Tag Archives: Puerto Rico

Call for Papers -Deadline for submission: 15 February 2008!

8th Conference – Puerto Rican Studies Association
8va Conferencia – Asociación de Estudios Puertorriqueños

October 1-4

Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe
San Juan, Puerto Rico

Program Committee
Chair: Elizabeth Crespo-Kebler (crespokebler@caribe.net)

Members:
Luis Aponte-Parés (Luis.Aponte@umb.edu)
Gladys M. Jiménez-Muñoz (gjimenez@binghamton.edu)
Anthony De Jesus (tdejesus@hunter.cuny.edu)
Myrna García Calderón (mygarcia@syr.edu)
Frederic W. Gleach (fwg1@cornell.edu)
Jorge Duany (jduany@coqui.net)
Carmen Haydeé Rivera (chrivera@coqui.net)
Carmen Milagros Concepción (cmconcepcion@uprrp.edu)
Alice Colón-Warren (colonal@coqui.net)

El Puerto Rican Embassy at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe!

Calling all in and out of focus Nuyoricans
of El Spirit Republic de Puerto Rico
to stand up for Las Guaranteed (protected by International Law)
Self Expression and Self Determination Rights.

GET A CLUE! FIRST IT’S ME THEN IT’S YOU!!!

Hosted by Mariposa & ADAL

Come and Untrain the Programmed Daze…

Performances by Tato Laviera, Sheila Candelario, Jesus Papoleto Melendez,
Ricardo Leon Pen~a Villa, Prisionera, Adal, DJ Mellow G, Mariposa w/ Frank
Perez… musical peformance by Indigo, Pucho y Guillito and live action art
by Miguel Luciano.

Saturaday, February 9, 2008
7PM-9PM
Nuyorican Poets Cafe
236 Pedro Pietri Way (E. 3rd bet. Ave. B & C)
Loisaida Village, NuYol

$10 to leave the premises (Proceeds
to benefit The Hostos Grand Jury Resistance Campaign)

“…To be free means to be creative. To be creative means to
defend your dreams….” –
Rev. Pedro Pietri/Co-founder El Puerto Rican Embassy

Rafael Tufino, 1922 – 2008

PRdream mourns the passing of our great painter and friend Rafael Tufino

Rafael Tufino is one of the central figures in the history of 20th Century Puerto Rican art. A versatile artist in many media, Tufino has been a major force in founding and furthering modern Puerto Rican art–both on the Island and in the Caribbean Diaspora.

Tufino’s work spanned a period of more than 65 years, depicting Puerto Rican life in urban New York, and pre-industrial Puerto Rico. While the artist’s work often celebrates popular traditions, including folk artists, religious and secular festivals, Tufino remains committed to fostering the appreciation of the Island’s African cultural contributions, especially as expressed in dance and music. Tufino’s images have become a trademark of Puerto Rico’s rich cultural heritage.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Tufino moved permanently to Puerto Rico with his Puerto Rican parents in 1936, initially studying under the Spanish painter Alejandro Sánchez Felipe and with Juan Rosado at his sign-painting workshop in San Juan. In the late 1940s he studied painting, printmaking and mural painting at the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico with José Chavez Morado, Antonio Rodríguez Luna and Castro Pacheco. He joined the staff of the Division of Community Education in Puerto Rico as a poster artist and illustrator in 1950, serving as director of the graphic arts workshop of this division from 1957 until 1963. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966 and the National Award for the Arts in 1985. He had two major retrospectives at El Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan, Puerto Rico; and El Museo del Barrio in New York, in 2002 and 2003, respectively. PRdream has an extensive interview with the artist in its archives, interview clips may be viewed along with his work in LA GALERIA of this web site.

PBS’s American Experience – Roberto Clemente

Monday, April 21 at 9pm on PBS (check local listings)

On December 31, 1972, Roberto Clemente, a thirty-seven-year-old baseball player for
the Pittsburgh Pirates, boarded a DC-7 aircraft loaded with relief supplies for survivors of a catastrophic earthquake in Managua, Nicaragua. Concerned over reports that the Nicaraguan dictatorship was misusing shipments of aid, Clemente, a native of neighboring Puerto Rico, hoped his involvement would persuade the government to distribute relief packages to the more than 300,000 people affected by the disaster. Shortly after take off, the overloaded aircraft plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, just one mile from the Puerto Rican coast. Roberto Clemente’s body was never recovered.

On Monday, April 21, PBS’s AMERICAN EXPERIENCE premieres Roberto Clemente, a one-hour documentary about an exceptional baseball player and committed humanitarian, who challenged racial discrimination to become baseball’s first Latino superstar. From independent filmmaker Bernardo Ruiz, Clemente features interviews with Pulitzer Prizewinning authors David Maraniss (Clemente) and George F. Will (Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball), Clemente’s wife Vera, Baseball Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda, and former teammates, to present an intimate and revealing portrait of a man whose passion and grace made him a legend. Go to www.pbs.org for more info. Also, check out www.robertoclemente.si.edu/english/index.htm.

