ABOUT MARTIN ESPADA
A Profile by César A. Salgado
hen Martin Espada turned twenty, a family friend gave him
a copy of the anthology Latin American Revolutionary
Poetry. Along with the gift, the friend ventured some words of
prophecy: “Titi también serds poeta,” he told Espada—“You will
also become a poet.” The book had been edited by Roberto
Marquez, a Nuyorican (New York-born Puerto Rican) professor
of working-class roots. It collected translations of political poems
by Latin American authors whose radicalism had been newly gal-
vanized in the wake of Pinochet's U.S.-supported coup of Allen-
de’s socialist government in Chile.
Espada had previously toyed with the idea of becoming a writer
when he’d attended the University of Maryland for one year. He
dropped out after one professor reprimanded him for admiring
Allen Ginsberg and another chided his work as “too hostile.” Even
so, the poems in Marquez’s book had a deep, transforming impact
on Espada. They revealed a rich literary heritage, one from which
he did not, for once, feel excluded. “I was thunderstruck,” he
recalls. “I was no longer a poetic amnesiac. All of a sudden I found
a tradition to identify with, I found a place where I could
sit... You think you are standing on the street all by yourself with
a picket sign and then you hear a noise and you turn around and
you see a demonstration four blocks long.” The image of the pick-
et line as a sudden, uplifting apparition reflects some key values in
Espada’s poetry: building communal solidarity as a way to con-
front social alienation and exploitation, maintaining an unwaver-
ing political commitment against great odds, and perceiving
designios (prophetic signs) in everyday circumstances.
Raised in the blighted East New York section of Brooklyn as the
son of a Puerto Rican community organizer, Martin Espada
began participating in political demonstrations at a young age;
they were the subjects of his earliest childhood drawings. Upon
discovering the deep social concerns in the writings of Pablo
Neruda, Nicolas Guillén, Ernesto Cardenal, Pedro Pietri, and oth-
203PLOUGHSHARES
ers featured in Marquez’s book, Espada saw the picket line he had
drawn as a child morph suddenly into an international chorus of
activist poets from a never-dying Hispanic tradition. Nurtured by
this legacy, Espada went back to college in Madison, Wisconsin.
He eked out money for tuition and rent by working in a bar, a
ballpark, a gas station, a primate lab, and a transient hotel. He
majored in History, focusing on Latin America, and traveled to
Nicaragua to witness the Sandinista Revolution up close. Then he
got a law degree at Northeastern University in Boston and repre-
sented Spanish-speaking immigrants as a tenant lawyer in Chel-
sea, Massachusetts, until 1993. He wrote poetry throughout these
years: “I started writing again and never looked back.”
Before leaving Madison for Boston, Espada published The
Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero (1982). The book’s mixing of assertive
urban poems with striking photos of dilapidated barrio life
(taken by Espada’s father) paid homage to the anthology Nuyori-
can Poetry, which had established the Nuyorican socio-aesthetic
agenda. Following these poets’ lead, the work in Espada’s first
book documents the institutional neglect suffered by Latinos in
rundown inner cities and crop fields. Each poem is also a paean
to the persistence and dignity with which immigrants survive
abuse and uncertainty: “fishermen wading into the North Ameri-
can gloom” who could pull out “a fierce gasping life / from the
polluted current.”
The Boston scene boosted Espada’s career as a poet in unex-
pected ways. While working as a legal intern at the Migrant Legal
Action Program, Espada applied for a writing fellowship, sending
some poems on a whim; he received $5,000, for once making
“more money as a poet than as a legal worker.” Espada thus
became a regular presence at poetry readings in Boston’s commu-
nity centers and university campuses, finding enough breathing
room to finish his second book, Trumpets from the Islands of Their
Eviction (1987), shortly after earning his law degree. Here he puts
forth what he has called his “poetry of advocacy,” zeroing in on
the many legal subterfuges that complicate and worsen the immi-
grant’s plight in North America. The poet-now-lawyer moves
from the streets into the courtroom, where he unveils the mis-
treatment of minorities throughout U.S. legal history. The evic-
tion in the title not only names the state-enforced homelessness
204ABOUT MARTIN ESPADA
that afflicts many immigrants; it is Espada’s metaphor for the
colonial underpinnings of diaspora itself, of the displacements
that expanding empires force upon the populations they occupy
after supplanting their native system of rights.
In his third book, Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands
(1990), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and the PEN/Revson
Fellowship, Espada takes leave of many idiosyncrasies in Nuyori-
can poetry to engage in methodical historical reflection and
cement himself in his own style and trade. He avoids compulsive
“Spanglish” wordplay and composes a rigorous bilingual collec-
tion; the poems in English on the left page are rendered meticu-
lously into Spanish on the right. An intricate and calculated verse
construction sets Espada’s work apart from the spontaneous ges-
tural and oral inflections, the slang and swagger, that are the
trademarks of the Nuyorican street poet’s performance. Espada’s
disregard for the improvisational qualities in Nuyorican poetry
comes from his commitment to fashion through his poems a type
of “verbal monument” that can bear witness to Puerto Rico’s and
other Latino nations’ struggle under U.S. neocolonial hegemony.
Espada’s reputation has been on a meteoric rise ever since. In
1990, Earl Shorris predicted in The New York Times that Martin
205PLOUGHSHARES
Espada would become “the Latino poet of his generation.” In a
2002 blurb, Sandra Cisneros thought of him as a potential U.S.
