 Honoring the Still Living
Legacy of Bimbo Rivas
By Robert Waddell, January 22, 2012
His iconic image still floats through the streets of the Lower East Side and the voice of poet Bimbo Rivas, who coined the term Loisaida, still has resounding meaning today as if the poet were still reciting poetry at a nearby coffee house. With wild grey hair and beard, reminiscent of Walt Whitman, Rivas was honored on Thursday January 13, 2012 at Two Boots pizzeria, 3rd street and Avenue A, with a commemorative tile mosaic mural showing that the community has not forgotten the eccentric yet brilliant poet and community activist.
Orange and dark blue tiles exploded outward recreating the image of Rivas’s iconic face. Bimbo’s piercing eyes still look deep into the soul of his Puerto Rican community. Above the image reads “Loisaida I love you. I dig the way you talk.” This honor to a LES rarity represents a community holding onto the history of its neighborhood. Much like the Julia de Burgos mural on 106th street and various Pedro Pietri murals in El Barrio and lower Manhattan, the Rivas mosaic honors a still living memory, as if the poet were still alive and he had been given a lifetime achievement award for all that he has left behind. In other words, his memory still lives. Say his name out loud and it sounds like a joyful call to action: Bimbo Rivas.
 Rivas’s poem “A Job,” which was included in “Nuyorican Poetry,” the original poetry collection of Nuyorican Poets, reads in part and resonates during the current recession, “A Job/to feed the time I spend adrift/in search for substance in the street/Awake at three a.m./not knowing where or when the end/will come to my disdain….”
His poem, like much of his work, was a declamation on the need for self-respect and financial independence amongst Boricuas. Often, Rivas writes of the struggles of Puerto Ricans looking to find and to better their lives while navigating through the labyrinth of the Lower East Side Streets.
“Out of all the brothers, Bimbo Rivas was a prince amongst the Lower East Side poets,” said original Nuyorican poet Jesus Papoleto Melendez. “He was down to Earth, honest and truthful. He had a genuine love of our people. He was an enigma amongst those Lower East Side characters.”
Melendez said that Rivas’s genius lives on today since Rivas named the Lower East Side, Loisaida. “He put his finger on something in a way that we can all identify with culturally,” said Melendez. www.papoleto.com
The commemorative mural is based on a rooftop photograph taken by photographer Marlis Momber, who for nearly 40 years has pictorially chronicled the life of Puerto Ricans in the Lower East Side. As the mural was being unveiled, Momber was included in a group show of 5 women photographers titled “Street.Life.Live,” at the 14th Street Y that runs until February 29th.
 The show, curated by photographer Shell Sheddy, brings together 5 talented photographers who capture street life, houses of worship, portraits and local history. Momber’s photographs capture the sense of gravity in Puerto Rican life, especially during the 1970s with photos of crumbling buildings and a thriving arts community, of which Rivas was a great part, especially his association with the Nuyorican Poets Café, El Teatro Ambulante and his relationship with poet Jorge Brandon.
“The fragmented pieces of the past but still going strong,” said Rivas’s daughter Sandra of the mural. “The orange tiles and the black tiles, I thought it was a good contrast.”
Rivas said that the mosaic was a moving tribute to her father who she said was always a people person and who looked beyond a person’s oppression or their drug abuse and “…he could see the bigger picture. He always tried to bring out the best in people,” she said. |
