By Lizz Mendez Berry

Eye Weekly, May 27, 1999

There's more prisoners outside of jail than inside." Veteran poet and playwright Pedro Pietri could be referring to Puerto Rico, his colonized native island, or to the poor U.S. barrios that hold the Nuyoricans (Puerto Ricans living in New York) who provide menial labor to the affluent and perhaps hope to become someone's Latin lover.

With his work, this swaggering man in black looks unwaveringly at the melancholy of his people, describing the rituals of New York barrio life in vivid color -- playing the numbers, welfare cheques, and rice and beans. But even as his writing is a protest against marginalization, the warmth of the Puerto Rican sun still shines out of its secret corners.

Puerto Rico has been controlled by colonial powers since the Spanish conquest. In the 1950s it became a U.S. "protectorate," and many poor Puerto Ricans, including Pietri's family, moved to the U.S., lured by the promise of First World earnings. Most often El Norte offered them only low-paying, unskilled jobs. They were also the victims of racism and discrimination -- apart from Ricky Ricardo, Latins were none-too-popular in the good ol' U.S. of A.

In the '60s, when the Black Panthers were gaining steam, fueled by frustration, a Chicago Puerto Rican street gang called the Young Lords transformed itself into a boricua (a Taino indigenous word for Puerto Rican) civil-rights advocacy group. The Chicago Young Lords sparked chapters in other cities and a U.S. Puerto Rican civil rights movement began to consolidate its agenda, seeking (among other things) bilingual education and an end to discrimination against Latins.

As the boricuas mobilized, members of the community also began to express themselves artistically and Pietri was one of them. He still does much of his writing in "Spanglish," a language that seeks to undermine the two colonial tongues (that of the Spanish conquistador and the American imperialist) by slipping back and forth between them without warning, thereby taking control of both.

In the spirit of poets like Langston Hughes and Allen Ginsberg, Pietri used language to claim cultural space for his people, at a time when the only people being heard were "educated" white males. He performed with the Young Lords, and in the late '60s he wrote "Puerto Rican Obituary," the poem for which he is best known. An excerpt from that piece helps explain why:

"Miguel/ died hating Milagros because Milagros/ had a color television set/ and he could not afford one yet/ Milagros died hating Olga because Olga/ made five dollars more on the same job/ Olga/ died hating Manuel because Manuel had hit the numbers more times/ than she had hit the numbers/ Manuel/ died hating all of them/ Juan/ Miguel/ Milagros/ and Olga/ because they all spoke broken english/ more fluently than he did."

Here, Pietri articulates the solitude of the Nuyorican soul, drowning in unfulfilled American dreams. He continues to read the poem today.

"People get very competitive and they ask me, 'You still reading that?' And my reply is always, 'Well, what has changed?' " Pietri explains. "Yes, I'm still reading that and I'll still be reading it for another 50 years -- or as long as it takes for things to change. You have to keep reminding them. Things have changed, but not much."

In the early '70s, Pietri co-founded the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe, which would become the nucleus of Nuyorican spoken word culture. Since then, he has continued to be a lyrical force to be reckoned with, bringing his tropical flavor to light in different guises. Pietri's plays have been performed by such Latin luminaries as Raúl Julia, and he has toured his poetry extensively around the world. His writing has been published in several anthologies of Nuyorican poetry, as well as The United States of Poetry and The Outlaw Bible of American Verse. He is also a contributing editor of the magazine Voices From the Bread Is Rising Poetry Collective.

Pietri is also the co-director of El Puerto Rican Embassy, a "free state of mind" located in New York City. The island of Puerto Rico may not have technical independence, but these Nuyoricans are definitely liberated, diplomatically immune to American domination.

"Colonization happens in Puerto Rico but also in New York City," Pietri says. "That's why we have the Puerto Rican passport. We broke loose. We're colonizing New York. When I came back from Cuba they stamped this passport."

When Pietri performed at 52 Inc. in Toronto last month the room was saturated with Nuyorican pride. His words shimmer with the rhythm of the mambo, la plena, and the slow sweetness of street dreams. In his "Viejo San Juan in Spanglish," Pietri writes that he "almost misplaced [his] soul/ somewhere in New Jersey." Not quite.

Lizz Mendez Berry is one of the organisers of the Revoluciones festival, for which Pedro Pietri reads -- at the Comfort Zone, Saturday May 29, 10pm and at the Rivoli, Sunday May 30, 6-8:30pm.