NYC Salsa Locus: Víctor Hernández Cruz’s Poetic Steps
we rise like fire
like magic
in the street
a mile of noise
heavy head listen
note
going into space
splitting molecules
— “Piano-Piano-Piano,” Víctor Hernández Cruz
Diasporican poet Víctor Hernández Cruz has always rejected pathological conceptions of Puerto Ricans and Latinx people. His poetic project employs musical intertexts and subtexts, suggesting that listening to music and dancing are ways of acquiring knowledge about the world around us and our power as a community [1]. As a poet, he channels and produces texts connected to the long history of coloniality and fusion in Latin America via music. He wants to describe the cultural amalgamation of Caribbean and North African people in their homelands and the diasporas. Through the sonic boom of Afro-Latinx music depicted in his poems, he has also developed a vision of Puerto Ricans as vibrant musical creators and social dancers and as inventors of transcendent, cosmic attuned, cultural environments and experiences. As part of my research on Puerto Rican poetic archives of dissent, I recently spoke with him and as I began re-engaging his work I discovered old and new freedoms [2]. His poetic steps offered me sonorous maps. His work is a gift infused and organized by the beat of bodies, spirits, city blocks, and Black cultures.
Robert Lulo. Salsa Dancer, Central Park, 1976. Museum of the City of New York
Hernández Cruz proposes a symbiosis between ballroom culture and street culture in his work. Mambo, boogaloo, and salsa are music genres that replicate el callejeo feroz distinctive of 1960s Boricua poets, Afro-Latinx musicians, and dancers in NYC. This connection between social dance and street life is not uncommon. As Latinx Studies scholar Frances R. Aparicio reminds us, salsa and Nuyorican poetry shared a common origin in los barrios de Nueva York.
Both are defined by the urban conditions from which they arise, sharing a violent, raw language. In poetry, this translates into a refusal to follow the lyrical modes of literature; in salsa, the violence and diction of the lyrics, coupled with the harsh sounds of the brass section, challenge the lyrical style of traditional boleros. Both salsa and Nuyorican poetry derive from syncretic forms of orality: the everyday speech and musical expressions of working-class communities and Blacks in the United States, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Caribbean [3].
These connections with working-class aesthetics and street speech are evident in the poem “The Latest Latin Dance Craze” [4]. In it, Hernández Cruz stages an absurd “Latin” dance class in which you must perform as a kangaroo and a swan, jump out, circle the floor, do scissor work with your legs, glide down, hit the streets, run at least ten blocks, and possibly break your head to complete just the first step. Hernández Cruz proposes that to understand the movements distinct to Latinx dancers, you need to trace the body’s routes in the streets. He invites readers to perceive the reciprocal relationship between the dancers’ bodies and urban happenings.
In other poems like “Latin & Soul,” he sees dancing as a conduit for out-of-the-body spiritual experiences. Sonic waves send the dancer/listener into a metaphysical realm [5]. The piano and the trombone are vehicles for interplanetary voyages “past stars bursting with drums.” In this and other poems, music is a spaceship. They experience borrachera, laughter, joy, body transformations, and time traveling. The poet says that through the music, the collective goes “away, away, away” beyond the city’s violence, urban scarcity, and the imperial geographies of the US. As the frequently anthologized poem “African Things” showcases too, Hernández Cruz constantly celebrates the wonder of Afro-Boricua performance, oral and body lineages [6]. He considers them bridges to cosmic knowledge [7].
In early poetry collections like Snaps and Tropicalization, Hernández Cruz opens a portal into a period of unparalleled cultural enthusiasm in the city for Afro-Latinx people. The poems from this era document Hernández Cruz’s lived experiences moving through mid and late 60s Latinx-centric dance venues. He embodies the role of poet-dancer-troubadour. In a personal interview, Hernández Cruz shared with me:
En los años 60 yo era adolescente. Yo entraba a los sitios a oír música frecuentemente. Eso era un fenómeno en Nueva York. Uno podía bailar todos los días de la semana. Había un sitio prendi’o en fuego en Brooklyn, en Manhattan, en el Bronx, en todos los Boroughs. Yo iba al Corso, al Cheetah, al Hipo Campo en el Bronx. Iba a todos. Viví la época del bugalú. En el 68, el bugalú estaba bien de moda. Me ajusté a esa loquera. Era una energía de la juventud. Eso del bugalú duró varios años, pero después los mismos promotores lo tumbaron. El son montuno y el mambo siempre estuvieron por debajo o por encima, era la base. Nunca desapareció [8].
