I have a small fence that surrounds my fair home where I propose and propound where I invent and discover.
Tengo una verjita, que rodea mi lindo hogar, donde propongo y pongo, donde invento y encuentro.
--Miguel Algarin, "Donde / Where"
Y tampoco importa el lenguaje de metaje tantos verbos y adjetivos que?
and neither does it matter the language of goalage so many verbs and adjectives what?
--Victor Hernandez Cruz, "Grafo-Mundo"
"Nuyorican"(1) writing has always been caught in the critical crossfire between two national spaces--Puerto Rico and the U.S.--and between their literary and linguistic borders? Because of this conflict, Nuyorican writers have created an apparent instability in their own writing as one of their literary concerns, trying either to carve out a space for their writing or to create a new space. It is in poetry that this crisis of space and language has been most deeply problematized, and yet where a possible alternative lies for these writers.
The question of belonging to one tradition or the other (or the decision not to belong to any one tradition) is, in this case, entangled with the concept of home that Nuyorican poets have developed. In many instances, that home is necessarily Puerto Rico--the Nuyorican poet positions him/herself as, in some way, coming from the island. What results from this positioning is a fusion of images that conflates the concept of home with the imagery of the island. The relation that the poets have with that home/island is ambivalent, a sort of love-hate relationship towards a space that nurtures and frustrates them at the same time. This ambivalence is sometimes translated as an idealizing project--home turns into a space of ecstasy and love, a tropical Arcadia.
Moreover, the poets have an equally important relationship with language. Their writing reveals the battle of choosing one language over the other, or of deciding to create a new language springing from both English and Spanish. The Nuyorican conflict within poetry includes both the representation of home and the selection of a language that recreates home and its corresponding identities.
It is the purpose of this essay to trace a certain tendency that two Nuyorican poets--Miguel Algarin and Victor Hernandez Cruz--manifest towards home and language.(3) While, on the one hand, the home/island appears in some cases to remain intact and unperturbed within an idealized imagery that reproduces a series of fantasies,(4) language, on the other hand, is forced through phonetic, morphological and syntactical deformations that eventually produce a new language composed of the ruined remains of the two standard languages. This double gesture leads these Nuyorican poets into an apparent preservation of home combined with a brutal mutilation of the so-called "original" languages.
The relationship that exists between these poets and home can be better understood if we approach it through the psychoanalytic structure of incorporation. In post-Freudian psychoanalysis, the mechanism of incorporation, along with the concept of the "crypt"--originally formulated by Ferenczi but later developed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok--denies or refuses to recognize a loss and creates a scenario or fantasy that veils that loss. Incorporation is usually set in opposition to introjection introjection /in·tro·jec·tion/ (in?trah-jek´shun) a mental mechanism in which the standards and values of other persons or groups are unconsciously and symbolically taken within oneself.
in·tro·jec·tion (, which is a process through which the loss becomes filled with a substitute object. Incorporation, on the other hand, can be seen as a device to refuse substitution for that loss; incorporation is triggered when "mourning ... cannot be admitted" (Abraham and Torok 9). The subject refuses to recognize the loss of his/her pleasure object, thus avoiding any feeling of mourning. What follows is the insertion of the object into a fantasy, in order to deny its loss. The fantasy is repeated again and again in an attempt to confirm the presence of the object, when what is really happening is the covering up of the fact that the object is lost forever. This process is, of course, kept secret, since the subject depends on that secrecy for the survival of the object within the fantasy, and also because the revelation of the process would indicate that a process of negation had occurred:
[T]he only recourse that remains open to him [the subject] is to contradict
the fact of his loss with a radical denial, by pretending to have nothing
to lose. It will therefore be out of the question for him to betray to
others the grief that has struck him.... Grief that cannot be expressed
builds a secret vault within the subject. In this crypt reposes--alive,
reconstituted from the memories of words, images, and feelings--the
objective counterpart of the loss ... as well as ... traumatic
incidents--real or imagined." (Abraham and Torok 8)
The loss carves out a "space" in which to hide the pleasure object. It is in this "crypt" that the lost object is put away and maintained intact embalmed, as it were, since what is hidden cannot be allowed to change.
