Introduction

The title for this collection of essays on poet and activist Martín Espada should justifiably invite the connection to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous proclamation of poets as “unacknowledged legislators of the World” (535). It was certainly intended to do so. In the many years since those words were set to print, some poets have lived up to this mission. Others have chosen to go only halfway, occasionally vocalizing social concerns in their poetry while remaining divorced from those commitments in the public sphere where such investments also crucially mattered (or vice versa). Worse yet, many more have seemingly kept “silent” through academic or institutional insularity that has, for too long, relied on the fundamentally antidemocratic language of obfuscation, whose only allegiance has been to a poetics that advances the interests of a “disimagination machine”^[2] and concomitantly serves its political masters as dumb market(ing) signage for the “rickety kiosk[s] in the dead mall of American civic life” (Biespiel n. pag.). The unfortunate legacy of this particular brand of poet is the predominant hallmark of the neoliberalized world we now inhabit, where human value is measured in market terms and consideration for the working poor, minorities, the elderly, and scores of forsaken others is oftentimes entirely tangential, or worse, altogether ignored.^[3] This is what happens when we indulge in the worship of poetry only as an aesthetic object and a language designed “not to communicate, but to control,” a politicized and fractious discourse that starves its citizenry of “the angels of bread.”^[4]

Readers who are only now being introduced to Espada will come to find after reviewing this volume why its title willfully subverts Shelley’s time-worn articulation of poets, decisively abolishing the putative “un” to assume a more radical, proactive, and anticipatory vision of the poet as acknowledged legislator.^[5] For where Espada is concerned, the poetical, the social, and the political are inextricable in word and deed—“the bread of the imagination, the bread of the table, and the bread of justice”—as belief, utterance, and commitment (Martín Espada qtd. in Jensen 271). As such, his poetry demonstrates how art and activism function in unison to speak on behalf of those caught between the rhetoric of unacknowledged legislators and their brand of disimagination—the increasingly large sector of the population that has been rendered unacknowledged and disimagined—inasmuch as it reminds us that poetry can cultivate a necessary space for the potential of what can be imagined to also become the possible.

Conceived in that spirit, Acknowledged Legislator: Critical Essays on the Poetry of Martín Espada today stands as the first-ever collection of essays on Martín Espada. It is also, to date, the only published book-length, single-author study of the poet currently in existence. With the aid of contributions by established scholars who elsewhere have either written about or have a sound working familiarity with Espada’s life and career, its principal aim is to argue for a much-needed critical awareness of and cultural appreciation for Espada and his body of work.

Acknowledged Legislator accomplishes that task in three fundamental ways: first, by providing readers with background information on the poet’s life and corpus (a brief overview of which follows below);^[6] next, by offering an examination into the subject matter and themes that are frequently contained in his writing; and finally, by advocating, in a variety of ways, for why we should be reading, discussing, and teaching the Espada canon.

Born August 7, 1957, Martín Espada came of age in the East New York projects of Brooklyn, New York. As Espada has confirmed in a variety of interviews,^[7] this period of his life had a profound experiential impact on him. Consequently, much of his poetry is narrative-based and autobiographical, with a number of poems chronicling those early years in New York (later Valley Stream, Long Island, and Rockville, Maryland) that were to shape the poet’s creative vision and political awareness. The development of Espada’s art and activism would be inspired not just by the environmental circumstances and class consciousness that followed, but by the poet’s father, the late Frank Espada, a noted documentary photographer and leading member of the Puerto Rican civil rights movement in Martín’s youth who would later become known for his Puerto Rican Diaspora Project (PRDP), a federally funded photographic survey of Puerto Rican life and work.^[8] To be sure, there are several poems in the Espada canon that emphasize Frank as a central character—either those directly dedicated to him or others that speak to his immigrant working-class struggles, the racism he encountered as a dark-skinned first-generation Puerto Rican living in the United States, or his political organizing that evolved from those early civil rights encounters. Frank’s various struggles had a decided impact on Martín and shaped his worldview. It is therefore not unusual to find these experiences documented in Espada’s poetry and prose, samples that supply us with textual evidence that today informs our critical understanding and reading of Espada’s larger body of work. Like his father before him, Espada would take up many of these “inherited”^[9] themes (of Puerto Rican subjectivity, racialized violence, and classist exclusion) and approached the craft of writing through a similar aesthetic sensibility, capturing with language what the elder Espada did with photography. The result of this quasi-mentor/mentee, father-son apprenticeship would yield poems informed by a tough, working-class ethos, where Espada rendered with precision—what the late Amiri Baraka described as “a ‘mason’ and a half” level of craftsmanship (15)—images that frequently depict in stark human detail the very real social crisis, immiseration, and despair affecting Puerto Ricans and the larger Latino community, while always remaining conscious of maintaining the dignity of his subjects.

Beyond the dominant familial and autobiographical themes in Espada’s poetry that occupy the author’s poems of identity, autoethnography, and place (often with an emphasis on Puerto Rico and what it means to be Latino in the United States), there are several other subthemes we can identify in Espada’s work, such as a concern for (im)migrant labor and indigent housing conditions (where Espada has also included himself and his life experiences as “factotum”);^[10] the institutional challenges of bilingualism (particularly, Spanish and English) and the reception, misinterpretation, and even the predominant (read: white) American fear of Latino culture; historical poetry that chronicles the socioeconomic and political impact of reforms that link colonial indenture to late capitalism and/or neoliberalism; and a poetics of advocacy, as well as of the political imagination, that lobbies for utopian alternatives to these and a variety of other global economic crises. Throughout these poems that cross socioeconomic, cultural, and historical valences there exists a narrative arc in Espada’s canon that outlines the progression of the personal to the political, where poetry serves to “illuminate, engage, and educate” the masses (Jensen 270).^[11]

The dynamic subjects taken up in Espada’s poetry, however, also somewhat problematize our efforts to classify his writing neatly within the spectrum of modern American poetry or a designated poetic school. Because of this, we should also avoid hasty compartmentalization and essentialized labels that could otherwise paint Espada exclusively as a “Puerto Rican poet” (neither can we label him purely as “Nuyorican” or even “post-Nuyorican”), an “American poet,” a “Latino poet,” or a “minority poet,” terminology that limits the inclusivity of other ethnic or aesthetic influences and diminishes the larger cultural conversation present in his work.^[12] Instead, we would do well to accept Espada’s poetry as a dense amalgamation of the aforementioned poetic styles and approaches that either borrows from or was informed by such diverse figures as: 1) Puerto Rican nationalist poets Clemente Soto Vélez, Julia de Burgos, and Juan Corretjer, as well as Nuyorican writers Pedro Pietri, Miguel Piñero, and Piri Thomas;^[13] 2) distinctly American voices like Walt Whitman, and poets of a Whitmanian trajectory—Carl Sandburg, poet-lawyers like Edgar Lee Masters, the Harlem Renaissance mainstay Langston Hughes and Beat generation icon Allen Ginsberg, or Black Mountain principal Robert Creeley, to name a few; 3) writers with Latin American revolutionary overtones, like Pablo Neruda, Ernesto Cardenal, Nicolás Guillén, and Roque Dalton; 4) and African American wordsmiths writing of the black experience, such as Rita Dove, June Jordan, and Black Arts Movement vanguard Amiri Baraka (née LeRoi Jones), among many others. Instructively, Espada has had direct contact with several of the writers noted above, a number of whom at one time could be seen as mentors and are today recognized as peers.^[14]

Having one’s name cataloged among such an impressive list of experts is likely to signal that one has established a preeminent place within their chosen métier. And in Espada’s case, indeed it does. The author, editor, and translator of almost twenty books (poetry and prose, edited and translated volumes, as well as collections of reprinted works), Espada has received wide critical acclaim during the span of his more than thirty-year career, mostly outside the academy. The more familiar press quotes circling Espada’s writing consist of bold pronouncements, including the widely cited (though frequently decontextualized)^[15] prediction of Earl Shorris that Espada would become “the Latino poet of his generation” (Latinos 394), which, as most would agree, he has. In the same vein, remarks from writer Sandra Cisneros and critic Ilan Stavans have cited Espada as the modern legatee of literary giants who have previously operated in the same poetic tradition of democratic imagination and social conscience, where he is seen as both “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors” on the one hand, and the “bridge between Whitman and Neruda, a conscientious objector in the war of silence” on the other.^[16]

Espada’s many awards doubtless give credence to the critical accolades he has received. Chief among these are a 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist nomination for his collection The Republic of Poetry (2006), “the American Book Award, the Robert Creeley Award, the Charity Randall Citation, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship[,] and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship,” as well as the more recent United Artists Fellowship and the Shelley Memorial Award, granted to “to a living American poet selected with reference to his or her genius and need” (“About” n. pag.; Poetry Society n. pag.).^[17] There is little indication that this trend will abate anytime soon. Impressively, his most recent poetry collection The Trouble Ball (Norton, 2011) drew significant critical attention as “the recipient of the Milt Kessler Award, a Massachusetts Book Award[,] and an International Latino Book Award” (“About” n. pag.).

