rethinking diaspora: the in visible corporeal movements of nuyorican poetry .pdf (original) (raw)
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Latinx Talk, 2022
Having served as a judge, competitor, and eventually host and curator, she brings a singular perspective to the study of Nuyorican performance poetry. The introduction is itself a must-read for anyone who wants a concise and accessible history of the Cafe space and the tensions that performers and curators have navigated. The Queer Nuyorican is a welcome addition to queer-of-color critique and performance studies more broadly, as Jaime's text converses with Urayoán Noel's In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (2014),
This essay takes Miguel Piñero’s "A Lower East Side Poem" as a rhetorical starting point for understanding Nuyorican identity. Close textual analysis reveals that the poem functions personally (as Piñero’s last will and testament) and politically (as a description of how the urban landscape of The Lower East side shaped Nuyorican identity). Piñero’s version of Nuyorican identity is presented theoretically as a dynamic mix of vernacular cosmopolitan and indigenous concerns.
Migration and Decolonial Politics in Two Afro- Latino Poets: “Pachín” Marín and “Tato” Laviera
Francisco Gonzalo “Pachín” Marín (1863–1897), Afro-Puertorriqueño, exiled poet, typesetter, journalist, and revolutionary, belongs to an Afro- Latina/o tradition in the late nineteenth century that opened a pathway for Jesús Abraham “Tato” Laviera (1951–2013). Tato Laviera, like his largely forgotten predecessor Marín, wrote to transform political con- sciousness, in the tradition of the Nuyorican poets. This history of Marín and Laviera’s Afro-Latina/o migrant writing helps define multilingual, transamerican Latina/o literature. Reading across decades elucidates connections among Puerto Rican poets whose language and style differ, but whose preoccupations and politics reveal generative connections.
Affirming an Afro-Latin @ Identity: An Interview with Poet María Teresa (Mariposa) Fernández
María Teresa (aka Mariposa) Fernández is one of the most prominent voices to emerge among New York Puerto Rican poets and performers of the post 1970s generation. Born in the Bronx on July 23, 1971, she graduated from Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts in 1989. Mariposa attended New York University where she earned a bachelor’s degree (1995) in Women’s Studies and English, and a master’s degree (1998) in special education. She first published her signature poem “Ode to the Diasporican” in June 1994 in a special centerfold of New York Newsday edited by Pedro Pietri commemorating the Puerto Rican day parade. Mariposa is the author of Born Bronxeña: Poems on Identity, Love & Survival (2001). Her work has also been published in numerous anthologies and journals including The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2010), The Afro Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (2010), Def Poetry Jam’s Bumrush the Page, and Centro Journal. Mariposa’s signature poem, “Ode to a Diasporican” highlights the African diaspora into the Western hemisphere and the Puerto Rican diaspora into the United States which intensified with the occupation of the island. This poem pushes the boundaries of the restrictive bonds of ethnicity and national identification. Paul Gilroy’s understanding of the history of the black Atlantic world is useful here. He notes that while black people move continually as commodities, they engage in “various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship, providing a means to reexamine the problems of nationality, location, identity, and historical memory” (Gilroy, 1993, 16). Mariposa’s poetry and performances enact the diasporic intimacy that is a distinct feature of black Atlantic cultural production. Her work is part of the transnational and intercultural black Atlantic creative expression that strives towards freedom and belonging. In her poetry, Mariposa affirms an Afro-Latin@ identity and more specifically an Afro-Puerto Rican identity. While the term Afro-Latin@ gained circulation in the 1990s, it was the Puerto Rican writers in New York during the 1960s who made up the most substantial community of Afro-Latin@s. Nuyorican writers such as Piri Thomas, Pedro Pietri, and Sandra María Esteves articulate a strong sense of black cultural identity. As part of a more recent generation of writers who grew out of the Nuyorican tradition, Mariposa’s writing further complicates notions of Blackness by challenging the African-American and English language understanding of Blackness in the United States. In a society that has come to understand Latinidad and Blackness as mutually exclusive, the work of Afro-Latin@ poets and performers defy those concepts. In describing the Afro-Latin@ experience, cultural critic Juan Flores takes a cue from W. E. B. Du Bois and uses the term “triple-consciousness” to define the three-pronged web of affiliations as a Latin@, Black, and American: “three souls, three thoughts, three un-reconciled strivings; three warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (Flores, 2010, 15). In this interview, Mariposa talks about her development as a poet and a performer. She notes that her family history follows the trajectory of Puerto Rican migration from the provinces on the island to San Juan and then to New York in search of work. She speaks of U.S. Black feminist writers as the primary influences on the development of her political and racial consciousness. Mariposa draws from African diaspora cultures of the Caribbean and the United States in her work, enriching our understanding of Blackness and the cultural production of the black Atlantic world.
