Using Walter Benjamin’s rubric, Hannah Arendt came to discover that Bertolt Brecht was the “poet who was most at home” in the twentieth century: “at home” in the sense of being the writer whose work most fully reflected both the complexities of the century’s horrors and that of struggles to resist and transcend their effects (45). The essence of my argument here is that Martín Espada is Brecht’s most notable contemporary equivalent, whose published work since 1982 exemplifies the potential reach of a “poetry of the political imagination” (M. Espada, Foreword 9), or what I suggest here might be defined more concretely as a “poetry of liberation.” Espada’s wide-ranging contributions to this global endeavor include the combined effects of the integrity and universality of his work as: Puerto Rico’s “most universal writer” (“Latin, Hispanic-American, Pan-American, transnational and global”) (Salgado, Introduction 19).

Espada’s poetry shares key dimensions as to its “documentary” and “epic” qualities with those highlighted by Benjamin’s assessment of Brecht’s “Epic Theater.” Brecht’s conception of a new kind of art characterized by a “distancing effect” was central to Benjamin’s understanding of his contributions and involved “stripping the event[s]” depicted of their “self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about them” (Brecht qtd. by Brooker 215). These are also characteristics shared by Martín’s poetry and by his father Frank’s documentary photography in his self-published The Puerto Rican Diaspora: Themes in the Survival of a People.

Martín’s unique achievements are driven by his dual grounding in the best of the longstanding tradition of critical realist literature in English (from Walt Whitman to Amiri Baraka and Adrienne Rich) and in his additional mastery of an intertwined Latin American and Latino political aesthetic with deep roots in Puerto Rico itself: in essence, what Espada refers to in his foreword to the seminal anthology he first edited in 1994, Poetry like Bread, as “América with an accent. Poets from New York, yes, but also Tegucigalpa”^[1] [. . .][,] “[t]his meeting of North and South” that is still today “unusual among poetry anthologies” (9) and among poets (a stylistic feature that is further reflected in his 1997 edited anthology of Latino poetry entitled El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry). This aesthetic is also rooted explicitly in the social and cultural impact of the Puerto Rican and African diasporas, in the rhythms and resonances of the Caribbean and broader region as a whole (including writers expressing themselves in Spanish, English, and French, described in greater detail below), in the connections between its indigenous, pre-Columbian, and African cultural legacies and an identification with the history of its struggles of anticolonial and antiracist resistance and liberation “from below,” and their contemporary implications.

Espada’s historic contributions to a redefinition of the contemporary canon, both in the context of the United States and global literature in English more generally^[2] and in that of Latin American, Caribbean, and Puerto Rican literature (in their diasporas and places of origin) specifically, are multidimensional. They include his wide-ranging efforts as a poet, editor, translator, cultural advocate, essayist, former radio journalist, and theorist to define and put to practice key characteristics and responsibilities such efforts entail: a belief in “each poem as a political act in itself,” the notion of “poets as committed advocates, speaking for the voices struck silent, living or dead,” the ability to wield a “prophetic voice,” and the emphasis placed on “visionary” qualities (M. Espada, Foreword 12, 14). Importantly, these features are encompassed by but also go beyond what Cary Nelson in sum describes as a commitment to writing as “a form of public action” (Revolutionary Memory 5). Espada’s work indeed has a transformative effect on both of the canons from which it arises, in the United States and Puerto Rico, by embodying a “counter-universal” ethos which undermines hegemonic traditions in both contexts, and reflects essential components of the “poetry of liberation” as a radical alternative aesthetic (González and Treece xiv). As Mike González and David Treece argue:

Thus, “[t]he local and the specific are in many instances the necessary site” where this alternative emerges (González and Treece xiv). As we will see, Espada’s work cuts across each of these dimensions.

“Heart of Hunger”

The key foundational aspects of the “poetry of liberation” are evident throughout Espada’s work, but my argument here is that they are most clearly reflected in poems such as “Heart of Hunger,” “Cordillera” (The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero [1982]); “The Moon Shatters on Alabama Avenue” (Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction [1987]); “Imagine the Angels of Bread” (“Imagina los angeles de pan”), “All the People Who Are Now Red Trees” (Imagine the Angels of Bread [1996]); and “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100” (Alabanza: New and Selected Poems, 1982–2002 [2003]) that serve as a representative sample of his overall work, because of their combination of the documentary and epic qualities highlighted above. I chose “Heart of Hunger” for the title of this chapter because it is one of Martín’s earliest published poems (along with “Cordillera”) and because it is so fully representative of the aspects of his work that I am seeking to emphasize here—not “just” his grounding in Puerto Rico (as if that were not enough, on its own), but his insistence on a broader, continental, and global vision of liberation with which his emphasis on Puerto Rico is completely intertwined (as with Puerto Rican nationalist poets Juan Antonio Corretjer, Clemente Soto Vélez, and Julia de Burgos, but even more so).

“Heart of Hunger” marks the genesis in Espada’s poetry of a definitive commitment beyond Puerto Rico to all those “[. . .] orphans and travelers,” the (im)migrants (“[. . .] mexicano, dominicano, / cubano”^[3] and “puertorriqueño”) (5, 4) who are displaced and “[s]muggled in boxcars through fields of dark morning, / tied to bundles at railroad crossings, / the brown grain of faces dissolved in bus station dim” (1–3), the “hands in the thousands” that “reach for the crop-ground together, / the countless roots of a tree lightning-torn, / capillaries running to a heart of hunger, / tobaccopicker, grapepicker, cotton picker”^[4] (14–17); beyond farmworkers (this is the first of his extensive cycle of farmworker poems, flowing directly from his formative engagement as a farmworker rights advocate in Maryland’s peninsula) to all workers, the “thousands [. . .] bowing to assembly lines, / frenzied in kitchens and sweatshops, / mopping the vomit of blond children,^[5] / leaning into the iron’s steam / and the steel mill glowing” (19–23); and to all those “refused permission to use gas station toilets, / beaten for a beer in unseen towns with white porches, / or evaporated without a tombstone in the peaceful grass” (6–8). The implicit Southern landscape here seems to intentionally resonate with memories of African Americans and Freedom Riders lynched, assaulted, and/or victimized by discrimination in such settings, in addition to its explicit invocation of Puerto Ricans, immigrants, and farmworkers.

Espada’s early positioning here as a poet already then asserts a basis for solidarity with, and identification among, Puerto Rican migrants, Mexican, Dominican, and Cuban immigrants, and implicitly, other victims of similar forms of discrimination and exploitation, within a shared vision of common struggle. His mention of Guatemalans in line 5 of the revised version of the poem (see Alabanza, pp. 30–31), in addition to more “obvious” examples such as Mexicans and Dominicans—that allude to both the volume of such migration, the historical material conditions that have contributed to it, and the direction in which it flows—is also significant given the importance of Central American migration during the 1980s as a direct product of intensified U.S. intervention in the region during that period. In 1982, migration to the United States from Guatemala specifically involved flight, primarily by indigenous Mayans, from a genocidal régime in a context where U.S. complicity included the systematic denial of political asylum to such refugees. The poem also marks the beginning of another cycle in his poetry dedicated to exploring the implications of liberation struggles in these countries and of Espada’s own engagement in solidarity efforts with Nicaragua.

The poem is an excellent example of Espada’s transformative aesthetic because it goes beyond “simply” documenting conditions of oppression to an invocation of the radical possibilities (i.e., the “political imagination”) of struggles for liberation to break the bonds depicted. The poem weaves together two key elements. One is its photographic (e.g., “[. . .] fields of dark morning”; “the brown grain of faces dissolved in bus station dim” [“Heart of Hunger” 1, 3])—recalling images from James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—and often cinematic (e.g., “[. . .] bowing to assembly lines, / frenzied in kitchens and sweatshops, / mopping the vomit of blond children, / leaning into the iron’s steam / and the steel mill glowing” [19–23], reminiscent of the factory scenes in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times) description of fragmentary aspects of transnational processes of displacement, discrimination, and exploitation. The other is an equally inherent dynamic of movement (e.g., “a centipede of hands moving, / hands clutching infants that grieve, / fingers to the crucifix, / hands that labor” [M. Espada, “Heart of Hunger” 9–12]) that leads to eventual communion and resistance:

As with the work of Agee and Evans (1941), or later that of Michael Harrington’s The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962) and similar work by Howard Zinn and Robert Coles during the 1960s, Frank Espada’s Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project (PRDP) (conducted primarily between 1963 and 1982, exhibited widely throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and finally published in book form in 2006),^[7] and more recently, Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Salgado’s extensive works seeking to chronicle “in black and white the lives of the world’s dispossessed and poor” (Straus n. pag.) (among children, as to processes of labor and of migration, and in Africa and Latin America), there is both a documentary and epic quality to Martín’s reaffirmation in 1982 that there continues be an unsatisfied hunger for liberation at the heart of the “[. . .] North American gloom.” Here, as in “Cordillera” and “Moon Shatters on Alabama Avenue,” and much later in “Imagine the Angels of Bread” (“Imagina los angeles de pan”) (written in 1994), “All the People Who Are Now Red Trees,” and “Alabanza,” conditions of exploitation, oppression, and resistance are historicized and continuously intertwined as material and spiritual bases for liberation. “Cordillera” grounds this approach in the splendor of Puerto Rico’s natural environment (with an emphasis on the same mountains invoked later in “We Live By What We See at Night” [Trumpets], the analysis of which follows in my essay subsection “‘Boricua en la luna’”), and how its physical landscape is intertwined with the ancient, ritualized legacies of its indigenous cultures (e.g., the mountains like “a council of elders” [5] “and broken rock / proud and broad / like the cheekbones / of an extinct people.^[8] // Older than suffering: // the mountains are shaman^[9] [. . .]” [9–14]), and with Puerto Rico’s traditions of exploitation and resistance (e.g., “the mountains are guerrilleros, / rising together / to swallow terrified armies; / the mountains are peasants, / great shoulders breaking the earth / to spring forth crops” [17–22]).

Specific places are invoked with concrete histories of rebellion such as “Lares, Jayuya, Utuado,” “where rebellion’s song wept / like slaves in the joy / of abolition, / rang like a machete forged / by insurgent blacksmiths, / raged like a rainstorm / deep in the chest of mountains” (23, 25–31), sites of insurrections against Spanish colonialism and slavery in September 1868, and against U.S. colonialism, respectively, in October 1950 (such as took place in Utuado, his father’s birthplace, one of the three towns where the Nationalist uprising broke out in 1950, and where the organizers of the rebellion were “probably” planning to “entrench themselves and hold out for as long as possible”) (Ayala and Bernabe 165). Ultimately “Cordillera” defines itself in terms of a poetics of identity, anchored in a collective vision: “We are of mountains. // Descended from / Taino [sic]^[10] carvings, / Spanish watchtowers, / African manacles, / the jibaro [sic]^[11] plow” (32–37). It is in this context that the poet-speaker affirms that “[he] will disappear / in Borinquen’s mountains” (43–44), “[f]ar from beggars’ hands / searching in cities / of Iberian cobblestone” (1–3), but nonetheless keep “searching, like those / beggars’ hands^[12] / for bread and sight / and salvation” (53–56). These are perhaps the earliest echoes in Espada’s work of Pablo Neruda’s ascension towards Macchu Picchu in Canto general.

As in “Colibrí” (“Colibrí”) (Rebellion/Rebelión [1990]), set in Jayuya, the rescue and liberation of a trapped hummingbird—made possible by the gentleness symbolized by the cupped hands of Martín’s wife Katherine Gilbert-Espada (reflected in the lines “If only history / were like your hands” [“Si la historia / solo fuera como tus manos”] [37–38])—becomes a metaphor for the persistent legacy of Taíno resistance against the Spanish conquest. The theme is revisited in several key lines from “The Moon Shatters on Alabama Avenue” (Trumpets), describing a childhood memory of a sidewalk vigil and protest march in East New York in response to the senseless murder by drug addicts of a fifty-seven year old “[. . .] kitchen worker [. . .]” with nine children, named “Agropino Bonillo” (7, 5, 37).^[13] Here, history is not only “kept alive by cupped hands” (24) of mercy, but also by the hands that labor, which have the potential of remaking history: “A wooden box rattled / with coins for the family, / on a stoop where the roots / of a brown bloodstain grew. // Brooklyn, 1966 [. . .]” (1–5), and “[a] community of faces gathered and murmured / in the dim circles of light” (22–23). Espada continues, “And the grief of thousands illuminated city blocks, / moving with the tired feet of the poor: / candles a reminder of the wakes too many and too soon / [. . .] in memoriam for generations of sacrificed blood” (48–50, 52) through to the poem’s closing lines: “Over the wooden box, a woman’s face / was slick in a drizzle of tears. / Her hand dropped coins like seed” (56–58).^[14] As with “Cordillera,” the tribute in this poem to the community’s response to Bonillo’s murder circles back to the seeds of “[. . .] bread and sight / and salvation” (M. Espada, “Cordillera” 55–56). In each of these poems, as again in the title poem “Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Pellín and Nina)” (“Rebelión es el giro de manos del amante [Pellín y Nina]”) from one of Martín’s most influential books, the close connection between hands, labor, love, and freedom is threaded in still another pattern. Martín describes in this poem how the news of the bloody March 1937 Ponce Massacre against Puerto Rico’s pro-independence Nationalist Party reached an expectant bride and “halted the circular motion / of his lover’s hands / as she embroidered / the wedding dress” (“detuvo el movimiento circular / de las manos de su amante / que bordaba / su traje de bodas”), leaving her and us with the reminder that “[. . .] rebellion / is the circle of a lover’s hands, / that must keep moving, / always weaving” ([. . .] rebelión / es el giro de manos del amante, / incesantemente moviéndose, / siempre tejiendo”) (21–24, 38–41).

Similarly, in “Imagine the Angels of Bread” (“Imagina los angeles de pan”), the fullest statement up until that time of Martín’s aesthetic of liberation (written in response to the request that he write a poem for the dawning of the year 1994, which coincidentally ended up being the date of the inception of the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico), it is the hands of tenants without hot water and of tomato pickers and cannery workers, together with those bound by slave-manacles, and the feet of “[. . .] shawled refugees [. . .],” which are freed and eventually turn the tide in the poem’s succession of dialectical inversions that are buttressed by the refrain, “This is the year . . .”—recurring as anaphoric motif in lines 1, 6, 12, 17, 23, 29, 35, 40, 44—(e.g., “[. . .] that squatters evict landlords [. . .],” “that shawled refugees deport judges,” “[. . .] that police revolvers, [. . .] / blister the fingers / of raging cops, / and nightsticks splinter / in their palms;” when “[. . .] darkskinned men / lynched a century ago / return to sip coffee quietly / with the apologizing descendants / of their executioners” and “those / who swim the border’s undertow / and shiver in boxcars / are greeted with trumpets and drums / at the first railroad crossing / on the other side;” when “[. . .] the hands / pulling tomatoes from the vine / uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,” / and “[. . .] the food stamps / of adolescent mothers / are auctioned like gold doubloons, / and no coin is given to buy machetes / for the next bouquet of severed heads / in coffee plantation country”) (1, 7, 12–16, 18–22, 24–31, 44–49).^[15] The “This is the year . . .” patterning that drives the poem is revisited in the modified “then this is the year” epistrophe that appears at the penultimate stanza in lines 52, 56, and 61. In “Imagine” (“Imagina”), as in “Cordillera,” “Moon Shatters” and “Colibrí (Colibrí)” and later “Alabanza,” insurgency and ultimately liberation is always bound up with a secularized form of prophecy, such as the abolition of slavery, the closing down of concentration camps, and indigenous, anticolonial rebellion against foreign conquest. Each of these moments of political response are borne of “[. . .] a vision” that once “began as imagination” or “[. . .] with the idea” of “[. . .] hands without manacles” and “[. . .] of a land / without barbed wire or the crematorium,” and educative awareness “that conquerors on horseback / are not many-legged gods, that they too drown / if plunged in the river” (51, 54, 57, 51, 54–55, 58–60). While “Imagine” (“Imagina”) embodies the classic hallmarks of “poetry of the political imagination” in the broadest sense, it also signifies an example of a “poetry of liberation,” implying to its reader that utopian vision can actively shape the imagination and move it in the direction of concrete processes of social transformation.

Espada’s poetry succeeds in embedding and reflecting the “transcendent possibilit[ies]” referred to above in the context of a work characterized by successive reappropriations of personal and collective history.

The Poetry of Liberation

The “poetry of liberation” is then an aesthetic that coincides with much of what Roberto Márquez sought to capture in his 1974 anthology Latin American Revolutionary Poetry/Poesía Revolucionaria Latinoamericana, a seminal work in Espada’s awakening to the radical transformative potential of poetry, and, in particular, the way the poets included there combine the “lyrical with the prophetic, and [. . .] the apocalyptic” (R. Márquez 26). Its characteristics are also exemplified by the late Sandy Taylor and Judy Doyle’s contributions through Curbstone Press and their unflagging support for Espada and the other poets they have made it possible to read (many of whom were included in the Poetry like Bread anthology). My approach here toward outlining key elements of such a poetry build on Márquez’s fundamental contributions, but with the contemporary equivalent of a more globalized perspective, such as that explored by Alan Bold in his classic anthology The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse (1970). So, too, my approach includes the kind of testimony highlighted by Carolyn Forché in her anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (1993), particularly her definition of the “social,” “a place of resistance and struggle, where books are published, poems read, and protest disseminated [. . .] the sphere in which claims against the political order are made in the name of justice,” and her understanding that it is “resistance to terror [. . .] [that] makes the world habitable” (31, 46). Forché was a key member of the distinguished panel (which also included Daniel Halpern and Charles Simic) that honored Espada’s completely bilingual book Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands/Rebelión es el giro de manos del amante (1990) with the PEN/Revson Award for Poetry, accompanied by the following statement (excerpted):

As I read these words I am reminded, for example, of the work of Aimé Césaire, ranging from his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) (1939) to his Discourse on Colonialism (1950), his essay “Poetry and Knowledge” (1944), and plays, specifically of the following passage from his 1946 play And the Dogs Were Silent, later quoted by Frantz Fanon (Césaire’s pupil—like him, from Martinique) in The Wretched of the Earth:

My approach here to Espada’s work in terms of its contributions to a “poetry of liberation” both maintains a dialogue with specific poets and traditions of poetry (e.g., négritude and negrismo and Chicano/a and feminist poetry, in some cases alluded to in this chapter and discussed in greater detail below) and finds particular resonance in a variety of critical approaches, notably those advanced by Robin D. G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002), Cary Nelson’s explorations of Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (2001) and in his anthology of U.S. poems about the Spanish Civil War, The Wound and the Dream (2002), as well as its Spanish-language equivalent Romancero de la Resistencia Española (1982, edited by Darío Puccini). Moreover, the poetics of liberation extends to collections such as In the Language of Kings: An Anthology of Meso-American Literature, Pre-Columbian to the Present (2002), edited by Miguel León-Portilla and Earl Shorris (it should be added that Shorris has been another writer very supportive of Espada’s work); Los poetas de la Comuna (poetry related to the Paris Commune, 1975, edited and translated by José Elías), and Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660–1810 (2002), edited by James G. Basker, with its stress on poetry as a way to map the “emergence of a collective awareness” in a specific historical period (xxiii–xxxiv) and on antislavery poetry as the basis for articulating a “shadow canon” and ultimately a counterhegemonic “Afrocentric poetics of the Enlightenment” (xlv). It is worth mentioning Basker’s invocation of the Shelleyan insistence on the “transformative power” of poetry, such as we so often find in Espada’s work, the application of which “giv[es] form to the previously unimagined,” helps to “shape reality, offering new models or blueprints for change, both personal and societal” (xxxv), and transfigures “suffering into beauty [. . .] alienation into empathy and connection” and the “unspeakable into” the “imaginative” (xxxiv).

Key forerunners and exponents of this approach, whose affinities can be traced in his work—often in its contents and sometimes, but usually more indirectly, in its diverse, still evolving style—range from Pablo Neruda (Chile) and Ernesto Cardenal (Nicaragua) to Juan Antonio Corretjer, Clemente Soto Vélez, Julia de Burgos, Luis Palés Matos, and Nuyorican writers or their “successors,” such as Piri Thomas, Felipe Luciano, Pedro Pietri, Victor Hernández Cruz, Jack Agüeros, Sandra Maria Esteves, Naomi Ayala, and Aracelis Girmay, among many others. All of the latter (starting with Corretjer) are of Puerto Rican origin,^[16] whose writing, like Espada’s, reflects the impact of the island’s colonial domination by the United States since 1898 and that of related processes and conditions of resistance, migration, poverty, discrimination, and marginalization. These writers’ works, as with Espada’s, are also specifically shaped by their experiences in New York’s Puerto Rican and Latino communities, where most lived for significant periods and where Espada was born in 1957. Martín’s father, Frank, who became a well-known community activist and documentary photographer, migrated to New York from Utuado in Puerto Rico in 1939 (the same year Julia de Burgos first arrived there, and on the eve of Corretjer and Soto Vélez’s arrivals there in exile in 1942).^[17]

It is also evident from Espada’s work that he has been an attentive reader of key Latin American poets of social commitment in addition to Neruda and Cardenal, such as César Vallejo (Peru), Nicolás Guillén (Cuba), Pedro Mir (Dominican Republic), Roque Dalton (El Salvador), and Otto René Castillo (Guatemala). It is equally clear that he shares important affinities with additional related examples of politically committed writers from both the English-speaking and Francophone Caribbean, such as Andrew Salkey (originally from Jamaica), Aimé Césaire (Martinique), and Jacques Roumain (Haiti). A full assessment of his work from the overall perspective outlined here also ultimately implies exploring critical connections between Espada’s poetry and “cultural advocacy” and that of other writers of color in the United States, including key African American writers from Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin to Sterling Brown, Etheridge Knight, Amiri Baraka, June Jordan, Quincy Troupe, and Yusef Komunyakaa. Similarly, we have to take into account his intertwined relationship with the accomplishments of other Latinos, such as Chicano writers Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, Tino Villanueva, Gary Soto, Sandra Cisneros, Luis J. Rodríguez, Indo-Mexican writer Jimmy Santiago Baca, Gloria Anzaldúa, Demetria Martínez, and more recently, Diana García. Villanueva’s concept of a “Chicano Renaissance” (Chicanos: Antología histórica y literaria [1980]) of writers in the ’60s and ’70s is an important point of departure for such an exploration.

An additional dimension that must be researched in detail elsewhere is the deep resonance between his work and that of Puerto Rican writers identified with traditions of self-determination, resistance, displacement, and exile, such as Corretjer and Soto Vélez.^[18] So, too, we can extend such thematic overtones in Espada’s writing to Palestinian poets such as Mahmoud Darwish and Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, Neruda’s contemporary and close friend. To quote from Darwish, as voices for nations and peoples “on the verge of dawn,” these writers explore the lessons of what “[t]he martyr teaches [. . .],” the premise that there is “[. . .] no aesthetic outside [one’s] freedom,” just as they remind us to account for the costs of such wisdom (7, 115, 500; emphasis added).^[19]

Espada’s work must thus ultimately be situated in the poetics, landscape, and epistemology of the “Global South,” as defined by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, where the concept of the Global South is not limited to geography, but instead

Espada’s work is most meaningfully explored in terms of its explicit overall identification with what Sousa Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito describe, following Mexican/Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel, as the “perspective of the victims” (69) of the global system, and specifically within the Latin American, Latino, and Puerto Rican dimensions of world literature that have emerged within the United States, and from critical engagement with the devastating effects of its cultural influence and economic and political domination in the region over the last forty years.

“Boricua en la luna”

What does it mean to say that Espada, born in New York, is Puerto Rico’s “most universal writer,” as Salgado has argued (Introduction 19)? My suggestion here is that the best response comes from one of Espada’s most important forerunners and influences, Juan Antonio Corretjer. Corretjer was a life-long revolutionary and leader of the most radical expressions of the island’s pro-independence movements, whose literary work was written entirely in Spanish, and is widely acknowledged to be Puerto Rico’s “National Poet.” Corretjer has often been associated with a “Hispanophile” (“criollista”) tendency in Puerto Rican literature, grounded primarily in the celebration and exploration of local idiom and culture. But he also lived in New York from 1928 to 1929 during a key formative stage in his life, and again between 1942 and 1946 while in exile following his imprisonment from 1936 to 1942 for seditious conspiracy as leader of Puerto Rico’s Nationalist Party (along with the party’s principal leader, Pedro Albizu Campos, and fellow poet Clemente Soto Vélez; Julia de Burgos was also a key supporter of this movement).

Many of Corretjer’s poems have been adapted to music and performed by Puerto Rican singer-songwriter Roy Brown. One of the most popular is the poem “Boricua en la luna” (“Boricua [or Puerto Rican] on the Moon”), a first-person narrative that assumes the persona of a Puerto Rican born in New York and conjoins that testimony with what appear to be excerpts from the oral history of the narrator’s migrant working-class family. The narrator describes himself as “a Puerto Rican who has nothing, / but who is unbroken” (“y yo soy puertorriqueño, / sin ná, pero sin quebranto”) (29–30). The cycle of the narrator’s poverty, alluded to by the “[. . .] nothing” as noted above, starts with his parents, who emigrate to the United States and suffer intensely for it. Yet, as they cling to the hope of returning to Puerto Rico, their dream is complicated by the decision to start and attempt to support a family on the mainland. The parents finally die without ever returning, consumed by work, “shattered in a sweatshop” (“reventó en un taller”) (20). But the guiding thread throughout the poem, which speaks to the narrator’s being “[. . .] unbroken,” is the memory of Puerto Rico fixed in his dreams by his grandfather’s love.

The implicit question posed by the poem is whether a Puerto Rican born in New York is truly Puerto Rican. Corretjer’s response about a Boricua retaining ethnicity in the face of displacement (a sense of ethnic preservation and pride so tied to his personhood, as he argues in line 40, that it would maintain even if he were originally from the Moon) is emphatic, leaving us to understand better the title of the poem. Perhaps the most notable aspect here is that Corretjer, who was born and raised on the island, and who was a vigorous advocate of a revolutionary nationalist approach to Puerto Rico’s struggle for independence, literally assumes the voice, and the most vigorous “defense” possible, of the “authenticity” of Puerto Ricans born on the mainland. Soto Vélez, who also wrote only in Spanish and lived in New York for almost fifty years, repeatedly echoes similar sentiments to those expressed by Corretjer in this poem and served as a generous mentor to Puerto Rican poets writing in both Spanish and English, including Martín, throughout his life there. As Corretjer put it later in his remarks at the tribute in his honor held at Harvard University’s Emerson Hall on February 18, 1984, what would prove his last appearance on the mainland and less than a year before his death on January 19, 1985, the voices of “a Puerto Rico that sings, and a Puerto Rico that struggles,” persists “anywhere in the world where a Puerto Rican stands” (Speech n. pag.).^[21] Martín Espada is one of the most eloquent and committed among these voices.

Both Corretjer and Vélez were equally insistent (as was their mentor, Pedro Albizu Campos) on the need for the Puerto Rican political and cultural struggle for liberation to be developed both on the island and on the mainland. It is, in fact, this visionary symmetry between his writing and his life of political commitment that makes Corretjer truly a “national” poet, since according to the most recent U.S. Census data (at the time of this writing) 4.1 million Puerto Ricans now live on the mainland, compared to 3.9 million on the island (“Hispanics of Puerto Rican Origin” n. pag.). The extraordinary dimensions of Puerto Rico’s migration—with over half of its population displaced—are inextricably intertwined with the effects of U.S. colonial domination in Puerto Rico; the only other case of similar magnitude is that of the Palestinians, with both resulting essentially from the denial of each people’s rights to self-determination.

Espada has evoked repeatedly in his own poetry the same kind of bond with Puerto Rico captured in Corretjer’s poem, such as we find in “We Live By What We See At Night” (Trumpets), remembering his father’s “[. . .] interrupted dreaming,” and his “[. . .] craving for that island birthplace / burrowed, deep / as thirty years’ exile / constant as your pulse” (10–14):

Another poem by Espada takes up the sword left by Rubén Darío in his poem “To Roosevelt” (1904), where Darío invokes Whitman in the name of Spanish America against Theodore Roosevelt’s seizure of Panama from Colombia,^[22] and that of Puerto Rico and Cuba in 1898, through the imposition of his “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. The poem “Bully” (“Buscabulla”) (Rebellion/Rebelión) relates how Puerto Rican and Latino migration to Boston has resulted in the creation of a new bilingual school named for renowned Puerto Rican composer Rafael Hernández (author of a famous song chronicling the impact of Puerto Rican migration on the lives and dreams of its people), in the same building that used to house a school named for Roosevelt, leaving his orphaned statue behind: “In the school auditorium / the Theodore Roosevelt statue / is nostalgic / for the Spanish-American war, / each fist lonely for a saber [. . .] // But now the Roosevelt school / is pronounced Hernández”^[23] (“En el auditorio de la escuela, / la estatua de Theodore Roosevelt / siente nostalgia / por la guerra hispanoamericana, / cada puño añorando un sable [. . .] // Pero ahora la escuela Roosevelt / más bien se pronuncia Hernández”) (1–5, 9–10). To this subversion, Espada adds,

The life and work of other Puerto Rican poets who share powerful aesthetic and political affinities with Espada, such as Soto Vélez and Burgos and the Nuyorican generation and its successors, confirm the importance of Corretjer’s approach in “Boricua en la luna” (“Boricua on the Moon”) to issues of Puerto Rican identity and its cultural and political expressions. All of those mentioned are as much “New York” or U.S. poets, and/or “poets of migration,” as they are Puerto Rican, and vice versa, depending on the specific example of their work or period of their writing that is at issue. Something significantly subtler, more complex, and reflexive than a “you-are-where-you-write” rule is necessary. This is especially so if, as a writer/activist, you also identify with universalist movements of a political and/or literary character such as Surrealism, Modernism, Marxism, and their contemporary equivalents in terms of a “poetry of the political imagination” and/or a “poetry of liberation.”

