César A. Salgado
(1957 –)
ALABANZA. Praise. Anglo and Latino critics alike have praised Martín Espada’s furiously compassionate, exquisitely crafted, uncompromising political poetry. Espada’s literary reputation has been on the rise since the publication of his first book, The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero (1982). Back in 1990, Earl Shorris predicted in a New York Times article titled “In Search of the Latino Writer” that Espada would become “the Latino poet of his generation” (p. 28). In a blurb for Espada’s last book, Sandra Cisneros joined those who have proposed selecting Espada as the Poet Laureate of the United States, calling him “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors.” Even in the midst of controversy, his stature has grown unabated. When National Public Radio commissioned Espada to create a poem inspired by current news events, he wrote about the plight of the radical Afro-American writer Mumia Abu-Jamal, on death row for a hotly disputed murder conviction. Apparently, the network thought the poem’s polemical topic would compromise government or private funding and chose not to air it; many rallied to Espada’s side when he denounced the network’s reaction as a form of censorship. He also made headlines when he turned down Nike’s offer to write a poem for an Olympics advertising campaign in a public letter that rebuked Nike’s profiteering and brutal labor practices in Asia. When Alabanza (2003), a selection of Espada’s poems spanning twenty years of work, was condescendingly reviewed in the New York Times, noted poets and critics sent letters to the editor in protest. In recent years, few poets, Latino or mainstream, have raised the temperature of political and literary debate with such visibility and topicality.
Although well deserved, all this excitement about his work probably strikes the self-deprecating Espada as ironic, if not bizarre. This national buzz recognizes the expression of a poet who often hushes his own voice so that those of the long-silenced and marginalized can be heard through his poems. (Espada thus honors Chilean Nobel Prize-winner Pablo Neruda’s call to let the voiceless “speak through [the poet’s] words and blood.”) It gives center stage to someone whose visionary breadth brings to mind Walt Whitman’s ebullient American outlook yet who identifies strongly with the periphery of “minority” and “Third World” subjects and has sharply criticized the multicultural deficits of the current academic canon. It seeks U.S. Poet Laureate status for a writer who captures the changing rhythms of the American vernacular as ably and scrupulously as William Carlos Williams yet remains stubbornly Puerto Rican, another independentista in the island’s forceful lineage of dissenting Nationalist poets, such as Clemente Soto Vélez, Juan Antonio Corretjer, and Julia de Burgos, and Caribbean cadence-masters such as Luis Palés Matos. In sum, the critics praise a poet who struggles to reinvent in his work the social practice of praise itself and make poetry matter as a real discourse in both the political and esthetic realms. That Espada’s work stands at the crossroads of many nonliterary fields and concerns—law, ethnicity, colonialism, history, public memory, urban and diaspora studies, language politics—is proof of how poetry becomes more politically efficacious as it is best crafted; the higher its esthetic and cognitive makeup, the greater its potential social relevance and impact. As critic Santa Arias argues, in Espada “the social text . . . is as important as the artifice, the calculated word, the images that unravel a myriad of meanings” (Bilingual Review, p. 232). Each Espada poem is a carefully engineered capsule of political epiphany in which a richly suggestive, often elaborate, riddle-like title helps the reader navigate the many symbolic dimensions of the concrete social story the poem tells. In this, through his apprenticeship with Neruda and the great Puerto Rican poets, Espada brings uniquely into American English the centuries-old arsenal of baroque poetic devices still active within the Spanish language: Francisco de Quevedo’s mordant political wit, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s refined social irony, and Luis de Góngora’s magical gift for dazzling metaphors.
Born on 7 August 1957, Martín Espada was raised in the Linden projects in the east section of Brooklyn, New York. His father, Frank Espada, a dark-skinned Puerto Rican from the mountain cafetales (coffee-growing regions) of Utuado, settled there and married Marilyn Levine, the daughter of a working-class Jewish family. Frank’s family had moved to East Harlem in 1939, just prior to the 1940s wave of work-starved rural workers “evicted” from the island as a consequence of “Operation Bootstrap,” the industrialization program launched by Luis Muñoz Marín’s Popular Democratic Party right before Puerto Rico’s current Commonwealth status was fashioned. An ambitious and talented young man, Frank worked in several blue-collar jobs. He enlisted and trained as a mechanic in a Texan Air Force base, played semipro baseball and had a chance to try out for the New York Yankees, and studied at the New York Institute of Photography. Still, he did not make it to college; prejudice against his dark skin stood in his way to social advancement. This experience forged in his character the qualities of frustration and resilience his son would often memorialize in his poetry. Traveling home on furlough from Texas when he was nineteen, Frank was jailed for a week in Biloxi, Mississippi, for refusing to move to the back of the bus. Closely identifying with the Southern Blacks in his cell, Frank became convinced of the systematic oppression of peoples of color in the United States. This “epiphany” marked him for life, as he became a powerful community organizer and civil rights activist in New York during the 1950s and 1960s. While growing up, Espada saw his father help found the National Welfare Rights Organization and the National Latino Media Coalition, among other groups.
In “Zapata’s Disciple and Perfect Brie,” an essay about his father, Espada remembers his dad as an unrelenting activist, organizing “rent strikes, voter registration drives, sit-ins of welfare mothers, marches for safe streets” (Zapata’s Disciple, p. 4). In the poem “The Sign in My Father’s Hands,” Espada recalls how, at seven, he marveled at his father’s return from jail days after joining a picket line protesting antiminority hiring policies. He then “searched my father’s hands / for a sign of the miracle,” believing that like Christ, he had risen from the dead (Imagine the Angels of Bread, p. 27). Thus a father’s example became deeply imprinted in the son’s imagination, shaping the latter’s political outlook at a very young age. “Some of my earliest drawings depict demonstrations,” Espada recalls (Zapata’s Disciple, p. 5). In another essay, Espada describes his own pilgrimage to Biloxi at forty to research and commemorate the day and place of Frank’s political awakening in 1949. There he figures out that his father’s imprisonment had been illegal. The Supreme Court had banned segregation in commercial interstate bus travel three years before, yet law officers in the South kept enforcing the cloaked apartheid system his father confronted (Zapata’s Disciple, pp. 13–29). Frank’s life experiences thus claim a protagonical presence in Espada’s writing, inspiring a cycle of more than twenty poems comprising a Boricua odyssey of exile, racial exclusion, outrage, and dignified resistance.
Espada’s mother commands a different, more latent sort of attention in his work. A God-fearing woman ostracized by her Jewish family, perhaps for marrying a Puerto Rican, Marilyn converted to Christianity and became a Jehovah’s Witness after Martín was born, as he recalls in his essay “Argue Not Concerning God” (Zapata’s Disciple, p. 31). In the absence of her Jewish religion, culture, and family, Espada has said, he grew up “identifying with my father’s cultural identity, with my father’s heritage, history, and so forth” (Steptoe, Grafico, part II). He thus feasted on the Puerto Rican anecdotes, songs, roast-pork Christmas banquets, and other traditions in the Espada–Roig family gatherings at his grandmother Tata’s Bronx apartment. Still, Espada reflects often about his mother’s work and domestic life experiences in his poetry and, in recent years, has started to trace his Jewish roots in poems dedicated to the Rosenbergs and other historical figures of Jewish radicalism. Despite his agnosticism, the deep Biblical undertones, prophetic voices, and apocalyptic glimpses in Espada’s poetry can be traced to his mother’s persistent religiosity.
