By Claudio Iván Remeseira | Posted October 26, 2012
On October 25, 2012 Columbia University celebrated the acquisition of the papers of writer and activist Jack Agüeros. This event marked the launch of the Latino Arts and Activism Archive, a joint initiative of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. The promoter of the initiative, CSER Director Frances Negrón-Muntaner, gave the opening remarks, followed by the library's Director, Michael Ryan; the poet Martín Espada; and Humberto Cintrón, a writer, former PBS host, and close friend of Agüeros. The organizers also gave me the honor of being one of the speakers; my comments on Agüeros' life and work are posted below. It was a highly emotional event: In 2004, Mr. Agüeros was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. At the end of the ceremony, Jack's children, Marcel and Natalia, thanked the numerous friends, family members, colleagues and admirers who gathered to celebrate the work and legacy of one of the most prominent Puerto Rican New Yorkers. —C.I.R.
On October 25, 2012 Columbia University celebrated the acquisition of the papers of writer and activist Jack Agüeros. This event marked the launch of the Latino Arts and Activism Archive, a joint initiative of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. The promoter of the initiative, CSER Director Frances Negrón-Muntaner, gave the opening remarks, followed by the library's Director, Michael Ryan; the poet Martín Espada; and Humberto Cintrón, a writer, former PBS host, and close friend of Agüeros. The organizers also gave me the honor of being one of the speakers; my comments on Agüeros' life and work are posted below. It was a highly emotional event: In 2004, Mr. Agüeros was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. At the end of the ceremony, Jack's children, Marcel and Natalia, thanked the numerous friends, family members, colleagues and admirers who gathered to celebrate the work and legacy of one of the most prominent Puerto Rican New Yorkers. —C.I.R.
1.
As I was taking notes
for this speech, rereading Jack Agüeros’s works and reflecting on his long and
plentiful career, it suddenly dawned on me that Jack’s life, his story, his
legacy, is a true metonym of New York’s Latino history. Jack himself describes his personal experience of that history in his poignant and beautiful essay “Halfway
to Dick and Jane: A Puerto Rican Pilgrimage”:
“I was born in Harlem
in 1934 … I am an only child … My mother, Carmen Díaz, came [from Puerto Rico]
to New York in 1931 … My father [Joaquín Agüeros] had been [here] since the
mid-twenties … We lived on 111th Street off Fifth Avenue … Our apartment was a
three-room first-floor walk-up … It was the Depression, and work was hard to
come by.” Carmen, who had dreamed of becoming an interior decorator, worked for
many years as a seamstress in the Garment District. Joaquín, a former police
officer described by his son as a character out of a picaresque Spanish novel,
toiled most of his adult life in restaurants and factories.
The first pages of his
essay—which actually is a short, intense memoir—are filled with a detailed evocation
of the apartment where Jack spent his early years, a warm, working-class
household kept immaculately clean by his mother, with a Detrola radio churning
out the Libertad Lamarque and Carlos Gardel tangos that Jack would learn by
heart, and large Christmas and birthday parties with pasteles and lechón asado
and arroz con gandules and lots of coquito to wash down the abundant food. Jack’s
father would even bring in a band to play for the guests every Christmas.
“The first seven years
of my life were not too great a variation on Dick and Jane, the school book
figures who … were blond and Anglo-Saxons, not migrants like the Puerto Ricans
… ”
In the 1930s and ’40s,
El Barrio was a multiethnic enclave: Italians, Irish, Jews, Chinese, “some
blacks” and “a sprinkling of Puerto Ricans,” in Agüeros’s words. That picture
would change dramatically after World War II. Agüeros describes this
change as the Fall from an Age of Innocence—the “clear and open world” of his
childhood.
“The war ended,” he
says, “and the heavy Puerto Rican migration began … Into an ancient
neighborhood came pouring four to five times more people than it had been
designed to hold. Men who came running at the promise of jobs were jobless …
The sudden surge in numbers caused new resentments, and prejudice was
intensified … In our confusion we were sometimes pathetically reaching out,
sometimes pathologically striking out. Gangs. Drugs. Wine. Smoking. Girls.