Hernández Cruz went to live concerts to see Pete Rodriguez, Joe Battan, Willie Colón, La Lupe, and Eddie Palmieri. In other words, all the prominent musical figures of the time in New York. He continued attending concerts by these artists in the Bay Area in California (where he lived for a period) and later in Music Festivals in Morocco, his current home base [9]. Inspired by his 1964 album Azúcar pa’ ti, he wrote “Piano-Piano-Piano,” a poem for Eddie Palmieri. He portrayed him as an astronaut musician [10]. He also became friends with Ray Barretto sharing backstage spaces, hangouts, and even collaborating on the epic track “Drum Poem (Free Spirit)” from Barretto’s 1972 album Head Sounds. Remembering this artistic colluding, Hernández Cruz shared with me how Papi Román, Barretto’s singer, recorded the poem with lights low, candles, and in a trance-like state that allowed him and Barretto to engage in a deep transmission “repartiendo golpes y comunicándose a través del poema” [11]. The backside of the Head Sounds record reproduces Hernández Cruz’s poem emphasizing it almost as a manifesto. In it, Hernández Cruz portrays Barretto as an “espíritu libre,” a cosmic traveler “marching in space.” He invites readers to listen to how Barretto engages simultaneously with the city vibes and outer space. In the poem, the drummer enters his zone as a priest of Santería or Voudoun. The soul drummer illuminates ecstatic experiences within Afro-Boricua-Latinx enclaves in the city.
listen
the dance the dance
O the stairs O the windows
will be broken O so many hearts
dancing so many legs swinging so
many heads shaking O so many people
living O so many loving
listen [12]
These protected and highly creative spaces of Afro-Latinx joy, love, sounds, performance, and body practices that Hernández Cruz works on have sequels later in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A practical example would be the queer ballroom movement famously depicted in the documentary Paris is Burning [13] or the TV show Pose [14]. In the underground ballroom culture of the late 80s and early 90s, queer and trans dancers, models, and performers competed for recognition. Queer people created a network of chosen families known as “houses” where they gave and received support from one another. Perhaps one of the most important legacies of these houses was the development of voguing, a stylized dance that takes cues and mobilizes poses from high fashion. While the music genres centered by Hernández Cruz seem to be utterly heteropatriarchal, recent analysis from scholars like Ren Ellis Neyra opens the door to look at salsa and Latin soul from a queer perspective. Neyra claims a “queer masculine attachment to salsa” [15] and focuses on the unruly multisensorial experiences of performing, dancing, and listening to it. Neyra is interested in putting a spotlight on the “orgiastic descargas [fugues/discharges] adorned by open-breasted blouses, all that silk, sequins, polyester, long nails, skinny thighs in crushed velvet, fleshy booties in bell bottoms, and high heeled patent leather shoes” [16]. From this perspective, the ballrooms created by African American and Afro Latinx LGBTQ+ people follow the fashionably loud, sensual legacy of the salsa scene that Neyra pinpoints. Like the more recent house and reggaeton movements, these manifestations contest norms and embrace unruliness [17]. For Hernández Cruz as well as for Neyra, the music of displaced Caribbean bodies in NYC carries the “crevasses, rivers, mountains and coast of archipelagic, plantation memory, and insurgent desires” [18]. Both Hernández Cruz and Neyra suggest that one way to grasp the scope of Caribbean history and geographies is to look at its impact on the bodies and movements of diasporic people.