As Frank rose through his community work to white-collar status, the Espadas left the projects and lived in a white Long Island neighborhood. “However, being Puerto Rican in effect canceled out whatever middle-class trappings we had acquired for ourselves,” recalls Espada; “Surrounded by the children of white flight, I faced racial obscenities everywhere, spray-painted on my locker and even scrawled in the icing of a cake” (Zapata’s Disciple, p. 5). The sense of being marginal and suspect, an alien in a white community, inspired him to write his first poems “as an attempt to explain myself to myself” (Zapata’s Disciple, p. 5). Espada refused to adopt or abide by American middle-class values, aspirations, and expectations. In the next few years, he would stray in and out of school and through an odd assortment of jobs: he worked as a janitor, a gas station attendant, and a part of the cleaning crew at a local ballpark. To protest the Vietnam War as his father did, he would refuse to pledge alliance to the American flag in school assemblies; he became the junior high school’s radical misfit. He dropped out from a discouraging first try as an English major in a Maryland college after one professor, hung up on the American high modernist canon, reprimanded him for writing a paper on beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Another chided the tone of his early poetry as “too hostile” in a creative writing seminar.
Espada’s luck would change dramatically in the late 1970s. At twenty, a family friend gave him a copy of Roberto Márquez’s 1974 anthology Latin American Revolutionary Poetry with the words “You’re going to be a poet.” The book had a transforming impact on Espada. Put together by a New York Puerto Rican professor of working-class roots, it gathered political poetry by Latin American writers whose radicalism had been newly galvanized in the wake of the 1973 U.S.-supported coup against Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile. Márquez organized the anthology as a bilingual poetry book, with English and Spanish versions facing each other, a structure Espada would later emulate in his own work. Three poets specially impressed Espada: Ernesto Cardenal, for his use of Nicaraguan history in “Hora Cero” (Zero hour); Nicolás Guillén, for the visionary utopianism and the Black–Cuban intonations of his conversational poetry; and Pedro Pietri, for his denunciation of the blighted New York immigrant experience in “Puerto Rican Obituary.” About how this book affected him, Espada has said: “I was thunderstruck. . . . I was no longer a poetic amnesiac. All of a sudden I found a tradition to identify with, I found a place where I could sit. . . . You think you are standing on the street all by yourself with a picket sign and then you hear a noise and you turn around and you see a demonstration four blocks long” (Steptoe, Grafico, part II). Espada’s image here reflects some key elements in his mature poetry: sensing communal solidarity in the midst of urban alienation, maintaining an unwavering political commitment against great odds, and perceiving prophetic revelations in everyday circumstances. The picket line he had painted as a child had suddenly come to life as an international chorus of activist poets from a never-dying tradition. Bearing “the [picket] sign on my father’s hands,” they raise their placard-poems to demand the betterment of humankind. “I started to write again and I never looked back” (Steptoe, Grafico, part II).
At this point Espada left Maryland to attend the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1978 to 1982. Not finding the apolitical curriculum of their English department suitable for his convictions, he chose to major in history, with a focus on Latin America and U.S. foreign policy. He continued writing poetry while supporting himself in a variety of jobs: he was bouncer in a bar, a primate lab caretaker, a groundskeeper for a minor league baseball team, a transient hotel night clerk. When unemployed, he once had to rely on welfare for sustenance. Foreshadowing a career in law, he volunteered as a paralegal and as a mental patient’s rights advocate. Like in many other colleges, the 1979 Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, the rightwing policies of the Reagan administration, and the U.S.-sustained military intervention in Central America prompted demonstrations and other forms of activism at the Madison campus. Espada spent the summer of 1982 in socialist Nicaragua as a radio journalist reporting on the accomplishments of the Revolution, then under siege by the U.S.-supported “Contra” insurgency. In a Managua barrio that had no plumbing he chose instead to volunteer digging latrines, working “for nothing / and for everything,” as he recalls in “The Meaning of the Shovel” and in other poems (Imagine the Angels of Bread, p. 54). Around this time, his father’s career also took a new turn. After winning a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Frank Espada set up the Puerto Rican Diaspora Project, a three-year plan to document with pictures over forty Boricua communities in the mainland, the island, and Hawaii. He gave up his work as community leader to become a full-time documentary photographer, photoessayist, and portraitist. Frank’s conviction about the merits of using artistic means to document social conditions, tell the story of diaspora subjects, and build up community identity probably helped motivate Espada’s writing at the time. Thus, in 1982, before leaving Madison, Espada published his first book, The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero, with Ghost Pony Press. Illustrated with some of his father’s PRDP pictures, this “sliver of a book”—seventeen poems and five photographs—represented a unique partnership between son and father, word and image, vision and tradition. The book’s mixing of assertive urban poems with striking photos of dilapidated barrio life recalls photographer Gil Mendez’s collaboration with poets Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero in Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings (1975), the book that established the socioesthetic agenda of “Nuyorican” writing (that by Puerto Rican immigrants to New York City).
From 1982 to 1985, Espada studied law at Northeastern University in Boston, an “alternative” law school whose experimental curriculum suited Espada’s needs well. He met and married Katherine Gilbert, a sociologist, teacher, and community worker raised in a Connecticut family with old farming roots and the muse of his later, more personal poetry. In Boston, Espada became part of a community of Hispanic law students, writers, and activists who shared common literary and political concerns. Two of these friends are recurring characters in several Espada poems: fellow Brooklyn–puertorriqueño Angel Guadalupe (“Tony Went to the Bodega,” “Cada puerco tiene su sábado”), and the Queens–colombiano Camilo Pérez-Bustillo (“The King of Books,” “Circle Your Name”). The latter, at that time a bilingual rights lawyer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later Haywood Burns Professor of Civil Rights law at CUNY (City University of New York), has collaborated closely with Espada as a translator of poetry and political activist for Central American causes. Together they translated and published in 1991 a selection of poems by Puerto Rican poet Clemente Soto Vélez under the title The Blood That Keeps Singing.
The Boston scene would boost Espada’s poetic career in unexpected ways. While working as a legal intern, Espada applied for the Massachusetts Artist Foundation Fellowship, sending some poems on a whim: he received $5,000, “the first time I made [more] money as a poet than as a legal worker” (Steptoe, Grafico, part II). He became a regular presence at poetry readings in Jamaica Plain, Villa Victoria, and other Latino community centers, and on Boston’s many university campuses. He published regularly in distinguished poetry journals and reviews. Other fellowships gave Espada enough breathing space to finish and publish his second book of poems, Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction (1987), shortly after earning his law degree. With a masterful prologue by Robert Creeley, the book impressed critic Earl Shorris so much that, in an article for the New York Times, he anticipated its “astonishingly bold young poet” would become “the Latino poet of his generation” (reprinted in Shorris, Latinos, pp. 393, 394).
Espada stayed in Boston to work as a lawyer in Su Clínica Legal, a legal services program for low-income Spanish-speaking tenants in nearby Chelsea. While attending the concerns of recent Hispanic immigrants, he wrote biting advocacy poems that decried the treatment of low-income Hispanics by the legal system. Helping organize a conference honoring the great Puerto Rican poet and Nationalist leader Juan Antonio Corretjer, Espada met Clemente Soto Vélez, another participant in the event. For Espada, it was like meeting history itself. Like Corretjer, Soto Vélez had been a trailblazing poet in Caribbean letters and a lifelong defender of the cause of Puerto Rican independence. Both these elder independentistas had been well-known disciples of Pedro Albizu Campos, the mulatto Harvard Law School graduate from Ponce, Puerto Rico, who was condemned to decades in federal prison for his “subversive” activities as founder and promoter of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. Soto Vélez himself had been in jail twice, between 1936 and 1942 for participating in such activities. After serving his second sentence, he moved to New York City and there became a community leader and the mentor to many Boricua poets and activists. Espada had not had the chance to know him before. After their Boston encounter they became fast friends and held an intense intellectual exchange that lasted until Soto Vélez’s death in 1993. This friendship inspired an expansive meditation about history and its burdens, especially that of Puerto Rico’s colonial experience and Nationalist resistance, in many of the poems in Espada’s next collection, Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (1990). Published by Curbstone Press, a small progressive publisher, the book won the PEN-Revson Fellowship for Poetry and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Soto Velez’s life as poet and Nationalist is the subject of two Espada poems. In 1991 Espada and Gilbert named their firstborn child after him.
