WORDS Lily Ní Dhomhnaill
Tato Laviera’s first poem was written, unsurprisingly, in his beloved Lower East Side after an encounter with a barefoot Puerto Rican boy sitting on the street. “I went and sat on the stairs and wrote my poem about that kid… That was the calling. It was a concrete calling and there it emerged. This happened in July, 1966.’‘ For the next 40-odd years his creativity was motivated by his people, the Puerto Ricans of New York, and their struggles and celebrations. In his own words: “I am nothing but the historian / who took your actions / and jotted them on paper / therefore making you / the source, the strength, / the base of my inspirations.”
Author of 5 volumes of poetry and over a dozen plays, musician, performance-poet, youth worker and social activist, Tato Laviera was a protagonist of the “Nuyorican” culture movement. Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico in 1951, he was brought to New York when he was 6 years old, where he lived for the rest of his life. His work, pulsing with the bomba and plena rhythms of the Caribbean and scattered with slang of the city, paid homage to the hybrid identity of his community. He wrote with equal mastery in English and Spanish, and often combined the two in a nod, both playful and brilliant, to contemporary speech. For example, the title of his second collection, Enclave, is a pun on “en clave”, which means both “in code” and “in key.”
His passion for his own enclave did not take away from his appreciation of other minority cultures. He believed in a synchronous celebration of the hybrid ethnicities that made up the United States, calling for a negation of the so-called melting pot, and an inclusion of all cultures: “why is america confused? / why does she adopt foreign modes / to escape her present reality? / why am I left alone as if I were / a token outside a telephone booth?” He was among the founders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a live poetry venue in the East Village that, despite the name, promotes work from all ethnicities and is still a buzzing multi-cultural performance centre today. Allen Ginsberg described it as “the most integrated place on the planet”.
In later life Laviera suffered from increasing health problems, going blind as a result of diabetes. In 2010 he underwent emergency brain surgery, which saved his life but left him homeless. He spent two weeks in a nursing home, but couldn’t bear to be around people who were, he thought, disengaged with life and the outside world. He preferred to stay at a shelter, where he held poetry readings with the other lodgers. While he was there he said, “I can create here, and that makes me feel liberated. Being here has given me the spirit of continuity and centrality, and that’s better than any salary.” When word got out about his predicament (via an article titled “Poet Spans Two Worlds, but has a Home in Neither”) the community response was overwhelming. Thanks to the campaigns of local community workers and lawyers, he was given an apartment in East Harlem, the biggest Puerto Rican barrio in NY. Lawyer Gloria Quinones saw it as their duty to help Laviera: “It’s not just about giving to Tato…it’s about giving to ourselves and taking care of a cultural value. A man who gave so much, so much love, giving that back to him means we give it back to ourselves.”
Tato Laviera, who went into a diabetes-related coma earlier this year, died on November 1 at the age of 63. He is survived by daughter Ella, sister Ruth and, evidently, a multitude of grateful and reverent admirers.