Is there a cryptic space in Nuyorican poetry? If so, where would one find it? I would argue that the crypt is, in fact, the poem itself: the construction that preserves the imperturbable concept of home intact. Jacques Derrida, in his introduction to Abraham and Torok's The Wolf-Man's Magic Word, states that the crypt "is ... not a natural place, but the striking history of an artifice, an architecture, an artifact" (xiv), and that is precisely what the poem is: it is an artifice that serves as the cryptic space for the fantasy of home. The function of home--as a space of protection, intimacy and comfort--is not disturbed, even though its representation in Nuyorican poetry changes incessantly. The secret that is embedded in much Nuyorican poetry is the fact that the home labeled as "original" (the island) has been lost--either through exile or some other mechanism of cultural movement (such as transculturation, acculturation or assimilation). The fantasy that each poem creates will vary, even though the concept of home remains constant. In many poems, the fantasy is utopic,(5) as Roman de la Campa has already discussed in the poetry of Miguel Algarin and another Nuyorican poet, Pedro Pietri. The poems, then, frame a double gesture: the reappropriation of home within an utopic fantasy along with the total rejection of mourning that would lead to the recognition of the loss of that homey space. What is interesting is that, as I will argue later, the fantasy contains cracks, gaps in which the loss is revealed in extremely violent, though subtle imagery. This is precisely how one ultimately gains access to the secret in the crypt: through the poem's fractures.(6)
There are a series of images that Nuyorican poetry uses to represent the home. The fusion of the home / house with the island of Puerto Rico is possibly the most frequent fantasy. In "Aguadilla Aguadilla (ä'gwädē`yä, ä'wä–), town (1990 pop. 59,335), NW Puerto Rico, a port on Mona Passage. It is the trade center for an agricultural region. Columbus reputedly landed at the site of Aguadilla in 1493.
..... Click the link for more information.," by Victor Hernandez Cruz, the poet returns to Puerto Rico, to a house in that northwest town. The poem warns us from the beginning that "the last people who went spoke of / the house being invisible from the inside" (Mainland 69)--that is, the house does not have a clear visual demarcation that separates it from the rest of the area; it is a nonarchitectural space. The house seems to be transparent, implying, perhaps, that here home is the landscape itself. Later in the poem, the house becomes a conventional structure, but turns a rosy pink--a color, no doubt, for sublimation. Beyond these transformations, however, the concept of home--the function that it serves in the poem--remains the same: "We can go into the house and not go" (69). The verb "can" eliminates the possibility that they may be barred from entering the house; the "not go" may imply an indefinite stay (we can go into the house and not leave). The place is equally idealized in terms of the things that go on in or around the house: "It stayed dry in Aguadilla / Chopping bananas all afternoon / The stove was burning / And the soft yellow smell of banana" (69). The hearth, "the stove"--a central element in the conceptualization of home--appears in this poem and emits its tranquilizing warmth. Also, the tropical space is once again linked to the space of home; the island becomes home.
In the poetry of Victor Hernandez Cruz there also exists an image of the island-home which is transferred to New York. The return home to Puerto Rico in "Los New Yorks YORKS - Yorkshire" is celebrated through food:
I am going home now
I am settling there with my fruits
Everything tastes good today
Even the ones that are grown here
Taste like they're from outer space. (Mainland 11)
The play with "here" and "there" is very curious: although the poet returns home, there is still a factor of distance, home is still "there," and fruits are produced "here" that resemble the ones produced "there." Returning home is, however, a coming / going back that fuses "here" and "there," regardless of physical distance. A section preceding the lines quoted above clarifies that fusion with a juxtaposition of the tropical home and New York: "I present you the tall sky-scrapers / as merely huge palm trees with lights," and "Snow falls / Coconut chips galore." New York is made strange because of the insertions of tropical elements, but the home never ceases to be idealized and marvelous.