For Corretjer and Soto Vélez it was Puerto Rico’s struggle for national liberation against U.S. colonialism, as ultimately refracted through Albizu’s form of revolutionary nationalism, that became the basis to embrace Marxism. As it would happen, Corretjer had already been headed in that direction since his experiences in New York and his early poem “Canción Multitudinaria” (“Multitudinous Song”) (1928), which refers to how “America / awakes [. . .]” (“America / despierta [. . .]”) to the clarion calls of the Bolshevik Revolution from the streets of New York and Washington to the Antilles and the Andes, with “calloused hands” (“de manos encallecidas”) and a blood that pumps “in the arteries of time” (“en las arterias del tiempo”) (24–25, 4, 6). The poem looks toward a utopian future of human inclusivity that embraces a return to the ethos of historical revolutionary figures, extolling equally such figures as Christ, Trotsky, Marx, and the early Soviet poet Sergei Esenin (58–59); interestingly, this is also one of only a handful of Corretjer’s poems that employs English: for example, in his reference to “[. . .] flash light” (20; emphasis in original). Soto Vélez’s path was through literary vanguardism in the context of the movement known as “Atalayismo” (a “modernist” response to “criollismo”). It was when Corretjer and Soto Vélez found themselves chained together, forcibly exiled and eventually in prison, however—perhaps the most concrete single denial of universalism possible in terms of its literal confinement and isolation—that both reaffirmed these initial universalist impulses, deepened them, and transformed them emphatically into their identities as “poets of liberation” for the rest of their lives (it is worth noting, for example, that Corretjer was only twenty-eight when he was imprisoned in 1936, and Soto thirty-one). Burgos refers to the event in her elegiac #178 “Responso de ocho partidas” (#178 “Responsory of Eight Departures”), recording the day on June 7, 1937, when Albizu, Corretjer, Soto Vélez, and five other key leaders of the Nationalist Party were chained together and forced into exile on a seaplane from San Juan harbor, and referring to them as those who had become figuratively larger than their own nation, leaving behind “[. . .] a message of strength / that wounded the slaves” (“[. . .] un mesaje de fuerza / que a los esclavos hería”) (33–34). (Espada’s allusions to this event and its significance in a much broader context in his poem “All the People Who Are Now Red Trees” will be discussed later in the subsection, “Roberto Márquez, the Nuyorican Generation, and the Young Lords.”) My approach here to Espada’s own journey, as a writer committed to the contemporary equivalent of the same struggles for liberation to which Corretjer, Soto Vélez, and Burgos dedicated their lives, assumes a combination of his own life experiences and analyzes how these are reflected in the way his literary affinities and influences began to trace an implicit “map” for him, beginning with our attendance together at a historic symposium dedicated to the life and work of Soto Vélez at Seton Hall University in April 1984, when we met the poet for the first time.

Walt Whitman, José Martí, Ramón Emeterio Betances y Alacán, and Eugenio María de Hostos

The political geography of Espada’s work also includes a crucial affinity with Whitman and his legacy. As Espada has put it in his interview with Edward J. Carvalho:

Whitman’s resonances among leading voices in the Spanish-speaking world (from Chile to Spain, Peru, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic) include Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, Miguel Hernández, León Felipe, Nicolás Guillén, and Pedro Mir, among others; García Lorca, Neruda, and Mir each dedicated important poems, and José Martí a seminal essay (“El poeta Walt Whitman” [“The Poet Walt Whitman”]) to the exploration of Whitman’s significance. I will explore the relationship between Martí’s essay on Whitman, his subsequent essay “Nuestra América” (“Our America”), and traditions that emerged as a result, which provide a crucial context for situating and understanding Espada’s work below.^[26]

Martí’s essay on Whitman is an exemplary illustration of the tradition that provides an essential context for Espada’s achievements. It was written in April 1887, during Martí’ s extensive period of exile in the United States, when he was primarily based in New York between 1880 and 1895,^[27] and was published in Mexico and Argentina. Both “El poeta Walt Whitman” (“The Poet Walt Whitman”) and his later “Nuestra América” (“Our America”) are in this sense as much concrete products of Martí’s life in New York, and “within the belly of the beast” inside the United States, as they are of his reflections about Whitman and the destiny of the American continent. The Whitman essay includes extensive translations into Spanish from the poet’s work.^[28] Martí scholar Enrique Sacerio-Garí has noted that “in one of the notebooks he left with his literary executor, Martí describes a future project, ‘My Book: The Rebel Poets,’ in which he planned to study Walt Whitman”;^[29] he would also author an eloquent tribute to Emerson upon his death in 1882 (436; emphasis added). Martí celebrated Whitman as a “poet rebel,” and Andrés Olaizola adds that Martí understood Whitman’s “rebellion and originality” as coming from his innovative uses of language, “from how his poetic devices reflected and at the same time are influenced by his ideas of universal unity, nature and friendship” (n. pag.). This was equally true of Martí’s own poetry and essays and has been crucial as to his enduring influence.

Martí’s understanding of Whitman as a prophetic “poet rebel” (with his “[. . .] songs of insurrection [. . .],” as the “[. . .] sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over” (10–11), affirmed in Whitman’s “To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire,” and his identification in “Song of Myself” with “[v]oices of the interminable generations of slaves” [. . .] / And of the rights of them the others are down upon” [24.509, 513], aligned with continental and global struggles of all oppressed peoples for freedom and for “the vistas of coming humanity” [Whitman, “Song of the Redwood-Tree” 1.81]), coincides with contemporary readings along similar lines, including Espada’s. But much more importantly for our purposes here, Martí’s perspective provides such approaches with a historical foundation anchored in a Latin American and Caribbean anti-imperialist praxis and consciousness, which is at the same time based within the United States and in New York. Martí understood the struggles for independence of Cuba and Puerto Rico to be necessarily, inextricably intertwined—“like two wings of a single bird”^[30]—and, as Simón Bolívar had insisted long before him,^[31] as an integral, Antillean component of broader anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles ultimately leading toward Latin American and Caribbean unity against U.S. domination.

Martí’s role as the key precursor of Cuban independence, and ultimately of the Cuban Revolution (launched with the 1953 attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago by Fidel Castro, and specifically timed to coincide with the year-long observance of the centennial of his birth), and as the country’s poet laureate (along with Nicolás Guillén) has its direct equivalents in those of Ramón Emeterio Betances y Alacán and Eugenio María de Hostos in the context of Puerto Rico. Martí was in many ways their disciple and successor. All three were contemporaries and allies at key moments in a difficult struggle waged amid the final stages of Spanish colonialism, and both Betances and Hostos, like Martí, lived in New York for varying periods and engaged in extensive community-based organizing efforts there during experiences of exile (in 1867 and 1869 to 1871, in the case of Betances, and during 1869, in the case of Hostos). Together, Betances, Hostos, and Martí founded a tradition of a Latin American (and eventually Latino/a) literary and political community of exile and resistance based in and within New York City beginning in the nineteenth century, long before any significant Puerto Rican presence was first registered there as a demographic and cultural phenomenon during the 1920s.^[32] Martín Espada and his work is one of their most notable heirs.

Bolívar, Betances, Hostos, and Martí all understood the connection between the challenges of Latin American and Caribbean struggles for independence from Spain and the imminent threat of, and imperative to resist, U.S. intervention and neocolonial domination. Bolívar’s concerns included the need to complete the decolonization of the region because of the danger that the United States would seize Cuba and Puerto Rico for itself first (precisely as later ensued in 1898), like “‘ripe fruit’” (in John Quincy Adams’s words—qtd. in Chomsky, Year 501 245) ready for harvest. A similar scenario soon emerged as to possible U.S. annexation of the Dominican Republic during 1869–1870, following its independence—first from Haiti in 1844, and then finally from Spain in 1865, after Spanish rule had been briefly reinstated in 1861.

Betances, a graduate of the medical school of the University of Paris who had participated in the 1848 revolution there and was known in Puerto Rico as the “doctor of the poor,” authored a decalogue of demands for self-rule and basic rights (ranging from the election of its own authorities to the abolition of slavery and freedom of religion, speech, press, commerce, assembly, the right to bear arms and to reject all taxes, as well as the “inviolability” [qtd. in Wagenheim and Jiménez de Wagenheim 61] of its citizens by Spanish officials) in November 1867, which was distributed throughout the island. Additionally, previous versions were published and disseminated along similar lines in July 1867 and early 1864; the 1864 version specifically connected the struggle for independence in Puerto Rico to those underway in Cuba and Santo Domingo (Wagenheim and Jiménez de Wagenheim 59–61, 66–67). Betances also designed the banner known as the flag of Lares, sewn by pro-independence heroine Mariana Bracetti, which became the official flag of the short-lived Puerto Rican republic declared in the “Cry of Lares” on September 23, 1868, and later of the Nationalist Party led by Pedro Albizu Campos and supported by leading Puerto Rican poets such as Juan Antonio Corretjer, Clemente Soto Vélez, Julia de Burgos, and Francisco Matos Paoli. It was the Nationalists who established the annual commemoration of the September 23 uprising at Lares as a living, convergent tradition celebrating the continuity between the struggle for independence from Spain and that which continues to demand independence from the United States. Lares was also later the literal birthplace of both Soto Vélez and Matos Paoli. Both poets would suffer persecution and imprisonment for their passionate identification with Lares’s full range of historical, cultural, and political significance. The city would ultimately come to embody the symbolic birthplace of the Puerto Rican nation as well and would serve in this regard for aesthetic inspiration as the visionary destination and abode of Soto Vélez’s journey in his epic poem La tierra prometida (The Promised Land).

Corretjer became one of the most influential historians and interpreters of the Lares revolt in several notable books, essays, speeches, and through his own epic poem El Leñero (The Woodcutter), subtitled poema de la revolución de Lares (Poem of the Revolution of Lares) and invoking the nickname of Manuel Rosado, a key participant in the uprising, which was written while imprisoned in La Princesa jail in San Juan in September 1936. It is in this poem, and in his 1968 speech commemorating the centenary of Lares, that he most clearly defines Lares as the historical event that “finally succeeded in forging a true Puerto Rican identity” (Juan Antonio Corretjer qtd. in Wagenheim and Jiménez de Wagenheim 62). The poem frames this convergence of history and identity in terms of an intercultural vision of a unified community of struggle between Puerto Ricans of mestizo, indigenous, and African origin, which is a preliminary, still incomplete version of the same vision developed further in its most eloquent expression in terms of Puerto Rico as a homeland for the oppressed in “Oubao-Moin” (“Island of Blood”) (Section V of Alabanza en la Torre de Ciales [Song of Praise from the Tower of Ciales] [1953]).^[33] This is also what Soto Vélez achieves in Tierra prometida (Promised Land) from a very convergent political perspective, but with a completely different style, heavily infused with surrealism and a language of experimentation. “Oubao-Moin” (“Island of Blood”) was written in Puerto Rico, very much from the perspective of Corretjer’s effort to immerse himself in Puerto Rico’s most concrete and traditional local realities and legacies. Yet, at the same time, the poem served to connect that emphasis on locality to his universalist aspirations. Soto Vélez instead, like Martí and like Espada, writes about Puerto Rico from New York and at least, in part, from the perspective of his life and work in New York City and the United States.

Corretjer and others have documented how it was in such a context that Betances, Hostos, and Martí made successive efforts to build revolutionary organizations capable of coordinating simultaneous insurgencies in Cuba and Puerto Rico between 1868 and 1895^[34] and eventually propose and promote the idea of an “Antillean Federation” as a framework for jointly defending the independence of both islands from U.S. intervention once it could be obtained. Corretjer also highlighted the fact that it was while in exile, in New York City in 1867 that Betances and others made their final plans for the uprisings that broke out (prematurely), first in Lares and then in Cuba on October 10, 1868, in Yara, and that combined the demand for independence from Spain with an insistence on the abolition of slavery (Wagenheim and Jiménez de Wagenheim 61–67).

This was the radical anticolonial, antiracist, and anti-imperialist framework that was also the context for Martí’s appreciation of Whitman and for the writing of Martí’s very influential essay “Nuestra América” (“Our America”) (first published in Mexico in 1891). “Nuestra América” (“Our America”), which is still widely studied and interpreted throughout Latin America, builds directly on important elements of Martí’s exploration of Whitman’s significance in his previous essay in 1887. These include Martí’s insistence, from the first paragraph, on the need for the American continent to awake and on his conviction that words and ideas (in the spirit of Whitman’s own invocation to “Bards of the great Idea!” [“By Blue Ontario’s Shore”] 20.331]) have a critical role to play as elements in the struggle to transform the region’s realities. He writes of revolutionary struggle while always attuned to the “sound of the book doing battle against the monk’s tall candle,” seeing both use-value and sign-value in

There are clear echoes here as well of the Whitman who penned “Yonnondio,” his “lament for the aborigines”^[35] (“A song, a poem of itself—the word itself a dirge” [1]; first published in 1887, just three years before Wounded Knee) and poems like “Unnamed Lands” (“Nations ten thousand years before these States [. . .] / I know that they belong to the scheme of the world every bit as much as we now belong to it” [1, 11]), as well as other facets of the bard, in terms of stylistic preference and political conviction, that Martí evokes in such lines as:

The efforts by Whitman and Martí to transcend the limitations of a Western, Eurocentric perspective, as to indigenous peoples, through compassion and implicit admiration and solidarity (Whitman), on the one hand, and by means of an early, prescient version of what might be described in contemporary terms as a postcolonial, radical multiculturalist perspective, on the other, will be taken up in depth later by Neruda and Corretjer, then by Espada, with unusual subtlety, humor, and eloquence.

Martí’s prose poetry in “Nuestra América” (“Our America”) is in effect a “translation” of the essence of Whitman from a Latin American and Caribbean perspective. Accordingly, its transformation into an exercise of the “political imagination” and of an incipient “poetry of liberation” speaks to the region’s historical, cultural, and spiritual potential. Aside from its lasting, intrinsic merits, Martí’s essay is of additional interest because of its prophetic character, since it was published in 1891, virtually on the eve of the full emergence of U.S. domination of the region, and specifically of Puerto Rico and Cuba, after 1898. The vision of the New World shared and developed contemporaneously by Whitman and Martí was directly reflected in Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío’s classic poem “To Roosevelt,” written in 1904 as a Latin American response to President Theodore Roosevelt’s proud boast that he had taken Panama (from Colombia) while Congress dithered.

In addition to Martín Espada, we find in the earlier literary traditions established by Ramón Emeterio Betances, Eugenio María de Hostos, José Martí, Juan Antonio Corretjer, Luisa Capetillo, Bernardo Vega, Jesús Colón, Julia de Burgos, Clemente Soto Vélez, Gilberto Gerena Valentín, Antonia Pantoja, Frank Espada, and Jack Agüeros (a cultural advocate, poet, and Burgos’s translator) and their contemporaries in community organizing and the civil rights and welfare rights movements, the Young Lords and their successors, the Nuyorican poets and writers (from Felipe Luciano and Pedro Pietri to Piri Thomas, Miguel Piñero, Miguel Algarín, Tato Laviera, and Sandra María Esteves, among many others), and contemporary exponents of spoken word and Hip Hop, that all reflect and have nourished a rich and diverse tradition of cultural and political resistance originally based in New York City. This movement has since spread throughout the island’s diaspora and has been further enriched and developed by Latin American and Latino communities throughout the hemisphere.

Luisa Capetillo, Bernardo Vega, and Jesús Colón were key predecessors in New York to the Nationalist generation represented in this account by Corretjer, Burgos, and Soto Vélez. Capetillo, a pioneering “labor, feminist, and anarchist activist [. . .] moved between Puerto Rico, New York, Havana, and Tampa” during the 1920s (Ayala and Bernabe 66–67). Vega arrived there in 1916 and returned to Puerto Rico “after four decades in New York” in 1961 to become a key leader in the socialist wing of the island’s pro-independence movement (the Movimiento Pro-Independencia or MPI) (Ayala and Bernabe 226–27);^[36] Colón arrived there shortly after Vega, in 1917, died in New York in 1974, and is described by many as a key intellectual and political mentor of the Nuyorican movement.

Corretjer first arrived in New York City (which, as he described, had by then become “almost a natural” destination for Puerto Ricans) on October 14, 1928, “entering through Brooklyn.”^[37] He recounts this journey as the customary route at the time, conjuring images from Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” with which, it is very likely, he was already familiar (English was the standard mode of instruction in Puerto Rican public schools during his youth, and the first Spanish-language selections from Leaves of Grass had already been published in 1912). It is, in any case, also very probable that Corretjer would have read Martí carefully by then, particularly “Nuestra América” (“Our America”), since before coming to New York he had already been active in literary and cultural circles opposed to the Machado dictatorship in Cuba, and to U.S. intervention in Nicaragua and Haiti (Medina López 16, 26–27).

Corretjer lived in New York until mid-July 1929 (and then again, in forced exile by court order from June 1942 to October 1945); he moved to Cuba until the suspended portion of his original ten-year sentence for “seditious conspiracy” expired in June 1946, after which time he was finally permitted to return to Puerto Rico (Medina López 16, 26–27). He continued to make working visits to New York from the early 1960s until 1984, both as a speaker at the United Nations’ deliberations on Puerto Rico’s status and as a bridge between pro-independence activities on the island and the mainland. Like Martí, Corretjer was active throughout his life in causes involving both Cuba and Puerto Rico, including two periods when he lived in Cuba (between January and May 1935, ending with his imprisonment, asylum, and deportation; and between October 1945 and June 1946, when he collaborated closely with Cuban poet Juan Marinello and the Cuban Communist Party’s daily Hoy).^[38] Burgos also lived there most of the time from 1939 (until 1941—she also lived part of each year in Cuba) until her own death there in 1953; Soto Vélez, from 1942 until the early 1990s (his last years between 1986 and 1993 included extended stays back and forth between the city and the island, where he died). Espada’s immediate predecessors among the Young Lords in the late-’60s and early ’70s,^[39] and the Nuyorican poets and writers and their successors, provide the context for Espada’s own origins and lifelong engagement with Puerto Rican and Latino communities in New York. The above narrative, when combined with the legacy of his father, Frank, who arrived there in 1939, thus completes the picture and allows us to understand more completely the origin of Martín’s aesthetic sensibility and political convictions.

The historical and cultural significance of these artists’ contributions must all be approached from within this context, with New York seen as a Puerto Rican, Latin American, Caribbean, and most recently, Latino dimension of the diversity of U.S. culture and politics, and a bridge between the United States and these places of origin as sources of reflection. Espada’s poetry exemplifies the potential depth and complexities of this intertwined heritage and its multidimensional contributions to the American, Puerto Rican, Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino “political imaginations,” together with that of writers of the Chicano generation, and in permanent dialogue and exchange with that of the African diaspora and of indigenous peoples throughout the hemisphere.

William Carlos Williams and Luis Palés Matos

Espada’s influences and contexts also include social realist poets of the United States like Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, William Carlos Williams, and more recent exponents, such as Carolyn Forché, who generally have a less contested relationship with the dominant canon than the Latino writers cited in the previous section. Williams’s Puerto Rican origins, as son of a Puerto Rican mother and English father (who had himself grown up in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and according to Williams, preferred speaking Spanish to his wife, Williams’s mother), and who spoke predominantly Spanish at home as a child while growing up in Rutherford, New Jersey, were virtually unrecognized as a central factor in his poetry until they were explored in depth by Julio Marzán. In his seminal text, The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams, he argues that Williams’s “Latin half revealed itself as his spiritual center. His major creative achievement was his translating the exotic voice of that core into the voice of an Anglo persona amenable to a reading public that conventionally held in low regard that most important component of his historical person”; ultimately, according to Marzán, “Williams’s own Latin American roots and anguished sense of foreignness also became his ‘lifelong source of power’” (xi–xii; emphasis in original).

In light of all of the above, Marzán concludes that Williams is thus a poet who was “literally, not nominally, bicultural” (Spanish American xiii). Evident traces of this legacy in Williams’s work include his great admiration for Spanish poets such as Luis de Góngora and Federico García Lorca, his use of Spanish language titles in his poetry, and his efforts to translate Spanish poets into English. Marzán’s hypothesis is that if one assumes, contrary to the dominant critical traditions regarding Williams prior to Marzán’s work, that he is “the product of his Spanish-language background, then he would be an antecedent to a nascent writing that appears to have no roots in this country’s literature” (Spanish American xi). Williams’s journey from the Puerto Rican identity at the heart of his bicultural origins toward an “Anglo persona” as a poet, in Marzán’s description, moves in the opposite direction from Espada’s, characterized by an embrace not only of the Puerto Rican component of his own bicultural origins but by a broader identification with Latinos in the United States as a whole, with the Caribbean and Latin America, and with struggles for liberation grounded in these realities and their equivalents on a global scale. Despite the differing content of their trajectories, however, Williams and Espada both ended up in a similar position combining key elements of their biculturalism and roots in Puerto Rico with an aesthetic of critical realism and political commitment.

Their differences stem largely from those inherent in their historical circumstances. The contributions and sacrifices of Puerto Rican writers such as Corretjer, Soto Vélez, Burgos, and the Nuyorican generation and their equivalents among African Americans and Chicanos, as well as in the Beat Generation and their successors that made it possible for Espada to openly affirm his intertwined roots and politics in his poetry, were not available or conceivable in the forms they eventually took when Williams published his first book at age twenty-six in 1909 (Poems). It is worth emphasizing in this context that to be Puerto Rican in the United States, until U.S. citizenship was imposed by the Jones Act in 1917 (and long thereafter, and in many ways up to the present, though arguably in more “symbolic” terms), was, literally, legally to be “foreign” in an era marked by widespread xenophobia and racist Social Darwinism as a hegemonic ideology. Within less than ten years came the Ludlow Massacre, the frame up and execution of Joe Hill, the imprisonment of Eugene Debs for his antiwar advocacy, the Palmer raids, followed by the mass deportation of “undesirable alien” radicals such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, the exile in the Soviet Union of John Reed and World War I labor leader William “Big Bill” Haywood, and in the 1920s, the Sacco and Vanzetti case and resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.

Williams and Espada also made different choices, among those options available to both, for reasons related to their personal circumstances and artistic sensibilities. Williams’s initial inclinations were toward Imagism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and his overall engagement with early Modernism, before developing his own version of critical realism and irony. Espada once again followed a similar trajectory but in reverse, beginning with critical realism and later experimenting with his own variations on surrealist imagery and humor as a vehicle for deepening political critique and broadening its reception.

Williams described himself as a socialist, was a contributor to radical journals such as the Masses and the Blast (an anarchist journal edited by Alexander Berkman that was published first in San Francisco and then in New York between January 1916 and June 1917), and eventually became a victim of McCarthyism when he was denied a consultancy with the Library of Congress because of his political views. In this context, Williams thought that writers should be less concerned with propagandizing and instead remain “devoted to writing (first and last)”; but he also affirmed his conviction in the same article that there are circumstances under which art can and should be conceived of as “in the service of the proletariat,” in a spirit ultimately convergent with Espada’s approach in his foreword to Poetry like Bread (Williams, “Art and Politics” 75). Williams was also an important mentor of key poets belonging to the Beat Generation, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the San Francisco and New York Schools, including Charles Olson, Robert Creeley (who later became an early mentor for Espada), Denise Levertov (notable later for her engagement as a poet and activist with the civil rights and antiwar movements, as well as for her position on human rights issues in Latin America, in particular, the 1973 coup in Chile [the “little September 11”] and U.S. intervention in El Salvador), Kenneth Rexroth, and notably, Allen Ginsberg (as the author of the introduction to Ginsberg’s “Howl”).

For example, Williams’s essay in tribute to Lorca was published in Spanish in the 1937 collection of elegies for the Spanish poet edited by Emilio Prados and released on the first anniversary of Lorca’s execution, honoring the Spanish Civil War’s single most celebrated victim (C. Nelson, Revolutionary Memory 229). It was also in 1937 that he contributed translations into English of Spanish writers included in the “New York anthology . . . And Spain Sings: Fifty Loyalist Ballads,” edited by M. J. Bernardete and Rolfe Humphries, since he and others, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Muriel Rukeyser, who also contributed translations to this volume, “realized that one of the most important things they could do was to give Spanish poets a voice in English and a broad American audience” (C. Nelson, Revolutionary Memory 198; ellipsis in original). Over the course of his career, Espada has sought to do the same with and for the voices of Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican communities in the United States, Central American, and Latin American liberation struggles, and those of Latino immigrant workers and African American prisoners throughout his work as a poet, editor, translator, “cultural advocate,” essayist, and mentor.

All of the above-described issues as to the characteristics of Williams’s work, his ambivalent sense of identity, and his politics might be some of the reasons why Harold Bloom considers William Carlos Williams’s (along with Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein’s) inclusion in his version and understanding of the “Western” canon to be “more problematic,” as compared to other clear choices for him—namely, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens (487–88). Espada, twice a winner of the Paterson Poetry Award, has stressed in private correspondence that he respected Williams’s work long before its connection to Puerto Rico was finally explored by Marzán. But aside from the deep connections both share as to Puerto Rico and the Spanish language, Williams is also a forerunner for Espada in his use of critical realism (“no ideas but in things”) and irony to both explore and dignify the lives of working people and their perspective on poverty and oppression, such as we find in the poems “The Yachts,” “Proletarian Portrait,” “The Red Wheelbarrow,” and those cited below:

Others, such as “The Poor” (1921), draw on Williams’s lifelong experience as a general practice physician and pediatrician (like Ramón Emeterio Betances, the “doctor of the poor,” who was Puerto Rico’s equivalent of José Martí, as reviewed in an earlier chapter subsection above). Comparably, it is not surprising to find we can understand Espada in a similar context, as he has drawn extensively on his “clinical” experiences as an advocate and lawyer. Consider William’s testimony in “The Poor” and the way in which it anticipates Espada’s more well-known lawyer-themed work from his fourth book City of Coughing and Dead Radiators as well as other advocacy-based samples included in Imagine the Angels of Bread:

The reference to the lice in the children’s hair in “Poor” reminds me, for example, of the clinical precision of Espada’s reference in “Imagine the Angels of Bread” (“Imagina los angeles de pan”), the titular proem to the latter book named above, to the desired, prophetic coming of “[. . .] the year that cockroaches / become extinct, that no doctor / finds a roach embedded / in the ear of an infant” (“[. . .] el año de la extinción / de las cucarachas, cuando ningún médico / encuentra una enterrada / en el oído de un infant”) (40–44).

Relatedly, one could also argue that Williams’s famed “Red Wheelbarrow” (“so much depends upon / a red wheel barrow,” etc. [1–2]) finds a powerful variation and extended commentary in Espada’s “The Meaning of the Shovel” (Imagine).^[41] In this poem (which belongs to a Nicaraguan cycle of perhaps a half dozen poems and a larger series dedicated to Central America), Espada describes his experiences in June and July 1982 digging latrines in Barrio René Cisneros in Managua (the locational and timestamp details are presented in an epigraph to the poem).

The setting of “Meaning of the Shovel” is described as a place where “[. . .] the congregation of the landless / stipples the earth with a thousand shacks” on what used to be land belonging to Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, with “every weatherbeaten carpenter^[^[42]^] / planting a fistful of nails” (M. Espada, “Meaning” 5–8). The second complementing phrase in line 9 that follows “Here I dig latrines,” that is, “I dig because [. . .],” refrains exactly five times after the original proclamation (appearing twice in the last verse [the second iteration is parsed to “I dig”], and then extended a third time with the gerund [51]) with painstaking concreteness, documenting crucial dimensions of the Sandinista Revolution and its impact, from the ground up, as well as the unfolding consequences of the Contra war (9, 18, 31, 38, 43, 48, 51). The range of images and experiences evoked, almost photographically, includes the funeral of an eighteen-year-old Sandinista soldier killed in border skirmishes with the U.S.-backed Somocistas, “[. . .] four walls of photographs” (19) of the faces of young literacy workers dead from malaria or by drowning or murdered for “bringing an alphabet / sandwiched in notebooks / to places where the mist never rises” (23–25), the implications of a “[. . .] barrio / without plumbing [. . .]” and “[. . .] a country / with no glass [. . .]” (31–32, 39–40), and the metaphorical depth of a contemporary struggle with ancient cultural roots. So why does he dig? Because, as he explains to the reader, “[. . .] I have hauled garbage / and pumped gas and cut paper / and sold encyclopedias door to door. / I dig, digging until the passport / in my back pocket saturates with dirt, / because here I work for nothing / and for everything” (48–54).

Williams also took a critical, implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) anti-colonialist approach, from what might be described now as a “postmodernist” and radical multiculturalist perspective (like Martí in “Nuestra América” [“Our America”]), to his polyphonic retelling of the Spanish conquest of the New World (including detailed chapters dedicated to the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico, and to the fall of Tenochtitlan). As part of his overall reinterpretation of the history of the Americas in prose poetry, he wrote In the American Grain (1925), where he lamented how “Upon the orchidean beauty of the new world the old rushed inevitably to revenge itself [. . .] [bringing] the evil of the whole world” (27). His efforts here build, on the one hand, on Whitman’s prefaces to Leaves of Grass and Darío’s perspective in his poem “To Roosevelt” (1904), and on the other, foreshadow important aspects of Guillén’s poem “Arrival” (1931) (e.g., “our sweaty skin will reflect the moist faces of the vanquished” [36]) and book West Indies Ltd. (1934); Roumain’s poem “Sales Nègres” (“Filthy Negroes”) (written during the 1930s but not published until 1945); Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, first published in French in 1939); Neruda’s Canto general (whose first two major components were published in 1943 and 1944, before the first publication of its complete version in Mexico in 1950); Mir’s “Hay un país en el mundo” (“There is a Country in the World”) (1949) and “Countersong to Walt Whitman” (1952); Corretjer’s “Oubao-Moin” (“Island of Blood”) (written in 1950 and published in 1953); Soto Vélez’s Tierra prometida (Promised Land) (whose writing began during the 1950s but was not published until 1979); and Eduardo Galeano’s continuing efforts since the early 1970s to reconstruct this same history in prose, “from below,” in books ranging from Open Veins of Latin America to his trilogy Memory of Fire.

