When I first came to live in Chicago in the early 1980s, I wanted to be a writer and fancied myself a poet. But I looked more to Walt Whitman (not knowing that he was a starting point for Jorge Luis Borges and a host of other Latin Americans), Gertrude Stein, and sapphic Olga Broumas (because I was an arty young lesbian discovering the pain and thrills of sex) than to Latino poets.
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Then one day a young Puerto Rican named Angel Figueroa—Figgy to one and all— tried to pick me up by inviting me to hear a band he was playing with: David Hernández & Street Sounds. I loved to dance and, assuming I’d be hearing some local Puerto Rican salsa, I accepted.
Street Sounds was founded on two important principles: to advance social justice and to celebrate the lives of ordinary people. The music is essential but Hernández never lets the poems become songs. He borrows from Puerto Rican jibaro tradition, but there’s very little improvisation involved. Each piece is a carefully crafted love note to everyday people—initially in Humboldt Park and then, later, Chicago. Harold Washington called on Hernández for an inaugural poem because by then he’d become the city’s unofficial poet laureate.
I am parent dreams of maletas/cardboard suitcases
I am Chi Town Brown.”
I am Chi Town Brown!
when their veins become a golf course for the needle’s conviction