Miguel Algarin has two poems that construct very different fantasies but achieve a similar effect. "Posed Release" produces what I would label a chromatization of home. The title of the poem already denotes the poet's position: there is going to be a release, an emission, a message, but this release is going to be posed, that is, false, performed, invented:
Turquoise blue
Smacks my eye
Tomato red
Pinches my tongue
Apple green-leaf
Soft arouser
Light afternoon
Made particular
Through rays
That congeal
Shifting green into
Some liveable
Reality--
It is time for
Green to be all green
Ultimate arrangement
Of self into,
And snugly,
Soothing meanings of
Blue dances in green
Devouring afternoons. (Nuyorican Poetry 96)
What do these colors represent? What do the words that seem to represent colors really represent? What do they have in common, aside from being located in the same poem? It seems to me that there is an attempt at colorizing the home/island. Of course, each color does not represent (it cannot represent) one specific element. The poem has the agility to slip from one meaning to another: blue can represent the sky as well as the sea; green might represent either the tropical forest or a certain food (green plantains, or certain fruits like panas and jobos); red ... perhaps blood, the flamboyan tree, or simply tomato sauce. But, without having to assign a color to a precise element, this chromatic cosmos can be discerned as a non-architectural construction (let us remember the title of the poem: "Posed Release") of a fantastic space.
Once the construction is established in the poem, however, the poet tries "shifting green into / some liveable / Reality," he attempts to make the fantasy tangible, extract it from the poem and insert it into reality, while keeping it comfortable, snuggle-y as well as "snugly." Algarin locates himself in the position of a Creator forming a new island, but risks revealing the nature of the fantasy by proposing that the island of colors be brought into reality. The conflict arises because this new island is extremely idealized, as a tranquilizing space, "soothing," where colors can stay equally magnificent and in perfect harmony, where "meanings of blue dances in green devouring afternoons," where meaning slides almost freely from one word/color to another. The poet's desire to bring all this into "some liveable reality," in fact, threatens to break down the fantasy and lets the secret enmeshed in it be uncovered--a glimpse of that loss that the Nuyorican poet tries to conceal.
Within a much more narrative poem, "San Juan / an arrest / Maguayo / a vision of Malo dancing" (Nuyorican Poetry 139-47), Algarin postulates a process of disenchantment/idealization idealization /ide·al·iza·tion/ (i-de?il-i-za´shun) a conscious or unconscious mental mechanism in which the individual overestimates an admired aspect or attribute of another person. with respect to the home / island. This time Puerto Rico is easily recognizable in the poem: the narration is the journey from the airport in San Juan to a neighborhood in Cabo Rojo, Maguayo, in the southwest region of the island. The first part of the poem portrays the Nuyoricans disillusioned when they arrive on the island because of the welcome they receive (a policeman stops them on the road). But once they drive away from San Juan, the mechanisms of idealization come back in full force:
Maguayo
gracias por las letrinas
that connect my shit to myself
without the sanitary mania that
now rules our lives ... (Nuyorican Poetry 144)
The island--in fact, Maguayo, the small town away from the capital--is transformed into the original land for the poet. The poet's evacuation structures a possible return to the lost land; shit is what connects the Nuyorican with home/island/land. Varying the line slightly: "that connects my shit to my Self." Moreover, Maguayo becomes as pure as Nuyoricans are impure, sublimating the land even more: "Maguayo you were and are / the proof of our lost innocence, / of our impurity" (144). From the land the poet moves to the water at the beach, where the relationship with the island is translated as a seduction. The sea--as an extension of the island--seduces the poet: "the water is gentle, / the water seduces, / the water accommodates / itself around my balls / around the whole of my body." The scenario of becoming one with each other concludes with an orgasm at the end of the poem: the idealization is consummated, creating a climax in the poet's joining with the water, and perpetuating the myth of the fusion of man and "land:" "my sperm / swims right up into / the world's wide open SEAS." The "seas" especially in a bilingual poem--are also "si's" or yesses, shouts of affirmation. That affirmation, of course, covers over the fact that the fusion is artificial, that the poet unites himself with an artificially constructed home/island. The orgasm is not strictly a regeneration (Campa 61), but rather the desire for it.