These works also echo Martí’s anti-imperialist interpretation of Whitman (“Manifest Destiny” in reverse), developed most fully, as discussed above, in his essay “Nuestra América” (“Our America”), which is in turn reflected in Darío’s poem “To Roosevelt.” Both Martí and Darío were crucial referents for Williams within their shared framework of developing a version of modernism centered in the New World (in contrast to Eurocentric and Anglocentric versions developed respectively by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot and later twisted into a canon of exclusion by Harold Bloom). Together with related poems by Espada (discussed below), the works cited above, by Darío et al., in fact, can and should be reread and reassessed together as part of a single continental, and eventually global, song (along the lines of “The Song of All” suggested by Roberto González Echevarría as a possible translation for the title of Neruda’s Canto general in his introduction to Jack Schmitt’s translation [6]) and as a counterhegemonic canon of creative liberation and resistance (in Spanish, French, and English, in terms of its influences and components highlighted here, but which must necessarily be extended to other languages ranging inter alia from Hikmet’s Turkish and Darwish’s Arabic to the Tojolabal variant of Mayan that has provided a crucial foundation for the political culture of Mexico’s Zapatistas; see Lenkersdorf).

The narrative voice in Williams’s book (In the American Grain) shifts from that of an early Viking explorer to that of Columbus and Ponce in the first few chapters and then begins to switch back and forth in the same paragraph, sometimes within the same sentence, between the perspective of the Spanish conquerors and that of their victims, including both the continent’s indigenous peoples and African slaves. Williams quickly adopts their perspective as his own, as did Neruda, Corretjer, and Galeano, and as can be found in related examples such as Mexican historian Miguel León-Portilla’s Visión de los vencidos (Visions of the Vanquished) (1959) that compiles Mexican and Mayan testimonies of the Conquest, and beginning in the 1930s with the poets of négritude (particularly Roumain and Césaire) and negrismo (Guillén, Palés Matos, Luis Carlos López of Colombia, and Langston Hughes, among others). This commitment and ability to speak poetically “from the perspective of the victims,” on a global scale, has already been referred to above as characteristic and central to Espada’s work and its contributions.

These sections of In the American Grain provide important common ground between Williams and Espada against the background of similar efforts by the other writers mentioned above. They include a shared insistence between them in this context on the need to historicize the continent’s experiences of oppression. From this vantage, like Martí and Darío, Williams insists on extending Whitman’s vision to the Americas as a whole, just as Espada’s work emphasizes the need to connect Puerto Rico’s struggle against U.S. colonialism, and that of Puerto Rican and Latino communities within the United States, to that of all Latin America (as Guillén did in West Indies Ltd., from the perspective of Cuba), and beyond. There are also important glimmers here, as in Martí, of Bolívar’s efforts to decipher the continent’s uniqueness, for the first time in depth, from a non-Eurocentric perspective within the “West” in his Letter from Jamaica (1815), as José Enrique Rodó and Darío later sought to do in terms of affirming the need for a Latin Americanist version of Modernism capable of serving as the basis for cultural resistance to both U.S. and European domination.

For Williams, as for Espada, it is history that is the point of departure, with all of its ironies and contradictions:

In the above passage, Williams relies on “our,” as in Mir’s invocation of an insurgent “we,” as collective protagonist in his Latin Americanist, continental rereading and reshaping of Whitman’s “I”: for example, “not Indians but [. . .] of their world,” “we who ran to the shore naked, we who cried” (39). For Guillén, Roumain, and Césaire, meanwhile, the historical task began from the perspective of assuming their identification with the legacy and concrete human experiences of slavery and with the African diaspora and Africa. While for Corretjer, in his radical politicized version of criollismo, the ties to history led initially to an emphasis on Puerto Rico’s indigenous roots in Taíno culture but ultimately (as in “Oubao-Moin” [“Island of Blood”]) a much broader vision of social liberation, combining an identification with the island’s indigenous and African legacies with a Marxist internationalist rejection of all forms of exploitation.

This is the same “history,” “murder,” “enslavement,” “blood,” “spirit,” and “souls” whose reiteration and voices provide the content, structure, and resonance in Canto XII of Neruda’s “The Heights of Macchu Picchu,”^[43] Corretjer’s “Oubao-Moin” (“Island of Blood”), sections 2, 8, 17, 18, 29, 35, and 65 of Soto Vélez’s Tierra prometida (Promised Land), and key related poems by Espada. The poems mentioned below by Espada each contribute to the deepening and expansion of themes of oppression and liberation evident in the work of Williams, Guillén, Roumain, Césaire, Neruda, Corretjer, and Soto Vélez, in specific (often overlapping) contexts, such as:

For Williams, as for Corretjer, Soto Vélez, and Espada, it is Puerto Rico that serves as the common point of departure for a broader vision. Williams’s “Spanish-American” roots in Puerto Rico are a crucial subtext for the critical realist vision of the New World developed in In the American Grain and are reflected directly in examples such as his pun on the meaning of the island’s name in English (“Rich Port”)—referring to how Ponce had been “trapped in Puerto Rico, rico! all ruined” (39; emphasis in original). Williams, like Corretjer, is haunted by the spirit of struggle and resistance he identifies with, the “vanquished” (as Guillén described them), and emphasizes how the military victory of the Spanish was in fact a tainted, spiritual defeat: “we kill them but their souls dominate us. Our men, our blood, but their spirit is master. It enters us, it defeats us, it imposes itself. We are moderns—madmen at Paris—all lacking in a ground sense of cleanliness” (40).

Williams also draws an implicit analogy between the Spanish conquerors’ ultimate “defeat” in this sense, and that of the United States and its interventions in Latin America, while describing the pursuit of an indigenous warrior by a Spanish dog: “But, O Soul of the New World, the man had his bow and arrow with him as he swam. Tell that to Wilson” (In the American Grain 41; emphasis added). Williams here directly invokes the echo of Darío’s “To Roosevelt” and extends the same message to Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, while president (1913–1921)—despite his Nobel Peace Prize—had exceeded the very significant increase in direct U.S. intervention in Latin America already initiated by Theodore Roosevelt, with full-scale occupations of the Dominican Republic (1916–1924) and Haiti (1915–1934), the prolongation and deepening of an intervention already underway in Nicaragua (1912–1925) when he took office, and others in Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Panama, and the imposition of U.S. citizenship on residents of Puerto Rico through the Jones Act in 1917. Several of these interventions had met fierce resistance that was widely publicized, as in Mexico (vs. Pancho Villa, 1916–1917 and 1918–1919) and Haiti (led by Charlemagne Péralte, 1915–1918). Similarly, the Nicaraguan intervention eventually led to the emergence of the rebel movement headed by Augusto César Sandino (beginning in 1925, the year In the American Grain was published), which became the inspiration for the Sandinista revolution of the 1980s, later depicted in Espada’s poetry.^[46]

Williams’s dual approach to the Spanish conquerors, and to their indigenous and African victims, is a Latino version of W. E. B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness” (e.g., “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others [. . .] two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings” [364]), and is reflected in his conclusion regarding the mixed legacy within him of Spanish conquest and indigenous spirit: “They left what they had defeated, to—us. If men inherit souls this is the color of mine. We are, too, the others. Think of them!” (Williams, In the American Grain 41; emphasis added). Once again, this echoes similar racial/cultural ambivalences as to the identity of the peoples of the Americas explored by Bolívar and Martí. As Marzán put it, In the American Grain was a key expression of Williams’s efforts “to recover a history in which he could see himself imaged” (Spanish American Roots 199). As the Harlem Renaissance emerged around him, Williams also insisted on a radical departure from the dominant historiography of his time, captured in his view of the overall sweep of North American history where “the slave ship” is “poised against the Mayflower” (Marzán, Spanish American Roots 199). Williams also developed an approach in his 1941 talk at the Inter-American Writers’ conference at the University of Puerto Rico to the singularity of U.S. idiom, poetics, and identity that included a combination of an identification with Spain and Spanish heritage and a vision that extolled racial heterogeneity: “We in the U.S. are climactically as by latitude and weather much nearer Spain than England, as also in the volatility of our spirit, in racial mixture—much more like Gothic and Moorish Spain” (qtd. in Marzán, Spanish American Roots 164).

It is these insights and interests that led Williams by the early 1940s to admire and translate the work of Puerto Rican poet Luis Palés Matos, the island’s leading exponent of the Africanist current represented by Guillén and Hughes’s shared “concepts of blackness” (see below), and variations developed by Roumain and Césaire. For Palés Matos, as for the others mentioned here, “while the Caribbean’s roots were half-Western, its defining spirit was African, which also informed its inhabitants, whatever their color” (Marzán, Spanish American Roots 221). In Palés Matos, according to Marzán, Williams found a poetry that “radiated the Dionysian duende” he had previously noted in Lorca; he also found “a truly American spiritual brother, from his mother’s homeland no less, who understood that the spirit of a culture resides in the local idiom, the popular speech, and not in a remotely relevant European literary language” (Spanish American Roots 214).

Williams described Palés Matos, who he met in Puerto Rico at a writer’s conference in 1941, as “‘one of the most important poets of all Latin America today though many would context this from a conventional viewpoint’” (qtd. in Marzán, Spanish American Roots 214), at a time when Palés Matos was considered an embarrassment by the island’s Hispanophile literary establishment in thrall to exiled Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez’s “purism.” Palés Matos is still the subject of widespread debate in terms of the “authenticity” of his Africanism, while at the same time others (such as Roberto Márquez) argue that it is precisely his stress on reflecting and exploring Puerto Rico’s African heritage in his poetry that makes him a better choice for “National Poet” than Corretjer, who combined a greater emphasis on the island’s indigenous legacies (absent from Palés Matos) with a Marxist vision of intertwined national and social liberation. (Palés Matos was very close to the island’s “Modernist” experiments and to Dadaism and Surrealism in particular in his early years, like Soto Vélez throughout his life, but never identified himself as Nationalist or leftist in a political sense.) But Palés Matos was also very critical of the U.S. role in Puerto Rico in several poems scattered throughout his work between the 1920s and the 1950s—although he was never an anticolonial or political activist—in verses like “The Yankee, a black bulldog, / chews on you, the bone between his paws” (“El yanki, bull-dog negro, / te roe entre sus patas como un hueso”) (from “Bocetos Impresionistas” [“Impressionist Sketches”] V.39–40); “Pity, Lord, pity on my poor town / where my poor people will likely die of nothing” (“¡Piedad, Señor, piedad para mi pobre pueblo / donde mi pobre gente se morirá de nada!”) (from “Pueblo” [“Town”] 1–2); and “In the wasteland of a continent, / mournfully Puerto Rico / bleats like a stewed goat” (“En el yermo de un continente, / Puerto Rico, lúgubremente, / bala como cabro estofado”) (from “Preludio en Boricua” [“Prelude in Boricua”] 43–45). Palés Matos also connected his celebration of Afro-Puerto Rican rhythm and sensuality with anticolonial sentiments directed both at symbols of U.S. colonial authority and their local collaborators, such as we find in “Plena del Menéalo” (“Shake it Plena”):^[47]

“Plena” was written in 1952 at a historical moment characterized by massive McCarthian repression against the island’s pro-independence movement which was precisely when the “turncoats” alluded to in the poem, headed by island governor Luis Muñoz Marín, had just succeeded in imposing the model of “Commonwealth” (or “Free Associated State”) status in order to stem the Puerto Rican expression of a global wave of anticolonial revolution from Vietnam to India, Indonesia, China, Algeria, and soon, Ghana and all of West Africa.

Corretjer reflected on the complexities of this historical moment from a Puerto Rican perspective in his poem “Andando de noche sola” (“Roaming at Night Alone”), dated November 5, 1950, in the immediate wake of the repression following the Jayuya uprising on October 30, which had resulted in his arrest. The poem was written in jail and describes his anguish at hearing that his wife had been searching to find where he was being held (prisons were overflowing with over a thousand arrested following the uprising [Ayala and Bernabe 167]). The poet mentions how painful it was for him to be in jail for a just, but persecuted and losing, cause, all while the world outside protected its own self interests and Puerto Rico suffered: “—Oh homeland! The fact that you live is our great fortune / but our disgrace is that you are captive” (“—¡ay patria! ¡Por suerte viva / y por desgracia cautiva”) (Corretjer, “Andando” [“Roaming”] 38–39). The Jayuya uprising took place just a year after the triumph of the Chinese Revolution under Mao Tse-tung and only a few months after the outbreak of the Korean War.

Palés Matos is present in Martín’s invocations of Afro-Puerto Rican rhythms, sensuality, and traditions of resistance in poems such as “The Spanish of Our Out-Loud Dreams” (“shining in your passionate blackness” [46]); “Los Sures” (“shake your black hair down, / and the night is a woman’s darkness. // shake your black hair down, // shake your black hair down, / you are a dark woman rising, / turning hips and heartbeat quick” 6–7, 14, 23–25); and perhaps most fully in “En la calle San Sebastían” (in such passages as “a dancer in white with a red red scarf / en la calle San Sebastían, / calls to the gods who were freed by slaves / en la calle San Sebastían” as well as “[. . .] and hands smack congas like flies in the field / en la calle San Sebastían, / and remember the beat of packing crates / en la calle San Sebastían, / from the days when overseers banished the drum,” and especially in the remaining lines 33–41 (3–6, 9–13).

Other examples, in terms of subject matter if not rhythm, include “Niggerlips”—which Martín and I translated together into Spanish with the title “Negro Bembón,” the title of a well-known poem by Nicolás Guillén that has been musicalized. There is also “My Name Is Espada,” a word play on the meaning of his last name in Spanish: “sword” (1). In the poem, the image of the sword is deconstructed and reconstructed from its origin as a weapon of oppression to its potential as a weapon for liberation—“[. . .] slave’s finger pressed to the blade / with the pulsing revelation that a Spaniard’s throat / could seep blood like a fingertip, sabers for the uprising / smuggled in the hay, slave of the upraised saber [. . .]”—and concludes with a forceful plea to “the slave of the saber riding a white horse by night / breathe my name, tell me to taste my name: Espada” (15–18, 42–43).

Roberto Márquez, the Nuyorican Generation,
and the Young Lords

Many of the writers mentioned here as influences or as having important affinities to Espada’s poetry were included in Roberto Márquez’s seminal five-hundred-page 1974 anthology Latin American Revolutionary Poetry/Poesía Revolucionaria Latinoamericana, which brought most of the writers included to U.S. readers for the first time, and did so in a fully bilingual edition that is still unusual today. In fact, at the time it was virtually unprecedented. Márquez, a Puerto Rican scholar from New York (currently based at Mt. Holyoke College), who became an important inspiration and mentor to both Espada and myself, had by then already published two stunning books of translations of poems by Nicolás Guillén—the first major effort of this kind since Langston Hughes and Ben Frederic Carruthers’s translation of Cuba Libre was published in the United States in 1948—and was then teaching Hispanic American literature, culture, and history at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he was my adviser during my studies there from 1974 to 1976. Márquez also founded and edited the influential literary journal Caliban: A Journal of New World Thought and Writing in 1975 (with David Arthur McMurray and Hortense Spillers), where both Espada and I discovered the work of Jamaican poet and essayist Andrew Salkey, soon to become a professor at Hampshire College as well. Salkey eventually became another important mentor for Martín and served as an indirect connection to the contributions of Trinidadian scholar CLR James, a key founder of the radical aesthetics of liberation of the English-speaking Caribbean.

Caliban’s editorial statement in the first issue described its contributors as “heirs to the combative spirit of the Antillean slave who is (their) symbol, and whose name (they) take as their own [. . .] against the Eurocentric, capitalistic, hierarchical vision traditionally imposed upon who we and what we are, upon how we view ourselves and our history,” and affirmed instead the “authenticity and singularity” of a radical alternative perspective (qtd. in Wasserman 15n28). This approach was inspired in large part by Cuban poet and essayist Roberto Fernández Retamar’s manifesto “Caliban,” originally published in Spanish (1971) and then in English (with some variation) for a special double issue of the Massachusetts Review (1973–1974), which became, in effect, the pilot number of the new journal (Vaughan and Vaughan 156n37). Fernández Retamar is a driving force behind Cuba’s leading cultural institution, Casa de las Americas, whose activities include research, publishing, events, and a very influential literary prize. Márquez’s anthology and the Caliban journal and essay (reflecting the ethos of the Caliban “school”) together have contributed importantly to the political and cultural environment that nourished Espada’s emergence and consolidation as a writer.

Pedro Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary,” the founding poem of the Nuyorican generation, was first published separately by Monthly Review Press in 1973 and was also included the following year in Márquez’s anthology, which did not catalog other leading Puerto Rican writers such as Corretjer, Soto Vélez, Burgos, or Palés Matos. This was surely a deliberate choice by Márquez to emphasize the importance of the emergence with Pietri of a Puerto Rican aesthetic of resistance based in New York and written in English. He also presented a full translation of the poem into Spanish, along the same lines as other poems included in the volume by better-known authors such as Guillén, Cardenal, Mir, and Benedetti. Pietri’s anguished, critical, and ultimately hopeful vision of the travails of Puerto Ricans in New York had already been foreshadowed in Piri Thomas’s classic memoir Down These Mean Streets (1967), which had an equivalent impact as to broader awareness about the realities of Puerto Rican migration as the work of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Ralph Ellison had achieved in the African-American context. Importantly, Thomas’s brutal nonfiction account of Puerto Rican life “was the first book by a Puerto Rican to attain fame and critical acclaim in the United States. Before this, Puerto Ricans had been represented in U.S. text and film—most lastingly in Leonard Bernstein’s 1957 musical play and 1961 film West Side Story—mainly as a delinquent, at best exotic, at worst degraded and dangerous, other” (Ayala and Bernabe 262–63).^[48]

Thomas’s work literally made the publication and reception soon afterwards of Víctor Hernández Cruz, Pedro Pietri, Miguel Piñero, and their generation possible, and thus, eventually, that of Espada. As Ayala and Bernabe note, “Thomas’[s] memoir is a vivid portrait and protest against racism, not only toward but among Puerto Ricans. It is an affirmation of his blackness as much as his Puerto Ricanness” (262), and shares important common features with explorations of such issues in the work of poet Palés Matos and Dominican-Puerto Rican essayist José Luis González, as well as in memoirs by Antonia Pantoja, Jesús Colón (in his columns, poetry, and 1961 book A Puerto Rican in New York, and Other Sketches), and Bernardo Vega (written much earlier but not finally published in English in Juan Flores’s translation until 1984). Colón and Vega were forerunners as to such issues and many others in a manner reminiscent of W. E. B. Du Bois’s role as a critical referent, precursor, and, at times, mentor to figures ranging from Langston Hughes and Richard Wright to James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. It is not uncommon to find Colón, in particular, described by many as an important intellectual and political mentor of the Young Lords and the Nuyorican generation.

Pietri’s poem was first published in the Young Lords Party book Palante in 1971, originally edited by photojournalist Michael Abramson, which was a documentary overview of the trajectory of New York’s Young Lords Party, based mostly among Puerto Rican, other Latino, and black youth in Spanish Harlem (initially as an offshoot of an organization originally founded in Chicago by youth gang activist José “Cha Cha” Jiménez); the poem was first read in public during the Lords’ takeover of the First Spanish Methodist Church (renamed by them as the People’s Church) on 111th Street in Harlem in December 1969. The Young Lords had a vision inspired by the Black Panthers and the Chicano Movement’s Brown Berets that combined grassroots antiracist community organizing (on issues ranging from police brutality to the right to decent health care, sanitation, and housing, including their provision of free breakfast, clothing, and educational programs) with revolutionary nationalism that took the form among the Young Lords of a commitment to Puerto Rican liberation, cutting across the divisions among Puerto Ricans on the mainland and on the island, as had been promoted by colonial migration. Martín has often spoken and written of the importance of the Young Lords for the development of his political and cultural consciousness, including the connections he has suggested in poems like “Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Pellín and Nina)” (“Rebelión es el giro de manos del amante [Pellín and Nina]”) between the Nationalist tradition and the Lords; it was in fact former Young Lords activist Luis Garden Acosta (founder-director of the community youth organization El Puente in Los Sures in Brooklyn), a childhood friend, who gave Martín the gift of Roberto Márquez’s anthology, somewhere around Martín’s twentieth birthday (roughly 1977).

As Márquez explained it in his introduction to Pietri’s poem in the Latin American Revolutionary Poetry/Poesia Revolucionaria Latinoamericana anthology:

This is the same landscape in which Luisa Capetillo, Jesús Colón, Bernardo Vega, Juan Antonio Corretjer, Clemente Soto Vélez, Julia de Burgos, Antonia Pantoja, Frank Espada, Jack Agüeros, and many others too numerous to name were engaged and which they helped transform with their actions and their words, laying the basis in turn for the dreams and struggles of the Young Lords, the Nuyorican generation, Martín Espada, and their successors.

Cultural work and poetry specifically were integral to the Young Lords from their beginning in New York through the leadership of political and cultural activist Felipe Luciano, who was a founding member of the original version of the Afro-Latino performance collective known as the Last Poets, the key forerunner of contemporary expressions of political and cultural resistance through Hip Hop and spoken word. Luciano developed a weekly radio program on Pacifica’s WBAI for the Young Lords in 1969, also called Palante, and eventually became a full -time radio and TV journalist. He played a key role in promoting political awareness among Puerto Rican and other youth in the city on his Latin Roots program through the music of New York-based Puerto Rican salsa musicians and composers such as Eddie Palmieri, Ray Barreto, Willie Colón, Dominican Johnny Pacheco, Cuban singer Celia Cruz, and singer-songwriter Rubén Blades from Panamá, free music festivals in Central Park, and eventually, annual salsa concerts at Madison Square Garden, organized by Fania Records. As a result of these efforts, the culture and politics of Puerto Rican, Latino, and Latin American liberation became a central aspect of the public sphere in New York City for the first time since the 1940s. Journals such as Pueblos Hispanos (Hispanic Peoples)—founded in 1942 as “a joint venture of independentistas and the American Communist Party” (Ayala and Bernabe 147; emphasis added) and edited by Corretjer in close collaboration with his second wife Consuelo Lee, Soto Vélez, Burgos, and Puerto Rican Communist activist, journalist, and writer Colón—and its successor Liberación, played a key role in New York’s overall political landscape dominated by figures such as Vito Marcantonio, a leading defender of the cause of Puerto Rican independence (and an important mentor for Soto Vélez in terms of his political activism in the city) (Ayala and Bernabe 131, 147–48; Colón, Lo que xxix–xxxv).

Random House meanwhile had published Victor Hernández Cruz’s pioneering poetry collections Snaps in 1969 and Mainland in 1973. The publication of the bilingual collection The Puerto Rican Poets/Los poetas puertorriqueños (1972) edited by Alfredo Matilla and Iván Silén—the same year as Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s extraordinary anthem of Chicano liberation, I am Joaquín/Yo soy Joaquín, also published by Bantam in a bilingual edition, and Tino Villanueva’s Hay otra voz: Poems (1968–1971) were released—the historic collection Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings, edited by Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero with Richard August (1975), Stan Steiner’s books La Raza: The Mexican Americans (on the Chicano movement and its origins, published in 1970) and The Islands: The Worlds of the Puerto Ricans (1974), Kal Wagenheim and Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim’s still-unsurpassed collection The Puerto Ricans: A Documentary History (1973), and, finally, Julio Marzán’s anthology of twentieth-century Puerto Rican poetry Inventing a Word (1980) that included both Corretjer and Pietri, complete a major portion of the relevant hypothetical bookshelf that helped shape the context for the emergence of the unusual sensibility and power already evident in Espada’s first book, Immigrant Iceboy’s, published in 1982.

Another very influential collection of poetry published during this formative period was For Neruda, for Chile: An International Anthology (1975), edited by Walter Lowenfels (presented with accompanying readings in Boston organized by Denise Levertov), which invoked the same kind of solidarity and affinity with the Chilean left, specifically in its celebration of the lives and work of Pablo Neruda and singer Víctor Jara,^[49] the latter of whom was executed in the immediate wake of the coup. (References to the Chilean coup, as well as to Neruda and Jara, are expressed recurrently in Espada’s own work.) Both Lowenfels’s anthology and Espada’s work as to Chile (and that of Espada and other writers who have commented on Central America in the 1980s and immigrant rights issues) also drew on rich precedents, such as the solidarity efforts during the Spanish Civil War in which William Carlos Williams participated. These connections were reinforced by the historical parallels between the deaths of Neruda and Jara in the wake of the coup in Chile and the deaths of Federico García Lorca, Antonio Machado, and Miguel Hernández in the context of the war in Spain, as well as the recurrent cycles of exile both moments unleashed.

Espada’s engagement with Chile and its implications begins with his poem “The Firing Squad is Singing in Chile” (Trumpets) and is echoed again almost twenty years later in “Something Escapes the Bonfire,” both dedicated to Jara (the latter poem is based on interviews with the singer’s widow, Joan Jara, and included in Republic of Poetry [2006]). This continuing thread in his work extends to the Neruda-inspired “The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park” (Imagine) and manifests more fully in The Republic of Poetry, the Pulitzer-finalist poetry collection that emerged from his experiences as an invited participant in Chile during the 2004 commemoration of the centenary of Neruda’s birth. This book includes sections of work wholly dedicated to Chile and the history surrounding the coup, including poems specifically focused on Neruda and his historical and imaginary legacies, such as the titular “The Republic of Poetry,” “The Soldiers in the Garden,” “Black Islands,” “Rain Without Rain,” “Not Paint and Wood,” and “City of Glass.” More recently, Espada has extended his Chilean-themed cluster with the haunting poem “The Swimming Pool at Villa Grimaldi” from The Trouble Ball (2011).^[50]

Added to his poems for Neruda and Jara, Espada’s series of poems honoring poets and writers from Clemente Soto Vélez and Julia de Burgos to Andrew Salkey (see below) and Mumia Abu-Jamal,^[51] along with his other works dedicated to those who are much less well known (including friends, colleagues, some who have come to his attention and others unnamed), are an important guide to Espada’s influences and priorities. “All the People Who Are Now Red Trees” sets the framework for these tributes by beginning with an homage to Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti and including references to the historic photograph of Puerto Rico’s leading poets of the twentieth century, Juan Antonio Corretjer and Clemente Soto Vélez, who were also key leaders of the pro-independence Nationalist Party: “When I see the red maple, / I think of flamboyán’s red flower, / two poets like flamboyán / chained at the wrist / for visions of San Juan Bay / without Navy gunboats” (7–12). The poem then highlights successively his evocation of “[. . .] nameless laborers / marching with broken rifles” in the context of the Spanish Civil War, through the imagery of “[. . .] union organizers / in graves without headstones” and “[. . .] the hands / of condemned anarchists [. . .],” which together provide the context for his reiterated image at the end of the poem that refers to “the eyes and mouths of poets in chains,” like “[. . .] red flowers” (17–18, 21–22, 27–29, 27). It is Corretjer and Soto Vélez’s visions of “[. . .] San Juan bay / without Navy gunboats,” combined with Espada’s bookended invocations of “[. . .] nameless laborers” in combat in the Spanish Civil War, the “[. . .] union organizers,” and “condemned anarchists [. . .],” referenced at the beginning and end of the poem, that literally endow this composition, as well as the poets whose life and work Espada celebrates here, with meaning and with significance. “All the People” is thus a litany of praise that resonates with, and yet manages to transcend, echoes of Whitman, Canto XII of Neruda’s “Heights of Macchu Picchu,” and Corretjer’s “Oubao-Moin” (“Island of Blood”) in a manner that makes these earlier works both more contemporary and more relevant than ever.

Espada has been a careful reader and interpreter of all of the writers mentioned above (including his regular teaching of a seminar dedicated to Neruda’s work) and has interacted, and at times collaborated closely, with others already mentioned, such as Corretjer, Soto Vélez, Cardenal, Salkey, Jordan, and Baraka. Espada’s relationship with the life and work of Soto Vélez and Salkey was especially close.^[52] We met some of the aforementioned writers during the 1980s, along with James Baldwin, Quincy Troupe, Tino Villanueva, Sandra Cisneros, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and many others. This is the period when I began to collaborate with Espada on translating his work into Spanish (and that of Soto Vélez and Corretjer into English). During this period, we also organized a string of poetry readings and other related cultural advocacy events and initiatives in the Boston area, including the region’s first Latino cultural center (known as El Portón [The Gateway]) (1982–1983), a tribute to Corretjer at Harvard (1984)—and, subsequently, the first international symposium in honor of Corretjer’s life and work at the Boston Public Library (1986)—the “Third World Poetry Series” (1984–1986 featuring Troupe, Cisneros, Baraka, Santiago Baca, among many others), Cardenal’s visit to Boston (1985), and Massachusetts’ first Latino Arts and Humanities conference (1987), with Soto Vélez as chief inspiration and keynote speaker and Nicaraguan/Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegría as reader (the latter of whom was a recent finalist for the Federico García Lorca International Poetry Award in Granada, Spain). The event headlined by Soto Vélez and Alegría was held at the height of the U.S. genocidal interventions in Central America during the 1980s, when much of Espada’s poetry was directed at raising consciousness about and expressing and inspiring solidarity with revolutionary movements, refugees, and exiles from Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

What kinds of lessons can be drawn from such influences? Espada insists that “perhaps the most remarkable characteristic found in the poetry of the political imagination is the quality of hopefulness [. . .]” that allows “poets [to] sing of the possibility, the certainty of eventual justice” (Foreword 13; emphasis in original). As German philosopher Ernst Bloch has argued in his book The Principle of Hope, the essence of the matter “is a question of learning hope” (3). Here we are entering the realm of what Bloch refers to as “anticipatory consciousness” (13; emphasis added), that of the “Not-Yet-Conscious, Not-Yet-Become” (6) which “arise[s] out of the No to deprivation” (5) and which implies an effort that goes well beyond the metaphysical or hypothetical to the imperative to transform actual historical conditions of domination and oppression: a hope that “is not only a basic feature of human consciousness, but, concretely corrected and grasped, a basic determination within objective reality as a whole” (7).

