Three Nuyorican Heroes: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

Francisco Cabanillas Bowling Green State University

In memory of Alfredo Matilla and Pedro Pietri

Introduction
If the Nuyorican movement, like other movements underscoring modernity, is based on an epic, in this essay I look at three Nuyorican heroes, of all them poets, in order to map out their trajectories, and, moreover, to establish who among them comes up with the most convincing performance. To determine what the most convincing Nuyorican performance means, I make two grounding.references-the first one to a leading Nuyorican critic (Juan Flores), and the second one to an established Caribbean "cartogra- pher" (Antonio Benitez Rojo).
From Flores's structuring of Nuyorican identity, the stage callep "branching out" becomes of paramount importance here, for it allows us to view the Nuyorican performance not only as a viable form of agency, that is to say, as a sound response to the newness that being Nuyorican implied in the 1960s and 1970s, but also as an agency that, in the process of self-preservation, goes beyond itself. "Branching out" entails articulating Nuyorican identity (and performance) in an interplay with others, and, also, it im- plies a critique of mainstream paradigms of modern subjectivity (191-92).
From Benitez Rojo's Caribbean, in addition to underscoring the sense of theatricality in which he inscribes the ontological experience (xv), the interplay between premodernity, modernity, and postmodernity that makes up the Caribbean interplay, allows us to argue this about the Nuyorican performance: that it, too, as a Puerto Rican rhizome, underscores summation, as opposed to subtraction, in its mathematical register. In other words, the Nuyorican hero operates on the premise of critical additions-as in Arcadio Diaz Quinones' brega-instead of uncritical accumulations or categorical exclusions.
Both Flores and Rojo's paradigms underscore ag~cy as a critical way of being in the flux of the world; a way of changing in relation with others, of negotiating difference for the sake of continuity in the midst of change. Both of these paradigms ground the Nuyorican hero, whose drama between modernity and premodernity in the context of New York we approach as it unfolds in the poetry of Victor Hernandez Cruz, Miguel Pinero, and Pedro Pietri-the three Nuyorican heroes which we dubbed as the good, the bad, and the ugly, respectively. In a nutshell, the most convincing Nuyorican performance will be that which manages to critically articulate difference as opposed to eradicating it;

The Nuyorican Hero
Between 1960s and 1970s, when Nuyorican culture came of age, many things were going on. For instance, as seen in the documentary Pa'lante (1996), a critical celebration and examination of the movement, we glimpsed at how political activism at the time synchronized the musical and the poetic in the struggle to center Nuyorican culture. Then, activists, musicians, and poets (many of whom performed their poetry) became the heroes driving the movement forward. In some cases, as in the case of Felipe Luciano's, the poet was more of an activist with direct ties to the musicians.
Stemming from this, two propositions can be underscored about the emblematic Nuyorican hero during this early, epic stage. First, its relationship with popular Puerto Rican/Caribbean culture, from which activists, musicians, and poets drew in order to redraw an image of Puerto Rican culture inscribed in the context of New York. Interestingly, the centrality of popular culture, with its emphasis on orality, did not translate into a negation of literature, because of the reading tradition inscribed in the tobacco culture that grounded the Nuyorican generation. This tradition, brought to New York by the parents of the first Nuyoricans, made literature a cqmmunal experience among tobacco workers in Puerto Rico, as Faythe Turner pointed out, among many others, in her introduction to Puerto Rican Writers at Home in the US (1991). The case of Victor Hernandez Cruz is important here, for he has defined this influence in two of his latest publications, Red Beans (1991) and Panoramas (1997), as a foundational presence in his poetry .

