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Nuyorican Theater and Poetry

Modern Drama, Emergence of Poetry, Evolution of Nuyorican Theater and Poetry,
Contemporary Scene
The history of Puerto Rican drama in the United States dates back to the first quarter of the twentieth century. Gonzalo
O'Neill's play Pabellón de Borinquén o bajo una sola bandera (1929), which supported the Puerto Rican nationalist
movement, was one of the first Puerto Rican plays written and produced in the United States. One of the most notable Puerto
Rican playwrights of the early period and a former president of La Liga Puertorriqueña e Hispana, O'Neill also wrote La
indiana borinqueña (1922), a patriotic dialogue in verse promoting Puerto Rican self-determination. In 1923 he wrote
Moncho Reyes, in which he criticizes the Americanization policies of the island's colonial government under U.S. governor E.
Montgomery Reily. Another notable U.S.–based Puerto Rican playwright was Juan Nadal de Santa Coloma, who wrote Día de
los Reyes, a musical zarzuela. Playwright Frank Martínez wrote the never-published De Puerto Rico a Nueva York (1939),
which focuses on Puerto Rican migration. This piece is said to be an influential precursor for René Marqués's La carreta
(1955). Also, in the tradition of the popular vaudeville and teatro bufo, actor and playwright Erasmo Vando wrote De Puerto
Rico al Metropolitan o el Caruso Criollo (1928).

An important indigenous tradition transplanted to the United States, teatro obrero (worker's theater) was an important part
of the labor movement on the island during the 1920s and 1930s. In the United States early theater productions were often
intended to raise consciousness among workers. Societies such as the Mutualista Obrera Puertorriqueña hosted performances
by professional companies and provided space for amateur productions. One of the plays that dealt with the topic of workers'
rights was Los hipócritas (1937) by feminist labor leader and tobacco stripper Franca de Armiño. De Armiño was also
involved in the Federación Libre de los Trabajadores de Puerto Rico, the Liga de la Mujer Obrera, and the First Congress of
Women Workers in 1919, and she was the leader of the Asociación Feminista Popular on the island. Little is known about her
life in New York in the 1930s, except that she worked on other publications.

Modern Drama
Some critics point to the specific juncture of the world premiere of La carreta in 1953 as the birth of modern Puerto Rican
drama and of Puerto Rican theater in the United States. La carreta did play an integral role in the development of U.S. Puerto
Rican theater in that the premiere of its English-language version on December 19, 1966, at the off-Broadway Greenwich
Mews Theatre marked the emergence of one of the most important Nuyorican theater institutions. Acclaimed actress Miriam
Colón persuaded her husband, George Edgar, to finance a translation of the play and its English production, and she founded
the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre (PRTT) to bring the play to New York's parks and playgrounds for free. During this era of
experimental theater, PRTT developed into one of the most prestigious institutions of the 1960s, one that continues as a
pioneer in Nuyorican arts.

Other resident Puerto Rican companies in New York would eventually pursue the same objectives as the PRTT. On
Manhattan's Lower East Side, The Nuyorican Poets Café provides a venue for performance artists, particularly up-and-
coming young artists. Uptown on 116th Street in El Barrio (Spanish Harlem), the Latino Experimental Fantastic Theater
(formerly the Shaman Theatre Repertory Company) has an ensemble group that does workshops as well as productions. In
the South Bronx, the Pregones Touring Puerto Rican Theatre Collection emphasizes history and heritage.

Outside of New York, the impact of Puerto Ricans in theater and performance has also been significant. The San Juan Theater
has contributed significantly to Nuyorican theater in Chicago, as have more contemporary companies such as Teatro Latino.
The off-Broadway Hartford Stage Company has made important commitments to supporting Nuyorican playwrights.
Pioneering traditions like radioteatro in California, street theaters in New York and New England, and Nuyorican poetry hubs
in Texas are among the forms and venues yet to be explored and documented.

The 1950s and 1960s were significant in the development of what would become a self-identified Nuyorican arts movement.
Juan Flores identifies a group of writers whose work he describes as “a view from within” the Puerto Rican community in the
United States as they begin to recognize the mainland as their new home. In theater, this was the position of Jaime Carrero,
one of the transitional writers whose plays Pipo Subway no sabe reír and El Lucky Seven begin to explore the concept of the
“insider-outsider” as a reflection of the Nuyorican perspective.

