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Migration and Decolonial Politics in Two Afro-Latino Poets: Pachn Marn and TatoLavieraLaura LomasPublished online: 31 Oct 2014.

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Migration and Decolonial Politics inTwo Afro-Latino Poets: PachnMarn and Tato LavieraLaura Lomas

Laura Lomas is Associate Professor of English and American Studies,Rutgers University, Newark. She is the author of Translating Empire: JosMart, Migrant Latino Subjects and American Modernities (2008). Sheserves on the Board of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary HeritageProject.

Francisco Gonzalo Pachn Marn (18631897), Afro-Puertorriqueo,exiled poet, typesetter, journalist, and revolutionary, belongs to an Afro-Latina/o tradition in the late nineteenth century that opened a pathwayfor Jess Abraham Tato Laviera (19512013). Tato Laviera, like hislargely forgotten predecessor Marn, wrote to transform political con-sciousness, in the tradition of the Nuyorican poets. This history of Marnand Lavieras Afro-Latina/o migrant writing helps define multilingual,transamerican Latina/o literature. Reading across decades elucidatesconnections among Puerto Rican poets whose language and style differ,but whose preoccupations and politics reveal generative connections.

Whereas Marn exists in Puerto Rican and Cuban literary historyprimarily as a nationalist who died fighting under Mximo Gmez, andLaviera figures primarily in anthologies of U.S. American literature, bothMarn and Laviera write from places of exclusion and displacement:colonial Puerto Rico/expatriate New York in the 1890s and the margins ofLower East Side New York in the 1980s and 1990s. Thus, the pairing I amproposing follows the lead of the editors of Herencia: An Anthology ofHispanic Literature in the United States and the Norton Anthology ofLatino Literature, who consider Marn as a Latina/o writer. Reading

Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 89, Vol. 47, No. 2, 2014, 155163

Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas ISSN 0890-5762 print/ISSN 1743-0666 online # 2014 Americas Society, Inc.http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905762.2014.956519

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Marn as an Afro-Latino helps us to recognize Lavieras similardecolonizing politics as integral to his aesthetic experiments andAfricanized Spanglish poetic sound. These poets made their literaryexpression into a mode of survivala way to make a living after theuprooting of exile and migrationand a means to collective healing. Theydocumented marginalized histories and projected a different future forus.1 In excavating a nineteenth-century ancestor for Laviera andimagining the futurity of Marn, I read these poets as part of a traditionthat, like a walking bridge (from Lavieras poem AmeRcan), movesback and forth across borders and time.2 These movements in multipledirections expand upon the transculturation that characterizes the Latina/oliterature of the Hispanic Caribbean borderlands.

Both Marn and Laviera engaged in crossing borders, geographic aswell as linguistic. Marn did not write in English, but documented theaislamiento y del silencio (isolation and silence) that the Spanish-speaking migrant encounters in the midst of New York Citys over-whelming noise (Nueva York desde adentro, Cinco Narraciones 61).Laviera, in his practice of bilingual poetics, invented words to makeregional claims, with ramifications beyond the scope of Puerto Rico andthe United States. Similarly, Marn affiliated himself with Cubas anti-colonial fight. Marn describes this struggle in transnational terms in hispoem entitled Mart, the Cuban organizer who sought la libertadobrero / lejos de los patrios lares (workers liberation / far from patrioticspaces) (En la Arena 29). Marn proposed class justice and an alternativeto empire without sacrificing the popular wit and irony of his poetry topolitical orthodoxy, just as Laviera articulated a subtle language of exileand revolt while deploying an arsenal of parody and bilingual wordplay.3

The revolutionary art and praxis of Marn led ultimately to Lavierasinventive Spanglish, his educational and bestseller success, and a newmainstream ethics (the title of Lavieras third book). The recoveredpoetry and prose of Marn help us think anew about twentieth-centurywriters like Laviera who inherited the previous centurys unfinishedliberation projects.4

Transamerican Migration and the Repression that Prompts It

Migration to and from the Hispanic Caribbean borderlands represents apoint of departure for both poets, in a tradition that Julio Ramos hasgeneratively limned.5 Francisco Gonzalo Marn lived an extreme form ofstatelessness during the period of economic crisis and repression in PuertoRico in the 1880s, much as Tato Laviera and other migrants from PuertoRico survived the violence, poverty, addiction, dysfunctional education,and corrupt system of the Lower East Side in the 1980s. For Marn, elAo Terrible, 1887, known as la poca del componte (the era of

1 See Analisa Degravesilluminating discussion ofLavieras use of little caseus as a revision of theupper case United States, inNot Nowhere (117),which thus also gesturesbeyond the U.S. proper.