Hernández Cruz argues that ancestral knowledge comes to life through social dance. Afro-Indigenous-Latin American music continues the centuries-long practices of areitos [19]. In his poem “Areyto” he conceives this Caribbean Indigenous musical and spiritual ritual as a portal to a holistic understanding of the Americas. The areitos were intense gatherings that involved dancing, singing, and storytelling, just like los bailables de salsa. Hernández Cruz links this Taíno community performance to other similar native practices all over the hemisphere that looked to be in communion with the forces of nature via songs, stories, and dance.
Areyto
Maraca güiro and drum
Quicharo maraca y tambor
Who we are
Printed in rhythm and song [20]
He also connects areitos to hemispheric musical genres like tango, samba, danza, mambo, bolero, and guaguancó. All these musical genres combine the sounds and rhythms of Indigenous people and Afro-descendants with the lyrical structures of the European songbook. Hernández Cruz claims that these trans-American soundscapes are “who we are.” He centers the African heritage and assigns to it a complementary position to indigeneity.
Screenshot of the multimedia-digital mapping website “Where We Were Safe
In the multimedia-digital mapping website “Where We Were Safe,” a section titled “Bailar es cósmico / Dancing is cosmic” resonates with Hernández Cruz’s work [21]. Through maps that identify long gone salsa venues and recorded audio clips that accompany them, Boricua and Latinx salsa dancers and musicians talk about their gatherings in ballrooms, clubs, record stores, and outdoor venues as refuges and safe spaces. That is, they think of salsa venues as transformative Afro-diasporic sites where kindred people reunite. Salsa gatherings in NYC are remembered as an antidote to racism and police oppression within the multimedia website. They were counter-cultural spaces where people found relief from disinvestment and government-led displacement. Salsa gatherings are considered a flipside to the crime-ridden, fiscally depressed city. Like this website, Hernández Cruz understood and created poetics of escapism and liberation inspired by his Latin soul and salsa adventures. He is a pioneer poet who saw the psychic, physical and spiritual reach of the loving sounds created and produced by Afro-Boricuas and Latinx people in the city. Looking back, reading, listening, and imagining the people inhabiting these poems allows us to bring back to light subjects who are at ease with how the body takes and makes spaces. In his poetry, Víctor Hernández Cruz defends the right to pleasure, tight bodies always in contact, and Afro-Caribbean sounds that take you into the future and allow you to grasp new perceptions.
Rojo Robles
Dr. Rojo Robles is a writer, filmmaker, and professor born and raised in Puerto Rico. He graduated from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras with a B.A. in Theater and an M.A. in Comparative Literature. He completed his M. Phil and Ph.D. Degrees in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at CUNY’s Graduate Center. He is an Assistant Professor of Black and Latinx Studies at Baruch College, CUNY, where his courses are particularly focused on Latin American, Latina/o/x, and Afro-diasporic literature, film, and intermedial cultures.
Along with teaching, researching, and writing, Dr. Robles has substantial work as a fiction writer, playwright, and filmmaker. Since 2004 he is the artistic director of the independent group, El kibutz del deseo, dedicated to producing plays, films, and publishing fiction and poetry. He is the author of Los desajustados/The Maladjusted (2015) and Escapistas (2017) and the writer, director, and producer of the experimental film The Sound of ILL Days (2017). He is currently at work on a book project about Boricua intermedial out-of-the-page poetics and disperse archives of dissent. He is also working on a series of articles about cinegraphic and intermedial literature in Puerto Rico, Latin America, and US Latinx communities.
Site: www.rojorobles.com
Twitter: @rojorobles
[1] “Reading the lyrics of an old favorite Salsa tune in the poetry of Victor Hernandez Cruz is an experience that involves recognizing past, as much as a recognition of the self, and of the collective offers predictability, continuity, and knowledge. It becomes, a vehicle for self-knowledge and acknowledgment (as recognition one's authority and that of the Puerto Rican community).” (Aparicio, Frances, “Salsa, Maracas, and Baile,” 49).