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Cultural Survival, Political Resistance and Sustainable Development in Contemporary Puerto Rico

A Seminar and Discussion presented by Hostos Center for the Arts & Culture

Tuesday, October 7, 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.

Hostos Art Gallery
Hostos Community College/CUNY
450 Grand Concourse (at 149 St.)
The Bronx

Admission is free. To register, call 718-518-4455

Transp: IRT 2, 4, 5, Bx1 & Bx19 to Grand Concourse & 149 St.

. . . a bilingual (English-Spanish) one-day seminar on the effects of development and globalization on traditional cultures in Puerto Rico focusing on the recent history of the coastal communities of Loíza and Piñones and the island of Vieques. The participants represent a cross section of leaders in the struggle for cultural and environmental survival: educators, cultural activists and advocates of alternative strategies for development.

The seminar serves as an introduction to BomPlenazo 2008, the Hostos Center for the Arts & Culture’s biennial celebration of Afro-Puerto Rican culture. This year, the festival will focus on the bomba and plena music and dance traditions as they are practiced in the communities of Loíza and Piñones, two of the principal centers of Afro-Puerto Rican culture.

Founded by runaway slaves and freedmen in the 19th century, Loíza and its neighborhood of Piñones, with their beautiful coastline and coconut groves, have become a symbol of cultural tenacity as many loiceños have bravely resisted development efforts that threaten their cultural traditions and the beauty of their communities.

This seminar will also focus on the recent history of Vieques, the struggle to end naval bombing of the island and the implementation of a strategy for sustainable development. The island’s recent history, characterized by military and economic assaults, mirrors that of Loiza and Piñones.

Program

8:30–9
Registration, coffee

9–9:30
Welcome and Introductory Remarks
Juan Flores, Ph.D., moderator, Professor, Black and Puerto Rican Studies, NYU
The Hon. José Rivera, New York State Assemblyman

9:30–10:30
Piñones & Isla Verde, the Historical Context
Juan Giusti, Professor, University of Puerto Rico

10:30-10:45
Break

10:45-11:45
The Struggle for Piñones: Political & Economic Aspects
Maricruz Rivera Clemente, President, Corporación Piñones se Integra

11:45-12:45
The Struggle for Vieques: Post Navy Bombardment
Robert Rabin, Director, Museo Fuerte Conde Mirasol, Vieques

12:45-1:30
Lunch

1:30-2:30
The Role of Popular Action in Environmental Preservation
Alberto de Jesús, a.k.a., Tito Kayak, Environmental Activist

2:30-3:30
Microenterprises: A Strategy for Sustainable Development
Nilda Medina, Director, Incubadora de Microempresas Bieke

3:30-3:45
Break

3:45-4:00
Observations and Conclusions
Juan Flores, Professor, Black and Puerto Rican Studies, NYU

4:00
Acto Cultural

Raúl Ayala
This seminar was made possible by a legislative initiative grant from the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation through the offices of New York State Assemblyman José Rivera. It is an integral part of the Hostos Creative Campus Project, a collaboration between the Hostos Center for the Arts & Culture and the Hostos Community College/CUNY Humanities Department. The creative campus project has been funded by the Association of Performing Arts Presenters Creative Campus Innovations Grant Program funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

PRdream mourns the passing of Edgardo Vega Yunqué

Edgardo Vega Yunqué
1936-2008

He was born May 20, 1936, a date to be commemorated because he was truly a great writer and contributed to a transnational, transcultural body of literature that is so much a part of what New York City really is all about.

(excerpted from The Daily News) The author of 17 novels, who was born in Cidra, Puerto Rico, and lived alone in Brooklyn, died at Lutheran Hospital on Aug. 25, said his agent Tom Colchie. Ed Vega Yunqué was “a great American writer as well as a great Puerto Rican writer,” he added. Vega Yunqué’s novels, such as ‘Blood Fugues’ and ‘Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow Into the Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle,’ are modern classics.” His first novel ‘The Comeback’ was published in 1985.

Ed Vega Yunqué moved to New York from Puerto Rico in the mid 1940s. He was the stepfather of singer Suzanne Vega. The feisty writer was the director of the Clemente Soto Velez from 1993 to 2000.

His last novel was a comic false memoir about a Jewish woman who meets a Puerto Rican Romeo and falls in love. It had been tentatively titled “Rebecca Horowitz, Puerto Rican Sex Freak” but publication was cancelled by the publisher recently, said Colchie, who’d been trying to find another publisher.

