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Books by Louis Reyes Rivera
Who Pays The Cost (1978) /
This One For You (1983) /
Scattered
Scripture
Bum Rush the Page
(co-editor) /
The Bandana Republic (co-editor)
Sancocho: A Book of Nuyorican Poetry by Shaggy Flores (edited by
Louis Reyes Rivera)
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Scattered
Scripture
Reaching,
Claiming, Lunging for the Universe of Things
Notes for (jorge’s journey)
By Louis Reyes Rivera
Jorge (pronounced HOR-heh, i.e. George)
represents the dilemma of colonial transplants, in this case,
Puerto Rican exiles who’ve been economically cajoled into New
York, with no substantive place for them in the throb of urban
capitalism.
Capitalism, of course, is an economic system. The
word defines the reason we do business—to make money. Democracy,
however, is a political term that defines how we
legislate the conduct of business. It means to say a
government that allows everyone equitable access.
Consequently, democracy is in conflict with capitalism,
as under the latter only capital (i.e., assets, credit, cash)
matters.
Its basic dictate requires a segment of the population to be
unskilled. The unemployed/unemployable become a cheaply
exploited commodity—a non-laboring lumpen caste upon which
inestimable numbers of jobs are created, particularly in social
services and the judicial system. In order to stay in business,
each sector must make more money each year. In social services
and in public schools, more unprepared people are created
through miseducation, even as the general economy moves into
high-tech skills.
Similarly, in order for courts, prisons and
police to justify expanding their tax-based budgets they must
arrest more people. This form of economics has its historic
parallels in chattel slavery. Where yesterday’s form for fast
money involved breeding, buying, transporting and selling
slaves, today’s form involves growing, buying, transporting
and selling drugs; where yesterday’s form for steady money
involved slave labor on plantations and inside mines, today’s
form involves an underclass in prison cells and welfare
dependency.
The juridical arena is now the nation’s
third largest industry, and building new prisons is the busiest
area for the construction trades. Former Detective Mark Fuhrman’s
nationally aired on-tape remarks (Aug., 1995) at the O. J.
Simpson trial corroborated the practice of planting evidence
against socalled "non-whites," which is as old as the
first prisons in the Americas. Standard statistics hold that
over 80% of the imprisoned are African Americans, Chicanos and
Puerto Ricans, yet their composite proportion to the population
has yet to exceed 28%. Thus an undercaste.
While it appears socially uprooted, an inner
consciousness drives many of its members to search out their
humanity (see F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
and The Autobiography of Malcolm X). In the poem,
Jorge the Younger begins his journey from a state prison.
(a) the bus at green haven
refers to the Green Haven maximum security prison in
Stormville, New York, one of two state prisons with death
houses.
(b) old san juan, the
first Spanish capital of Puerto Rico, is part of Greater
San Juan (a series of small towns which grew to overlap
one another, including Old San Juan, Santurce, Isla Verde,
Rio Piedras, etc.).
(c) ha ti fue quien mandaron
means So, you’re the one they sent!
(d) heh/heh, mira, que con el
no se hace na’/ni pa’ la leche del nene se hace na! means, heh/heh, look, man, with that guy you won’t make a
thing/not even enough to buy milk for the baby.
(e) esta bien, muchas
gracias, pero. . .means it’s all right; thanks, but.
. .
(f) botado en la calle pero
ando, compai/ botado en la calle pero sigo, comai/ siempre
estoy mirando buscando my pai/ siempre encontrando mas de
lo que hai/ botado en la calle pero. . . . roughly
translates as "ejected into the streets/ and yet,
my man, I’m still walking/ ejected into the streets/ and
yet, dear heart, I keep on/ I’m always looking/
searching for my father/ always finding more than what I
sought/ ejected into the streets/ and yet. . ." The
terms compai and comai are short for compadre
and comadre (masculine/feminine for intimate
friend), often chosen as godparents to one's children
(as parents-in-reserve). the term pai, like
mai,
is an impolite way to say padre/madre (i.e., father/mother
versus pop or old lady).
(g) born from the seed of Caguas
heads for that highland town alludes to Caguas, Puerto
Rico, which mountain town was also the name of a village
elder (a cacique, i.e., chief) at the time
of the Spanish invasion. The cacique (pronounced KA-see-keh)
Caguas is said to have capitulated to Spanish domination.
Jorge is given here as a descendant of Caguas, earching
for his roots (his father’s crime).
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
update 4 October 2011
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