758 The American Century: Literature since 1945group. He uses a harsh, demotic language, the street speech of African-Americans
and Puerto Ricans in the barrio, to reflect the problems and the pride of puertorriquenos.
In a key text for Nuyorican poetry, Puerto Rican Obituary (1973), Pietri even creates
a mock epic about the Puerto Rican community. The image of communal death is
deployed here to denounce the suffering and the failure of everyone in the barrio;
men and women have died, the poet declares, and will continue to die, “Always broke /
Always owing / Never knowing / that they are a beautiful people.” Yet the poem
concludes in a hopeful vein with a vision of some place, some symbolic inner space,
where puertorriquenas can achieve peace. That place is aquí, “here,” within each
Puerto Rican man and woman. “Aquí Se habla Español all the time / Aquí you salute
your flag first,” the poet insists. “Aquí Qué Pase Power is what’s happening / Aquí to
be called negrito / means to be called LOVE.” It is a vision of possible redemption that
measures its distance from mainstream millennialism, the American dream, precisely
through its bilingualism, the poetic use of English and Spanish – and what has been
called Spanglish, a mixture of the two.
Tato Laviera (1951–) is another Puerto Rican poet who mixes languages to register
his mixed inheritance and uses a powerful orality to capture the rhythms of the
street. Laviera has published several volumes, including La Carreta Made a U-Turn
(1976), Mainstream Ethics (1988), and Mixturao and Other Poems (2008), but he has
always produced poems that are meant to be sung or spoken. He celebrates the
Puerto Rican community, and his own Puertoricanness. However, he also insists on
the presence of a new ethnic identity, the product of a convergence with other
minority groups: with New York City as the exemplary space in which this cultural
mixing, or mestijaze, occurs. “We gave birth to a new generation,” Laviera announces
in “AmeRican” (1985), and the title of this poem is the term he uses to describe this
“new generation,” a new America with the accents of many cultures. In his own way,
Laviera is rewriting the line and vision of Whitman. His poems often have the
oracular sweep of “Song of Myself,” with Laviera stirring in new influences, such as
the oral traditions of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean music.
They equally often proclaim the arrival of a new dispensation in the new world, just
as Whitman did. But this “new america, humane america, admired america, loved
america, harmonious america” that Laviera conjures with insistent, driving rhythms,
speaks in the tongues of many languages, far more than even Whitman ever
imagined: among them, “the soul gliding talk of gospel boogie music” and “new
words in spanglish tenements, fast tongue moving street corner ‘que corta’ talk being
invented at the insistence of a smile!” By comparison, Victor Hernández Cruz
(1949–) is a more formal, introspective poet, whose work registers the influence of
such different aesthetic movements as surrealism, concrete poetry, and minimalism.
He is attentive to the subtleties of wordplay, as the title of his 1982 collection
By Lingual Wholes illustrates – alluding as it does to bilingualism and the warring
concepts of totality and absence. And he is interested in literary experiment.
By Lingual Wholes, for instance, is a collage in which visual signs become part of the
meaning and poetry and prose are intertwined with haikus, short stories, prose
poems, one-word poems, and an empty appendix. Nevertheless, Cruz is just asGGray_c05.indd 758ray_c 05 .indd 758 8 8/1/2011 7:31:43 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 43 PM