A Note on Victor Hernández-Cruz's Migratory and Publishing History

César A. Salgado

Victor Hernández-Cruz's lifelong itinerary of to-and-from, island-to-mainland,

coast-to-coast, continent-to-continent migratory displacements is unique among Puerto

Rican writers. Throughout his writing career, Hernández-Cruz has lived across a

geographical tangle of contrasting ethnic, rural, and urban landscapes and seascapes:

provincial Aguas Buenas in Caribbean Puerto Rico, Manhattan's Lower East Side on the

Atlantic Coast, and Berkeley on California's Pacific seaboard. The counterpoints and

polyrhythms emerging from traveling between these distant settings are at the source of

the dazzling speed and rich inventiveness of Hernández-Cruz's metaphorical,

multicultural, and crosslinguistic associations. The evolution of Hernández-Cruz's thirty-

three year poetic career thus can be traced by following the vertiginous route map that

sent him from Puerto Rico to New York and California, and back to Aguas Buenas.

After he moved with his family from Aguas Buenas to New York City,

Hernández-Cruz began writing poetry at fourteen while attending Benjamin Franklin

School on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Hernández-Cruz benefited from the

encouragement of supportive English teachers and from a surge of 1960s government

programs that promoted artistic expression among minority teenagers as an alternative to

drug use and other symptoms of urban blight in inner-city neighborhoods. At seventeen,

Hernández-Cruz got the chance to work as an assistant to Herbert Kohl, an education

expert who at the time was directing the Poets in the Schools program in New York City.

Hernández-Cruz thus became the editor of a literary youth magazine, Umbra; he coedited

with Kohl an anthology of poetry by inner-city teenagers titled STUFF: A Collection of

Student Writing; and he was able to publish on his own a small chapbook of his work,
Papo Got His Gun, which he sold by consignment in highbrow bookstores in Greenwich

Village. The chapbook caught the eye of an editor of the Evergreen Review, who asked

Hernández for permission to reprint sections in the journal. An office worker at the Poet

in the Schools program sent a Random House editor who was familiar with the journal

more of Hernández-Cruz's poems; Random House then offered him a contract for a book.

With Snaps (1968) Hernández-Cruz thus became one of the first Puerto Rican writers to

publish with a mainstream U.S. publisher, a Latino literary wunderkind at the age of

nineteen.

In 1968 Hernández-Cruz went to Berkeley to help organize poetry workshops for

Other Ways, a program that sought to bring art to public schools. Shortly after this

experience, he chose to settle on the West Coast and shuttle back and forth to New York.

In 1971 he visited Puerto Rico for the first time after he had left at five, and he stayed for

six months. The transregional web woven by such transits inspired the themes and the

structure of his second book, Mainland (1973). The book is divided into three sections:

"Rhythm Section Part One" features poems about moving about in a sonorously ethnic

New York City; "Flight" recounts episodes of visiting, living with, and hanging out with

Chicano friends in California with eyes wide open before the bright colors that the Aztlán

and Mexica legacies had left on the social landscape; "Boriken" tells of Hernández-Cruz's

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.

Hernández-Cruz's next book, By Lingual Wholes, published in 1982 by Momo's

Press in San Francisco, is his most radical and experimental work. The ferocity of the

poem's bilingual and thematic code-switching explodes all rules of textual propriety.

Pages are not numbered; standard spelling is disrespected; syntactical norms are broken

down and reassembled; typography behaves with a schizoid streak of huge font titles,

intruding graphics, and concrete poetry arrangements. The poem loses all moorings from

Hernández-Cruz's multiple "home" settings: the strong sense of place previously

displayed in his work dissolves in a kaleidoscopic fusion of historical times and

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.

Hernández-Cruz has also published two anthologies of his poetry. Rhythm,

Content & Flavor came out in 1989 and summarizes Hernández-Cruz's career as a New

York–Californian Puerto Rican poet. Maraca (2002) is a recent and very comprehensive

anthology that covers all the locales and displacements of Hernández-Cruz's career from

the perspective of Aguas Buenas's regained ground point. It includes previously

unpublished poems that span all of the poet's distinctive periods of production.
Selected Bibliography
Works of Victor Hernández Cruz

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).

Critical and Biographical Studies

Algarín, Miguel; Piñero, Miguel; and August, Richard, eds. Nuyorican Poetry: An
Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings. New York: Morrow, 1975.
Rosa, Victor. "Interview with Victor Hernández Cruz." Bilingual Review 2:281–287
(September–December 1975).
Sheppard, Walt. "An Interview with Clarence Major and Victor Hernández Cruz." In New
Black Voices. Edited by Abraham Chapman. New York: New American Library, 1972.
Pp. 545–552.
Turner, Faythe E. "Puerto Rican Writers on the Mainland. The Neoricans: A Thematic
Study." Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 1978. Pp. 120–134.
Wallenstein, Barry. "The Poet in New York: Victor Hernández Cruz." Bilingual Review
1:312–319 (September–December 1974).