poets Café is visually represented in the space of the Lower East Side. His face is pictured on a mural on the exterior of the Nuyorican Poets Café:      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The man standing outside the Nuyorican Poets Café in this photograph helps the viewer understand the scale of the mural. The image of Pedro Pietri’s face is over 15 feet tall, and dominates the walls of the buildings on 3^rd Street. This visual homage to the renowned Vintage Nuyorican poet, Pietri, pays credit to the poet’s profound effects on the Nuyorican movement, suitably placed on the exterior of the Café.

             Pietri’s influence on the Nuyorican movement is also memorialized by the name of the street which the Café is located on. The street was re-named “Rev. Pedro Pietri Way” in 2006; the sidebar to this page is an image of this street sign, and the re-naming ceremony is further examined at this page on the Nuyorican Poet’s Café website. The re-naming of the street is a memorial to the life and work of Rev. Pedro Pietri, and therefore acknowledges the significant contribution that he and the Nuyorican movement made to New York City. In more metaphorical terms, the naming of the street can be seen as a direct claim to the space, as a product of the poetry that Pietri produced and that which he inspired in other artists. By stepping foot onto the street in order to go to the Café, other artists and audience members follow the “Way” of Rev Pedro Pietri, both physically and metaphorically. Pietri’s poetry, which was so thematically concerned with the nature of life in New York City, can be seen to have ‘named’ his lived experience of the city through his poetic descriptions. Appropriately, his name (embodying the subversiveness of Nuyorican Newness in naming himself Reverend to express his irreverence for religion) will always be part of the names of the city streets, reminding the public of his own and the Nuyorican story. The commemoration of Pietri in terms of his work through the Nuyorican movement imbues Pietri with a symbolic status—the street name and his image prompt interest in the passer-by. This is an example of intentional commemorative value, as explained by Alois Regel:

 

Intentional commemorative value aims to preserve a moment in the consciousness of later generations, and therefore remain alive and present in perpetuity.⁹

 

In this case, the ‘moment’ of preservation is that which Pietri embodies in relation to the Nuyorican movement. As a founding member of the movement and major Vintage Nuyorican poet, the Nuyorican movement is a direct result of his legacy. However, his subversive characteristics on a personal level render him the ideal symbol of Nuyorican Newness—he constantly pushed metaphorical boundaries against religious authorities, the authority of monolingualism as well as challenging physical boundaries in his part in the Nuyorican political movement, as illustrated in Segment 1.

             As a result of this commemoration of Pietri’s life and work on Rev. Pedro Pietri Way, interest in the history of the Nuyorican movement and space of the Lower East Side has developed. This is demonstrated in the Yellow Arrow Project. A socio-artistic project, the Yellow Arrow project attempts to engage city dwellers or visitors in the specifics of the urban environment. Hundreds of yellow arrows are scattered around New York City, and anyone who has a cell phone can text the code to the number designated on the arrow, and will subsequently receive a phone call including a sound clip giving them relevant information on the location of the corresponding Yellow Arrow. As part of the video component to this project, titled ‘Secret NY’, two video clips were made featuring the Nuyorican movement. The following sound clip references Bimbo Rivas’s naming of the Lower East Side, ‘Loisaida’:

 

                          Go to this link, and click ‘go directly to the 5 borough map’, and view ‘Loisaida’

 

This clip presents the basics of the Nuyorican aesthetic, as well as featuring the Nuyorican Poet’s Café as an important hub for performance poetry. The following video features the Café more specifically. Here Algarín speaks about the history of the Café, and tells an anecdote about a poet, William Borrows, attending a performance there.

                         

                          Go to this link, and click ‘go directly to the 5 borough map’, and view ‘Nuyorican Poets Café’

 

Conclusions

 

             It has been argued, then, that the Nuyorican Poets Café is the permanent site upon which Nuyorican rituals can be performed. The Café plays an essential role in being the fixed locus upon which the evolving personal and artistic identities of the Nuyorican poets and audience are constructed, as well as the aesthetic and ideology of Newness. The influence of the Nuyorican movement extends beyond the Café and into the city space of the Lower East Side, endowing the Nuyorican Poets Café with a symbolic importance as the nucleus of the Nuyorican movement. The expansive qualities of Nuyorican Newness are metaphorically manifested at the Nuyorican Poets Café site, giving the movement a physical core without limiting or contradicting the aesthetic of Newness.

             How is the Café space used today? In line with the thematic tropes of the poetry, during the Vintage Nuyorican phase the diasporic identities of the poets and audience were emphasized and developed by the poetry performances. However, do Puerto Ricans living in New York City still attend the Café as a community, or is the public which attends the Café instead engaged in the subversive artistic mode? Corresponding to the changing aesthetic of Nuyorican poetry, the Café now predominantly attracts a public interested in the performance of the aesthetic of Newness, rather than those concerned with the condition of existing between the spaces and identities of New York and Puerto Rico. The Café thus serves as a “Mecca for performance poets”¹⁰—the Café, symbolically, is the magnet to which performance poets and fans alike are drawn, due to the site’s legendary status and permanent location in New York City.

             A residual complication to the discussion of the Café’s role as the nucleus for exchange of performance art is the rise of the internet, and specifically phenomenae of You Tube and MySpace, as raised in Segment 3. As demonstrated by this website, You Tube allows performances to be freely consumed by anyone in the world at any time, and MySpace allows poets to communicate—and arguably to perform—to a self-selected fan base located anywhere around the world, instantaneously and simultaneously. The web has the potential to become the prime location where poetry can be shared. Does this pose a challenge to the Nuyorican Poets Café in terms of its function as a facilitator of exchange? Could there be a moment where the Open Room is conducted live via video conference, allowing for the expansion of the participants and audience beyond that of New York City ?

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1:Adál, in artists comment on the exhibit in accompanying pamphlet to “Out of Focus Nuyoricans”, (David Rockerfeller Center, Harvard University 2002)

2:Edrik Lopez, “Nuyorican Spaces: Mapping Identity in a Poetic Geography” in Centro Journal, Spring XVII No.1, (City University New York, New York, 2005), 202.

3:Miguel Algarín, “Nuyorican Language” in Survival Supervivencia  (Arte Público Press, Houston, 2009), 11.

4:Vanessa Knights “Nostalgia and the Negotiation of Dislocated Identities: Puerto Rican Boleros in New York and Nuyorican Poetry” in Postnational Musical Identities: Cultural Production, Distribution, and Consumption in a Globalized Scenario ed Corona, Madrid-Gonzalez, (Lexington Books, New York, 2007), 82.

23:Interview by Elizabeth Brook with Arnaldo Cruz-Malave, July 25th 2009.

6: Miguel Algarín, Introduction in Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, ed Algarin and Holman, (Holt Paperbacks, New York, 1994), 3.

7:Ibid

8: Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, (Routledge, New York, 1988), 141.

9:Alois Regel, The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Origin, Trans Forster and Ghirardo, (Oppositions Press,  25,1982,) 38.

10:Sandra María Esteves, Introductory comments to live performance at the Nuyorican Poets Café, 29th August 2009.

Segment 4: Places and Spaces

“Newness...grows as people do and learn things never done or learned before…”—Miguel Algarín