From this perspective, one’s understanding of what is utopian, according to Bloch, is “turned towards the world,” directed at “overtaking the natural course of events” (12), and imagining what a “society without deprivation” (14; emphasis in original), “a life of fulfilling work free of exploitation,” and also even what “a life beyond work” (16) might actually look like. This vision also allows for reinterpretations of the social role of art as a liberatory space that “presupposes possibility beyond already existing reality,” where painting and poetry can be reconceived as “realisms of possibility” (15). The idea expressed here is that art must be transformed from its functional essence, in the context of systems of domination, as a “beautifying mirror which often only reflects how the ruling class wishes the wishes of the weak to be,” into a transformative “mirror [that] comes from the people” and that is directed instead at the “still unbecome [or unrealized], still unachieved homeland” (Bloch 13, 9; emphases added).

This is the “homeland” (patria) dreamt of by Corretjer, Burgos, Soto Vélez, Matos Paoli, and Pietri (among many others) in the Puerto Rican context of U.S. colonial domination, and by Espada in the framework of the equivalent hopes threaded throughout his work for the past thirty years in poems ranging from “Cordillera” to “Heart of Hunger,” “La Tumba de Buenaventura Roig” (“La tumba de Buenaventura Roig”), “Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Pellín and Nina)” (“Rebelión es el giro de manos del amante [Pellín and Nina]”), “Colibrí” (“Colibrí”), “Imagine the Angels of Bread” (“Imagina los angeles de pan”), “Hands Without Irons Become Dragonflies,” “En la calle San Sebastían,” “Inheritance of Waterfalls and Sharks,” and “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100,” to name only some of those most representative of his vision of Puerto Rico and the dimensions of the Puerto Rican struggle for liberation, as one of its most important “translators” and cultural advocates.

Espada as “Translator”

Martín is a gifted translator in the traditional sense of the term, rendering skillful versions in English of poets ranging from Soto Vélez to Neruda and Corretjer—Puerto Rico’s “National Poet”—and into Spanish representative samples of his own work and that of Whitman, among other examples. He has also engaged in many other collaborative translation efforts, such as those he and I have developed together.^[53] Espada’s poetry has also been widely translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, French, German, Thai, Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, and Turkish and includes Spanish-language editions that have been published in Puerto Rico, Chile, and Spain. In the Latin American and Caribbean context, he has also presented readings and workshops in Mexico, Cuba, and Jamaica (as well as in Puerto Rico and Chile) and has been invited to do so in Venezuela and Spain.

But Espada’s interest in the craft of literary translation is not, however, primarily academic or technical, but driven instead by the kind of political and cultural passion and commitment to building intercultural consciousness and transnational communities of struggle that is characteristic of Langston Hughes’s translations of Federico García Lorca, Nicolás Guillén, Jacques Roumain, and Gabriela Mistral. Hughes, an especially important influence on Espada’s work,

This is precisely the kind of zeal and attention to detail evident in Espada’s efforts as a translator, an editor, and a cultural advocate. But like Hughes, he also understands translation “as a bridge to accessing other cultures” and “as a way of transferring knowledge about those cultures and their people through his writing” (Martin-Ogunsola 2). Thus, for both Hughes and Espada, the theoretical or purely technical aspects of translation are secondary; as Hughes noted, for him (just as it applies for Espada), to transmit literal meaning without “word music would be to lose [. . .] meaning” (Martin-Ogunsola 4). This affinity between Hughes and Espada is clearly reflected in Espada’s insistence on the need for the poetry of the political imagination to go

Martha Cobb has argued in her book Harlem, Haiti, and Havana (1979), as cited below by Martin-Ogunsola, that Hughes found important commonalities between his own work and life experiences in the United States and that of writers such as Guillén, Roumain, and García Lorca, despite their apparent differences and particularities, in terms of the underlying “cultural continuities and corresponding literary patterns” emerging from “similar environments” (United States, Cuba, Haiti, Spain) that expressed themselves in shared “concepts of blackness” with characteristics such as

In Martin-Ogunsola’s words, “No matter what linguistic or cultural differences existed among these writers, concepts of blackness figure prominently in their works. Therefore, translation was the perfect vehicle for Hughes to explore the survival, resilience, continuity, and wholeness of the black literary tradition on a global level” (8).^[54]

All of the characteristics cited by Martin-Ogunsola as representative of the “concepts of blackness” reflected in the work of Hughes, Guillén, García Lorca, and Roumain, are also notable in Espada’s work and in that of many of the Puerto Rican, Latin American, and Caribbean writers with whom he has the greatest affinities. This framework as applied to Espada’s poetic output thus should be understood to reflect particularities of the global black tradition analyzed by Cobb and Martin-Ogunsola that are not only reflected in Latin American and Caribbean traditions strongly influenced by the African diaspora and in solidarity with its contributions, but also shared by global, regional, and national traditions of commitment to a political aesthetic of liberation that includes, but transcends, race or any specific ethnic or cultural origin or identity.

Hence, the affinities in Espada’s work between these writers and Hughes go beyond his sense of identification with their common roots and experiences in the African diaspora and ultimately return to Africa itself, emphasizing its legacies and influences, thereby extending to their vision what it means to be a writer grounded in contexts characterized by shared challenges as to dilemmas of “confrontation,” “dualism,” “identity,” and “liberation.” Carolyn Fowler (as cited by Martin-Ogunsola below) has noted for example that

Martin-Ogunsola concludes that “[t]he same is true of the relationship between Hughes and Guillén, for the shared vision of these two writers extends, as [Martha K.] Cobb points out, in ‘the network of its expression stretching across the Americas, whose basic unity is visible in its variety’” (Martin-Ogunsola 13; emphasis added). Similarly, “Even though Lorca was not black, his poetry and drama explored the themes of suffering, injustice [. . .] oppression, and death in a manner that connected him to the black experience” in part “because he [Hughes] and Lorca shared a similar perspective on the function of literature in the cause of justice” (Martin-Ogunsola 13–14). As with Hughes and Whitman, one key aspect of Lorca’s affinity with experiences related to discrimination, exclusion, and marginality had to do with the combination of his sexuality and his politics. These convergent dimensions ended up driving Lorca’s persecution and ultimate murder, not unlike the personal suffering and isolation that affected Whitman and Hughes in their lifetimes.

Both the characteristics identified above as to “concepts of blackness” and most of those enumerated with regard to Lorca (in terms of an identification with “themes of suffering, injustice [. . .][,] oppression”) are factors that apply with equal emphasis to Espada’s work and to his principal influences; as such, his poetry builds upon a shared vision of what it means to be a writer arising from and identifying with such contexts and themes. But, as with Lorca and his connections to Hughes, Guillén, and Roumain, Espada’s work also has additional universalist dimensions related in his case to the fact that his writing is deeply rooted in the Puerto Rican experience of colonial domination by the United States and its literary impact, though it is primarily in English. This, together with the common embrace of a political aesthetics of liberation, connects him as well to Roumain and his contemporaries (most notably Leópold Sédar-Senghor and Aimé Césaire) and the tradition they helped found—the literature of négritude in French—and later, to some of their most notable successors among writers and revolutionaries, such as Frantz Fanon, René Depestre, and Paul Laraque. Part of this connection has to do with their convergent politics in an anticolonial, antiracist, and anti-imperialist context but also relates to their equivalent positioning with respect to French and English, respectively, as languages of colonialism, racial domination, and empire that can also be deployed dialectically as weapons to undermine such forms of domination, oppression, and exploitation. A similar argument could also be applied to the innovative uses of Spanish enriched by Puerto Rican (including Taíno indigenous) vernacular, place names, flora, fauna, and topographies pioneered by writers such as Corretjer and Soto Vélez, and to which Espada has also contributed—again, but in English.

It is widely acknowledged today that no reading of poetry in French during the twentieth century is complete without recognizing the contributions of Césaire, his generation, and their successors, or understanding how their work has helped shape the language and its expressions, content, and subject matter. The same is objectively true as to African American writers and orators or shapers of language and of concepts and languages of consciousness and struggle from Frederick Douglass and other key authors of slave narratives, to Du Bois, those of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison (among many others), just as it is for authors writing of and from several other cultural frames of reference, including the postcolonial English-speaking world rooted in contexts such as the Anglophone Caribbean (CLR James, Andrew Salkey, George Lamming, Walter Rodney, Kamau Edward Braithwaite, V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, etc.); the Middle East (Edward Said for example); Nigeria (Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka); India (Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi, Arundhati Roy); Zimbabwe (Doris Lessing); and South Africa (Nelson Mandela, Breyten Breytenbach, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee).

Contributions to the further development and enrichment of the depth and range of English literature by writers like Espada, who must also be included in the above lineage, are much less generally or easily acknowledged than they have come to be in the context of French. The reasons for this are complex. In Espada’s case and that of his peers, the stigmatization and stereotyping of Puerto Ricans and of Puerto Rico itself, due to the inherent dynamics, structures, and costs of U.S. colonial domination, plays a significant role. This produces a situation where the very idea of a Puerto Rican writer or poet or artist seems incongruous, or at best exotic, both in the context of the United States, and in Latin America or Spain where the dominant assumptions are that the Spanish spoken and written there, and in Puerto Rican communities on the mainland, is somehow deficient or corrupted and/or that a Puerto Rican is a kind of “mongrel” incapable of expression worthy of note in either language, much less of any kind of “poetry.”

The ability of Césaire and others among his contemporaries to break through similar barriers in the Francophone context was not only the product of the talent and force of their achievements, but also of the overall process of decolonization that dismantled most of the French empire between 1945 and 1962. The négritude movement both helped inspire and was well positioned to reap the benefits in terms of recognition flowing from the spillover effects and ultimate consequences of anticolonial wars for national liberation in Indochina and Algeria that completely transformed the landscape of the Francophone world and the internal cultural politics of France itself (through immigration). Césaire’s Martinique and the neighboring island of Guadeloupe became “integral” parts of France with full representation in the National Assembly in Paris, a solution akin to what Puerto Rican admission as the fifty-first state might mean (which continues to be a very unlikely prospect). Césaire was Martinique’s dominant political figure from 1945 until his retirement from office in 1993 at age eighty, while Sédar-Senghor became the first president of Senegal, continuing to affirm his intertwined identities as “Black, French, and African.”

In this context, and despite its revolutionary origins, much of négritude and its political agenda became hegemonic, at least in a diluted cultural nationalist form, outside of metropolitan France. Nonetheless, it continues to be an important source of inspiration for rebellious French-speaking immigrant youth from the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle East in the suburbs of Paris, as refracted through North African rai and Hip Hop. Whereas with Puerto Rico, by contrast, U.S. colonial domination has continued without any significant modifications since 1952, and anticolonial poets and leaders such as Corretjer, Soto Vélez, and later, Matos Paoli, were imprisoned for lengthy periods, and in the cases of Corretjer and Soto Vélez (and arguably Burgos), forced into exile during their prime. It is not difficult to imagine someone like Corretjer as a leading statesman in a free Puerto Rico, but he died instead in marginalization and poverty amid unrelenting political persecution despite (or because of?) his widespread recognition as the island’s “National Poet,” in contrast, as well, to his Afro-Cuban peer, Guillén, “the poet laureate of the Cuban Revolution” (in Roberto Márquez’s words), who became a diplomat representing the Cuban revolutionary government, the longtime head of Cuba’s National Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC), and a veritable national institution in himself. Corretjer could have chosen a “golden exile” in Cuba, where he had been twice imprisoned because of his activities in solidarity with the Cuban revolutionary movement in the 1930s and 1940s, and where his intensive continuing efforts in the 1950s in support of the July 26 Movement headed by Fidel Castro had earned him a distinguished place. Instead, he elected the path of “courage and sacrifice” traced by Albizu Campos (who was imprisoned for about a third of his life, from 1936 to 1946, and again from 1950 until his death, shortly after being released in 1965), and more recently, by those political prisoners and “prisoners of war” held by the United States and accused of collaborating with or being members of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN) and Ejército Popular Boricua-Macheteros (EPB-Macheteros).

Espada’s contributions as a translator, in the traditional sense of the term, are a strategic aspect of a much broader role his work, leadership, and mentorship has played as: 1) one of the most effective single “translators” (in a much broader sense that connects advocacy with interpretation) in the contemporary United States between its realities and those of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Puerto Rico; and 2) as a spokesperson and activist within the United States for causes and concerns grounded in such realities and in a sense of dignity and resistance regarding their implications that are routinely marginalized in U.S. public discourse ranging from policy making, public opinion, and media, to academia, literary and cultural life, and expression.

It is the multidimensional complexity, range, and diversity of such activities that he and I sought to capture more than twenty years ago when we coined together the concept of “cultural advocacy.” An additional, decisive dimension of this role is how Espada’s poetry also potentially serves as a unique place of dialogue and communion between convergent traditions of literature of social and political commitment in English and Spanish, and more specifically, between such traditions in the United States and in Puerto Rico, Latin America, the Caribbean, and beyond (for example, the intriguing receptivity to his work beyond this hemisphere in settings as diverse as the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Norway, and Spain).

This includes the specific affinities and echoes between his work and those of key Puerto Rican exponents, interpreters, and innovators of these traditions in Spanish, such as Corretjer and Soto Vélez, and his ability to connect and to weave together these expressions with the contributions of Puerto Rican poets based in New York, such as Pedro Pietri and others of the Nuyorican generation and its successors. His poetry thus includes and enables a kind of synthesis within Puerto Rican literature between island-based (and broader Latin American and Hispanic) traditions in Spanish and those of the mainland, which tend to be expressed primarily in English or bilingually. Espada’s work is indebted to, and both honors and enriches, each tradition, while at the same time transcending each of their most characteristic limitations, laying the basis in turn for a reconfigured tradition, potentially equally at home in both English and Spanish and in the complexities of their interactions. This is one of his most important contributions, reflected both directly in the texts of his poems and their plasticity in terms of the use of Spanish language titles, words, rhythms, and glossaries, in his publication of a completely bilingual book and inclusion of Spanish versions of certain poems in several other books, in addition to the multiple editions of his work in several different varieties of Spanish, and in his own work as a translator, editor, essayist, and mentor.

His work along these lines has a dialectical impact as well, however, on his accessibility, influence, and recognition. Espada’s work has made a major contribution toward highlighting, critiquing, and helping dismantle the “double blockade” or double insularity he once described between Puerto Rican culture and U.S. culture on the one hand,^[56] and Latin American and Caribbean culture on the other, which is in turn reproduced within Puerto Rican literature, between its manifestations and exponents based on the island and those based in the mainland, and those who express themselves primarily or exclusively in English and Spanish. His poetry is, in this sense, a powerful wedge in the interstices between these two walls that helps destabilize both barriers. But just as poets of continental and global stature such as Corretjer, Soto Vélez, and Burgos have never received such recognition—in Latin America and the Caribbean, Spain, or the United States—precisely because of their identification with Puerto Rico and the invisibility imposed by its colonial status, it is also very difficult for an anticolonial, “postcolonial,” and anti-imperialist poet like Espada to be recognized fully for the quality and importance of his work in either the United States or beyond. The same English idiom that theoretically makes his work more accessible is typically outweighed by the political content and convictions that marginalize him, along with his militant embrace of Puerto Rican identity.

Puerto Rican writers like Corretjer, Soto Vélez, and Burgos are typically excluded both from anthologies of the best of U.S. writing (despite the fact that Puerto Rico has been legally but illegitimately considered part of the United States since 1898—“foreign in a domestic sense,”^[57] as the Supreme Court so memorably and perversely put it in the Insular Cases—and that all three writers lived, worked, wrote, and published in New York for significant periods), and from collections of the best writing from Latin America and the Caribbean, whether published in this hemisphere or in Spain (the latter is especially ironic and painful given the Hispanophile pretensions of certain sectors of the Puerto Rican Nationalist movement). Writers like Espada and of his generation continue to be excluded or marginalized in both settings as well, even in the United States, regardless of the fact that they primarily write in English. The same can be said for their representation in Latin America, despite these writers’ bilingualism and the historical and cultural commonality between Puerto Rico’s colonialism and its Latin American origins and equivalents.

Yet, at the same time, it is precisely his deep roots in the Puerto Rican tradition of cultural and political struggle and its rich expressions, both on the island and in the mainland, that provide his work with the ability to shape a common language of critical engagement with contemporary systems of domination and oppression, as a foundation for a universalist “poetry of liberation.” As I have argued above, Espada’s work in this vein reflects and builds upon, but potentially goes further than, the essential contributions of the “poetry of the political imagination” he himself has outlined so eloquently in the foreword to Poetry like Bread, primarily in terms of a “radical subjectivity” that has been collectivized, as suggested by Puerto Rican writer and former political prisoner Elizam Escobar.

“Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100”

Notable examples of his ability to capture the complexities of these collectivized, universalist encounters and these liberatory tasks in his poetry include his extraordinary achievement in “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100,”^[58] where he situates his reflections about 9/11 in the “chant of nations” emerging from the Latin American, Caribbean, African, Arab, and Asian immigrant and migrant workers.^[59]

The poem is striking for its unusual combination of audacity and humility that on the one hand dares to articulate a poetic vision regarding the founding, canonical moment of this country’s painful, still incomplete transition from being the supposed “master” of the world to its apparent “victim,” and on the other insists on approaching this event “from below,” from the margins of its most hegemonic readings. Its point of departure, off stage, could have been drawn from Whitman’s opening reflection in his elegy “Outlines for a Tomb”: “What may we chant, O thou within this tomb?” (1). Espada’s response puts the country’s most marginalized and exploited laborers at the center of his vision, those who were the least celebrated victims of those day’s events, thereby retelling and redefining their significance in a completely different, truly universal key, such as we find in Whitman’s allusions in no. 18 from “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” to “America isolated yet embodying all [. . .]” (309) or his “Song of the Universal” that fashions “[. . .] a song no [other] poet yet has chanted” (2) in a place where “[. . .] all earth’s lands [. . .]” are welcome (“Song of the Broad-Axe” 2.1).

Espada does much more than simply evoke Whitman or Soto Vélez, though, going beyond the abstraction of mere enumeration to which each of these earlier writers’ work sometimes succumbs. Rather, he applies painstaking emphasis on the specificity of the event portrayed, its location (the effects of the 9/11 attacks on those working in the kitchen of the Windows on the World Restaurant at the World Trade Center), and of its protagonists (the forty-three members of Local 100 of the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union killed that day), all within a literary economy that is at the same time much less and much more than the reiterated media landscape populated by Usama bin Ladin, al Qaeda, U.S. retaliation, and their victims.

Espada’s horizon of understanding as to the day’s eventual additional victims goes much further as well. He simultaneously navigates the “lyrical, the prophetic, and the apocalyptic” (as Roberto Márquez employed these concepts with reference to the work of Neruda and Vallejo [26]), foreshadowing the effects of these events not only on “[. . .] this city,” but also “[. . .] cities to come” (42) (a map with which we have since become familiar, that spans “[. . .] from Manhattan and Kabul” [44] to Baghdad, Madrid, London, Gaza, and Mumbai), and in particular, on the victims he so powerfully evokes, those “[. . .] constellations of smoke [. . .],” the dead who speak from the grave “[. . .] with an Afghan tongue” (45–46). These victims are described in terms of their shared humanity and community with others of a “[. . .] Spanish tongue” (48), what Whitman would describe as “[s]piritual projections” (“Outlines” 2.12), thus allowing Espada to “[. . .] launch,” in turn, “[. . .] [his] thought, [his] memory” well beyond the fallen Towers (“Outlines” 3.49). This is especially notable because neither Afghans nor Latino workers have been typically highlighted as either representative victims or protagonists of 9/11, just as the voices and images of the ongoing Afghan civilian victims of U.S. and NATO aggression in Afghanistan, and of Latinos in military service, continue to be marginalized today.

It is also of crucial importance, from the perspective of the argument suggested here as to Espada’s work as a whole, that he elects to name this poem “Alabanza” (the Spanish word for “praise”—employed eleven times within the text^[60]—that signifies a celebration with words of the importance of an event or a person’s achievements, sometimes with religious connotations), directly evoking the closing lines of the single most widely known poem by Corretjer, “Oubao-Moin” (“Island of Blood”), which is regularly recited, sung (in the musical version created by Roy Brown), and performed in adaptations to dance and theater in Puerto Rican communities throughout the island and its diaspora as an anthem of national and social liberation.

Corretjer’s poem is Part V of his most influential book, entitled Alabanza en la Torre de Ciales (Song of Praise from the Tower of Ciales);^[61] both the poem and the book have the same central place in Corretjer’s poetry as does Canto XII of “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” and Canto general in the poetry of Neruda. Both express each poet’s most universal and lyrical visions of liberation and connect them in each case to the liberation of their own homeland. Espada’s allusions to “Oubao-Moin” (“Island of Blood”) in his own “Alabanza” include its structure of reiteration and rhythm,^[62] as well as the way it insists upon the centrality of workers as protagonists of history, even if they are “hidden” in kitchens or made invisible because of their undocumented status. Espada’s emphasis on putting immigrant workers at the center of a recent historical event such as 9/11 is also notable because it is, in fact, such workers today who are the closest contemporary equivalent to the international working class evoked by Corretjer as the foundation and heart of the kind of homeland he was seeking to establish in a free Puerto Rico and that Soto Vélez wrote about in the Lares cycle of poems that conclude his La tierra prometida (The Promised Land). Here Espada completes the circle of his most important influences derived from Corretjer and Soto Vélez and thereby widens the internal circle of the central themes in his poetry that span from “Heart of Hunger” to “Alabanza” and that extend into his most recent work (see “Heal the Cracks in the Bell of the World”). It is entirely likely that “Alabanza,” in particular, will be long remembered, recited, and sung, in the same realm and register as Neruda’s Canto XII, Corretjer’s “Oubao-Moin” (“Island of Blood”), and Soto Vélez’s Tierra prometida (Promised Land).

Conclusion

Kelley is certainly correct to point out how power shapes our perceptions of social movement advancement. Where Puerto Rican writers are concerned, indeed, “the basic power relations” confronted by each have largely remained “intact.” While some might see that as a “failure,” there are many more who will resist the reductive binary of win/lose and instead continue seeking other ways to apply “alternative visions” to unjust realities. Of contemporary Puerto Rican authors who have “continue[d] to struggle for change,” Espada is the most important inheritor of a tradition of “poetry of liberation” in Puerto Rican and U.S. literature, a movement littered with “losers” (in dialogue with the ironic application of Kelley’s terminology above) like Juan Antonio Corretjer, Clemente Soto Vélez, and Julia de Burgos: Puerto Rico is still a U.S. colony mired in poverty and dependence, Puerto Ricans are still among those most marginalized on the mainland, and the United States and the world (with some recent exceptions in Latin America) have taken a sharp turn to the right in the opposite direction from the anticolonial proletarian internationalism that drove their writing. Yet, Espada and his peers and the contemporary movements against forms of exploitation and oppression that inspire their work, and to which Corretjer, Soto Vélez, and Burgos dedicated their lives to undo, exist precisely because of the breadth, depth, and continuity of their vision and sacrifices.

U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico is vastly underrated. The community-based struggle and international solidarity campaign against the environmental and social devastation wrought by U.S. military training exercises on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, the still unpunished state-sanctioned murder on September 23, 2005 (the date the Lares Uprising is commemorated each year), of Los Macheteros (EPBM) leader Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, and the recent widely supported General Strike on October 15, 2009, against massive layoffs of public workers resulting from the effects of the economic crisis “imported” from the mainland collectively epitomize the continuing challenges in Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States. The overall context is the persistent, deepening impasse as to the island’s status and a new wave of innovative social and cultural movements that make this deadlock untenable, conditions that bring the island closer to the tides of liberation rising throughout Latin America. This consciousness continues to be reflected in Martín’s poetry, essays, and cultural advocacy, and in the voices of a new generation of Hip Hop activists and performers such as Residente of the Puerto Rican group Calle 13, whose planned concerts in Puerto Rico and Colombia were canceled in October 2009 because of his fiery remarks, while hosting the Latino MTV Awards, in support of Puerto Rican independence, of the General Strike, and against Colombian president Alvaro Uribe’s approval of new planned U.S. military bases in Colombia. As Residente put it, his solidarity with the struggle against these bases in Colombia is grounded in his consciousness regarding Puerto Rico’s experiences under U.S. colonialism: “‘As a Puerto Rican I have lived the same thing in my flesh and bones[,] and I would not like your country to go through what mine has had to’” (qtd. in Agence France-Presse 8A).^[63] As Eduardo Galeano has recently put it, capturing the essence of the ethics of resistance and liberation that voices like Espada and Residente represent:

Residente, like Espada, is a disciple of Corretjer, Soto Vélez, and Burgos, and an exponent of the “poetry of liberation,” along with Galeano.

Espada’s work is essential not only in terms of his contributions to Puerto Rico’s struggle for liberation but in the context of the need to assess the implications for the United States of continuing to deny the rights of Puerto Ricans to self-determination, both on the island and on the mainland. To this extent, Espada’s poetry is especially relevant to these implications from the perspective of the health of U.S. society and culture, in a manner analogous to that of the impact of Guantánamo and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Colombia. As Jean-Paul Sartre argued in the context of the impact of French colonialism within France during the Algerian war for national liberation:

Linking these principles to Espada’s poetic mission, and in defense of the liberatory vision they embody, we say, “alabanza.”

Notes

As I write this essay, the mention here by Espada of Tegucigalpa rings eerily amid the still unsettled consequences of Honduras’ military coup, met at best with official U.S. ambivalence and the embrace of Clintonian lobbyists, amid flashbacks to the illegal Contra war against the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, stage-managed by John Negroponte from the U.S. Embassy there.

Note his publications (such as Smokestack Books’ collection of Espada’s Puerto Rico-specific poems Crucifixion in the Plaza de Armas and their anthology edited by Jon Andersen, Seeds of Fire: Contemporary Poetry from the Other USA, which contains four Espada poems), and readings in the United Kingdom.

Ed. note: See also the collection of Espada’s labor poetry, The Meaning of the Shovel, and his third edited collection, His Hands Were Gentle: Selected Lyrics of Víctor Jara, both from Smokestack (the latter title is listed under Jara in Works Cited).

Ed. note: Line 5 in the Alabanza revised version of the poem reads “guatemalteco” instead of “cubano.”

Ed. note: Last word in line 17 in the Alabanza revised version of the poem reads as “lettucepicker” instead of “cottonpicker.”

Ed. note: End of line 21 in the Alabanza revised version of the poem reads as “others’ children” instead of “blond children.”

Ed. note: See Note 3 above. As with line 5, “cubano” is also altered to “guatemalteco” in line 31 of the revised Alabanza version of the poem.

Ed. note: For more on Frank Espada’s PRDP, see Carvalho, Puerto Rico Is in the Heart, ch. 4.

Ed. note: The original poem is fifty-six lines as compared to the revised Alabanza version of fifty-five lines. Extra line appears in lines 10–11, where “proud and broad” and “like the cheekbones” are concatenated in the revised version into one line that reads “broad like the cheekbones” (10).

Ed. note: Line 13 in the revised Alabanza version of the poem reads “shamans” plural. For line numbering differences, see Note 8 above.

10.

Ed. note: “Taíno” is properly accented in line 33 of the revised Alabanza version of the poem. For line number distinctions between original and revised, see Note 8 above.

11.

Ed. note: The “í” in the word “jíbaro” is properly accented in line 36 of the revised Alabanza version of the poem as compared with the unaccented that appears in the original. For line number distinctions between original and revised, see Note 8 above.

12.

Ed. note: A comma after “hands” appears in line 53 of the revised Alabanza version of the poem to read “beggars’ hands,” as compared to the unpunctuated “beggars’ hands” in the original. For line number distinctions between original and revised, see Note 8 above.

13.

Ed. note: See F. Espada, Puerto Rican Diaspora 41 for a fuller narrative account of the incident that accompanies Frank’s photograph of Bonillo. See also the Carvalho interview with Frank Espada (“Frank Espada”) and Puerto Rico Is in the Heart, pp. 80 and 95n14.

14.

Ed. note: The “[. . .] dropped coins like seeds” image hints toward the root denotation of diaspora itself, that is, “a scattering of seeds.”

15.

Ed. note: For the sake of readability and clarity, given the heavy citational interaction/saturation in this section, an editorial decision was made to exclude the Spanish translation for the cited passages here.

16.

And in Esteves’s case, also of Dominican origin.

17.

Ed. note: For the most comprehensive examination of Frank Espada’s (and his family’s) emigration to the United States, see Carvalho, Puerto Rico Is in the Heart, ch. 1–2.

18.

Ed. note: These themes are explored in Natasha Azank’s dissertation “‘The Guerilla Tongue’: The Politics of Resistance in Puerto Rican Poetry.” See also her essay in this volume (for more on Espada’s connections to Soto Vélez).

19.

Ed. note: See also lines 184–90 of the Darwish poem.

20.

Translated by Camilo Pérez-Bustillo.

21.

See the essay “Futuro Sin Falla: Mito, Realidad, Antillanía” written by Corretjer in April 1961, as his response to the unsuccessful U.S. invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, which in turn precipitated Fidel Castro’s first official declaration that Cuba’s was a “socialist revolution.”

22.

Ed. note: Cf. Neruda’s condemnation of the Nixon administration’s colonial preoccupations in “I Begin by Invoking Walt Whitman.” See also the Carvalho interview with Cornel West, “Preserving the Democratic Experiment” in the Works and Days special double issue Academic Freedom and Intellectual Activism in the Post-9/11 University, wherein Whitman, Neruda, and Espada are discussed in similar contexts on p. 577.

23.

Ed. note: “Hernández” is italicized in line 10 of the revised Alabanza version of the poem. Additionally, the hyphen between “[. . .] Spanish-American war” on line 4 technically should have been replaced with an en dash.

24.

Ed. note: See also Jonathan Vincent and Michael Simeone’s analysis of this poem on Cary Nelson’s Modern American Poetry page housed here: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/espada/bully.html.