Scores of individual Espada works have been published by the leading, most respected periodicals, including the Progressive, Ploughshares, “The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Nation, and The Best American Poetry” (“Faculty Profiles” n. pag.). As an editor, he has produced three volumes, Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press (Curbstone, 1994), [. . .] El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (University of Massachusetts, 1997), and His Hands Were Gentle: Selected Lyrics of Víctor Jara (Smokestack, 2012), with additional titles currently being planned (“Faculty Profiles” n. pag.).^[18]

Throughout his catalog, Espada’s connectedness to the poetic traditions of Neruda and Whitman, the “granite foundation” his own work is set upon, is fundamentally grounded in what he has coined a “poetics of advocacy.”^[19] Rooted in the legal tradition of the advocate—literally, one who speaks on behalf of another—and linked to Espada’s own background as a former tenants’ rights lawyer, the poet becomes another kind of spokesperson, decrying and denouncing injustice to reconfigure a broader, more inclusive notion of how we understand “poetic justice.”^[20] Increasingly, Espada has more consciously positioned himself within the modality of advocate poets, as reflected in his post–9/11 volumes Republic of Poetry and Trouble Ball, where he assumes fully the role of North American Neruda (in Republic) and the dominant, undisputed inheritor of the Whitmanian tradition (in Trouble Ball).^[21] His second collection of essays, The Lover of a Subversive Is Also a Subversive, supplies further evidence of Espada’s commitment to a poetics of advocacy, for here we find content and context that serve as the figurative gateway between these two literary fountainheads, presenting distinctly Whitmanian themes (see the essay “Through Me Many Long Dumb Voices” and interview “A Branch on the Tree of Whitman”) alongside Nerudian political concerns about a poet’s ability—and responsibility—to confront and subvert state power (raised in his essay “The Unacknowledged Legislator”).

Espada’s work, often identified as “political,”^[22] challenges contemporary neoliberal rationality alongside the cultural phenomena that predates and informs it, for example, colonial power and indenture,^[23] specifically, though not exclusively, with Puerto Rico in mind. He thus emphasizes, with an acuity of vision and great compassion, the plight of the marginalized, what Whitman would describe in “Song of Myself” as the “deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, [and] despised,” the “prisoners and slaves,” the “diseas’d and despairing,” the “thieves and dwarves,” today’s “multitude” of the dispossessed, disenfranchised, and disempowered—in sum, the most vulnerable members of our society: minorities, (im)migrant laborers, women, children, and countless others, truly “them the others are down upon” (24.514, 509–10).^[24] Accordingly, it can be said that like Whitman, Espada stands opposed to poets as unacknowledged legislators while unflinchingly “stand[ing] up” for what his nineteenth-century predecessor, the “good gray poet,”^[25] called “the stupid and [the] crazy,” the unacknowledged and the disimagined of our modern world (Whitman, Preface vi).

Inasmuch as he has responded to the various wars that have been (and continue to be) waged on marginalized populations, Espada has also actively vocalized against our post–9/11 climate of seemingly unending crisis through a series of antiwar poems. These poems, as I have examined at some length elsewhere,^[26] do more than expose the horrors of global conflict or caution against our participation in these acts; they also serve to “heal a grieving nation” (M. Espada, “Can Poetry Console” n. pag.), as well as to project and leave space for the utopian possibility that crosses longitudinal/latitudinal lines and exists within each of us. As a result, Espada’s poetics of advocacy moves more firmly toward a poetry of the political imagination, effectively conjoining poetics, politics, and pedagogy in an attempt to “heal the cracks in the bell of the world,” as Espada has so eloquently phrased it.^[27]

In so doing, he has maintained an aggressive touring schedule over the years, often sacrificing his time, his proximity to his family, and sometimes his health to do so (see for instance, the Trouble Ball poem “The Poet’s Son Watches His Father Leave for Another Gig”), bringing poetry to what some might see as the most unlikely of places: into prisons, at grave sites, in front of a memorial at Ground Zero in New York, under a streetlamp in the face of a bomb threat, to name but a few. In 2013 alone, he offered workshops, participated in a “People’s Poetry, People’s History” event at the University of Pittsburgh, and conducted several readings. Shortly before the time of this writing, with the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting still in the nation’s collective consciousness, he contributed to a National Children’s Day outreach event that was to “emphasize all the simple ways in which transformative change is possible right now in every town and city” (“Within Our Reach” n. pag.).^[28]

Though poetic and prosaic (historical) subjects in Espada’s writing of impoverishment and human suffering tend to center on crises linked to the Puerto Rican and Latino communities, Boston Globe reporter Ellen Bartlett is careful to point out Espada “has not limited his writing [to such] experience[s]” (46). Rather, readers and critics who are at all familiar with his corpus will readily concede that Espada’s later poetry has in fact modulated from a Puerto Rican-specific or Latino-centric vantage to one that embraces a heightened (inter)national consciousness and responds to exploitation with a more purposeful global perspective.^[29]

Bartlett goes on to insightfully say of Espada’s poetic vision, “The way he sees it, his subjects, his audience, his own identity, exist in a series of concentric circles,” which Espada defines as follows:

The Bartlett interview was conducted in 1990, a few years after Espada started formally publishing, when he was but three books into his catalog. While reflecting on the above-cited circle pattern analogy, it is likely Espada would today agree that this early theoretical articulation of his poetic interaction with other communities (e.g., “of color,” “the Left,” “the working-class experience,” “anybody else who will listen”) has since changed and no longer stands in its de facto articulation. This may be because the concentric rings in his description can also be understood, potentially, as exclusionary boundaries. And rather than leaving these demarcations in place to distance his poetry and his poetic subjects from the other groups he mentions above, Espada’s more contemporary works (e.g., Alabanza, Republic of Poetry, Lover of a Subversive, Trouble Ball) have made concerted, open-handed efforts to break down such barriers. In so doing, he has created one large, inclusive circle within which his Puerto Rican and his pan-Latin American activism can share “common ground” with the other activist groups and issues he earlier outlines, ultimately forming what Michael Dowdy describes in his contribution to this volume (while borrowing from Espada’s phrase and more linear analogy) as a “black braid of names.”^[31] More precisely, Espada in his most recent work has more consciously situated himself in solidarity with these movements and amid global socioeconomic and political issues, thus creating poetry that reflects an interest in the collective response necessary to resolve such crises: borrowing from Pierre Bourdieu, we could refer to this as “[poetics] with commitment” (266; emphasis in original). César Salgado identifies this shift in Espada’s late work as the poet’s effort to transition beyond the “anecdote[al]” toward “fields of interlocking transnational stories” (“Martín Espada”),^[32] a concept that is generally agreed upon and highlighted by critics Maritza Stanchich, Natasha Azank, Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, and Michael Dowdy in their respective essays contained in the Acknowledged Legislator collection.

With Espada’s noble efforts to improve human society through poetry and his many literary achievements taken into account, it is all the more remarkable to consider the poet’s scant representation within the academy. This forces some necessary questions: Why hasn’t anyone attempted a book about Martín Espada before? Why now? and What purpose will such a collection of essays serve?

To a certain extent, Espada’s observations on the dubious political factors surrounding Latino literary recognition extends this line of inquiry, but it also complicates matters: notably, Espada introduces the difficult question of whether a “cultural blockade” (to invoke a term from Espada and Pérez-Bustillo) or a “glass ceiling” exists for Puerto Rican and Latino writers plying their trade in the United States (M. Espada and Pérez-Bustillo 10; M. Espada qtd. in Carvalho, “‘Taking Back’” 259).^[33] While the query on its face may seem initially self-contradictory—it is true that Espada has enjoyed a certain amount of literary “success,” as evidenced by his prodigious publication record, unsparing travel schedule, and commendable awards roster mentioned earlier—we are still left to reconcile the lack of critical demand for Espada within the academy. This discussion also raises the specter of a potential double bind between Espada’s artistic mission (as advocate) and his placement within a publishing industry that marginalizes his context (as a Latino writer). As we will soon see, these internal tensions may, in effect, be impeding his ability to: 1) effectively vocalize and maintain critical visibility as a Latino writer; and 2) be accepted for doing so by “academic” poets and their audiences, as well as recognized with the institutional support (funds and awards) that maintains those spheres.

The first question above, while useful, indulges certain false assumptions. Though it can be answered directly as it stands, it nonetheless presupposes that a previous attempt at assembling a critical volume on Espada had not already been conceived or even ventured. The plain fact is poet and scholar John Bradley was in dialogue with Espada on a critical volume of the poet’s work well before the present undertaking.^[34] He writes:

Tellingly, Bradley’s message to Espada is more than a decade old, dated December 18, 2002, just prior to the release of Espada’s compilation of new and selected poems, Alabanza. Since then, Espada has gone on to publish several other books of poetry and prose and has received even more impressive recognition of his work. One could effectively argue on these grounds alone, echoing Marge Piercy, that a volume on Espada “is long overdue.”^[35] While it is true that Bradley’s academic labor commitments, as he outlines above, were largely the reason he was unable to advance the project, we have yet to contend with the second reality: that is, the sparse critical response to Espada’s work over the past decade. Troublingly, we can almost count on one hand the number of critical articles to have been published on the poet in recent years (excepting book reviews and non-peer-reviewed blog posts or Web-based essays), which not only seems to validate Espada’s observation that when it comes to scholarly assessment of his work there exists a “void,”^[36] but also still leaves us to examine uncomfortable truths about Latino representation in the publishing world (and, by extension, the academy), a subject Espada has addressed in numerous other forums over the years. Recall that we are talking about a writer who is generally regarded as “the Latino poet of his generation”: if such a critical absence surrounds his work, what must this say about the state of affairs for lesser-known Latino writers? Indeed, it is interesting to consider the quandary, even if theoretically, that suggests the very essence of what Espada has lobbied for in his poetics and his politics—to make the invisible visible and to speak of the unspoken people, places, politics, and history—is in many respects at the base of the same structural limitations that have also impacted him, from a critical perspective, as a Puerto Rican and Latino writer living and working in the United States, a point to which I now return.