As I have already suggested, the identification of home with the island of Puerto Rico, along with the seemingly blinding affirmation of an idealized space called home, is at fleeting moments revealed as a fabrication within the same poetry, an attempt to formalize a geographical and architectural utopia. These moments are usually accompanied by images threatening to the poet. While the "not go" in Victor Hernandez Cruz's "Aguadilla" could be read as a standing welcome to the Tropical House, it really portrays the home as an unreachable space: we can go there but never actually arrive, "we can go into the house and not go." "Los New Yorks"--the poem in which food becomes a metaphor for the nearness of home--ends with a threatening image:
We turn around to look for the house
But it is not there
All we see is green rhythm coming
to eat us. (Mainland 69)
The tropical house now becomes haunting and cannibalistic. The same occurs at the end of Miguel Algarin's "Posed Release" where "Blue dances in green / Devouring afternoons." The colors of home cease to be comforting and turn violent and overwhelming.
Thus, the idealization of home breaks down, the poem becoming an ultimately cracked crypt that loses its power to keep the House intact. No longer sealed away, home acquires a monstrous aspect and escapes from the poet's control. The fantasy of incorporation, then, never wholly works in these samples of Nuyorican poetry, since we are able to read the breakdown of the fantasy as fantasy in the poem itself.
If these poets attempt to keep the home intact--even though the crypt is fractured--they nonetheless manipulate and dismantle the language that represents home to the utmost degree. What is peculiar of these two poets is that their poetry locates itself between two languages, producing almost a bellicose interaction between Spanish and English. In certain poems there is a hierarchy of languages, in which one language serves as a base for the other, Spanish being in many instances the base language for the poetry. In others, English is the base with Spanish words inserted throughout the poem. Frances Aparicio describes the Spanish vocabulary in primarily English-language poetry as a "conjuro" or an incantation:
These words are not only unique in their cultural denotations, but, more
important, they function as "conjuros," as ways of bringing back an
original, primordial reality--Puerto Ricanness--from which these poets have
been uprooted in a political and cultural way. ("La vida es un Spanglish
Disparatero" 149)
In other words, the poet tries to reinsert himself into the home through the invocation of Spanish words.
Beyond this attraction to single words (the "conjuros"), Aparicio sees this bilingual poetry as based on the language of "la gente," the people, as "an antidote to [the] common prejudice against popular literature" (147). There is no doubt that the language used in many of these poems does stem from Nuyorican everyday speech, but Aparicio seems to center her argument on the importance of the origins of that language (i.e., speech). In making of poetry a liberating socio-political instrument, she finds a direct and tangible use for Nuyorican poetry because of its supposed oral referent: "In Nuyorican poetry, indeed, the word functions as a weapon in the political and social struggle of Puerto Ricans in New York" (148). This is no doubt true, but what it really does is emphasize the way this poetry can be used and indeed is being used by Nuyoricans and other mainland Puerto Ricans. There are many poets who fit this description (Tato Laviera is perhaps the clearest example within the Nuyorican poets), but there is another Nuyorican poetry that (regardless of the presumed social origin of poetic language in Nuyorican literature) does not propose a straightforward social or political function for poetry; neither is it ultimately interested in reproducing a series of specific oral utterances. A portion of Miguel Algarin's and much of Victor Hernandez Cruz's poetry evinces a poetic and linguistic preoccupation in their desire to destroy language morphologically and syntactically. Efrain Barradas has already pointed out that this generation of Puerto Ricans in the U.S. "crea una obra, marcada por la vida en el gueto, pero que no puede ser calificada como obra folclorica sino culta, a pesar de su procedencia y del usual rechazo del mundo literario establecido" [creates a body of work marked by the life of the ghetto, but these writings cannot be described as folkloric but rather learned, regardless of their origin and their typical rejection of the established literary world] (14). I do not, and cannot, deny a political and social effect in this poetry, but I want to stress the important poetic games in these two Nuyorican poets, and how they gear us back to their relationship to home.
Victor Hernandez Cruz explains his encounter with English in "Snaps of Immigration:"
At first English was nothing
but sound
Like trumpets doing yakity yak,
As we found meanings for the words
We noticed that many times the
Letters deceived the sound
What could we do
It was the language of a
foreign land.