FUNERAL SERVICES for Edgardo Vega Yunqué, 1936-2008

Monday, Sept 15, 2008
6:00pm-8:00pm
Soka Gakkai International-USA
7 East 15th Street
New York, NY 10003
212-727-7715

A TRIBUTE TO EDGARDO VEGA YUNQUE

Saturday, November 15, 3PM – 7PM
PRdream/MediaNoche
1355 Park Avenue, Corner Store
at East 102nd Street in Manhattan

A non-stop, ongoing reading of Ed Vega’s “The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow into the Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle” — Magical Realism comes to Loisaida (and now El Barrio)! Bring your copy!

We are looking for readers who would like to sign up to seriously work on reading for ten to fifteen minutes. Please contact Judy at escalona@prdream.com.

TRIBUTE TO ED VEGA YUNQUE _ NOVEMBER 15, 3PM -7PM AT PRDREAM, 1355 Park Ave at 102nd St

vega-yunque.190.jpg

NOVEMBER 15 TRIBUTE: A non-stop, ongoing reading of Ed Vega’s “The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow into the Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle” — Magical Realism comes to Loisaida (and now El Barrio)! Bring your copy!

*****

September 9, 2008
Edgardo Vega Yunqué, Novelist of the Puerto Rican Experience in New York, Dies at 72

By BRUCE WEBER
Edgardo Vega Yunqué, whose novels and stories about life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan were picaresque, combustive and sometimes flamboyantly comic expressions of the Puerto Rican experience in New York’s multicultural maelstrom, died on Aug. 26 in Brooklyn. He was 72 and lived in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn.

The cause was probably a blood clot, said his daughter, Alyson Vega, who said that he died suddenly during a visit to the emergency room at Lutheran Medical Center and that his family had not been immediately notified.

Mr. Vega Yunqué, who moved to New York from Puerto Rico at the age of 13 and spent his teenage years in a Puerto Rican and Irish neighborhood in the Bronx, resisted characterization both as a writer and as an individual. Angered by the expectation of Latin writers either to document ghetto life or to “dabble in magic realism,” as he put it, he was known as a contentious man with a philosophy founded on the sanctity of self-expression, and he wrote with a voice that was lyrical, insistent, irrepressible and often scathingly satiric.

In “The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow Into the Impenetrable Loisada Jungle,” (Overlook Press, 2004), he cast a comic, sardonic eye on the American response to the Sept. 11 attacks. His latest book, “Rachel Horowitz, Puerto Rican Sex Freak,” an earthy send-up of sexual politics, was scheduled for publication this summer but Overlook canceled it after a dispute with him.

“He was an iconoclast of the first order,” said his agent, Tom Colchie. “Ed was always cantankerous about editing. He would say, ‘I’m not going to be any publisher’s fuzzy-wuzzy.’ ”

With a counterculture-ish perspective and a penchant for florid turns of phrase and hyper-punctuated sentences, he had a literary relative in Tom Robbins, though his work often had a political fierceness about it as well.

His best-known book, “No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain’t Never Coming Home Again” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), is a sprawling tale of two families, one Puerto Rican and one Irish, and their intertwining over several generations. The Vietnam War plays a central role and so does American jazz, not only thematically — one main character is a pianist who walks away from the chance to play with Miles Davis when he joins the Marines — but stylistically as well, with narrative strains wandering improvisatorily away from the main tale and finding intricate paths that bring them back again. Julia Livshin, writing in The New York Times Book Review, said it was a “powerhouse of a novel” that “brings vividly to life, with its polyphony of voices, the simmering ethnic stew of the great American city.”

Edgardo Alberto Vega Yunqué was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, on May 20, 1936, but he was raised in the town of Cidra. His father, a Baptist minister, moved the family to New York in 1949 when he took over a Spanish-speaking congregation in the South Bronx. Mr. Vega Yunqué was a radio operator in the Air Force, and during one home leave, he was asked by his sister to help clean out an estate in central New York. In the attic he found hundreds of paperback novels — by Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway and others — and he began reading them voraciously. That spurred him to write novels.

Mr. Vega Yunqué attended New York University and worked as a community organizer before publishing his first novel, “The Comeback,” in 1985. His other works include two collections of stories and the novel “Blood Fugues.” (HarperCollins, 2006.) In 1994, he founded the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center on the Lower East Side as a home for theater artists, dancers and visual artists, and he ran it until 2000, when he stepped down, his tenure marred by fierce disputes between the mostly Hispanic theater artists and the mostly white visual artists over the center’s management.

