'Spic Up!' & why 'US Hispanics Don't Count'

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thanks to all those who entered the contests! i had a blast reading the submissions! and the winners are: marthe reed, eric landon, kate powell shine, gary fitzgerald, and john shaw (who wins 3 books!). please browse the omnidawn catalog and email me your book choice(s) with mailing address (you will find my email in the comments section).

[update: i missed one entry from the contest! add to the list of winners 'J Mitch'. J, please email me to claim your prize.]

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continuing our discussion on the racialized pun, i want to draw attention to another recent example of how the aesthetics of a racialized pun can overshadow the ethics of its use. please read below the fold:

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'SPIC UP! SPEAK OUT!' ON THE RACIALIZED PUN (2)

el museo del barrio, in east harlem, named a reading series 'spic up!speak out!' [note the use of exclamation marks! afro picks!!! anyone] this title caused quite a controversy, garnering coverage in the NY Times last November here.

Emmanuel Xavier, one of the organizers, explains why they used the derogatory term:

“For me, it’s about empowerment,” Mr. Xavier said. “Look at everything we have done and accomplished. And it is a play on the word. We are speaking out our truths and identities in very perfect English.”

poet aracelis girmay expressed a different perspective:

“I guess I get it, but I don’t like the joke,” said Aracelis Girmay, a young poet who declined to participate. “It would be one thing if it were some underground place, but it’s at an institution. El Museo del Barrio is supposed to be the place that I would expect would guard our culture respectfully. This is giving dangerous permission to that word. It’s inviting it through the front door.”

one of the strongest voices against the use of 'spic' was the poet rich villar. in a powerful essay on his blog, he writes:

We didn't hear ['spic'] from other Latinos. We didn't inoculate ourselves against its weight by hollering it from our cars, or our hallways, or our windows. In our homes, our parents never used it. Because our parents were chased by it, had it bounced off their skulls, found a fist at the end of it. Because we knew better. Because we were taught better.

[...] But we didn't use ['spic'] for identifier, salve, naming, or renaming. We didn't invent it like we invented Nuyorican, Xicano, Latino. It was invented for us, like slavery and colonialism was invented for us. And we reject it.

Thanks, but we have our own names. We have our own stories, and we have survived every attempt to make us disappear. And because we won't disappear, our kids often prefer to call themselves Dominican, or Puerto Rican, or Cuban or Mexican or Ecuadorian. Guatemalan. Honduran. Latino. Latino-Americano. Americano. American.

But not spic. Not now. Not ever.

Why do I have to remind you of this?

as you can see from this follow-up article in the NY Times, the museo decided to change the name of its series to 'speak up/speak out.'

lesson: don't f*ck with rich villar.

question: what are your thoughts on this debate? did el museo del barrio make a good choice by changing their name? or should they have kept the controversy/conversation going?

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'US HISPANICS DONT COUNT'

raymond bianchi (whom i've discussed in the past) responds to the end of the decade reflections found on this website:

There is nothing in this essay about the 400 million people in this hemisphere who do not speak english, and US Hispanics dont count they are Americans what I am talking about are the millions of poetry READERS in places like Brazil, Mexico an Argentina.

He goes further in a recent post at his own blog:

A strong criticism of the Poetry Foundation's Decade in Review is that in all of these short articles there was nothing about global poetry. [...]

It is important as well to not delude ourselves that "multi cultural poetry' in the US is Global Poetry it is not. A Hispanic or Asian origin poet writing in the US is a unique expression but it is not the river of poetry being written globally and needs to be defined as what it is an immigrant literature.

In China there are poets who are sitting in jail cells for writing poems critical of their government or environmental degradation. there are poets in Iran who are persecuted for their work and one who were killed . There are poets in Brazil whose work is quoted in major media yet none of these poets were deemed important for these articles.

i'm not sure yet what i think about these statements. what does "global" poetry mean? isn't any US poetry global poetry since only a naive sense of american exceptionalism would suggest that US poetry somehow transcends the global? what is "immigrant" literature? isnt all white-american poetry also immigrant literature? what are your thoughts & opinions of bianchi's claims? well, this is my last post for this week so i hope we can have a nice discussion in the comment field these next couple of days.

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