Dances and slow-drag music. Mambo, Spics, Spooks, and Wops. Territories,
brother gangs, and war councils establishing rules for right of way on blocks
and avenues and for seating in the local theater. Pegged pants and zip guns.
Slang. Dick and Jane were dead, man. Education collapsed. Every class had ten
kids who spoke no English. Black, Italian, Puerto Rican relations in the
classroom were good, but we all knew we couldn’t visit one another’s
neighborhoods. Sometimes we could not move too freely within our own blocks.”
This stark,
unsentimental depiction of an unraveling community concludes with a dystopian
variation on John Winthrop’s A Model of
Christian Charity theme. “[T]here was a hill on 103rd Street known locally
as Cooney’s Hill. When you got to the top of the hill, something strange
happened: America began, because from the hill South was where the ‘Americans’
lived. Dick and Jane were not dead; they were alive and well, living in a
better place.”
Jack Agüeros’s lifelong
mission, both as an activist and as an artist, has been to demand that those living
on the other side of the hill pay attention to the needs of his people, the
ones living on this side, and to remove the obstacles that prevented them from reaching
the better place they deserved in American life.
2.
Jack attended Public
School 107—now the Julia de Burgos Latino Cultural Center—and Benjamin Franklin
High School, both in El Barrio. After four years in the U.S. Air Force, he went to Brooklyn
College on the GI Bill and graduated with a B.A. in English literature. After college he would
walk directly into the turmoil of the 1960s.
During the first part
of the decade, he worked as a community organizer for the Henry Street
Settlement and the Neighborhood Youth Corps, as director of the Upper Manhattan
branch of the Citywide Interfaith Coordinating Committee, and as a field
representative for the Federal Office of Economic Opportunity.
In 1966 the Puerto
Rican Forum, led by Antonia Pantoja, established the Puerto Rican Community
Development Project (PRCDP). This organization, like many others that flourished
in that period, was funded as part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty. Jack Agüeros
became the PRCDP’s deputy director. In that position he played a key role in
the events preceding and following the 1967 East Harlem riots.
On July 21, 1967, an
off-duty policeman killed an allegedly armed Puerto Rican; this killing
triggered a series of clashes between the police and groups of young men in El Barrio. Over the next few days, the violence escalated, and on the night of the 24th, thousands
rioted in the streets of East Harlem and of Mott Haven in the Bronx. At
daybreak, three people lay dead, dozens of stores had been looted, several cars
were destroyed, and piles of garbage turned into bonfires still burned
ominously on the streets.
It was a Puerto Rican
Summer of Discontent, the explosion of a cauldron of frustration and rage that
had been simmering in plain sight over the past two decades, stirred by the
combustible mix of poverty, inner-city decay, racism, discrimination, and police
harassment. A watershed moment for the visibility of a long-neglected minority,
its historical significance was captured by this New York Times headline: “Puerto Rican Story: A Sensitive People Erupts.” .
These events were part of
a larger national drama: Between 1965 and 1971, riots broke out in the Puerto
Rican barrios of Chicago (1965,
1966), Perth Amboy (1967), East Harlem (1967, 1970), New Haven (1967), Passaic
and Hartford (1969, 1970), the South Bronx (1970), and Camden, Hoboken, and Long
Branch (1971).
The 1967 East Harlem
riots were, as Lorrin Thomas puts it in Puerto Rican Citizenship: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City,
El Barrio’s “first full-scale riots,” and the worst “disturbances” (the
euphemism used in those days by the authorities) in New York City since the
Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant riots of 1964.
Agüeros is quoted in almost
every story published by the press about the events. Along with other public
figures, he was from the first night on the streets trying to prevent the
crisis from expanding—there were fears of a clash between Puerto Ricans and blacks,
which fortunately never happened—and organizing the neighborhood for the
aftermath of the riots.
