Dialogue Over Time: A New Boogaloo: “How Beautiful We Really Are”

Paired with “Puerto Rican Obituary”

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.
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Polyphony: Reader and Explorations for First-Year Writing Copyright © 2024 by Jennie Snow, Elise Takehana, Diego Ubiera is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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