25.

Ed. note: This interview has been reprinted multiple times after having first appeared in Quay A Journal of the Arts (Apr. 2007): 1–12. See also the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 26.1 (Summer 2008): 23–34, where this interview was reprinted with a slightly modified title; MartinEspada.net (Path: Interviews/Whitman Quarterly); and in book form in Espada’s Lover of a Subversive 67–78, as is cited here.

26.

Ed. note: Citational references to Martí’ s “El poeta Walt Whitman” and “Nuestra América” correspond with English translations of these works. See Works Cited for “Our America” and “The Poet Walt Whitman” under Martí.

27.

Plus a brief period in 1875, resulting from his leadership role in Cuba and Puerto Rico’s struggle for independence from Spain which culminated in U.S. intervention in both islands and the Philippines in 1898; Martí died in combat against Spanish troops in Cuba in May 1895.

28.

Martí’s translations are particularly notable because of their quality and because it was not until twenty-five years later, in 1912, that Uruguayan writer Álvaro Armando Vasseur’s fragmentary efforts (which were dismissed by Ecuadorian poet Francisco Alexander in the preface to his complete translation of Leaves of Grass, first published in Quito in 1953 and then long unavailable until it was finally reissued in 2006) were published, followed by León Felipe’s improved but still incomplete version in 1941.

29.

See also A. Márquez, including his references to Andres Olaizola’s “El lenguaje poético de Whitman según el lenguaje ensayístico de Martí: Una aproximación a ‘El poeta Walt Whitman.’”

30.

In the words of his contemporary, Puerto Rican poet and patriot Lola Rodríguez de Tió, author of the island’s revolutionary anthem, “La Borinqueña,” which was inspired by the Lares revolt.

31.

See references to Puerto Rico and Cuba in Bolívar’s works as key uncompleted tasks in the overall continental process of Latin American and Caribbean independence and self-determination, beginning in his “La Carta de Jamaica” (“Letter from Jamaica”) (1815) and later in his attempts to organize armed expeditions in 1816 and 1825 (Bolívar, Selected Writings 544, 631–32) to accomplish this result in the context of his promotion of alliances and treaties for federation between Mexico (which then included all of Central America from Guatemala to the borders of what is now Panama) and Greater Colombia (1819–1830, which then included what are now the independent states of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama) in 1823, and then between 1826 and 1828 as part of processes related to his convening of an ultimately unsuccessful continental unity congress held in two sessions in Panama and Mexico during this period. All of this in turn laid the basis for contemporary efforts along similar lines, such as the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of the Americas (ALBA), which includes Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras (until the recent military coup), St. Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Lucia, and Haiti as an observer.

32.

Following the passage of the Jones Act by the U.S. Congress in March 1917 that imposed U.S. citizenship on residents of Puerto Rico just in time to insure their military service as part of the U.S. Army during World War I; it was U.S. citizenship, of course, that made massive migration by Puerto Ricans to the mainland possible from then on. By 1920, “there were around 45,000 Puerto Ricans in New York City, mostly concentrated initially what came to be known as ‘Spanish Harlem’” (Ayala and Bernabe 66).

33.

Ed. note: This poem is also included in Corretjer’s Obra Poética, pp. 207–08 and his Invitación: Antología de poesía (PDF file available online), pp. 44–45. Occasional variants of the poem title do appear: for example, in some cases, the poem is titled with or without hyphenation (see Invitación) and may also appear with a lowercase “m” in “moin,” as featured in the table of contents to Obra Poética.

34.

See Note 21 above.

35.

Ed. note: See the bracketed headnote to this poem in the Norton Critical Edition of Leaves of Grass, p. 440, which reads: “[The sense of the word is lament for the aborigines. It is an Iroquois term; and has been used for a personal name]” (Whitman, “Yonnondio” 440; brackets and emphasis in original).

36.

His 1977 Memoirs of Bernardo Vega: A Contribution to the History of the Puerto Rican Community in New York recall his uncle Antonio’s migration to New York in 1857, a decade before Betances, where he joined the first circles of Puerto Rican and Cuban exiles organizing for independence from Spain (Vega 40–42, 48–54).

37.

Based on Corretjer’s own account in unpublished remarks during the tribute in his honor at Eliot Hall in Harvard University, Feb. 18, 1984 (Copy on file. Tape recording and transcription in author’s possession).

38.

Marinello and Corretjer had met in 1935 while both were political prisoners in Havana’s El Princípe jail, twin of San Juan’s La Princesa. Marinello was also one of Cuba’s finest poets along with Guillén, its leading scholar of Martí, and later Rector of the University of Havana from 1962 to 1963, following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, and member of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party from 1965 to 1977.

39.

See Young Lords Party and Abramson. See also Torres and Velásquez, esp. ch. 1, 2, and 12.

40.

Ed. note: The publication date for this poem is 1917; Spanish title in the original (translates as “Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!”).

41.

Ed. note: See also Michael Dowdy’s analysis of this poem in his American Political Poetry into the 21st Century, pp. 73–74. For more on Espada’s Central American poetry in relation to neoliberalism, see Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical,” ch. 4 “‘Armed with a terrorist’s sonnet’—The Language of War: Espada’s Historical Trace of Neoliberalism,” subsection “The First War on Terror: Nicaragua,” pp. 356–75.

42.

Ed. note: Rendered as the compound “weather-beaten” in line 7 of the revised Alabanza version of the poem.

43.

Ed. note: The original Spanish title of this poem is “Alturas de Macchu Picchu.”

44.

Ed. note: The title of this poem (i.e., “My Name Is Espada”) in the revised Alabanza version features a lowercased copula (“is”) as compared to an uppercase articulation in the original. See also Sarmiento Note 9 and Dowdy Note 4, each in this volume.

45.

Ed. note: The original title (i.e., “All the People Who Are Now Red Trees”) features capitalization of the copula (“Are”), whereas the revised version in Alabanza utilizes the lowercase “are.” Cf. “My Name Is Espada”—see Note 44 above. See also Uchmanowicz Note 1, Sarmiento Note 9, and Dowdy Note 4, all in this volume.

46.

Re: Sandino: Corretjer’s first political activism in New York in 1927–1928 was focused on solidarity efforts with Sandino through the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas and their lightning rallies on Harlem street corners rife with soapbox oratory, as documented in his 1929 poem “Pero a pesar de todo . . .” (“But despite all . . .”) (translated here into English), as the poet transforms himself into “a soapbox on a streetcorner / and many voices together cursing tyranny” (“un cajón en una esquina / y muchas voces juntas maldiciendo la tiranía”) (37–38).

47.

For alternate translations of “Plena del Menéalo,” see Marzán, Spanish American Roots 214; and Scandura 111–12 .

48.

Ed. note: See also Enloe’s Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, ch. 6 “Carmen Miranda on My Mind: International Politics of the Banana,” pp. 124–50 where she comments both on media representations of Latino culture as well as on the co-optation and commodification of Carmen Miranda as the exotic Latina naïf used to support “Good Neighbor” market intervention in South America. See also Carvalho, “Introduction” Note 46.

49.

Ed. note: See also the 2012 Smokestack publication of selected Víctor Jara song lyrics, His Hands Were Gentle, edited and with introduction by Martín Espada. The volume also includes a translation of Jara’s “Preguntas por Puerto Montt” (“Questions about the Massacre of Puerto Montt”) by Espada. See Note 16 in Stanchich (in this volume).

50.

Ed. note: For a comprehensive analysis of this poem, see the essay by Michael Dowdy that immediately follows Pérez-Bustillo’s contribution (in this volume).

51.

Ed. note: See M. Espada, Mayan Astronomer 74–77 for “Another Nameless Prostitute Says the Man Is Innocent.” For more information on the NPR controversy (associated with this poem), see also M. Espada, Zapata’s Disciple 125–35, and M. Espada, “All Things Censored” in the Progressive, where the story originally appeared. There is another poem on Mumia Abu-Jamal by Espada; see his “Prisoner AM-8335 and His Library of Lions” in Mayan Astronomer, pp. 78–79, reprinted in Alabanza on pp. 187–89.

52.

See for example his tribute to Salkey, “Compañero Poet and the Surveillance of Sheep,” p. 190 in Alabanza, and the implicit dialogue between them in each of their poems dedicated to Víctor Jara of Chile; regarding Soto Vélez, a critical inspiration, mentor, and friend to both of us and to our families, see “Clemente’s Bullets,” pp. 28–29 of Rebellion/Rebelión, and “Hands Without Irons Become Dragonflies,” p. 159 in Alabanza, our coauthored foreword to the only bilingual anthology published thus far of Soto Vélez’s selected poetry (M. Espada and Pérez-Bustillo 7–10), and the title essay in M. Espada’s The Lover of a Subversive Is Also a Subversive: Essays and Commentaries (11–31) (listed as “The Lover of a Subversive Is Also a Subversive: Colonialism and the Poetry of Rebellion in Puerto Rico” in Works Cited). See also his elegy for Julia de Burgos, “The Face on the Envelope,” pp. 34–35, in Republic of Poetry.

53.

These include: Rebellion/Rebelión, Blood/Sangre, and Poetry like Bread; bilingual poems in books like Imagine the Angels and Mayan Astronomer; and collaborations regarding revision of the translations recently included in editions of his work in Spain (Soldados en el jardín) and Puerto Rico (La tumba).

54.

Similar affinities have been noted by Carlos A. Rabassó and Francisco Javier Rabassó in their book Federico García Lorca entre el flamenco, el jazz y el afrocubanismo: Granada, Nueva York, La Habana, which emphasizes the role played by underlying convergences between flamenco, blues, jazz, and Afro-Cuban rhythms, cultures, and beliefs in connecting García Lorca’s work with that of Hughes and Guillén.

55.

Ed. note: The cited passage is block-quoted in the original, without quote marks; second ellipsis appears in Martin-Ogunsola.

56.

Ed. note: The author alludes to Espada’s term and theoretical concept of “double dislocation,” outlined in an interview with E. Ethelbert Miller. See Miller and Feffer. See also Azank Note 13 in this volume.

57.

In the words of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Edward Douglass White: “‘[W]hilst in an international sense [Puerto] Rico was not a foreign country, since it was owned by the United States, it was foreign to the United States in a domestic sense because the island had not been incorporated into the United States, but was merely appurtenant thereto as a possession’” (qtd. in Duffy Burnett and Marshall 13).

58.

The title poem in the twentieth anniversary compilation of his work, published in 2003.

59.

With their specific places of origin enumerated from Puerto Rico to “Ecuador, México, Republica Dominican a [the Dominican Republic], / to “Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh, [. . .]” [18–19] as in Whitman’s “Salut au Monde!” and later in Soto Vélez’s Caballo de palo [The Wooden Horse], in addition to concrete identifications of the nature of their labor, as “[. . .] the cook with a shaven head,” a baker, “[. . .] the busboy’s music [. . .],” the “dish-dog, the dishwasher,” a “[. . .] waitress [. . .],” [1, 25, 27, 32] as in Whitman’s “Song for Occupations.”

60.

Ed. note: The repetition of “Alabanza” (potentially symbolic of 9/11, or the WTC towers in numeric form?), alternates as anaphora and epistrophe in lines 1, 7, 11, 13, 20, 25, 27, 32–33, and 43–44 (emphasis in original). See also Azank Note 26 in this volume.

61.

Ciales is Corretjer’s birthplace and current site of the library and cultural center established in his memory. He explains in the glossary compiled for Alabanza en la Torre de Ciales (Song of Praise from the Tower of Ciales) that “Oubao-Moin,” which means “Island of Blood,” was the name given by the Caribe Indians to the island renamed “Puerto Rico” by the Spanish and which its original inhabitants, the Taíno people, called “Boriken” or “Borínquen” (in its Hispanicized form); the latter name is the basis for many Puerto Ricans referring to themselves as “Boricuas,” including the underground armed pro-independence movement supported by Corretjer known as the Boricua Popular Army (Ejército Popular Boricua, EPB) or Macheteros.

62.

Ed. note: Beyond the allusion to Corretjer’s “Oubao-Moin” (“Island of Blood”) incorporated in “Alabanza,” Espada also chose to include lines from the poem (26–28, 45) as epigraph to the book Alabanza itself. See M. Espada, Alabanza xv.

63.

Ed. note: Passage translated into English by Camilo Pérez-Bustillo.

The original Spanish passage from the La Jornada article reads: “‘Como puertorriqueño yo he vivido esto en carne y hueso y no me gustaría que su país pasara por lo que pasa el mío’” (Residente qtd. in Agence France-Presse 8A).

64.

Ed. note: Passage translated into English by Camilo Pérez-Bustillo.

The original Spanish passage from the La Jornada article by Galeano reads:

Yo no conozco dicha más alta que la alegría de reconocerme en los demás. Quizás ésa es, para mí, la única inmortalidad digna de fe. Reconocerme en los demás, reconocerme en mi patria y en mi tiempo, y también reconocerme en mujeres y hombres que son compatriotas míos, nacidos en otras tierras, y reconocerme en mujeres y hombres que son contemporáneos míos, vividos en otros tiempos. (“Los mapas” [“Maps”] 44A)

Chapter 8

“[T]he black braid of names”

Michael Dowdy

A Hemispheric Mapping of Martín Espada’s
Lyric Monuments

Nicanor Parra’s three-line “antipoem,” “De las infalibles palomas,” translated by Liz Werner as “No President’s Statue Escapes,” attributes instrumental knowledge and subversive action to pigeons, those sometimes-despised urban squatters, by conferring strategic intent to their distinctive species-being—the tendency to perch and defecate on even the most revered public monuments. According to the Chilean poet’s mother (Clara Sandoval), ostensibly quoted directly in the poem, these acts of defacement are intentional: “Those pigeons know exactly what they’re doing” (“Las palomas saben múy bien lo que hacen”) (3). As a poetic figure of the subaltern, pigeons possess prophetic, intuitive knowledge that they coordinate to acts of nonhierarchical collective resistance.

Martín Espada’s poetry imagines similar processes of subject formation, knowledge articulation, and resistance to power. In his poems, no statues are safe from subversives, dissidents, workers, poets, and most significantly, politically engaged readers of poems. Given that city pigeons are ridiculed, shooed away, and branded stupid, weak-winged beggars that soil streets, sidewalks, and squares, aggravating decorum and order, their possession of knowledge, and a subversive set of practices set in motion by it, offends bourgeois common sense. In Parra’s antipoem, pigeons symbolize the dispossessed classes that offer a dual-valence resistance to monumentalized official versions of history. Their defacements are materially constituted—actual feces stain the statues—as well as symbolically situated. This subversion is orchestrated, after all, by the very figures devalued by official power, who then justify their suffering by blaming them for it; in this entrenched rationale, pigeons are, like the media-constructed representations of poor and indigenous in Latin America, lazy, backward, dirty, and impediments to progress, and thus to blame for their own poverty.

Such a construction pits the ahistorical claims of the neoliberal state against those who challenge its ideological claims to universality. As it functions under neoliberal rationality, whereby every goal and policy must be submitted to market logic, the nation-state often projects its vision of market-based order through a version of what Henri Lefebvre calls “a colonization of the urban space, which takes place in the street through the image, through publicity, through the spectacle of objects” (21; emphasis in original). For these reasons, he argues “against the monument” because it “is essentially repressive” and “raised to glorify conquerors and the powerful” (21; emphasis in original). Yet Lefebvre, like Espada, reserves a putative space “for the monument” (21; emphasis in original). In Lefebvre’s view, monuments are “the only conceivable or imaginable site of collective (social) life,” for they “embody a sense of transcendence, a sense of being elsewhere” that is powerfully “u-topic” (21–22; emphasis in original). The monument qua monument does not belong to the state, nor does it necessarily represent a particular conception of the past in service of an equally specific future; rather, it is eminently revisable, by pigeons, poets, and the collective imagination. Espada’s poems realize their signature poetics of resistance within this dialectic of against and for, producing lyric forms of dissidence and alternative forms of knowledge, belonging, and state formation. Two registers of memory—one represented in monuments erected by the joint machinations of state and capital, the other forged through individual and collective resistance—form binary conditions of possibility for Espada’s imagining of an “elsewhere” that emerges in response to the violence of the neoliberal era.

As several critics have pointed out, Espada’s poetry frequently “tear[s] down false” monuments and “build[s]” new ones in the service of egalitarian historical memory (Stanchich, “Republic of Memory”).^[1] The representation, defacement, and reinscription of monuments, and the attendant monumentalizing of figures of resistance to oppression, feature consistently in the poems. From the vandalism of Theodore Roosevelt’s statue in “Bully” (“Buscabulla”) (Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands/Rebelión es el giro de manos del amante [1990]); to the depiction of his father’s “scarring the wooden doors / of the Alamo,” that monument to manifest destiny, “in black streaks of fire” in “The Other Alamo” (City of Coughing and Dead Radiators [1993] 56–58);^[2] to Pablo Neruda’s house as a memorial to the power of poetry to resist state violence in “City of Glass” (The Republic of Poetry [2006]), the monument serves as a flexible trope for the ways in which memory and knowledge are configured through processes of contestation. Espada’s poetry maps an inter-American historical geography comprised of specific “space-times,” in the terminology of David Harvey and other critical geographers, by figuring three contested sites for (de)facing various types of monuments and for symbolically erecting lyric monuments to a range of leftists, poets, workers, and the poet’s friends and family members.

Parra’s antipoem implicitly summons the first space-time: September 11, 1973, when a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-backed coup installed Augusto Pinochet as dictator of Chile. This historical geography serves as a touchstone for Espada, contextualizing poems such as “The Firing Squad Is Singing in Chile” (Trumpets from the Islands of their Eviction [1987]); “The Good Liar Meets His Executioners” and “The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park” (Imagine the Angels of Bread [1996]); and the cycle of Chile poems in Republic of Poetry. The second space-time—January 1, 1994, in Mexico—situates Espada’s “Imagine the Angels of Bread” (“Imagina los angeles de pan”) (Imagine); “For the Jim Crow Mexican Restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Where My Cousin Esteban was Forbidden to Wait Tables Because He Wears Dreadlocks” (A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen [2000]); “Circle Your Name”; “Sing Zapatista”; and “Searching for La Revolución in the Streets of Tijuana” (all in Alabanza: New and Selected Poems, 1982–2002 [2003]) in reference to the day when both the Zapatista uprising (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional [EZLN]) began in Chiapas and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect. The third space-time maps contemporary Massachusetts and the Boston metropolitan area to include Cambridge, whose affluence and putatively enlightened politics Espada lampoons in “For the Jim Crow Restaurant” (Mayan Astronomer) and in “Jorge the Church Janitor Finally Quits” (“Por fin renuncia Jorge el conserje de la iglesia”) (Rebellion/Rebelión), and the less prosperous Chelsea, Massachusetts, from City of Coughing, a “[. . .] waterfront city of the north” (“Mi Vida: Wings of Fright” 7) with “[. . .] coughing / and dead radiators” that haunt the poet’s “[. . .] insomniac nights” (“City of Coughing and Dead Radiators” 3–4, 2). Espada’s Massachusetts also reinscribes the historical memory of indigenous peoples effaced in official narratives of U.S. history. In “The River Will Not Testify” (Mayan Astronomer), for instance, “[. . .] the granite monument” above the Connecticut River in Turners Falls, Massachusetts, “[. . .] cannot testify to all the names” of these Indian nations; rather, it celebrates the fact that Captain Turner “[. . .] destroyed 300 Indians at this place” (44, 7, 45; emphasis in original).^[3]

Espada’s poetry triangulates these Latin and North American space-times in a poetic topography of competing claims to knowledge and power. These three locations encompass numerous poems populating Espada’s poetic map of the Americas. Three additional groupings of poems can be understood as occupying geographical interstices between Chile, Mexico, and Massachusetts: the Central American poems, including El Salvador poems such as “The Skull Beneath the Skin of the Mango” (City of Coughing) and Nicaragua poems such as “The Meaning of the Shovel” (Imagine); the Puerto Rico poems, such as “My Name Is Espada” (Mayan Astronomer);^[4] and the New York City poems, such as “The Moon Shatters on Alabama Avenue” (Trumpets) and “Return” (Republic of Poetry). In order to mobilize this inter-American historical geography, Espada links these divergent space-times through the distinctive capabilities of lyric poetry, whereby the poem itself acts as a figurative device for monumentalizing resistance and preserving alternative forms of knowledge.

In my book, Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization (2013), I examine the place-based poetics and inter-American spatial dimensions of “Not Here” (Republic of Poetry) and “Circle Your Name” (Alabanza). In this essay, I use their discrete figures of monuments as departure points to theorize how monuments function more broadly in Espada’s poetics. My primary concern is to understand the monumental scale of Espada’s poetics. Why and how does Espada continually use monuments to uncover more encompassing historical patterns? Although each poem features a marble monument, the former represents an emancipatory historical figure, and the latter broadly symbolizes the continuity of oppression between Spanish colonialism and the neoliberal project in Mexico. The “[. . .] white marble [. . .]” (M. Espada, “Not Here” 34) statue of Salvador Allende outside the presidential palace in Santiago, Chile, for example, both clarifies and conceals the persistent symbolic and material consequences of September 11, 1973. In contrast, “[t]he marble general on horseback in the plaza” (M. Espada, “Circle Your Name” 49) in Mexico City offers a paradoxically static and flexible antagonist to the Zapatista movement and its supporters. Putting these figures into dialectical play reveals how Espada creates a multifaceted lyric monument to subversives, dissidents, revolutionaries, workers, and activists. Yet, equally significant to Espada’s monumental poetics are acts of exposing and defacing monuments to infamy, depravity, injustice, and dispossession. Perhaps no monument in his poetry is more chilling than “The Swimming Pool at Villa Grimaldi” (Trouble Ball). After I map the theoretical and historical-geographical coordinates of Espada’s lyric monuments, I then explain how this concentration camp during the Pinochet regime marks the paradigmatic apex of Espada’s monumental poetics and how the poem represents a key node for instantiating Lefebvre’s dialectic of monuments.

The frequent figures of monuments in Espada’s poems form the foundation for his specifically lyric monuments to poets, revolutionaries, and other fellow travelers. From Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction (1987) to The Trouble Ball (2011), eighty-one of Espada’s poems include dedications, an astounding number by any measure but especially among contemporary North American poets. This fact demands that we see Espada’s poetic project as an attempt to memorialize specific individuals within an encompassing vision for the liberation of specific places, Puerto Rico foremost among them, and of the displaced, dispossessed, and exploited peoples more broadly.^[5] Collectively, the dedications form what “Circle Your Name” refers to as a “[. . .] black braid of names [. . .]” (6) that testify to resistance and courage, which is to say, each name is “[. . .] a strand / in the black braid of names on the page” (5–6). Explicitly material, textural, and the product of the labor of braiding, the names thread together a textual archive of resistance, creating a paginated lyric monument. Among these dedications are those to leftists such as César Chávez (“Huelga” [Imagine]), Mumia Abu-Jamal (“Another Nameless Prostitute Says the Man Is Innocent” and “Prisoner AM-8335 and His Library of Lions” [Mayan Astronomer]), and Howard Zinn (“Walking” [Trouble Ball]);^[6] poets such as Clemente Soto Vélez (“Clemente’s Bullets” [“Las balas de Clemente”] [Rebellion/ Rebelión] and “Hands Without Irons Become Dragonflies” [Imagine]) and Leroy Quintana (“Searching for La Revolución” [Alabanza]); and those who fight for dignity for the poor and oppressed, such as Sister Dianna Ortíz in Guatemala (“A Cigarette’s Iris in the Eye of a Candle” [Mayan Astronomer]) and Sandinistan rebel Fernando Reñazco in Nicaragua (“The Jeep Driver” [Trumpets]). They each deploy what Michael Thurston calls “the trope of the monument” in which “the lyric resembles the monument” in its capacity to orchestrate the “casting of history into form” (80, 86). In this way, the viewer encounters images of monuments as embodiments of historical memory and the lyric poem as a monument to a specific conception of truth and memory. Poems exert strong claims on readers when they are understood as monuments readers face and embody through their breathing and speaking of its syllables, both as a representation of the poet’s apprehension of particular space-times and as a testament to the ways in which the coordinates of memory, knowledge, and power are constructed.

If these poems memorialize resistance to hegemonic power through acts of naming, they also consider possibilities for an epistemology of resistance that requires the courage to translate values and knowledge into practices. As I have argued in my essay on Puerto Rican poetics (“‘[M]ountain / in my pocket’”), Espada’s poems question the structures of knowledge that perpetuate inequality and praise those that resist its machinations. What we know, how we come to know it, and how this knowledge gets memorialized are fundamental axes of Espada’s poetic epistemology of resistance. “Public School 190, Brooklyn 1963” (Imagine) effectively illustrates this idea. The poem’s final stanza shows how intuitive, affective knowledge of structural inequality begins in elementary school:^[7]

When Kennedy was shot,

they hurried us onto buses,

not saying why,

saying only that

something bad had happened.

But we knew

something bad had happened,

knew that before

November 22, 1963. (15–23)

Similar constructions of the verb “to know” appear throughout Espada’s work, and it is reasonable to consider his dexterous use of it an ongoing borrowing from the complexities of saber and conocer in Spanish. In this poem, particularly, the seven-year-old speaker resists hegemonic power in several complex ways: by refusing to erect a monument to John F. Kennedy, by substituting a broader structural knowledge for the event-based and momentary, and by countering his own marginalization from U.S. history (“not saying why”) with the placement of the monumental historical moment of Kennedy’s assassination to the margins of the poem’s narrative arc and structure of knowledge.

In order to build monuments to historical figures, the poem suggests it is necessary to create consent, even if it entails coercion, displacement, and withholding knowledge. The poem implies further that those whom the state deems marginal, such as the poor, minorities, and the young, are either incapable of knowledge or, more enticingly, potentially dangerous if in possession of it.^[8] When this poem is read in conjunction with Parra’s “No President’s Statue Escapes” and the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal’s “Somoza Unveils Somoza’s Statue of Somoza in the Somoza Stadium,” the latter of which Espada rewrites for the digital age in “An Admirer of General Pinochet Writes to the Web Site of General Pinochet to Wish General Pinochet a Happy Birthday” (Republic of Poetry),^[9] a dialectic emerges for modeling the dynamic relationship between knowledge and resistance central to many of Espada’s poems, including “Not Here,” “Circle Your Name,” and “Swimming Pool at Villa Grimaldi.” Parra’s and Cardenal’s monument poems imagine diametrically opposed poetic voices and sources and structures of knowledge. In Parra’s antipoem, as in Espada’s dedications, the act of naming his uneducated mother (Werner xi) as the source of wisdom about pigeons celebrates an antirational and anti-institutional epistemology. In Cardenal’s poem, on the other hand, the Nicaraguan dictator is self-conscious of his actions, much like Parra’s pigeons. Cardenal’s insight into Somoza’s mind is produced by imagining his first-person address to Nicaragua, using the second-person apostrophe “you” (2, 6, 7). “I know” appears three times in the seven-line poem (2, 4, 7), and in each case Somoza circumvents his audience’s hatred of him and their resistance to his rule with his own resistance to their subversion. The poem ends with Somoza’s eerie rationale for erecting a monument to himself: “I put up this statue just because I know you’ll hate it” (7). Oddly enough, this egomaniacal act testifies to his self-knowledge, as he admits that the statue will not last beyond his reign. Taken together, Parra’s and Cardenal’s poems configure the dialectical complexities of knowledge and memory constitutive of Espada’s poetics of resistance. The monument often represents oppressive power, but it also possesses a capacity as a lyric trope of resistance. This capacity for defacement and subsequent reinscription with the names of those who promote alternative visions is fundamental to his poetics. Further, Espada’s representation of monuments and monumentality must be understood as an extension of Latin American poetry and art, with multiple vectors from south to north—through Parra, Cardenal, Neruda, and, as Maritza Stanchich points out in this volume, the Mexican muralists, even as his monument tropes share qualities with Robert Lowell’s poetic monuments.^[10]

Espada’s images of monuments, and his predilection for poems-as-monuments, coordinate conceptions of power, resistance, and epistemology into a historical geography that provides insight into how monuments, to borrow the words of Michael North, provide “microcosmic summations of entire cultures” (30). I argue below that “Swimming Pool at Villa Grimaldi” offers just such a holistic summation of the cultural dimensions of the neoliberal project. Using Lefebvre’s dialectic of monuments (against and for), it is possible to see Espada’s body of poetry building a multifaceted monument for cultures of resistance and against oppressive power during the era of neoliberalism in the Americas. The neoliberal era, in the estimation of David Harvey, Greg Grandin, Naomi Klein, and others, unofficially began with the coup in Chile in 1973 (although its causes and motivations have deeper roots) that gave the economist Milton Friedman and “the Chicago Boys” their initial opportunity to implement a “fundamentalist form of capitalism” (Klein 11).^[11] The presumptive start of hegemonic neoliberalism, as well as the concomitant rise of what Harvey and Grandin call “the new imperialism,”^[12] coincides with the end of the “Neruda era,” who died twelve days after the coup, and thus with a key formative moment for and figure of Espada’s poetry. In elegizing, celebrating, and (re)visiting Neruda, Espada’s poetics of resistance conjure Neruda’s final days as a talisman against the pieties of neoliberal theory and the violence of its often contradictory practices. In this way, it is useful to map Espada’s poems to conflicts involving neoliberal market “reforms” in the hemisphere—Chile in 1973, Central America in the 1980s, and Mexico in the mid-1990s—and to his biographical arcs that touch down within these space-times. “Not Here,” for example, shifts between narrating the poet’s visit to Santiago on the Neruda centennial in 2004 to the coup in 1973, when he is “[. . .] sixteen, / [. . .] vandalizing a golf course in the rain,” “[t]en miles away [from] the White House” (51–52, 55). Understanding Espada’s poetry as an extended, if often implicit, response to neoliberalism, as Espada scholar Edward J. Carvalho has also argued at some length,^[13] offers a historically and geographically grounded, class-based interpretive framework, while also providing the basis for reading Espada’s gestures toward alternative universal models for justice that counter neoliberal theory’s market-based view of human freedom. This periodization therefore accounts for personal and public historical geographies while also contributing to the mapping of his inter-American poetics along north-south and biographical-historical axes.