Taking account of Espada’s résumé also tells us something about the structural conditions and institutions, the veritable “glass ceilings,” that keep the vast number of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos from attaining higher social status. As is well known, social hierarchies are not limited to or only defined by class-based divisions; they can also manifest as racialized imbrications within each of the respective castes that are formed. Subsequently, even if Latinos break through their fetters to work in white-collar or “professional” capacities, this same population can still be subject to a similar kind of structural pecking order, oftentimes finding themselves at the bottom of it. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent, at least for our purposes here, than in the academy and the publishing world, where Latino/a scholars and writers, who are doing white-collar work, consistently press against very real, though often invisible, barriers. Here is Espada on this matter, imploring us to look more closely at the aporia contained in the following passage:

But to the larger issue of Latino exclusion from the more coveted literary prizes—historically reserved for an institutionally protected, select cadre of literati—these continue to remain just out of Espada’s reach. And, once more, we need to ask ourselves why that is. For example, though his Republic of Poetry was a finalist for five separate literary prizes, what Espada describes as “a mathematical impossibility,” he walked away from each nomination empty handed (qtd. in Carvalho, “Bard and Bombthrower” 4). One of these was for the Pulitzer in 2007. That award went to a former student of his, Natasha Trethewey, a writer with much less established writing credentials, who earned her MFA, as it would so happen, from Espada’s home institution, the University of Massachusetts Amherst.^[38] Just as Trethewey would later be appointed to national poet laureate, another emerging writer, the gay Cuban-American poet Richard Blanco,^[39] would be chosen to read the inaugural poem for Barack Obama’s second term. It could be argued that Blanco was selected by the administration as a conspicuous “safe choice,” that he was essentially tokenized with the political intent to represent (if not transparently appease) both the gay and Latino vote, visibility that would disproportionately catapult his levels of popularity and marketability within mainstream literary audiences.^[40] The fallout is illustrated in the following case in point: while Blanco and Espada were both scheduled to take part at the Castle Hill Center for the Arts Summer 2013 workshops, it was Espada, whose long-time participation with the organization, well-known credentials, and industry standing has been duly noted, who suffered the undeserved ignominy of a canceled workshop due to a “lack of enrollment.”^[41] We should remind ourselves that pairing these two writers in the present context does not automatically suggest an analogous comparison in their experience, reputations, or accomplishments—as human beings or as poets. But such an example as this is nonetheless useful to study for its ability to both illustrate and underscore how short-sighted decisions by institutions like Castle Hill—to promote Blanco and cancel Espada—unwittingly put at cross-purposes Latino cultural representation by heralding (even if without intention) a less established Latino poet in favor of an award-winning, veteran Latino artist. So, too, the resultant circumstances speak volumes on the gross popular misrepresentation of Latino identity in the United States, further contribute to its (in)visibility and its tokenization, and engender within our broader society the fundamental misunderstanding of its cultural vanguards, spokespersons, organizers, and leaders, like Espada, who have advocated for years on behalf of Latino rights in literary and political terms and are indeed among the long-standing activist members of this community. Given the sad commentary in these circumstances, it is hardly surprising to find within the popular and political consciousness, more Americans will likely recognize the name Ricky Ricardo rather than César Chávez.^[42]

From a discussion of the political and structural forces underlying ethnic and racial identity in the United States, some would nonetheless hold to the unyielding view that within an analysis of poetry and poets there is only “[l]iterary merit” to consider, “[t]hat is all” (Spece, “Politics” n. pag.).^[43] Archibald Macleish might surely agree.^[44] But how does such a mandate adequately account for the gross internal contradictions present in Espada’s case?

Long-time Espada colleague, friend, and translator Camilo Pérez-Bustillo helps us to survey the larger picture by introducing into the conversation an astute observation on Puerto Rican colonial indenture, advancing the notion that Espada’s pro-independence views as an independentista,^[45] in conjunction with the island’s lack of political agency within the U.S. system as colony/Commonwealth, could be part of the problem and account for the structural obstacles set against the poet. As Pérez-Bustillo makes clear, like Espada, other Puerto Rican writers have suffered the politics of exclusion:

Pérez-Bustillo may well be correct in his assertion that political opposition to Puerto Rico (and those of a Puerto Rican Nationalist persuasion) is at the root cause of an “Espada trade blockade,” if you will. Such a determination may also, in turn, account reciprocally for Blanco’s newfound success as a Cuban poet, considering the recent moves by the Obama administration to establish improved relations in the region through the “eas[ing] of travel and remittance restrictions” to the island (Nasaw n. pag.).^[46]

Adding to the discussion of Espada’s identification with Puerto Rico, we would do well to remember that the “glass ceilings” of institutional opposition to Latino writers are further solidified by the persistent hostility directed toward ethnic minorities in the United States (unless, as in the case of Blanco, they can be used for political pandering and raising constituents), specifically Spanish-speaking immigrants, that in turn drive both political motive and rhetoric in the current immigration debate. In extreme cases, the effects of and legal fallout from this debate have altered deportation policies, amplified racial profiling, and even resulted in ethnic studies program bans that institutionalize the prohibition of reading materials by Latino writers—including Espada—or texts that advocate from a pro-Spanish and even a multicultural viewpoint.^[47] With these forms of structural violence focused on Latino writers and writing in border states like Arizona, much of this literature has disappeared from school classrooms and libraries, now only accessible by “underground book repositories” or made available through the activism of librotraficante advocates, like Espada.^[48]

Taking up the mantle to edit the first-ever critical volume on Espada in such a politically charged climate comes with its own set of challenges, but it also fortuitously answers the second question about the development of this book, posed earlier: “Why now?” The release of this long-anticipated collection on Espada not only legitimates the important work of the librotraficante movement, it allows us to break down some of the institutional barriers, providing an accessible forum for such literature to “always trigger the sweating and babbling of bigots” and promote a new kind of “cultural advocacy” (M. Espada, “Another Bomb Threat” n. pag.; Pérez-Bustillo). One would be hard pressed to find a better reason for warranting this book’s publication.

Political and racial considerations aside, perhaps the most difficult theoretical obstacle to navigate when developing this book was how best to assemble an edited collection on Espada that would effectively address the many nuances of the poet’s thirty-plus-year career while avoiding the echo chamber, as well as the trappings, of earlier criticism, much of which is at times either too concerned with the poet’s Puerto Rican-ness, developed only to the surface-level, is woefully outdated,^[49] and sometimes exhibits fundamental misinterpretations/misreadings of the poet’s intention or his poetic content. Complicating editorial efforts all the more is the related intricacy of how to develop critical cohesion and limit narrative fragmentation when collating new essay samples on the poet’s writing. Because much of the earlier criticism tends to function as individualized statements and routinely avoids discourse with other like-minded Espada scholars (even when circling around, say, a common theme such as resistance), the extant criticism also leaves modern Espada enthusiasts with the challenge of how to derive meaning from an either flawed or partially fractured appraisal of what common socioeconomic, cultural, and historical features may have shaped, and are continuing to determine, the poet’s biography, writing, and subject position.^[50] Hence, for today’s students and scholars of Espada, it thereby becomes even more difficult to study, teach, or trace critical veins in the poet’s canon or even to assess the literary expressions themselves as embodying any particular kind of informed historical or political response, let alone narrative trajectory, without the aid of a definitive critical statement as a guidepost.

This brings us to Michael Dowdy’s salient point, while writing for this volume on Espada’s poetic response to neoliberal capitalism, that “[a]lthough numerous scholars have grappled with the dimensions of resistance in Espada’s work, [. . .] as of yet none [. . .] adequately account for these overarching contexts,” a forceful declaration that tells us in unclouded, simple terms that any effort to develop a critical consensus or a thematic organization for such ideas (overlapping or otherwise) has been, up to this point, generally unsuccessful. And that is precisely the double bind here. Which is to say, because earlier Espada critics have worked independently rather than grounded in collective response, thus developing their work in relative isolation rather than the consideration of/for a larger collective conversation about Espada scholarship that actively traces thematic continuity and the poet’s place within such a narrative, efforts to “adequately account for these overarching contexts,” as Dowdy puts it, are merely lost in translation (“[B]lack braid”). Even so, such a task does not have to necessarily preclude other critics from reading Espada along entirely oppositional or unrelated lines, either (one could argue that room for this consideration also exists in the present volume), as diversity in points of view is an essential part of cultivating new arguments and maintaining fresh research perspectives. But when the criticism shares at least some common ground and is organized around an attempt at thematic concentricity, as we have endeavored to do here, conversational patterns between critics begin to coalesce, allowing critical discourse, in the truest sense of the term, to take hold and solidify into a body of work all its own. What emerges is a critical canon for the creative one.

Not all of the criticism prior to or outside this project has been in vain, however. In recent years, particularly, things have started to shift and become more organized, allowing a larger conversation on Espada studies to come into view.^[51] On the “cultural blockade” front, Espada has realized the important milestone of seeing his first collection of reprinted bilingual poems, La tumba de Buenaventura Roig: Selected Poems/Poemas Selectos (2008), published on a Puerto Rican imprint.^[52] Espada scholars like César Salgado and Michael Dowdy, for example, have made other notable inroads. Salgado produced an important, comprehensive profile of Espada’s life and work (reprinted in this volume) and wrote the introduction to La tumba, a volume he edited and to which he contributed translations.^[53] And Dowdy, who has penned theoretically rigorous journal articles on Espada for respectable publications like College Literature and MELUS,^[54] has written a path-breaking book, Broken Souths (University of Arizona, 2013), which features prominent commentary on Espada’s neoliberal poetry. Conference panels and presentations on Espada have also taken place in recent years. At these forums, several scholars—all of whom are included in the Acknowledged Legislator collection—met to discuss new, innovative research approaches to Espada’s writing and present those findings to a larger audience.^[55] The assembly and publication of this volume is a key part of the sea of change in Espada studies that aims to take those conversations even further. For these and other reasons, Acknowledged Legislator is without question another important, necessary step in raising critical awareness of Espada’s work.

