What Scattered Ashes Leave behind: Expressions of Nuyorican Identity in Miguel Piñero’s A Lower East Side Poem

Marcia Alesan Dawkins

Abstract


Miguel Piñero’s (1985) A Lower East Side Poem offers social and spatial critique of New York City’s Lower East Side and the corruption and neocolonialism that made it a contested domain in the 1970s and 80s. In so doing, the poem functions as Piñero’s last will and testament and description of how the urban landscape of The Lower East side was ground for reshaping Nuyorican identity. This essay takes A Lower East Side Poem as a starting point for understanding Nuyorican identity as a dynamic expression of vernacular cosmopolitan and indigenous concerns using rich rhetorical representations.
Key words: Nuyorican; Rhetoric; Miguel Pinero; Puerto Rico; Identity; Vernacular Cosmopolitanism; Indigeneity

Resumé: Le poème de Lower East Side de Miguel Piñero (1985) offre une critique sociale et spatiale sur le Lower East Side de la cité de New York et sur la corruption et le néocolonialisme qui l'ont transformée en un domaine contesté dans les années 1970 et 80. Cela faisant, le poème fonctionne comme le dernier souhait et le testament de Piñero et la description de la façon dont le paysage urbain du Lower East Side a été broyé pour remodeler l'identité Nuyoricane. Cet essai considère Le Poème de Lower East Side comme le point de départ pour comprendre l'identité Nuyoricane comme une expression dynamique de quiétudes vernaculaires cosmopolitaines et indigènes en utilisant des représentation rhétoriques riches
Mots-clés: Nuyorican; Rhétorique; Miguel Piñero; Puerto Rico; Identité; Cosmopolitanisme Vernaculaire; Indigénéité

Keywords


Nuyorican; Rhetoric; Miguel Pinero; Puerto Rico; Identity; Vernacular Cosmopolitanism; Indigeneity;Nuyorican; Rhétorique; Miguel Piñero; Puerto Rico; Identité; Cosmopolitanisme Vernaculaire; Indigénéité

References


Algarín, M.(1994). Introduction, M. Algarín & B. Holman, (Eds.), Aloud: Voices from the nuyorican poets café (pp. 3-28). New York: Henry holt and Company.

Anselmo, A. & Rubal-Lopez, A.(2005). On becoming Nuyorican. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.

Anzaldua, G. (1999). Borderlands/la frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.

Apparicio, F. R. (1998). Performing the caribbean in American studies. American Quarterly, 50, 636-644.

---. (1994). On multiculturalism and privilege: A Latina perspective. American Quarterly, 46, 575-588.

Arendt, H. (1998). The human condition (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Beck, U. & Sznaider, N. (2006). Unpacking cosmopolitanism for the social sciences: A research agenda. The British Journal of Sociology, 57, 1-23.

Bennets, L. (1988, June 18). Miguel Pi?ero, whose plays dealt with life in prison, is dead at 41. New York Times.

Bernard-Carre?o, R. (2010). Nuyorganics: Organic intellectualism, the search for racial identity, and Nuyorican thought. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.

Bhabha, H. K. (2001). Unsatisfied: Notes on vernacular cosmopolitanism. G. Castle (Ed.), Postcolonial discourses: An anthology (pp. 38-52). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Brown, M. (2002). Gang nation: Delinquent citizens in Puerto Rican, Chicano, and Chicana narratives. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press.

---. (1998). Neither here nor there: Nuyorican literature, home and the “American” national symbolic. (Unpublished Master’s Thesis) Michigan State University, USA.

Campbell K. K. & Jamieson, K. H. (1978). Form and genre in rhetorical criticism: An introduction. K. K. Campbell & K. H. Jamieson (Eds.), Form And genre: Shaping rhetorical action. Falls Church: Speech Communication Association

Cruz-Malavé, A. (1998). Teaching puerto rican authors: identity and modernization in Nuyorican texts. ADE Bulletin, 91, 45-51.

Dawkins, M. A. (2011). A different kind of professor. M. N. Niles & N. S. Gordon (Eds.), Still searching for our mothers’ gardens: experiences of new, tenure-track women of color at “majority” institutions (pp. 63-78). Lanham: University Press of America.

Duany, J. (2002). The Puerto Rican nation on the move: Identities on the island and in the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Esteves, S. M. (1987). Ambivalence or activism from the Nuyorican perspective of poetry. Asela Rodriguez-Sela De Laguna (Eds.), Images and identities: The Puerto Rican world in two contexts (pp. 164-170). New Brunswick: Transaction Inc.

