In this pandemic age of social fragmentation, it can be tempting to romanticize the physical copresence of earlier performance communities, including those in and around the Nuyorican Poets Café, as legendary New York sites of embodied counter histories and political imaginations. The past few years have witnessed the passing of Café founder Miguel Algarín, poet and playwright Ntozake Shange (part of the Cafe’s 1970s vanguard), and artist ADÁL, among others (¡presente, all!), and highlighted ongoing struggles over the seemingly always precarious future of the Cafe, its archive, and histories, even as mass media attention remains fixated on the big-budget productions of Lin-Manuel Miranda or Steven Spielberg.
Against this backdrop, these books by Patricia Herrera and Karen Jaime could not be more welcome or needed. Both are groundbreaking in their attention to forgotten archives of Nuyorican performance, including an impressive range of archival materials. However, both insist on a situated approach to the archive that foregrounds the performing body, and the critic’s relationship to it, allowing us to read recent generations of Nuyorican performance as contra/dictions (following Lorgia García-Peña [2016]) of both the hegemonic culture and dominant hetero-patriarchal Nuyorican and Latina/o/x histories. In doing so, Herrera and Jaime help us move beyond the politics of archival recovery and toward embodied (counter)archival histories.
Herrera centers the archival in the first chapter of her book, which proposes a feminist Nuyorican aesthetic against the largely masculinist histories sketched in the book’s prologue and fleshed out in chapter 2. In this first chapter, Herrera writes that since “the performance of the live body is an integral site of inquiry, I cannot speak to the ‘liveness’ of performances that occurred in the 1970s” and that she has instead “turned to archival materials, the scripts and reviews of the artists’ performances that document the live bodies” (11–12). She argues for a cross-generational reading of Sandra María Esteves’s foundational work initiated in the 1970s alongside that of a range of “contemporary performeras” (La Bruja, Nilaja Sun, Mariposa, and Aya de León). Herrera thereby allows us to trace a feminist aesthetic at the intersection of performance, hip hop, and theatre, one rooted in “their intersectional experiences as women, Afro-Latinas, working-class subjects, and artists, all challenged by colonial power” (14). In doing so, Herrera stresses these contemporary performers’ resignification of “hip hop theatre” (a term most associated with Danny Hoch’s Hip-Hop Theatre Festival, which ran at the Café in the early 2000s) as a feminist Nuyorican practice that also counters masculinist hip hop genealogies (14).
While chapter 2 is a more conventional exploration of the masculinism of the early Nuyorican aesthetic of the 1960s and 1970s, it is noteworthy for the discussion of poet, playwright, and artist Jaime Carrero’s fascinating and critically neglected comic Notes of Neorican Seminar (1972). In unpacking and contextualizing Carrero’s eccentric work alongside very different materials from the New York Young Lords, Herrera shows how differing male/masculinist visual politics worked together in shaping an anticolonial Nuyorican aesthetic, thus setting the stage for feminist critiques and revisions, including ones that emerged within the Young Lords. Chapter 3 reads for some of these revisions by focusing on women poets/performers included in the foundational 1975 Nuyorican Poetry anthology, crucially devoting attention to critically neglected figures (such as Amina Muñoz and Martita Morales), supplementing the analysis with insights from interviews Herrera conducted with Esteves and Muñoz. While I think it is essential that Herrera foregrounds the political significance of conversations between women and connects this to the sometimes searing and irreverent conversational language of poet-performers such as Muñoz, I wonder about Herrera’s insistence on the term plática (chat, conversation) in the section entitled “Feminist Practice of Pláticas in Nuyorican Poetry.” I think of plática/platicar as powerful in how it connects the informal performances of everyday speech to feminist politics, and it certainly functions and is theorized as such in Chicana feminist communities with which poets like Esteves were connected. Still, the term is not used in everyday Puerto Rican Spanish (it would appear as either formal or foreign) and to my mind has none of the political currency in a feminist Nuyorican context that it holds in the Chicana one. In that sense, perhaps improvisando (“Improvising,” the title of one of Esteves’s early poems) captures something plática does not, with its nod to doing rather than saying and its connection to improvisational Afro-diasporic performance, from salsa to hip hop. Nonetheless, a highlight of the chapter is Herrera’s revelatory discussion of Esteves’s falling out with Public Theater director Joseph Papp and former Young Lord, Eddie Figueroa, founder of the underground Lower East Side performance space (and former jazz club) the New Rican Village, where Esteves and others staged open-ended, collaborative performances. I won’t reveal all the fascinating details, but it involves a lawsuit over unpaid money by Esteves, who then made a flyer and “staged the lawsuit to reveal the gendered power dynamics at play in the Nuyorican poetry theater scene” (66). In unearthing the archive of Esteves’s brilliant and heretofore silenced conceptual performance intervention, Herrera gives us the fullest sense yet of Esteves’s significance as a performer and visual artist, while correcting largely celebratory accounts (my own included) of the masculinist New Rican Village scene.
