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Sandra Maria Esteves (May 10, 1948), also known as La Madrina, “is an American poet and graphic artist” (from Wiki entry).

Life

Esteves was born to a Puerto Rican sailor, Charlie Esteves, and Dominican mother, Christina Huyghue. Her father separated before Esteves’ birth from her mother but Esteves maintained a close connection with the Puerto Rican side of her family while her mother had broken ties to her Dominican past. Her mother Christina worked as a garment worker, and was concerned early on with her upbringing in the challenging environment of the Bronx, and thus enrolled her in a Catholic boarding school in the Lower East Side, Holy Rosary Academy, where she attended for elementary school until continuing on to St. Anslem for middle school and graduated from Cardinal Spellman High School. i During her upbringing, Esteves was exposed circumstances that challenged her identity such as colorism within her family and racism at school, particularly from the nuns that ran the boarding school. She went on her first trip at seventeen to the island of Puerto Rico to better understand herself but was left further questioning her identity as she found all the ways she did not fit in with the people and culture on the island, but it led her to want to better understand all of it; this would be important for her poetry. ii She would then enroll at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn to pursue her artistic passion since the age of seven as a graphic artist, but continued to struggle with her identity as well as the criticism she received for her work and dropped out after the first year; she would, however, return and complete her degree in 1978. While she did find lack of support during her initial time at Pratt, one Japanese professor who specialized in sculpture, Toshio Odate, encouraged her to look at how words could contribute to her work as a visual artist. This, along with the inspiration she found in attending the poetry readings at the National Black Theater of Harlem and the artistic she would find herself becoming a founding member of, all helped her to begin to utilizing poetry as medium to grapple with her identity crisis.

Esteves joined El Grupo, an artistic collective who performed with the intention of leading social change; this would serve as the foundation and core for the Nuyorican movement itself. As a performing poet, she read in the Nuyorican Poet’s Café during its first launch in 1974 under Miguel Algarin and Miguel Pinero as well as its reopening in 1988. Her reach was not exclusive to Loisaida, though, as she also spent several years as the executive director and producer of the African Caribbean Poetry Theater from 1983 until 1988, as well as performing with Taller Boricua, which helped cultivate a distinction within her poetry compared with her male Nuyorican counterparts. Since then she has continued her involvement in numerous community organization projects and performing workshops dedicated to youth outreach via the arts and writing, partnering with associations throughout New York City such as, but not exclusive to, the New York State Poets in the Schools Program (1981-1989), the Caribbean Cultural Center and African Diaspora Institute, the New Rican Village Cultural Center, the Cultural Council Foundation of the Artistic Project of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, the Teachers and Writers Collaborative, and the Bronx Music Heritage Center.

Poetic Contribution

Sandra Maria Esteves is often recognized as the godmother or La Madrina of the Nuyorican movement as the most renowned and dominant female voice to come out of it. She has utilized her poetry, as well as her less-recognized art, as a method of communicating the numerous struggles she faced in understanding her identity and the issues faced as and by women of color beyond just those of the Puerto Rican diaspora as a way to challenge the silence imposed on all of them. Her works stand out from the rest of her associates from the Nuyorican movement because while there was a focus on what was recognized as “outlaw” poetry—raw use of language to evoke intense hyperbolic imagery, Esteves’ works contrasts her peers due to its implementation of lyricism within her social poetry, as Estill calls it, some of which draw on various genres of music, most notably in her third collection Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo. Urayoan Noel has also noted her poetry as distinct and referred to it as an example of “organic poetics” due to the evolutionary nature of her poetry alongside her politicized growth in conjunction with her personal growth with her identity. Her distinguishing poetic quality can be recognized through those she deemed her mentors, who include Julia de Burgos, Nicolas Guillen, and Pablo Neruda, as well as who she kept close to, which included fellow Nuyoricans Miguel Algarin and Miguel Pinero but also African-American writers Ntozake Shange and Michael Harper. The themes that she frequently addresses are identity struggles—most notably her personally comprehension of her place as an Afro-Caribbean but also as challenges to her mentors and peers (“A Julia y a Mi” for Julia de Burgos, “3:00 AM Eulogy for a Small Time Poet” presumably for Miguel Pinero), parsing out feminism within the Latino culture, oppression of women, metapoems describing poetry as a tool to instill change, motherhood and birth, and mysticism and spiritualism. Her first poetry collection Yerba Buena: Dibujos y poemas was published in 1980 and holds the accolade of being the first poetry book published by a Latina in the United States. While most known for the poetry within, it also contains art she created to pair with the written words. One of the most well-known poems from the collection, “A la Mujer Borrinquena,” details the life of the character Maria Cristina who takes on the role of the Puerto Rican woman as she is idealized in one sense—dedicated to supporting her family—while maintaining awareness of her role and how despite seemingly falling in line with what is expected of her, her actions serve as a mode of protection of her family but even more so her culture. This would be challenged by Luz Maria Umpierre, who wrote “In Response” and criticized the construction of Maria Cristina’s, and Esteves’, feminism by utilizing the original poem’s format to construct a new female character that aggressively opposes traditional sex roles. Esteves would respond once again in her third collection, Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo, with the poem “So Your Name Isn’t Maria Cristina” and uses her words to recognize the value in Umpierre’s words but reaffirms the autonomy that can be found within Maria Cristina’s actions as well, validating the diverse ways to work against patriarchal oppression.

