Cruz, Victor Hernández

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CRUZ, Victor Hernández


Nationality: Puerto Rican. Born: Aguas Buenas, 6 February 1949. Immigrated to the United States in 1954. Education: Benjamin Franklin High School, New York. Family: Divorced; one son and one daughter. Career: Editor, Umbra magazine, 1967–69; co-founder, East Harlem Gut Theatre, New York, 1968; guest lecturer, University of California, Berkeley, 1970; member of ethnic studies Department, San Francisco State College, 1971–72. Visiting professor, literature department, University of California, San Diego, winter 1993, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, program in Caribbean culture and literature, winter 1994. Also worked for the San Francisco ArtCommission, 1976, and Mission Neighborhood Center, San Francisco, 1981. Founder, with Ishmael Reed, Before Columbus Foundation. Awards: Creative Arts Public Service award, 1974; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1980; New York Poetry Foundation award, 1989; Guggenheim award (Latin America and the Caribbean), 1991. Address: P.O. Box 1047, Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico 00703.

Publications

Poetry

Papo Got His Gun. New York, Calle Once, 1966.

Doing Poetry. Berkeley, California, Other Ways, 1968.

Snaps. New York, Random House, 1969.

Mainland. New York, Random House, 1973.

Tropicalization. Berkeley, California, Reed Cannon and Johnson, 1976.

By Lingual Wholes. San Francisco, Momo's Press, 1982.

Rhythm, Content and Flavor: New and Selected Poems. Houston, Arte Publico Press, 1988.

Red Beans. Minneapolis, Minnesota, Coffee House Press, 1991.

Panoramas. Minneapolis, Minnesota, Coffee House Press, 1997.

Other

Editor, with Herbert Kohl, Stuff: A Collection of Poems, Visions and Imaginative Happenings from Young Writers in Schools—Opened and Closed. Cleveland, World, 1970.

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Critical Studies: "Latin Popular Music in the Poetry of Victor Hernández Cruz" by Frances Aparicio, in MELUS, 16(1), spring 1990; by Anne C. Bromley, in American Book Review, 13(6), February 1992.

Victor Hernández Cruz comments:

I was born via midwife in a small wooden house some two hundred miles from the equatorial line of the planet on the island of Puerto Rico in a small town of agricultural habits, Aguas Buenas. My grandfather Julio, "El Bohemio," was a tobacconist; that is, he rolled cigars. Tobacconists are notorious spinners of tales, and they have a tradition of reading literature out loud while they work. This was my introduction to expression through readers of Cervantes and the Bible in the chin-chal (tobacco workshop) and the practitioners of oral poetry—declaimers and the singers of the bolero. When the agricultural system of the island broke down due to bad management, it left a great portion of the interior campesino population displaced. These were my folks, and we became a part of some kind of massive forced migration. We left the mountains with our songs, spiritism, humor, and our Caribbean spaced-out heads and headed toward cities like New York and Chicago. At the age of five I was staring out a window on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, locked in the house until my mother made certain that it was okay to go out while white coconut meat fell frozen from the sky. At the age of fifteen I began to write, feeling a very deep impulse to do so. I really had to balance a lot of worlds together, for I was feeling and looking at the culture of my parents and the new and modern culture of New York, its architecture, its art, and its fervent intellectual thought. I have been comparing things silently inside myself ever since. I feel like an eternal immigrant, leaving a past and going toward a future. I practice folkloric experimentation and hope that I can rescue the old stories to tell them in the houses of the future.

(1995) Coming from a Caribbean culture, I am at the center of cultural and racial syntheses. This includes psychology, religion, spirituality, music, languages, dances, gestures. It is a great place from which to write and make music because so much of world culture has come through here to be molded and changed. We are truly one of the greatest cosmopolitan centers of the planet. Before leaving to the United States and thus to English, the Spanish of my upbringing was full of Taino words, Arabic and African words. Speaking or writing, it was like making the story of my mestizo body vibrate in the sounds. The language was full of the conquest, slavery, the hacienda, and other forms of encomiendas, a Spanish word for "migration." In New York City I came into contact with different forms of English—Yiddish-influenced English, African-American English, all sorts of working-class speech from the great community of immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Language for me is always migration and translation. History for me is many epochs and social attitudes, one within the other. Out of all these elements I have forged a poetry that contains both tradition and experiment, a marriage between oral and literate forms, the popular and the cultivated. Writing is a strong individual freedom. The poet deciphers his psychological, emotional, and historical position for himself and others (for language is always a social bridge) within the rhythms of his culture, the culture that he was born into and the culture that he continuously acquires. Writing is making oneself up from what one has toward what one dreams.

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Victor Hernández Cruz, a Puerto Rican émigré and bilingual poet of cultural collisions and fusions, emerged as a vital and distinctive poetic voice during the early 1970s. His is a major voice in the so-called Newyorican school of émigré poets. Key to his work is his use of English in relation to his native Spanish. His early books—Snaps and Mainland—reflect the immigrant experience with verve, desire, and irony, moving back and forth from Puerto Rico to New York to California: "I am quiet / Still / Like the owls who sit atop / telephone poles."

Cruz's poems move easily in and out of barrio pop song infusions with post-Lorca odas delire, an insistence on place and displacement, the graftings of multicultural urban voices and images, and the poet as alien eyes and ears observing and rewriting the world he wanders through. Cruz plays with syntactical and grammatical conventions in both English and Spanish, weaving fascinating bifurcated chaos that he transcends, offering a diffracted synthesis allowing for more complex pleasures.

By Lingual Wholes is a comprehensive collection of Cruz's work and the place where his language play is most contagious and extensive. American and Spanish vernaculars bruise and caress often traditional rhythms and sentiments. The poet sees through the torn world to green paradises of perfection: "The greater cities are / surrounded by woods / Jungles secretly / of America / / Behind lights / the green / Green eyes of Tree gods / Rhythm we would call it Puerto Rico / But it doesn't begin to be as real."

—David Meltzer