In 1993 Espada’s wish to be part of an English college program finally came to fruition. His literary accomplishments helped him land a faculty position in English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Espada teaches creative writing workshops and a seminar on the life and works of Pablo Neruda. Full-time employment as a professor has given Espada the opportunity to branch out into new literary endeavors as an anthologist and essayist. He edited for Curbstone Press a collection of works by the publisher’s political poets, Poetry Like Bread (1994), a type of homage to Márquez’s 1974 anthology. For the University of Massachusetts Press he put together El Coro (1997), a compilation of recent Latino and Latina poetry, which received the Gustavo Myers Outstanding Book Award. His collection of essays, Zapata’s Disciple, published by South End Press, won the 1999 Independent Publisher Book Award.
In the last ten years, Espada has also kept a busy schedule of readings and presentations nationwide that has earned him a visibility unequaled among Latino poets. His bouts with NPR and Nike, signs of his growing national profile, have only increased his reputation. Espada has also increased the rhythm of his poetic output and expanded the range of his themes and concerns. Since joining the University of Massachusetts faculty he has published three new poetry collections with Norton: City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993), Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), and A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000). Imagine won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. In 2003 Norton published the most comprehensive anthology of Espada’s work yet, Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982–2002. The book ends with a postscript of seventeen new poems written in 2002 in the light of significant personal and national events: a first trip to Ireland, health problems in his family, and the anniversary of the 9/11 Twin Towers attack.
Espada’s first book, The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero, already predicts the full range of his poetic themes and capacities. In the tradition of Nuyorican poetry, each of its poems documents the institutional and economic neglect Latinos suffer as they pursue dreams of prosperity in rundown inner cities and backbreaking crop fields. Each poem also sings a paean to the persistence of immigrants who survive abuse and uncertainty with bulletproof dignity: “fishermen wading into the North American gloom” who can pull out “a fierce gasping life / from the polluted current” (p. 15). As in the work of Espada’s Nuyorican predecessors, the harsh life conditions of New York City and lush memories of Puerto Rico’s rural landscape are set in counterpoint as main settings for the book. Still, poems about Chicago, Nicaragua, and the U.S.–Mexican border are already signs of the Whitman- and Neruda-like scope of vision that will distinguish Espada’s standpoint from the narrower inner-city scenarios of Nuyorican poetry.
Still, Espada’s self-effacing poetic persona avoids the bombast and self-aggrandizement frequent in Whitman and Neruda’s voices. There are no “songs of myself” in Espada’s work, only “hymns to the unsung.” Espada limits his presence in these poems to that of a compassionate, observant, yet unsentimental witness of immigrant struggles. The poems come through as straightforward yet haunting anecdotes, stories one cannot walk away from, because of their quiet urgency. “Mrs. Baez Serves Coffee on the Third Floor” tells about the fire set by a Manhattan landlord to terrorize and expel his Dominican tenants and cash in on gentrification: “Everyone knows it, / the building’s worth more empty” (p. 2). Rather than indulge in melodrama by recreating the night of the fire, Espada describes its aftermath like a determined investigator who collects the quirkiest, most telling details for trial evidence:
It hunches
with a brittle black spine
where they poured
gasoline on the stairs
. . .
Some of the people left.
There’s a room
on the third floor:
high-heeled shoes kicked off,
a broken dresser,
the saint’s portrait
hanging where it looked on
shrugging shoulders for years,
soot, trash, burnt tile,
a perfect black light bulb
to remember everything. (p. 1)
What begins as a sort of crime-scene report becomes in mid-poem a song of ethnic vindication and pride. Although the fire fumes have killed an old Dominicano “over the objections / of his choking spirit,” the poem softly celebrates the courage of the tenants who choose to stay and not be intimidated. After documenting the fearsome ravages of the fire, the poet records how the timeless customs of hospitality and sharing that characterize the community continue undisturbed. The old men keep playing dominoes. The children “laugh anyway,” playing between “charred metal doors.” And Mrs. Baez “still serves coffee / in porcelain cups / to strangers, / coffee the color / of a young girl’s skin / in Santo Domingo” (pp. 1–3). The poem turns Mrs. Baez’s elegant gesture into a youthful symbol of regeneration and hope, merging present and past, city and island, outrage and dignity. There is the sense that the resilience of Latino traditions will outlast any abuse, that Latino generosity will win out over greed and destructiveness.
Espada’s father, Frank, is the subject of two of the collection’s strongest poems. This is significant, since the whole book can be appreciated as an artistic collaboration between photographer-father and poet-son. In concise poems the son emulates the father’s knack for stark black-and-white portraiture: the lens’s capacity to condense years of painful barrio experiences into one snapshot; the focus on a telling gesture, a giveaway expression. Both Espadas go for the one visual image that can summarize a lifetime. In these two poems, the poet portrays the portraitist; both are stories of immigrant disappointment and lost dreams. “Tato Hates the New York Yankees” tells about his father’s career in semipro baseball during the 1940s. The “only Puerto Rican allowed / on the neighborhood team,” he wows the scouts with “the most natural swing / since Ted Williams.” Still, Frank loses his chance to try out for the Yankees when “the alarm clock / didn’t work that morning.” He ends up “soaping his illusions / off the walls” as part of the sanitation crew at the Holland Tunnel. The poem implies that Frank’s failure to ascend in the ranks of baseball had more to do with standing racism than with lack of heart and talent. It concludes with a terse metaphor of resentful defeat: “‘I wasn’t good enough,’ / he says today, but the words / are cheated bettors at the track” (pp. 12–13). In an interview, Espada has revealed that these verses were inspired by a photo print of racetrack bettors his father hung up at home with other pictures: “To me that photograph summarized the experience of human frustration, illusions and dreams which do not materialize” (Pérez-Erdelyi, Americas Review, p. 79).
The title poem also builds up to a remarkable “photorealist” synthesis. It is an elegy to his father’s lost dream about returning to the green Utuado Mountains his family left forty years ago. “I can’t go back / They poisoned the country,” says the father. “They” refers here to Puerto Rico’s new “landlords”: “General Electric, Union Carbide, / Kennecott Copper, ITT.” These transnational companies, enticed by Operation Bootstrap incentives and Commonwealth tax exemptions, built industrial complexes that harmed the environment throughout the island. The poem expresses the pain of a boxed-in, decades-long frustration, “feeling in the head / the city’s drill-press rhythms,” “rage of a bloodclot / streaked in oil refinery sky” (pp. 8–9). It concludes with a startling flashback that succinctly conveys how the betrayed immigrant balances the weights of sadness and harsh work with the small but powerful consolations of music and dance:
Then sometimes it is 1940,
sadness enormous
as a block of ice backlifted
up tenement stairs
on 108th St.,
staggering an iceboy’s bolero. (p. 9)
Espada’s ability to stamp into a single image layered references to the traditions, aspirations, and hardships of Puerto Rican and Latino immigrants is evident in the title of his next collection, Trumpets from the Islands of Their Eviction. In the book’s first section, Espada begins to put forth what he calls his “poetry of advocacy.” In these poems Espada denounces the many legal subterfuges that complicate and worsen the immigrant’s plight in North America. The poet-now-lawyer moves from the streets into the courtroom; there he unveils and testifies to the unjust treatment of minorities throughout U.S. legal history. The eviction in the title not only names the state-enforced homelessness that afflicts many immigrants; in these poems Espada also turns eviction into a metaphor of the colonial underpinnings of diaspora itself, of the displacements that expanding empires force upon the populations they occupy after voiding and supplanting their native system of rights. Espada rescues from oblivion the faces and cases suppressed or disregarded by misguided justice as if poetry were the ultimate Supreme Court in which to make a final appeal. In an interview in Z Magazine, Espada explains: “The whole idea of advocacy in poetry is something I derive from my training in the law. Advocacy is speaking on behalf of those who don’t have the opportunity to be heard. . . . What I do when I write a poem about someone being evicted is no different from standing up and representing that person in court when that person is threatened with eviction” (Anderson, p. 20).
