[In the following review of Red Beans, Bromley describes Cruz's poetry as “the voice of a troubadour” speaking the hybrid language of a “society of the Americas.”]

American poets speak in voices that integrate and echo many languages and traditions, resulting in an extraordinarily various literature. Yet the contemporary canon as defined by mainstream anthologies, literary journals, and critical works does not, unfortunately, accurately reflect this variety. Published on the eve of the anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the “new” world, Red Beans by Victor Hernández Cruz, The Concrete River by Luis J. Rodriguez, and Going Home Away Indian by Leo Romero offer distinctive poetic responses to and journeys through the mix of cultures made possible by this encounter.

In Red Beans, a collection of poetry and prose, Hernández Cruz embraces the mixed traditions within Puerto Rico: the “red beans” are a pun on “red beings,” the characters from Hernández Cruz's native Puerto Rico: indigenous (Taino and through them the whole of the pre-Columbian American world), Spanish (which includes Arabs, Gypsies, and Jews), and African (the Yorubas). “Migration is the story of my body,” he says, exploring the difficult marriage between “Northern Americana” and the “Hispano-Criollo-Caribbean” cultures when they clash on the streets of New York City. He remembers the town of Aguas Buenas in Puerto Rico, his place of birth, and the great Puerto Rican migration toward New York that moved his family from one island to another: “A world of awesome gray velocity, an air of metallic coldness, a cement much more cemented than any which we had previously observed. Another language which sounded like bla-bla-bla.” Yet through these “migratory entanglements” Hernández Cruz has found a poetry that keeps alive lyrics and rhythms that used to emanate from coastal Caribbean beaches and towns, traditions that extended into the mists of Spain and Africa.

Hernández Cruz brings poetry back in many ways to its earlier public functions. His are poems that remember, poems that declaim, poems that celebrate language as a pathway into and out of dreams. The poems of Red Beans are not private poems in the sense that a personal “I” figures as the controlling voice. It is instead the voice of a troubadour that emerges out of a poem such as “Corsica,” in which Hernández Cruz links Puerto Rico and Spain by way of plate tectonics:

Underneath with the geologic plates
Puerto Rico and Corsica
Are holding hands
Both hands with gold rings
Sweating each other's palm
The same moon is seen
From both islands
The light of the sun
Upon the mother
The seaman's stories of migration
Like whispering olives within
Red beans.

Although he writes in English, Hernández Cruz seasons this language with Spanish. In a provocative essay on Hispanic writing in the United States, he says, “National languages melt, spill into each other.” Spanish revitalizes English as a poetry that can “dance on the edges.” Broadcasting the kaleidoscopic qualities of Puerto Rican culture, he celebrates the variety with new hybrids: he writes about Salsa, guava, and all that embodies the organic, succulent, explosive energy that has infused the urban centers of the United States with the essences of the rural villages of the Caribbean. Red Beans celebrates a migratory poetics that is self-reflective, lyrical, lush, and often dead-pan humorous as Spanish and English dance a lambada through its pages.

Through his lyrical narratives (essays, stories, and manifestos on poetics), Hernández Cruz offers himself as an “informant” to readers who need to be reminded of the rich diversity of influences that comes to American poetry from sources other than the Anglo-European tradition. In truth, as consumers of American poetry, we are, in many ways, still colonized by that tradition. Hernández Cruz would ask us to be receptive to other traditions, other ways of regarding language, other ways of regarding art and its relationship to community and spirituality:

I wait with a gourd full
of gasoline
for a chip to fall from
The festival fireworks
to favor me
… And set me on fire. …

If, indeed, as Hernández Cruz suggests, migration is “the condition of this age,” then the voices that inhabit Red Beans, The Concrete River, and Going Home Away Indian speak a poetics belonging to a “society of the Americas.” In hybrid accents as spicy as a good salsa, these poets see the United States as a place of great convergence, where vigorous poems can declaim, dramatize, and dance.