2 I am indebted to Degravesessay Not Nowhere for itselaboration of thismetaphor of the walkingbridge, which derives fromthe seventh stanza of thepoem AmeRcan, inLavieras book of the samename: forth across andback and forth / our tripsare walking bridges!(1985:94).

3 This phrase appears in thecollaborative testimoniocreated by Alvarez andLaviera, Tato in his ownwords (The AmeRcan Poet301). As for Marns humor,he refers to a flag as atrapo (rag) (1944:19) andpokes fun at the futility andbrevity of life inHumoristica (1944:8990)and Laviera draws onhumor in brava criollostory(AmeRcan) andparodies Ren Marquezwith his title La CarretaMade a U-Turn.

4 With the term recoveredI want to express gratitudeto Nicols Kanellos,Puertorriqueo scholar,archivist, and indefatigablefounder and director of the

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rectification), proved a catalyst for his political and poetic consciousness.6

Confronting the myth of racial harmony or nation as familia in LatinAmerican creole nationalism radicalized Marn and forced him intostruggle. Similarly, Tato Laviera encountered his familys anti-blackracism and sexism after having left the Santurce of his nationalist,Venezuelan-born father, because his sister was pregnant and their fatherdid not approve. Drawing on his familys legacy of maroon escape andrebellionSanturce was founded by rebellious former slavesLavieraused his tongue as a weapon throughout his career: la lengua es / laametrelladora / de la libertad (the tongue is / the machine gun / ofliberty).7 Indeed, the critique of racism, colonialism, and poverty thatdisproportionately affects darker-skinned Latinas/os, constitutes one ofthe unfinished projects that twentieth-century poets inherited from theirnineteenth-century predecessors.

Reading these poets together facilitates reconstruction of a literarytradition in the face of dispersed national archives. While Tato Lavierainvented poetic forms that vindicated the migratory subjectivity of thePuerto Rican diaspora, Marn sang his lyrical ballads, often accompaniedon guitar, for his friends and followers as a creative response to the racismand colonialism that prompted his exile. Critical of restricted positionstheir societies constructed for them as Boricuas of African descent, theyput into practice revolutionary ideals and lived as bohemian poets andperformers. Just as Marn laid necessary groundwork for Laviera, thelatters deconstruction of binaries (English/Spanish, white/black, nation/diaspora, us/them) makes it possible to recover the formers poetry inSpanish as part of a Latina/o literary tradition.

Let me briefly sketch Pachn Marns life. Of African descent throughhis grandmothers, from a young age Marn promoted the abolition ofprejudices based on rank, color, or caste, freedom of the press, and self-government in the Americas. Marns public declaration of these ideashad repercussions, including deportations and trans-Caribbean migra-tions. Eventually, such ideas informed his role as Secretary of the ClubBorinquen of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (the Puerto RicanSection of the Cuban Revolutionary Club) and as designer of the PuertoRican flag, as well as his death on the Isla de Turiguan among therevolutionary forces fighting for Cuban and Puerto Rican independence.8

After the publication of his second book of poems, Mi Obolo (1887),dedicated to autonomist party founder Romn Baldioroty de Castro, hisnewspaper, El Postilln, was shut down during the compontes and Marnleft for the Dominican Republic. Although his literary prowess initiallygained him favor from General Ulises Heureaux, with Marns publiccritique the Dominican dictator forced him to march through the city in

award-winning Recoveringthe U.S. Hispanic LiteraryHeritage Project and of ArtePblico Press, both based atthe University of Houston,in Houston, Texas.