Secondly, as an emblematic Nuyorican performance, the hero underscores the links between the indiyidual and the community. In this regard, both the self-sufficiency of the modern subject, as well as the reciprocity that characterizes Angel Quintero Rivera's "tropical" sociology (32-86), marks the Nuyori- can hero. The fact that the Nuyorican hero is driven by premodern reciprocity does not translate into a weak sense of self, as commonly conceived. On the contrary, as in the case of Pedro Pietri, where the poetic persona took completely over the individual, transforming life into art, erasing the line between performance and everyday life, the centrality of the poet underscores the drive of the subject, whose strong individuality emerges in relationship with the group-thus, Pietri called himself "el reverendol Rev- erend."
In order to narrow the Nuyorican hero down to the models of the good, the bad, and the ugly, we draw from Miguel Algarin's 1975 definition of Nuyorican poetry. What Algarin called "dusmic," "evolutionary," and "outlaw" poetry, we call "dusmic hero," "evolutionary hero," and "outlaw hero." And this we feel we can do because Algarin, himself the theoretical hero of the group, defined the poet in heroic terms-although he called the poet a prince. 'The poet blazes with fire for the self. He juggles with words. He lives risking each moment. Whatever he does, in every way he moves, he is a prince of the inner city jungle. He is the philosopher of the sugar cane that grows between the cracks of concrete sidewalks" (11 ).

In Algarin's mapping of Nuyorican poetry, we find both the modern dimension of the hero- "rebellious," "contentious," whose "questioning personality wins out"-as well as the premodern dimen- sion, grounded on reciprocity. "The poet sees his function as a troubadour. He tells the tale of the streets to the streets. The people listen. They cry, they laugh, they dance as the troubadour opens up and tunes his voice and moves his pitch and rhythm to the high tension of 'bomba truth'" (11).
If dusmic poetry "defines the process of transforming aggression being directed at you by another person (or, more generally, society) into your strength" (Algarin 12), the dusmic hero (the good) transforms reality into a politics of love and poetry. This we argue in terms of Hernandez Cruz' Snaps (1968). If evolutionary poetry involved "adjusting the outside to the inside" (Algarin 89), the evolutionary hero (the bad) over-adjusts the inside at the expense of the outside-which it transgresses. This we argue in relation to Miguel Pinero. If outlaw poetry "aggresses against authority because [it] realizes that that is [its] power" (Algarin 27), the outlaw hero (the ugly), like Pedro Pietri, aggresses against reason- establishing in its place a metaphysics of the absurd.

Victor Hernandez Cruz: The Good (the Lyrical)
In calling Hernandez Cruz a dusmic hero, we draw from Alfredo Matilla's early essay, "Broken English: Puerto Rican Poetry in New York" (1971). Instead of saying, as does Matilla, that in Hernandez Cruz' poetry "there is only 'poetry'" (303), we say that in Snaps everything involves asummative politi9s of culture. In doing so, we aim to give back to Hernandez Cruz' early work a political edge critics have grown. to overlook.
In a nutshell, because of Matilla's early essay, because Hernandez Cruz is not included in the emblematic anthology of Algarin and Pinero, Nuyorican Poetry (1975), and because Eugene Mohr regar- ded his poetry in The Nuyorican Experience (1980) as fundamentally non-Nuyorican-arguing that he did not "share the ideological and aesthetic commitments of poets who are self-consciously Nuyorican" (104)-the view that Hernandez Cruz' work constitutes a self-centered, narcissistic literature, does not do justice to the work of the first Puerto Rican poet to publish in 1968 the first "official" book of Nuyorican poetry, Snaps. .In fact, as Efrain Barradas argued six years,after Matilla (1977), there is indeed a political edge to Hernandez Cruz' poetry-which is related to the aestheticism that critics have misread as political indifference.
Barradas' point is too strong to ignore it: he argued that, like XIX century Puerto Rican nationalist poetry, idealization in Hernandez Cruz' poetry involved a "political act" against colonial supremacy (68). .
Instead of talking about escapism, Ba.rradas argued the opposite: that Nuyorican idealization in general, and Hernandez Cruz' in particular-the flight to the feminine origins of an imagined paradisiacal ontology, Puerto Rico-is strategic instead of reactionary (68-69), because it entails a dynarnic that confronts mar- ginalization and underrepresentation.
Similarly, it can be argued that Hernandez Cruz' marked aestheticism-"the pictorial brilliance" about which Mohr talked (104), "the introspective line" that Matilla argued as "eclipsing" social commit- ment, "seeing things with a photographic poet's eye, his message falls short of striking a balance betweenpoetry and the historical moment in which he lives" (Matilla 303)-is a strategy to counter colonial su- premacy with seemingly innocuous forms of poetic escapism.
As a dusmic hero, Hernandez Cruz beautifies the ugly, a cultural politics that turns aggression into aestheticism, as in the homonymous poem "Snaps": "Monday night / the / winters / grow colder /colder that this / just the projects / on fridays / so good / sometimes the moon / so clear / head to the river / soft noise / of moving water / a ship passing / tugboats / so near / the bright lights/ talking to us/ in red and blue (Snaps 97).
In order to argue that aestheticism in Hernandez Cruz' poetry involves a politics of culture, and that his literary narcissism has a political edge, we analyze "today is a day of great joy," arguably the most idealistic poem in Snaps-certainly, the most narcissistic and self-reflective. In this metapoem, notwithstanding its militaristic metaphor, poetry is construed as the supreme source of agency: "a true poet aiming / poems & watching things fall to the ground" (29). The poem argues that poetic agency constitutes the ultimate ethics; thus, when poetry happens, "it is a great day" (29). In addition, the poem argues that this good/beautiful dimension of poetry has already happened to the poetic voice-to which the "today" in the title refers. "True" greatness has already touched this poet.
But before reaching this high stage of poetic bliss, the poem addresses the mundane; when poetry takes over everything and poems inundate the postal system, when, as masculine poetry, "women become pregnant / by the side of poems," when poems "fall down to movie crowds" and "bars" (29). In this mundane dimension, poetry also becomes openly political, as "when poems start to / knock down walls to / choke politicians / when poems scream & / begin to break the air" (29). When all this happens, the dusmic hero underscores: "that is the time of / true poets / that is / the time of greatness" (29).
From the biological (reproduction), the social (commerce, entertainment, night life), the political (crooks), ttie cosmological ("break the air"), to the metaliterary (true poetry), this poem is nothing but an attempt to strike a broad balance, contrary to Matilla's claim, between poetry and history, between the present and the future, for the sake of transforming negativity into joy. True to the idealism of the 60s, the poem is but another version of the "all you need is love" of the decade, with the significant difference that in Hernandez Cruz' case, love is defined as poetry. We can agree or disagree with that idea, but it would be difficult to neglect the fact that in this idealization of poetry, as naive as it may seem, there is an explicit political register.
Matilla's claim that in Hernandez Cruz' poetry "there is only poetry," needs adjustment, for the aestheticism of the dusmic hero is summative (the biological, the social, the political, the cosmological, the literary) instead of reductive.