Chapter 4 provides the context for masculinist hip hop, spoken word, and slam traditions by considering the feminist revisions in the work of La Bruja (Caridad de la Luz), Nilaja Sun, and Aya de León, the subjects of chapters 5, 6, and 7 respectively. I especially appreciated how Herrera reads La Bruja’s virtuosic, polyvocal musical performance Boogie Rican Blvd. as using “Nuyorican and hip hop aesthetics to demystify conventional notions of a nuclear family and underscore the importance of alternative familial arrangements, patterns, and networks” (86). The chapter on Nilaja Sun is groundbreaking in its attention to a performer who uses gendered and racialized masks and personae (“La Nubia Latina”) to engage Afro-Latina trauma (117), testing the limits of hip hop theatre while echoing 1970s Nuyorican Poets Café aesthetics by “making the self vulnerable as a form of communal healing” (80). In the chapter on de León and her outrageously eroticized and sexualized emcee persona Lady Triple X, I was struck by the attention to nostalgia (in conversation with scholars such as Fred Davis and Fredric Jameson) as generative, as “a mode of feminist resistance, one that theatrically celebrates the commercial consumption and branding of hip hop, while simultaneously critiquing its misogynistic practices” (124). Still, I am surprised by the inclusion of a chapter on de León but not one on Mariposa Fernández, a major figure in Nuyorican poetry and performance, thanks in part to her canonical performance poem “Diasporican,” and a key innovator in Afro-Latina performance over the past three decades (especially since, as Herrera acknowledges, de León was not born and raised in New York like the other major performeras discussed and has nowhere near as significant a connection as Mariposa to the Café and its foundational histories). Fernández’s anticolonial and decolonial feminist politics of performance is a key bridge from the foundational women performers of the 1970s to younger generations (as Herrera notes, Fernández famously “married” Puerto Rico in an unforgettable post-Hurricane Maria performance), so the lack of more substantive engagement with her work is a missed opportunity in tracing cross-generational feminist histories.
I take seriously Herrera’s claim that there is a “continuous Nuyorican aesthetic” amid these different performance practices, and her conclusion that these performeras “conjure up the spiritual world” to “construct a platform on which they can document, reflect, contest, and reimagine their social roles, both as Latinas and as global citizens” (169). Yet, I wish the eighth and final chapter had made more room for (Afro) Nuyorican feminist spiritual epistemologies. Herrera’s take on the spiritual comes largely via foundational Chicanas Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, yet I would have loved to see Herrera complement and/or complicate their mestiza politics in conversation with Afro-Latina/Black Boricua thinkers like the foundational Marta Moreno Vega, whose When the Spirits Dance Mambo (2004) is as much a treatise on the spiritual energy of the African diaspora as a Nuyorican memoir and is so close to Esteves’s work and all that emerges with and from it. In general, Black feminist thought and its relationship to performance cultures could have been much more rigorously engaged. Still, as Herrera makes clear in the epilogue, in the context of the rapid yet fitful institutionalization of both performance studies and Latina/o/x studies, we must now — more than ever — pay attention to the embodied knowledge of Nuyorican women’s bodies and to the ways that race, class, and other differences inflect their performances in ways that challenge the disciplinary boundaries between theatre, performance, and poetics scholarship.