Thus the title poem is a roll call of grievances against an arbitrary legal system that the poet files in the name of those “identified by case number / summons in the wrong language.” Mrs. Alfaro, unfairly evicted for sealing “ten trapped mice” in sandwich bags as a gift to her landlord. Daniel, unfairly evicted from third grade to “retarded classrooms” for not speaking English. Even “the nameless Florida jíbaro” that grocery clerks refused to service gets his due. Meanwhile, at the bar, “immigrants with Spanish mouths” hear loud “trumpets” whose bleats swarm the barrio “along with predatory squad cars / and bullying handcuffs” (pp. 17–18). The triumphal brass section of the bar’s jukebox salsa song warns the authorities that the tenants will continue resisting colonial eviction. Other poems in this section testify to the lawlessness migrant workers are subject to in the United States. In “The Chota and the Patrón,” a squealer prevents the legal aid team from helping Delaware crop pickers protect themselves from intimidation and subhuman barrack conditions. “Water, White Cotton, and the Rich Man” tells of Rosa, daughter of a Mexican cotton picker in Lubbock, Texas, “whose body stopped growing / at the age of twelve” (p. 36), ravaged by pesticides and lack of drinking water in the fields. “Toque de queda: Curfew in Lawrence” describes the escalating confrontations that follow years of decline in a strapped industrial town in Massachusetts. Unemployed workers riot in the streets; police built barricades and make arbitrary arrests; white mobs harass Spanish speakers; the archbishop finally “comes to Lawrence / to say a Spanish mass” (p. 26).
Other poems in this section are family elegies. These could also be called “hospital dirges” since they track the death process of an ill ancestor, the grandparent who began the hard migrant journey with “out-loud dreams” (p. 15) and goes back home to the island resting in a coffin. Still, these poems are more about legacy than about lamentation. “El señor está muerto” (The gentleman is dead) mourns the passing of grandfather Francisco Espada. It describes the searing bedside vigil, the final deathbed symptoms—“eyes were white boats overturned, / blind yet amazed at hallucinations”—and the business of making funeral arrangements. In doing so, the poem makes clear that death does not mark an end to family tradition but its most powerful moment of transmission. When an ancestor dies, inheritance assumes its full weight and becomes an even greater gift and obligation. Thus when Frank hears the “hospital words” of the title at the funeral parlor,
son’s body huge with a father’s life
lowered to a leather chair. (p. 19)
This legacy can turn into an inexorable burden, a curse, for those who choose to deny it. The daughter in “From an Island You Cannot Name” cannot shake off her Black–Caribbean ancestry even when she, like her hospitalized veteran father thirty years before, protests that “she is Other / that she is not” (p. 32). When that legacy is embraced, it turns into an inexhaustible, life-affirming source of imagination that towers over any feelings of social alienation or urban anomie, as in the poem “We Live By What We See at Night”:
This was the inheritance
of your son, born in New York:
that years before
I saw Puerto Rico,
I saw the mountains
looming above the projects,
overwhelming Brooklyn,
living by what I saw at night,
with my eyes closed. (p. 27)
The next section, “La tormenta” (The storm), consists of eight poems about war and revolution in different fronts and borderlands of the Americas. Some are deft character portraits of ordinary Hispanics who have chosen to take a stand while caught in the turmoil. Fernando, the fast-talking Indian jeep driver in Nicaragua, supports the Sandinista Revolution against the mercenary Contras. Héctor, the Salvadorian refugee at the Boston soup kitchen, still hears army helicopters hovering over his village seeking teenagers like himself to conscript into its ranks. Jacobo, the Guatemalan painter, left for Boston fleeing death-squad threats at home; he has just been denied political asylum and waits for an appeal.
The poems in the third section, “Pinball between Madhouses,” constitute a singular genre in Espada’s work: songs of insomnia. These are advisory texts that warn about the pathological extremes that come with the dislocations of immigrant experience: poems about rage, compulsive sleeplessness, snapping under pressure, drug addiction, and madness. Here the immigrant seems to suffer from acute sleep deprivation in the “indentured servitude” (The Immigrant lceboy’s Bolero, p. 14) of graveyard shifts, slaving as night watchmen or janitors, startled by the screams of a mugging or “the sound of factories exhaling” (p. 10), fretting over the threats of eviction or deportation, frantic about the next dope hit. Restful sleep is an elusive elixir that the overworked Puerto Rican migrant stubbornly seeks to keep his psychical balance and replenish his dreams. Thus, in “The Spanish of Our Out-Loud Dreams,” Espada writes:
Los puertorriqueños are always looking
for a place to sleep:
not in the houses we scrape clean for others,
not in the migrant camps we leave
after the crop is busheled,
not on the buses blowing out their bad lungs
in the horseshoe curve of highways,
or on the beaches of an island
spiked with the picket fences of tall hotels. (p. 15)
Since, as all exiles, Latino immigrants have their consciousness split between discrepant languages, traditions, and landscapes, harsh conditions will drive them to behaviors that authorities will interpret as unstable or schizoid, keeping them captive in mental institutions. In Espada’s insomnia poems, sleeplessness leads to such “madness.” In this fractured state of mind, the immigrant loses track of reality as she cannot recover her dreams, of time as he forgets his identity. In “Pinball between Madhouses,” Espada parodies the arbitrary mental health bureaucracy that manhandles those Latinos unable to adjust psychologically to the demands of exile:
Slum building in blurred sun
and a woman started shrieking
on the sixth floor.
Hospital men, white men
with tightened faces
strapped her to a stretcher
. . .
The ambulance left, bright and loud
like a traveling circus,
a pinball between madhouses. (p. 54)
In Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands, Espada takes leave of many idiosyncrasies in Nuyorican poetry to cement himself in his own style and trade. He avoids compulsive “Spanglish” wordplay (the mixed code-switching so dear to poets such as Piñero, Algarín, Tato Laviera, and Víctor Hernández Cruz) and composes a strict bilingual collection; the poems in flawless English on the left page are rendered meticulously into Spanish on the right. As an experiment, this effort transcends mere self-translation. It requires thinking the poem in terms of two distinct linguistic audiences, which may or may not be bilingual. It pre-inscribes in the English draft the spirit of Spanish, hispanizing the poem’s style and content even more forcefully. Such an intricate and calculated degree of construction sets Espada’s poems apart from the spontaneous gestural and oral inflections, the slang and swagger, that are the trademarks of the Nuyorican street poet’s performance. Espada’s disregard for the site-specific, improvisational qualities in Nuyorican poetry has to do with his commitment to rigorously document in his poetry Puerto Rico’s forgotten colonial and Nationalist history, to save it from “the crypt-wreckage of graveyard” (p. 22). In Rebellion there are poems of pilgrimage to restore the tombs of ancestors, solemn dialogues with the dead, meditations about statues and landmarks. Here Espada chooses to build word-monuments that can last long in public memory rather than exist only through performance.
