“I Am a Contradiction”

Salima Rivera, born in the coastal pueblo of Santa Isabel, Puerto Rico, in 1946 and raised in Chicago, embraced contradictions. Throughout her life, she assumed various names—Salima, Sulima, Sula, Sal—and embraced multiple roles, including poet, cook, feminist, activist, institution-builder, and mother. Known for her reclusive tendencies, Rivera would isolate herself for hours and sometimes even days to refine her poems—many of which might paradoxically appear spontaneous and conversational on first reading. As a cultural and political activist, Rivera was anything but reclusive. She navigated the public sphere with power and tenacity, often reciting her poems for working-class Chicagoans at protests, rallies, and workshops. Whichever name she took and whatever she was doing, Rivera was always committed to improving peoples’ material conditions and facilitating the free expression of their experiences, needs, and desires.

Local literary magazines and journals in Chicago were not publishing Puerto Rican poets when Rivera started writing poetry in the sixties. This would begin to change after the 1966 Division Street riots, triggered in part by the police shooting of the twenty-year-old Puerto Rican Arcelis Cruz. The riots represented a collective recognition among Chicago Puerto Ricans of their shared experiences of forced dislocation, social ostracization, and state-sanctioned violence. In the wake of the riots, Rivera and fellow Chicago Rican poet David Hernández built literary institutions in Humboldt Park from the bottom up, hoping to engage Puerto Rican youth and gang members in the transformative possibilities of poetry. By 1970, Rivera, Hernández, and Chicago Rican muralist Gamaliel Ramírez cofounded Los Otros Poetry Collective, the Association of Latino Brotherhood of Artists (ALBA), and El Taller. Within these organizations and workspaces, Rivera and other Latine artists and activists envisioned and endeavored to build a world prioritizing global liberation for all peoples across categories of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

This organizational work led to a viable literary infrastructure for Latine people to publish and distribute their work on the page. Throughout the seventies and early eighties, Rivera published poems, paintings, and sketches in journals and anthologies like Third World Woman, ECOS: A Latino Journal of People’s Culture and Literature, Revista Chicano-Riqueña, and Power Lines: A Decade of Poetry from Chicago’s Guild Complex. At the same time, Rivera grew as a political and cultural activist, working very closely with local organizations Mujeres Latinas en Acción, Casa Aztlán, Movimiento Artístico Chicago (MARCH), and Mi Raza Arts Consortium (MIRA). In 1978, her tireless efforts and effectiveness as a community organizer earned Rivera the Chicago YWCA Women Leadership Award. Rivera’s published work from this period was typically direct and politically engaged with local and global issues. From the street corner to the page, Rivera’s poems continued to incite readers into action.

In the late eighties, Rivera’s publishing declined after joining the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs under the Harold Washington administration. In the realm of mainstream politics, Rivera’s goal of providing opportunities for marginalized and criminalized communities reemerged when she controversially hired alleged gang members as security for the 1984 Puerto Rican Festival. A few years later in 1989, Rivera envisioned and coordinated the first Viva Chicago Latin Music Festival. However, political conflict arose once again when anti-Castro Cubans protested the inclusion of Cuban ensemble Orquesta Aragón. Rivera refused to let political ideologies dictate the festival’s participants and threatened to resign as lead coordinator if the band was banned. Orquesta Aragón was ultimately removed from the program, and Rivera stepped down from her position.

In the nineties, disheartened, depressed, and physically exhausted, Rivera withdrew from the public eye. During this reclusive period, she returned to work on her first book of poetry—a collection of old, revised, and new poems—and a cookbook. However, Rivera’s battle with ovarian cancer obstructed these plans, and she passed away in 2004. In 2014, Rivera’s manuscript, It’s Not About Dreams, was published, coinciding with a year-long exhibit at the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture in Chicago that showcased her literary, visual, and political works. In 2019, Rivera was finally inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.

This folio assembles published poems from It’s Not About Dreams in the order they were written to provide readers with a sense of Rivera’s life through her poetry. The selection begins with “Contradictions,” a more interior poem that contrasts the politically overt poems that follow. The poem introduces Rivera perfectly in its opening line: “I am a contradiction.” In each poem, Rivera—recluse and activist—approaches the contradictions of her experience, working out the tension between the personal and the political.

An earlier version of “Contradictions,” included in Nosotros Anthology: A Collection of Latino Poetry and Graphics from Chicago (1977), opens with a dedication to “all women.” Rivera’s feminist intentions in the poem are perhaps more muted in the 2014 revision reprinted here, but there remains a woman subject dealing with the ups and downs of motherhood, friendship, spirituality, success, and failure. The poem clarifies that what makes its subject a “contradiction” is not simply the ambivalence of her feelings toward different people and ideas, but also (and more interestingly) her self-authorization to trust and embrace these feelings, even when they might challenge what the reigning social order deems appropriate for a woman. Nearing exasperation in the poem’s last lines, the speaker finally finds resolution and strength within her own body:

I endure life
with laughter and tears
believing only
in the truth
of my smile.

Rivera’s more overtly political poems—poems that she likely intended for performance at a rally or protest—also appear in this folio. One of Rivera’s best-known poems, “Pilsen,” encourages readers to imagine spaces for social belonging against the ongoing forces of privatization and “urban renewal” (read: gentrification). In 1979, at the Festival de Mujeres, Rivera dedicated the poem to Pilsen and the Chicago 21 Plan. This dedication slyly denounced Plan 21, which sought to “revitalize” the Chicago Loop area by inviting private investors to create an exclusive (predominantly white and upper-class) downtown community known today as Dearborn Park. In this performance of “Pilsen,” Rivera sounded a call to Latina women to assemble, organize, and imagine new ways of preserving and revitalizing their community that would not end with foreclosure, demolition, and dislocation.

The geographic scope of Rivera’s poetics and politics goes well beyond Chicago’s city limits. Several poems in this folio render accounts of real interventions against colonial structures of power in the US and beyond. For example, “Lolita” and “Louie the Mongoose—Killer of  Snakes” represent the radical actions of Puerto Rican nationalists and political prisoners Lolita Lebrón and Luis Rosa. Beyond questions about the (sometimes violent) means to attaining liberation, these and other poetic memorializations—like her tribute to the Argentinean human rights group Madres de Plaza de Mayo in “The Crazy Women of Plaza de Mayo”—create imaginative space for readers to envision (and perhaps enact) a feminist, multiracial, and transnational decolonization movement.

The tension between the internal and the external—the subject and community—is a throughline in Rivera’s poetry. Rivera wrote across manners of speaking, using her own voice and the voices of other marginalized subjects as poetic material. Rivera’s verse conjoins registers of speech and dictions that are often excluded from poetics, with harmonious and cacophonous results. She recasts poetry as an activity for all people. Each poem is an attempt to reach out and establish relationships with others that could lead to concrete actions and change. Poetry for Rivera is therefore not only a form of self-expression but also a transformative mode of communication.

Today, reading is often approached as a solitary and silent activity. A Rivera poem invites us to traverse the bridge between the internal and the external, to build trust in the self and in community. I hope you’ll let the poems jump off the page to touch, hold, and shake you into action.