“Dicen que en la distancia es el olvido.”
Childhood in the Latin Caribbean
I was child mountain
lived in a Latin American country
till I was five,
My grandfather was a cigar maker,
a tobacconist, rolled the leaves
Ancient craft.
Mother and father brought
together by custom routine,
young and curious,
primero balcony stares,
held hands for a while.
The plaza, Catholic Church,
life there was Pueblo ocio
arrested by boredom
Rutina tedium.
Marry young jíbara
wooden house
Christ on the cross
over the bed
Covered by mosquito net,
nocturnal bolero voices
could be Julio, el Bohemio
in canción
Grandfather/Abuelo
always sang,
everyone cantando
Even the rocks sang.
I was there in the air
not yet born but alive
counting the tamarindo
Coconut lollipops.
anxious to be white sombrero
getting hints upon the weaving of straws
glances from eyes like music
Shadow depth, the porcelain tinge
Surrounds the pearl black eyes
Of the girls.
Otro lelolay.
Destiny had other plans.
Life has no pity,
It moves forward.
Someone told me
man of father’s generation that
he was quiet in school,
that he made it somehow
from mountaintop barrio Bayamoncito
into the town each day
the tribulation labor, secret that
people took in silence,
my mother refunfuñar (bickered)
as her family was everyday town-
people,
her father the dignity of the
tabaqueros,
black café and brandy six in
the morning rolling cigars,
sun falling singing with Alegría boleros
Together rolling the life given,
the tobacco cape leaf
Wrapping the guts, pajilla
tight cigars.
Later Chicago Mafiosos will smoke
them
Porto Rico American Tobacco Company
New Jersey ’mericans
owned the production of cigars
los tabaqueros just rolled
what the mountains gave,
the Taino ancestral leaf
in your fingers,
To which they sang
Poetry of the Spanish golden
Age in Cuban bolero sway.
Habaneros for the New York
bankers,
Antiquity awakes in the
now, the past dreams in the future.
Boleros de Rosa-Julia
Persist, the image tomorrow
somewhere
Someone else the same,
a different similarity,
my root of earth.
Modernity does what it does?
I maintain
macho Cimarrón,
the old café tobacco cane night
Flavor churning
grind bones.
Limbes tamarindo, coco
at Doña Rufa’s.
Café con leche,
ensalat bacalao
Rosada beans,
yuca with olive oil
twas my country,
Black eyes
launch from black hair
Skin rosa brown,
What can improve?
Evolve?
upon a day
of our hot wintertime,
We jumped from the
Fire
Into the freezer
Cold November,
The cruelest month
Excusez moi
T. S. Eliot
April lluvia
Brings Mayo flores.
Mother’s schooling
included math riddles
With poetry jingles,
As father Severo accomplished
numbers in addition
astute with the economy
he never slept.
Forward we went into
New York of the early
50s into the future
with the past,
into the English
with the Spanish,
in a movie rerun
the mountains melt
with the bricks.
Eyes hang sideways
upon guayaba trees frozen
East side school yards,
Guitars strum history
bolero broadcast
amor trovadores,
singing back into the layla night
the lyrics.
Awkward language sounds
Still photos crumbled
In compost moisture.
A lone plaza photograph
A post spelling RECUERDOS
Of a country of childhood
Which dissolves
As
Now a now, is all there is.
San Agustín/Florida
The eastern south of the continental United States could have been another Latin American country, originating in San Agustín, Florida, in 1565, under Spanish rule, and still a municipality today, oldest of the mainland USA cities.
What did the natives call the homeland to describe its beauty: florid seaside, green carpet underfoot, ocean vistas, rivers and ponds of coldblooded reptiles, descendants of dinosaurs, basking in the Everglades? Smelling funky in Puerto Rico, Juan Ponce de León got an itch, intuition of more turf to steal and rumor of gold and fountains of youth, and took flight north. It was early in 1513. The adventure became misadventure that led to his finale, as eventually a poison-tipped arrow pierced his nalga tissues and nerves to taste blood. The Spaniards pulled back. The crazy natives didn’t want to be told what to do, didn’t want to work. Back in Cuba, the native chemical weapon did its work for Ponce de León’s demise.
