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Latino poetry is a branch of American poetry written by poets born or living in the United States who are of Latin American origin or descent [1] and whose roots are tied to the Americas and their languages, cultures, and geography. [2]
The work is most often written only in English and Spanish, with flourishes of code-switching and Spanglish. [3] However, Latino poetry is also written in Portuguese and can include Nahuatl, Mayan, Huichol, Arawakan, and other indigenous languages related to the Latino experience. [2] [4] The most prominent cultural groups that write Latino poetry are Mexican-Americans and Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and Nuyoricans, Cuban-Americans, Dominican-Americans, and Central Americans.
Notable Latino poets who write in Spanish, Spanglish, and English include Miguel Algarin, Giannina Braschi, Carmen Boullosa, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Pedro Pietri, Miguel Piñero, and Tato Laviera. [3]
Notable Latino poets who write primarily in English include William Carlos Williams, Martín Espada, Sandra Maria Esteves, Cristina García, and Jimmy Santiago Baca. [5] [6]
Latino poetry explores a wide variety of personal, social justice, and historical issues, spanning themes of love, death, language, family, and history, [7] as well as discussing real-life events like immigration restrictions, human rights, DACA, and DREAMers. [7] Borders are a prevalent theme of Latino poetry. Their genres are widely varied, spanning epic poetry, prose poetry, narrative poetry, lyric poems, hip hop, rap, reggaeton, and experimental and bilingual formats. [3]
William Carlos Williams (whose English father was raised in the Dominican Republic, and whose his mother was from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico.) wrote the poetry epic Paterson from 1946 to 1958. [8] He is associated with the American modernism and imagism. [9] [8] With the goal of expanding American audiences for literature written in Spanish, Williams and José Vázquez-Amaral translated Spanish and Latin American literature together, including Figueredo's “Naked”; Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to Laziness”; and Silvina Ocampo’s “The Infinite Horses.” [10] Williams also translated The Dog and the Fever, a novella by Pedro Espinosa. [11]
Among the major Latino lyric poets writing today are MacArthur Award winner Sandra Cisneros [12] (author of the American Book Award-winning novel The House on Mango Street) and Richard Blanco, whom Barack Obama selected to write his Presidential inauguration poem. [13] In How to Love a Country, Blanco, born of Cuban exiles, writes in a mix of English and Spanish about the trauma of immigration and exile, especially for those whose lives are entwined in DACA or who live as DREAMers. [14]
Latino poets who use dramatic poetry in an epic work include Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of the Broadway musicals In the Heights (2008) and Hamilton (2015), which has rhyming couplets throughout the historical play, often multiple couplets within a single line of verse. [15] Hamilton is widely used to teach poetry in classrooms. [16] Another dramatic Latino poet is Giannina Braschi, who writes epic poetry that embeds dramatic, lyrical, and prose poems into lyric essays, political manifestos, and short stories. [17] [18] Braschi's cross-genre poetry works include Empire of Dreams (1994), the Spanglish classic Yo-Yo Boing! (1998), and the geopolitical comic-tragedy United States of Banana (2011) about the collapse of the American empire and the distribution of American passports to all Latin Americans. [19]
Other important works of poetry on American immigration and the Mexican border include 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments (1971-2007) and Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream (1999) by Juan Felipe Herrera. [20] [21]
During the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Latino poets, artists, and activists formed bilingual literary journals, magazines, publishing houses, and cultural centers to disseminate their poetry, honor their cultural legacies, and advance social justice for Latino communities. [22] Until they created their own publishing venues their works were not available. Examples of Latino founded early publishing platforms include: the performance venue Nuyorican Poets Cafe (1973); magazines such as Corazon De Aztlán (1972), Revista Chicano-Riqueña (1973), [22] and Chiricú (1976); and independent publishing house Arte Publico Press (1979), which brought bilingual authors such as Sandra Cisneros, Miguel Piñero, Pat Mora, and Nicholasa Mohr into the mainstream. [23] [24]
It was not until 2012 that a Latino, Juan Felipe Herrera, the son of migrant workers from Mexico, served as poet laureate of the United States. [25] Several Latino poets have since been elected to mainstream American poetry institutions such as the Poetry Society of America (onto whose board Rigoberto Gonzalez was elected [26] ) and the Academy of American Poets (in which Alberto Rios [27] was elected as Chancellor). However, Latino and other nonwhite poets, especially women, remain underrepresented in National Poetry Month and other mainstream American poetry organizations in the United States. [28]
However, there are many scholarly forums for the dissemination of research and teaching methods related to Latino poetry. Since 1968, there are many institutes and programs in colleges and universities throughout the United States that teach Latino literature as a counter-narrative to classes deemed "Eurocentric." [29] In addition, the largest language and academic literary associations feature post-graduate level panels and events on developments in Latino poetry, such as the Modern Language Association, Latin American Studies Association, American Comparative Literature Association, and the American Literature Association, among others.