Such advances point to the twofold mission of this book. On the one hand, the collection was designed in such a way as to establish a baseline for Espada scholarship to come. But it was also intended to transcend considerations for critical baselines in order to draw a line, openly challenging institutional powers that have otherwise prevented access to Espada and other Latino writers’ work (and in the case of ethnic studies bans, continue to prevent). And in this capacity, the collective voice of this book’s contributors speaks in solidarity with their subject to make the following political statement: even if we cannot fully shatter the glass ceilings that yet remain, we can at least fracture them in such a way as to allow glints of hope to penetrate through the fissures, granting us the opportunity to “keep reading to each other in whatever light we can find,” and to keep fighting, just as Espada encourages and recommends (M. Espada, “Another Bomb Threat” n. pag.). The contributors to this volume also share in the common goal to redress the grievance of institutional silence and/or opposition to Espada’s work as they join together to advocate for and acknowledge him. To this end, they speak critically about what hitherto has been left unspoken and make visible what has for too long remained invisible. This is a particularly relevant mission that testifies to Espada’s import to the poetry world, underscores his poetic legacy, and critically establishes his deserved position within an academic survey of celebrated writers from a North, Central, and South American, as well as a Caribbean, literary heritage. In the words of Ilan Stavans, “Martín Espada is one of America’s essential poets. (America understood as a nation, a continent, and a state of mind.) Without him, we are poorer; with him, we are purer” (Rev. of Acknowledged Legislator n. pag.).

Taken together then, projects like my “Puerto Rican Radical” dissertation and the present Acknowledged Legislator collection do more than account for the only book-length manuscripts focused on Espada; they also serve the urgent, commonly held goal to produce a definitive, as well as cohesive, scholarly statement on the poet’s life and work that will allow others to examine Espada criticism by way of an organized narrative, and, at the same time, establish critical determinations on Espada’s canon that can be used by future scholars to participate in and augment that conversation.

Acknowledged Legislator is divided into four main parts. The first section, “‘My Name Is Espada,’” titled after a well-known Espada poem, features a comprehensive biographical and literary profile of Espada up through and including his 2003 release Alabanza. Authored by César A. Salgado, whom Espada regards as one of his foremost critics,^[56] the reproduction of a Latino and Latina Writers encyclopedia entry in this volume provides illuminating context for readers who are interested in understanding better the origins of Espada’s themes, his sociohistorical placement within Latino literary traditions, and the arc of his development as a writer. Focusing on the intersections between the “political and esthetic realms,” Salgado eloquently argues: “Espada’s work stands at the crossroads of many nonliterary fields and concerns,” including the “law, ethnicity, colonialism, history, public memory, urban and diaspora studies, [and] language politics,” thus enhancing its “political efficac[y]” and its “social relevance.”^[57]

Section II of the book, “‘[T]o give history a human face,’” is centered on Espada’s poetry of historical memory, resistance, and subversion. The segment begins with Maritza Stanchich’s “The Republic of Memory,” an essay that dually emphasizes the recuperative power of historical location and remembrance in Espada’s Republic of Poetry and La tumba de Buenaventura Roig collections.^[58] In her assessment of each volume, Stanchich carries forward the Espada maxim to humanize history^[59] by taking account of how his poetry of the 1973 Chilean Coup (Republic) and the struggle of the Puerto Rican independence movement (La tumba) aids in the function of historical memory as a historical marker. Interpreted as such, Espada’s poetry becomes an act of dissent against the state when the poet and the poems speak of events, people, places, and atrocities that consensus history itself has left undocumented and ignored.

Pauline Uchmanowicz has chosen to examine resistance features in Espada’s poetry through the lens of postmodernity. Uchmanowicz’s essay, with its keen appraisal of labor dynamics, examines how Espada frequently relies on détournement in his poetic turns to subvert not only the anticipated action of class and identity within his poems, but the political and socioeconomic outcomes for his subjects. Between these two poles of reality and a yet-to-be-determined futurity that exist in Espada’s poetry, Uchmanowicz carefully attends to how Espada cultivates space for utopic vision and the imaginative capability of what is politically possible to emerge.

Following Espada’s own statement on the subject in his Zapata’s Disciple essay “The Puerto Rican Dummy and the Merciful Son,” Oscar D. Sarmiento’s “Undoing Macho” provides a welcome analysis of Espada’s poetry against domestic violence. Specifically, the essay deconstructs several of Espada’s autobiographical poems about his wife Katherine Gilbert Espada, either those that chronicle the history of physical abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of her father (Maynard Gilbert) or that document the gendered trauma she has experienced in other facets of her life. While Espada’s poetry is an attempt to both heal and to break the cycle of patriarchal violence for Katherine, it also undoes the condition and social expectations of Latino male rage, thus challenging the stereotype of macho and reclaiming a progressive view of what it means to be a Latino male.

Eric B. Salo’s “Muse on First” offers a highly original take on Espada’s baseball poetry, a long-overlooked, but significant cross section of Espada’s catalog that quite literally bookends his poetic output, starting with “Tato Hates the New York Yankees” (1982) and extending to “The Trouble Ball” (2011).^[60] Far from being regaled only as “America’s favorite pastime,” Salo maintains that baseball for Espada is more than a game; it is a critical foreground (and sometimes backdrop) that allows for a meaningful critique of America’s other favorite pastimes—namely, both its historical legacy of, and ongoing participation in, racial and economic segregation. In these poems, Espada frequently relies on past experiences of his father Frank (who was a minor league player himself and from whom Espada would adopt his passion for the sport) that he complements with his own in order to expose and creatively reconceive that history through the political imagination.

Based in part on her doctoral research of resistance in Puerto Rican diasporic poetry, “A Poetry like Ammunition” by Natasha Azank scaffolds Espada’s resistance poetics with nationalist poets Julia de Burgos and Clemente Soto Vélez, the latter of whom was one of Espada’s key mentors. Azank’s essay makes clear that while Espada and his poetic predecessors all “denounce the injustices of colonialism, challenge dominant historical narratives, subvert negative stereotypes of immigrants and the working class, and condemn human and civil rights violations on a global level,” they do so from a Puerto Rican perspective that draws upon the Puerto Rican experience of colonial oppression and displacement (Azank, “NeMLA” n. pag.). Azank posits further that Espada’s incorporation of a “transnational element” in his poetry is a distinguishing contribution to the subgenre of Puerto Rican nationalist poetry, thus “demonstrat[ing] an expansion of the poetic tradition of resistance he inherits from Soto Vélez and Burgos” and thereby allowing his poetry to encompass a broader, international polyvocality and inclusivity that extends beyond the island (“NeMLA” n. pag.).

What does it mean to be a compañero poet engaged in the liberatory struggle of a people and a nation? Is it possible for such a poet to operate in solidarity with other revolutionary movements that advance his/her poetics beyond the national, the political, or the personal, such as Azank suggests, toward the global and universal? Do Espada and his poetry fit within these parameters? Section III, “Compañero,” with its impassioned, in-depth contributions from Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, Michael Dowdy, and Jeremy Larochelle, attempts to answer these and other questions, while fulfilling the hermeneutic task of reading Espada’s poetics across the critical intersections of labor advocacy, economic concerns, and class consciousness.

Opening the section with a composition titled after an early Espada poem, “Heart of Hunger,” Camilo Pérez-Bustillo contends that Espada’s poetry dialogues with and extends the literary tradition of writers—as nationally proximate as William Carlos Williams and geographically distant as Dennis Brutus—whose work incorporates liberatory themes and communicates with (inter)national audiences engaged in a variety of counter-hegemonic offensives: to combat, inter alia, the effects of colonialism, cultural supremacy, and racial segregation. Expansive in breadth and incredibly thorough in its many comparative interstices—of genres, authors, historical contexts, and literary samples—Pérez-Bustillo’s modular essay is the lengthiest of all contributions to this volume. It is also because of Pérez-Bustillo’s close friendship with Espada, and the unique, personal history that he incorporates into his critical observations, that he is perhaps, among us all, the most well equipped to situate Espada’s poetics within this specific field of inquiry. Clearly grounded in fraternal affection, the bond of a true compañero, Pérez-Bustillo’s essay brings to mind the words of Ernesto “Che” Guevara who famously said that of all qualities “love” was the defining feature of a “true revolutionary” (225). Through its recurring metaphor of a “Heart of Hunger,” the essay reinforces Guevara’s sensibility but also expresses Pérez-Bustillo’s effort as a labor of love while articulating Espada’s deep empathy for human suffering, what could be described as a “[l]ove of living humanity,” as the basis of his commitment to liberation—for all peoples (Guevara 225). For these and other reasons, Pérez-Bustillo’s essay is a historical document that occupies a central place within this manuscript.

