America's Hispanic, Latino poets stretch far beyond borders for a wide topical, emotional reach
America's Hispanic, Latino poets stretch far beyond borders for a wide topical, emotional reach
By MATT PEIKEN
editor-publisher
© Metaphor Media, LLC
April 30, 2007
In 2003, at the dawn of America's invasion of Iraq, Paul Flores wrote a poem about Mexican immigrants lured by U.S. military recruiters to join up on the promise of American citizenship. "Brown Dream" tells the story of the war's first official casualty - a Mexican immigrant - and it thrust Flores into a national spotlight, winning him an invitation to perform the piece on Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam and inspiring him to take stock of his potential impact beyond poetry circles.
"It pushed me out in talking about a national and international issue, not just a local issue," says Flores, who grew up in Chula Vista, Calif., and now lives in San Francisco. "It was taking Chicano issues and putting it out in a populist form."
Paul Flores
Flores' breakthrough was more personal than public - he had reached an elusive holy grail for America's Hispanic and Latino performance poets. More so than their peers on the printed page, Flores and others who take the stage find themselves facing public perceptions, expectations and stereotypes based on surnames and skin color, even before the first words leave their mouths.
Joaquin Zihuatanejo, who teaches English and creative writing to high schoolers in Denton, Tex., initially wrote and performed poetry about "these beautiful people from the barrio" and strove to "give voice to the voiceless." He received early praise and momentum when people compared him to groundbreaking Chicano poet Jimmy Santiago Baca. Slam hosts would often introduce him to audiences as "the hot new Hispanic poet," and he became an upstart finalist and near-winner at the 2006 Individual World Poetry Slam.
But Zihuatanejo found some audiences didn't allow him the wide berth they otherwise gave to white poets. In trying to expand the scope of his work, by writing about his experiences in the classroom, Zihuatanejo has come up against perceptions - his own and from audiences - of the subject matter open to a Mexican-American poet.
Joaquin Zihuatanejo
"I've had people say to me 'Being a Mexican-American from Texas, the border themes must shake you,' but you know, there are borders everywhere," he says. "It doesn't mean we have to turn our backs on the themes that first drew us into writing, but we do have to look beyond a world larger than our own familia and find what we have in common with the African-American struggle and the Native American struggle."
Lorena Duarte is a performance poet and native of El Salvador who studied literature at Harvard and teaches in the Department of Chicano Studies at the University of Minnesota. Spanish is her first language and she often threads Spanish into her poetry - her mother translated her poem "Generic Brown Woman" into Spanish. But "my world is in English," says Duarte, who adding that if audiences find it hard to understand where she's coming from, it's sometimes even more difficult to get a handle on that, herself.
"Being a Latina poet opens doors - I recognize it can be a marketing tool; I get that - but it also hinders because it puts you in a niche," says Duarte, a member of a collective of women artists called Palabristas. "It's only part of who I am."
Emanuel Xavier
Perhaps no Hispanic poet both basks in and bristles against the labels of definition as Emanuel Xavier. A Brooklyn native and queer poet, Xavier has led workshops all over the country and performed work exploring Nuyorican (New York/Puerto Rican) culture and homosexuality.
"I identify myself as queer and Latino and those labels are important to me because those are the people I'm trying to give voice to, and (people) see you're able to be successful and grow as an artist and it's OK to be yourself," Xavier says. "I've been doing this for 10 years now and you want people to see you as more than that, to see you as a spoken word artist. I write about a lot of things about the Latino community and people can bypass my sexuality."
Xavier's tendency to write about the positive through negative experiences is embodied in the poem "Bushwick Bohemia," where he unfolds returning to the neighborhood that haunted him as a youth and finding new beauty.
"There's a lot of machismo in Latin culture. Homosexuality is still a very taboo subject with the Latino community, and I find myself wanting to drive into a wall," he says. "But I hope the work I do builds bridges. I'd like to be able to reach a group of homophobes, but I'm not going to get myself killed. I'd like to think that someday I can write in Spanish and speak directly to that community, because they're the ones who really need to hear it."