On July 28, The New York Times ran a front-page article
on the harsh criticism leveled by an assembly of Puerto Rican leaders against
Mayor John Lindsey. They accused Lindsey of disregarding the recommendations they
had given him at a conference summoned by the Mayor himself in the spring. The article
calls Agüeros—who read the meeting’s press release to the media—one of the “most
vocal” critics.
The response from the
Major’s office was immediate. A statement issued in response by the Major's
spokesman read, “The aspirations of the Puerto Rican community are just, and their
fulfillment is imperative.”
As part of his policy of
outreach to minorities, Lindsey invited grassroots activists to participate in his
administration. On April 22, 1968, Agüeros was appointed deputy commissioner of
New York's Community Development Agency (CDA), the city’s anti-poverty program.
For a short time, he was the highest-ranking Puerto Rican official in town.
His stint ended abruptly
a couple of months later when he launched a hunger strike to protest the mistreatment
of the community by the Lindsey administration. A black and white photo by Neal Boenzi of a cross-legged Agüeros on a long armchair at his office, with his conditions
handwritten on posters taped on the wall behind him, is an iconic image of the
Latino civil rights struggles.
On the fifth day, Lindsay
conceded to most of the conditions, and Agüeros ended his strike.
He went on to earn an M.A.
in urban studies from Occidental College. Back in New York, he became director
of Mobilization for Youth, a social service agency operating in the Lower East
Side whose archives, by the way, are also hosted by this Library.
From 1977 to 1986, Agüeros
accomplished what is generally considered his crowning achievement as a community
leader: He served as director of El Museo del Barrio,
which had been created in 1969 by local educators, artists, and activists with the
goal of preserving the Puerto Rican cultural heritage. His tenure marked a turning point in the history of the
organization, the first museum in the mainland U.S. dedicated to Puerto Rican
art and culture. Among many other things, he assembled a collection of carved
wooden saints from Puerto Rico, provided space to local Puerto Rican artists
and writers, and started one of the most beloved of El Museo’s traditions: the annual
Three Kings’ Day Parade.
3.
Agüeros’s career as a
social activist would have been enough to ensure his place in the history of New
York. But there is his literary work too.
In the words of Martín Espada, “Jack Agüeros is one of the most accomplished and versatile of all
Latino writers. Consider the range of his production … poetry, short fiction,
translation, plays, essays, theatre criticism, journalism, scriptwriting, children’s
stories. He has received grants and awards in three different disciplines—for
poetry, fiction, and playwriting—which is a rare feat indeed. Yet he has not received
the recognition … he deserves, either from the mainstream literary world or
from the Puerto Rican literary community.”
There are several
reasons that explain this strange equal-opportunity indifference; I’ll try to
hint at them later.
Jack Agüeros wrote his
first poems and plays in college, and he kept writing throughout the 1960s and ’70s
while performing his public work. In an interview with
Carmen Dolores Hernández for her book Puerto Rican Voices in English, he describes his literary credo: “I try to write
from the point of view of a person who was raised within what is called a
minority in this country … to present people as we know them, from inside, from
the heart, with all the details.” This view manifests itself in quite different ways in his poetry, his short
stories, and his theater.
He wrote a dozen
one-act plays—in which he combined modern, classical, and medieval elements,
such as Spanish autos sacramentales—and
three longer plays. One of them, The News
form Puerto Rico, won the 1989 McDonald's Latino Dramatist Award. Most of
his plays have been staged by the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater and other
companies, but they remain unpublished.
He also wrote TV scripts.
The script for “They Can't Even Read Spanish,” a 30-minute drama produced by
Joe Michaels for NBC with an entirely Puerto Rican cast (including Sesame Street actress Carla Pinza), was
the first one on prime-time TV entirely written and performed by Puerto Ricans.
This was probably also the first TV show videotaped on location at a Lower East
Side bodega.