Espada’s poetics of resistance implicitly confronts neoliberal policies of privatization, deregulation, and the elimination of public services through a primary means of their instantiation: dispossession. Whereas neoliberal theory purports to create greater equality on a global scale, it is better understood, Harvey argues, as a class project that takes as its aim the restoration (or creation) of class power to economic elites (Brief History 16, 19, 202).^[14] This process is often orchestrated through “accumulation by dispossession,” a flexible set of tools and practices that redistributes wealth (such as collectively held land and state-run public services) upward, by violence if necessary, usually by selling off public and government assets at cut-rate prices and without democratic input (Harvey, Brief History 159).^[15] Espada’s poetry contests both neoliberal theory and practices, for example in “Imagine the Angels of Bread” (“Imagina los angeles de pan”) (Imagine) which offers to Central American and Mexican migrants “[. . .] trumpets and drums” (“[. . .] trompetas y tambores”), “[. . .] the deed to the earth [. . .]” (“[. . .] los títulos a la tierra [. . .]”), and ownership “[. . .] of the cannery” (“[. . .] de la enlatadora”) (26, 31, 33–34). “Sing Zapatista,” moreover, envisions an alternative political economy grounded in the earth through the egalitarian local and indigenous cultures uprooted by NAFTA’s policies of “competition” and privatization.^[16]

Such interventions expose the hollow pieties of neoliberal conceptions of freedom, particularly as they concern indigenous and workers’ rights. However, if a leading light of neoliberal policy, say, the late Margaret Thatcher, were to erect a monument to neoliberal theory giving a “microcosmic summation” (North 30) of its core beliefs, the monument would represent an ideology of “freedom” rather than one of dispossession. As Grandin notes in his analysis of the aftermath of the coup and Friedman’s application of “shock treatment” to the Chilean economy, neoliberalism aims to reconfigure “the relationship between capitalism and freedom” (165–70) by converting every valence of the latter into a function of the capitalist marketplace. Harvey describes these configurations in defining neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Brief History 2). “The assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market and of trade is,” he continues, “a cardinal feature of neoliberal thinking” (7). As such, the neoliberal state must “facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation on the part of both domestic and foreign capital [. . .] [and] the freedoms it embodies reflect the interests of private property owners, businesses, multinational corporations, and financial capital” (Harvey, Brief History 7). In practice, this set of beliefs has resulted in deep contradictions, particularly in the relationships between states and capital. The trends toward the privatization, commoditization, and financialization of everything (and I mean everything—see carbon markets for trading pollution credits and the patenting of seeds and genomes) have helped to gut state-provided social and welfare protections, weaken drastically labor unions and the laws protecting them, destroy environmental protections, and ensure the free movement of capital while inhibiting and punishing any attempts to strengthen labor.

Espada’s poetics of resistance has emerged in parallel to neoliberal economic “reforms” in Chile, Central America, Mexico, and the United States, and he also came of age in the 1970s, when neoliberal austerity measures instituted in New York City became the model for Reagan’s economic policies.^[17] Although numerous scholars have grappled with the dimensions of resistance in Espada’s work, myself included, as of yet none of the formulations adequately account for these overarching contexts.^[18] The Canadian poet-critic Jeff Derksen’s discussion of contemporary poetic responses to neoliberalism allows us to frame Espada’s poetics both in terms of its overarching politics and in its more specific iterations in particular space-times. Derksen identifies “two types of critical cultural practices that carry a strain of anti-neoliberalism and anti-capitalism” (99). The first “counters the claims and ideology of universal capitalism,” while the second “is more spatialized, engaging with particular globalized contexts or localized struggles at the scale of the nation and below” (99). Although Derksen is interested in “semantically dense cultural production,” in this case focusing on superb books by two experimental political poets very different from Espada, Mark Nowak’s Shut Up Shut Down (2004) and Rodrigo Toscano’s Platform (2003), he finds that these poets, like Espada, “provide a range of information that has been withheld from public cultures” (99). As I argue in Broken Souths, Espada prefers lucidity to density in poetic language, but his poetry certainly fits both practices identified by Derksen. In the following pages, and in the reading of “Swimming Pool at Villa Grimaldi” particularly, I aim to show how he targets the “ideology of universal capitalism” and sets his poems in specific spatiotemporal contexts and struggles.

In addition to María Elena Cepeda’s discussion of divergences between opposition and resistance in Espada’s poetry, the Mexican poet-critic Tomás Segovia’s probing articulation further clarifies how Espada’s poetics engages universal claims in specific space-times:

I ask you not to confuse resistance with political opposition. Opposition does not oppose itself to power but to a government, and its fully formed shape is that of an opposition party; resistance, on the other hand, cannot be a party, by definition: It is not made in order to govern but . . . to resist (qtd. in Subcomandante Marcos 282; ellipsis in original).

Espada’s poems, taken as a whole, do not oppose a government (or governments) per se or the state qua the state; rather, they resist the complex imbrications of forces that constitute the power of neoliberalism in the Americas, especially the often-concealed cooperation among states, international institutions, the mainstream media, and finance and corporate capital that together enforce it by encouraging unthinking consumption and by stifling dissent. In this way, for example, the subtle ironies of “Skull Beneath the Skin of the Mango,” with its convergence of militarized “[. . .] massacre[s] [. . .],” “[. . .] treaties and ballot boxes,” “[. . .] reporter[s],” and “[. . .] sneaker[s],” can be understood as metonyms for reading the types of transnational cooperation invested in neoliberal restructuring, as well as for interpreting the forms of appearance (“ballot boxes”) masking its violent realities (3, 10, 12, 15). Espada’s poems resist these symbols of hegemonic power, dispossession, and displacement, in addition to what the Zapatistas refer to as the cultural “oblivion” that often accompanies them, rather than the state as such. Because Parra’s and Cardenal’s monument poems imply that the presidents idealized on statues will change and that the historical-geographical contexts of oppression will shift from Chile to El Salvador to Boston to nation-state X, “pigeons” and poets must “know exactly” what (neoliberalism) they resist as much as whom (Pinochet, Somoza, et al.). Power, after all, is constituted interpersonally and passed from one president, one administration to another.^[19]

This process of critiquing official state monuments and creating lyric monuments foregrounds a dialectical relation between speech and silence. Like the “[. . .] granite monument” in “River Will Not Testify” that “[. . .] cannot testify to all the names” of dispossessed Indian nations (44, 7), Allende’s monument in “Not Here” cannot speak. It is “mute [. . .]” and lacks both “a free hand” (specifically, as cited in the poem, “[. . .] a hand free to wave”) and “[. . .] a voice [. . .]” (35–36). As a representation, Allende takes a similar form as the Roosevelt monument in “Bully” (“Buscabulla”) and “the marble general on horseback” (49) in “Circle Your Name,” thereby leveling their historical, geographical, and political differences, which are effaced in their convergent images and materials. Whereas it is pertinent that Allende is a revolutionary icon in Espada’s “black braid,” in this monumental form he remains motionless, state-bound, and unable to move others. Speaking is left to the living, and thus to poets, poems, and readers. “A book,” and thus a poem, as Jorge Luis Borges writes, is, like a monument, “a physical object among others” (267). It must be read, interpreted, breathed, encountered, and internalized. Espada reinscribes monumental functions by figuring the poem’s unique capacity to actively memorialize and to imagine utopian spatiotemporalities. As such, the poems activate in the imagination what stone and marble cannot: an alternative “republic of poetry” that departs from the well-documented ways in which the neoliberal state favors capital accumulation, financial institutions, and the redistribution of wealth upward at the expense of workers and the environment.^[20]

The dedications of “Not Here” and “Circle Your Name” facilitate a comprehensive mapping of dedications in Espada’s lyric monuments. “Not Here” is dedicated to Raúl Zurita, who represents an exemplar of courage and dignity in Espada’s poetry. As I argue in Broken Souths, the Chilean poet serves as a local guide for the Latino poet from North America. Not only does Zurita revere Neruda, he was also imprisoned and tortured under Pinochet and thus gives Espada intimate access to the experience of poetic resistance from a Chilean who works in the Nerudian vein.^[21] Like the earlier “The King of Books” (“El Rey de los Libros”) (Rebellion/Rebelión), “Circle Your Name” is dedicated to Espada’s friend Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, a lawyer, translator, and frequent collaborator with Espada in creating Spanish versions of his poems, as well as those of the Puerto Rican poet Clemente Soto Vélez.^[22] “King of Books” (“Rey de los Libros”) celebrates Pérez-Bustillo’s unwillingness to surrender his books, the lawyer’s tools of the trade “blackening the nightmares / of treasury police and army captains / in El Salvador” (“ennegreciendo las pesadillas / de la policía de hacienda y capitanes del ejército”) (40–42). His traveling library serves as a metaphor for a language of resistance—his “[. . .] books [are] bandits, / bootlegging illicit words” (“[. . .] libros [son] bandidos, / contrabandeando palabra ilícitas”) (11–12) to assist victims of U.S.-backed atrocities in El Salvador in the 1980s, a context that also informs Espada’s “La tormenta” (Trumpets) and “Skull Beneath the Skin of the Mango.” As Pérez-Bustillo is “[. . .] not persuaded” (“No lo persuadieron”) by the demands of Salvadoran authorities, Espada imagines his friend, “the King of Books” (“el Rey de los Libros”), “command[ing]” “a plague [. . .]” (“una plaga comandada”) of texts to attack the Salvadoran army (M. Espada, “King of Books” [“El Rey de los Libros”] 35, 45, 43). This first dedication to Pérez-Bustillo monumentalizes his advocacy for the victims of El Salvador’s right-wing death squads, with the image of the lawyer upon a throne orchestrating “a horde of printed words like grasshoppers” (“una horda de palabras impresas como saltamontes”) playfully portraying his resistance without sanctifying it (M. Espada, “King of Books” [“El Rey de los Libros”] 39).

“Circle Your Name” creates a more complex monument to Pérez-Bustillo’s resistance by pinpointing the ironies of his being labeled a “subversive” for his work on behalf of the Zapatistas between 1994 and 1996. The poet’s friend is “Fingered” as an “Enem[y] of the System” (1; emphasis in original) in the Mexico City newspaper Excelsior, and Espada urges him to flee Mexico for Massachusetts. Whereas the Mexican state ascribed to subversives an inverse monumental presence by naming them in this list, which the public, to avoid a similar fate, must follow in defacing, Espada’s poem asserts the subversives’ subsequent right to reappropriate that debased monument for resistant ends. Marx’s articulation of the law of equal exchange in the capitalist marketplace, “between equal rights, force decides” (344), produces a strange doubling of these competing monumental claims in “Circle Your Name.” Marx’s “force,” in this case, does not reside within the law of exchanges that matches two owners—the capitalist with his capital and the worker with his labor power—but within a power dynamic between textual codes. On one side, the poet’s metaphors, tropes, and reversals: on the other, the state’s laws and decrees. If, as “the officer in charge of interrogation” says to Zurita in “Not Here,” “sh[aking] the poet’s papers and fum[ing]: This is not poetry” (13–14; emphasis in original), so, too, can the subversive say to the state: this is not justice. The state’s texts, in seeking to erase or marginalize each and every Zurita and Pérez-Bustillo in its midst, unwittingly monumentalize their names even as they threaten their physical well-being. But many die for their principles, such as the Mexican “[. . .] judge / who refused [. . .]” to participate in the neoliberal goal of crushing organized labor (M. Espada, “Circle Your Name” 22–23). At the end of the poem, the monument in the plaza “[. . .] rear[s] up [. . .]” in “[. . .] jealousy [. . .]” (50) at the power of subversives, as if to lament the limited power of monuments in relation to the living language of poems.

Although the discrete figures of monuments in “Not Here” and “Circle Your Name” are secondary to the poems’ dedications, which weave into an unfolding, monumental “black braid of names” testifying in the aggregate to the challenge to neoliberal hegemony, these figures nonetheless illustrate the central role of monuments—both official marble-and-stone iterations and unofficial textual versions—in Espada’s poetics of resistance. “Swimming Pool at Villa Grimaldi” is both a distinctive instance of Espada’s lyric monuments in the ways I have identified here and representative of his poetics of resistance more broadly. Because the poem is not dedicated to anyone in particular, it defers to and praises the nameless subversives, dissidents, revolutionaries, and workers appearing across his collections.^[23] The bare fact that the poem has been published (and reprinted) so widely—the acknowledgments prefacing The Trouble Ball (11–12) list five different places, not including Espada’s own Web site (The Café Review, Open Letters Monthly, Rosebud, So Much Things to Say, and Southword)—suggests that the poem is both exemplary and representative of Espada’s corpus. The poem utilizes the signature formal devices of his poetics in a more understated than customary tone. And, for current purposes, “Swimming Pool at Villa Grimaldi” participates in an ongoing critique of the monuments to authoritarian power, depravity, and injustice represented by the neoliberal project and its historical vehicle, the Pinochet regime. But the obverse also pertains: the poem erects a lyric monument to the Chileans kidnapped, tortured, disappeared, and executed for their leftist politics. This particular lyric monument might be termed a “reversible monument,” a concept I borrow from Octavio Paz’s concrete poem Topoemas (Topoems) and Reversible Monuments, an anthology of contemporary Mexican poetry in translation, edited by Mónica de la Torre and Michael Wiegers and titled after Paz’s “Monumento reversible” (“Reversible monument”) section of Topoemas (Topoems). Whereas Torre and Wiegers use Paz’s translated phrase (“Reversible monument”) to conceptualize the processes of translating and reading between Spanish, English, and indigenous languages, and from Mexico to the United States and back (4–5), I am using it more narrowly and directly to describe how Espada engages the historical-geographical dimensions of Villa Grimaldi. By focusing on the swimming pool specifically, Espada’s poem troubles the cathartic elements of the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park while simultaneously inverting the monumental dimensions of its previous form, the concentration camp, rendering it petty and perverse but nonetheless horrifying in its implications. These aesthetic moves magnify the inequalities and injustices of the neoliberal project that the swimming pool symbolizes as a reversible site of torture and leisure, electrocution and sunbathing.

The longue durée of Villa Grimaldi is replete with violence in the centuries before it was converted to the concentration camp known as the Cuartel Terranova. Mario Aguilar’s diachronic “ethnography of landscape transformation” details its multiple transitions, from indigenous land to colonial latifundio to a Jesuit retreat (before they were expelled from the Americas); from a private mansion in the first half of the twentieth century to the social space of a restaurant and dance club, then to the private, hidden space of a torture center; and finally to the public space of the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park, as it is known today (8–12). Disjunction, radical change, and violent dispossession inhere in Villa Grimaldi, as infrastructural as walls and roofs. This idea has significant consequences for Espada’s lyric monument: unlike many stone and marble monuments, the possibility of revision, reinterpretation, and reuse are built into this one, to the good and to the bad. As Macarena Gómez-Barris writes, although there is “scant documentation” about the workings of the torture center, from 1974 to 1977 at least 4,000 were tortured, 208 disappeared, and 18 executed there (“Witness Citizenship” 35, 38). She argues that the Peace Park offers a space for exercising “witness citizenship,” which she describes as the “forms of cultural, social, and political engagement that share an imagination about a traumatic past in order to activate and promote usually local collective solidarity” (31). Espada would undoubtedly support these forms of “witness citizenship,” but as in his poem “When Songs Become Water” (“Cuando los cantos se vuelven agua”) (City of Coughing) and “Sing Zapatista,” his “Swimming Pool at Villa Grimaldi” eschews a witnessing first-person lyric “I” for an omniscient third-person speaker. Although the note to the poem informs us that it is “based on [the poet’s] visit to the Villa Grimaldi site [. . .] in the company of [his] Chilean translator, Oscar Sarmiento, in March 2007” (M. Espada, “Notes on the Poems: The Swimming Pool” 63), the poem itself allows us to enter the site unrestrained, at least theoretically, by the directional cues of a poet guide.^[24]

This idea facilitates a reading of the first stanza’s prophetic voice and its syntactical and formal properties. Like so many of Espada’s stanzas, this one is structured through prepositional phrases and frequent conjunctions. The subtle use of anaphora, using only function words (conjunctions, articles, and prepositions), bears the mark of the Whitmanian mode as well as that of Espada’s fellow Latino poets Juan Felipe Herrera and Maurice Kilwein Guevara who use the literary device brilliantly. But it also evinces the lawyer’s approach to truth: the anaphora serves to accumulate evidence of depravity, with its slow, deliberate syntax, and with its measure of calmness and certitude bound together by hard consonants and stark monosyllables:

Beyond the gate where the convoys spilled their cargo

of blindfolded prisoners, and the cells too narrow to lie down,

and the rooms where electricity convulsed the body

strapped across the grill until the bones would break,

and the parking lot where interrogators rolled pickup trucks

over the legs of subversives who would not talk,

and the tower where the condemned listened through the wall

for the song of another inmate on the morning of execution,

there is a swimming pool at Villa Grimaldi. (M. Espada, “Swimming Pool” 1–9)

The first eight lines of evidence build up to the final line’s disarmingly flat affective tone and matter-of-fact declaration. The line enfolds numerous rhetorical operations: it can stand alone as its own sentence; it can collapse lines 2–8 to enclose the stanza, figuratively (en)closing “[. . .] the gate [. . .]” of Villa Grimaldi (e.g., “Beyond the gate where the convoys spilled their cargo // there is a swimming pool at Villa Grimaldi”); its quotidian, observational, solemn tone magnifies the craven depictions of torture in the previous lines; and it stages a latent reversal of the order of the stanza. This reversible stanza can conceivably be read in both directions as well as via an inward spiral: “[T]here is a swimming pool at Villa Grimaldi // [b]eyond the gate where the convoys spilled their cargo.”

These features create a spatialized historical gravity that turns precipitously on the grotesque absurdity of the swimming pool, a symbol of leisure, pleasure, and privilege in a concentration camp, pointed out simply and effectively with “there.” Deictic words such as “there” and “here” require spatiotemporal contexts, and they often locate actions in time and space. Such moves are common in Espada, and they begin three of the remaining four stanzas: “Here the guards and officers would gather families / for barbeques [. . .]” (10–11); “Here the splash of children [. . .]” (15); and, in the final stanza, “There is a swimming pool at the heart of Villa Grimaldi” (34). Whereas the spatial play of here and there underlies Nuyorican cultural production, and just as it frames Espada’s own inter-American poetics from south to north (of which “Not Here” is a prime example), in this poem it suggests that merely pointing out the swimming pool is sufficient for demonstrating the horror of Pinochet’s Chile. Each “there” and “here” illuminates the terrible depths of this swimming pool, as if to say, so long as such a thing exists our eyes should be here. For this is precisely how monuments work: their discrete, highly visible contours demand our undivided attention, compelling us to focus our gaze directly and to internalize their versions of history, but never to investigate their ideological foundations.

Read concurrently, the poem’s pivotal figures, the gate and the pool, offer just such a dexterous critique of the neoliberal project. The opening clause, “Beyond the gate [. . .],” identifies the ascendant spatial form of the neoliberal era, the “new enclosures” produced through privatizations and secured by increasingly omnipresent surveillance states. The rise of “gated communities” of extreme wealth, privilege, and protection have only been possible because of places such as Villa Grimaldi, which facilitate the frequently violent suppression and isolation of dissent (and dissenters), alternative modes of organizing social and economic life, leftist political parties, organized labor, and all sorts of collective forms, while also protecting the spoils reserved for the extremely wealthy. In this sense, Lefebvre’s notion that a monument functions as “the seat of an institution” (21) aptly describes the symbolic status of Villa Grimaldi as a monument to the contradictions of the neoliberal project’s economic freedom and authoritarian repression, extreme wealth alongside crippling poverty, swimming pools, and cattle prods. As a concentration camp, Aguilar calls Villa Grimaldi a “landscape of secrecy” (or “secret landscape”) and a “landscape of exclusion” that was paradoxically well known and unable to be spoken about openly (10). Like both gated communities and prisons, it performed dual functions as a spectacle and as a clandestine, hidden space—they are meant to be gazed at and to be looked away from. Such “secret enclosures,” Aguilar writes, are designed to elude the gaze of the researcher (the ethnographer, in his case) and thus the pursuit of knowledge (9). It is also likely that Villa Grimaldi was chosen as a high-value concentration camp in part because of its easy access to Santiago and because its location on the periphery in Peñalolén “allowed Pinochet’s secret police [Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, DINA] to conduct its dirty work without meddling from national observers or international human rights organizations” (Gómez-Barris, “Witness Citizenship” 37).

In addition to concealing secrets, preventing entry, and impeding sight, gates also protect what is deemed valuable from those considered threatening. The enjambed “[. . .] cargo” on the end of the first line creates a pause before we learn what type of goods are delivered to Villa Grimaldi. In addition to this haunting enjambment, the trochee with its unstressed second syllable prolongs the uncertainty preceding “[. . .] blindfolded prisoners [. . .].” Although “[. . .] convoys [. . .]” and “[. . .] cargo” might be read as synecdoche for Pinochet’s military apparatus, a more provocative reading might emphasize how the latter term works as a synecdoche for a range of commodities of which human beings—as labor power, trafficked bodies, and sources of information—are simply one form among others. Because this “[. . .] cargo” is also “[. . .] spilled [. . .],” it is simultaneously expendable, undesirable. The image of “[. . .] the parking lot where interrogators rolled pickup trucks” in the first stanza works similarly (5): in one sense, it reminds us that consumption is the primary mode of citizenship under neoliberalism; in another, it suggests the routinized delivery of goods to and from warehouse docks. And each of these figures in the first stanza is historically accurate, as Espada demands of his poems. Aguilar points out that most prisoners were kidnapped by DINA, which “operated a fleet of Ford pick-ups with canvas covers” (15). He adds that the surviving prisoners remembered “the noise of the big gates when they were opened” and that their experiences were largely derived from senses other than sight, noting that they were allowed outside in the summer but only when blindfolded (15).

The poem ultimately moves our focus past the gate, even past the implements and methods of torture, to the pool. Rather than focusing more capaciously on the history of Villa Grimaldi, Pinochet (unlike Espada’s other Pinochet-era Chile poems, this one does not use the word “dictator”), or the Peace Park, this telescoping magnifies the pool’s symbolism, constituting Espada’s primary act of poem making. For the swimming pool is an apt symbolic monument to the neoliberal project’s asymmetries, cruelties, and privations. Conversely, for the select few, there are the rewards and freedoms of “[. . .] poolside” (18) parties, cookouts (11), and the time to give their children swimming lessons (14). The rest are submerged in “[. . .] a vat / of urine and feces [. . .]” (25–26) as the pool is used for electrocution and drowning. Whereas “[t]he torturer’s hands braced the belly of his daughter, / learning to float [. . .]” (13–14), the “[subversives’] bellies [were] slit so the bodies could not float” when dropped “[. . .] from helicopters into the ocean [. . .]” (38–39). Yet, by dividing the spoils too neatly, this stark dichotomy misses something important. Troubling this calculus are the prisoners rewarded for talking with “[. . .] chocolate cookies and Coke on ice” (20), treats typically reserved for children when they obey their elders. Equally troubling is the absent presence lurking in the poem’s rifts between prisoners and torturers. As a lawyer, Espada knows that in the United States a pool constitutes an attractive nuisance that must be gated, hidden, or otherwise inaccessible to avoid legal liabilities from those tempted to trespass on private property. In this way, “[h]ere the guards and officers [. . .]” at Villa Grimaldi (10) may enjoy some benefits of the new order ushered in by Pinochet and the neoliberal project, but for all intents and purposes, they are subservient henchmen for those who truly wield power and who owned the vast majority of extant private property and who would soon own the soon-to-be privatized state-run industries—multinational corporations, financial institutions, and the wealthy and well connected. It is telling that these historical actors are absent from the poem, for they were largely, if falsely, insulated from the charges of violence and repression under Pinochet. The guards thus constitute figurative gates; they do not occupy the mansion, so to speak, they protect it. The poem thus demands that we ask: Who benefitted from this torture? Who ordered it? And who ignored it?

As in a swimming pool, we must dive below the surface to discover some troubling answers. As Espada suggestively puts it, we must be “[. . .] plunged below the surface” (27), like swimmers and the tortured. Like “[. . .] vat[s]” and “[. . .] bellies [. . .],” swimming pools can be emptied and filled, but unlike them they cannot move or be moved (25, 39). Only the water moves, shimmering and dancing in a play of surface and depth, reflections, refractions, and distortions dependent on the light, season, and time of day. These qualities contribute to the pool’s evocative symbolism. But what makes Espada’s poem are its aural effects. Given that prisoners’ experiences were often largely comprised of sounds and sensations, as Aguilar reports, the frequent sibilance in “Swimming Pool at Villa Grimaldi” creates a consistent, unnerving register of disgust. In addition to the consistent plural nouns (“[. . .] prisoners [. . .]” [2], “[. . .] torturers [. . .]” [13], and “[. . .] subversives [. . .]” [6], among many others), the hissing sounds create a connective phonetic tissue from the first line’s “spilled” through those such as “[. . .] strapped” (4), “[. . .] splash [. . .]” (15), “[. . .] dissolved [. . .]” (37), “[. . .] vanished [. . .]” (37), and “[. . .] secret police” (38) to the final line’s “[. . .] slit [. . .].” In contrast, the leisurely “[. . .] swimmers [. . .]” (27) are safe in “[. . .] the bottom of [the] soundless blue world” (28) at the depths of the swimming pool that conceal the injustices above. Perhaps the most chilling fact about the swimming pool is that “prisoners were immersed by force and electricity was generated into the water in order to allow for the torture of more than one prisoner at the same time” (Aguilar 15). In this historical fact there is a seedling of the neoliberal fetish for efficiency, but there is also a source for the poem’s sibilance: the buzzing of electricity passing through water. In this light, the conclusion that “Swimming Pool at Villa Grimaldi” draws—in this pool in this concentration camp “[. . .] human beings / would dive and paddle till what was human in them / had dissolved forever [. . .]” (35–37)—has antagonistic ramifications. It depicts the barbarity of Pinochet’s regime, in part by acknowledging the humanity of those “[. . .] guards and officers [. . .],” the humanity sacrificed to their extreme indifference to suffering (10). That said, they share a fate with those who would resist neoliberal violence and those they tortured—drowning—though one is literal and the other figurative.

In contrast to the swimming pool’s hard, cold, and slippery “white tiles, white steps [. . .]” (35) and marble and stone statues, “the black braid of names” is a pliable, durable textural/textual monument.^[25] Yet, both iterations exemplify Espada’s consistent preference for the monumental scale. Beginning with Thomas Fink, scholars have identified in his work the imperative to make visible the invisible (immigrants, the elderly, workers, the marginalized, dispossessed, imprisoned, and colonized). The monumental scale facilitates such visibility by instantiating the material presence of the dispossessed and marginalized in the celebratory space of the lyric. “Laden with symbols,” Lefebvre writes, “monumental splendor is formal” (21). It might be said that Espada’s lyric monuments formalize the dignity of subjects denied recognition in official historical narratives. This symbolic depth is a primary reason American modernists found monuments so irresistible, as scholars such as Thurston and North argue. Given that monuments derive “their ethical and aesthetic power” from their “transfunctional” and “transcultural” dimensions (Lefebvre 21–22), poets working at the intersections of cultures, languages, movements, historical eras, and geographies often find them salient figures of conflict, resolution, and exchange. Espada frequently builds monuments that make transcultural connections between north and south. But it is the transfunctional element that ultimately subtends his lyric monuments, the functions of lyrics and monuments converging in the reader/viewer who encounters and ideally inhabits the experience formalized in the poem/monument through its eyes, ears, and hands.

This notion brings us to a final point about the ways in which “Swimming Pool at Villa Grimaldi” exemplifies the pedagogical strategies of Espada’s lyric monuments.^[26] Appropriately, the Villa Grimaldi Peace Park has a “pedagogical purpose” (Gómez-Barris, “Witness Citizenship” 42). Salient here is the symbolic character of the park’s explanatory signs “located on the ground because it was the only landscape that the blindfolded prisoners could see” (Aguilar 20). The poem’s paratactic component functions like such a sign on a physical monument: the poem is the monument, the explanatory note following Trouble Ball is its sign (63). There Espada acknowledges the writers essential to his composition of the poem, including Aguilar and Sarmiento, and he lists several books about Chile under and after Pinochet. Espada’s poetry collections often conclude with a substantive section of notes, a practice that has been expanded in his two most recent volumes, Republic of Poetry and Trouble Ball. Espada’s notes suggest that he deems his own poems necessary but insufficient: we must also read the noted books in order to follow “the black braid” through its literary-historical iterations and to flesh out the poems’ contexts. “[T]he black braid of names” therefore includes the names in the notes as well as in the poems and their dedications.