Miguel Pinero: The Bad (the Transgressor) "-
To draw a picture of Pinero as an evolutionary hero, one who adjusts the outside to the inside, we start off with a reference to Jorge Ichaso's film, Pinero (2000), in order to underscore the relationship the director traces, whether superficially or with some detail, between the outside and the inside in Pinero's biography. In this regard, what the film argues seems uncontroversial: Pinero's move to adjust the outside to the inside became self-destructive. In that journey, the evolutionary hero crossed all the borders, and transgressed all the rules. Pinero became really bad. As he himself stated, "I am the philosopher of the criminal mind" (Turner 132). To secure the inside, Pinero destroyed the outside-as it were, he ultimately transgressed the law of his own body. Pinero evolved too much and too fast.
From self-destruction, thus, we need to step down a notch. From Ichaso's film we move to Pinero's emblematic poem, "A Lower East Side Poem," where, almost a decade before it happened, he envisioned the celebration that was to follow his death-an ontological tribute to the streets he declared his essential home. This is how Pinero put it: "Just once before I die / I want to climb up on a / tenement sky / to dream my lungs out till/I cry / then scatter my ashes thru the Lower East Side ... From Houston to 14th Street / from Second Avenue to the mighty D / here the hustlers & suckers meet / the faggots and freaks will all get / high / on the ashes that have been scattered / thru the Lower East Side" (Turner 131).
Pinero's wish became reality in 1988, when he died of cirrhosis (some say of AIDS) at the age of forty-two, and his friends made sure that reality honored the poem. His ashes will forever substantiate the streets of the Lower East Side, his adoptive-turned-foundational island, which he chose, among other things, to straighten his score with Puerto Rico, the island-myth that disappointed Pinero in 1974, as reality shattered mythology.
In addition to being the ultimate adjustment of the streets to the inside (ashes), "A Lower East Side Poem" registers a self-destructive move in the hero's evolution. For it is in this poem that the poet
explicitly rules out Puerto Rico as the geography for death. "I don't wanna be buried in Puerto Rico I I don't wanna rest in long island cemetery" (Turner 132). Pinero adjusted the outside (now Puerto Rico) to the inside (his ultimate Nuyoricanness) in a reductive manner, transgressing, as it were, his own cultural, New York/Puerto Rican body. A degree of Pinero's heroism resides in that over-adjustment of the inside to deal with the outside, which is why his appetite for drugs was as big as his inner thirst.
In that final funerary adjustment of the outside to the inside, where Pinero's ashes substantiate the outside, Pinero cuts off one of his Puerto Rican cultures-a plural Frances Aparicio does not underestimate in Listening to Salsa (1998)-as a way of underscoring his Nuyoricanness in philosophical and political opposition to Puerto Rico, symbolically severing ties in the poem he wrote after his visit in 1974, "This is Not the Place Where I was Born." Because of the way reality had shattered the stories his mother had told him about the island; because of the U.S. colony he encountered in 1974, and because of the way Puerto Ricans imagined Nuyoricans, Pinero chose the Lower East Side as the ontological resting home. Thus, in "This is Not the Place Where I was Born," Pinero stated this about Puerto Rico: "this slave blessed land I were nuyoricans come in search of spiritual identity I are greeted with profanity" (Gonzalez 114).
In refusing to go back to the origins, Pinero's inversion of the nationalistic, telluric tradition of returning to the native soil, endorses, nevertheless, its subtractive logic; the evolutionary hero transcended the geography of the island, but kept the essentialism, the monism of the nationalist heroes who demand homogeneity at death. Pinero's eschatological return to the streets of New York at the explicit exclusion of Puerto Rico-"I wanna be near the stabbing shooting / gambling fighting & unnatural dying I & new birth crying I so please when I die ... I don't take me far away I keep me near by I take my ashes and scatter them thru out I the Lower East Side" (Turner 132)-is a twisted endorsement of that patriarchal tradition, and it is also a transgression of the Nuyorican idealization of the island that fueled Hernandez Cruz' cultural politics. .