In “La tumba de Buenaventura Roig” (“The Tomb of Buenaventura Roig”), Espada addresses his great-grandfather, an enterprising Utuado mayor who, having stood against the American occupation, was once venerated throughout the county: “Once peasants in the thousands / streamed down hillsides / to witness the great eclipse / of your funeral.” Espada searches for traces of Roig’s role in the town’s history but finds few signs of remembrance: “The drunken caretaker / cannot find the grave”; not even the “bench / with the family name” remains in the plaza. Only the oldest gravedigger remembers the funeral. The poem suggests that colonial suppression of the memory of those who resisted U.S. hegemony is at the source of such neglect. The poet ends by asking Roig’s voice to rain down in a “cloudburst of wild sacred song” (pp. 20–23). As Espada does with other independentista heroes and events, he writes this poem as a memorial that compensates for the lack of Roig’s statue in the plaza. The poem stands for Roig’s missing tombstone in the cemetery.
The title poem continues the remembrance of family heroes who resisted the American colonial establishment in Puerto Rico and were suppressed. It commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the 1937 Ponce Massacre, when Governor Blanton Winship allowed police to shoot a march of unarmed Nationalist Party Republican Cadets in the streets of Puerto Rico’s second largest city on Palm Sunday. Twenty young Nationalists were killed. The massacre was the last in a spiraling chain of events. On 24 October 1935 police had killed several Nationalist Party officials in an altercation at the Rio Piedras University campus. At their funeral, Albizu Campos swore revenge for their deaths and called for the formation of a Nationalist military corps. On 23 February 1936 two Nationalists assassinated Police Chief E. Francis Riggs as reprisal for the “Río Piedras massacre.” The authorities then rounded up all Nationalist leaders—Albizu Campos, Corretjer, and Soto Vélez among them—and tried and convicted them for conspiracy and sedition. The march in Ponce was organized to protest their deportation to a federal prison in Atlanta. In trademark Espada fashion, the poem concentrates on the intimate consequences of history, on how the event derails the marriage plans of two lovers, Pellín and Nina. These are people so ordinary and familiar they are called only by their nicknames:
Fifty years of family history
says it was Pellín
who dipped a finger
into the bloody soup of his own body
and scratched defiance
in jagged wet letters on the sidewalk. (p. 24)
The passage refers to the most sensational and publicized image of the Ponce Massacre: a photograph of a Marina Street wall with the words “Qué viva la República, mueran los asesinos” (Long live the Republic, down with the assassins) painted in blood by one of the victims before dying. Historians are still disputing the victim’s identity. In the poem Espada chooses to rely on a family legend of a friend, Luis Garden Acosta, to show how alive and personal this event remains to many Puerto Ricans. The poem then shifts to the police repression of fiery Puerto Rican demonstrators in New York City, where Nina, now an elder migrant, worries about “the whip of nightsticks” falling on her son, one of the protest leaders. Espada thus establishes New York City as the new front for the struggle for Puerto Rican self-determination, a circle “that must keep moving / always weaving” (p. 26). The next poem, “Clemente’s Bullets,” follows the same historical itinerary of rebellious displacements by tracing Soto Vélez’s career as Nationalist poet and organizer. Involved in political agitation in Puerto Rico during the 1930s, federal prison during the 1940s, and community building in New York City after 1955, now “his long white hair / is winter sky, the smoke of cities / taken by the rebels at last” (p. 30). As one in the series of love poems Espada dedicates to his wife, “Colibrí” (Hummingbird) brings closer to home Espada’s reflection about the historical plight of colonized people. It begins with a meditation about the power Spanish conquerors had in the Caribbean to impose new names upon the territories and their inhabitants, including the Taino Indians and the colibrí. The poem then leaps to the present, a vacation in a Jayuya hacienda room near Utuado where Katherine Gilbert patiently cups into her hands a scared, trapped hummingbird—“a racing Taino heart / frantic as if hearing / the bellowing god of gunpowder / for the first time”—and gently releases it through the window. The poem ends, yearning: “If only history / were like your hands” (pp. 34–37). The colibrí becomes a symbol for the fragility of all conquered beings that deserve release, the hands a wish for an alternative history of deliverance.
“Bully,” an ingenious and mischievous poem about Theodore Roosevelt’s participation in the 1898 Spanish American War, crowns the book’s ongoing meditation about ironic reversals in colonial history. Since Rubén Darío’s 1905 disparaging poem “A Roosevelt” (“To Roosevelt”), Latin American writers have often denounced Roosevelt as the prototypical imperialist from the United States. In “Bully,” Espada flicks a dash of wicked humor into this tradition by showing the statue of the great defiler of Spanish American sovereignty vandalized by the children of the conquered. The metropole is now overtaken by the people it victimized; a new, vibrant, multiethnic nation of Hispanic immigrants gets the upper hand over a bigoted warmonger now fossilized and obsolete. The poem collapses two time periods—the war years the statue longs for; the playful present of schoolchildren during recess—to create the comic effect of romping children defeating an arrogant general, military weapons outdone by paint brushes, Goliath humiliated by a league of Davids:
In the school auditorium,
the Theodore Roosevelt statue
is nostalgic
for the Spanish-American war,
each fist lonely for a saber
or the reins of anguish-eyed horses,
or a podium to clatter with speeches
glorying in the malaria of conquest.
But now the Roosevelt school
is pronounced Hernández.
Puerto Rico has invaded Roosevelt
with its army of Spanish-singing children
in the hallways,
brown children devouring
the stockpiles of the cafeteria,
children painting Taíno ancestors
that leap naked across murals.
Roosevelt is surrounded
by all the faces
he ever shoved in eugenic spite
and cursed as mongrels, skin of one race
hair and cheekbones of another.
Once Marines tramped
from the newsreel of his imagination;
now children plot to spray graffiti
in parrot-brilliant colors
across the Victorian mustache
and monocle. (p. 38)
Rebellion also features a number of autobiographical pieces—“Revolutionary Spanish Lesson,” “Niggerlips,” “Cross Plains, Wisconsin,” “The Words of the Mute are Like Silver Dollars”—in which Espada professes his strong sense of Latino heritage and identity against hushed or hostile environments of prejudice. The book’s second half includes a series of advocacy poems depicting people from the underclass as they confront the pains of overwork. Federico the fruit picker dies from overexposure to pesticides. Nando the Legal Aid organizer outsmarts Papo, the antiunion crew leader. Julio the illiterate lettuce picker “cheats / signing his name, / copying slowly / from his Social Security card” on a lawsuit against his employer (p. 86). Jorge the Honduran janitor finally quits. Puerto Ricans in a Boston moving crew grunt and sweat under metal desks and cabinets while “The Anglos carried the smallest boxes / or snapped open beers” (p. 26).
The lack of obscene outbursts in these concise, restrained poems about accursed jobs shows how far Espada has strayed from the aggressive oral style and volatile demeanor of Nuyorican writers like Miguel Piñero. This may be part of Espada’s sustained critique of Latin American machismo, which he lays out in his essay “The Puerto Rican Dummy and the Merciful Son” (Zapata’s Disciple, p. 37). Espada appears to believe that, whatever its relevance in Latino expression and culture, the rhetorical abuse of profanity in social poetry ends up making its style and message less forceful and effective, as too much damning depletes understanding and trivializes real defiance. This critical outlook is the theme of one of the very few poems featuring a cuss in Espada’s work, “Portrait of a Real Hijo de Puta” (Portrait of a real son of a bitch). Here Espada reflects on what these swear words mean literally: “Not the obscenity, / but a real ten year old / son of a whore, / locked out of the apartment / so mamá could return / to the slavery / of her ancestors” (p. 46). He thus paints a compassionate picture of a fragile, obscure individual whose real vulnerability and stigma worsens anytime someone hurls the expression, in anger or in play, as a mere figure of insult or admiration.
