18 pages • 36 minutes read
Victor Hernández CruzProblems with Hurricanes
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: The Nuyorican Movement
The Nuyorican poetry movement emerged in the 1960s in New York City. In the 1950s and 1960s, a swell of Puerto Rican immigrants arrived in New York City’s East Harlem as a result of Puerto Rico becoming a commonwealth of the United States. This explosion of immigrants in one centralized area mirrored the emergence of African American art during the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, and just like then, the Nuyorican community became a powerful artistic movement made up of musicians, poets, and artists.
Most of the artists who belonged to the movement were either immigrants or first-generation Americans who were united by their shared heritage, struggles with poverty, and experiences of discrimination in New York City, particularly in public schools. For example, in American schools at this time, speaking Spanish was discouraged if not outright banned, and students were forced to assimilate in traumatic ways.
Perhaps the defining feature of the Nuyorican movement is its use of Spanglish. The Spanglish spoken by Nuyorican poets combined influences from Puerto Rican Spanish, American English, and aspects of Afro-Puerto Rican Spanish, as well as some influences from African American Vernacular English (AAVE). These language influences, alongside other artistic movements of the time like modernism and the avant-garde of the 1960s, led to a stylistic fusion unique among Nuyorican artists.
The movement has had staying power as well, as the Nuyorican Poets Café continues to be one of the central hubs of modern poetry in New York City.
Authorial Context: Cruz’s Poetic Influences
In addition to Cruz’s identity as a Nuyorican poet, other writers outside of his community also influenced him. Cruz has noted the Beat poets as central to the development of his lyrical technique. For example, he writes in a similar style of disjointed free verse that Allen Ginsberg invented, combining rhythmic lines with unorthodox syntactical structures. While Cruz says that the Beats’ philosophical views did not influence him, he does incorporate their poetic style into his poems. William Carlos Williams also influenced Cruz. This influence mainly comes through in Cruz’s sentence structure and lyrical voice, which was noticed as early as Snaps (1969), his debut poetry collection.
Finally, Cruz’s earliest influences were Spanish writers, including Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda. These influences come through in Cruz’s use of Spanish and in his focus on romantic sensory descriptions, especially in his early poetry. As Cruz evolved as a writer, his influences outside of poetry increased as he traveled across America and spent years in Puerto Rico. Ultimately, Cruz’s poetry is a fusion of various English and Spanish poets as well as experiences in New York City, San Francisco, and Puerto Rico.