The Nuyorican movement is a cultural and intellectual movement involving poets, writers, musicians and artists who are Puerto Rican or of Puerto Rican descent, who live in or near New York City, and either call themselves or are known as Nuyoricans. It originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s in neighborhoods such as Loisaida, East Harlem, Williamsburg, and the South Bronx as a means to validate Puerto Rican experience in the United States, particularly for poor and working-class people who suffered from marginalization, ostracism, and discrimination.
Puerto Rican literature is the body of literature produced by writers of Puerto Rican descent. It evolved from the art of oral storytelling. Written works by the indigenous inhabitants of Puerto Rico were originally prohibited and repressed by the Spanish colonial government.
Latin American poetry is the poetry written by Latin American authors. Latin American poetry is often written in Spanish, but is also composed in Portuguese, Mapuche, Nahuatl, Quechua, Mazatec, Zapotec, Ladino, English, and Spanglish. The unification of Indigenous and imperial cultures produced a unique and extraordinary body of literature in this region. Later with the introduction of African slaves to the new world, African traditions greatly influenced Latin American poetry. Many great works of poetry were written in the colonial and pre-colonial time periods, but it was in the 1960s that the world began to notice the poetry of Latin America. Through the modernismo movement, and the international success of Latin American authors, poetry from this region became increasingly influential.
Frederick Luis Aldama is an American author, editor, and academic. He is the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and founder and director of the Latinx Pop Lab at the University of Texas, Austin. At UT Austin is also affiliate faculty in Latino Media Arts & Studies and LGBTQ Studies. He continues to hold the title Distinguished University Professor as adjunct professor at The Ohio State University. He teaches courses on Latinx pop culture, especially focused on the areas of comics, TV, film, animation, and video games in the departments of English and Radio-Television-Film at UT Austin. At the Ohio State University he was Distinguished University Professor, Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor of English, University Distinguished Scholar, and Alumni Distinguished Teacher as well as recipient of the Rodica C. Botoman Award for Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring and the Susan M. Hartmann Mentoring and Leadership Award. He was also founder and director of the award-winning LASER/Latinx Space for Enrichment Research and founder and co-director of the Humanities & Cognitive Sciences High School Summer Institute. In has been inducted into the National Academy of Teachers, National Cartoonist Society, the Texas Institute of Letters, the Ohio State University's Office of Diversity & Inclusion Hall of Fame, and as board of directors for The Academy of American Poets. He sits on the boards for American Library Association Graphic Novel and Comics Round Table, BreakBread Literacy Project, and Ad Astra Media. He is founder and director of UT Austin's BIPOC POP: Comics, Gaming & Animation Arts Expo & Symposium as well as Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Latinx Pop Magazine.
Latin American literature consists of the oral and written literature of Latin America in several languages, particularly in Spanish, Portuguese, and the indigenous languages of Latin America. It rose to particular prominence globally during the second half of the 20th century, largely due to the international success of the style known as magical realism. As such, the region's literature is often associated solely with this style, with the 20th century literary movement known as Latin American Boom, and with its most famous exponent, Gabriel García Márquez. Latin American literature has a rich and complex tradition of literary production that dates back many centuries.