5 See Julio Ramossindispensable essayMigratories, and hisDivergent Modernities,which describe migration asrequiring an alternative tosingle national origin andposits a deterritorializedLatina/o subjectivity thattransports rather thanplants cultural roots.

6 The word compontederives from the Spanishuse of torture tocomponer (put in order)or subdue rebellious freeblack artisans in Cubaduring La Escalera severaldecades earlier in 1844. Inother words, the period ofviolently enforcedordering created aparadigm of state-sponsored repression thatextended to colonial PuertoRico and beyond.

7 I credit Stephanie Alvarezfor making this last coupletfrom conciencia inMainstream Ethics (ticacorriente) the catchphrasethat encapsulates Lavierasradical politics and poetics.

8 See Figueroa de Cifredo,7173, where she citescorrespondence withpersonal testimony fromDomingo Collazo and J. deH. Terrforte crediting aletter from Marn, then inJamaica, suggesting thedesign of the PuertoRican flag.

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chains and very nearly ordered his assassination. Deported first toCuraao and then to Venezuela in 1889, Marn worked as a typesetterby day and performed his poetry by night. His fellow typesetter andfellow-traveler, the self-declared socialist Afro-Colombian Juan Coronel,likened their low-budget lives to scenes from Henri Murgers La Viebohme (1851).9 Marn, his daughter Quisqueya, Juan Coronel, FelixMatos Bernier, and Luis Caballerthe last two Puertorriqueos who alsocontributed to La Sombra, a leftist newspaperwere all imprisoned andthen deported together in August of 1890 to Martinique, due to thenewspapers critique of Venezuelas Liberal-party president, RaimundoAndueza Palacio. Marn next went to St. Thomas and Jamaica beforereturning to Ponce, where he joined protests and demonstrations led byhis cousin, Amrico Marn. Forced into a second exile in a matter ofmonths, in 1891 Marn migrated to New York.

During his six years residence in Manhattan, Marn associated closelywith Jos Mart and became a fierce advocate of Cuban and Puerto Ricanindependence.10 Marns name appears alongside Mart and ArturoSchomburgs in the founding of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892.He worked as a correspondent for Rafael Serras La Doctrina de Mart,in addition to publishing El Postilln, the New York editions of whichnow carried the subtitle Heraldo Incondicionalmente Revolucionario.11

Marn also continued his work as poet and writer, with his widelyanthologized chronicle Nueva York por Dentro: Una Faz de su vidabohemia (New York from Within: A Facet of Its Bohemian Life) andother prose works published in La Gaceta del Pueblo (The PeoplesGazette).12 Upon learning of the death in combat of his younger brotherWenceslao in 1896, Marn joined the military forces as a lieutenant andaide-de-camp of Mximo Gmez. At age thirty-four, Marn died of afever, having asked his comrades to leave him behind so as not to slowtheir march through the mangroves. His friend, Cuban mamb ModestoA. Tirado, posthumously published his complete poetry in Cuba andPuerto Rico in 1898.

Although Marns end-rhyming, conventionally structured stanzas andLavieras post-modern Spanglish mixing in free verse formally reflect theliterary trends of their distinct historical moments, their writing manifestsconcerns marked by their Afro-Latino, migratory prism. Lavieras literaryimaginary draws on Marns in their ideals of liberation; they criticallyassessed the internalized racism of the Hispanic Caribbean; they spentdecisive years as writers who commented on the monstrous guts ofempire, New York; they worked to improve the possibilities of Afro-Latinas/os; they honored the specifically Afro-Latina/o practice ofdeclamation, and offered prendas (gifts) in recognition of ancestors orforerunners; both endorsed national liberation in Puerto Rico but also

9 See Juan Coronel, Unperegrino (302).

10 Jos Mart describesMarns public speaking aselegant and ardenteloquence(Los Clubs:Rifleros de la Habana,Patria [28 de mayo 1892];rpt. OC 1:471) or assizzling improvisation(El Club MercedesVarona, Patria [1 denoviembre 1892]; rpt.OC 2:178).