For Gómez-Barris, the Peace Park offers a space for “terror narratives,” which “educate and facilitate the transmission of a Left political history and legacy to younger generations” (“Witness Citizenship” 43). Espada’s lyric monuments serve a similar pedagogic purpose, as illustrated by poems dedicated to Zinn and by those about Subcomandante Marcos (“Sing Zapatista”), to take two examples among many.^[27] Yet, if “no president’s statue escapes” Parra’s antipoetry, and Allende’s as well as Roosevelt’s and Pinochet’s cannot “escape” Espada’s poetry, “the black braid” inherently runs the risk of elevating exceptional individuals to monumental status, where they may be insulated from criticism. Espada’s Neruda is such a figure, particularly in poems such as “The Soldiers in the Garden” (Republic of Poetry). Any monument runs the risk of becoming a monolith, a singularity in a world of multiplicities, where resistance must be polyvocal, collective, and pluralistic. This is not to suggest that Espada ascribes to a “great man” historical model, but that for him “the poet,” with Neruda its archetype, creates the foundation for a just state by articulating the shared, lived dimensions of human needs, desires, and conflicts. The poet-critic Urayoán Noel argues that Republic of Poetry exhibits a “Nerudian faith [. . .] in a total poetry” that is mythic and utopian yet neglectful of the realities of the present, neoliberal Chile (868–69). Although these effects are mitigated by the nameless “[. . .] subversives counted by the state,”^[28] dignified and praised in “Circle Your Name” (4), “Not Here” (5), and “Swimming Pool at Villa Grimaldi” (6), Noel’s critique runs up against Espada’s idealistic faith in the transformative power of poetry formalized in his poetic monuments. This belief differentiates him in the field of contemporary North American poetry, in which doubt, dissonance, uncertainty, and dismissal of poetry’s transformative properties are de rigueur. Espada believes that a just nation-state is both desirable and achievable. The challenges of building a republic valuing dignity, self-determination, and equality above all come into acute focus in regard to monuments. “The extension of monumental space to habiting is always catastrophic,” Lefebvre uncharacteristically frames as an absolute, “and for the most part hidden from those who are subject to it” (21). For Espada, a key task of the poet as a Nerudian figure is to reconcile the power and utility of monuments with the everyday, cellular scale of habiting, to imagine daily life as autonomous, dignifying, enriched by meaningful, unalienated labor, and fully visible to all subjects.

I want to conclude by using the pliant trope of reversal common to many of Espada’s poems, “Imagine the Angels of Bread” (“Imagina los angeles de pan”) foremost among them, reading a poem dedicated to Espada rather than by him. The Lovelock Paiute poet Adrian C. Louis dedicates “This Ends with a Frozen Penis” to Espada. His poem builds an ironic monument to conquest and oppression, and in so doing reveals the ignorance and banality that support them. On first glance, it is not clear why Louis dedicates this particular poem to Espada. Yet, careful attention to the poem’s concluding lines and to the correspondence between the two poets in the Martín Espada Papers at Amherst College indicates that each shares an abiding interest in misnomers.^[29] I have argued here that a “black braid of names” winds through Espada’s poetry, creating a properly named lyric monument to resistance in the Americas during the neoliberal era, from Chile to Central America and from Mexico to Massachusetts. But the public-reading standby “Mariano Explains Yanqui Colonialism to Judge Collings” (Trumpets); “Revolutionary Spanish Lesson” (“Lección revolucionaria de español”) (Rebellion/Rebelión); “Borofels” (City of Coughing); and “The Sign in My Father’s Hands” (Imagine), where the young speaker explains that “[he] would learn too that ‘boycott’ / is not a boy’s haircut” (26–27), also attest to Espada’s ironic twists on acts of improper naming and mistranslation. In Louis’s poem, the speaker watches a talk show on which Loni Anderson discusses her relationship with Burt Reynolds, leading him to pained digressions about Reynolds’s specious assertion of Indian identity. He then switches the channel to find a Mormon Tabernacle Choir concert, “[t]he snow-covered Wasatch Mountains / bulg[ing] in the background” (143–44). To this sight Louis’s speaker says bluntly, “Wasatch is the Ute Indian word for ‘frozen penis’” (145). Although the poem’s complex narrative turns and the etymology of this (mis)naming are beyond the scope of this essay, the latter’s performative dimension serves as an ironic monument to conquest that figuratively emasculates any unwitting white male speaker. This deconstruction of Anglo-American claims to rugged masculinity comprises a subversive act by the Indians whose stolen land carries their name, Utah.

As in “Circle Your Name,” Louis’s poem doubles and then inverts tropes of dispossession and monumentalization. And like Espada’s poetics of resistance, Louis’s poetics of “personal survival” thread subversive humor and layered irony in response to conquest and colonization (Geronimo n. pag.). This strategy permeates a letter to Espada dated September 21, 1993, in which Louis cheekily addresses Espada with a misnomer: “Dear Martin S. Spada” (“Dear Martin” n. pag.). This salutation drops the accented “í” in the first name, misplaces the stress on the “S” that becomes the phantom middle initial rather than the first syllable of the last name, and severs figuratively the poet’s last name, which is Spanish for “sword” (see also Espada’s “My Name Is Espada” [1]). Each “mistake” suggests the violent erasure of sociolinguistic specificity and biographical history perpetrated by acts of misnaming. Between Parra’s subversive pigeons and Louis’s misnomers and misspellings, I have contextualized Martín Espada’s lyric monuments within Latin and North American historical geographies of oppression and injustice, extending from the conquest of the “New World,” the originary misnomer in the Americas, to neoliberalism’s conquests of the present. This idiosyncratic framing also attends to Espada’s subversive humor and irony, in his defacement and reinscription of monuments. Monuments are key tropes in Espada’s poems precisely because, as North notes, they “have been a powerfully ambiguous model [for poets], fascinating and repelling at the same time” (18). This pliability grounds Espada’s creation of lyric monuments to courage and resistance. Taken together, his dedications to dissidents, poets, revolutionaries, leftists, and workers correct the misnomer “subversive.” This “black braid of names” weaves together an imagined “elsewhere” in which the world is turned right side up, and where those who orchestrate coups, electrocute and disappear students, and murder judges in the name of a narrow, if not illusory, “freedom,” will be “fingered” as the actual subversives.

Notes

Cross reference to Alabanza. The following poems cited in this essay are also contained in Espada’s Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982–2002. Listed by order of appearance, they are (Alabanza page references included):

“Bully” 67–68; “The Other Alamo” 106–08; “The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park” 156–58; “Imagine the Angels of Bread” 117–19; “For the Jim Crow Mexican Restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Where My Cousin Esteban was Forbidden to Wait Tables Because He Wears Dreadlocks” 179–80; “Jorge the Church Janitor Finally Quits” 82–83; “Mi Vida: Wings of Fright” 98–99; “The River Will Not Testify” 198–200; “The Skull Beneath the Skin of the Mango” 109–10; “The Meaning of the Shovel” 135–37; “My Name is Espada” 173–74; “The Moon Shatters on Alabama Avenue” 54–56; “Prisoner AM-8335 and His Library of Lions” 187–89; “Hands Without Irons Become Dragonflies” 159–70; “La tormenta” 47–48; “When Songs Become Water” 112–13; “Mariano Explains Yanqui Colonialism to Judge Collings” 45; “Revolutionary Spanish Lesson” 75.

Vincent addresses this aspect of Espada’s poetry, as do Stanchich (in this volume) and Salgado (in this volume). Thank you to Acknowledged Legislator editor Edward J. Carvalho for directing me to Vincent. See Carvalho, “Re: Espada Journal.”

Ed. note: Revised Alabanza version of poem features only fifty-seven lines total instead of fifty-eight that comprise the original composition (see Note 12 in Sarmiento for information on consolidation of lines 32–33 into a single line in Alabanza version of poem. Hence, Dowdy’s lines referenced here are actually 55–57 in Alabanza).

For more on this poem, see Azank in this volume.

Ed. note: Text on line 45 of the Alabanza version of the poem was edited by the poet to read “three hundred” instead of “300” (emphasis in original). See also Azank Note 21 in this volume.

Puerto Rico is the cultural capital of Espada’s poetic map of the Americas. I have written at length elsewhere about Espada’s Commonwealth-era Puerto Rican poetics and its unique place within this triangular mapping. See Dowdy, “‘A mountain / in my pocket’” and “Spaces for Congregation.”

Ed. note: The title of this poem (i.e., “My Name Is Espada”) in the revised Alabanza version features a lowercased copula (“is”) as compared to an uppercase articulation in the original. See also Uchmanowicz Note 1, Sarmiento Note 9, and in Pérez-Bustillo Note 44, all in this volume.

Arias points out that Espada’s poetry is textured with specific people and places demanding to be remembered.

Ed. note: See the latest Howard Zinn poem by Espada, “Castles for the Laborers and Ballgames on the Radio,” that appeared in Progressive magazine, Dec. 2012–Jan. 2013. The poem was also read by Espada on Bill Moyers’s program. See Moyers, “Martín Espada’s Poem for Howard Zinn” in Works Cited.

Ed. note: See Carvalho “Puerto Rican Radical,” ch. 3 subsection “The Structural Violence of the Classroom,” pp. 176–88 for a discussion on school-based structural violence in Espada’s life and work that engages with Dowdy’s assertions.

Not coincidentally, this idea appears repeatedly in Espada’s poetry.

Ed. note: See Espada’s notes in Republic of Poetry for “An Admirer of General Pinochet . . .” on pp. 60–61 that make clear the connection between the Espada and Cardenal poems.

10.

See Longo’s “Post Wonder Bread” on Espada’s relationship to Neruda. See also Thurston, “Robert Lowell.”

11.

See Parra’s “Ecopoemas” that refers directly to Friedman’s involvement in Chile.

12.

See Harvey on the historical roots of “the new imperialism,” particularly in Nicaragua in the 1930s, and again in the 1980s (Brief History 27–28; New Imperialism). Also see Grandin 51 and Klein 59–106 on Friedman in Chile. It is important to account for both external and internal forces in events such as September 11, 1973. Local elites usually play key roles in instituting (and reaping the benefits from) neoliberal policies. Although U.S. imperialism in Latin America predates the neoliberal era (in Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, particularly), this era is qualitatively different and of a different magnitude. See Harvey, Brief History 39.

13.

See Carvalho’s dissertation “Puerto Rican Radical,” esp. ch. 4 “‘Armed with a terrorist’s sonnet’—The Language of War: Espada’s Historical Trace of Neoliberalism” for further development of the relationship between Espada’s poetry and neoliberalism; see also the interviews “Lessons,” pp. 534–35, “‘Taking Back,’” pp. 545–48, “Preserving,” 577, and “‘Bard and the Bombthrower’” under Carvalho in Works Cited.

14.

Ed. note: See also the report by Facundo Alvaredo, et al. on increasing U.S. income inequality that is summarized and cited by Mark Gongloff.

15.

Ed. note: The neoliberalization of an economy and the consolidation of class power that comes with it is also supported by flexible labor initiatives, a cultural supremacy that is reinforced through cultural pedagogy, and often military incursion and/or a rise in authoritarianism. Thus neoliberalism serves as both a political project and an economic platform, to invoke the important theoretical understanding of the phenomena offered by Henry Giroux in his many articles and books on the subject.

16.

See Espada’s Zapata’s Disciple essay “All Things Censored: The Poem NPR Doesn’t Want You to Hear” on the fortuitous relationship between “Imagine the Angels of Bread” and the Zapatista uprising (125).

17.

The liberalization of the Puerto Rican economy under “Operation Bootstrap” is a precursor to this range of neoliberal reforms. See also Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical,” his book Puerto Rico Is in the Heart, and the introduction to each volume for more on this and the ways in which Espada’s poetics parallel what Carvalho refers to as “proto-neoliberal” and conventional neoliberal historical markers.

Ed. note: To Dowdy’s phrase, “Espada’s poetics of resistance has emerged in parallel to neoliberal economic ‘reforms’” we should add “sometimes anachronously, and typically not sequentially.” See Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical,” ch. 4 for more on the development and narrative arc of Espada’s neoliberal responses.

18.

See my discussion of Espada’s “Cockroaches of Liberation” in “Spaces for Congregation.” See also Cepeda, Arias, Fink, and Stanchich (in this volume) on the dimensions of resistance and opposition in Espada’s work. See also Harvey on New York City’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s in relationship to Reagan’s neoliberal policies in the 1980s (Brief History 44–48).

19.

Reginald Gibbons argues that Cardenal’s poems that name Somoza can register similar meanings in different contexts, even when readers do not know the Nicaraguan dictator. It is “possible,” Gibbons writes, “to substitute the name of any historical or literary figure identified with state terror [for Somoza], or any political figure identified by some audience, somewhere, as tyrannical and violent, without changing the poem’s meaning, only its focus” (653–54).

20.

Ed. note: Additional information on this theme is examined in Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical,” ch. 5 “From a Republic of Property to a Republic of Poetry.”

21.

Stanchich provides more on the details of Zurita’s torture in this volume. It’s also worth noting that Zurita’s act of self-mutilation, in which he attempted to blind himself with poison, offers an additional context for the references to sight and vision in “Not Here” and to the historical contexts of “The Swimming Pool at Villa Grimaldi.”

22.

See also the Espada and Pérez-Bustillo cotranslated, coedited volume of Soto Vélez’s poetry The Blood That Keeps Singing/La sangre que sigue cantando (under Soto Vélez) and Pérez-Bustillo’s contribution to the present volume.

23.

Ed. note: The lack of a dedication in this poem is also likely tied to the fact that so many “nameless subversives” were disappeared by the Pinochet regime and could not be/have not been identified. Hence, inasmuch as the poem harkens to the “black braid of names” as an extension of solidarity, it becomes a dirge as well for the Chilean victims, adopting a quasi-“Alabanza”-like tonal focus.

24.

Oscar Sarmiento, Espada’s Chilean translator and guide during the poet’s second visit to Chile, has also contributed to the present volume. See his essay for a discussion on how Espada’s poetry works to “undo” the harmful effects of Latino “macho” posturing and violence.

For background on Espada’s visit to Villa Grimaldi, including his insight on the pool, see Vincenz. See also Carvalho “Puerto Rican Radical” 343–44 on the poem, which he sees as “asking the reader to consider the site of torture against a different history, of German Nazi dehumanization” (343).

Ed. note: See also the index reference to “concentration camps in Chile” and related cross-references to “torture sites” and “Villa Grimaldi concentration camp[,] concentration camps in Nazi Germany” on pp. 204–05, respectively, in Macarena Gómez-Barris’s Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile.

25.

In this particular detail, Espada seems to deviate from the historical record. Aguilar informs us that the pool in fact had blue tiles (15).

26.

Ed. note: Additional information on this theme is examined in Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical,” ch. 5 “From a Republic of Property to a Republic of Poetry—The Language of Possibility” that establishes the links between poetry, politics, and pedagogy in Espada’s writing.

27.

Ed. note: See Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical,” ch. 5 “From a Republic of Property to a Republic of Poetry—The Language of Possibility” for more information on the pedagogical function of Espada’s poetry dedicated to Howard Zinn, esp. “Walking.” See also Note 26 above.

28.

Gómez-Barris provides some details about the nameless and the named. She writes, “The infamous Patio 29 in the General Cemetery of Santiago” includes “a series of graves [that] have been inscribed only with ‘NN’ (or no name),” all of whom were victims of Pinochet (“Witness Citizenship” 37). There is also a “Wall of Names” of victims at the Peace Park (“Witness Citizenship” 38).

29.

Ed. note: For more on the Espada Papers archive, see the essay from Amherst College special collections archivist Peter Nelson in this volume.

Chapter 9

From the Inner City to the Cotton Fields

Jeremy Larochelle

Living and Working Conditions
in Martín Espada’s Poetry

On a night in September 2007, packed into the community space at Bus Boys and Poets in Northwest Washington, D.C., my poetry-doubting environmental literature students sat transfixed as poet and activist Martín Espada bellowed lines that blurred the borders between high art and activism. With tears in their eyes, and nodding with new found understanding, they were transported to inner-city tenements in Espada’s poetry, as they vividly pictured living and working conditions far from the comfort of their liberal arts college or their suburban neighborhoods. Poetry, they told me on the trip back to campus, is not just dead words on a page, but rather a relevant means of denouncing injustices to which they would not have otherwise been exposed first hand.

Without knowing it, my students were essentially voicing the essence of Lawrence Buell’s definition of environmental literature and the sense of place that literary texts can so powerfully convey:

The more a site feels like a place, the more fervently it is so cherished, the greater the potential concern at its violation or even the possibility of violation. That one of literary imagination’s traditional specialties has been to evoke and create a sense of place is all the more reason why place should have a place in a book such as this. (56)

According to Buell, in order to bring about both social and environmental awareness in readers, the writing needs to be persuasive and successfully draw the attention of a large reading audience. As evidenced on that September night, Espada’s poems do precisely that: they make readers aware of the unpleasant realities faced daily by U.S. Latinos. This reality is often portrayed through the use of graphic, highly descriptive language that captures the conditions under which communities live and work.

Despite the emergence of the environmental justice movement over the last few decades, discussions of U.S. Latino/a literature up until recently have tended not to address connections between environmental and social concerns. Alternatively, most of this criticism has tended to revolve around issues of identity, class, and sexuality.^[1] Although these matters permeate Espada’s writing, and inevitably much recent U.S. Latino/a literature, my analysis of Espada’s poetry instead focuses on poetic representations of the intersection between these crucial spheres and the concrete social and environmental issues faced by Latinos living and working in the United States.^[2] I argue, then, that environmental justice concerns are part of the larger social justice agenda that appears time and again throughout Espada’s work.

Much of the extant criticism on Espada’s writing has tended to focus on issues such as opposition and resistance and, accordingly, the poetry of rebellion, without making explicit reference to problems of urban ecology.^[3] In studies such as Thomas Fink’s journal article, “Visibility and History in the Poetry of Martín Espada” (the content of which is reproduced in his book “A Different Sense of Power”: Problems of Community in Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. Poetry [2001]), though the “dilemma of urban housing” is discussed, it is only in reference to the “harsh social conditions that Puerto Ricans, many other Latinos, and other people of color face” in the United States (203). While Fink includes poems that make reference to unjust living conditions, his analysis describes these experiences as social issues, ultimately making no mention whatever of how they might correspond with urban ecology or environmental justice. The tendency to consider cases of environmental justice only as issues of “social justice” invites an in-depth analysis of environmental justice issues in U.S. Latino/a literature, as presented in the work of sociologist Barbara Deutsch Lynch. In her article, “The Garden and the Sea: U.S. Latino Environmental Discourses and Mainstream Environmentalism,” Deutsch Lynch identifies Espada as a writer whose poetry “captures with brutal economy the real and imaginary environments of the Latino poor in northern cities, [and] in the fields” (121). She argues that the “activist experiences” delineated in his poetry are “part of a program for continuing environmental action” (121). Moreover, Deutsch Lynn identifies U.S. Latino/a literature and Espada’s writing, along with that of Chicana poet and activist Gloria Anzaldúa, as a relevant means to articulate better U.S. Latino/a environmental discourse. She leaves it to the literary scholars, however, to pursue close readings of the texts. Although many critics rightly highlight the strong social justice component of Espada’s writing, informed by the philosophy behind the environmental justice movement itself, I view his preoccupations with health and unjust living and working conditions as problems that are both social and environmental.^[4]

Although Espada does not identify himself specifically or even overtly with the environmental justice movement, ideas found throughout his writings nonetheless reveal a strong concern for environmental justice issues within the communities of which he writes.^[5] In this respect, his work contributes a unique perspective to the discourse of the environmental movement based on an immediate need to improve environmental conditions in “the places we call home,” as William Cronon urges deep ecologists to do in his 2001 essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.”^[6] Cronon criticizes the tendency of conservationists and deep ecologists to seek to conserve far away spaces of wilderness while ignoring the areas where they actually live. Such a perspective, according to Cronon, “would seem to exclude from the radical environmentalist agenda problems of occupational health and safety in industrial settings, problems of toxic waste exposure on ‘unnatural’ urban and agricultural sites, problems of poor children poisoned by lead exposure in the inner city, problems of famine and poverty and human suffering” (84). By including issues of “occupational health and safety in industrial settings” and “problems of poor children poisoned by lead exposure in the inner city”—among other crises affecting people in urban and rural areas—environmental justice activists, and writers such as Espada, perhaps even without realizing it, extend the scope of traditional environmentalism concerns.

Selected texts by Espada represent in poetic form the struggle of individuals in big cities and in migrant worker camps who suffer from the ill effects of industrialization and urbanization. Some of these situations originate from more traditional ecological problems, while others relate to the process of gentrification, which fails to recognize the particular sense of place of minorities whose homes are often first to be demolished in efforts to both improve neighborhood or city district aesthetics, as well as maximize profit for landlords and other private property interests.^[7] Rather than moving away and seeking a space free of pollution and toxic chemical deposits, or a place where they do not need to fight against gentrification to hold onto their neighborhoods and properties, environmental justice activists strive to improve environmental conditions in their local communities.^[8]

By evoking a strong sense of place through the poetic text, Espada works to expose unjust power relationships that further marginalize the underprivileged.^[9] For example, the bilingual titular proem from Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996) proposes an inversion of the power relationships relating to injustice experienced by minority groups, as we see in the following verse: “this is the year that the hands / pulling tomatoes from the vine / uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine” (“este es el año cuando las manos / que cosechan los frutos de la tomatera / arrancan los títulos a la tierra que la hace brotar”) (29–31). Rather than remain anonymous, powerless pairs of hands working for the wealthy landowner, Espada proposes that this year—that is, “in the now”—the workers should rise up to claim the “[. . .] deed to the earth that sprouts the vine” (“[. . .] los títulos a la tierra que la hace brotar”) (31). This poem, and for that matter the book itself, evokes the power of poetry to bring about radical change and invert long-standing power dynamics. Espada’s poetry on the whole promotes social and environmental change, as it encourages the reader to strive toward alternative spaces that can be achieved through the political imagination,^[10] as exhibited in the penultimate stanza of “Imagine the Angels of Bread” (“Imagina los angeles de pan”): “[I]f the shutdown of extermination camps / began as imagination of a land / without barbed wire or the crematorium, / then this is the year” (“si el cierre de los campamentos del exterminio / se inició con la imaginación de una tierra / sin alambre de púas y sin crematorio, / entonces este es el año”) (53–56). Thus, this iconic Espada poem represents optimism that the world could be a more just place for the marginalized. It is also a testimony to the importance of the “imagination”—of a utopian (but achievable) space “without barbed wire or the crematorium,” or without environmental problems that affect the lives of the dispossessed—in bringing about social and environmental transformation.^[11] This is the logical starting place for such an analysis of Espada’s poetry. And so I begin my survey of Espada’s concerns for social justice by discussing poems related to an increasingly prevalent reality of inner-city life: gentrification and eviction.

Living in the Inner City:
Gentrification, Eviction, and a Sense of Place

Latino communities are often the ones selected for revamping by urban planners and political decision makers, typically those who are externalized by privileges of race and class to the harsh realities of urban life. The people who have lived and worked there for years, however, are traditionally the only ones who suffer in these scenarios, displaced while new businesses are brought in to essentially replace them and their sense of place. There are many cases of this kind of dislocation represented in Espada’s catalog, wherein he introduces the reader to the reality of unjust, unsafe, and sometimes inhuman living conditions for Puerto Ricans and other Latin American immigrants in the United States, a country that prides itself on giving everyone the democratic right to be treated with dignity and respect.

In his second collection, Trumpets from the Islands of their Eviction (1987), Espada reflects on the eviction of members of local Latino communities as a result of gentrification. In the poem, “Los Sures,”^[12] written in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, during the winter of 1984, the speaker illustrates the lives of those who lived in an apartment building that was to be evacuated to make room for residents from other, more privileged social classes:

The bright-color portrait of Jesus jumps

on South 4th Street plaster

where the subway train’s iron tremor

startles like the hunger that wakes us,

night in Los Sures

shake your black hair down,

and the night is a woman’s darkness.

Night is the only tenant left,

night is the face at every window,

where yellowish heat splashed soot on walls,

spit a mouthful of glass

onto South 4th Street sidewalk,

night in Los Sures

shake your black hair down,

leaning on the ruined grain of brick. (1–15)

The opening two stanzas above provide a snapshot of life on South 4th Street through the use of imagery such as the “Bright color portrait of Jesus [that] jumps” on “South 4th Street plaster,” as the subway train’s “iron tremor startles like the hunger that wakes us” (41–44). The speaker’s emphasis on “us” here implies that the experience is felt by the collective population—both in the barrio and as readers—in addition to the narrator of the poem as poetic voice. Here, this poetic voice is defining the distinct sense of location on South 4th Street, which, despite the “yellowish heat splash[ing] soot on walls” and the passing subway trains, remains a place where one feels a sense of be longing (10). Although many aspects of the community are in physical disrepair, the “ruined grain of brick” is where one leans as the speaker repeats, “Night in Los Sures / shake your black hair down” (5–6). The epistrophe of “shake your black hair down” at the end of every stanza, along with the word “night” in the first two lines of the second strophe, gives the composition a rhythm that increases over the course of the poem when read aloud, as my students were able to hear firsthand last September. The emphasis on “night in Los Sures” conveys the combined fear and celebration that occurs in the community during the night: at the same time that “night is the face at every window,” the repetition of “shake your black hair down” implies a festive tone (6). This celebratory mood is abruptly interrupted, however, by the plans of the builders, as we see in the last stanza of the poem. The builders’ “[. . .] defiant blueprint,” thwarts the sense of place established in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, affectionately known as “Los Sures”:

But the builders have a defiant blueprint,

the hammer’s tap multiplies furious^[^[13]^]

as the hands of plena drummers,^[^[14]^]

the abandoned church will be a health center,

the evacuated buildings on South 4th Street

will shout with the voices of the living,

night in Los Sures

shake your black hair down,

you are a dark woman rising,

turning hips and heartbeat quick. (16–25)

“[T]he abandoned church will be a health center,” and “the evacuated buildings on South 4th Street” will fill up with new residents to replace those who have been forced to leave (19–20). The speaker’s description of these new residents as people who “will shout with the voices of the living,” implies the Latino community that was forced to vacate the premises was not perceived by those in power as possessing “[. . .] voices of the living” (21), or concomitantly, as living beings. They are invisible to decision makers who demolish peoples’ homes in order to bring about economic progress.^[15] At the end of the poem, after the repetition of “night in Los Sures / shake your black hair down,” the poem concludes with a call to resist gentrification (22–23). By proclaiming that “you are a dark woman rising, / turning hips and heartbeat quick,” the speaker gives agency to the woman and to the community, which is represented as rising up. In so doing, the poetic voice acknowledges the importance of an often-overlooked Latino sense of place in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—one that merits the site be preserved. Rather than passively accepting the fate of Los Sures, the image of “turning hips and heartbeat quick” suggests that the community will respond powerfully and quickly to the changes ahead by resisting gentrification through community solidarity (25).

Other poems by Espada further illustrate the effects of gentrification on Latino communities. The eponymous “City of Coughing and Dead Radiators,” from Espada’s third book (released in 1993),^[16] focuses on the eviction of members of Latino communities north of Boston in Chelsea, Massachusetts, in close geographic proximity to where Espada lived and worked as a tenants’ rights lawyer.^[17] The poem illustrates the living conditions in the apartment buildings from which the people are evicted—literally suffering with “[. . .] coughing / and dead radiators”—as is illuminated in the opening stanza of the poem:

I cannot evict them

from my insomniac nights,

tenants in the city of coughing

and dead radiators.

They bang the radiators

like cold hollow marimbas;

they cry out

to unseen creatures

skittering across their feet

in darkness;

they fold hands over plates

to protect food

from ceilings black with roaches. (1–13)

In the first stanza, the poem effectively evokes the sense of despair created by the living conditions. The use of simile to compare the radiators the tenants “[. . .] bang [. . .]” during the night to “[. . .] cold hollow marimbas” provides the reader with a palpable image that evokes the senses of sight, sound, and touch (6). This image of the radiators evokes multiple senses in the reader: both “[. . .] cold [. . .]” and “[. . .] hollow [. . .]” use one sense to refer to another (6). As the tenants bang on these “[. . .] cold hollow marimbas,” their sense of fear during the night is articulated by their perception of “[. . .] unseen creatures / skittering across their feet / in darkness” (8–10). Their anxiety over what they cannot see, based on their perception in the darkness and on the abundance of “[. . .] creatures [. . .]” on the floor, evokes a vivid sense of life in the tenements and prepares the reader to see the injustice of the judge—“poking his broken hearing aid” (42)—from the perspective of the evicted members of the community, as we see in the lengthy second stanza:

And they answer the call

of the list,

all evictions in court,^[^[18]^]

brays the clerk.

Quiet and dutiful

as spectral troops returning,

they file into the courtroom,

crowding the gallery:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

the prostitute swollen

with pregnancy and sobbing

as the landlady

sneers miscarriage^[^[19]^]

before a judge

poking his broken hearing aid;

the girl surrounded by a pleading carousel

of children, in Spanish bewilderment,

sleepless and rat-vigilant,

who wins reluctant extermination

but loses the youngest,

lead paint retarded. (14–21; 37–48)

Rather than inspire confidence in the legal system, the narrator’s representation of the “[. . .] judge” “poking his broken hearing aid” after “[. . .] the landlady / sneers miscarriage,” is a metaphor for a legal system that literally turns a deaf ear to the afflictions of the underprivileged (41–42, 40). The living conditions described in the poem, imposed by landlords (read: slumlords), such as the one represented in the poem, have devastating effects on human health. The speaker evokes these living conditions with his descriptions of a girl with many children—“[. . .] surrounded by a pleading carousel / of children [. . .]”—who, along with being “sleepless and rat-vigilant,” in stark contrast to the lifestyle of the judge and the landlady, loses one of her children to the devastating effects of lead paint (43–45). The poem concludes with the perspective from the courtroom and speaks from the point of view of those on the receiving end of injustice:

For all those sprawled down stairs

with the work boot’s crusted map

printed on the back,

the creases of the judge’s face

collapse into a fist.

As we shut files

and click briefcases

to leave,

a loud-faced man

trumpets from the gallery:

Death to Legal Aid. (64–74)^[^[20]^]

The image of “the creases of the judge’s face” evokes a violent, even insuperable impression of authority, suggestions that are perceived in a more visceral manner by those not served by the judge, who have been “[. . .] sprawled down stairs” and are permanently marked on the back (branded like slaves) “[by] the work boot’s crusted map” (64–65, 67). At the same time, the judge’s personhood also disappears behind the veil of raw power, emphasizing the injustice of decisions that arbitrarily cast aside the suffering of the Latino tenants. The poem clearly delineates the class inequities suffered by the underprivileged, from unsafe living conditions to scars left behind by violence in the workplace, which inform their perspective on the legal system and provide the context behind which “[the] loud-faced man / trumpets [. . .]” his opinion about Legal Aid (72–73).