Beyond the possible hierarchy of languages,(7) Hernandez Cruz discovers that the "letter" deceives in English. In biographical terms, the poem presents the Puerto Rican eye (and ear) before written English; in more poetical terms, this discovery will lead the poet to realize that once what is heard is written down, the written word dominates, and the process from the written to the oral (and vice versa) is slippery and faulty. Much of Hernandez Cruz's poetry becomes more interested in language itself than in reproducing the Nuyorican or even Puerto Rican speech. This poetry seems to be written in "the language of a foreign land" that here is neither the United States nor Puerto Rico.
It is this interest in the word--in the letter and the sound that the letter produces, and in the word's slippery relationship with meaning--that drives these writers to mix both languages in a creative way, not always placing them side by side, but rather deforming the structure of both languages. It is not about one language slowly intruding into the other, but about a linguistic massacre of both languages. As "Hearing Inside Out" proposes:
O uno habla con las cosas
O se esconde de ellas
y ellas hablan solas
The translation through
a rear view mirror
Things the with talk one her either
Alone talk hers--and plus (By Lingual Wholes)
The process of "translation" that occurs here is not one of meaning but of words as words. The rear-view mirror flips the first line of the Spanish section, although not word for word ("her" is added); the second line of the "English" translation collapses the second and third lines of the Spanish poem, deleting and adding words to it, and in one instance, letting "Spanish" grammar intrude into an "English" word: "hers" / "ellas." The translation is meaningless, although it forecasts the result of the linguistic collision of Spanish and English. The "cosas" of the Spanish section--those "things" that speak for themselves when one refuses to talk about them--are, indeed, words, the material with which these poems are constructed. Hernandez Cruz points out in the Spanish part of the poem that we must speak with words, have a dialogue with them, because if one becomes afraid of them they will speak for themselves. It is with the distorting mirror of this poem that Hernandez Cruz talks to words, by violently getting them out of order, out of context, out of sense.(8)
It is also with this mirror that he begins to create poetry from the remains of ruined languages. This language and this poetry refuse to be homogenized into the norms of any language, a process that Hernandez Cruz describes in "Bi-Lingual Education" (By Lingual Wholes n.p.):
your tongue hanging out
like a carpet
where two ladies
are sprawled entwined
they come to eat you
in doubles
They chew you
till you are
a strong and perfect 1. (By Lingual Wholes n.p.)
Victor Hernandez Cruz is perhaps the one poet who most clearly has attempted this obvious linguistic dismantlement, especially in a series of prose poems in which both Spanish and English go through infinite transformations. The writing that James Joyce attempted in his last book, Finnegans Wake (1939), seems to be resurrected by this Nuyorican poet. The poems are seemingly in Spanish or English, but once the reading starts, the reader soon realizes that they are written in neither:
Pero la caja duro tres inviernos hasta que no pudo mas y es tres que no es
guitarra cubana por poco llego al cuatro guitarra Puertorriquena y casi to
lo que hablaba era en esa era en Ingles se rebala mucho en ese idioma y
solo porque un recuerdo vino no solo porque tenia miedo presentarse si no
en las caras de aquellas que pasaron Que-que tu no ves que estan escondidas
detras las paginas detras las cajas Es asi que yo me recuerdo y sigo
pasando este Grafo-Mundo. ("Grafo-Mundo," By Lingual Wholes n.p.)
To me myself them and others always then and now that day we was flying
through above Atlantic Ocean clouds the place and the plain O also plain
language piano feet or face was in perfect harmonious bolero wavy plena to
someplace a few miles away from heaven this gathered from the way the
adults spoke their eyes out from their sockets. ("Airoplain,"
Tropicalization 77-78)
The first aspect of these poems that springs to mind is their apparent attachment to speech. This idea, however, collapses immediately because of the multiple syntactical maneuverings that lay bare the written nature of the pieces. Although one is able to identify certain Puerto Rican speech patterns (like "rebala" for resbala), the link back to speech has been lost; what constructs "Grafo-mundo"--literally, written world--and "Airoplain" are the written damaged remains of English and Spanish. These poems are a direct attack on syntax, generating a less univocal signification and degenerating both Spanish and English as we know them now. As he says earlier in "Grafo-mundo," "y el disco lo dice serio tambien `si se rompe se compone,'" that is, from breaking it up, composition arises.