Fahey, F. (2001). Beyond the island: Puerto Rican diaspora in “America” and “América.” Post Identity, 3, 25-56.

Flores, J. (2000). From bomba to hip-hop. New York: Columbia University Press.

Gross, D. (2004). Vanishing worlds: On dealing with what is passing anyway? Telos: A Quarterly Journal of Radical Social Theory, 124, 55-70.

Gussow, M. (1988, July 3). Stage view: From the city streets, a poet of the stage. New York Times.

Hall, S. (2002). Political belonging in a world of multiple identities. S. Vertovec & R. Cohen (Eds.), Conceiving cosmopolitanism: Theory, context and practice (pp. 25-31). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Irizarry, R. (2004). The house of pretension: Space and performance in Miguel Pi?ero’s theatre. Latin American Theatre Review, 37, 77-94.

Kanellos, N. (2002). An overview of latino poetry: The iceberg below the surface. American Book Review, 5, 10.

Leff, M. (1992). Things made by words: Reflections on textual criticism. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 78, 223-231.

López, E. (2005). Nuyorican spaces: Mapping identity in a poetic geography. Centro Journal, 26, 202-219.

Maaka R. & Fleras, A. (2005). The politics of indigeneity: Challenging the state in Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. Dunedin: University Of Otago Press.

Mele, C. (2000). Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, real estate and resistance, 1880-2000. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Nuyorican Poet’s Café. (N.D.). About us: History. Retrieved from http://www.nuyorican.org

Otero, S. (2008). Getting there and back: The road, the journey and home in Nuyorican diaspora literature. J. Torres-Padilla & C. H. Rivera (Eds.), Writing off the hyphen: New critical perspectives on the literature of the Puerto Rican diaspora (pp. 274-292). Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Pi?ero, M. (1985). La bodega sold dreams. Houston: Arte Publico Press.

Rebollo-Gil, G. (2004). The new boogaloo: Nuyorican poetry and the coming Puerto Rican identities. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Rodriguez, C. E. (1996). Puerto Ricans: Between black and white. C. E. Rodriguez And V. Sanchez Korrol (Eds.), Historical perspectives on Puerto Ricans in the United States (pp. 23-36). Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers.

---. (1990). Puerto Rican Studies. American Quarterly, 42, 437-455.

Sanchez-Gonzalez, L. (2001). Boricua literature: A literary history of the Puerto Rican diaspora. New York: New York University Press.

Shewey, D. (2001, December 2). The prey of demons, Miguel Pi?ero wrote like an angel. New York Times.

US Census Bureau. (2006, August). Income, Earning and Poverty from 2005 American Community Survey. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/prod/2006pubs/acs-02.pdf

Villanueva, V. (2005). Toward a political economy of rhetoric (or a rhetoric of political economy). S. Rosedale (Ed.), Radical relevance: Toward a scholarship of the whole left (pp. 57-68). Albany: State University of New York Press.

Werbner, P. (2006). Understanding vernacular cosmopolitanism. Anthropology News, 47, 7-11.

Yanover, B. (Producer), & L. Ichaso (Director). (2001). Pi?ero, [Motion Picture]. New York, NY: Greene Street Films.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/j.ccc.1923670020110702.001

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2011 Marcia Alesan Dawkins

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Share us to:   

Reminder

  • How to do online submission to another Journal?
  • If you have already registered in Journal A, then how can you submit another article to Journal B? It takes two steps to make it happen:

1. Register yourself in Journal B as an Author

  • Find the journal you want to submit to in CATEGORIES, click on “VIEW JOURNAL”, “Online Submissions”, “GO TO LOGIN” and “Edit My Profile”. Check “Author” on the “Edit Profile” page, then “Save”.

2. Submission

Online Submission: http://cscanada.org/index.php/ccc/submission/wizard

  • Go to “User Home”, and click on “Author” under the name of Journal B. You may start a New Submission by clicking on “CLICK HERE”.
  • We only use four mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases: caooc@hotmail.com; office@cscanada.net; ccc@cscanada.net; ccc@cscanada.org

 Articles published in Cross-Cultural Communication are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).

 CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION Editorial Office

Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138 
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org 
E-mail:caooc@hotmail.com; office@cscanada.net

Copyright © Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture