Neither from here nor from there: the articulation between Nuyorican poetry and Latin-American tradition in Miguel Algarín and Tato Laviera’s works

Abstract

Miguel Algarín, a founder and icon of Nuyorican poetic tradition, recovered Pablo Neruda's work as a basis for his political-poetic project based on an image of the poet as a spokesman for his community and an instrument of social urge through the process of awareness. This articulation allowed Algarín to insert the Nuyorican tradition extraterritorially, within the map of Latin American literature through its political and performative function. However, some other cases of Nuyorican poetics are different, as it is with Tato Laviera's, whose work shows an articulation between Nuyorican poetry and Latin American tradition not based in this counter-hegemonic function but in Afro-Antillean cultural heritage of Nuyorican identity. Thus, Laviera sets a poetics that problematizes and expands the geopolitical and cultural boundaries of this imaginary cartography called "Latin American literature".