26 pages • 52 minutes read
Pedro PietriPuerto Rican Obituary
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1973A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: The Nuyorican Movement
The term “Nuyorican” is a combination of “New York City” and “Puerto Rican,” and it distinguishes New York-born Puerto Ricans from ones who moved from Puerto Rico to the United States. It was originally a pejorative that individuals who identified with that background sought to reclaim. The Nuyorican creative movement began in the 1960s and sought to document the struggles faced by working-class Nuyoricans. As explained in poets.org’s “A Brief Guide to Nuyorican Poetry,” “they also tell stories of rebellion, resistance, and endurance in the midst of these struggles.” All of these themes are evident in Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary,” as explained above.
Just like the poets of the Harlem Renaissance sought to document their particular voice, the Nuyorican poets sought to capture the rhythms and speech patterns of their fellow Nuyoricans, leading to a poetry that Miguel Algarín referred to as “street-rooted” (qtd. in “A Brief Guide to Nuyorican Poetry”). By 1973, the movement became so popular that the several members opened the Nuyorican Poets Café when they no longer had room to accommodate all of the artists and audience members who attended readings and get-togethers in Algarín’s apartment. Prominent members of the movement include not just Algarín and Pietri, but also Jack Agüeros, Jorge Brandon, Victor Hernández Crus, and Sandra María Esteves.
Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary” shares many of the hallmarks of the Nuyorican movement, including its emphasis on five individuals living in New York City, the trials they face in making a living in white America, and a celebration of the potential for endurance in the face of so many obstacles. In the end, the poem celebrates those who continue to fight for equality and survive amidst all of the challenges they face.
Socio-Historical Context
Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary” is a product of its time. As a member of the Nuyorican movement, Pietri is attuned to the challenges faced by those of Puerto Rican descent in mid-twentieth-century white America. The references to the legal and financial systems demonstrate how difficult it was for Nuyoricans to get ahead. Maintaining a unified front became equally challenging, as depicted when the five characters in the poem go from “dreaming,” in Stanza 9, to “Hating fighting and stealing,” in the twelfth stanza. Opportunities for progress were few and far between in the 1960s, while the civil rights movement was reaching its peak. While Pietri blames “gringos who want them lynched” (Line 158), the civil rights movement, with leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, centered on rights for African Americans, leaving Nuyoricans to fend for themselves against those wielding “white supremacy bibles” (Line 279).
Nuyoricans also face the challenge of not being viewed as authentically Puerto Rican either, as they are more often born in New York than in Puerto Rico. Though Pietri himself was born in Puerto Rico, he immigrated with his family at the age of three, meaning he would have limited—or no—memories of the island. He acknowledges this limitation in the poem when he writes, “Never knowing / the geography of their complexion” (Lines 271-272). As a result of this “Never knowing” (Line 271) and the racism of white America, they are caught in the middle, looked down upon by those on both sides.