In City of Coughing and Dead Radiators, Espada takes his ethics of political compassion to a new level. Espada’s vocation for advocacy remains steadfast, and he refines his craft in political poems that are more evocative and reflexive, brimming with stark and subtle ironies. The book begins with a four-poem series written in the wake of the 1992 quincentenary commemoration of Columbus’s discovery of America that examines the damaging legacies of imperial conquest and political persecution in the Caribbean. In “The Hidalgo’s Hat and a Hawk’s Bell of Gold,” Espada explores the dark side of Columbus’s reign as governor in Isabela, Hispaniola’s first town, when he decreed Indians’ hands be chopped off when they did not meet “a hawk’s bell / full of gold” head tax: “Their stumps became torches / seething flames of blood, / the vowels of their language / lamentations flattening the tongue” (p. 17). The next three poems then leap to present-day instances of colonial abuse in Puerto Rico under U.S. rule. “The Admiral and the Snake” recounts the years the U.S. Navy decimated the environment of the Puerto Rican island municipality of Culebra (Spanish for snake) with “blast-intoxicated target practice” until civil disobedience in the shelling fields forced “the commanders / [to cancel] the rehearsal for apocalypse at last” (p. 19). “The Lover of a Subversive Is Also a Subversive” denounces long-standing FBI surveillance and harassment of independentista dissenters and their loved ones in the island. “Cockroaches of Liberation” celebrates the skills of resourceful student strikers in Río Piedras who reconvene after evading police repression “like cockroaches of liberation / too quick for stomping boots” (pp. 23–24).
Still, Espada explores new roads as well. In Rebellion, Espada began a deep retrospection into how Puerto Rican history was interwoven into his family ancestry; in City this effort turns into an introspection through the years of his childhood and adolescence. In this journey through personal memory, Espada breaks with his inclination to write about underprivileged others and only about himself when recounting the experiences that have politicized him as an adult. Still, these growing-up poems are far from self-indulgent; they zero in on moments of revelation and hard learning in which the child catches sight of the violent ironies inscribed in unjust or uneven social and colonial situations. In “The Lesson of My Uncle’s Nose,” the speaker recalls sparring as a teenager with his uncle in a first boxing lesson. Before putting on the gloves, the uncle promises “not to punch too hard” and fools his nephew into agreeing not to hit him on the nose; the latter then sees his uncle smiling while “spanking my face flush, / dizzy as the mambo record on the turntable, / my stomach a washing machine of nausea” (pp. 70–71). The lesson learned is not about boxing, but about how bitter adults can vent their personal frustrations on weaker family members in small but burning acts of betrayal. “Day of the Dead on Wortman Avenue” evokes “the lust of a paranoid” (p. 29) that Halloween rituals unleash in children and adults alike within the crime-ridden world of the projects, magnifying the gallery of ghosts parading in the hallways. “Coca-Cola and Coco Frío” records how the bountiful tropical landscape enchants the child from the projects after he drinks from a chilled coconut during his first visit to the “island of family folklore.” Fascination mixes with bafflement when the child begins to perceive the contradictions inherent in colonized mentalities:
For years afterward, the boy marveled at an island
where the people drank Coca-Cola
and sang jingles from World War II
in a language they did not speak,
while so many coconuts in the trees
sagged heavy with milk, swollen
and unsuckled. (pp. 26–27)
Further into this personal vein are more poems inspired by Espada’s wife. All along family has stood as the best vehicle for historical reflection, redress, and intervention in Espada’s political imagination. It is the one space where conflicted legacies can be effectively joined and reconstituted, evils expunged, and virtues expanded. In these poems to Katherine, Espada finds a new face for his parables of advocacy. Journeying through the ancestral blood of his wife’s Connecticut memories, the Hispanic husband finds common ground in a foreign social scenery. The Nuyorican poet leaves the inner city and the Utuado Mountains and ventures deep into the woods of Robert Frost’s poetic territory. “Blackballed by the Rainbow Girls” tells how Katherine became ostracized from her community for speaking out against the exclusion of a local girl from the Rainbow Girls, a youth club at her family’s Masonic Lodge. The girl had been “stained by the character of her mother; / the choice of a Puerto Rican stepfather / brought small-town grimaces between sips of Coke.” Like many other Espada poems, “Blackballed” records a distressing political epiphany. Katherine loses her faith in Masonic rituals and beliefs when she realizes how these sustain the virulent, contaminating character of white prejudice, “that stain spreading brightly / across her own cheeks and forehead” (pp. 64–65). “White Birch,” one of Espada’s most searingly personal and hopeful poems, deals with how new love, family, and birth can miraculously heal the innermost wounds inflicted by unspeakable domestic violence in previous generations. Orchestrating flashing images of memory, anatomy, and landscape into a heartrending account of their firstborn’s birth, in “White Birch” Espada delves skillfully into a new repertoire of cultural symbols. “This might be the first Puerto Rican poem swaying with white birch instead of coconut palms,” Espada quips (Zapata’s Disciple, p. 46). Through his loving and visionary empathy for his wife’s traumatic family heritage, in poems such as “To Skin the Hands of God,” “Thanksgiving,” and “The River Will Not Testify,” Espada the Latino writer is on his way to becoming the poet of New England’s hidden “white” history.
City also features a sequence of poems inspired by Espada’s experiences as a Legal Aid tenant lawyer in Chelsea. These are no longer poems of advocacy in the strictest sense but a catalogue of ghoulish apparitions, ghosts of desperate tenant cases lost to an absurd system that haunt the lawyer’s conscience in their obstinate quest for justice. “I cannot evict them / from my insomniac nights, / tenants in the city of coughing / and dead radiators” (p. 39). In his dreams and recollections the poet/ex-lawyer sees the pleading, terrorized faces of the “spectral troops” of eviction filing into the courtroom. On the face of one Guatemalan refugee struggling to save his family, he sees “carved wings of fright / into his forehead, / growing more crooked / with every eviction notice”; on “the red-haired woman / with no electricity / . . . the drug’s heat / swimming in the pools / of her blue bruises.” He recalls the craven legal antics of dissolute slumlords and the subhuman conditions of the dwellings: “ceilings black with roaches,” “while mice darted / like runaway convicts” (pp. 39–44). In “DSS Dream” and “Tires Stacked in the Hallways of Civilization,” he spoofs the nightmarish, nonsensical criteria of the legal and social services officials that dictate the immigrants’ fate. These are poems of humbling in which the ex-lawyer acknowledges his impotence in making right using the standing court system, having there “a bookshelf of prophecy / but a cabinet empty of cures” (p. 45). Espada here reasserts his position as public poet as the best way of exercising his vocation for justice given that, in U.S. courtrooms,
For all those sprawled down stairs
with the work boot’s crusted map
printed on the back,
the creases of the judge’s face
collapse into a fist. (p. 41)
Imagine the Angels of Bread shows Espada at the height of his powers. This is a book of splendid architecture, overflowing vision, remarkable coherence, and poetic self-confidence. If City of Coughing pictured the insomniac poet afflicted by the failures of justice and the misfortune of its victims, here the title poem has him using the full resources of his prophetic imagination to dream a utopia of restitution. In a visionary reversal, the “spectral troops” of the mistreated and dejected the poet had once testified for come back from their eviction to pass judgment upon those who exploited them. “Squatters evict landlords, / gazing like admirals from the rail / of the roofdeck”; “shawled refugees deport judges”; “darkskinned men / lynched a century ago / return to sip coffee quietly / with the apologizing descendants / of their executioners”; “the hands / pulling tomatoes from the vine / uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine.” The poem’s repeated emphasis on justice taking action now (the “this is the year” refrain) indicates that the speaker is taking a stand to pronounce a defining statement before marching ahead. In “Imagine” Espada reexamines all his previous achievements as a poet to articulate an ars poetica, a defense of the poetic imagination as a social force capable of challenging hegemonic strictures and transforming history:
If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.