Pedro Pietri: The Ugly (the Philosopher)
Even though Pinero regarded himself as the "philosopher of the criminal mind," few would doubt that the honor of being considered the Nuyorican philosopher belongs to Pietri, whose philosophy Efrain Barradas has approached as a coherent unfolding of propositions logically displayed in poetic, narrative, and theatrical forms. With Pietri, Nuyorican literature comes with an additional baggage: a Nuyorican philosophy of the absurd.. . .
In general terms, Barradas' approach to Pietri's philosophy makes two important points. First, that Pietri's philosophy moves around two gravitational forces-the absurd as the social condition created within the Puerto Rican diaspora from the 1950 to the 1970s; and the abSurd as a cosmological condition. Secondly, that, ultimately, Pietri's philosophy, particularly in its theatrical complexity, posits a left-wing take on the absurd (155). From Pietri's first book of poetry, Puerto Rican Obituary (1973), to his second, Traffic Violations (1983), Barradas underlined this key change: Pietri went from viewing the absurd in social terms (in the first book), to making it a cosmological condition (in the second book).
It is at this level of Pietri's philosophy-that contained within poetry-that we stop to argue, like Pinero's transgressions, that Pietri's heroism is subtractive.
Pietri's heroism can be understood in two ways. First, as the profound social truth of the Puerto Rican diaspora, a proposition that, from the Nuyorican condition, grows into a metaphysical truth-the absurd becomes universal. Second, Pietri's heroism becomes a privilege for the poet, the only subject who can "save us" from the absurd, because the poet's thought "reproduces" the cosmological chaos (Barradas 137-38). In Pietri's philosophy, only the poet can deal with the metaphysical truth.
As a metaphysical proposition, the absurd in Traffic Violations (1983) brings about an important subtraction in Pietri's philosophy. For one thing, love, even if we call it ethnic self-love, the one contention that kept social chaos in Puerto Rican Obituary (1973) from becoming cosmological disorder, no longer maintains any redemptive value. In the absence of love, Traffic Violations installs a sense of humor that never develops into laughter or happiness. Nothing more distant from to the so-called "irreverent happiness" associated with popular Caribbean cultures, than Pietri's metaphysical sense of humor. Pietri's second book is seductive and witty, but it is at the expense of reciprocity, a key "tropical" and Nuyorican sociality. In the absence of love, Pietri's poetry reaches a problematic dimension, as if that stage of philosophical heroism were in direct elimination of the Nuyorican marks, as if metaphysical ~ grandiosity were a form of self-mutilation.