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Observers, including John Antush, identify the actual blossoming of the Nuyorican artistic movement as taking place in the
late 1960s and 1970s in New York City. The movement encompasses writers who call themselves Nuyorican and others thus
classified by critics. It is characterized by a combination of autobiographical and imaginative elements. One of the strategies
these writers utilize is Spanglish or code-switching between Spanish and English. The evolution of these elements covers a
wide span from the 1960s up to 1980, as illustrated by such writers as Piri Thomas, Nicholasa Mohr, Edward Rivera, Aurora
Levins Morales, Rosario Morales, Sandra María Esteves, and Judith Ortiz Cofer. The writings of this generation would
become part of the new canon of Puerto Rican literature. While previous writers explored issues of migration and the sense of
living in an intermediary space, between cultures and languages, Nuyoricans began to negotiate what they understood to be a
permanent stay in the United States. They were now forced to incorporate new understandings of race, class, and space.
During this time, Miguel Piñero wrote Short Eyes (1974), a play that would reach Broadway, documenting urban life and the
realities of prison. That same year, Piñero, along with poet Miguel Algarín, started the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York's
Lower East Side.

Emergence of Poetry
In many ways, poetry has come to represent the quintessential Nuyorican form of expression. This is largely due to the
success of the poetry slam tradition, the Nuyorican Poets Café, and the particular generation of poetry that emerged from this
space. Characteristically described as “poetry of protest” of the poor and oppressed masses, it reflects the Puerto Rican
experience in the United States. After the opening of the café, people flocked in to hear messages of affirmation from writers
such as Miguel Algarín, Sandra María Esteves, Martita Morales, Amina Muñoz, Louis Reyes Rivera, Amiri Baraka, and Pedro
Pietri. The work of many of the café's poets appeared in print in Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and
Feelings (1975), a collection put together by Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero.

While the café's poets in its early stages drew from older traditions, including African oral traditions, Gospel music, Puerto
Rican improvisaciones, décimas, and bomba, Nuyorican poetry has long been associated with the heritage of poetry slams.
The first official slam recognized by critics was held in Chicago in 1980 and modeled after a boxing match. Performance, as
understood through theater practices, folklore, and storytelling, to name a few sources, is what distinguishes the slam.
Concurrent forms also contributed to slam's development, including hip-hop, which shares the use of the spoken word,
rhythm, and performance to communicate the poet's vision. Nuyorican slam poetry style also revealed the influence of
movements such as the Beat Poets and the Harlem Renaissance. While slam poetry has been a significant force in U.S. Puerto
Rican poetics, the Nuyorican poetry tradition is far from being exclusively tied to this movement.

Several important collections, critical works, and anthologies on Nuyorican poetry have been produced. Efraín Barradas's
sampler of bilingual poetry, Herejes y mitificadores: Muestra de poesía puertorriqueña en los Estados Unidos (1980),
outlines for the first time the major themes of writers living in the United States. Hispanics in the United States: An
Anthology of Creative Literature, edited by Francisco Jiménez and Gary Keller, introduces Judith Ortiz Cofer, Diana Rivera,
and Naomi Lockwood Barletta, along with Luz Ivonne Ochart, Luz María Umpierre, Giannina Braschi, Marithelma Costa, and
Olga Nolla. These anthologies provide a representative sample, although they rarely distinguish between “Puerto Rican” and
“Nuyorican.” The recent critical work of Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Larry LaFountain-Stokes, and Frances Negrón-Muntaner,
among others, challenges traditional readings of Nuyorican texts, engaging issues of gender, sexuality, and the multiplicity of
identity, rather than focusing solely on ethnicity or race.