Jaime’s The Queer Nuyorican approaches the embodied archive of Nuyorican performance through a compelling and strategic situating of the book in her “own set of identifications as a queer of color, a first-generation, butch Dominican lesbian born in the United States” and in how her extensive experiences as “a performer, a host, and an active community member allow me to move between autoethnography, performance analysis, and literary criticism to consult physical documents and texts as well as audiovisual footage as my archive” (3). From this situated knowledge, and in response to Herrera’s theorization of an uppercase “Nuyorican” feminist aesthetic that connects generations of New York Puerto Rican performeras, Jaime proposes a lowercase “nuyorican” aesthetic beyond the ethnically Puerto Rican that makes room for a range of diasporas: “a queer/trans of color poetic that, while situated within the Café’s physical space and countercultural discursive history, exceeds these gendered, geographic, and ethnic boundaries” (20).
Chapter 1 finds in the work of poet, playwright, and Café cofounder Miguel Piñero a “walking” poetics that “demonstrates a move from an ethnically fixed Nuyorican identity toward the more fluid nuyorican aesthetic” (45). Two standouts from the chapter are how Jaime engages Piñero’s relationship and collaboration with Chinese American artist Martin Wong to flesh out this fluid lowercase aesthetic, and her framing of the chapter around Piñero’s critically neglected (and unknown to me) 1985 chapbook Miguelito Piñero’s Random Thoughts and Walking Poetry, which “includes excerpts from Piñero’s journal in the early 1980s, photocopies of newspaper articles describing his arrest for selling drugs in 1982 on the Lower East Side, and writings detailing Piñero’s complicated relationship with alcohol and drugs, culture and poverty, desire and imprisonment” (27). In the context of the Café’s closure in the early 1980s, Piñero’s chapbook becomes for Jaime a key text for an alternative queer history that operates on the streets outside the Café.
While I find it crucial that “Piñero’s walks around his beloved Lower East Side, wherein he is creating and performing poetry at the Café, buying and/or selling drugs, and cruising and hooking up with men, contest the sanitizing impulse of topographical appropriation through gentrification” (37), I wish the distinctly queer nature of Piñero’s walking and its implications had been a bit more carefully and substantively theorized, especially as it relates to the poetics and politics of cruising ( José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia [2009] seems key here) and to the space for queer women and trans people within this homosocial Loisaida. Still, some of this happens in later chapters, in the book’s conclusion, and in the conclusion to the chapter, where Jaime compellingly juxtaposes photos of the outside of the Café and its surrounding murals with a meditation on her own history and practice of walking, beautifully linking the scattering of Piñero’s ashes to diasporas and the dispersal of communities through gentrification.
Chapter 2 builds on a range of thinkers (Martin Manalansan, Danny Hoch, Susan B.A. Somers-Willett) in locating Filipino American performer and poet Regie Cabico’s work within the lowercase nuyorican aesthetic inasmuch as his work embodies “a queer affect and aesthetic through movement that claims geographic space in Loisaida” (86). I especially value how Jaime frames Cabico’s work in and beyond hip hop traditions as it “moves away from the choreopoem genre through his usage of prose, parody, and camp alongside the hip-hop aesthetic practices of sampling and remixing” (70). I agree with Jaime that Cabico “articulates his Filipino identity as one formed and informed by interactions and historical links to the cultures of other marginalized peoples” (66) and as shaped by the “interconnectivity between formerly colonized peoples living within the metropole” (60), but I wonder what becomes of the ongoing struggle, knowledges, and practices of Puerto Ricans and other currently colonized peoples within this lowercase aesthetic. Is there room for evolving, uppercase anticolonial Nuyorican epistemologies (fraught and localized as they may be) in this revised queer nuyorican landscape?