Michael Dowdy’s “‘[T]he black braid of names’” analyzes the theme of monuments and monumentalization in Espada’s poetry, a tropic response used by the poet to identify, counteract, and even “deface” crystallizations of neoliberal power that are “hemispheric[ally] mapp[ed].” In his sophisticated appraisal, Dowdy relies on a series of theoretical models to buttress his reading of Espada, including critical geographer David Harvey’s views on neoliberalism, “new imperialism,” and “space-times” and Henri Lefebvre’s dialectic of the monument (an object that is both repressive and yet capable of “embody[ing] [. . .] transcenden[t] social change” [21–22]), in order to sustain his interpretation of how the poet ultimately reconfigures historical memories of neoliberal atrocity into utopian possibility. Dialoguing with the theme of historical memory present in Maritza Stanchich and Natasha Azank’s contributions from section II, Dowdy’s essay focuses on a series of poems (e.g., “Not Here,” “Circle Your Name,” and “The Swimming Pool at Villa Grimaldi”) that demonstrate the means by which Espada defies neoliberal orthodoxy by “symbolically erecting lyric monuments to a range of leftists, poets, workers, and the poet’s friends and family members.”

This section concludes with Jeremy Larochelle’s “From the Inner City to the Cotton Fields,” an essay that advocates for the inclusion of Espada’s poetry in the canon of environmental justice literature. Larochelle bases his argument on the critical absence of environmental concerns in Latino literature generally as a mode of interpretation. He argues that Espada’s “poetic representations” of Latino urban spaces and migrant labor conditions, that so often occupy his themes, provide a useful theoretical lens by which to survey the “intersection [in Espada’s poems] between these crucial spheres” and the dominant areas of the social justice movement (e.g., class, gender, ethnicity, race) that traditionally have excluded “the concrete social and environmental issues faced by Latinos living and working in the United States.” As might be expected, close readings in this section focus on signature Espada poems of advocacy that connect his early legal work, as tenants’ rights attorney and migrant labor outreach liaison, to his poetry samples which document those experiences, from “City of Coughing and Dead Radiators” and “Thieves of Light” to “Water, White Cotton, and the Rich Man” and “Federico’s Ghost” (“El fantasma de Federico”).

The volume closes with three brief postscripts and a poetic epilogue in the fourth and final section titled “‘The poets must speak’” that is comprised of a book review and interview with Espada by one of Puerto Rico’s leading literary critics, Carmen Dolores Hernández; a short essay on the Martín Espada Papers by Peter Nelson, an archivist for the Amherst College Archives and Special Collections; and a poem dedicated to Espada by esteemed British poet, activist, and publisher Andy Croft.

To commemorate Espada’s 2008 visit to Puerto Rico for the release of his first volume of poems published on a Puerto Rican imprint, La tumba de Buenaventura Roig: Selected Poems/Poemas selectos, Carmen Dolores Hernández penned a book review and conducted an interview with the poet that appeared (in Spanish) in the island’s national paper, El Nuevo Día. These two historical documents have been updated with additional content added and, for the first time, were translated into English expressly for the Acknowledged Legislator. Both Hernández’s review of La tumba and her corresponding interview were designed to introduce Puerto Rican literary audiences to Espada’s poetic principles (e.g., that he is “more [. . .] prophet than [. . .] protestor” and a practitioner of a “poetics of advocacy”), as well as to highlight central poems in the Espada canon. Hernández carefully articulates for “the Puerto Rican literary establishment” how Espada’s poetry serves as a historical record, possesses the ability to vocalize beyond the Nuyorican school, and extends the Puerto Rican nationalist poetry traditions that influenced him.

Peter Nelson’s “A Visit to the Bakery” provides readers with a unique inside look at the origin and contents of the Martín Espada Papers housed as part of the Special Collections at the Amherst College Library. A substantial, dynamic collection, “compris[ing] more than thirteen linear feet of material” and including fourteen separate series with future plans for expansion, the Espada Papers include rare autobiographical and autoethnographic samples—a catalog of correspondence, writer’s notebooks, early drafts of poems, etc.—for researchers to examine both Espada’s labor habits and the kinds of personal details that influenced his body of work, among other investigatory considerations. The inclusion of this archive at Amherst College not only links Espada to the rich historical traditions of the town itself, as Nelson attests, but also to the “other notable American poets whose papers are preserved at the Amherst College Library, including Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost (for whom the library is named), Louise Bogan, Rolfe Humphries ’15, Richard Wilbur ’42, and James Merrill ’47, to name but a few.”

Despite this being a collection of critical writing on Espada, it nonetheless makes sense to include in the final postscript a creative statement in the form of a poem dedicated to Espada by the acclaimed British writer, “the unofficial poet laureate of the North,” Andy Croft.^[61] “The Great Bell in Martín Espada’s Chest” chronicles Espada’s 2006 “health scare” while traveling in England.^[62] Meant at its onset to be “light-hearted” (pun intended) in tone, the poem eventually assumes a more serious tone when Croft raises the compelling question of our moral and ethical obligations as individuals in the face of mass suffering, laying bare the choice between self-interest versus self-sacrifice. “Great Bell” also reinforces the notion of how one person—here Espada—can make a difference when others of a like mind and a like soul join to combat social crises and respond to a particular political calling. The poem therefore emphasizes how individual commitment can impact collective responsibility, principles at the core of Espada’s writing and activism, what defines his “heart” as it were, not just as a physical organ but as an allusion to spirit (e.g., “he has heart . . .”), as captured in the penultimate stanza:

Savvy readers will undoubtedly find that Croft’s poem relies on a rich series of global literary allusions along the way and dialogues with “The Great Bell in Paul Robeson’s Chest” by Adrian Mitchell, another of Espada’s English compañeros, well noted for his contributions to poetry and dedication to social activism.

This collection of essays on Espada was conceived more than five years ago, on September 11, 2008, at a time when the nation was at a historical crossroads. Then seven years into the global war on terror (today, more than twelve), voters were struggling between amplifying an already calamitous political climate under Republican leadership or ending the “Age of Reagan” and moving the nation toward democratic possibility. Under the “sterling democratic rhetoric” of Barack Obama, as Cornel West has elsewhere described it (qtd. in Naidoo n. pag.), many believed that for the first time since the late 1960s that a radical egalitarian society, such as Whitman might have imagined, was indeed not only possible, but imminent.

Martín Espada came to my mind during this period. I remember thinking to myself, to quote from the utopian refrain of his most celebrated poem, “Imagine the Angels of Bread,” that “this [was] the year”^[63] for the nation to realize its full potential, a year that “hope” would not be an impotent campaign slogan, that real structural change in the United States could be achieved. With Obama’s victory and the release of Espada’s then-uncollected poem chronicling the historical importance of this event, “Litany at the Tomb of Frederick Douglass” (later featured as the closing poem in Trouble Ball), I also held to the notion of there being a very real likelihood that we were indeed standing alongside Espada at the “the crossroads of the unimaginable” and that he would be asked to read “Imagine” or “Epiphany” as the inaugural poem . . . perhaps, in the wake of this newfound national optimism, he would even be named the national poet laureate.

At the time, it seemed regrettable that none of these things came to pass. But soon thereafter, as we now know, democratic potential was nothing more than snake oil sold by the state. The “change we [could] believe in” devolved rapidly into the naked apathy and bad poetry of the “same old, same old,” from the expansion of “overseas contingency operations,”^[64] to the molly-coddled preferential treatment granted to Wall Street investment bankers in the face of one of the worst economic crises since the Great Depression, the legitimation of torture and the targeted assassination of American citizens, and the unyielding expansion of a domestic surveillance apparatus within the National Security State. What poet would seek to be connected officially to such an atrocious record of human rights violations, war mongering, and flagrant disregard for national and global security?^[65]

It’s all too easy to devolve toward apathy in dark conditions such as we now face, (dis)contentedly engaging in rhetorical exercises and cynically asking ourselves “What good are poets in times like these?” or “What can poetry really do to alter our present circumstances?” But these pressing questions could be answered if we were to walk in another direction entirely—toward hope and a common good, where one day we demonstrate to ourselves that “What is now proved was once only imagin’d” (Blake 33).^[66] There we might find enough room for utopian “elsewhere[s]” and “otherwises” to take shape as legitimate alternate choices to our current reality.^[67] I would like to think that this book (even in some small way) plays a role in helping to achieve that objective.

Then, as now, I return to Espada not only to clarify this historical moment, but as our own national “shadow poet laureate,”^[68] to hear him respond to these crises, and, more importantly, to learn from him how to reconceive the present circumstances as opportunities to improve our society through the political imagination. That Espada has not been inaugurated as poet laureate of the United States and welcomed into the “official” fold of a failed administration is a good thing. For it means he continues to stand apart from the antidemocratic practices of our current leaders and remain among us as “the people’s poet,”^[69] advocating on behalf of human interests and embracing the foundational principle of the Whitmanian tradition, “to cheer up slaves and horrify despots” (Whitman, Preface vi),^[70] all while reminding oppressors and the oppressed alike of the real relations of power that define our democracy: “The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you who are here for him” (Whitman, “Song for Occupations” 4.83).

Lacking courage or imagination, there will doubtless always be those who scoff at such idealized notions.^[71] But while reading about Espada in this edited collection and learning more about the subjects he has undertaken in his writing, we should keep close at hand the prescient words of the venerable Walt Whitman, who famously stated in his prefatory remarks for the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, that “[o]f all nations the United States [. . .] most need[ed] poets” and would “use them the greatest” (Preface iv). Whitman added to these superlatives an important provision that would seemingly upend Shelley’s famous dictum about “unacknowledged legislators” with the more assertive proclamation of poets as the nation’s “common referee,” hence, its acknowledged legislators, we could say, of greater political import and endowed with a more socially urgent mission than even the nation’s congressional members or its president (iv).