Evolution of Nuyorican Theater and Poetry

Nuyorican theater and poetry continue to evolve together and independently. Many factors have aided in their development
and differentiation. New York life is no longer considered the epicenter of Nuyorican expression. The term “Nuyorican” itself
has come to include Puerto Rican poets and writers elsewhere in the United States. Distanced from both the populations in
the Northeast and the Midwest, contemporary Nuyorican writer Gloria Vando has produced two collections of poems
addressing issues of imperialism and colonialism affecting people around the world. Nuyorican poet Mayda del Valle of
Chicago won the 2001 National Poetry Slam in Seattle with her poems “Descendancy,” about stereotypes and labels, and
“Tonguetactics,” about the value of Spanglish. Nuyorican literature now also includes an important segment of writing
produced by immigrant writers who address issues of alienation, exile, and uprootedness in U.S. society, including poet Iván
Silen in New York and Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez.

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The Nuyorican poetics of the latest generation signals the emergence of a new performative discourse that cannot be
described within the traditional rhetoric of oppositions in ethnic and nationalist discourses. An important reason for the
revolutionary nature of the works of recent generations is the newly assumed U.S. Latina subjectivity and growing feminist,
gay, and lesbian-feminist consciousness. Many recent plays written by women and men engage the plurality of women's
experiences and points of view. The work of Edwin Sánchez (Trafficking in Broken Hearts) is pioneering in this sense, as he
was one of the first openly gay Latino playwrights to have his work produced in a mainstream venue. The 1994 production of
Janis Astor del Valle's lesbian romantic comedy Where the Señoritas Are at the Nuyorican Poets Café is an example of the
exploration of lesbian subjectivity.

In José, Can You See? (1999) Alberto Sandoval explores the emergence of Latina and Latino AIDS theater, adding another
contemporary dimension to the history of Nuyorican theater specifically and Latina and Latino theater in general. Sandoval
explains that AIDS theater in Latina and Latino communities usually takes the form of workshops. Teatro Pregones and
Teatro El Puente in New York City, for example, have raised consciousness about AIDS through teatro del oprimido-type
workshops and the staging of short plays. Sandoval compiles a list of plays that deal directly or indirectly with the subject of
AIDS in Latina and Latino communities. The list includes various U.S. Puerto Rican works, including his own Side Effects and
Migdalia Cruz's So … as well as Mariluz and the Angels, and Edwin Sánchez's The Road.

As more gay and lesbian poets and women playwrights tell their stories, they bring up the complex issues of the gendered
body as a vehicle for storytelling, as a spectacle and visual display. Through a delicate layering of messages and conversations
“disguised” in the text, they contribute to the further development of Nuyorican aesthetics. The works of this generation call
upon the reader to seek to understand how each individual artist sees the roles that race, culture, and politics play in his or
her work. The works defy containment along clearly definable lines of language, nation, class, sexuality, or even ethnicity.

Performance art has also become an ideal genre through which to explore issues of difference and the construction of multiple
subject positions. Following the legacy of writers from an earlier generation, young artists captivate audiences with a fresh
brand of art. Spoken word poet and novelist Emanuel Xavier, for example, celebrates sexuality and heritage complicated by
the brutality of New York streets in his works Pier Queen (1997) and Christ-Like (1999). Marga Gómez (Memory Tricks and A
Line around the Block) has helped to create new approaches to performance, as have other Latina and Latino solo performers
such as Belinda Acosta, Yareli Arizmendi, Beto Araiza, Wilma Bonet, Nao Bustamante, Laura Esparza, Coco Fusco, María
Mar, Monica Palacios, and Ruby Nelda Pérez.

Contemporary Scene
While the Nuyorican Poets Café is still home for many Nuyorican poets, many others also read at places like Point in the
Bronx, Bar 13 in Greenwich Village, and the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery. Many more can also be found
acting and singing in their own shows and performance pieces, such as “Spic-Chic,” Luis Chaluisan's one-man show that
played at the Nuyorican Poets Café. Contemporary multimedia formats like CDs and DVDs now help catalogue and
disseminate poetic and performed text, such as slam poet Steven Bonafide Rojas's “Nuyorican Dreams” and “Yemaya y
Ochún,” and Marga Gómez's performance/stand-up in “Hung Like a Fly.” New terms have emerged from this art form,
including “Nuyo-Futuristo,” which Edwin Torres of the South Bronx uses to describe his brand of sound-poetry performance.