Dessa Darling
The discrimination can come from the other side of the fence. Dessa Darling is a spoken word artist and emerging hip-hopper in Minneapolis with German and Puerto Rican blood. She has written much about discovering her Latin identity as a Minnesotan and dissected the symbolism and traditions of Latin Catholicism. She once wrote a poem to her mother about the bond they will always have, despite Dessa leaving the church.
"I'm tall and I'm a light-skinned girl, and it's always been 'Oh, you're Puerto Rican? Prove it,'" she says. "And Puerto Rican Spanish is a dirty Spanish - I have imperfect Spanish - and the Spanish I speak is the one you're teased about. But my route is to say I'm a girl trying to pay rent, trying to find love, trying to find connections to the people around me, trying to make a little money with my art. I just like to write about being a person."
Duarte, Zihuatanejo and others point to a relative absence or obscurity of Latino and Hispanic poets while in their own formative years. Today, social, economic and linguistic barriers can crush the seeds of creativity for immigrant youth, Latino or otherwise, says Duarte, who roots her own poetry in "the empowerment of expression through writing."
"A lot of them don't even know where to begin finding their own voices, but if I pop in 'Def Poetry Jam' or the movie 'Slam!,' it's like 'Oh, that's cool,'" Duarte says of her creative writing students. "When I was growing up, Maya Angelou really spoke to me - it doesn't have to be a Latina-to-Latina."
Flores is working to broaden the canvas for young poets, Hispanic and otherwise, as the program director for Youth Speaks, a nonprofit literary arts center for teens in San Francisco that has spawned chapters nationwide. Meanwhile, he hasn't softened much of the political activism and protest poetry that has always marked his own work, produced largely through a series of groundbreaking collectives - Los Delicados and, most recently, the Chicano Messengers. His new work, he says, is more hip-hop theater than straight-up poetry.
"I'm a spoken word artist, a playwright, a writer, an actor - why should I put myself in any one area?" Flores says, pointing to the poet, novelist and musician Carl Hancock Rux as a model.
"The foundation of my art is identity and talking about my experience as a Latino in the United States, and the universal message in my work is linked to the necessity to represent yourself, to tell the stories of your life," he says. "The dearth of good art in that area inspires me to keep creating."
By MATT PEIKEN
editor-publisher
© Metaphor Media, LLC
April 30, 2007
In 2003, at the dawn of America's invasion of Iraq, Paul Flores wrote a poem about Mexican immigrants lured by U.S. military recruiters to join up on the promise of American citizenship. "Brown Dream" tells the story of the war's first official casualty - a Mexican immigrant - and it thrust Flores into a national spotlight, winning him an invitation to perform the piece on Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam and inspiring him to take stock of his potential impact beyond poetry circles.
"It pushed me out in talking about a national and international issue, not just a local issue," says Flores, who grew up in Chula Vista, Calif., and now lives in San Francisco. "It was taking Chicano issues and putting it out in a populist form."
Paul Flores
Flores' breakthrough was more personal than public - he had reached an elusive holy grail for America's Hispanic and Latino performance poets. More so than their peers on the printed page, Flores and others who take the stage find themselves facing public perceptions, expectations and stereotypes based on surnames and skin color, even before the first words leave their mouths.
Joaquin Zihuatanejo, who teaches English and creative writing to high schoolers in Denton, Tex., initially wrote and performed poetry about "these beautiful people from the barrio" and strove to "give voice to the voiceless." He received early praise and momentum when people compared him to groundbreaking Chicano poet Jimmy Santiago Baca. Slam hosts would often introduce him to audiences as "the hot new Hispanic poet," and he became an upstart finalist and near-winner at the 2006 Individual World Poetry Slam.
But Zihuatanejo found some audiences didn't allow him the wide berth they otherwise gave to white poets. In trying to expand the scope of his work, by writing about his experiences in the classroom, Zihuatanejo has come up against perceptions - his own and from audiences - of the subject matter open to a Mexican-American poet.
Joaquin Zihuatanejo
"I've had people say to me 'Being a Mexican-American from Texas, the border themes must shake you,' but you know, there are borders everywhere," he says. "It doesn't mean we have to turn our backs on the themes that first drew us into writing, but we do have to look beyond a world larger than our own familia and find what we have in common with the African-American struggle and the Native American struggle."
