Centro Journal ISSN: The City University of New York Estados Unidos

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1 Centro Journal ISSN: The City University of New York Estados Unidos Io r i o S a n d í n, Ly n D i Edward Rivera, the "Culture-conscious scribe". Introduction Centro Journal, vol. XIV, núm. 1, 2002, pp The City University of New York New York, Estados Unidos Available in: How to cite Complete issue More information about this article Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Scientific Information System Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative

2 pgs qxd 7/22/07 3:22 PM Page 102 Photograph courtesy of Kathy Roe. As a pigeon-flier at the roof of 9-11 East 107 St. circa Photograph courtesy of the Rivera family.

3 pgs qxd 7/22/07 3:22 PM Page 103 CENTRO Journal 7 Volume xiv Number 1 spring 2002 Edward Rivera, the Culture-Conscious Scribe The hilly village of Bautabarro had no chroniclers; illiteracy was high in those days, headstones a luxury. Besides, who would have had time to record all the comings and goings, the births and deaths? Who would have bothered? The people of Bautabarro were peasants, not history-minded, culture-conscious scribes. You died, and a few years later people forgot where you'd been buried. Only the town church recorded the day God had cut you loose, but our town church burned down several times and its records were pretty meager. From Chapter One: Antecedentes, in Family Installments.

4 pgs qxd 7/22/07 3:22 PM Page 104 Ed Manuel with his sisters, brother and father. From left to right: Ed, Carmen, Froil n, H ctor, and Aurea. With students at CCNY s Center for Workers Education Painting.

5 pgs qxd 7/22/07 3:22 PM Page 105 Teaching English at Saint Anne School in Brooklyn On the roof of 9-11 East 107 St

6 pgs qxd 7/22/07 3:22 PM Page 106 Playing stoopball in front of 23 East 107 St Photograph courtesy of the Rivera family.

7 pgs qxd 7/22/07 3:22 PM Page 107 CENTRO Journal 7 Volume xiv Number 1 spring 2002 Introduction Lyn Di Iorio Sandín In response to Edward Rivera s sudden death in the fall of 2001, this section of CENTRO Journal pays homage to the New York-based Puerto Rican writer and his bildungsroman Family Installments (1982) a now classic work of U.S. Latino literature. Although this year marks the twentieth anniversary of the novel s publication, the stunning fact remains that the six critical essays and personal reminiscences here included with reprinted writings by the author comprise the first extensive collection of commentaries ever published on Rivera and his work. Why has there been such a dearth of criticism on a book that many scholars of Puerto Rican diasporic literature recognize as an important achievement, and that some well-known younger Puerto Rican and Latino writers Ernesto Quiñonez and Abraham Rodriguez, with essays here, as well as Junot Díaz cite as a significant influence? Why has such an important Nuyorican literary personage been relegated to relative oblivion by his Latino peers? One answer is that Family Installments is anomalous among texts written by Nuyorican writers who like Rivera came of age in the late sixties and early seventies. This group includes Miguel Algarín, Tato Laviera, Nicholasa Mohr, Miguel Piñero, Pedro Pietri, and Piri Thomas as its most famous, and revered, exponents. Rivera s novel does not fit easily into the highly politicized category of social protest literature. This doesn t mean, of course, that there is no social protest in Family Installments. There is, of the most biting kind. The chapters set in Puerto Rico, for example, caustically critique machismo. However, the most devastating social criticism in the book appears in the chapters about the narrator s miseducation at the hands of a crew of despotic and humorless nuns and brothers in a fictional East Harlem parochial school. A Little Lavabo (1975), a short story published originally in The Bilingual Review /La Revista Biling e, features a variation on the theme of discipline and punishment. The narrator of the story pokes fun at the nun who derides, and punishes, him and his Latino classmates for having dirty hands and unbrushed teeth. The nun s disciplinary measures can be read as both racist and sadomasochistic. Yet, by the end of the story, the narrator has taken on the nun s neurosis about cleanliness, and unconsciously brandishes it against his parents. The story subtly portrays how Latinos internalize repressive injunctions of those in power, and how this in turn leads to passive agressive behavior, and even self-loathing.