Observing contemporary Nuyorican theater, performance, and practices, one can see both how it is grounded within this
historical trajectory and how it has branched out and become transnational. If the “success” of poets and dramatists can be
measured by numbers of professional writers, increased access to mainstream venues, and opportunities for developing
community venues, then the most recent generation of Nuyorican poets and playwrights are certainly moving toward it.
Witness the careers of Migdalia Cruz, a professional playwright who has written scores of plays, many of which have been
produced frequently in both Latina and Latino and mainstream venues (Miriam's Flowers, Fur, Salt); Edwin Sánchez
(Unmerciful Good Fortune), whose work has been produced off-Broadway; Yolanda Rodríguez (The Cause); Reuben González
(The Boiler Room); and José Rivera (Marisol) to name just a few. They seem to have overcome what Sandoval calls the
“burden of representation,” under which “success” in mainstream venues depended upon Latina and Latino authors
producing stereotypical representations of Latinas and Latinos as drug dealers, gangsters, and other deviants.

While Nuyorican performance and poetry continue to be identifiable within the trajectory of their themes and concerns, it is

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within the context of U.S. Latina and Latino communities and U.S. minority communities in general that the reconfiguration
of traditional representation can be seen. Nuyorican theater and poetry ground themselves in one perspective and then
“travel” across literary heritages, engaging different traditions yet still maintaining something distinctly Nuyorican. Creating
characters both universal and specific, many recent playwrights never actually label those characters as Nuyorican, although
to those who recognize particularly Nuyorican characteristic historical references and linguistic references, they continue to
be identifiably Nuyorican. As Puerto Ricans and Americans, Nuyorican writers have shed light on the United States as a
challenging setting for Puerto Rican culture within the complex mainland social space. As a result of the colonial experience of
Puerto Rico and its people, the literature and arts of the nation have been influenced by all of the traditions and political
contacts that have shaped the lived experiences of Puerto Ricans both on the island and in the continental United States.

Bibliography and More Information about Nuyorican Theater and Poetry

Acosta-Belén, Edna. Adiós, Borinquen Querida: La diáspora puertorriqueña, su historia y sus aportaciones. New
York: CELAC, 2000.

Algarín, Miguel, and Miguel Piñero, eds. Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings. New
York: Morrow, 1975.

Antush, John V., ed. Nuestro New York: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Plays. New York: Mentor, 1994.

Barradas, Efraín, and Rafael Rodríguez, eds. Herejes y mitificadores: Muestra de poesía puertorriqueña en los
Estados Unidos. Río Piedras, P.R.: Ediciones Huracán, 1980.

Broyles-González, Yolanda. El Teatro Campesino: Theatre in the Chicano Movement. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1994.

Carrero, Jaime. Jet neorriqueño: Neo-Rican Jetliner. San Germán, P.R.: Universidad Interamericana, 1964.

Cruz-Malavé, Arnaldo, and Martin F. Manalansan IV, eds. Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of
Colonialism. New York: New York University Press, 2002.

Dávila-Santiago, Rubén, ed. Teatro obrero en Puerto Rico, 1900–1920: Antología. Río Piedras, P.R.: Editorial Edil,
1985.

Flores, Juan. Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1993.

Kanellos, Nicolás. A History of Hispanic Theatre in the United States: Origins to 1940. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1990.

Lazú, Jacqueline. Nuyorican Theatre: Prophecies and Monstrosities. PhD diss. Stanford University, 2002.

Marqués, René. La carreta: Drama en tres actos. Río Piedras, P.R.: Editorial Cultural, 1963.

Mohr, Eugenio V. The Nuyorican Experience: Literature of the Puerto Rican Minority. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood
Press, 1982.

Navarro, Mireya. “The Poetry of the Nuyorican Experience.” New York Times, January 2, 2002.

Negrón-Muntaner, Frances, and Ramón Grosfoguel, eds. Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and
Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Pietri, Pedro. Puerto Rican Obituary. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973.

Pottlitzer, Joanne. Hispanic Theatre in the United States and Puerto Rico: A Report to the Ford Foundation. New
York: Ford Foundation, 1988.

Sandoval-Sánchez, Alberto. Joseé Can You See?: Latinos on and off Broadway. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1999.

See also Literature; Nyuorican Poets Café; Performing Arts and Theater; Poetry; Puerto Ricans; and biographies of figures
mentioned in this article.

Jacqueline Lazú

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