So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.
The astonishing final stanza transforms the “crypt-wreckage of graveyard”—those untended tombs that obsess Espada—into a miraculous, last judgment image of resurrection and reparation. Cemetery angels turn their stone bodies into bread to finally sate the hunger of the wretched of the earth.
Imagine is also Espada’s most methodically autobiographical book. The first section—“My Native Costume”—features poems that move progressively from his earliest childhood memories to the bewildering turnabouts of life at twenty-five up to the sobering emergency hospitalization of his infant son Clemente in 1992. These poems focus on the evolution of the poetic self: the “I” that slowly awakens to life, awareness, memory, awe, pain, struggle, violence, rage, political consciousness, and, finally, to the magical capacities of literary language. Espada thus recalls meeting at age two, for the first and last time, his shadowy, institutionalized Jewish grandfather; already intuits at six that “something bad had happened” (p. 25) before 22 November 1963, the day of President John F. Kennedy’s murder, because of the deteriorated, vandalized conditions of his school’s facilities; believes at seven that his father had died when he was arrested for picketing; acts as his father’s teenage “accomplice” in an incongruous Puerto Rican pig roast ritual at their Long Island backyard; wants “to break this piñata / painted with a face like mine” (p. 33) in a fight spiked by murderous jealousy with his delinquent brother. Other poems refer to perplexing working-class experiences of youthful frustration and release working as bouncer, gas station attendant, printing plant bindery worker, and primate lab caretaker, as well as standing in line for food stamps.
Even the advocacy poems included in the book turn the spotlight from the client to the tenant lawyer incensed or overwhelmed by the crooked irresponsibility of colluding landlords and judges. In “Offerings to an Ulcerated God,” the emphasis is on the “burning / bubble in his throat” that the lawyer posing as interpreter experiences when he has to tell Mrs. López the judge is evicting her without considering damning evidence against the landlord, the “offerings” she has in her hand (pp. 60–61). In “Thieves of Light” the lawyer-speaker arranges to “burglarize” and restore electricity to Luisa’s apartment, “three months in darkness” because landlord Gus’s mafioso reputation inhibits the authorities from taking action against his abuses. The inefficacy of the Chelsea law agencies thus forces the lawyer to turn into a “thief.” Humbled by the gratitude in Luisa’s face “as if the rosary / had brought me here” when the ploy succeeds, the poet concludes by acknowledging his personal obeisance to a “louder light”: the luminous miracle that underlies every act taken against drab injustice.
I know there were no angels
swimming in that dim yellow globe,
but there was a light louder than Gus,
so much light
I had to close my eyes. (pp. 58–59)
This sense of wondrous adumbration in the worldly, of glimpsing a designio (sign, destiny, design, alignment) in the daily tumult, traverses Espada’s work and is the main theme in two key poems. As a vertiginous chronicle of the wild turns his life took in 1982, “My Twenty-Fifth Year Amazed the Astrologers” cues the reader into the total autobiographical intent of the book. What awes the “astrologers,” expert readers of life’s designios, is that, despite the chaos of “planets by Christmas zooming inebriated,” a “catastrophe of silence” is missed by a few “inches” (pp. 49–50) and the author is able to fulfill his literary fate: 1982 also marks the publication date of his first book of poems. “Because Clemente Means Merciful” mixes designio and Espada’s intuition of secular miracles by detailing how Espada’s infant son’s survival from a life-threatening bout with pneumonia is somehow connected to the dutiful clemency Espada shows volunteering as interpreter to the “hospital roommate’s father / from Guatemala, ignored by the doctors / as if he had picked their morning coffee.” Espada concludes the poem by addressing his son about his life-saving designio of mercy, “the meaning of your name”:
I know someday you’ll stand beside
the Guatemalan fathers,
speak in the tongue
of all the shunned faces,
breathe in a music
we have never heard, and live
by the meaning of your name. (p. 67)
A book about how life’s designios lead a child from the projects to the adult exercise of a finely perfected poetry of social commitment ends by paying homage to some of Espada’s titular political poets: Demetria Martínez, Pablo Neruda, and Clemente Soto Vélez. To each is dedicated a visionary poem that proposes supernatural scenarios, improbable junctures, and alternative histories. “Sing in the Voice of a God Even Atheists Can Hear” tells of the “conspiracy” charges the Justice Department brought against Martínez for being involved in the sanctuary movement, “smuggling” Salvadorian refugees into the United States. Martínez’s own poetry, “evidence abducted from her desk,” was used in the indictment. The jury acquitted Martínez on First Amendment grounds, but Espada concludes the poem with a fantastic tableau: a chorus of Mexican and Salvadorian ancestors, peasants, and workers rises from the dead and sings to persuade the “jury across the border” (pp. 87–89). “The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park,” perhaps Espada’s most comical and inventive poem, has two of his heroes exercising their respective arts at the top of their game. A fugitive and incognito Pablo Neruda, the Chilean secret police on his heels, watches ecstatically as Ted Williams slams a homer at Boston’s famous baseball park on 7 August 1948. Even though the poem’s narrator was born nine years after this impossible encounter, he facetiously assures us “This is true. I was there at Fenway” (p. 81). Neruda blows his cover as “The fugitive poet could not keep silent, / standing on his seat to declaim the ode / erupted in crowd-bewildering Spanish from his mouth,” and runs to “disappear / through a Fenway tunnel” when his persecutors scramble after him (p. 80).
The closing poem is Espada’s most ambitious: a vigorous, resonant elegy with five cantos and a recurring quatrain celebrating Clemente Soto Vélez’s life accomplishments as avant-garde poet, revolutionary Nationalist, and East Harlem labor organizer. Its writing was prompted by a 1994 visit to Soto Vélez’s grave in Lares, Puerto Rico, which Espada finds is as desolate and nameless as his grandfather’s in Utuado, “parched and cracking, a plank marked M75. / . . . So the poet who named us / suffocates in the anonymity of dirt” (p. 100). This disappointment drives Espada to tap deep into the hymn reservoirs of his voice and compose a multidimensional epic cantata that restores the full dignity of Soto Vélez’s memory. To achieve this, “Hands without Irons Become Dragonflies” surveys 130-plus years in Puerto Rico’s historical struggle for independence. Among its many motifs are the failed Grito de Lares insurrection against Spain in 1868; Theodore Roosevelt’s battleship visit to the island in 1906, the year after Soto Vélez was born; Soto Vélez’s role in the Nationalists’ 1932 armed takeover of the San Juan Capitol and further radicalization as a Marxist in federal prison; the vivid, exploding imagery in Soto Vélez’s verses (“subversive angels / born in the sky, / an insurrection of sunflowers, / a goddess of fireflies, / a hurricane of persecuted stars”) and political speeches, so entrancing that, upon hearing them, his New York audiences “swore red flowers rained on their hats / and floated in the shovels of their hands.” The poem concludes with Sóto Velez’s poetic spirit transforming commonplace items in Puerto Rican reality—a dragonfly in the plaza, a horse stopping traffic—into prophetic signs of its coming independence. The poem’s symphonic dimensions and sturdy lacework of motifs recall the expert, soulful intricacy of a requiem by Mozart or Verdi. The poet’s craft is intensified by his will to immortalize the dead through his words, to show that “this stripped and starving earth is not a grave” (pp. 93–101).
