Papers of a Puerto Rican Poet Will Find a Home at Columbia

August 30, 2012, 12:40 pm

By VIVIAN YEE

In 1996, Jack Agüeros, a Puerto Rican author and activist who wrote sonnets about the immigrant poor and Latino street life, would have seemed an unlikely candidate for inclusion in the library of New York City's most prestigious university.

That year, his son, Marcel Agüeros, was one of four Columbia students who staged a hunger strike in front of Butler Library to demand the creation of an ethnic studies program, becoming something of a poster child for the fraught relationship between Columbia - famous for its Western classics-based curriculum - and the diverse communities that surround its Morningside Heights campus.

Yet times have changed: the ethnic studies program Marcel Agüeros fought to establish, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, is in its 13th year, and he is now an assistant professor of astronomy at Columbia. His father, who has been suffering from Alzheimer's disease for nearly 10 years, has all but forgotten a career that included four books of poetry, an eight-year stint as director of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem and a hunger strike that protested the lack of Puerto Ricans in Mayor John V. Lindsay's government. And later this year, the elder Mr. Agüeros's personal papers will be unveiled at Columbia as the first piece of a new archive of significant New York Latino figures.

“How do I say this diplomatically?” Marcel Agüeros said. “I think Columbia could do better in terms of its relationships with the surrounding communities, and incorporating my father's papers here at the library was a way of connecting the institution with East Harlem in a way that was appealing to us.”

With Col umbia planning to expand north into Manhattanville, an expansion that has provoked anger among some activists, neighborliness is more important than ever. Besides giving researchers valuable insight into New York's Latinos, the collection will be available to the public.

“I think Columbia, given its move up the island, is anxious also to begin to develop a closer tie with the Latino community as they've tried to do with the African-American community in Harlem for quite a while now,” said Michael Ryan, the director of Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where the materials will be housed.

Mr. Ryan and Frances Negrón-Muntaner, the director of the ethnic studies center, believe Columbia can plug a gaping hole in Latino scholarship in the northeast: Although Hunter College houses a Puerto Rican archive and City College has a collection that focuses on Dominicans, no institution in the northeastern United States collects pan-Latino papers. (Such archive s do exist at the University of California-Los Angeles, the University of Texas and other institutions in the south and the west.)

“Honestly, as the country becomes increasingly Latino, in 20-some years, if you're not collecting these materials now, there's going to be huge gaps in knowledge,” Ms. Negrón-Muntaner said, adding that a lack of primary sources is one reason for the dearth of scholarship in Latino studies. “It's a rich moment to think about a whole lot of questions, but we need to have the materials, you know?”

Ms. Negrón-Muntaner says a New York-based archive will be able to gather significant material on the Latino cultural and political movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when many New York activists and artists like Mr. Agüeros propelled what is now known as the Puerto Rican Renaissance.

The Renaissance has a substantial legacy in New York, including El Museo del Barrio and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe - both institutions founded by Lati no artists whose work had been rejected by traditional galleries and literary journals. Many artists were forced to take up activism to ensure their work would be seen, even if they did not think of themselves as activists, Ms. Negrón-Muntaner said.

“The subject matter they incorporated spoke to a different experience of becoming American,” she said. “They were seen as topics that weren't high enough or literary enough - they were about poor people facing hardship and discrimination.”

As the director of a gallery for Puerto Rican artists and then of El Museo del Barrio, which he moved to its current location on Museum Mile, Mr. Agüeros dedicated years to finding a niche for Latino artists in New York. Later, he was primarily a writer. Like other Latino poets of his day, Mr. Agüeros explored subjects like immigration, inequality and poverty in his satirical poems, short stories and plays. But he differed in that he usually used traditional forms, like p salms and sonnets.

“He wanted to use classic forms, because he loved sonnets, but he wanted to write about the things that mattered to him - sonnets about drug addicts or boxers or Christopher Columbus, you know, whatever - Mars!” his son said.

Mr. Agüeros is astonished that anyone would want his papers; he remembers little of his career. His condition has deteriorated far enough that it was his daughter, Nathalie Agüeros-Macario, and son Marcel who decided to donate the collection, which includes correspondence, drafts, recordings of his poetry readings, films of his plays and even hate mail from his activist days. It has given his children new insight into a father who rarely spoke about his past, and who now cannot remember it.

“When you have a relative with Alzheimer's, you suddenly discover how many questions you wish you'd asked and how many holes there are in your knowledge of their lives,” Marcel Agüeros said. “Every little piece you ge t feels like a small miracle.”

Many people at the forefront of the 20th-century Latino cultural and political movement are growing older and may be wondering what to do about their papers, Ms. Negrón-Muntaner said. It is up to her to convince them that Columbia is the right place for community members and scholars alike to study what is still an under-researched academic field, 16 years after Marcel Agüeros's hunger strike.

“I can't stress enough importance of people who do have materials to conserve, preserve and try to get them to an archive,” she said. “There's so much we don't know and so much left to be told.”