To do away with love in the Nuyorican context is to collide sooner or later with the dusmic hero, whose purpose it is to transform chaos and aggression into beauty and strength; it is also to contest the evolutionary hero, whose purpose is to strike a balance between the outside and the inside. But moreover, to do away with love is to demand the presence of the poet as the sine qua non intermediary, a problematic proposition in the Nuyorican context, where popular music has established such an important cultural politics-where, indeed, popular musicians were, as stated in Nuyorican Poetry (1975), barrio super heroes. In the process to elevate his philosophy from the social to the cosmological, Pietri, who called himself "Reverend Pedro," dares to cut off not -only love but also music. In Traffic Violations he does that in the most openly defiant, ugliest way: Pietri dedicated the book to the musical group Los Panchos, with whom Traffic Violations has absolutely no connection, other than a profound negation of Los Panchos' sociality.

Conclusion
In looking at how the dusmic hero idealized poetry without excluding politics; how the evolutionary hero asserted his ontology at the expense of one of its cultures; and how the outlaw-hero negated "tropical" sociology, we risk the following conclusion: the dusmic hero came up with the most convincing Nuyorican performance, because in a critical way it managed to articulate the fragments that came upon its Nuyoricanness, and also because the dusmic hero asserted both the tenacity of the modern hero- which both Pinero and Pietri stressed-and the reciprocity of the premodern troubadour-which both Pinero and Pietri downplayed; the first in relation to Puerto Rico and the second in relation to love.
Translated)nto Nuyorican terms, the relationship between the good, the bad, and the ugly comes down to this. First, as far as the poet is concerned, both the good and the ugly privilege its centrality- however, there are also important differences. For instance, the centrality the poet occupies in the poetry of Hernandez Cruz is often shared with the musician, which is something the ugly is not prepared to do. In the case of Pinero, the poet occupies an altogether different plane of reality, interesting but less cen- tral, since Pinero talked about "the poet" as an eventuality, something he had experienced only as an illusion: "dreamt i was a poet / & / writin' silver sailin'songs I words / strong & powerful crashin' thru / walls of steel & concrete / erected in minds weak / & / those asleep / replacin' a hobby of paper candy / wrap- pin', collectin' / potent to pregnate sterile young / thoughts" (Turner 135).
Secondly, as far as music is concerned, both the good and the bad register the cultural, political, and philosophical dimension popular music brings into the Nuyorican landscape. In the case of Hernandez Cruz, Snaps constitutes by far the emblematic Nuyorican book of music; no other Nuyorican book of poetry is as Pythagorean as Snaps. The only Nuyorican book that comes closer to the way in which Snaps revolved around popular music, even after Laviera's La Carreta Made a U- Turr/, (1979), happened seventeen years later, with Adal's photography in Mango Mambo (1985). Although Pinero reacts to music like Hernandez Cruz, he is less driven by musfcality; but when Pinero focuses on rhythm, he sounds like Hernandez Cruz. Here is Pinero's homage to the famous conga player Mongo Santamaria: "do it to them Mongo / do it to them Mongo / wake up the would-be wise / and the pseudo hip with your / wee folks wailing those hard hands / that revitalize the images of sungods / in the island of fianigo / those mountains of kings / valleys of spirits that dance to / the ritmo beat sweat pellets to all that / music which is ours by law" (Herejes y mitificadores 100). For the ugly nothing can mitigate the ultimate metaphysical predicament. "I will start by saying: our father / which art in heaven FUCK YOU" (Puerto Rican Obituary 30).
In Nuyorican terms, the dusmic hero is the good because it ultimately incorporates the evolutionary and the outlaw-heroes. Perhaps the most dramatic of all evolutionary poems is this one by Hernandez Cruz: "Today I eat guineo / With my hands / Under a palm tree by the beach lWhere I am not / Do you see the dance that could begin / Evolve" (Mainland 9).


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