A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen rounds off many of the themes and concerns explored in Espada’s previous books. Its opening poem, “My Name is Espada,” harks further back in family ancestry to explore the conflicted ethnic and social foundations of personal identity. Still, in the following pieces Espada deflects the focus away from himself and sets it back on others. This time these are not tenant clients but relatives at dinner or at work, needy Puerto Ricans attending the 1998 Governor’s inaugural, migrants that manage to return and retire to the island, fellow writers and activists like Mumia Abu-Jamal and Andrew Salkey who have suffered unfair persecution for professing radical ideas. Poems about Grandmother Tata’s death and funeral deal with how such rituals of passing can either strengthen or befuddle family ties. New, unheroic portraits of his father focus on the flashes of anger that dogged him during Espada’s growing years. There are also poems about specters branded indelibly in the poet’s memory: a dead dog found in a field where he played baseball, the car borrowed in college once “used in a murder” with “a ghost in the trunk.” Dedicated to the great American activist Abe Osheroff, “The Carpenter Swam to Spain” is another vintage “poem-memorial” that “resurrects” the pro-Republic volunteers of the Spanish Civil War’s Abraham Lincoln Brigade who died during the sinking of their transport, Cuidad de Barcelona. It concludes with Espada “tapping” the ship’s name “like a telegraph operator / with news of survivors” (pp. 67–69). There is an admirable ode to Katherine’s earrings and a song of apology that proposes a hilarious, extreme act of penance. Espada broadens his deft use of irony in a brilliant poem in which he mockingly blasts the owners of a Cambridge, Massachusetts, Mexican restaurant who forbid his cousin from waiting tables for wearing dreadlocks. Espada’s litany of clever curses recalls the sequence of righteous reversals in “Imagine the Angels of Bread.” Here, rather than solemn or miraculous, final justice is shown to have a sardonic, sly sense of humor that plays on the paranoias lurking behind “white” guilt:
May a Zapatista squadron commandeer the refrigerator,
liberating a pillar of tortillas at gunpoint;
may you hallucinate dreadlocks
braided in thick vines around your ankles;
and may the Aztec gods pinned like butterflies
to the menu wait for you in the parking lot
at midnight, demanding that you spell their names. (pp. 23–24)
The new poems in Alabanza explore new directions that broaden even more the geopolitical horizons within Espada’s poetic reach. The Chelsea courtroom, the Brooklyn projects, the Utuado cemetery, and the New England woods no longer act as the main setting for a poem but as one among many wider frames of references well beyond Neruda’s own New World hemispheric boundaries. Alabanza coalesces a new array of ethnoscapes—an Old San Juan street during a strongly Africanized San Sebastian festival; the pastoral yet history-scarred Irish scenery of Achill Island; the Mexican metropolis, heartland, and borderland; the Arab World—to fashion poems that celebrate the overlapping of immigrant, revolutionary, and anticolonial experience across American and non-American nations. The Puerto Rican cordillera is evoked in an Irish mountain range; blacklisting in post-Zapatista Mexico recalls repression in 1973 post-Allende Chile; Carl Sandburg’s bookish shyness as a young Illinois army recruit in the Spanish–American War is juxtaposed with great-great-granduncle Luis Espada’s thespian antics as a colorful Utuado cigar factory reader and literature lover; bombed Afghan refugees and Manhattan Latinos address each other in “constellations of smoke.” The poems behave no longer as straightforward anecdotes but as novelistic fields of interlocking transnational stories, with lengthier stanzas and verses and a weightier presence of the poet’s persona acting as side character, as narrator, as singer, as prophetic seer.
“Now the Dead Will Dance the Mambo” has the poet relishing Ireland’s pastoral landscape and peoples during a writer’s residency in Achill Island. While burning turf and hearing Irish songs on the radio, he hears a broadcast announcing the death of world-famous New York Puerto Rican band leader and percussionist “Mambo King” Tito Puente. The news transports the poet’s mind to memories of Brooklyn dances, watching his father dance to Puente’s records; of a Puente performance at Boston Harbor in which his friend and salsa fan Guadalupe tried to get Puente’s drumsticks as mementos. Perhaps as a consequence of trying to explain Puente’s significance as a revered Latino icon to his Irish companions, instead of mourning, Espada begins approximating the Irish and Puerto Rican histories of resistance under the British and U.S. empires. He compares the Irish handheld bodhran drum with the portable plena pandereta, a percussion instrument made of wood and skin first played by Puerto Rican descendants from slaves. Moving to a pub, Espada swaps with the bartender fervent stories about political martyrs in Ireland and Puerto Rico that still stir indignation and pride in the tellers, as if they had happened yesterday. To the tale of the 1916 Easter Dead— in which the Irish insurrectionist Citizen Army leader James Connolly was savagely executed—Espada responds by recalling the 1937 Palm Sunday Dead at the Ponce Massacre and Nationalist hero Rafael Cancel Miranda’s famous childhood remembrance of the event: “My mother left in a white dress and came home in a red dress.” Shooting a game of pool with Puente’s standard “Oye como va” on the jukebox, “The table becomes a dance floor at the Palladium” where “Now James Connolly could dance the mambo / gangrene forever banished from his leg.” With this joyful image of cultural brotherhood and miraculous healing, the poem celebrates the Irish and Puerto Rican reliance on indigenous musical traditions to resist or confront the colonial forces that have tried to subject and assimilate them.
The closing poem, dedicated to the “43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 100,” also commemorates through alabanza those dead at the World Trade Center tragedy. The book’s epigraph reveals that Juan Antonio Corretjer’s classic poem “Oubao-Moin” (Taino for “island of blood”), part of an epic cycle that honors the travails of exploited Indian, black, and white peasant workers along Puerto Rico’s Corozal river, inspires the anaphoric structure and trancelike, chantful tone of the poem. Although Espada appears to narrow down his remembrance to the anonymous food workers at the Windows on the World restaurant killed the morning of 11 September 2001, there is a sweeping impetus in the poem’s use of metonym so that the praise bestowed on one individual seems to unfold in every possible direction to grace all things, memories, and landscapes contiguous to the dead, however remote or infinitesimal. This visionary chain reaction starts with the cook:
Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head
and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye,
a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo,
the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle
glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.
Alabanza. Praise the cook’s yellow Pirates cap
worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane
that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua,
for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked
even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish
rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.
The radius of praise keeps expanding exponentially, a sort of cosmic counter-explosion that includes all of Manhattan, “like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium,” and the nations of the kitchen’s other immigrant workers, “Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana, / Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh” (p. 231). Espada’s model for this extravagant cornucopia of praising is Neruda, not Corretjer. In “The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park,” Espada spoofed jovially this metonymic procedure by having Neruda burst out in effusive praise for Ted Williams’s home run, for his bat, “sword / cut from the ash,” for the ball, “white planet glowing in the atmosphere / of the right field grandstand!” for Fenway Park’s Wall “green wave / from the green sea of the outfield!” even for the hot dog, “pink meat, / pork snouts, sawdust, mouse feces, / human hair, plugging our intestines, / yet baptized joyfully with mustard!” and “the wobbling drunk” demanding his seat (Imagine the Angels of Bread, p. 80). In both poems the spiraling metonymic propulsions of praise go inwardly to what is most minute and mundanely constitutional to life in the kitchen or the park—the radio, the stove, the bread, the dishrag, the hot dog’s innards—and outwardly to what is globally, even universally constitutional—forests, seas, ancestries, cities, nations, religions, planets, and, in “Alabanza,” the souls of the 9-11 dead as “smoke-beings flung as constellations / across the night sky of this city and cities to come” (Alabanza, p. 232), God himself who “has no face” (an Islam-like characterization that caps the poem’s openhearted inclusiveness). Following the cosmic propensities in Neruda, Soto Vélez, and Corretjer’s celebration of the working poor, Espada shows us that poetry exercised as praise helps us realize the multidirectional interconnectedness of all human experience in space and time. In the thrusts of Espada’s alabanza, all ignored or downtrodden peoples are dignified, since through such homage they are shown to weave the innermost fabric of history.
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