Contributors to this volume argue throughout this collection that today chief among acknowledged legislators is Martín Espada, whose poetry and political activism has been described aptly by David Mura for its ability to illuminate the utopian possibilities of the “‘city behind the city,’ the America hidden from America, the history hidden from history”: that is precisely why “[l]ike Whitman, Espada is essential to understanding who we truly are as a people” (n. pag.). One could respectfully add to Mura’s assessment only to say that Espada is vital for how he helps us, as a people, to understand our social obligations and our political responsibilities.

In this capacity, Espada, like Whitman, uses his poetry to serve as our national conscience. By imagining the potential for a world without a politics of disimagination, we could well stand to not only abolish the horrors of poverty, victimization, inequality, and injustice, but to also intervene on and prevent further human tragedies tied to these phenomena (at home and abroad), such as Espada has visibilized in his poetry—the child with a roach embedded in her ear, the crop picker who is exposed to pesticide poisoning, the deported family forcibly separated from their children as a result of inhumane immigration policies, the striking laborers everywhere, and so many more.^[72] This may require an entirely different course of action and even the reclamation of what it means to imagine the unimaginable in the present context, thus taking back the political and rhetorical power of disimagination from the disimagineers themselves. For in another capacity, with a conscious, active reprogramming and resignification of the terminology, to “disimagine” could one day mean to institute action against, and maybe reverse, unjust and unsustainable policies we as a society know to be unlawful and unethical. These are indeed large-scale initiatives and the road that leads us toward them will prove a “long, hard slog,”^[73] but they can be met by continually progressing toward our established goals, for as the words of Antonio Machado bring to mind, “caminante, no hay camino, / se hace camino al andar”—“walker there is no way, / the path is made by walking” (VI.3–4).^[74]

It stands to reason, then, that a manuscript crafted around the central premise of an acknowledged legislator would be dedicated to and in appreciation of Martín Espada’s long-spanning career as a political poet and a social activist, one whose work and whose message is still so urgently needed in our world. As with Espada, the contributors to this volume, and those responsible for bringing it life, are also acknowledged legislators. So, too, are the readers of this book who may well consider themselves part of this tradition.

Notes

The epigraph to this introduction is an excerpt from Marge Piercy’s endorsement for the hardcover edition of Espada’s Alabanza.

I was introduced to the terminology and the concept of disimagination from Henry Giroux, whose Truth-Out.org article “The Politics of Disimagination and the Pathologies of Power” expands on its application to neoliberalism. Within the essay subheading “The Rise of the ‘Disimagination Machine,’” he writes:

Borrowing from Georges Didi-Huberman’s use of the term, “disimagination machine,” I argue that the politics of disimagination refers to images, and I would argue institutions, discourses, and other modes of representation, that undermine the capacity of individuals to bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics and collective resistance. The “disimagination machine” is both a set of cultural apparatuses extending from schools and mainstream media to the new sites of screen culture, and a public pedagogy that functions primarily to undermine the ability of individuals to think critically, imagine the unimaginable, and engage in thoughtful and critical dialogue: put simply, to become critically informed citizens of the world. (n. pag.)

See also Giroux’s forthcoming book The Violence of Organized Forgetting, to be released by City Lights, 2014.

On the language of obfuscation, see M. Espada, “The New Bathroom Policy at English High School: Dispatches from the Language Wars” in Zapata’s Disciple, where Espada, while framing the problems with English-only debates and curricula, deftly exposes the underlying dynamics of power inherent in such movements:

If anything, the English language is being eroded from the top down, by the dialects of the powerful: Legalese, medicalese, bureaucratese. These dialects seek to obscure, rather than clarify; their intent is not to communicate, but to control. (75)

I am here borrowing from Cornel West’s articulation of Obama’s “secondary” and “tertiary” concern for such groups. See Naidoo in Works Cited.

The first quoted passage references Espada’s “The New Bathroom Policy at English High School” essay from Zapata’s Disciple, p. 75 (see Note 2 above). See also Uchmanowicz Note 5 in the present volume.

The “angels of bread” allusion is from Espada’s seminal book and bilingual proem of the same title, Imagine the Angels of Bread.

See Espada’s own statement that challenges modern interpretations of Shelley’s phrase (those that have led to poetical and political apathy) in his “The Unacknowledged Legislator: A Rebuttal,” contained in his Lover of a Subversive book.

I mention “overview” as it would indeed be a difficult undertaking for anyone to improve upon the already comprehensive, eloquently written biographical profile and canonical summary of Martín Espada by César Salgado, originally included as an entry in the Latino and Latina Writers encyclopedia (2004) and which is reproduced here in this volume (immediately following the introduction).

Rather than retread any content that is more substantively examined by Salgado, my aim in the introduction is to instead lay a basic contextual footing for readers who are unfamiliar with Espada and his work. From my preliminary biographical summarization, readers should be able to at least understand who Espada is, to have a firm grasp on the subject matter he writes about, and to validate why his poetry and prose warrant further critical examination.

It also should be added that due to publishing permission terms, guidelines, and restrictions with Gale (the publisher of Salgado’s encyclopedia entry), I was prevented from correcting, notating, or otherwise modifying any preexisting errors contained in Salgado’s original essay; as a result, these errors have been reproduced in the version included in this volume, just as they appear in the original. I mention this not to embarrass Salgado (errors such as these appear in almost any publication—my own included), but to point out only for the benefit of future Espada researchers who may question the editorial decision to include them. For a full list of these errors, please e-mail the editor at ejcarvalho(at)icloud.com.

See also my interview with the poet’s father Frank Espada that is housed at Amherst College—listed under Carvalho, “Frank Espada” in Works Cited.

For more on Frank Espada, see my book Puerto Rico Is in the Heart: Emigration, Labor, and Politics in the Life and Work of Frank Espada.

For more on the subject of Espada’s “inheritance” of the aesthetic, political, and experiential realities of his father Frank Espada, see my dissertation “Puerto Rican Radical,” esp. ch. 3, “‘A mi padre—for my father’: Martín Espada’s Early Life, Work Experience, and Political Awakening.”

10.

See the ch. 3 subsection “Espada as Factotum: The Poet Defined By Work” of my dissertation, pp. 188–230.

11.

See also Jensen for a brief summarization of Espada’s Imagine the Angels of Bread, described as a creative mission by the poet to conjoin “both the personal and the political in the poems of this collection” (271).

12.

Recall, for instance, that Espada has a Puerto Rican father and a Jewish mother (who converted to the Jehovah’s Witness faith). And while Espada self-identifies with his father’s Puerto Rican heritage, he has, just the same, begun to explore more vigorously in his later work themes relating to Jewish intellectuals and to religious/spiritual allusion (see also Salgado’s essay on this volume for additional insight on this subject). For more on Espada’s cultural identification, see my Puerto Rico Is in the Heart, pp. 50–52n13 and 93n7–8.

13.

It is important to note that even as Espada’s poetry dialogues with the Nuyorican movement, for its minor infusions of code-switching, “the spatial play of here and there [that] underlies Nuyorican cultural production,” which informs Espada’s thematic concerns and his “own inter-American poetics from south to north” (Dowdy, “[B]lack braid”), most would agree (including the poet) that he should not be identified with the particular aesthetic of Nuyorican poetry proper. This talking point is argued by a variety of critics, including César Salgado, Maritza Stanchich, and others—see their contributions in this volume.

For the express ways that Nuyorican literature has impacted Espada’s writing and for other statements by or about the poet relating to the Nuyorican movement’s influence, see my “Branch on the Tree of Whitman,” p. 75 and Espada’s comments following the death of Piri Thomas, under Berger in Works Cited.

14.

For more on Espada’s connections to some of the authors and literary trends named above, see Salgado, Stanchich, and Pérez-Bustillo’s essays in this volume.

15.

On the “decontextualization” of this passage, see my dissertation “Puerto Rican Radical,” pp. 40–41n8.

I did fail to mention in the above reference that César Salgado is one of the few critics who correctly cited Shorris’s passage. See his profile of Espada in this volume.

16.

Both quotes are from back cover blurbs to hardcover editions of Espada’s books. The Cisneros quote is for Alabanza. The source for the Stavans quote is listed under his entry for Rev. of The Republic of Poetry in Works Cited.

17.

Several of these awards were accompanied by significant honoraria. See my dissertation “Puerto Rican Radical,” pp. 285n79.

18.

In e-mail correspondence from July 2013, Espada indicated that he was assembling a collection of his labor poetry and editing a collection of baseball-themed essays for future release. See M. Espada, “Re: Permissions” and “Re: Info.” The proposed titles for these books are The Meaning of the Shovel and The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park: Essays on Latinos and Baseball (Meaning of the Shovel was released in 2014.) .

See also Note 60.

19.

See M. Espada, “Poetics of Advocacy.”

Espada and Camilo Pérez-Bustillo developed a similar term, “cultural advocacy,” that is explained in the Pérez-Bustillo essay contained in this volume. The “poetics of advocacy” and “cultural advocacy” can be seen as a bifurcation of the same current of advocacy reflected in Espada’s poetic and political commitments.

20.

See Espada’s comments on this subject (e.g., the notion that “all justice is poetic”) in Bill Moyers’s Conversation Continues interview, “Martín Espada,” based on the July 2007 video-recorded interview “Bill Moyers talks” (listed under Moyers in Works Cited).

See also Hernández, “La tumba,” Note 1 in this volume.

21.

Poet and critic John Bradley was early to identify Espada “as our modern Walt Whitman” in his back cover blurb for the trade paper edition of Espada’s Mayan Astronomer collection. See Bradley, Rev. of A Mayan Astronomer in Works Cited.

22.