[2] My current book project, tentatively titled Expansive Poetry: Intermedial Poetics in Boricua Diasporas, analyzes how Boricua (the Taíno-derived name for Puerto Ricans) poets in the U.S. founded and created intermedial poetic practices and spaces. I argue that, within the U.S. literary world, Boricua poetry represents an experimental laboratory connected to Black arts and a dispersed archive of dissent. I emphasize how audiovisual performance, visual arts, audio recordings, and textual representations of sound disrupt linguistic, disciplinary, racial, and imperial borders.
[3] Aparicio, Frances R. “Salsa, Maracas, and Baile: Latin Popular Music in the Poetry of Victor Hernandez Cruz.” MELUS, 16:1 (1990), 44.
[4] Hernández Cruz, Víctor. Maraca: New and Selected Poems 1965-2000. (Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2001), 78.
[5] Hernández Cruz,Victor. Maraca, 33-34.
[6] Hernández Cruz, Victor. Maraca, 65.
[7] The poet’s latest collections do something similar to Morocco’s music. See The Mountain in the Sea (Coffee House, 2006), In the Shadow of Al-Andalus (Coffee House, 2011), Beneath the Spanish (Coffee House, 2017), and Dr. Marisel Moreno’s essay “Swimming in Olive Oil: North Africa and the Hispanic Caribbean in the Poetry of Víctor Hernández Cruz.”
[8] Hernández Cruz, Víctor. Personal interview and translation by Rojo Robles, September 27, 2021. “I was a teenager in the 1960s. I frequently went to places to listen to music. That was a phenomenon in New York. One could dance every day of the week. There was a place “set on fire” in Brooklyn, in Manhattan, or the Bronx, in all the Boroughs. I used to go to the Corso, the Cheetah, the Hipo Campo in the Bronx. I went to all of them. I lived the boogaloo craze. In 1968 the boogaloo was very fashionable. I adjusted to that “loquera.” It was an energy of youth. Boogaloo lasted several years, but later the same promoters knocked it down. The son montuno and the mambo were the base of all that. They never disappeared.”
[9] Frances R. Aparicio considers that Hernández Cruz mythified them as modern deities. The musicians take on the role of healers in a contemporary society (implying a view of music analogous to that of primitive societies). These composers and singers are also re-vindicated as important cultural heroes for the Latino communities in the United States. See “Salsa, Maracas, and Baile,” 48.
[10] Hernández Cruz, Victor. Maraca, 16-17.
[11] Hernández Cruz, Victor. Interview by Rojo Robles. September 27, 2021.
[12] Hernández Cruz in Barretto, Ray. Head Sounds. Fania, 1972.
[13] Paris is Burning. Directed by Jennie Livingston, 1990.
[14] Pose. Created by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Steven Canals, 2018-2021.
[15] Neyra, Ren Ellis. “¡Anormales! Unruly Audition in Performances of 1970s Salsa.” The Cry of the Senses Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics. Duke University Press, 2020, 31.
[16] Neyra, Ren Ellis. “¡Anormales!” 31.
[17] To explore the Afro-diasporic and trans-Caribbean influences in reggaeton and its connection to salsa, see Petra Rivera Rideau’s “‘Cocolos Modernos’: Salsa, Reggaetón, and Puerto Rico's Cultural Politics of Blackness.” For a discussion on reggaeton as protest music in Puerto Rico, see the work of Marisol LeBrón. For an examination of current Afro-Latinx nightlife in NYC see Carina del Valle Schorske’s New York Times essay “Dancing Through New York in a Summer of Joy and Grief.”
[18] Neyra, Ren Ellis. “¡Anormales!,” 29.
[19] Aparicio argues that the presence of Salsa in Nuyorican poetry questions the definition of literature as an elitist Western paradigm of cult expression. It also recognizes the differential role that so called "native knowledges" can play within the margins of erudite culture. This set of knowledges, considered inadequate by traditional historians, creates a dialectic "knowledge of struggles.” (“Salsa, Maracas, and Baile,” 46).
[20] Hernández Cruz, Victor. Maraca, 33-34.