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César A. Salgado, A Note On Víctor Hernández-Cruz
César A. Salgado, A Note On Víctor Hernández-Cruz
César A. Salgado
return to and rediscovery of Puerto Rico, with poems devoted to island towns with rich
African heritages, such as Loíza Aldea, or suggestive Taíno toponyms, such as Caguas.
The collection ends with "The Man Who Came o he Last Floor," a hilariously surreal
narrative poem of cultural affirmation about a Puerto Rican man who plants magical
mango trees in a busy New York avenue, including one on the scalp of a hapless police
officer.
Despite its title, Hernández-Cruz devotes all the poems in his next book,
Tropicalizations (1976), to recreating New York City settings, rhythms, impressions, and
sensations. The first section, "New York–Potpourri," consists of thirty-three pieces
Hernández-Cruz calls "sides," as if he were successively playing songs from the "sides"
of a Latin jazz vinyl record collection; the second, "Electricity," refers, among other
things, to the Con Edison plant Hernández-Cruz's family had as frontal scenery in their
Lower East Side tenement apartment. Still, memory and nostalgia inscribe in the text a
temporal and spatial distance away from the city. Tropicalizations is a rigorous evocation
of Manhattan's ebullient Latino life in the 1950s and early 1960s. It recollects the Latino
nightclub scene, street-smart social dynamics, and immigrant mythologies of Hernández-
Cruz's growing-up years and early adolescence from the vantage point of 1970s
California.
landscapes. The punning play with toponymical sounds and spellings (i.e., Hutuado,
Yucatán / Yuquiyu, Cinco de Maya, Borinkins) disrupt any cartographic stability,
bending geographical and cultural space into loops and crumpling maps into
palimpsestual folds and collages. The book's concluding poem, "Borinkins in Hawaii,"
exemplifies this new, expansive, fluent, interlocking geocultural outlook, tracing the
diasporic history of the peasants who left San Juan Harbor in 1900 to work as pineapple
farm workers in Hawaii and who still remain alive today as Hawaii's Puerto Rican
community. Moving farther west, back into the ocean, the Puerto Rican–New York–
Californian poet remixes Pacific, Atlantic, and Caribbean ethnoscapes and dialects to
disclose new rhythms of cultural exchange and survival.
Red Beans, published in 1991, is the first work Hernández-Cruz published after
his decision to return and resettle in his native Aguas Buenas in 1989. Most poems in this
collection register the poet's reabsorption of the lush landscape and timeless customs of
this tobacco-and-coffee region, but the multitudinous, global range of geographical
associations is far from provincial. The poet keeps his eyes and ears open for the most
primeval vestiges of the region's complex diasporic ethnohistory to make the invisible
heritage visible, concentrating on the traces of Andalusian Islamic traditions left in the
Spanish folk songs, the forms of piety, and the general behavioral character of Puerto
Rico's mountain culture. As in Red Beans, in Panoramas Cruz alternates essays and long
prose pieces with new poems. Hernández-Cruz's sixth book develops even further his
new, multidimensional exploration of the human ancestry that has grown along with
Puerto Rican rural landscape in the long middle section, "Panoramas," a dreamlike
reflection that glimpses "a resurrection of the tribes" (p. 85) occurring in the tropical
thicket. There is a latent homage to the nineteenth-century Cuban poet José María de
Heredia's romantic celebration of the American landscape, with verses and poems that
echo Heredia's fascination with the mythopoetic and cosmogonical potential of the
Caribbean hurricane experience. The book concludes with a section of poems in Spanish,
mostly pliant translations that riff off poems Hernández-Cruz first wrote in English.
Poetry
Papo Got His Gun! New York: Calle Once Publications, 1966.
Doing Poetry. Berkeley: Other Ways, 1968.
Snaps: Poems. New York: Random House, 1969.
Mainland: Poems. New York: Random House, 1973.
Tropicalization. New York: Reed, Cannon & Johnson Communications, 1976.
The Low Writings. San Francisco: Lee / Lucas Press, 1980.
By Lingual Wholes. San Francisco: Momo's Press, 1982.
Rhythm, Content & Flavor. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1989.
Red Beans: Poems. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1991.
Maraca: New & Selected Poems, 1966–2000. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2001.
Other Works
Panoramas. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1997.
Paper Dance: 55 Latino Poets. Edited by the author and by Leroy V. Quintana and Virgil
Suarez. New York: Persea Books, 1995.
Periodical Publications
"Papo Got His Gun." Evergreen Review 11:73–80 (August 1967).
"Three Poems by Victor Hernández Cruz." Ramparts 7:51–52 (August 24, 1968).
"The Champagne of Cocaine." Yardbird Reader 1:99–102 (1972).
"You Gotta Have Your Tips on Fire." Village Voice 19:56 (October 31, 1974).
"The Latest Latin Dance Craze." Revista Chicano Riquena 3:12–14 (summer 1975).
"Caffeine Gardeens." Greenfield Review 4, no. 3 / 4:70–71 (autumn 1975).
"The Plumbers." Black Scholar 12:18–19 (September–October 1981).