Te juro que va a caer: Patricia Herrera on Nuyorican Feminist Performance
During the second week of January 1979, a unique performance took place in New York. Titled The Lawsuit, it was written, produced, and directed by Sandra María Esteves, poet, performera, and member of the founding generation of the Nuyorican Poets Café. It featured (unwillingly) Eduardo Figueroa, director of the New Rican Village, and Joseph Papp, director and producer of the Public Theater, and it took place in Small Claims Court.
The lawsuit, as it turns out, was real. Figueroa and Papp had hired the artistic services of Esteves for a production, then refused to pay her. Seeing that she—the lone woman in the production—had been the only one to be refused payment, she decided to take a stand. Noticing the absurdity of having to go to court to demand the $250 she was owed by members of her own community, Esteves decided to frame the lawsuit as a theatrical production and distribute fliers in order to raise awareness about “the gendered power dynamics at play in the Nuyorican poetry theater scene.” The court ruled in favor of Esteves. Papp paid her; Figueroa never did.
This subversive performance had been left out of the archives and scholarship about the Nuyorican movement until Patricia Herrera, Associate Professor of Theater at the University of Richmond, included it in her first book, Nuyorican Feminist Performance. From the Café to Hip Hop Theater (2020), which aims to “challenge the masculinist narrative of the Nuyorican poetry and theater scene in the 1970s and contextualize the work of women influenced by the Nuyorican Poets Café.” By recuperating the work of women poets from that time through interviews and ephemera (such as the flier for The Lawsuit), Herrera foregrounds the way in which Esteves and others contributed to Nuyorican aesthetics, the obstacles they faced in navigating the male-centered scene, and the ways in which they resisted and talked back.
According to Herrera, the inspiration for this book came when she was at New York Public Library listening to meters upon meters of undigitized reels of sound recordings of Nuyorican musicals presented at the Public Theater. What caught her attention was that, along with the performance, the music, and the soundscape, she could hear laughter, children screaming and playing and crying, audience members talking back, shouting in support or interrupting the performance if they were not satisfied. In contrast with the musical scripts she was used to studying, sound allowed her to grasp the excitement and sense of community that emerged from the physical interfacing of performance, venue, and audience. This led her to ask questions such as, what was community like in the early years of the Nuyorican movement? How was the community mobilized? What was it like to be there, at the Public Theater, El Bohío, or the Nuyorican Poets Café, experiencing those musicals not in writing but through the interfacing of two bodies in a given space? How can these questions be properly treated through written scholarship? Can they?
The Nuyorican Poets Café was founded in 1975 (or 1973, depending on who you ask and what you mean by “founded”) by Miguel Algarín. The Café provided a venue and a platform for other poets (most of them male) such as Pedro Pietri, Lucky Cienfuegos, Miguel Piñero and Sandra María Esteves to present their work to the Latinx community of New York. For the last five decades, New York poets and performers of Puerto Rican descent have gathered in the Café and developed a dynamic aesthetic grounded in the global collective theater experiments of the 60s, community-oriented poetics, and the radical politics of twentieth-century Puerto Rican nationalists. However, as Herrera shows, masculinist ideals of revolutionary action were part of the fabric of this aesthetics in the early years of the Café, which contributed to the exclusion, erasure, and misreading of women Nuyorican poets.
One of the most striking passages in Nuyorican Feminist Performance is the one in which Herrera shows how heteronormative expectations of masculinist poets distorted the way in which the work of women poets was interpreted. She discusses a poem by Esteves, “For Tito”, which memorialized Martín “Tito” Pérez, a Puerto Rican musician who was detained by police in 1974 for drumming in the subway, and who later “committed suicide” while in custody. In the introduction to an anthology of Nuyorican poetry in which “For Tito” is included, Miguel Algarín reads the sensuously charged language of the poem as a declaration of the romantic love that Esteves held for Tito. For Herrera, however, an attentive reading of the poem reveals the foregrounding of a corporeal engagement with Tito’s lost music and its potential to be a “culturally regenerative tool:”
you, macho machete
are all the fine conga rhythms
played on the street, in parties, in spring
all the beautiful vibes of la playa sextet
washing up against the palms in the hairs of my back [...]
you, macho soledad
are a unique language
the one filling my eyes with heat for you
growing and pounding
with all the desire
of your drum.
Herrera shows that a simplistic, heteropatriarchal reading of the poem results in hiding the powerful message against police violence that may imbue the poem with relevance and urgency for these troubled times. Every life that is taken by police brutality results in the loss of a world of sensory experience, of a unique language and music.
Herrera not only foregrounds the work of the “Founding Mothers” of the Café (among whom are, besides Esteves, Amina Muñoz, Martita Morales, and Luz Rodríguez) in the 1970s; she also shows how different performeras from the hip hop generation of the 90s and early 2000s can be understood to actualize and transform the feminist aesthetics of that earlier generation. Even if hip hop theater differs as an artistic medium from the poetry readings and performances that were presented by early Nuyorican feminist performeras, there are common preoccupations and resources that make it possible for Herrera to say, with La Bruja, that it was definitely a family affair. Just like Esteves appropriated the courts of the city as the stage for her performances, La Bruja appropriates New York City and the Bronx to invent her own geography, under the heterotopic names of Nuyorico and Boogie Rican Boulevard. Nilaja Sun uses over-the-top characterization and blue-face to question the gender and racial tensions inside the Latinx community, as well as the dynamic, contradictory construction of Afro-Latinx subjectivity. Finally, Aya de León uses the tropes of mainstream hip hop culture to question its influence in young Nuyoricans. These hip hop performeras share with Esteves and her peers a focus on familial relationships, pedagogy, a critical approach to the culture and art forms which they use, and an interest in the betterment of the Nuyorican community.