Her second poetry collection, Tropical Rains: A Bilingual Downpour, was published in 1984 but did not see the wide success of Yerba Buena, potentially due to the fact that it was self-published. It is where Esteves further expounds upon her identity as an Afro-Caribbean alongside that of a Nuyorican, as well as where she begins exploring the complexities of motherhood and the maternal female figure.

Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo was published in 1990 and remains her most widely distributed collection. As the title suggests, she draws on various musical genres that have influenced and defined her identity such as blues and jazz coming from the African-American community alongside mambo, salsa, bomba, and plena from the Latino community to influence her writing here. It is also where she begins to expand beyond struggles within the Latino community and develops multicultural voices beyond her own to further elaborate on the oppressions that envelop numerous communities of women and the need for alliance formation to create widespread change.

______________________________ Esteves, Sandra Maria. “Sandra Maria Esteves.” Puerto Rican Poetry: An Anthology from Aboriginal to Contemporary Times, ed. Roberto Marquez, U of Massachusetts Press, 2007, pp. 422-423. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vk7d3.65. Accessed 9 Nov 2018. Estill, Adriana. “Puerto Rican Authors: Sandra Maria Esteves (1948-).” Latino and Latina Writers, ed. Alan West-Durán, vol. 2, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004, pp. 817-1030. Gale Virtual Reference Library, http://link.galegroup.com.ezproxy.gc.cuny.edu/apps/doc/CX1385800015/GVRL?u=cuny _gradctr&sid=GVRL&xid=54445585. Accessed 9 Nov 2018.

iii Hernandez, Carmen Dolores. “Sandra Maria Esteves.” Puerto Rican Voices In English: Interviews with Writers. Praeger Publishers, 1997, pp. 48-61.

DeCosta-Willis, Miriam. “Sandra María Esteves's Nuyorican Poetics: The Signifying Difference.” Afro-Hispanic Review, vol. 23, no. 2, 2004, pp. 3–12. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23054547. Accessed 16 Nov 2018.

Noel, Urayoan. Invisible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixtied to Slam. U of Iowa Press, 2014, pp. 75-82.

“Sandra Maria Esteves.” The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, ed. Ilan Stavans, W. W. Norton & Co, 2011, pp. 1396-1397.

SW's PROPOSED EDITS: -Her father separated from her mother before Esteves’ birth... -...middle school and graduating from Cardinal Spellman High School... -During her upbringing, Esteves was exposed to circumstances that challenged her identity such as colorism within her family and racism at school, particularly from the nuns that ran the boarding school. -She went on her first trip at seventeen to the island of Puerto Rico to better understand herself but was left further questioning her identity as she found all the ways she did not fit in with the people and culture on the island. Her trip led her to want to better understand her identity, and this would be important for her poetry.

-This, along with the inspiration she found in attending the poetry readings at the National Black Theater of Harlem and the –artistic– (CONFUSED BY THIS) she would find herself becoming a founding member of, all helped her to begin to utilizing poetry as medium to grapple with her identity crisis.

- Her works depart from the rest of her associates' within the Nuyorican movement because Esteves draws on various genres of music, most notably in her third collection Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo, as opposed to focusing on what was recognized as “outlaw” poetry—raw use of language to evoke intense hyperbolic imagery. Estil calls her implementation of music social poetry.