11 This new subtitle appearsin editions reprinted inFlix Ojeda Reyes,Peregrinos de la libertad.

12 Marns interpretation ofNew York from withinin Spanish makes an early,jocular contribution to atradition of Afro-Latinomigrants who critiqueAmerica as part of theirradical commitment tochange the effects ofcolonization.

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sought to transform the United States and the Americas, through politicalengagements beyond their island.13

Afro-Latino Poets in New York

While Marns militant political commitments tend to eclipse his poetryand prose in literary historical discussions, Lavieras revolutionarypolitics have been marginal in critical discussions of his writing. Lavieracirculates as a U.S. ethnic minority writer. But Lavieras poetry alsooffers a radical expression that has implications beyond an appeal forreform within the existing structures of the United States. Leftist poemssuch as guerrilla, conciencia (Mainstream Ethics 2023, 4952),boyhood, socialista, revolutionary (AmeRcan 40, 8485, 90),Patriota (Mixturao 4445), commemorate and issue a call forrevolutionary transformation. Laviera criticizes the internalized coloni-alism of Puerto Ricos freely associated status under Luis Muoz Marnin something i heard (La Carreta 28), against muoz pamphleteer-ing (La Carreta 29), and nuyorican (AmeRcan 53). His personal-is-political, feminist, and anti-racist poems articulate a radical Latina/ocultural politics in a message to our unwed women (La Carreta),compaero (Mainstream 33), the africa in Pedro Morejn(La Carreta 5758), negrito (AmeRcan 41), and the salsa of bethesdafountain (La Carreta 6768). He criticizes the underside of U.S.capitalism and its particular effects for working class Latina/o migrantsin lady liberty (Mainstream 10), Militant (Mixturao 4647), and thesuffering of ruth santiago snchez (La Carreta 45), which capture thepeculiar spiritual anger of the crusty cries of the ghetto (45). Thisvindication of struggling Latina/o immigrants, displaced by empire,becomes a celebration of acts of resistance by border crossers inSouthwest Border Trucos and a declaration of independence for aredefined Amrica in nideaquinideall (Mixturao 810).

Just as Marn devoted his life to fearlessly speaking out in print onbehalf of his oppressed people and as an educator at the Afro-Latina/onight school La Liga, Laviera was an indefatigable community activist andpoet-spokesperson for specifically dark-skinned, indigenous, and African-descended Latinas/os in the United States. Laviera worked as a poet,playwright, teacher, and political organizer, running the University of theStreets beginning at age sixteen, teaching Newark youth to write after the1967 riots at the Livingston College of Rutgers University, lecturing acrossthe country, and teaching migrant workers to speak their voice in the RioGrande Valley.14 But despite being a bestselling Latina/o poet in theUnited States, Laviera found himself homeless in New York and displaced

13 Laviera offers poems tojuan boria, rafa,miriam makeba, jorgebrandon, many of whichappear in a section entitledPrendas in Enclave; seeMarns poems Mart,Mximo Gmez, andVictor Hugo, En laArena, and 24 de febrero!Astro y Meteoro: AntonioMaceo, Panchito Gmez,ms. first published inFigueroa de Cifredo190196.

14 See Alvarez and Martnez,La palabra, concienciay voz.

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from the gentrifying Lower East Side, while he wrestled with complica-tions from diabetes.15

In Marns poetry and prose, his affirmation of his blackness disobeys thedominant pressure to whiten himself. Marn bears witness to the anguishprovoked by American societys treatment of poets of African descent. In thepoem El Puerto, his poetic persona accuses his interlocutor (the belovedFilena) of drawing negative conclusions about him based on his skin color:

This poem, which alludes in a coded fashion to the physiognomy of thespeakers origins, exposes Filenas racist inability to perceive the poetssoulful self-expression because she fixates on his skin color. The poemssecond stanza notes the effects of pejorative coding of appearance: sobrela frente / llevo escrita la historia de mi pena (on my face / is written thehistory of my pain) (53). The poet feels that centuries of racism andcolonialism are literally inscribed upon his skin.