Afro-Latinx Intersections: Nuyorican and Afro-Brazilian Art and Activism in New York City
American Art Journal, 2022
In 1981, the Nuyorican artist Jorge Soto Sánchez (1947-87) argued for the existence of a "Caribbean aesthetic" from the United States in an article published by the New York-based interdisciplinary journal Caribe. 1 Recognizing the impact of migration, colonialism, and urban inequalities on the production of art, Soto named several artists with Latin American ancestry who, in his opinion, contributed to this aesthetic. He included Abdias do Nascimento (1914-2011), an Afro-Brazilian painter and activist residing in the United States from 1968 to the early 1980s, who was an active participant in New York's Caribbean American and African American art scenes. 2 A year earlier, in 1980, Caribe had dedicated an entire issue to Afro-Brazilian resistance and featured an article by Nascimento discussing antiracist activism and its expressions in visual art. 3 Nascimento exhibited his paintings of Afro-Brazilian deities mixed with U.S. Black Power symbolism that year at Taller Boricua, a Nuyorican activist art organization whose members included Soto, solidifying his place in the city's artist-activist community. Informed by political debates, exhibitions, and protests in New York City, Soto, Nascimento, and the Nuyorican artist Marcos Dimas (b. 1943) created art in the context of a burgeoning Afro-Latinx aesthetic of resistance from the late 1960s to early 1980s. Latinx is a gender-neutral term that identifies the ethnicity (not the race) of people of Latin American descent in the United States. 4 Rather than influencing one another or making derivative imagery, the artists created conversations and works that present a collective response to the needs of an Afro-Latinx community, establishing activist solidarity based on social affinities. 5 The three artists, I argue, depicted African diasporic religious symbolism from Latin America to protest racism in the Americas, producing a new visual language that was at once iconographically experimental and politically potent. Focusing on exchanges in artistic production, I examine artists' depictions of flags as well as Indigenous and African-derived religions such as Candomblé in Brazil and Santería in the United States and the Caribbean. Their art subverted racist perceptions of national identity and belonging in the Americas, while also inscribing Afro-Latinx into the city's urban landscape to counter racial and social inequalities. The artists' work and crossing paths evidence their contributions to an Afro-Latinx aesthetic, which is related to, but also distinct from, existing histories of Latinx art. Afro-Latinx Intersections Nuyorican and Afro-Brazilian Art and Activism in New York City Building on the groundbreaking work of the art historians E. Carmen Ramos, Taína Caragol, Yasmin Ramirez, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto and their call to examine the multiplicity of Latinx art, I unveil the intersections of Puerto Rican and Afro-Brazilian U.S. post-civil rights expressions of resistance. Like my predecessors, my goal, in part, is to promote a broader understanding of Latinx art and, by extension, U.S. art. Caragol and Ramirez have contributed foundational studies about Soto and Dimas's Nuyorican art. 6 Nascimento's painting has been examined through the lens of Afro-Brazilian art, largely eschewing his engagement with transnational Black and Latinx sociopolitics in the United States. 7 In positioning Nascimento in the milieu of Afro-Latinx artistic production instead of an exclusively Brazilian context, I present his work not only through a U.S. postcivil rights lens but also in relation to a transnational community of Latinx artists interested in similar issues: antiracism; the multiplicity of identity; redefining the meaning of citizenship and nationhood; and providing access to art exhibitions and education for working-class Afro-Brazilian, African American, Afro-Latinx, and Latinx communities. Histories of Latinx and U.S. art marginalize Black cultural producers and African-derived imagery. Relatedly, these narratives have often flattened artists' translational experiences and the multiplicity of identities that they contribute to Latinx. For instance, the Afro-Cuban American painter Emilio Cruz and the Afro-Caribbean American artist and critic Avel de Knight have been described as African American artists. 8 Redressing this erasure of identity demands in-depth formal analyses of and archival research on Afro-Latinx art and artists. 9 As the Latinx studies scholars Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, Jennifer A. Jones, and Tianna S. Paschel have explained, "it is the way in which Latinidad has been constructed as sometimes Black, or aspirationally white, on the one hand, and nonwhite, mestizo, or brown, on the other, that has precluded, by definition, the possibility of a Latinidad that is compatible with Blackness." 10 To distance themselves from such a definition, which mimics racist tropes in Latin American countries, the authors focus on migration and immigration as central to the construction of Latinx identity's complexity. Rather than maintaining nationalistic categories, I employ the term "Afro-Latinx" to argue that U.S. artists with both Latin American and African heritage illustrated their belonging-within U.S. citizenship and political agency, New York's artistic communities, as well as Latinx and African diasporic identities-through transnationalism, Black liberation, and resistance. Brazilians in the United States like Nascimento occupy an ambiguous place in notions of Latinx identities; in particular, Nascimento's permanent return to Brazil in 1985 complicates his inclusion under a Latinx umbrella that has, historically, only included artists who remain in the United States. Yet, by centering his artwork produced in the United States as Afro-Latinx art, I insist that he offers a major contribution to the artistic production of Latin American-descended artists in the United States and, by extension, allows us to reframe such debilitatingly limited categories. By emphasizing the fluidity and multiplicity of the artists' experiences and artistic production, I propose a definition of Afro-Latinx artistic production marked by artists' shared experiences and ideas grounded in political resistance and African-diasporic symbolism. Soto, Dimas, and Nascimento had similar experiences with Latin American racism and identity discourses that privilege whiteness, commonly associating it