The last (and perhaps too short) chapter of the book focuses on the spiritual practices of Nuyorican performeras. It contains some of the most fascinating passages of the book, as it speculates about the ways in which spirituality may expand the way theater and theater history are studied. Herrera argues that spirituality is a mode of activism, an alternative form of knowledge, and a crucial strategy of identity formation, a way to embody a multiple and fluid sense of self. The performance of spirituality, thus, turns into a critical moment to observe the ways in which Latinx artists negotiate often conflicting senses of subjectivity and communal identity.
The methodological tools that Herrera employs in that chapter show the way in which her book is quietly radical, in much the same way that the platicas of Amina Muñoz and Esteves were. She addresses La Cura, an interdisciplinary performance by Sandra Esteves, Marilyn Worrell and Andrea Barchfeld, in which they staged a ritual of collective healing through poetry, dance, and music. However, the only traces of the performance available to her are the recollections of Esteves, and a flier, also provided by Esteves. The critical indifference towards women Nuyorican performeras in the 70s entails that there are no recordings, reviews or external accounts of the performance. In spite of that, Herrera manages to flesh out a complex reading of La Cura from those limited materials, and to show that, despite their exclusion and erasure, women were proposing alternative forms of artistic community and activism through their engagement with spiritual practices. She reads a moment in history and a political strategy from one archival document, showcasing the kind of creative and engaged scholarly work that sometimes is necessary to access that which the archives conceal.
Nuyorican Feminist Performance is an activist intervention as much as it is an scholarly work. While reading it, it sometimes felt as if Herrera were walking along the performeras she wrote about, instead of “dissecting” or “studying” them. The use of interviews allows her to access material that is not stored in any physical archive and write not from the “objective distance” of scientific rationalism, but from a creative proximity, an engaged closeness. As she puts it, “I write from the perspective of a Latina, community-based theater practitioner, scholar, and informed insider.”
A quick look at her online presence reveals that the intersection of activism and scholarship is a constant in Dr. Herrera’s work. Two projects published earlier this year (around the same time that her book was published) stand out. The most recent is a video project entitled Knowledge of This Cannot Be Hidden, produced by students of the course “Collaborative Arts Lab: Dance, Humanities, and Technology,” taught by Dr. Herrera and her colleague Alicia Díaz. In it, the students artistically commemorate the lives of enslaved people who were buried in unmarked burial sites all across the University of Richmond, which is built on the land of a former plantation. The other is a video of a Feminist Flashmob Intervention at the University of Richmond. During that intervention, which took place on March this year, right before the pandemic disrupted academic activities, students from six different courses at the University of Richmond (including one taught by Herrera and Mariela Méndez) staged a version of “Un violador en tu camino,” a performance by Chilean feminist collective Lastesis which has been deployed and appropriated by women all over the world. The students at the University of Richmond sang in both English and Spanish, and intervened the lyrics of the performance in order to reflect the legacy of enslavement and the specific context of white supremacy, anti-Black prejudice, and gender violence that exist in Richmond, former capital of the Confederacy.
At one point in the book, Herrera recalls a 2009 performance by Esteves, which took place on the fortieth-anniversary celebration of the Young Lords, a radical group central to the history of Nuyorican politics and aesthetics. Esteves performed a piece entitled “Aguacero.” Amid verses in both English and Spanish, she sang excerpts from the salsa song “Agua que va a caer”, which she characterized as “the theme song of the Young Lords.” Two verses caught my attention:
Te juro que va a caer
Agua que va a caer.
Herrera reads those verses as a promise that the rain will fall and wash away the problems and “fatalidades” that the singer wishes to avert. The phrase “va a caer”, however, is one that has boomed all over Latin America for the last two or three years. Feminist activists chant it at women’s marches in every country of the subcontinent, as a promise, a show of resolution that they will bring down the system of patriarchy. The scholarship of Patricia Herrera, engaged as it is with feminist practice across the Americas, is a testament to the fact that both readings can coexist in that same line, and to the validity and importance of both promises.
Author’s note: This review-essay on Nuyorican Feminist Performance. From the Café to Hip-Hop Theater (2020) by Patricia Herrera is partly informed by a conversation with Dr. Herrera, which took place on September 24. The conversation was held via Zoom, and it could not be recorded due to technical difficulties.
Nuyorican Feminist Performance: From the Café to Hip Hop Theater
By Patricia Herrera.
246 pp. University of Michigan Press. $34.95.
Fernando Bañuelos is a doctoral student at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures of New York University. He obtained a B.A. in Hispanic Literature in December 2019, at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, in Mexico. He is a member of the Seminario Amparán, a creative writing collective coordinated by Sylvia Estrada and Julián Herbert, in the city of Saltillo, and has published several reviews in the cultural magazine Replicante. His research interests include contemporary Mexican poetry, representations of violence in the Mexican public sphere, and anthropocene poetics.