Poet Laureate, calling him “the Pablo Neruda of North American
authors.” Controversy has only helped increase his stature. When
National Public Radio commissioned Espada to create a poem
inspired by current news events, he wrote about the plight of
Mumia Abu-Jamal, on death row for a hotly disputed murder
conviction. Apparently, the network thought the poem’s polemi-
cal topic would compromise government or private funding and
chose not to air it; many rallied to Espada’s side when he inter-
preted the network’s decision as a form of censorship. He also
made headlines when he turned down Nike’s offer to write a poem
for an Olympic advertising campaign in a public letter, rebuking
Nike’s brutal, exploitative labor practices in Asia. Few poets, Lati-
no or mainstream, have raised the temperature of political and lit-
erary debate with such visibility and topicality.
Although well-deserved, all this attention is somewhat ironic,
as it recognizes the expression of a poet who, following Neruda,
often hushes his own voice so that those of the long-silenced and
marginalized can be heard through his poems. It gives center
stage to someone whose visionary breadth brings to mind Walt
Whitman’s ebullient American outlook, yet identifies strongly
with the periphery of “minority” and “Third World” subjects and
sharply criticizes the multicultural deficits of the current academ-
ic canon. It seeks U.S. Poet Laureate status for a writer who cap-
tures the changing rhythms of the American vernacular as ably
and scrupulously as William Carlos Williams, yet remains stub-
bornly Puerto Rican, another independentista in the island’s
forceful lineage of politically minded, anti-colonial poets such as
Clemente Soto Vélez and Juan Antonio Corretjer, and Caribbean
cadence-masters such as Luis Palés Matos.
That Espada’s work stands at the crossroads of many non-liter-
ary fields and concerns—law, ethnicity, colonialism, history, pub-
lic memory, urban and diaspora studies, language politics—is
proof of how poetry can become more politically efficacious with
superior craft; the better its aesthetic and cognitive makeup, the
greater its potential social relevance and impact. The new poems
in Espada’s latest book, Alabanza, which means praise, are a case
in point. Each piece is a carefully engineered capsule of political
206ABOUT MARTIN ESPADA
epiphany in which a richly suggestive, often elaborate, riddle-like
title helps the reader navigate the symbolic dimensions of a con-
crete social story.
In 1993, Espada’s wish to be part of an English university pro-
gram finally came to fruition. His literary accomplishments
helped him secure a faculty position in English at the University
of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he now teaches creative writing
workshops and seminars on the life and works of Pablo Neruda
and on Latino poetry. Full-time employment as a professor has
let him branch out into new literary endeavors as an anthologist
and essayist. For Curbstone Press, he edited a collection of works
by the publisher’s political poets, Poetry Like Bread (1994). For
the University of Massachusetts Press, he put together El Coro
(1997), a compilation of recent Latino and Latina poetry, which
received the Gustavo Myers Outstanding Book Award. His collec-
tion of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (1990), published by South End
Press, won the Independent Publisher Book Award.
In the last fifteen years, Espada has kept a busy schedule of read-
ings nationwide that has earned him a visibility unequaled among
Latino poets. He has also increased the rhythm of his poetic out-
put and expanded the range of his themes and concerns. Since
joining the faculty of the University of Massachusetts, he has pub-
lished three new poetry collections with W.W. Norton: City of
Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993), Imagine the Angels of Bread
(1996), and A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000). Imagine
won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National
Book Critics’ Circle Award. In 2003, Norton published a compre-
hensive anthology of Espada’s work, Alabanza: New and Selected
Poems 1982-2002, an American Library Association Notable Book
of the Year and the recipient of the Paterson Award for Sustained
Achievement. The book ends with a postscript of seventeen new
poems written in 2002 in the light of significant personal and
national events: a first trip to Ireland, health problems in his fam-
ily, and the anniversary of the 9/11 Twin Towers attack.
The poems explore new directions that broaden even more the
geopolitical horizons within Espada’s poetic reach. The Chelsea
courtroom, the Brooklyn projects, the Puerto Rican cemetery,
and the New England woods no longer act as the main setting for
a poem, but as one among many wider frames of reference that
207PLOUGHSHARES
go well beyond Neruda’s own New World hemispheric bound-
aries. Alabanza coalesces a new array of ethnoscapes—an Old San
Juan street during a strongly Africanized San Sebastian festival;
the pastoral yet history-scarred Irish scenery of Achill Island; the
Mexican metropolis, heartland, and borderland; the Arab
World—to fashion poems that celebrate the overlapping of
immigrant, revolutionary, and anti-colonial experience across
American and non-American nations. The Puerto Rican
cordillera is evoked in an Irish mountain range; blacklisting in
post-Zapatista Mexico recalls repression in 1973 post-Allende
Chile; Carl Sandburg’s bookish shyness as a young Illinois army
recruit in the 1898 Spanish-American War is juxtaposed with
great-grand-uncle Luis Espada’s thespian antics as a colorful cigar
factory reader and literature lover; bombed Afghan refugees and
Manhattan Latinos address each other in “constellations of
smoke.” The poems behave no longer as straightforward anec-
dotes but as novelistic fields of interlocking transnational stories,
with lengthier stanzas and verses and a weightier presence of the
poet’s persona acting as side character, as narrator, as singer, as
prophetic seer.
Following the cosmic propensities in Neruda, Soto Vélez, and
Corretjer’s celebration of the working poor, Espada shows us that
poetry exercised as praise for the exploited and the ignored helps
us realize the multidirectional interconnectedness of all human
experience in space and time. Through such homage, we recog-
nize how the disenfranchised are those who weave the innermost
fabric of history.
César A, Salgado is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and
Portuguese and the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of
Texas at Austin. He is the author of From Modernism to Neobaroque: Joyce
and Lezama Lima (2001). The profile above draws from previous articles on
Espada published by the author.
208