In other poems, such as “Thieves of Light” from Imagine (1996), Espada’s experience as a legal advocate becomes more personal and more urgent.^[21] In this poem, he captures the conditions under which a woman named Luisa lived, where Gus, the landlord/owner of the building, treated her and the other residents like subhuman inhabitants. In the second stanza, Espada, working as tenants’ rights attorney as we saw in the above example, tells the reader how he met Gus:

This is how we knew Gus:

Luisa saw the sludge plop

from the faucet, the mice

dropping from the ceiling,

shook her head and said no rent,

still said no after his fist

buckled the bolted door.

In the basement, Gus hit switches.

The electric arteries in the walls

stopped pumping, stove cold,

heat off, light bulbs grey.^[^[22]^]

She lived three months in darkness,

the wax from her candle spreading

over the kitchen table like a calendar

of the constant night,

sleeping in her coat, a beggar

in the underworld kingdom of rodents.

When Luisa came to me, a lawyer

who knew Spanish,

she kept coughing

into her fist, apologizing

with every cough. (24–45)

The “[. . .] sludge [. . .]” that drips out of the kitchen faucet evidences the contamination of the water in the area of the city where Luisa lives in her role as not only a resident of low-income housing, as the judge may view her, but rather as “[. . .] a beggar / in the underworld kingdom of rodents” (25, 39–40). Espada, more than just a poet with activist ideas, also puts his commitments to action. Alongside a locksmith and with help from an electric company employee, he goes to the basement and turns the electricity back on in Luisa’s apartment in the bid to improve Luisa’s living conditions and despite threats of violence from Gus. The poem concludes with a description of the events that establish Espada and his cohort as “[. . .] thieves of light,” which is then followed by Luisa’s reaction and the poet’s response:

We worked quickly, thieves of light.

The door propped open,

as in a dream of welcome,

swaying with the locksmith’s fingers.

The Edison man pressed his palms

against the fuse boxes

and awakened the sleeping wires

in the walls. I kept watch by the door,

then crept upstairs, past Gus’s office

where shadows and voices

drove the blood in my wrist

still faster. I tapped on Luisa’s door.

I had to see if the light was on.

She stared at me

as if the rosary

had brought me here

with this sudden glow from the ceiling,

a stove where rice and beans

could simmer, sleep without a coat.

I know there were no angels

swimming in that dim yellow globe,

but there was a light louder than Gus,

so much light

I had to close my eyes. (65–88)

Through narrating the process of turning on Luisa’s electricity, Espada also conveys through various impactful images the emotion he experiences at witnessing Luisa’s gratitude for the improvement in her living conditions. The description of the “[. . .] angels / swimming in that dim yellow globe” articulates Luisa’s epiphanic realization (and perhaps the writer’s, given the name of the collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread, in which this poem is housed) of the dim light bulb as a miraculous event (emphasis added). The use of descriptive language in this narrative poem written in short verse effectively draws the reader into the experience, persuading her/him to identify with Luisa’s struggle and the injustice she suffers, rather than the landlord’s insidious actions. In addition to denouncing living conditions from the perspective of mistreated tenants, many poems throughout Espada’s canon also deal specifically and intimately with the working conditions endured by Latino communities, such as we find in the next section.

Bodies in Pain: Work Poems by Martín Espada

While some of the conditions we will see below in Espada’s poetry relate directly to a disregard for the local ecology around cities or out in the field, which in turn affects the living and working conditions of many communities, other poems illustrate a preoccupation with working conditions to which many individuals are subjected regardless of their ecological effects. In “Water, White Cotton, and the Rich Man,” for example, from Trumpets (1987), Espada illustrates the experience of a twelve-year-old girl, “Rosa,” who is raised picking cotton in Texas. Her experience of adjusting to thirst and to the “squeezed headaches [. . .]” brought on by pesticides vividly demonstrates the conditions under which she was forced to work as a migrant farm worker, as is clear in the first stanza:

Rosa’s body stopped growing

at the age of twelve.

Ten hours a day

blurred pesticide and sweat,

squeezed headaches and full bladder

surrounded by widening white-cotton sun,

doing what Mexicanos in Lubbock, Texas

did for working. (1–8)

The perspective of the poetic voice centers around the direct effects the pesticides had on Rosa’s body. By beginning the poem with the assertion that “[her] body stopped growing,” which is repeated again in a slightly different iteration in the last stanza (with the pronoun “her” replacing “Rosa’s”), the poetic voice affirms that her working conditions—including deprivation of water and other necessary nutrients/fluids to keep her healthy as well as exposure to harmful pesticides—had a direct impact on her health and her growth process as an adolescent (1, 35). Rosa’s thirst is described from her perspective, among “blurred pesticide and sweat, / squeezed headaches and full bladder” and can be felt in a visceral way by the reader (4–5). Rosa’s experience is described in the second stanza to evoke in the reader the physiological sensations she experienced in the fields, perhaps as her eyes burned with the trickle of sweat and pesticide or as she felt the painful thirst in her throat: “soon the jug was empty, / and every time Rosa swallowed / she felt the scraping in her neck / that reminded her of water” (17–20). Espada’s technique of describing reality from the phenomenological perspective of the individual he represents in his poetry affords the reader the ability to inhabit someone else’s experience, inviting pathos, which, as Buell argues, environmental texts have the power to do: “They may connect readers vicariously with others’ experience, suffering, pain [. . .]. They may reconnect readers with places they have been and send them where they would otherwise never physically go” (2). Thus, in the last stanza, when the speaker emphasizes how Rosa “learned her thirst, slowly / over the days that no landlord / volunteered the drippings of his tap,” the reader sees the injustice of the landowner from Rosa’s perspective, similar to the evicted Latino’s perception of the judge in the last poem (29–31). Rosa, along with the reader who experiences Rosa’s suffering vicariously, is left with nothing more than “a closing throat, paste of saliva / and humidity that becomes rage” (32–33).

This theme carries over into Espada’s third collection, the bilingual Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands/Rebelión es el giro de manos del amante (1990).^[23] Following the pesticide cloud and its effects presented in “Water, White Cotton” above, the reader is further drawn into the harsh reality of the life of migrant workers, this time from the perspective of a young boy named “Federico” in the well-known Espada poem “Federico’s Ghost” (“El fantasma de Federico”).^[24] The poem relates an incident in which a young fruit picker, Federico, succumbs to dangerous pesticides while standing defiant against a crop-duster plane pilot who sprays the field where the boy works. The poem is both a memorial to the death of the poor, yet gutsy, Federico, and a testimony to the harsh conditions, at once social and environmental, under which migrant farm workers such as he often live—which are not necessarily restricted to the U.S. West Coast or Southwest as the media traditionally depicts, but can also include the mid-Atlantic United States, such as in Maryland.^[25] We find that the strong pesticides that Rachel Carson writes about so eloquently in Silent Spring (1963) not only affect endangered bird and other animal species, but also migrant farm workers who are exposed first hand to the harmful, sometimes lethal, effects of these toxic chemicals.^[26] (It therefore makes sense, then, that Espada makes the conflation of man and animal—that is, brown-skinned workers and “[. . .] dark birds” [“pájaros oscuros”] [9]—in the poem, as we see in the passage below.) This narrative poem graphically describes the death of Federico:

The story is

that whole families of fruitpickers

still crept between the furrows

of the field at dusk,

when for reasons of whiskey or whatever

the cropduster plane sprayed anyway,

floating a pesticide drizzle

over the pickers

who thrashed like dark birds

in a glistening white net,

except for Federico,

a skinny boy who stood apart

in his own green row,

and, knowing the pilot

would not understand in Spanish

that he was the son of a whore,

instead jerked his arm

and thrust an obscene finger.

The pilot understood.

He circled the plane and sprayed again,

watching a fine gauze of poison

drift over the brown bodies

that cowered and scurried on the ground,

and aiming at Federico,

leaving the skin beneath his shirt

wet and blistered,

but still pumping his finger at the sky. (1–27)

Cuentan que

familias enteras de peones

aún se arrastraban entre los surcos

de los campos al anochecer,

cuando a raíz de whiskey o lo que sea

el avión regador roció de todas maneras,

dejando flotar una llovizna pesticida

sobre los que piscaban,

retorciéndose como pájaros oscuros

en una blanca red reluciente,

todos menos Federico,

un flaco joven de pie aparte

en su propio surco verde,

que a sabiendas de que el piloto

no comprendería en español

lo que era un hijo de puta,

sacudío su brazo

y lo embistió con un dedazo obsceno.

El piloto comprendió.

Hizo girar el avión y regó de nuevo,

mirando la fina gasa de veneno

esparcirse por encima de los cuerpos morenos

que se refugiaron y arrastraron por el suelo,

y haciéndole blanco a Federico,

dejándole la piel mojada y ampollada

por debajo de la camisa,

aún embistiendo su dedo hacia el cielo. (1–27)

The narration of the pilot’s action of circling and spraying again denounces his crime, as he knowingly cropdusts Federico and the other fruit pickers with poison. The image of the pesticides that “drift over the brown bodies” (“esparcirse por encima de los cuerpos morenos”), seen from the vantage of the drunk pilot, as they “[. . .] cowered and scurried on the ground” (“[. . .] se refugiaron y arrastraron por el suelo”), is persuasive in denouncing an injustice, and many others like it, that was never officially acknowledged by authorities (22–23).^[27] The description of the bodies in pain “[that] thrashed like dark birds / in a glistening white net,” followed by the graphic image of Federico’s “[. . .] skin beneath his shirt / wet and blistered” (“[. . .] la piel mojada y ampollada por debajo de la camisa”), quite forcefully urges the reader to abandon his/her passivity as one who stands removed from the poem (9–10, 25–26). In this respect, the poem is driven by its active message of advocacy, encouraging the reader to make a political and moral decision about the crisis of Federico’s working conditions and, ultimately, to take a side in this debate.

We find out later that in response to Federico’s death there were many “[. . .] tomatoes picked and smashed [during the] night” (“tomates piscados y aplastados de noche”) (30). Although the official response to Federico’s death remained untraceable and unaccounted for, the farm owners “[. . .] promis[ed] every Sunday off / if only the smashing of the tomatoes would stop” (“[. . .] prometiendo domingos sin trabajo” / a cambio de que dejaran de machacar los tomates”) (34–35). As we see in the last stanza of the poem, however, the destruction of the crop did not stop, and instead became tied to a work camp legend about Federico:

Still tomatoes were picked and squashed

in the dark,

and the old women in camp

said it was Federico,

laboring after sundown

to cool the burns on his arms,

flinging tomatoes

at the cropduster

that hummed like a mosquito

lost in his ear,

and kept his soul awake. (36–46)

Pero los tomates seguían siendo piscados y aplastados

en la oscuridad,

y las ancianas del campamento

decían que era Federico,

trabajando después del anochecer

para calmar las quemaduras en sus brazos,

lanzándole tomates

al avión regador

que zumbaba como un mosquito

perdido en su oído,

manteniendo su alma despierta. (36–46)

This poem, like others that delineate the living conditions of farm workers, is replete with images of suffering bodies. Although portrayed as a legend, the image of Federico continuing to work “[. . .] after sundown / to cool the burns on his arms” ([. . .] después del anochecer / para calmar las quemaduras en sus brazos) (40–41) created by the toxic spray of the pesticides, demonstrates the concrete effects that human bodies suffer as a result of an agricultural production model that values increased production and economic gain over the health of both the workers and the natural world that sustain the industry: to quote from Noam Chomsky, “profit over people.” The implication here is that the effects suffered by the brown human bodies in the poem are also absorbed by the nonhuman world. Which is to say, the pesticides also greatly harm the bodies of birds and other animals, in addition to contaminating the ecological systems and rendering the land itself unfit for further production.

“Federico’s Ghost” (“El fantasma de Federico”) and other poems about unfavorable and often inhumane working conditions, question the commodification of products, an unquestioned course of business and market logic that has become so common in an increasingly globalized world. Under capitalism, one is encouraged to avoid thinking about who worked to manufacture products, their experiences as laborers, where the products came from, and under what conditions they were created. A significant part of the metanarrative in Espada’s poem challenges the reader to consider the reification of that labor and the liminality of the workers who perform it. More plainly, the fruit produced and picked by Federico and his community is purchased by unknowing consumers, unaware and uninformed of the suffering produced in order for the product to reach the grocery aisle. Martín Espada, far from being removed from the social and environmental realities of the people he represents in his poetry, has also lived and worked among other poor Latinos, performing a variety of labor-intensive jobs.^[28] For example, before becoming an immigration lawyer, as we will see in the poem below, one of his high school jobs was manufacturing legal pads in a local Maryland factory. Later in life, as a lawyer and migrant labor advocate, he understood fully the suffering that went into the production of those yellow pads so often taken for granted.^[29] It follows that in “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper” from City of Coughing, the reader then learns of the harsh working conditions Espada experienced by producing those legal pads:^[30]

At sixteen, I worked after high school hours

at a printing plant

that manufactured legal pads:

Yellow paper

stacked seven feet high

and leaning

as I slipped cardboard

between the pages,

then brushed red glue

up and down the stack.

No gloves: fingertips required

for the perfection of paper,

smoothing the exact rectangle.

Sluggish by 9 PM, the hands^[^[31]^]

would slide along suddenly sharp paper,

and gather slits thinner than the crevices

of the skin, hidden.

Then the glue would sting,

hands oozing

till both palms burned

at the punchclock.

Ten years later, in law school,

I knew that every legal pad

was glued with the sting of hidden cuts,

that every open lawbook

was a pair of hands

upturned and burning. (1–27)

The poem stands as a model example of how Espada emphasizes the concrete effects of unsafe conditions endured by the bodies of the workers. The image of the workers’ hands stinging as the glue enters cuts on the fingers actively confronts the tendency to take products bought in stores for granted, divorced from the processes of production that created them. This process, summed up by the image of “hands oozing / till both palms burned / at the punchclock,” urges readers to ascertain where and how products were made (19–21). The metonymic use of “[. . .] a pair of hands / upturned and burning” to represent “[. . .] open lawbook[s] [sic]” at the end of the poem makes the direct association between the reification of labor and how we often ignore the human process of production, seldom associating material artifacts of labor with the hands that produce them (25, 26–27).^[32] The poem brings back the original definition, and even etymology, of “to manufacture”—by directly connecting the legal pad labor to the hands of a specific worker.

As seen in the poems above, Espada’s work illustrates the less pleasant aspects of reality with certain urgency. Consistently, Espada makes use of narrative poems written in short lines. Rather than questioning the literary tradition, the form Espada chooses in fact evokes popular and traditional poetry, or folk literature. It is poetry that tells a story and offers a concrete narrative, which emphasizes the experience of particular Latinos/as in the United States. Although the poems undoubtedly represent the experiences of many other Latinos/as in similar predicaments, representative samples, from “Los Sures” to “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper,” focus on particular pairs of hands, and particular bodies in pain, typically belonging to the Latino/a working poor, whose precarity demands the reader’s attention. Through concrete, often graphic, imagery, the poems reveal and denounce unjust living and working conditions that often go unnoticed and become invisible once removed from the source of labor.

In Espada’s work we see a serious reflection on improving the quality of life for all living things. As several other critics have rightly affirmed, Espada’s work is rooted in the poetry of resistance and has an overarching social justice agenda. His denunciation of social injustice, however, also clearly extends to concerns at the heart of the environmental justice movement. Contrary to the way environmentalism is often perceived in the political sphere—as well as, to a real extent, in the academy^[33]—as an entity divorced from social, political, and economic issues, Espada’s work speaks to the interconnectedness of myriad social and environmental problems with which the subjects of the poetic texts grapple. Literature that engages with environmental issues, like other literary forms, continues the ancient art of storytelling, of oral history, by inevitably engaging with place. Espada, however, does not write merely to tell a story but rather to make readers aware of the social and environmental issues he has witnessed. Such an engagement with place, with specific living and working conditions, and with particular bodies in pain, has the potential of raising awareness in the reader and, following Buell, to generate “greater concern at [the] violation” of those individuals and places (56). More than texts destined to remain in the realm of textuality, or in that of literary intertextuality, these writings respond to changes in empirical reality that affect the quality of life of human beings and our natural surroundings. In so doing, as my students astutely observed after the performance referenced at the beginning of this essay, Espada’s work speaks to the direct connection between literature and activism.

Notes

“Imagine the Angels of Bread” 117–19; “City of Coughing and Dead Radiators” 94–96; “Thieves of Light” 138–41; “Federico’s Ghost” 79–80; “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper” 93; “The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park” 156–58; “I Apologize for Giving You Poison Ivy by Smacking You in the Eye with the Crayfish at the End of My Fishing Line” 193–95; “Coca-Cola and Coco Frío” 91–92; “The Bouncer’s Confession” 130–31; “The Florida Citrus Growers Association Responds to a Proposed Law Requiring Handwashing Facilities in the Fields” 81.

See, for example, “Language and Identity in Three Plays by Dolores Prida” by Wilma Feliciano, an excellent study on the role language plays in confirming the identity of Latinas in New York. See also “Dolores Prida’s Coser y cantar: Mapping Dialectics of Ethnic Identity and Assimilation” by Alberto Sandoval Sánchez, which offers another analysis of the mechanics of language and identity in Prida’s plays; and María Luisa Ochoa-Fernández’s “Weaving the Personal and the Political in Dolores Prida’s Beautiful Señoritas, Coser y cantar, and Botánica” (the latter work by Prida is available in Puro teatro: A Latina Anthology edited by Sandoval Sánchez—see Prida in Works Cited). Criticism on other writers, such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, revolves around issues of feminism and sexuality in asserting Latina identity. Studies such as “Maquiladora Mestizas and a Feminist Border Politics: Revisiting Anzaldúa” by Melissa Wright, and “Moving from Feminist Identity Politics through a Feminist Materialist Standpoint of Intersubjectivity in Gloria Anzaldúa” by Diane Fowlkes, provide excellent analyses of feminist themes in their works.

The term “Latino” arose in the late 1980s in response to the term “Hispanic” that appeared on legal documents and that served as an imprecise umbrella term for all individuals who come from a Spanish-speaking background. “Latino,” as opposed to “Hispanic,” which also includes Spaniards, acknowledges a particularly Latin American heritage, whether in subsequent generations of U.S.-born children, or in the individuals who immigrated to the United States.

Ed. The term “Latino” is also understood as a form of cultural empowerment, and is seen by many as a conscious subversion, resistance, and repudiation of the influence and colonial history associated with Spanish rule.

Marguerite Rivas’s “‘Lengua, Cultura, Sangre’: Song of the New Homeland,” however, focuses on the industrialization and ecological destruction of Puerto Rico by Operation Bootstrap. Citing lines 17–18 from the Espada poem “Where the Disappeared Would Dance” (Trumpets [1987]), Rivas points out, “Espada tells us that ‘Even the festivals now / wear factory-masks’” (152). Other studies, such as Teresa Longo’s excellent and artful analysis “Post Wonder Bread: Pablo Neruda in Centerfield,” that focuses on Neruda’s presence in Espada’s poem “The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park” and is contextually framed around 1940s baseball, segregation, and, later, McCarthyism, offers a fascinating reading of Espada in relation to Neruda.

Ed. note: For more on Espada’s baseball poetry, see Eric B. Salo’s essay in the present volume.

See Luke Cole and Sheila Foster’s book From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (2001) for an in-depth introduction to the movement and a variety of case studies illustrating community successes in confronting targeting of their communities for toxic dumping and trash incinerators.

Ed. note: See lines 10–19 from the whimsical Espada poem, “I Apologize for Giving You Poison Ivy . . . ,” esp. lines 14–16 that read: “The bricklayer inside my body / stacked the bricks of pollution row by row, so now / if I eat fresh vegetables I might have a stroke.”

“Deep ecology” refers to a form of environmentalism in which the preservation of the natural world is valued above all else. It advocates radical measures to protect the natural environment, sometimes regardless of their effect on the welfare of people. Philosopher Michael E. Zimmerman defines the term in an interview entitled “Introduction to Deep Ecology” by Alan Atkisson:

Deep ecology portrays itself as ‘deep’ because it asks deeper questions about the place of human life, who we are.

Deep ecology is founded on two basic principles: one is a scientific insight into the interrelatedness of all systems of life on Earth; together with the idea that anthropocentrism—human centeredness—is a misguided way of seeing things. Deep ecologists say that an ecocentric attitude is more consistent with the truth about the nature of life on Earth. Instead of regarding humans as something completely unique or chosen by God, they see us as integral threads in the fabric of life. They believe we need to develop a less dominating and aggressive posture towards the Earth if we and the planet are to survive. (n. pag.; emphasis in original)

This interview originally appeared in Global Climate Change (Summer 1989), p. 24 and is currently mirrored on the In Context site, as featured in the associated Works Cited entry.

This is not only a phenomenon that affects minorities. Fairly recent, unpopular decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court in regard to “eminent domain” affect anyone whose home or business is in an area where a local government “needs” to build something else. In New Brunswick, New Jersey, for example, many businesses have been demolished to accommodate a hotel and conference center. Moreover, New Jersey Books, a competitor to the Rutgers University bookstore, was forced in 2006 under “eminent domain” to leave its current location in order for Rutgers to build new facilities. In 2009, however, they were able to move into a new, more desirable location.

See Michael Bennett and David Teague’s study entitled “Manufacturing the Ghetto: Anti-urbanism and the Spatialization of Race” for a revealing study of how environmental factors directly affect inner-city residents across racial lines.

Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn in 1957 to a working-class Puerto Rican father, Frank Espada, and an Anglican Jewish mother, Marilyn Levine. (Ed. note: Espada’s mother later converted to the Jehovah’s Witness faith. For more on Espada’s bicultural background, see his Zapata’s Disciple essay, “Argue Not Concerning God” and Note 12 from the Carvalho Acknowledged Legislator: Critical Essays on the Poetry of Martín Espada introduction.) After occupying a variety of occupations from hotel bouncer, factory worker producing legal pads, to tenants’ rights lawyer working on behalf of evicted Latinos within his community, he now teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He remains active in the community but his participation now takes the form of poetry readings rather than defending community members in the courtroom. (Ed. note: For more on Espada’s many vocations, see Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical,” ch. 3.)

10.

Ed. note: The imagination is, of course, tied to the poetic and the political. For more on this particular theme in Espada’s poetry, see Carvalho, ch. 5, “From a Republic of Property to a Republic of Poetry—The Language of Possibility: Espada’s Poetry as Politics and Pedagogy” from the dissertation “Puerto Rican Radical.” See also Carvalho’s First World Diaspora presentation, “No Poet Is an Island,” based in part on a subsection from the above-named chapter.

11.

Ibid.

12.

Ed. note: See Diana L. Vélez’s commentary on “Los Sures” in her critical essay “Dancing to the Music of an Other Voice: Martin [sic] Espada” (see the subheading “Eros,” esp. pp. 81–84), contained in Espada’s Trumpets.

13.

Ed. note: For more on Espada’s use of the “hammer” image, cf. Note 3 in the Sarmiento essay contained in this volume.

14.

Drummers who play “plena” music, a Puerto Rican folk form with a heavy emphasis on drumming.

15.

Ed. note: Latinos living and working in the United States are not just invisible, but disposable. For more on how a politics of disposability comes to bear on Latino, and especially Puerto Rican, subjectivity, see the introduction to Puerto Rico Is in the Heart by Carvalho.

16.

City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993) is a collection of poetry that focuses predominantly on injustices related to the legal system in relation to the living conditions of Latinos in the inner city. Other poems, however, such as “Coca-Cola and Coco Frío” describe the experience of an American-born Puerto Rican who returns to the island and marvels at the fact that his relatives drink Coca-Cola and recite U.S. ads from the World War II era “while so many coconuts in the trees / sagged heavy with milk, swollen / and unsuckled” (26–28). Espada’s perspicacious and ironic commentary in these lines underscores the ecological effects of Operation Bootstrap, a U.S. policy established in 1947 that made Puerto Rico dependent on the United States for much of its goods, while crops, resources, and human ingenuity went to waste.

17.

Ed. note: At the time, Espada was living at 4l Revere St., #2 Boston, Massachusetts 02114 (various articles in the Espada Papers archive contain this address, including the PEN/Revson Fellowship award documentation [Box 3, folder 5]). See Morrone.

The Espada Papers archive also includes a folder relating to a legal case that may have been the inspiration for portions of “City of Coughing” (City of Coughing) and “Thieves of Light” (Imagine). See materials included in “Su Clínica Legal—Tenant Law (course taught by Espada)” in Box 11, folder 20.

18.

Ed. note: Line 16 is italicized in Alabanza. See Note 11 in Sarmiento for more on Espada’s articulation of italicized text in Alabanza revised versions of poems.

19.

Ed. note: Line 40 emphasis is not included in the original version of the poem but is applied to the Alabanza revision. See also above Note 18.

20.

Ed. note: Line 74 emphasis is not included in the original version but is applied to the Alabanza revision. See also above Notes 18–19.

21.

The poems that appear in the collection cover a wide variety of themes, ranging from poems about the author’s work experiences in “The Foreman’s Wallet,” “The Hearse Driver,” “The Bouncer’s Confession,” and “Thieves of Light,” to “Hands Without Irons Become Dragonflies,” a tribute to Espada’s close friend and mentor, the poet and Puerto Rican nationalist revolutionary Clemente Soto Vélez, written on a trip to Puerto Rico a year after the elder poet’s death.

22.

Ed. note: The Alabanza version of this poem reads “lightbulbs gray” on line 34.

23.

A collection of Espada’s poetry published by Curbstone Press in a bilingual edition, with translations by Espada and long-time friend, Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, and a preface by Black Arts Movement vanguard and former New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka. The poems in this collection, as articulated by the title, speak broadly to the theme of resistance, from “The New Bathroom Policy at English High School” (“Nueva norma para el baño en la English High School”) that denounces institutional discrimination against Latinos at U.S. high schools—the poem includes a portrait of the racist principal who bans Spanish in the bathrooms after overhearing a conversation in which all he could make out was his own name—to others about worker solidarity, such as “Nando Meets Papo” (“Nando conoce a Papo”), about a Legal Aid worker who stands up to a vicious work crew leader.

24.

Ed. note: See also the analysis of this poem by Ryan Cull featured on Cary Nelson’s Modern American Poetry (MAP S) Web site at: www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/espada/federico.htm.

25.

Ed. note: We should remember here that Espada did outreach work for migrant farm workers in Maryland and Delaware while in law school, a job that only paid him “thirty-five dollars a week for thirty-five hours a week. A dollar an hour for legal work, in 1983, not 1938” (qtd. in Dick 30). This helps us to understand that Espada was essentially sharing in the Latino work experience of those he was representing. See Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical,” ch. 3 subsection “Espada as Factotum: The Poet Defined By Work,” pp. 188–230 for more on this point and a detailed account of Espada’s labor history.

26.

Other Latino/a and Chicano/a literature also deals with the serious consequences of pesticide poisoning suffered by workers such as Federico and his family. See Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, which chronicles another case of pesticide contamination and the social and political conditions that work against the protagonist.

Ed. note: See also the documentary The Harvest (La cosecha).

27.

In recent cases in Florida exposed by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), landowners have been prosecuted for not only enforcing inhumane conditions on migrant farm workers who were forced to pay an exorbitant rent to live in small trailers with nine other fruit pickers despite exaggeratedly low pay, but also on accounts of slavery and the murder of fruit pickers who attempted to leave the fields. See “CIW Anti-Slavery Campaign” in Works Cited and CIW’s Web site for more details on what continues to be a relevant issue in the United States: http://www.ciw-online.org (listed in Works Cited under “CIW”). (Ed. note: See also the found poem, M. Espada, “The Florida Citrus Growers Association . . .” (“La Asociación de Productores de Cítricos de la Florida . . . .”)

28.

Ed. note: See Note 25 above, esp. the reference to Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical,” ch. 3 subsection “Espada as Factotum: The Poet Defined By Work,” pp. 188–230.

29.

Los Angeles-based Chicano poet Luis J. Rodríguez is another example of a poet writing about harsh working and living conditions with an eye for social and environmental justice. See his book The Concrete River (1991).

30.

Ed. note: See Uchmanowicz in this volume for a discussion of Espada’s related poem “The Foreman’s Wallet” and Note 28 above. See also the collection of Espada’s labor poetry, The Meaning of the Shovel, from Smokestack.

31.

Ed. note: Original poem features no periods between “PM”—periods added in Alabanza revised version, line 14.

32.

Ed. note: See the section on David Harvey and Marx Capital lectures in Carvalho, “Puerto Rican Radical,” pp. 204–08, 295n99.

33.

Ed. note: This is especially the case today as this mode of scholarship often incorporates indigenous concerns and area and ethnic studies, two of the most virulently assaulted areas of research in the post–9/11 university. For more on this subject, see Carvalho and Downing and the original Works and Days journal issue this book was based upon, Academic Freedom and Intellectual Activism in the Post-9/11 University, guest-edited by Edward J. Carvalho. (It also should be noted that an interview with Espada, “‘Taking Back the Street Corner,’” is contained in each edition. See the two entries for Carvalho, “‘Taking Back’” in Works Cited.)

Compañero: Labor Advocacy, Economic Concerns, and Class Consciousness

“Heart of Hunger”

Introduction

“Heart of Hunger”

The Poetry of Liberation

“Boricua en la luna”

Walt Whitman, José Martí, Ramón Emeterio Betances y Alacán, and Eugenio María de Hostos

William Carlos Williams and Luis Palés Matos

Roberto Márquez, the Nuyorican Generation, and the Young Lords

Espada as “Translator”

“Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100”

Conclusion

Notes

“[T]he black braid of names”

Notes

From the Inner City to the Cotton Fields

Living in the Inner City: Gentrification, Eviction, and a Sense of Place

Bodies in Pain: Work Poems by Martín Espada

Notes

Compañero:
Labor Advocacy, Economic Concerns,
and Class Consciousness

Roberto Márquez, the Nuyorican Generation,
and the Young Lords

Living in the Inner City:
Gentrification, Eviction, and a Sense of Place