The British pilgrims and Dutch merchants and investors were nowhere on the horizon when the medieval gates of San Juan were erected. They were still over a hundred years away. Santo Domingo and San Juan would become cities with cobblestone streets and callejuelas, horse-drawn carriages, plazas, plazuelas, patios, and balconies in the Andalusian style, wine bars/cavas, bibliotecas with books growing yellow in the humid and salty Caribbean air. Workers atop scaffolds building the San José Church. Sir Francis Drake tried to take the Island—and the French and the Dutch as well as the British. They all failed.
Tampa has always been a cigar-making center, like much of Cuba. Florida could have been part of Cuba. José Martí raised funds for the Cuban independence struggle there. The Anglos’ Fort Marion, where resistance fighters of the “Indian wars” were imprisoned in 1872, was actually the sixteenth-century San Marcos Spanish fortress. San Agustín was a center for runaway slaves from the American South, bottom tip of the railroad to freedom. In 1693 the Spanish government gave these Africans and their descendants their freedom, and Fort Mose (Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose), just north of San Agustín, would become the first free Black town in North America. Oh, yes, Afros had to convert to Catholicism, as the Inquisition thrived; the Spanish kept “their” slaves elsewhere. The first African-American child born in continental USA was born there in that Latin region past, where Martin Luther King Jr. would talk and organize in the modern freedom movement. So, in a way, the civil rights movement had seeds in this neo-Latin enclave.
Florida, Latin center at the start (and today), the beginning and the end of the Caribbean. Imagine, there actually was a Treaty of Paris (1763) that gave Florida to the Britis
h, a history fact insane enough to seem in credible. San Agustín is a barrio in Habana too. So, Ponce de León and his fantasy entourage interrupt the Seminole people and the crocodiles—must’ve been a case of spook sees spook. No Hollywood crea tion can ever reproduce it. Later, Africans enslaved in nearby Georgia took to disappearing and finding the Seminole enclaves (the name itself, Seminole, from Spanish cimarrón, “runaway slave”), becoming one with the families, jumping into the powwow circle, their language fusing with their hosts’ to produce the Afro-Seminole Creole. Perhaps these Africans and their children contemplated the sea from there and dreamt of swimming back home to Africa. Today, Florida might as well be a Latin American country. The air is Spanish; dishes of plátanos and arroz moro for lunch; everywhere, café, cubanito, negrito, azuquita pa’ ti San Agustín, St. Augustine—first European settlement in North America. What are the Americans talking about when they say “immigrants”?
More Nuevo Mundo
“I ran away from the Hispanos
on a boat,
Chasing a perfume hint toward the North
of nowhere,
a fragrance which was almost
A sound.”
Ponce de León left his big
house in Caparra,
White walls, Arabesque tiles,
island of San Juan Bautista
a bay
From which he sailed off,
who were these explorers?
Who were once open mouthed
gasping at Moorish Cordoba,
Roman Hispanos
wrapped in Muslim mantas
warm in the merging Spanish,
tango of Latin and Arabic.
Wood upon the ocean waters
ships, ears and noses inflated
by the winds, canvas flapping sails
Percussion, wide latitude whatever
the mother sends,
hijos de puts
who the Vandals conquered
Moros swift submission
identity blossom,
Fragrance of citrus with roses.
the conquered conquer on.
A child in a tantrum
mar Abierto
Va’paya
going to where
to be somewhere
No one
to be someone.
History is made
by so many nobodys,
So many of them
they have crusted
At the edges of a pie,
tanto loco que hacen
orilla,
Of the lions there is de León
roaring beyond his stature,
the Tainos were the Jews to his
Hitler claws,
was de León derailed to the Bahamas,
puzzled in the islands
They all look the same,
naked pickings,
Some were actually empty
of human population: birds
and reptiles of nervous
icy blood
“el mundo es ancho y ajeno”
Thank you, Ciro Alegría.
in that alien new north the Spanish
set down the grid for St. Augustine
Old pattern in virgin turf,
the Seminole somewhere distant
the Spanish kept at distance,
not welcomed
enough many became cadavers,
The Seminole were never conquered
not by the Spanish not by the
Anglos.
California once part of
Mexico,
The USA kept invading land
As now it searches for oil
Lands Middle East.
The first flavor of the
continental Estados Unidos
was this Seminole/Creek
enter the Spanish-Latins,
when the Saxons, bored in the
Suburbs of London,
the Dutch in the cold
canals of Amsterdam,
did they all smell luz
warm light of the sun.
We must know that it was,
the pull of the sea,
the Spanish looking to find Asian
spices
bolted out of boorish Castilian
prairies pampas stretch of savannahs.
