User:Anavasquez32502/Nuyorican Poets Café

The Nuyorican (Puerto Rican New Yorkers) Poets Café is a nonprofit organization in Alphabet City, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan founded in 1973. It is a bastion of the Nuyorican art movement in New York City, and has become a forum for poetry, music, hip hop, video, visual arts, comedy, and theatre. Several events during the PEN World Voices festival are hosted at the Café.

The Café is meant to be a shooting-off point from which Nuyorican artists, poets, and playwrights take shared themes and messages of community, understanding, and the breaking down of arbitrary separators of color, among others, and spread them outside the environment of the Café.

In popular culture
Also in 1994, founder, Miguel Algarín, and poet and eventual co-director of the Café, Bob Holman, worked together to edit a collection of poetry originating from the Café. In this collection of Nuyorican poetry, Algarín makes a point that the main purpose of the Café and the poetry it’s produced is to show poetry as the living art form it is in his opinion and understanding. It tracks the poetry coming out of the Café through the 90s and early 2000s.

In 1997, another collection was published. This one centered around more performance pieces: plays and monologues emerging from the Nuyorican Poets Café Theater Festival. This collection is organized to emphasis a few certain shared themes that define some part of the Nuyorican movement.

Nuyorican Poetry and Plays at the Café
Puerto Rican New York poets, percussing the Café itself (1964-1974), were heavily involved in political conversation and the poetry coming from these individuals leading up to the founding of the Café dealt with capturing their own overlooked history. It broke poetic convention and centered upon examining the concepts of identity and representation.

From 1982 to 1989, the Café was shut down but Nuyorican poetry continued through this time to become part of the foundation of a newly forming literary canon. This canon was that of Latinx people in the United States. Publication increased both in the United States and Puerto Rico, and this poetry was studied as exemplary of multiculturalism's emerging effects on the formation of literary canons at a time when the question of multiculturalism was a preoccupation.

Nuyorican poetry and plays are both considered a part of the cultural and intellectual Nuyorican movement. The Café was and is a place designed for the active performance of this poetry and these plays. Performance and active audience engagement with the work presented were important to the Café and its environment. The Café itself played large part in solidifying the Nuyorican movement and the performance element it emphasized reveals themes of visibility and voice. Before and while serving as co-director of the Café, Bob Holman heavily advocated for poetry slam nights at the Nuyorican. He wanted the Café to be a community-oriented space and his own experience with slam poetry as oral, active, engaging, and connecting influenced this choice. Founder, Miguel Algarín, agreed to the suggestion. Slam poetry nights at the Nuyorican drew in large crowds and press soon followed. The Café and the Nuyorican movement works coming out of it began to reach a whole new audience.

The works of Nuyorican poetry and plays coming from the Nuyorican Poets Café throughout it's decades share themes, meanings, messages, and motifs. The historical context and social parameters around these have changed throughout the years but they've stayed essentially the same. These include questions of identity and belonging, tolerance and understanding, and visibility and representation. In a book collection of plays, those coming out of the Nuyorican Poets Café Theater Festival, edited by Algarín, he groups certain plays together. Algarín’s editorial categories include themes of inner city tragedy and politics, gender plays, and hip hop and rap. These are big, essential themes also present in the larger Nuyorican movement.

Algarín also co-edited a similar book collection focused on Nuyorican poetry coming out of the Café. This collection is broken down into time periods. It tracks the thematic changes of Nuyorican works specifically in the 90s and early 2000s. Nuyorican poetry of the 90s era was focused on breaking down political, social, cultural, and racial boundaries between individuals and groups in the United States. The early 2000s for Nuyorican poetry was the time period when slam poetry took full root and the living, accessible nature of poetry was solidified.