Dialogue Over Time: A New Boogaloo: “How Beautiful We Really Are”
Paired with “Puerto Rican Obituary”
Hashtags
#close reading, #audio, #30 minutes, #community, #colonialism, #context, #protest, #critique
Inviting students to move from close reading to guiding ideas in the essay as a whole, this activity could be used as either an in-class discussion or as an extended writing prompt.
Introduction
DU: The Nuyorican Poets movement had a lasting impact on Latinx Literature. Willie Perdomo (b. 1967) continues the legacy of Pietri and other Nuyorican poets by writing back to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe more than forty years later. Read and listen to Perdomo’s “How Beautiful We Really Are” and explore with students the specific ways in which Perdomo is in dialogue with Pietri. I would suggest researching more about the Nuyorican Poets movement to properly contextualize these two readings for students.
Guide
Listen:
Watch Willie Perdomo perform his poem “How Beautiful We Really Are”
Questions
- How does this poem build off of Petri but also depart from it?
- What are the names of the five fictional characters in Perdomo’s poem and why is this important?
- What kind of “inclusive” 21st-century community is Perdomo representing through these five lives?
- What kinds of “ways of knowing” have these five characters developed that signal that they’re “going to die knowing how beautiful [they] really are?”
- How does Perdomo incorporate Spanglish in similar and different ways to Pietri? The first line of this poem announces a “new kind of bugalú (boogaloo)” in reference to a genre of Latin music and dance popular in the United States in the 1960s.
- What does this new bugalú look like? How are grief and mourning rituals different in each poem?
- How is Perdomo’s musicality and rhythm different from Pietri’s elegy?
Write: Latinx Literature and Protest, 1960s- present
- Latinx protest literature has changed from the ‘60s and ‘70s to now. Read Dalleo and Saez’s analysis of Pedro Pietri’s poetry in The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature (2008). As these authors suggest, Latinx literature from the 1960s is regarded as politically committed and resistant to the commodifying forces of the market. Literature of the post-1990s, Dalleo and Saez suggest, is often read as apolitical, assimilationist, and personalist. Do you think Pietri’s aesthetic of protest is still viable now? Why or why not?
- Following Pietri as a model, write an elegy of five people who have become disconnected or disillusioned from their lives. You could also write yourself into the five if you wish. Students could choose historical figures or fictional characters. The former would be more of a research project and the latter would be a creative writing exercise.
analysis that is grounded in textual details as evidence and material for interpretation
See:
Tracing Citations (exploration)
Body as Metaphoric Space (exploration)
Poetry and Science: Epistemology through Language (exploration)
Aphoristic Translation (exploration)
Parsing Themes (exploration)
Reading the “Fine Print” (exploration)
Juxtapositions of Silence (exploration)
Self Reflection, Collective Change (exploration)
Insufficient Definitions (exploration)
Dialogue Over Time: A New Boogaloo: “How Beautiful We Really Are” (exploration)
Against the Grain: Listening for Controversy (exploration)
recorded text delivered orally rather than in writing
See:
"Asters and Goldenrod"
“Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive”
“Place Name: Oracabessa”
"Puerto Rican Obituary"
“Saving a Language You’re Learning to Speak”
“Three Ways to Speak English”
Dialogue Over Time: A New Boogaloo: “How Beautiful We Really Are” (exploration)
Historical Contexts (exploration)
Indigenous Perspectives of Western Science (exploration)
Music Trails (exploration)
Reading the “Fine Print” (exploration)
activity designed to take about 30 minutes to complete
See:
Body as Metaphoric Space (exploration)
Dialogue Over Time: A New Boogaloo: “How Beautiful We Really Are” (exploration)
Indigenous Perspectives of Western Science (exploration)
Insufficient Definitions (exploration)
Juxtapositions of Silence (exploration)
Parsing Themes (exploration)
The Point of Education? (exploration)
Tracing Citations (exploration)
See:
"Asters and Goldenrod"
“Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive”
“How to Tame a Wild Tongue”
“Saving a Language You’re Learning to Speak”
“Skin Feeling”
Dialogue Over Time: A New Boogaloo: “How Beautiful We Really Are” (exploration)
Building an Opinion (exploration)
Self Reflection, Collective Change (exploration)
See:
“As a Child in Haiti, I Was Taught to Despise My Language and Myself”
"Connecting the Dots"
“Three Ways to Speak English”
“Place Name: Oracabessa”
Insufficient Definitions (exploration)
Dialogue Over Time: A New Boogaloo: “How Beautiful We Really Are” (exploration)
Historical Contexts (exploration)
analysis that connects to relevant background and bigger issues
Set:
Music Trails (exploration)
Historical Contexts (exploration)
Translations Across and Within Languages (exploration)
Reading the “Fine Print” (exploration)
Language Life Story (exploration)
Dialogue Over Time: A New Boogaloo: “How Beautiful We Really Are” (exploration)
Work Culture Reexamined (exploration)
Against the Grain: Listening for Controversy (exploration)
See:
“As a Child in Haiti, I Was Taught to Despise My Language and Myself”
“The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual”
“How to Tame a Wild Tongue”
“Place Name: Oracabessa”
“Puerto Rican Obituary”
“Three Ways to Speak English”
“The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”
Dialogue Over Time: A New Boogaloo: “How Beautiful We Really Are” (exploration)
analysis that evaluates arguments through differing viewpoints or examines assumptions and norms, for example
See:
Critical Learning Reflection (exploration)
Dialogue Over Time: A New Boogaloo: “How Beautiful We Really Are” (exploration)
Work Culture Reexamined (exploration)
Against the Grain: Listening for Controversy (exploration)