The third chapter is to my mind the heart of the book, and in its own right a major contribution to Nuyorican performance scholarship. Here, Jaime produces a powerful “(auto) poetical-ethnographic account” (93) of the legendary Glam Slams that poet, novelist, and performer Emanuel Xavier organized and hosted at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and beyond in the late 1990s and 2000s. In conversation with writers such as Toni Cade Bambara and E. Patrick Johnson, Jaime reads the Glam Slams in the context of New York City ball culture famously depicted in Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1991) (Hector Xtravaganza and Willi Ninja served as the Slam’s inaugural judges), strategically deemphasizing Xavier’s founding role to highlight the audiences’ role in shaping the performances as well as the contributions of other performers, including Andres Chulisi Rodriguez as “Mother Diva” of the House of Xavier. Brilliantly, Jaime argues for the significance of the Glam Slams in terms of their dissonance with a slam-era authenticity politics of “realness” and their embrace of the “constructed performance of self in ball culture,” so that “the Glam Slam as a poetry drag ball helps us to see the textuality of corporeality and the function of movement as scripted in poetry slams” (111). Jaime rightfully emphasizes how “[m]embership in the House of Xavier, alongside participation in the event, is not limited to people who self-identify as queer or trans, or who are Puerto Rican or people of color more broadly,” as “members of the House, were chosen by Xavier and Mother Diva based on their ability to positively represent the House, with preference given to those involved in the literary scene who they felt were ‘fabulous’” (108). For Jaime, being fabulous together is about how “performances function as sites of corporeal enjoyment and release” in the context of “systems and structures that accelerate queer of color death” (111). The analytical and political imagination of this chapter, and its mix of situated cultural history, visual archive, and careful readings of performances, make it one I will return to and teach time and again.
In chapter 4, Jaime brings some welcome attention to the performances and musical productions of the multidisciplinary Black Trans poet and recording artist Ellison Glenn, now based in Berlin. Jaime highlights how Glenn’s work as Black Cracker “recombines racialized and queer trans aesthetic techniques including minstrelsy and Afrofuturity in order to underscore their differences, bringing together hip-hop tropes in dissonant ways” (124), and she boldly values Black Cracker’s willingness to “appropriate racist iconographies and reconfigure them as oppositional and joyful political gestures” (124). The chapter powerfully uses video screenshots and performance ephemera to convey how Glenn’s work as Black Cracker articulates “a sonics of ceaseless motion and travel through repetition [that] presents transness as unsettling to configurations of Afrofuturism as a politics of fixed and finite arrival” (153). Although I applaud Jaime’s theoretical sophistication here and her efforts to revise cisgender histories of Nuyorican performance, I am confused by the chronology, since my sense is that Glenn’s work as Black Cracker postdates his time at the Nuyorican Poets Café.
In the gorgeous conclusion, Jaime connects the performance cultures of the 1970s Café to the present day through the foundational figures of Miguel Algarín and Lois Elaine Griffith, while highlighting little known footage of early performers at the Café, including a very young Luis Guzmán and the percussionist Stephanie Chapman, a “Nuyorican lesbian active in the Cafe” whose presence speaks to the historical omission of an “early queer presence” (161) there. Crucially, Jaime emphasizes not only Algarín and Griffith’s artistic and cultural work but also their being “sexually ‘fluid’ — in terms of identity, practice, adventure” (169) as foundational to a lowercase queer nuyorican history. She also includes her own poetic tribute to the Cafe, which functions as a coda to this grippingly autopoetic book.
Less present in the book are the early and mid-1990s, the period just before Jaime’s involvement with the Café, when slam poetry was becoming prominent and Algarín and Bob Holman published their celebrated anthology Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (1994). That book includes at least two now well-known queer writers/performers, Sapphire and Pamela Sneed, both Black women and neither discussed in The Queer Nuyorican. How would engaging with their work inflect the lowercase nuyorican aesthetic, especially as it makes room for non-Latina/o/x Black figures from Griffith through Glenn and beyond?
Finally, I return to the opposition between an uppercase ethnically Puerto Rican tradition and an open-ended lowercase one. What do we do with someone like Glam Slam founder Emanuel Xavier, who is Ecuadorian and Puerto Rican, or even with Stonewall icon Sylvia Rivera, who was Venezuelan and Puerto Rican? The performance and politics of Rivera, who collaborated with the Young Lords but had no use for reductive nationalisms (neither does Xavier), make me think that perhaps a more capacious history of Latina/o/x New York performance requires both anticolonial (as in Herrera’s uppercase Nuyorican) and multiethnic approaches (as in Jaime’s lowercase nuyorican). I am grateful to both scholars for showing us a way there, and for the fearlessness, archival breadth, and political imagination of their embodied histories.