8 pgs qxd 7/22/07 3:22 PM Page 108 Rivera s sardonic essay Stable Manners; Or, How the Publication of Family Installments was Stalled for Three Years and $3, underlines the fact that editors who initially turned down the book were looking for an updated version of Thomas memoir Down These Mean Streets (1967). His only capitulation to such pressures and expectations was Rivera s decision to allow his publishers to market as a memoir a book that he considered to be quintessentially fictional. The author s witty comment, and final verdict, on social protest literature from a 1986 letter to scholar and translator Diana Vélez, which makes its publishing debut in these pages is telling: Social protest writers missed out on a sense of humor, most of them. I guess not having one is part of their ideology. Humor in all its forms: irony, satire, tragicomedy, even slapstick, can be found in the pages of Family Installments. And Rivera s self-deprecatory humor finds its direct offspring in the self-mocking narrators of Junot Díaz s short stories. The celebrated Dominican-American writer frequently notes in talks and interviews that Rivera and Thomas are his main U.S. Latino literary progenitors. Much of Family Installments richness stems from its author s intense concern with aesthetics. This is reflected stylistically, in the book s ironic texture, and thematically in its narrator s painful awakening to the disjunction between the appeal of the English literary works that he loves and the grim realities of his working-class background. But love for English literature in Rivera does not equal assimilation or cultural brown nosing. Instead, as Rivera s former student, Diana Vélez, points out in her article, A Puerto Rican Story: Family Installments by Edward Rivera, the book s chapter on Shakespeare s Julius Caesar satirizes every possible aspect of bilingual language usage. Rivera s punning is a veiled tribute to Shakespeare, the master of word play. But the often hilarious interpolation of Spanish by Rivera s narrator also functions to challenge and resist with an ease and consistency unequaled by any other East Coast Latino writer of fiction the cultural paradigms imposed on Latinos by mainstream American culture. Knowledge of both high and low language registers was a gift that Rivera deployed in the classroom as well as in his fiction. In A Final Installment, another of Rivera s former City College students, Ernesto Quiñonez, the acclaimed author of Bodega Dreams (2000) notes that what set Rivera apart as a teacher was that despite his prodigious knowledge of literature his discussion of literary texts was always intimate and down to earth. His method enabled Rivera s students to come away from his classes with a new sense of identity shaped by their suddenly more personal connections to books. A third former CCNY student of Rivera s, Abraham Rodriguez the dynamic, prolific author of The Boy Without a Flag (1992), Spidertown (1993), and The Buddha Book (2001) emphasizes in looking for ed rivera that the latter was the first person to push him to write about what he knew best, the smoldering ghetto world of the South Bronx. Latinos do not place a high value on literature, and are the first to turn their backs on their own literary royalty. Rodriguez formulates these highly polemical answers to the question about the relative obscurity of Family Installments. He eloquently expounds the loneliness of writing in English while coming from a community that doesn t worship the written word. It is the painfulness of this contradictory condition that Rodriguez offers as an explanation for why Rivera never published another book after his first. Being overlooked must have been particularly trying for Rivera who was, all by himself, the literary vanguard of his generation of Latino writers. He was the most erudite and talented of them all, according to El

9 pgs qxd 7/22/07 3:22 PM Page 109 Huitlacoche, Gary Keller, the Chicano author and publisher of the progressive Latino journal, The Bilingual Review/La Revista Biling e. Being so talented and so misunderstood by mainstream and Latino readers more interested in the crime-tosuccess street story genre contributed to Rivera s frustration and writing blocks, which led, increasingly, to alcoholism and fits of public (and no doubt private) rage. One of the most interesting of these outbursts resulted in Rivera s public confrontation with the well-known cultural critic Alfred Kazin, an incident recounted in Keller s article, The Pioneering Bilingual Persona of Eduardo/Edward Rivera. In his brilliantly incisive essay, Edward Rivera s Family Installments: An Agonistic Reading, Alfredo Villanueva shows how a monster that haunts the narrator of Family Installments is ultimately a representation of the cultural Other. This monster, Villanueva demonstrates, is cast by Rivera as a composite of Grendel the murky creature from the abyss in the Anglo-Saxon classic epic Beowulf and Grendel s mother. In the book, the creature repeatedly attacks the narrator in his dreams. Villanueva reveals the monster to be a metaphor for the many characters who threaten and alienate the narrator: a nun, a black gang member, a policeman carrying a big stick. The monster in Family Installments keeps coming back to terrorize him as long as the narrator fails to face what Villanueva calls his diminished condition, as a minority subject who can never assimilate into the images promoted by U.S. cultural paradigms. A link between the monster that Villanueva s article uncovers in Family Installments, and Keller s notion of a darker side to Rivera, also surfaces in my own article, Latino Rage: The Life and Work of Ed Rivera. The female monster that attacks Rivera s narrator eerily corresponds to the real life succubus, which Rivera described to me in private conversation. I posit Rivera s humility which many of his friends saw as his defining personality trait as a mask that kept everybody, including Rivera himself, distant from his hurt, angry, secret self. But this wounded part of the self kept returning in different guises. I suggest that Rivera s monsters were not his alone, but also haunt the Latino psyche. Rivera s life is like a mirror in which Latinos can see how self-destructive we are in our denial of the pain and anger in our fragmented identifies. This type of repression among Latinos leads to a rejection of solidarity among ourselves. It leads to a fixation on the petty differences that divide Puerto Ricans from Dominicans, Cubans, Mexicans, and Chicanos; Nuyoricans from island Puerto Ricans; Domericans and other mixed Ricans from those with two Puerto Rican parents; and Afro-Latinos and other dark-skinned Latinos from those who are lightskinned and can pass. Not to speak of the rancor visited by those completely fluent in Spanish upon those who are not, and the resentment of the former by the latter. Such insidiously varied fetishization goes a long way toward explaining why Rivera s wonderful book has been overlooked by Nuyorican and Puerto Rican writers and critics for such a long time. It tells a story that differs from the dominant Down These Mean Streets New York story. Instead of favoring, and limiting ourselves to, just one kind of story, one kind of identity, it is high time for Nuyoricans, Puerto Ricans, Latinos, whatever we call ourselves, to embrace the different stories and the differences among ourselves. Let us follow the lead of our African-American brothers and sisters, leaving behind solitude which ultimately annihilated Edward Rivera s writing career and embracing solidarity. It is heartbreaking that Rivera had to die for even a modest collection of essays on his work to come into existence. Let us work against the recurrence of such loneliness. Let us proclaim unity among ourselves by full-heartedly embracing our bards who are still breathing and writing.