Ilan Stavans is an American writer and academic. He writes and speaks on American, Hispanic, and Jewish cultures. He is the author of Quixote (2015) and a contributor to the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (2010). He was the host of the syndicated PBS show Conversations with Ilan Stavans, which ran from 2001 to 2006.
McOndo is a Latin American literary movement that breaks with the magical realism mode of narration, and counters it with languages borrowed from mass media. The literature of McOndo presents urban Latin American life, in opposition to the fictional rural town of Macondo.
The Nuyorican Poets Cafe is a nonprofit organization in the Alphabet City neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It is a bastion of the Nuyorican art movement, and has become a forum for poetry, music, hip hop, video, visual arts, comedy, and theater. Several events during the PEN World Voices festival are hosted at the cafe.
Juan Felipe Herrera is an American poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist. Herrera was the 21st United States Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017. He is a major figure in the literary field of Chicano poetry.
The Ohio State University Press is the university press of Ohio State University. It was founded in 1957.
Giannina Braschi is a Puerto Rican poet, novelist, dramatist, and scholar. Her notable works include Empire of Dreams (1988), Yo-Yo Boing! (1998) and United States of Banana (2011).
The female epic is a concept in literary criticism that seeks to expand generic boundaries by identifying ways in which women authors have adapted the masculine epic tradition to express their own heroic visions.
Caribbean poetry is vast and rapidly evolving field of poetry written by people from the Caribbean region and the diaspora.
American literature in Spanish in the United States dates back as 1610 when the Spanish explorer Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá published his epic poem Historia de Nuevo México. He was an early chronicler of the conquest of the Americas and a forerunner of Spanish-language literature in the United States given his focus on the American landscape and the customs of the people. However, it was not until the late 20th century that Spanish language literature written by Americans was regularly published in the United States.
Yo-Yo Boing! (1998) is a postmodern novel in English, Spanish, and Spanglish by Puerto Rican author Giannina Braschi. The cross-genre work is a structural hybrid of poetry, political philosophy, musical, manifesto, treatise, memoir, and drama. The work addresses tensions between Anglo-American and Hispanic-American cultures in the United States.
United States of Banana (2011) is a postmodern allegorical novel by the Puerto Rican author Giannina Braschi. It is a cross-genre work that blends experimental theatre, prose poetry, short story, and political philosophy with a manifesto on democracy and American life in a post-9/11 world. The book dramatizes the global war on terror and narrates the author's displacement after the attacks from her home in the Battery Park neighborhood in New York City. The work addresses Latin American immigration to the United States, Puerto Rico's colonial status, and "power imbalances within the Americas."
Latino literature is literature written by people of Latin American ancestry, often but not always in English, most notably by Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Dominican Americans, many of whom were born in the United States. The origin of the term "Latino literature" dates back to the 1960s, during the Chicano Movement, which was a social and political movement by Mexican Americans seeking equal rights and representation. At the time, the term "Chicano literature" was used to describe the work of Mexican-American writers. As the movement expanded, the term "Latino" came into use to encompass writers of various Latin American backgrounds, including Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and others.
Empire of Dreams is a postmodern poetry epic by Puerto Rican author Giannina Braschi, who is considered "one of the most revolutionary voices in Latin American literature today".
Latino theatre presents a wide range of aesthetic approaches, dramatic structures, and themes, ranging from love, romance, immigration, border politics, nation building, incarceration, and social justice. Whether of a linguistic, ethnic, political, cultural or sexual nature, the plays often have a social justice component involving Latino people living in the United States. The Oxcart by René Marqués, Marisol by José Rivera, and In the Heights by Lin-Manuel Miranda are examples of staged Broadway plays. There is also a strong tradition of Latino avant-garde and absurdist theatre, which double as political satires; prime examples include The Masses are Asses by Pedro Pietri and United States of Banana by Giannina Braschi.
Jose Luis Torres-Padilla, also known by his pen name J. L. Torres, is a Puerto Rican and American fiction writer, poet, literary scholar, critic and editor. He was born in Cayey, Puerto Rico and grew up in the South Bronx. His work focuses on diasporic Puerto Rican literature and culture. He is married and has two sons.
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