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In "The Scattering of The Ashes," the first section of his 1994 anthology, poet Miguel Algarín describes the mourning rituals for Miguel Piñero, the talented but self-destructive Nuyorican2 poet, playwright, and actor, whose drug-induced demise at age forty-two would make him something of a cult figure in New York's Lower East Side, as well as the subject of an avant-garde film. Algarín describes in poetic detail the solemn procession of weeping junkies and cross-signing women who ambled through Manhattan's Lower East Side from "Houston to 14th Street / From Second Avenue to the mighty D"3 after gathering in the garbage-strewn, paper-littered lot next to the Nuyorican Poet's Cafe, where Amiri Baraka and Pedro Pietri, among many others, ritually tossed their poems into the fire after paying tribute to their fallen comrade. One poet was conspicuous by her absence: Sandra María Esteves. Piñero's death on June 17, 1988 was a defining moment and a turning point in the evolution of Nuyorican poetry. His death marked the end of an era ushered in by a foundational text-Algarín and Piñero's Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings, published in 1975. Like Stephen Henderson's anthology Understanding the New Black Poetry, published two years earlier, Nuyorican Poetry, especially the introduction by poet/professor Algarín, characterizes a new literary tradition, identifies the salient figures in that literature, provides a cultural and critical context for its interpretation, underscores its socio-political significance, and structures a poetics based on language, music, and cultural history.4 Significantly, the 1988 "scattering" led to the reopening of the Nuyorican Poet's Café (founded in 1974 by Algarín and Piñero) and it initiated, indirectly, the second stage-characterized by richer and deeper verse-in the evolution of Nuyorican poetry, which culminated in the publication of a second anthology, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poet's Café, which won the American Book Award in 1994. In this essay, I shall examine the work of Sandra María Esteves within the framework of the poetics developed by Nuyorican writers and literary critics, focusing primarily on the treatment of language, music, and ideology; and I shall use the work of other New Ricans, whose paradigmatic poetry exemplifies the new aesthetic, to illustrate the signifying difference in Esteves's praxis and theory.
Esteves, whose poetry appears in...