Re: “political”—a label that Espada readily welcomes. See his “Zapata’s Disciple” and “Poetry Like Bread” essays in Zapata’s Disciple. Though these essays overtly call upon definitions of the “political” poet and poetry, one could argue that the entire Zapata’s Disciple book (even its cover photo of Latino laborers picketing, taken by his father Frank) is dedicated to the exploration and celebration of this subject.

See also Espada’s more recent essay, “Unacknowledged Legislator.”

23.

As well as other “proto-neoliberal” tendencies. For more on this subject, see my introduction to Puerto Rico Is in the Heart.

24.

This grouping converses with Michael Dowdy’s description of the “invisible” Espada has endeavored “to make visible”—i.e., “(immigrants, the elderly, workers, the marginalized, dispossessed, imprisoned, and colonized).” See his essay in this volume.

25.

Reference to the tract by William Douglas O’Connor in defense of Whitman, “The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication,” following the poet’s loss of a clerkship in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (a draft copy of Leaves of Grass was found in Whitman’s desk and his then-supervisor, “James Harlan, secretary of the interior, judged the book to be immoral” [Price n. pag.]). See Works Cited under O’Connor.

26.

See my dissertation “Puerto Rican Radical,” ch. 5 “From a Republic of Property to a Republic of Poetry—The Language of Possibility: Espada’s Poetry as Politics and Pedagogy,” esp. subsection II “The ‘Poet as Public Citizen’: Poetry as Protest, Poetry as Public Pedagogy,” pp. 530–63.

27.

Reference to the 2013 Espada poem of the same title, written for the victims of the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting tragedy. See also Note 26 above for more information on the merging of poetics, politics, and pedagogy in Espada’s work.

28.

For those who were unable to attend or tune in via the live Webcast of the event, I have since learned from Within Our Reach organizational representative Jim Allyn that the proceedings were recorded with plans for video release sometime in late 2013 (possibly November 20). See Allyn, “Re: Newtown Event, Saturday, June 8.” See also the commemorative poem that Espada wrote for and recited at the Newtown event under, M. Espada, “Heal the Cracks.”

29.

Some attentive readers and critics of Espada’s work, such as Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, who has for several years enjoyed a close relationship with the poet, argue that this international consciousness has been manifest in Espada’s poetry from the earliest. See his “‘Heart of Hunger’” essay in this volume.

30.

See also my dissertation “Puerto Rican Radical,” ch. 5 subsection “III. No Poet Is an Island: Toward a Poetics of Solidarity—‘Foreign Concerns and Activities,’” p. 566.

31.

See M. Espada, “Circle Your Name,” lines 6 and 47.

32.

Citation appears on p. 868 in the original Salgado publication contained in Latino and Latina Writers.

33.

See p. 541 in the Works and Days journal version of this interview, listed under the first entry for Carvalho, “‘Taking Back’” in Works Cited.

34.

From the Espada Papers correspondence record between Espada and Bradley here cited, it remains unclear if the idea to pursue a critical volume on Espada was actually Bradley’s or per Espada’s suggestion. At the time, Bradley was one of Espada’s leading critics, having blurbed and reviewed a good portion of the poet’s work up to Mayan Astronomer.

For the record, lest I be accused of strip mining someone else’s intellectual labor, I did not piggyback on the idea to cultivate an Espada edited collection; rather, I discovered the Bradley–Espada exchange while combing through the Espada Papers archive in 2010, a full two years after the initial Acknowledged Legislator project had already been underway and essays for the volume had been collected.

35.

See Note 1.

36.

The Espada quote reads:

Whereas my books have been widely reviewed, and I have received considerable media attention from Bill Moyers to the BBC, there is very little out there in the way of academic essays, doctoral theses, etc. My work is studied extensively in high schools and intro college courses—I’m in a lot of textbooks—but almost not at all at the MFA/doctoral level. That’s what you’re up against: a void. (M. Espada, “Re: Espada project submission” n. pag.)

Though it may prove difficult for some readers to believe, given Espada’s many readings and general celebrity in the poetry world (such as we have seen), the poet’s remarks above, concerning his almost nonexistent critical placement in the academy, are actually quite accurate, as even a cursory literature review will attest. Apart from one sixty-four-page MFA thesis housed in the Martín Espada papers archive (authored by Carlos Martínez) and my dissertation, there have been no published books dedicated solely to Espada prior to the release of this edited collection. Instead, what remains is a limited and sundry cross section of dissertation references that incorporate mostly (but not always) minor, and in some cases underdeveloped, chapters on Espada that are accompanied by a modest handful of journal articles. Beyond this, very little else exists in terms of an established or sustained critical narrative about Espada’s canon other than the many interview statements Espada himself has made over the years. In a very obvious sense then, the relative paucity of Espada criticism exposes a lacuna that warrants further discussion and demands intervention.

37.

See Note 33 above.

38.

Which is not to say that a student cannot outshine their instructor. Just the same, the example here is telling when one realizes Trethewey once occupied the role of understudy to Espada and thus likely benefitted from and improved her process as a result of his guidance. The tangential question of recognizing the master’s role (here, Espada) thus remains at issue.

39.

See Hopkins.

40.

Blanco, like Trethewey, could be seen as having benefited, to an extent, from attachment to Espada’s “brand,” if you will, allowing additional doors of opportunity—such as the one outlined here—to open. Recall that Blanco’s prose poem “What’s Love Got to Do?” was chosen by Espada for publication in his 2005 guest-edited Ploughshares issue that featured several well-known poets, including Robert Creeley and Marge Piercy, among others. The reality exposed here is that Blanco and Trethewey have been granted literary opportunities and marketing privileges in recent years not afforded to Espada, but which may have been facilitated by him.

41.

See my letter to Cherie Mittenthal, executive director for Truro Center of the Arts at Castle Hill, on this matter, listed under Carvalho, “Cancelation” in Works Cited. My letter, however, made no mention of Blanco but instead focused on what I saw as several other poor marketing decisions that could have impacted Espada’s workshop enrollment. One such telling example was the potential “self-cannibalization” of Castle Hill’s poetry offerings, which may have resulted from placing several established poets on the same summer program roster in competition for what was likely a limited number of students (e.g., Mark Doty, et al.).

42.

As such awarenesses are obviously shaped by these and other ideological apparatuses as described above.

43.

The full tweet from poet, editor, and critic Joseph Spece reads: “Politics, confessionalism, identity poetics—refuse. Literary merit. That is all” (n. pag.).

Though I enjoy a friendship with and have immense respect for Spece, I entirely disagree with his statement (as he knows), least of all for its embedded logical fallacy: e.g., to demand divorcing politics from literature is a political act in and of itself (which is a related argument and functions in a similar way as Stanley Fish’s recommendation that we separate politics from the classroom, the academic freedom context of which I have addressed elsewhere. See my response to this in my dissertation, “Puerto Rican Radical” pp. 487–89n86 and in my interview with Gayatri Spivak, “‘Changing Reflexes,’” pp. 325–27). There is plenty of sound scholarship on the origins of the movement to depoliticize poetry in the academy that crescendoed during the McCarthy era. Borrowing from the insight and research of Cary Nelson, Espada comments on this phenomenon in his “Unacknowledged Legislator” essay. See also Nelson’s Revolutionary Memory, cited by Espada, and the introduction to Michael Thurston’s Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry Between the World Wars, pp. 1–41.

Related is the historical fallout in the academy during the Cold War when McCarthy-era attacks against labor rights and communist sympathizers (real and imagined) gave concomitant rise to New Criticism and a political shift in the reception of poetry that openly called for its depoliticization. Hence, the university would become a reproductive site for conservative ideology and rigid, insular, aestheticized views of poetry, further isolating and marginalizing its ability to communicate in the social sphere, if not sepulchering the genre from popular reception and mainstream audiences.

As such, Spece’s declaration, though spirited, is not only (as I see it) representative of a fusty, outmoded way of understanding literary or poetic “value,” but it also can be seen as deeply entrenched in the pathology of cultural supremacy and a market logic that proposes to grant to an elite cadre the right to determine the aesthetic criteria—or “(artistic) consequence[s]” (Spece, “Aha” n. pag.)—upon which a work of “art” is judged and determined, all while obscuring from view the structural power or influence of class, race, ethnicity, and gender. In sum, as Roque Dalton so eloquently frames it:

“It is foolish even to argue with those who affirm that the social and humanist attitudes in poetry are, at the very least, extrapoetic elements. Foolish principally because such a discussion implies an a priori renunciation of the universality of poetry.” (qtd. in Márquez 32; emphasis in original)

44.

See lines 23–24 of the MacLeish poem “Ars Poetica” that read: “A poem should not mean / but be.”

45.

One who engages in the radical struggle for Puerto Rican self-determination and national sovereignty.

46.

For those who may think my claims concerning Blanco are hyperbolic, recall that entertainer Carmen Miranda was used to market and promote economic facility of North and South American trade as part of the “Good Neighbor” program during the Roosevelt administration. See Enloe’s Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, ch. 6 “Carmen Miranda on My Mind: International Politics of the Banana,” pp. 124–50 and my dissertation “Puerto Rican Radical” ch. 4 “‘Armed with a terrorist’s sonnet’—The Language of War: Espada’s Historical Trace of Neoliberalism,” section II “The 1980s,” subsection “The First War on Terror: Nicaragua,” pp. 371–75.

See also Pérez-Bustillo Note 48 (in this volume).

47.

See ch. IV “Looking Inward,” section C “Nationalism vs. Assimilation” in Delgado and Stefancic.

48.

For more on this, see L. Steiner; see also Villar.

49.