Mr. Vega’s marriage to Pat Vega ended in divorce, the culmination of what his daughter, Alyson, and his stepdaughter, the singer Suzanne Vega, described as a tempestuous home life. Her stepfather was passionate about knowledge and passed that zeal on, Suzanne Vega said. “But the thing that made him a great writer was the thing that also made him dangerous,” she added. “Any boundary or restriction he took as a red flag.”

In addition to Suzanne and Alyson Vega, both of Manhattan, Mr. Vega Yunqué is survived by a son, Matthew, of Amagansett, New York; a brother, Jay Vega, of Cape May, N.J.; a sister, Abigail McGlynn, of Queens; and a granddaughter.

PRdream mourns the passing of José “Chegui” Torres, 1936 – 2009

Boxing’s renaissance man Jose Torres commanded ring & respect
by Mike Lupica

torres-jose.jpg

For the old-timers, the ones who come out of fight nights at the old Garden and out of a much older New York, it will always be 1965 for Jose Torres, when he was young. It will be the night at the old Garden when he beat Willie Pastrano, dancing and jabbing and finally body-punching his way to a TKO. He became the light-heavyweight champion of the world that night and seemed to have won the championship of the city as well. Jose Torres came from Puerto Rico, but by then he was more here than there.

The next day he made his first stop as champ at 110th and Lexington Ave., climbed up on a fire escape and addressed a crowd of thousands.

“This is for everybody,” he said, and told the crowd that if he could do something like this in the city of New York, anything was possible.

But he was so much more than just a prizefighter, even if that is how the world first knew him. He became the first Latino columnist in town, at least in an English-language paper, when my old boss, the great Paul Sann, put him to work at the old New York Post. He would later become a commentator on television, and radio host, and in the 1980s even became the New York State Athletic Commissioner.

He was a friend to Norman Mailer, who was once brave enough to get into the ring with him, and Pete Hamill. He once said that Pete had given him his first book and how he now owned more than 800 of them, and was confident that “Pete’s responsible for six or seven hundred.” He had a good enough voice to sing a ballad one time on the Ed Sullivan Show.

“I keep telling you,” he used to say to me, “I am more a lover than a fighter.”

Jose Torres wrote books about Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson, and spent so much time trying to save Tyson from himself and what he called the “parasites” around him. And became a friend to Robert F. Kennedy when Kennedy became the U.S. senator from New York.

Kennedy wanted to learn about the city, to know the city, and not just the avenues of power in Manhattan. So Hamill and the late Jack Newfield became guides for him in those years. So did Jose Torres. They would get in the car at night and drive the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, get out and talk to the people who lived in them. A Kennedy doing this, and the kid from Puerto Rico who had won a silver medal in the ’56 Summer Olympics, won the 160-pound division of the ’58 Golden Gloves, would later end up in the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, N.Y.

And Kennedy and Jose Torres would talk through the night. One of the things they talked about was what Robert Kennedy talked about in speeches in those days, about how within 40 years a man of color would be President. It was why Torres thrilled so much to the run Barack Obama made to the nomination and finally to today, even though he was back in Puerto Rico by last year, there to write and grow old as gracefully as he had fought once.

Pete Hamill said Monday that the last time he talked to Torres, his dear friend of half a century, was 10 days ago.

“It’s amazing, Pete, this country – what a place. What an amazing place,” Torres said to Hamill on the phone that day. He was talking, of course, about Obama.

Jose Torres did not make it to Obama’s inauguration. Did not make it to today. Did not live long enough to hear Obama, whom he believed was the heir to Kennedy’s ideals and compassion and spirit, give his speech today.

Jose Torres died in his sleep early Monday, at the age of 72. He suffered from diabetes and his friends believe that his body was never right after the pounding he took from Tom McNeely, a heavyweight, in Puerto Rico in 1965. It was a non-title fight and Jose ended up winning it, but McNeely brutally worked Jose’s body that night.

Jose finally lost his title to Dick Tiger, a future Hall of Famer the same as Willie Pastrano, the same as Jose. It was some amazing time in their division. Then Tiger beat him a second fight at the Garden, even though that one nearly caused a riot when it was announced that the decision had gone against Jose. He fought twice more after that and then retired.

And this wasn’t the beginning of some slow, sad ending for a retired boxer who had taken too many shots to the head. This was the beginning of a joyful, amazing life, one so well-lived and so well-enjoyed, in the city of New York.

For the next four decades he lectured and wrote his books and became Commissioner Torres finally. His last columns were for El Diario. At the boxing Hall of Fame, he is described this way: “Boxing’s renaissance man.” He was all that, a splendid ambassador for the island of his birth and the city he adopted and of his sport.

He was a lover: of his boxing career, of being a champion, of being a writer, of knowing that books he wrote, in his second language, would be on library shelves forever. More than anything he would have loved Barack Obama’s speech today, about the world Jose Torres imagined once from a fire escape on 110th Street, one where anything really is possible.