Because the very creole nationalism to which Marn had committedhimself denied racial difference as a real force that distributed valueunjustlyMarn learned through experience he would likely never enjoyequal rightsit is all the more remarkable that his poem returnsrepeatedly to a discussion of blackness. The third stanza repeats theword negro (black) as an adjective to modify the poets heavy burden ofpain: Como el negro pesar que me devora / negra es tambin tu hermosacabellera (As the black burden that devours me / black too is yourbeautiful hair) (53). This adjectival description of a burden as blackinvites us to deconstruct the association of blackness or Africanity withpain or stupidity. As the speaker points out, his beloved Filena also hasblack hair and black eyes, but ironically her vision of him remains cloudyand in her eyes his soul is mute.

Marns critique of class and race privileges (as in Las Botas, AlSol, or Emilia) and his fight for Puerto Rican independence (in La

Acaso piensas que en mi tez decobre

Have you considered before mycopper skin

se anubla la expresin de la mirada clouds the expression of the gazey ves que est mi cabellera pobre and you only see my poor hairpor el sol de los trpicos quemada! is burned by the tropical sun!Acaso antes tus ojos mi almaes muda

Before your eyes my soul is mute

e ignoras nia, en tu razn secreta and in your secret reason, girl, youhavent noticed

que bajo el bosque de micrencha ruda

that beneath the rude forest of myparted curls

la inspiracin se oculta delPoeta! (54)

lurks the hidden inspiration of aPoet! (54)

15 See David Gonzalez, PoetSpans Two Worlds ButHas a Home in Neither.New York Times, February12, 2010.

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Ultima Batalla, Al Trapo) set the stage for Lavieras radical politics.16Lavieras politics draws on the creativity of the working-class culture ofthe Lower East Side (doa cisa y su anafre in La Carreta, or unem-ployment line in Enclave). Marn affirms his own blackness and callsattention to it, as does Laviera in the culminating poem in his meditationson his blackness: yo soy un majestuoso BEMBN (I am a majesticBLACK) (Tesis de Negreza, Mixturao 25). Marn alludes to himself as abardo oscuro (obscure/dark bard) as he claims a place in the literarytradition of Victor Hugo (Victor Hugo 60). Similarly, in the preface tohis tragic narrative poem Emilia (1890), about love between Luciano deun semblante bronceado . . . de una raza maldecida (of bronzesemblance . . . of an ill-spoken race) and his light-skinned betrothed,Emilia, Marn famously attacks the Dominican dictator Ulises Heureauxfor his disdain of Marns and his own blackness: Tirano, entre t y yohay una gran diferencia: ambos llevamos sangre africana en las venas:pero t te avergenzas de ella y yo no (Tyrant, between you and me thereis a significant difference: African blood flows in both of our veins, butyou are ashamed of it, whereas I am not).17 Whether Marn affirms thatAfrican blood flows in him because of the African shadow over Spain, orhe exposes the Dominican dictator Lil for attempting to deny hisAfricanity (much as Laviera exposes Pals Matoss blackness in homenajea don luis pals matos), Marn refuses to see his blackness as a source ofshame.

The connection Im proposing between Marn and Marts latenineteenth-century and Lavieras late twentieth-century writing highlightstheir contributions to a definition of Afro-Latinidad, or the intersectingexperiences of class, race, and culture in the diaspora. In his remarkableinterview with Carmen D. Hernndez, Laviera noted with ironicconsciousness that upon arriving in the Lower East Side in the 1960s hisaunt admonished him to keep his distance from people of Africandescent: no te juntes con los prietos, negrito (dont hang out with theblacks, negrito) (80). According to his poem negrito in AmeRcan, thiscomment reveals to the youthful poetic subject the general confusion thatprevailed in New York and even in his family. In negrito, the city greetsthe narrator and speaks to him frankly about this confusion. The youngpoetic persona also confesses his confusion as he answers to the namenegrito, a term of affection that references the color of his skin, when heclosely resembles the prietos whom his aunt admonishes him to avoid.Lavieras poem addresses multiple confusions: the U.S. projection of itselfas a snow white country into colonial Puerto Rico as the islandunderwent the brutal industrialization imposed during Operation Boot-strap (80); and the confusion of Puerto Rican immigrants who inter-nalized U.S. and Spanish Eurocentric values and allowed those values tocreate animosities within the culturally diverse African-diaspora.

