poets stand proud as you can see

Puerto Rican poet and playwright, Miguel Piñero, was a leading member of the Nuyorican literary movement and founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café—an influential forum in Alphabet City known as a haven for music, poetry, theater, and comedy.

Piñero migrated from Puerto Rico to Manhattan in 1950. Enmeshed in poverty and abandoned by his father, Piñero began stealing food for his family.  Eventually, he was incarcerated at Sing Sing Correctional Facility where he got the inspiration for his groundbreaking play, Short Eyes.  The influential producer and director, Joseph Papp, was so impressed by the play that he moved the production to Broadway—the first play written by a Puerto Rican to make it there.

Though he is best known for his plays and screenwriting, Piñero’s poetry is essential to the mid-century Puerto Rican experience in the United States. At a time when thousands of people were leaving the island for the mainland in search of better opportunities, artists like Piñero accurately depicted the pain of inescapable poverty and institutional racism, set to the beat of an unforgiving city.

So here I am, look at me
I stand proud as you can see
pleased to be from the Lower East
a street fighting man
a problem of this land
I am the Philosopher of the Criminal Mind
a dweller of prison time
a cancer of Rockefeller’s ghettocide
this concrete tomb is my home
to belong to survive you gotta be strong
you can’t be shy less without request
someone will scatter your ashes thru
the Lower East Side.

– excerpt from “A Lower East Side Poem”