Just
like including every migrant community from Japan to Sri Lanka under an overarching
"Asian" identity is problematic, clubbing all immigrants from Latin America and the
Caribbean under the broad umbrella of "Hispanics" is equally reductive. In his essay
"The Structuring of Puerto Rican Identity in the US," (From Divided
Borders, 1993) Juan Flores argues that the Puerto Rican identity in particular is
distinct from the Chicano or Mexican identity.
Flores argues that, while
Chicanos find an affinity with Native Americans, Puerto Ricans are more closely aligned with the
Black community in the US. This no doubt has to do with their respective racial and cultural
roots. The observations of his Chicano friend Francisco bolster Flores's own long-held views on
the subject:
He heard Nuyorican poetry and salsa, and
detected more Afro-American language and rhythms than anything familiar to him in Chicano
expression.
But how does this distinct identity develop?
Flores traces the development of the unique identity of the Puerto Rican diaspora, or Nuyoricans
(a portmanteau of the terms New York and Puerto Rico), through four important moments. I'll
first examine these moments and then try to apply them to the life of the Nuyorican poet
Pietri. Of course, these moments don't always flow in a strict sequence in an
individual life, as we will see in Pedro's case. There are always idiosyncratic overlaps as well
as chronological blips.
Coming back to Flores's essay, he structures the
contemporary Afro-allied Nuyorican identity along four crucial moments. The first he traces to
the immigrant's arrival in the US. This is a moment of alienation and abandonment from their own
cultural context and a disillusionment with their new home, America. The reality of their bleak,
poverty-ridden existence hits the immigrant hard:
Prior to
any cultural associations or orientations, there are the abandoned buildings, the welfare lines,
the run-down streets, the frigid winter nights with no heat.
The second is the idealization of the homeland left behind. This longing for Puerto
Rico, Flores notes, has more to with a psychological and spiritual dislocation rather than
geographical distance. In this state, Puerto Rico appears as a land of perfect harmony,
representing the wholeness the migrant seeks. Flores quotes Pedro's poetry to show this
idealized representation of the homeland. In the poem, Pedro first details the bleakness of
immigrant life for "Juan, Miguel, Milagros, Olga" and then exhorts them to rise from
the dead and be transported to a beautiful place:
where
beautiful people sing
and dance and work together
where the wind is a
stranger
to miserable weather conditions
where you do not need a
dictionary
to communicate with your people. (From Puerto Rican Obituary
1971)
The third moment is "located back
in New York." Flores terms this moment the immigrant's psychological re-entry into America,
when they begin to assimilate into their new homeland. However, Flores notes this assimilation
is not as much a function of an accommodating environment, as of the Puerto Rican diaspora's
"deliberate self-insertion into the urban landscape."
The migrant
begins to assert their own ethnic identity as well as recognize the points in which they can
connect with the urban culture around them: one of these connections is Spanish-English
bilingualism. What confronted the Nuyorican initially, now becomes a sign of "potential
enrichment and advancement."
Lastly is the moment of reaching out to
communities with which Nuyoricans feel the closest proximity, "not only spatially, but
because of congruent cultural experience." For Nuyoricans, these communities are firstly
Black Americans and then communities from the Caribbean and Latin America. However, this
cultural connection should not be mistaken for a way to assimilate into the dominant surrounding
culture. Rather, it is a means of "growing together," a means for these communities to
form their own vibrant, synergistic bonds.
To apply these moments to the life
of Pedro Pietri (1944€“2004), I have referenced a detailed biographical interview, which can be
found
Pedro is credited as a co-founder of the Nuyorican movement, a movement of poets, singers, and
other artists that gave voice to the emerging Puerto Rican identity. A master of the
spoken-poetry form celebrating the rich Puerto Rican tradition of oral poetry, Pedro also helped
found the Nuyorican Poets Caf©, a place where Nuyorican poets could read and perform verse, hip
hop, music, theater, and other art forms.
At the age of three, Pedro moved to
the US with his extended family, the move an unfortunate consequence of "Operation
Bootstrap," which refers to the rapid industrialization of Puerto Rico after World War II.
Though intended as a policy to turn Puerto Rico into a developed nation, Operation Bootstrap has
been heavily criticized for breaking down the island's flourishing agrarian economy and leading
to widespread unemployment and emigration. Forced to sell his land, migrate to America a pauper,
and "disillusioned with this question of the American dream stuff," Pedro's
grandfather committed suicide in 1948.
On New Year's Eve of the following
year, Pedro's father, unfamiliar yet with the severe New York winter, went out inadequately
clad, contracted double pneumonia, and died soon after. Thus, the bleakness of their new life
hits Pedro's family very hard and mirrors disenchantmentthe first moment of Flores's
essay.
Furthermore, as Pedro grows up and deals with discrimination, he
begins to build the idea of an idealized homeland. He describes a school teacher who forbids him
from speaking Spanish, threatening to send him "back to Puerto Rico" if he doesn't
speak in English. Pedro grows up in the "housing projects" and, despite earning a
high-school diploma, ends up doing blue collar jobs anyway. However, a job at the Columbia
University library exposes him to both Spanish and English literature, which is a turning point
in his life:
I read everything I got my hands on: I read
Faulkner, I read the Wasteland, I read everybody, everyone.
But shortly after, he is drafted into the Vietnam War. His experience in Vietnam is
extremely traumatic. It is after his return from the war that Pedro processes the events in his
life and writes his most famous book of poems: Puerto Rican Obituary. In
the book, he details the horrors of immigrant life and calls out for a return to the spiritual
homeland of Puerto Rico. Through this sequence of events, we see Flores's second moment play
out.
A parallel to Flores's third moment of cultural assertion can be found
in the development of Pedro's poetic sensibility and his use of Spanglish in his poems. Pedro
discovers a "point of enrichment" (Flores) in the very English which was his nemesis
in school and uses his knowledge of English literature to enrich his writing. But studying in
the English medium has removed Pedro's felicity in writing in Spanish. When he visits the real
Puerto Rico after 25 years, he experiences another cultural dislocation: he is not considered a
Puerto Rican writer since he doesn't write in Spanish. This causes dissonance within him
initially, but Pedro overcomes it by writing in Spanglish, owning his bilingualism and asserting
his Nuyorican identity.
Finally, Pedro is greatly influenced by Black and
Caribbean artists and rhythms as well as the oral tradition of the Caribbean and Africa. His
religiosity too has more of a link with African cultures than with Christianity, a point he
specifies. Though his mother raised him as a Christian, protecting him from the "voodoo,
black magic, the African religions" she herself grew up with, Pedro finds an affinity with
these very cultural practices:
I like to hold candles, I
like the incense, the dances€¦That has always been in me. Christianity just interfered with
that.
Thus, though his alliance with aspects of Black and
Caribbean culture, we see Pedro enact Flores's fourth moment of "growing
together."
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