Lorena Duarte is a performance poet and native of El Salvador who studied literature at Harvard and teaches in the Department of Chicano Studies at the University of Minnesota. Spanish is her first language and she often threads Spanish into her poetry - her mother translated her poem "Generic Brown Woman" into Spanish. But "my world is in English," says Duarte, who adding that if audiences find it hard to understand where she's coming from, it's sometimes even more difficult to get a handle on that, herself.
"Being a Latina poet opens doors - I recognize it can be a marketing tool; I get that - but it also hinders because it puts you in a niche," says Duarte, a member of a collective of women artists called Palabristas. "It's only part of who I am."
Emanuel Xavier
Perhaps no Hispanic poet both basks in and bristles against the labels of definition as Emanuel Xavier. A Brooklyn native and queer poet, Xavier has led workshops all over the country and performed work exploring Nuyorican (New York/Puerto Rican) culture and homosexuality.
"I identify myself as queer and Latino and those labels are important to me because those are the people I'm trying to give voice to, and (people) see you're able to be successful and grow as an artist and it's OK to be yourself," Xavier says. "I've been doing this for 10 years now and you want people to see you as more than that, to see you as a spoken word artist. I write about a lot of things about the Latino community and people can bypass my sexuality."
Xavier's tendency to write about the positive through negative experiences is embodied in the poem "Bushwick Bohemia," where he unfolds returning to the neighborhood that haunted him as a youth and finding new beauty.
"There's a lot of machismo in Latin culture. Homosexuality is still a very taboo subject with the Latino community, and I find myself wanting to drive into a wall," he says. "But I hope the work I do builds bridges. I'd like to be able to reach a group of homophobes, but I'm not going to get myself killed. I'd like to think that someday I can write in Spanish and speak directly to that community, because they're the ones who really need to hear it."
Dessa Darling
The discrimination can come from the other side of the fence. Dessa Darling is a spoken word artist and emerging hip-hopper in Minneapolis with German and Puerto Rican blood. She has written much about discovering her Latin identity as a Minnesotan and dissected the symbolism and traditions of Latin Catholicism. She once wrote a poem to her mother about the bond they will always have, despite Dessa leaving the church.
"I'm tall and I'm a light-skinned girl, and it's always been 'Oh, you're Puerto Rican? Prove it,'" she says. "And Puerto Rican Spanish is a dirty Spanish - I have imperfect Spanish - and the Spanish I speak is the one you're teased about. But my route is to say I'm a girl trying to pay rent, trying to find love, trying to find connections to the people around me, trying to make a little money with my art. I just like to write about being a person."
Duarte, Zihuatanejo and others point to a relative absence or obscurity of Latino and Hispanic poets while in their own formative years. Today, social, economic and linguistic barriers can crush the seeds of creativity for immigrant youth, Latino or otherwise, says Duarte, who roots her own poetry in "the empowerment of expression through writing."
"A lot of them don't even know where to begin finding their own voices, but if I pop in 'Def Poetry Jam' or the movie 'Slam!,' it's like 'Oh, that's cool,'" Duarte says of her creative writing students. "When I was growing up, Maya Angelou really spoke to me - it doesn't have to be a Latina-to-Latina."
Flores is working to broaden the canvas for young poets, Hispanic and otherwise, as the program director for Youth Speaks, a nonprofit literary arts center for teens in San Francisco that has spawned chapters nationwide. Meanwhile, he hasn't softened much of the political activism and protest poetry that has always marked his own work, produced largely through a series of groundbreaking collectives - Los Delicados and, most recently, the Chicano Messengers. His new work, he says, is more hip-hop theater than straight-up poetry.
"I'm a spoken word artist, a playwright, a writer, an actor - why should I put myself in any one area?" Flores says, pointing to the poet, novelist and musician Carl Hancock Rux as a model.
"The foundation of my art is identity and talking about my experience as a Latino in the United States, and the universal message in my work is linked to the necessity to represent yourself, to tell the stories of your life," he says. "The dearth of good art in that area inspires me to keep creating."
posted by Carlos T Mock at 2:39 PM
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