Nuyoricans

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Nuyoricans

The term Nuyorican refers to Puerto Ricans born or raised in New York City, or more broadly in the mainland United States, as distinguished from those from the island of Puerto Rico. Indeed, the word in a range of other spellings—“neorrican,” “neorrriqueno,” and “newyorquino,” among others—was first used by those from the island, notably in the glossary of Guillermo Cotto-Thorner’s early novel about Puerto Rican life in New York, Trópico en Manhattan (1952) and, in more direct anticipation of the usage familiar today, in Jaime Carrero’s long poem NeoRican Jetliner (1965). But in those early, island-based occurrences the term often carried a derogatory or at least derisive connotation. It signified cultural inauthenticity and evoked a paternalistic sympathy for the cultural loss, or even blame for the betrayal involved in the migrants’ adaptation to North America. It also could imply significantly negative qualities in terms of class (usually very poor and lazy), sometimes described with the idea of “lumpen” (proletarian), and race (generally identified as black, perhaps tainted with the proximity of African Americans). Many were the young New York Puerto Ricans who experienced painful rejection and discrimination on occasions of their temporary or permanent return to their ancestral homeland, especially in the 1970s and more recent decades.

Nuyorican in its present spelling and usage emerged in the early 1970s in part as a reaction to this negative characterization. The founding of the Nuyorican Poets’ Café on New York’s Lower East Side in 1973 and the publication of the anthology Nuyorican Poetry in 1975 were the major events in this historical emergence, in both cases resulting from the collaboration between writers Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero. But it was rapidly adopted by many other writers, artists, and other New York–born youth of Puerto Rican extraction. It became the name of a vibrant poetic and artistic movement of those vibrant years of ethnic awakening, capturing as it did the zeitgeist of the Puerto Rican community in the 1960s and early 1970s, and featuring such poetic talents as Victor Hernández Cruz, Sandra María Estevez, and the quintessential Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri. Algarín and Piñero both recount the indignities they endured at the hands of members of the island’s cultural elite, and how they then took the negative term and threw it back at them with a sense of cultural pride, much as African Americans did in those same years with the word black. A dramatization of this act of resignifying occurs in the more recent film Piñero (2002), in a vivid scene depicting Piñero’s encounter with that elite on his visit to the island in the mid-1970s. Though another Loisaida (Lower East Side) cultural institution of the times, the New Rican Village, may be considered an even more significant center of experimental expression in those same years, it was the word Nuyorican spelled in that idiosyncratic way that has continued as the identifying cultural nomenclature for subsequent generations of Puerto Ricans in the U.S. diaspora. In its combination of Spanish and English phonetics, its semantic mix of “newness” and geographical location, and its intertwining of the New York and the “Rican” reference, that spelling has turned out to be ideally appropriate to epitomize a fully hybrid, bicultural field of personal and group identity, corresponding to the term Chicano among Mexican American youth of the same period.

In more recent times some objections to the usage have emerged because of the dispersal of U.S.-based Puerto Ricans and the emergence of significant communities in other places, notably Philadelphia, Chicago, Florida, and other cities in the Northeast such as Hartford, Connecticut; Jersey City, New Jersey; and Springfield, Massachusetts. Though no new word has arisen to replace the geographically specific Nuyorican, some writers and others have toyed with such neologisms as diasporican and AmeRícan, the latter a signature poem by well-known writer Tato Laviera. Terms clearly modeled after Nuyorican, such as ChicagoRican and PhillyRican, have also cropped up, as has nomenclature such as Dominican Yorks and MexYorks to name newer Latino groups in New York City. In more recent times, change is also evident even in Puerto Rico, where the concept first emerged in its less sanguine usage: The diaspora cultural experience has gained greater acceptance, receiving frequent coverage in the media and cultural institutions, though often still in reluctant or paternalistic terms. Among the youth on the island, many of whom are from families of return migrants who were raised on the mainland, Nuyorican has come to be a term of strong admiration and even emulation. Significantly, Old San Juan now boasts the Nuyorican Café among its cultural nightspots. In the days of hip hop, reggaetón, and spoken-word poetry, the long-standing gap between island and diaspora cultural realities has finally come to narrow, and the ironic, deeper meaning of the highly charged expression Nuyorican to come full turn.

SEE ALSO African Diaspora; Blackness; Boricua; Culture; Immigrants, New York City; Latinos; Nationalism and Nationality; Natives; Politics, Identity; Popular Culture; Protest; Race; Racism; Radicalism; Resistance