16 See Juan Flores andMiriam Jimnez-Romnsriff on W.E.B. DuBoissSouls of Black Folk bydiscussing the tripleconsciousness of Afro-Latina/o subjects as black,American, and Latina/o(1415). Afro-Cubancultural theorist RobertoZurbano also introducestriple conciencia as anadaptation of W.E.B.DuBois, which refers toracial, nationalist, andtransnationalconsciousness (272273).

17 Preface to Emilia qtdCarlos N. Carreras, Elheroismo de GonzaloMarn en la poca de loscompontes Puerto RicoIlustrado 27.1441 (23 oct1937): 61; qtd Figueroa deCifredo, Pachn Marn 46.

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Marn attests to his blackness obliquely, for his critique renders himagorero / pjaro de la noche tenebrosa (ominous bird of the gloomynight) in a world where reason is delirious (Las Botas, En la Arena 108).The figure of the strange black bird who brings bad omens obliquelyreferences the black critical poet who raises awareness of the oppression ofworking people of color and joins a revolution. AmeRcan, the title ofLavieras third book of poetry rewrites what it means to be American byforegrounding the experiences of working-class Latina/o migrants. TatoLavieras play with the term AmeRcan accentuates and calls for a newpronunciation that celebrates the presence of two and half million PuertoRicans on the mainland. This move, like his work in the 1990s and 2000son the border with Cosecha Voices, speaks to Lavieras larger project ofaffirming and validating the non-assimilationist non-white Latina/odifference as a source of transformation in this hemisphere, a positionhe articulates with specific gratitude to black people in asimilao(AmeRcan 54).

Marn and Laviera critique empire and all forms of tyranny from aSpanish-speaking, anti-colonial, and Afro-Latina/o perspective and pro-pose a concomitant transformation of the culture of the Americas.Lavieras anti-racist proposal develops the militant revolutionary projectfor which Marn and so many black people diedas black people madeup the majority of the armies of liberation that ended slavery and foughtcolonialism in the late nineteenth century. Attending to the mutualillumination of the Afro-Latino writing of the 1890s and 1980s will help toensure that neither Marn nor Lavieras texts experience the fate ofoblivion for working-class Afro-Latina/o writers.18

Works Cited

Alvarez, Stephanie. Qu, qu?!Transculturacin and Tato Lavieras Spanglishpoetics. CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 18 (2): 2547.

Alvarez, Stephanie and William Luis, eds. The AmeRcan Poet: Essays on the Work ofTato Laviera. New York: CENTRO de Estudios Puertorriqueos, Hunter College,CUNY, 2014.

Alvarez, Stephanie and Jos Luis Martnez. La palabra, conciencia y voz: Tato Lavieraand the Cosecha Voices Project at The University of Texas-Pan American, inStephanie Alvarez and William Luis, op cit. 204236.

Cspedes, Digenes and Silvio Torres Saillant. Fiction is the Poor Mans Cinema: Aninterview with Junot Daz. Callaloo 23.3 (2000): 892907.

Coronel, Juan. Un peregrino. Pre-Biblion de Anbal EsquiVIA Vasquez. Cartagena:Direccin de Educacin Pblica de Bolvar, Extensin Cultural, Imprenta Departa-mental, 1944.

Degrave, Analisa. Not Nowhere: Walking Bridges in an AmeRcan Utopia.Stephanie Alvarez and William Luis, eds. The AmeRcan Poet: Essays on the Work ofTato Laviera. New York: CENTRO de Estudios Puertorriqueos, Hunter College,CUNY, 2014.

18 Marn notes that skin colorsadly affects whether acreative artist will enter thecanon of cultural memory,or not: Tal vez porque lamano / que las traz continta de violeta /no fuerasonrosada, han de perderseen la impalpable nada / elcreador, y el poeta?(Perhaps because the hand /that wrote those words withviolet ink / was not pink, thecreator, the poet / will belost in the etherealnothingness?) (En laArena 146).

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Edwards, Brent. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation and the Rise of BlackInternationalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

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Gonzlez, John Morn, ed. Cambridge Companion to Latina/o Literature. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2015.

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