[In the following essay, Cruz explores the influence of a rich cultural heritage on contemporary Puerto Rican American poetry, concluding, “It is the job of writers to perceive and explain the truth.”]

The earth is migration, everything is moving, changing interchanging, appearing, disappearing. National languages melt, sail into each other; languages are made of fragments, like bodies are made of fragments of something in the something. Who'd want to stand still, go to the edges where you see clear the horizon, explore the shape of the coast? Are poets not the antennas of the race? Then tune into the chatter, the murmur that arises from the collection. Add and subtract, submit it to your mathematics. Take and give. Enlarge, diminish. The Romans ate everything up and now we dance Latin to African music, so we don't exactly fall into the things through the words. Columbus thought he came to the land of India and he even took Cuba for Japan. Language is clarification of the inner, of the part that does not rot. Moving through a terrain, languages would sound out graduation scale—Italian, Spanish, Portuguese—and so move through the whole planet making a tapestry. Old geography lingers in the language of the conquistadores: names of rivers and fruits. Our Spanish—which has Latin and Italian—has Taíno, Siboney, Chichimeca. It has sounds coming out of it that amaze it and over the years it has been spiced, making it a rich instrument full of our history, our adventures, our desires, ourselves. The Caribbean is a place of great convergence; it mixes and uniforms diversities; it is a march of rhythm and style.

Those of us who have ventured off into writing should be in awe of the possibilities inherent in our tradition. Writing is behind the scenes; it is not like music and dance which engulf the masses. Poetry gets to the people in the form of lyrics within a bolero or a salsa tune. It is a valid form of expression, for it contains image and story line; it places old proverbs at the entrance of our contemporary ears. Poetry also lives in the oral tradition known as declamation. There is a warehouse of poems from the Spanish which are memorized and bellowed from the various corners of balconies and colors. The moon is in the tongue between the cheeks, the troubadours move between ceiba trees and plazas, their poetry full of the battles of love, romance, lost love, what to do within the pain of departure. Conversation, spontaneous chitchat constantly interchanging, is a poetry that arises all around us; it is poetry in flight, it is the magic of words bouncing off the pueblos, off the trees into the vines, it comes through the floor like an anaconda, it darts like lizards, it soars like garzas: this language of the Caribbean, this criollo encarnation. Full of passion and opinions, this is the language of our parents. We are the sons and daughters of campesinos, fishermen, farmers who cultivated café and tabaco, cutters of cane whose eyes contain the memory of ardent green vistas out of wooden windows within the hottest tropicality. They have pictures of the ocean tongues and the vibrant hugging of the coast upon a sofa within their retinas. They were spiritual mediums and santeros who worshipped natural forces tapped since time immemorial by African and indigenous societies.

As the children of these immigrants, we are at the center of a world debate; we can speak of the shift from agriculture to industry to technology and the toll it has taken upon the human equilibrium. Let us look at it with clear eyes in our trajectory from one language (Spanish) to another (English). What have we lost or gained? Claro, there is the beautiful lyricism, rhyming and blending of that great romance language exemplified even in the reading of books on mechanical operations in which the words are still sonorous despite the subject. Is there an inner flower which passions its fragance despite its being clothed in English words? I believe that this is happening in much U.S. Hispanic literature; the syntax of the English is being changed. This can be seen very prominently within the work of Alurista, a Chicano poet. In his recent work, the subject is the language itself; it is not that he merely plays with the language as some Anglo language experimenters do, for his poetry still contains social meanings directed towards personal and political change and awareness. We also find in the prose work of Rudolfo Anaya a natural Spanish pastoral style resounding through his English, a very relaxed, unharsh sentence. In both the English and the Spanish the poets and writers uphold a sensibility of Hispanitude.

We battle the sterility of Anglo culture, of television cliches; we labor at being ourselves in a land of weirdos, electric freaks who sit mesmerized in front of screens and buttons, only stopping to eat the farthest reaches of junk or to jerk off about some personal need to be understood, barking about having the freedom to do whatever nauseous things their life styles call for. You know that a pastime of the North American middle class now is to go out to fields and dress up in military fatigues and play war, shoot the commies or, better yet, shoot third-world guerrillas—shoot real guerrillas—, after that get back in the pick up and go down to Burger King and eat whatever that is. Meanwhile, the ozone layer is disappearing and, what's that song by Richie Havens “Here Comes The Sun”? Then they have that thing where they eat until they almost explode and then stick their fingers down their throat and vomit, solely to start the process again. It's an image culture: what you see is all there is. Jane Fonda in “Barbarella” was offering body; now that she has gained consciousness she is offering more body and even better build.