The argument
encapsulates the tensions of that decade: Don Luis (José Ocasio), a hardworking
bodeguero, is proud and at the same
time ashamed of his son’s activities in the “Young People’s Party” (an allusion
to the Young Lords). The son (Alex Colon) and some friends picket the local
library, demanding more books in Spanish “so the people can read about our
history and our heroes.” The father is perplexed by his son’s attitude, since
the son doesn’t speak Spanish. “If they don’t give me books in Spanish, I’ll
never be able to read them,” the son replies.
The show aired on WNBC
TV Channel 4 on Saturday, May 8, 1971. It was supposed to be the first of four programs (the second one was written by Pancho Cintrón, who is also here tonight),
but the series was discontinued. It was a long time until any Puerto Rican
wrote a major TV show again.
That same year, “Halfway to Dick and Jane” was
included in Thomas C. Wheeler’s anthology The
Immigrant Experience: The Anguish of Becoming American (The Dial Press,
1971). Agüeros’s literary debut could not have been more auspicious: His name headed
the list of contributors, which also included, among others, the bestselling author
of The Godfather, Mario Puzo, and a still
little-known Pole exile, the future Nobel Prize laureate Czesław Miłosz.
In the years that
followed, Agüeros would publish his poetry and fiction in different journals
and magazines and would even appear in a few anthologies of Latino literature. He
also wrote theater reviews and other pieces of journalism for the Village Voice, El Diario-La Prensa, and Newsday.
But it would take him another
20 years to publish his first book, the collection of poems Correspondence Between the Stonehaulers
(Hanging Loose Press, 1991). He would publish two more poetry volumes, Sonnets from the Puerto Rican (1996) and
Lord, Is This a Psalm? (2002).
The
titles of these books are self-explanatory. Agüeros the poet works mainly with
two forms: the sonnet and psalms. (Sonnets From the Puerto Rican is an
ironic reference to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets From the Portuguese.)
His
sonnets, Espada says, are sonnets
of the street, and “their subjects are often the homeless, the exploited, the
addicted, the anonymous dead.” Agüeros chose this prestigious structure, adds
Espada, “to bestow dignity on undignified lives and demand respect for those
usually denied that respect. How many sonnets exist in the world for the
homeless of Tompkins Square Park, or for a tubercular bindery worker?”
The psalms, on the
other hand, are short, often humorous poems. In them the author talks to God,
although it’s not clear whether he really believes in God or not. “There is a
wry social satirist at work in these poems,” says Espada, “for the questions he
asks are pointed as much at the church, or the government, or the corporate culture,
or us, as they are at the inscrutable Lord.”
Among the poets who influenced
him, Agüeros has mentioned e.e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent
Millay, and above all, Shakespeare. Espada points out the influence of Neruda, especially
in the psalms.
Far removed from the
spoken-word tradition that has dominated Latino poetry for decades, Agüeros also rejects the label “Nuyorican.” Nuyorican culture, he says, stems
from “a sort of schizophrenic formation” of those who are divided between two
cultures, two languages. “That doesn’t happen to me,” Agüeros told Hernández.
“I had access to Spanish through the radio and because it was spoken at home,
but I never learned it in formal terms … I can’t feel like a Nuyorican because
I identify with many Puerto Rican things and I’m interested in the island’s
culture, but I would be a liar if I said that culture has been an influence
over me.”
Another extraordinary accomplishment
is his translation of the complete poetry of Puerto Rican writer Julia de
Burgos (Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems, Curbstone Press, 1997) and Cuban
author and revolutionary José Martí (Come, Come, My Boiling Blood: The Complete Poems, Curbstone Press, 2007).
Because of his social
activism and the constant references to the dispossessed in his poems, Agüeros
may seem to be a typical artiste engagé;
but his literature is much more than a means to achieve the end of social
justice. “In my poetry I do I lot of denunciation, but in my stories [and in his
theater, I would add] I don’t think I do. In the stories I try to imply rather
than explain,” he told Hernández. This is apparent in his only published collection
of short stories, Dominoes and Other Stories from the Puerto Rican (1993).