Hernandez Cruz admits in "Grafo-mundo" that the box ("la caja," that is, the TV) "era en Ingles se rebala mucho en ese idioma," but it seems to be that not only English, but Spanish and especially Spanglish are equally slippery. This is a poetry that takes advantage of that linguistic slip, to produce a language that does not stop. As Hernandez Cruz says in another instance: "This must be the Life of Skidsofrenos without breaks" ("Airoplain" 77), a slippery schizophrenia out of control.
"Airoplain"--mutilated from the title itself--ends with the following phrase: "You do your claves on the paper I will read you your secrets Civilization smells so different within the iron trees Sivilessensation spread yourself out of it listen to the beat abnormalize yourself compa." To do the clave on paper is precisely what certain Nuyorican poetry attempts, to appropriate a culture to represent it in writing. But that is what others do ("You"); what Hernandez Cruz tries to achieve ("I"), at least in these poems, is to read the secrets of Civilization or "Sivilessensation"--to reveal the shortcomings of a civilized essentialization. This poetry, from its conscious linguistic breakdown, tries to move away from any sort of (civilized) essence. Aparicio's call to "Puerto Ricanness"--as a framing cultural device and as what she calls the "original primordial reality" (149)--, although relevant to much U.S. Puerto Rican literature, fails to find substantiation in these poems. Rather, the motto of this poetry seems to be, simply, "abnormalize yourself compa," that is, destructure your identity in writing, pulling it away from a univocal identity. The same idea seems to permeate in Algarin's poetry, as he proposes in "Happy New Year:" "pero cono maybe there's no time like short-circuit time" (Turner 199), a linguistic short that promotes writing in collapsed languages.
This multivalent restructuration is done, it seems to me, mainly through this slippery language, neither Spanish nor English, but what Algarin calls "Spanglish-Nuyorican" (Nuyorican Poetry 149), that language-in-ruins that, in many ways, helps in the making of a malleable identity for the Nuyorican poet.
While the idea of home is kept as intact as possible--even though the poetry itself reveals, as I have shown, several fractures in that paradigm--, it seems that any conscious or unconscious desire of the poet to disassemble the home is channeled through language, destroying all its standardized norms, since the destruction of the home is forbidden within the poet's cryptic fantasy. This mutilation leaves the concept of home alone, while creating a ruined, consciously bastardized language, intentionally destroying all possible linguistic barriers and frontiers, molding a literature that constantly questions its linguistic ancestors, and perhaps proposing a home in language. This new home is not, however, pristine like the previous one, but rather unpredictable, unsafe, destructible, while fascinatingly creative and fluid.
Notes
(1) I use the word "Nuyorican" in a very specific social and historical context of Puerto Rican migrations to the United States. I am speaking in this essay about the literary movement created in New York in the sixties and seventies by Puerto Ricans who were either born in the city or moved there when they were very young. I do not mean to imply that all U.S. Puerto Rican literature today (or then) comes only from New York, nor that newer generations of Puerto Ricans living in New York continue this tradition.
(2.) For this debate, see Efrain Barradas's introduction to Herejes y mitificadores; Juan Flores's, "Puerto Rican Literature in the United States: Stages and Perspectives;" and Marc Zimmerman's "U.S. Latinos: Their Culture and Literature."
(3.) Eugene Mohr, in his study The Nuyorican Experience, discards Victor Hernandez Cruz's poetry as not "Nuyorican' enough to belong to this literary community: "He does not, despite common experiences, share the ideological and esthetic commitments of poets who are self-consciously Nuyorican, and he is not represented in the Algarin-Pinero anthology, the best indicator of who belongs and who doesn't ... [The] pictorial brilliance of Hernandez Cruz sometimes leads to almost pure verbal abstraction, miles apart form the Nuyorican poetry of feeling and statement" (104-05). Mohr seems to believe in a canonical Nuyorican group that exists under the umbrella of Algarin's anthology, and sets aside Hernandez Cruz's poetry as too experimental and not sufficiently politically involved. I hope this essay points out the inaccuracy of this statement (published in the early 1980s). Fortunately critics like Frances Aparicio have already started to insert Hernandez Cruz back into the linguistic and literary tradition of Nuyorican literature.