Another consideration is that a significant portion of this early criticism is difficult to access through conventional means, the result of limited small-press distribution or publication in periodicals that may no longer be in operation/circulation. One of the best sources to access such materials is the Martín Espada Papers archive at Amherst College (see esp. Series 9: Miscellaneous Works by and about Espada). See Peter Nelson’s essay in this volume.

50.

A particularly insightful example of this is related to Espada’s canonic appraisal of neoliberalism, for instance. For more on the subject, see my “Puerto Rican Radical” and Puerto Rico Is in the Heart.

51.

“[T]hings have started to shift” . . . both in the specific area of Espada studies, as is addressed here, and the more general sense of Latino/a literary advancement elsewhere. To this latter point, see Veronica Makowsky’s editor’s introduction to the MELUS issue dedicated to “New Perspectives on Puerto Rican, Latina/o, Chicana/o, and Caribbean American Literatures,” where she rightly observes that “the very notion [of such literary modes] opened new canonical vistas only a few decades ago” (1). Obviously, Espada’s work and its critical reception are included in Makowsky’s admission, even if indirectly, the results and details of which are examined in my Acknowledged Legislator introduction content.

See also my discussion of “glass ceilings” in relation to Espada’s work in my dissertation “Puerto Rican Radical,” ch. 3, subsection “Espada as Factotum: The Poet Defined By Work,” esp. pp. 191–96.

52.

This is discussed briefly in the Hernández interview contained in the present volume. See Hernández, “Poet Is a Historian.”

53.

See Stanchich in this volume. See also Hernández’s review of La tumba in this volume. La tumba is not readily commercially available in North America (although the book is available through interlibrary loan channels). For the benefit of those who may not have seen this book, La tumba in its design and its function is almost a perfect hybridization of Espada’s third volume Rebellion/Rebelión (for the bilingual presentation of poems and the incorporation of photography by Frank Espada) and his new and selected works Alabanza that capture representative samples from each Espada collection up to and including the Republic of Poetry.

For a review of La tumba, see Hernández, “La tumba” in this volume.

54.

See Dowdy, “‘[M]ountain in my pocket’” and “Spaces for Congregation.”

55.

Pauline Uchmanowicz invited Michael Dowdy and me to discuss Espada’s work at SUNY New Paltz for the Third Biennial First World Diaspora Conference. The following year, I organized and chaired a Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) panel with contributors Natasha Azank, Michael Dowdy, Jeremy Larochelle, and Pauline Uchmanowicz. See the entries for Mapping the Republic and The Acknowledged Legislator: A Critical (Re)Assessment in Works Cited.

56.

In our early conversations about this book project, Espada was quite adamant about Salgado’s inclusion, asserting, in effect, that there could not be a volume on Espada without Salgado.

There is a good deal of truth in Espada’s claim. Salgado has in fact produced a number of seminal, high-profile contributions over the years that have notably advanced critical visibility to the Espada canon. See his entries in Works Cited for more information. See also Espada’s acknowledgments for Trouble Ball, p. 12.

57.

Cited passages appear on p. 852 of Salgado’s original Latino and Latina Writers profile (reproduced in this volume).

A significantly redacted version of Salgado’s Latino and Latina Writers profile also appears in the Espada guest-edited Ploughshares volume from 2005, and is titled “About Martín Espada.”

58.

Stanchich also provided the English back cover blurb for the latter book, which appears directly above Salgado’s endorsement that was written in Spanish. See Stanchich, Rev. of La tumba in Works Cited.

59.

See the Espada interview with Browning for the poet’s explanation of what a political poem is and does, encapsulated in his belief that poetry should “give politics or history a human face” (13).

60.

See also the latest addition to the cluster of Espada baseball poems, “The Socialist in the Crowd” (2013).

As indicated in Note 18, Espada is in the process of assembling an edited collection of baseball essays (his own) that is tentatively titled (after one of his most recognizable baseball poems), The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park: Essays on Latinos and Baseball (forthcoming).

61.

Croft’s name should be recognizable to Espada researchers through his affiliation with Smokestack Books (as owner/operator), which produced the Espada volume of republished verse, Crucifixion in the Plaza de Armas, a compilation of Espada’s Puerto Rican-based poems that was also edited by Croft. See M. Espada, Crucifixion in Works Cited. Croft’s press also published Espada’s collection of labor poetry, The Meaning of the Shovel, in January 2014.

See also “Andy Croft” in Works Cited.

62.

See Note 1 in the poem for more details.

63.

The refrain recurs as anaphoric motif in lines 1, 6, 12, 17, 23, 29, 35, 40, and 44 of the poem. From the Spanish translation of the poem (“Imagina los angeles de pan”), the refrain reads: “este es al año.”

64.

See ch. 5 of my dissertation “Puerto Rican Radical,” subsection I “‘Restoring the Blood to Words’: Taking Language Back from the State: Espada’s Hampshire College Commencement Speeches as [c]onscientização,” esp. pp. 524–26 dealing with the “bad poetry” and linguistic co-optation of language/poetic possibility under the Obama administration.

65.

Even if we agree from the position of popular consensus that Espada is the most legitimate heir apparent to the national poet laureate position, it is doubtful that he will be elected to this post given his vocal political opposition to war and other defining features of administrative power. However, it is precisely because Espada is not the U.S. poet laureate that he maintains his ability to operate outside the “official” system of state power. In this capacity, Espada is in a very similar historical position as Allen Ginsberg, who was estimably the most important American modern poet of the twentieth century. And like Ginsberg, whose activist opposition to de facto state positions would (more than likely) roadblock his nomination to national poet laureate, so, too, Espada finds himself in a similar circumstance. Just as Norman Mailer prophesied Ginsberg’s legacy would one day overshadow his contemporary Robert Lowell (e.g., “posterity would judge Allen Ginsberg the greater poet” [21])—for many of the reasons I have outlined above (primarily for his ability to connect with humanity rather than maintain a position of institutional insularity), I feel confident in saying that Espada’s place within the poetry world will be judged comparably. The evidence of this claim will be weighed against the historical memory of poets from this period, especially those who occupied the national poet laureate position during the past twelve years of the post–9/11 era and either distanced themselves, prevaricated on, or altogether avoided confronting war crimes associated with the global war on terror and the foreign policy decisions that sustained them.

66.

Identified as line 13 from “Proverbs of Hell” (Plate 8) subsection of Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” See the edition listed in Works Cited.

67.

On the utopian possibility of “‘elsewhere[s],’” see Dowdy, “‘[B]lack braid’” (in this volume; emphasis in original). The related terminology “otherwise” appears in my dissertation “Puerto Rican Radical,” ch. 5, p. 646. I coined this term in 2011 to articulate a more precise register of Lefebvre’s concept of “‘elsewhere’” that defines not only an alternative space (e.g., the commons), but also an alternative discourse, an alternative subjectivity, and an alternative reality to the one mandated by neoliberalism. Michael Dowdy has since incorporated this terminology and its theoretical construct in his Broken Souths book. See esp. pp. 16, 233n5, and his ch. 1 “Hemispheric Otherwises in the Shadow of ‘1968,’” pp. 29–60.

68.

The call for Espada to be seen as national poet laureate was earlier raised by Sandra Cisneros, who indicated “that she would ‘select him as the Poet Laureate of the United States’” (qtd. in Jensen 273). See also Salgado’s essay in this volume for reference to Cisneros’s statement. Her quote is also featured on the back cover endorsement for Espada’s hardcover edition of Alabanza.

At the First International Whitman symposium in Dortmund, Germany, June 2008, I argued the very same issue in my introductory extemporaneous remarks before presenting a paper comparing Espada and Whitman and identifying him (Espada) as the modern inheritor of the Whitmanian tradition. See my conference paper/presentation “‘I contain multitudes.’”

69.

For more on Espada as “The People’s Poet,” see the profile of Espada by Goldscheider. See also Márquez 26 where Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo are identified as “people’s poets” for their “persistent struggle to forge a language [. . .] that would be ever more consistent with their revolutionary convictions,” characteristics that could also be used to describe Espada’s artistic development.

70.

The Whitman passage here referenced is quoted in the foreword to Espada’s edited collection Poetry like Bread, p. 10 (which was later reproduced in Espada’s Zapata’s Disciple collection as the essay “Poetry Like Bread”; the Whitman quote appears on p. 100 of that book).

71.

See, for example, Henry Giroux’s latest “manifesto” of critical pedagogy, “When Schools Become Dead Zones of the Imagination.”

72.

This passage includes several allusions to Espada poems, such as: “Imagine the Angels of Bread” (“Imagina los angeles de pan”) lines 41–43, for its reference to the roach in the child’s ear; “Federico’s Ghost” (“El fantasma de Federico”) and “Water, White Cotton, and the Rich Man,” on the subject of pesticide poisoning of migrant workers; “Mr. and Mrs. Rodríguez Have Been Deported, Leaving Six Children Behind with the Neighbors” that critiques U.S. immigration policies (see also “Isabel’s Corrido,” “Ezequiel,” and “Sing in the Voice of a God Even Atheists Can Hear”); and “The Foreman’s Wallet,” “Huelga,” “Walking,” “The Sign in My Father’s Hands,” and several others that are grounded in the theme of labor advocacy and labor rights.

73.

A willful subversion of the phrase popularized by Donald Rumsfeld, the former Bush administration defense secretary, who was referring to the U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. See Knowlton.

74.

See the interview with Espada by poet Naomi Ayala that is mirrored on Charles Bivona’s NJpoet.com. The translation is Espada’s.

The Trueblood translation that is referenced in the Works Cited reads: “Wayfarer, there is no way, / you make the way as you go” (Machado VI.3–4).