Did Richard Rodriguez fall down hard? Well there are those who jump quickly to attack him because he seemed to say the opposite of what was being fought for. Of course we must strive for an English that is standard and universal, a language that can be understood by as many people as possible, but why lose the Spanish process? We should change the English and give it spice, Hispanic mobility, all this can be done within the framework of understanding, whether the reader is Anglo or Latino.

U.S. Hispanics have not blended into Northern Americana because their roots stay fresh. Due to the close proximities of our Americans, rushes of tropical electricity keep coming up to inform the work and transform the North American literary landscape. The location and atmosphere of stories and poetry have been taken to places that until now North American authors were only able to write about in the position of tourists. The literature is full of border towns, farm workers, the lives of salsa musicians blowing through northern cities. The racial and cultural mixing of our cultures keeps us jumping through a huge spectrum of styles and philosophies. In terms of history, we can walk the planet with our genes, imagine ourselves in the Sevilla of the Arabs holding court with Ibn' El Arabi and Al'Ghazali, quickly switch over to the halls of Tenochtitlán, then once again wake up in our contemporary reality dancing Yoruba choreography in some club in Manhattan near a subway train. You can change the content and mix into the infinite. Worlds exist simultaneously, flashes of scenarios, linquistic stereo; they conflict, they debate, Spanish and English constantly breaking into each other like ocean waves. Your head scatters with adverbs over the horizon.

All art forms borrow from each other for the purpose of enrichment. Architects can draw from ancient and colonial styles to arrive at their contemporary geometries—structures which improve human living. Musicians are constantly blending and mixing the rhythms of the earth; Caribbean music is like Andalucía and the Ivory Coast. In New York's Latin Jazz fusion of the '40s and '50s there are cuts where Tito Puente jams with Charlie Parker; this is like a toning of temperaments, or adjusting reality to get the most out of it. It seems to be the center of the musician to translate, re-arrange, to give personal flavor to a variety of rhythms and melodies.

There are some words, so personal, so locked up in the oral and geographic area of a certain people that puns and stories have to be translated first into the standard language in order for them to be understood by speakers of the same language from another country, and passing them into another language is a labor of losing flavor, for there are things which remain within the mountains and can never be put into the textbook. If I said un maflón next to a Spaniard, he might look at me with a certain degree of curiosity and wonder what space I was coming from. Latinos speaking to each other have to constantly stop and review certain words. Sometimes when a word jumps over to the next country, it takes on an opposite meaning, or a word which you can yell in the plaza at the top of your voice, like popusa in El Salvador, moonlights as the private part of a woman in Guatemala. Anglos have difficulties in grasping the variety of our world and have a tendency to slip us all under the same blanket in a careless act of generalizing, which upholds their manner: “Oh,” they might say, “if you've read one Latino novel, you've read them all.” In a system that works on quotas, this dispatches a lot of talented voices. Latin American writers publish with a lot more facility than State-born Hispanics writing in English or Spanish. It is the habit of the establishment to enjoy things at a distance; package it with ease, throw the label magic realism on it—its gotta be magic, unreal sells well as exotica. Now, we know who these writers are and I for one have great respect for them and their work, but because the Anglos work on quotas, the tremendous visibility of the Latin American writers obscures the chances for US Hispanics of getting published by the same presses. It isn't the fault of these brilliant Latin American writers, but of the publicity mechanisms they get attached to. The society of the Americas is probably the most complex and diverse experiment in culture upon this earth and a full picture can only be obtained by allowing writers from many angles and countries to be exposed.

Unlike other groups who have had to erase their own cultural memories, Hispanics are moving forward, maintaining their own tradition and language. We will be the first group that does not melt; our ingredients are raw and the Anglo fire is not hot enough to dissolve them.

In the North of America it is a constant job just keeping ourselves from going looney-tunes, for this is a place where every stupidity is made available for the purpose of jamming the circuits. Explore, for example, the limited capacity of many in this electric culture to remember details of events: they are not able to tell stories. Computer screens have everybody dizzy, seeing dots in the air. Food preservatives are destroying taste buds. With all this going on, one must be on the watch: you gotta watch out that the next person doesn't jump and start acting out something he saw on television the previous night. It is the job of writers to perceive and explain the truth. To get to the essense of things in this society is a monumental task of awareness.