(4.) Along with the idealization of home, there is also a rejection of the home/island, as I will discuss later. But everytime there is an attempt to construct the home--wherever it may be--, the island's positive features come back as the primary images of the poets.
(5.) This utopic construction is also an integral part of incorporation: "The fantasy of incorporation merely reveals a utopian wish; would that the memory of what was shocking never have been, or at a deeper level, not have been shocking" (Abraham and Torok 12).
(6.) As Abraham and Torok clearly state in their essay, "As long as the crypt holds, there is no melancholia melan·choli·ac (-l-k. It declares itself as soon as the walls become shaky" (14); that is, there is no way of detecting the mechanism of incorporation without the crypt cracking.
(7.) Victor Hernandez Cruz describes his linguistic process as "a trajectory from one language (Spanish) to another (English)" ("Mountains in the North" 88), but it seems to me that his poetry contradicts his statement, as I will argue later: it is a trajectory coming from both English and Spanish to the remains of their collision.
(8.) Hernandez Cruz stated in an interview that "in order to [write], I have to kick this English, the language that I love, in the ass" (Rosa 286).
Works Cited
Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok. "Introjection--Incorporation: Mourning or Melancholia." Psychoanalysis in France. Ed. S. Lebovici and D. Widlocher. New York: International Universities, 1980. 3-16.
Algarin, Miguel. On Call. Houston: Arte Publico, 1980.
--. Time's Now/ Ya es Tiempo. Houston: Arte Publico, 1985.
--. and Miguel Pinero, Eds. Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings. New York: Morrow, 1975.
Aparicio, Frances R. "La Vida Es un Spanglish Disparatero." European Perspectives on Hispanic Literature. Ed. Genevieve Fabre. Houston: Arte Publico, 1988. 147-60.
Barradas, Efrain. Introduction. Herejes y mitificadores: muestra de poesia puertorriquena en los Estados Unidos. Efrain Barradas y Rafael Rodriguez, Eds. Rio Piedras: Huracan, 1980. 11-30.
Campa, Roman de la. "En la utopia redentora del lenguaje: Pedro Pietri y Miguel Algarin." The Americas Review 16.2 (Summer 1988): 49-67.
Derrida, Jacques. "Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok." Introduction. The Wolf Man's Magic Word. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. xi-xlviii.
Flores, Juan. "Puerto Rican Literature in the United States: Stages and Perspectives." Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage. Ramon Gutierrez and Genaro Padilla, Eds. Houston: Arte Publico, 1993. 31-68.
Hernandez Cruz, Victor. By Lingual Wholes. San Francisco: Momo's, 1982.
--. Mainland. New York: Random House, 1973.
--. "Mountains in the North." Americas Review 18.1 (Spring 1990): 110-14.
--. Red Beans. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 1991.
--. Tropicalization. Reed, Cannon & Johnson, 1976.
Mohr, Eugene V. The Nuyorican Experience: Literature and Puerto Rican Minority. Contributions in American Studies 62. Wesport, Ct: Greenwood, 1982.
Rosa, Victor. "Interview with Victor Hernandez Cruz." Bilingual Review 1.3 (Sept./Dec. 1975): 281-87.
Turner, Faythe. Puerto Rican Writers at Home in the USA: An Anthology. Seattle: Open Hand, 1991.
Zimmerman, Marc. Introduction. U.S. Latino Literature: an Essay and Annotated Bibliography. Chicago: MARCH / Abrazo, 1992. 9-47.
Carmelo Esterrich is a Professor of Humanities at Columbia College Chicago. He has written on Latin American literatures and cultures, from Reinaldo Arenas and Raul Ruiz to Cantinflas and Latin American Rock. He is currently writing on transvetitism, mystical rhetoric, and AIDS in the novels of Cuban writer Severo Sarduy.3
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