I transcribe what Kirkus
Reviews said of this collection of “eight well-crafted stories”: “Agüeros
offers a memorable portrait gallery of ordinary—though thoroughly
individualized—Puerto Rican New Yorkers … Here are some of the expected, common
images of Puerto Rican life—the men playing dominoes on the street, the young
boy working in the family bodega, the hopeful entrepreneur selling food in the
park—but there are more unusual characters, too, such as Vázquez, the
horologist seen at work repairing antique clocks in a Greenwich Village shop.
In each case, Agüeros provides enough detail (without getting bogged down in
minutiae) to capture the flavor and texture of daily life. For his point of
departure, he often takes a character or situation so familiar as to border on
stereotype; but in his hands, these small tales lead the reader to a deeper
sense of recognition. Studies of character and community in the realist mode,
told with quiet humor, without sensationalism or sentimentality.”
One point to highlight
here is Agüeros’s attitude toward stereotypes, his reaction to how the
“typical” Puerto Rican should behave or look. In the interview with Hernández,
Agüeros adamantly dismisses what he calls the two major Puerto Rican clichés: “the
man wearing rolled-up white pants, a straw hat … and a machete in his hand.” the
island stereotype of the jíbaro, and
its mainland counterpart, “the Ghetto-Rican, the ghetto kid, tough and with a
gun in his hand.”
Agüeros is a big
admirer of 19th-century English novelists: Jane Austen, the Brönte sisters,
George Eliot, and above all, Charles Dickens, he told Hernández. It is not hard
to find the influence of those writers in his work, as in that of many other
American writers, Latino or otherwise.
Another, less obvious
influence is that of the “local colorists,” the regionalist American writers of
that period, the most important of whom is undoubtedly Mark Twain. But Agüeros also
mentions two lesser-known writers who were widely popular in post-bellum
America: Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, the author of very successful books on New
Orleans and Japan, and Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby, the self-styled “Lait paster
uv the church of the Noo Dispensashun.” (I wonder whether Pedro Pietri was somehow inspired by him too.) Petroleum V. Nasby was
the pseudonym of David Ross Locke, a radical Republican and the fictional
persona in whose mouth Locke would put the most outrageously racist arguments—a
sort of a Jim Crow Archie Bunker.
Those writers paid extraordinary
attention to details of environment, customs, and speech. “Some of our writers
now are trying to do the same for the Puerto Ricans, to give that sound, to mix
in those words, that Spanglish,” Agüeros told Hernández. “I think it’s a continuity
with that kind of literature. They are writing the way their people speak, like
what happened with the Negro dialect at the time of the Harlem Renaissance.”
By inserting himself in
that tradition, Agüeros is not only trying to become a good American writer; he
is also trying to insert his Puerto Rican characters into the great flow of
American literature, to grant them full citizenship in the republic of U.S.
letters. In doing so, he is vindicating the lives of the actual people who
inspired those characters, justifying their rightful place in the hill.
“While everybody is
trying to find these magnificent world themes to write about, why don’t I go
down to the bar on 110th Street and listen to what they are saying and write
about that? That’s what Mark Twain did.”
4.
Earlier this year, Jack
Agüeros was awarded the Asan World Prize, instituted by the Asan Memorial
Association; previous recipients include Nicolás Guillén, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Judith Wright. In addition to this
award, Agüeros received another one for his poetry and a couple of prizes as a playwright,
one of them when he was still in college. By any account, this is a highly
ungenerous lack of recognition of his merits.
In the words of Martín
Espada: “Despite his impressive record of accomplishment, Jack Agüeros does not
rank among the most celebrated of Latino writers … In a community full of
neglected writers, the neglect of Agüeros seems particularly unjust.”
Today, that injustice
is being undone.
Claudio, an extraordinary tribute to an extraordinary man. Thanks for sharing this article with me. I've posted it on my FB wall.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comments Dan!
ReplyDelete