Spanish the first
Euro nonnative language here,
speak well, when you text the book,
Latinos the original pilgrims,
the mix would have been
Caribbean/Brazil Racial stew
not
The sharp white/black divide
of Anglo north,
Color would have been most fuzzy,
blurry, jagged shades of tones.
Ah yet Augustine is
the Caribbean
The Seminole mouth
tasting the black beans
The plaza in Tampa
like the plaza in Comerío
Tobacco just as well.
St. Augustine original ciudad
of the USA
New Cordoba Continental
the grid of the street/
Architecture created in moro Spain,
“America! America! God shed
his grace on thee”
teach Children in the schools
How magic true reality is
marvelous
practical everyday
If you go through
the weaving pulling strings,
Cloth algodón of colors,
History is imagination
It all has happened
In the future
Coming up chocolate Elixir
The arrows are words
To Free the imagination
of the truth.
What Is the Lower East Side
The lower tip of Manhattan, the ass of the island, el culo de la isla, a piece of rock surrounded by rivers, the Atlantic not far. Historians say that the Dutch purchased Manhattan for the equivalent of sixty guilders, whatever that was in dollars, but wait they gave it in trinkets, pots, beads, etc., what money natives need for in the world they lived, qué, for what, to go to Chase Manhattan to make a deposit? It was a custom of all native peoples to give gifts one to each other, especially when they were in transit through the land of others, space not familiar to them, and this was the spirit of the Munsee, Canarsi Indios, selling land was a concept not comprehended, couldn’t even be thought of that such such was possible, they were exchanging gifts as was their always manner-custom. It was just another day of social communication. Then just go on their way. Manhattan when it is summer is semitropical bliss, imagine back then, green, clean clear rivers and streams, animals roaming, hopping about, hills mountains flowers the warm air full of bees, ladybugs, birds singing, canoas floating stream down the East River, Hudson, visual bays bright like Gauguin paintings caressed the rock-littered banks, fried fish served with berries as spring flowers wind serenade. Indigenous people had no concept of selling the earth; what other films have been invented to cover the theft. James Delancey (one of the Delanceys, as all the males in the family were called James) had a farm that was a good piece of the Lower East Side. Delancey was a landmark street for the Loisaida neighborhood that I knew, this area or right below it was once known as Corlear’s Hook, fecund with putas and thieves. Wino Bowery fame memories pop like cartoons, original Popeye and Donald Duck, Porky Pig, “what’s up folks” walking in the cold breeze south down Avenue B turn at that cuchifritos restaurant on the corner the window full of fatback, fried fritters, plantains like the island of Puerto Rico, next was Barneys Boys Town, the adolescent apparel store where I once purchased a leather coat. Turn of the century, further down, this was Irish jumping, Italian spaghetti barrio The Five Points area. Originally it was a lake, beautiful within Manhattan summer, when it was all those hills green and abundant of berries, cherries, breezes bouncing off the clean pristine East and Hudson Riv
ers, Manhattan without buildings. With progress the air now flows stinky of bricks, cement, steel, industrial fumes, glass windows, automobile exhaust suffocates, disfigures the air, asphalt of hurried stress. This lake dried became the sight of the Five Points called the Collect. Coincidence but in Puerto Rico’s Santurce area there was a shantytown barrio on the water, the bahía, which was known as La Colectora; it got full of jíbaros migrating from the agricultural countryside to get closer to the Metropolitan area menial jobs, lumps of shit floating in water all around the residents. The Five Points slum, the original American ghetto. The Irish mixed with freshly freed African slaves, Italians, Catholics foreign to Protestant America. That particular reality, Irish Italian and African American mixture, it was an everyday fusion of living, working out by the docks, heavy loads, bars to drink shellac, the exhaustion, brothels to take care of what ails you. Here was a barrio of Germans, Irish, Chinamen, Italians, free blacks, working people struggling to put food on the table for families. The Irish and the Afros saloon’d, boogaloo’d together, creating friendships, relations, marriages, children. Master Juba was there, cream de caramel-looking young man feeling the Irish dancing with their jump, adding his African timing, came out tap dancing, a very early expression of that art form that later African Americans continued to perfect, foot wizards, magic toes. The immigrant neighborhood par excellence. The place from which the Gershwin brothers Americanized. I got a glimpse of that Jewish-Euro immigrant barrio in the midfifties. That was a Lower East Side world now lost forever.
Lower East Side Red Brick Blues