by Danny Postel
09.01.98

LiP: Martin, like yourself I'm something of a fetishist for words, for language, and particularly for titles. I therefore love the titles of your books. They're a bit ponderous, and wonderfully evocative. Let's start with your very first collection of poetry, The Immigrant Ice Boy's Bolero. Can you tell us about the tide of that book?

Espada: The Immigrant Ice Boy’s Bolero was my first book. It was published in 1982, and the title poem is about my father, and about my father's migration to this country from the island of Puerto Rico when he was very young. He was about nine years old when he first came here in 1939. My father had to work as an ice boy. He had to carry these huge blocks of ice up tenement stairs and that ruined his back. So I conceived of his experience in the form of a bilingual image, the immigrant iceboy's bolero. Those familiar with the bolero as a slow, sad, romantic Latin American song form, a ballad form, can perhaps visualize this. The way the poem concludes is with the image of my father carrying the ice up tenement stairs, staggering in an ice boy's bolero. So in this particular frame of reference, that's a shuffle step, and he is shuffling, or staggering, under the weight of the ice as he goes up the stairs. That's a bilingual image because it is an ice boy's bolero. It's not an ice boy's shuffle-step. The reference is multi-layered, and it refers to the sadness of the tremendous strain, the tremendous pressure, that this boy found himself under. Not only literal, physical pressure, but metaphorical pressure as well, in terms of the whole experience of being Puerto Rican in the United States and migrating here and facing racism at that time in the late '30s and early '40s.

So The Immigrant Ice Boy's Bolero became the title of that poem and the title of that first collection of poems. But you can see that right away a pattern had begun in terms of my titles, and I've had various descriptions applied to them. A friend of mine used to call them operatic, which I found a little disturbing, because I don't like opera. But he found the fact that they were complex and involved amusing. For me, the title of a poem is the headline. It's what announces the poem, draws the reader in, compels the reader to care, to read on, or to listen on, as the case may be. I am always driven a little bit crazy by poems that I see called "Poem" or "Untitled." You might as well call it "I Give Up, I Quit, I Don't Care Very Much." If the poet doesn't care, why should anyone else?

LiP: In 1990, you published a collection of poems called Rebellion Is The Circle of a Lover's Hands, also the title of a poem.

Espada: Rebellion Is The Circle of a Lover's Hands refers to an incident in Puerto Rican history called the Ponce Massacre, where, on Palm Sunday, 1937, pro-independence marchers were shot down in the streets of Ponce by the police, a notorious incident. The title itself not only departs from that historical incident, but from a particular anecdote, which I heard from a good friend of mine about his mother and her fiancee', who was killed at the Ponce massacre. The word "circle" in the middle of that title is paramount because the circle in this case refers to the eternal nature of resistance. If oppression is eternal so, too, is resistance. One is never found without the other. So in many ways, I'm using the image, the symbol, of the circle to represent the eternal nature of resistance. On a more literal level, it represents the sewing motion in the hands of a young woman who is sewing her wedding dress when she gets word that her fiancee' has been killed in this Ponce massacre. And this actually happened. So it is again a title that is multi-layered and is meant to draw the reader in, to make the reader give a damn about what happens next.

LiP: My favorite title of yours is City of Coughing and Dead Radiators, again, the name of a poem.

Espada: refers to a poem which comes from a phase of my life where I worked as a tenant lawyer. Sometimes people are stunned to find out I have had all these other incarnations. I was a bouncer in a bar, too, and I wrote a couple of poems about that. But I worked as a tenant lawyer in greater Boston with a legal services program for low income, Spanish-speaking tenants in a city called Chelsea, right outside of Boston. Immigrant city, gateway city, and a very poor city.

LiP: Where are most of the immigrants in Chelsea from?

Espada: They tend to come from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean: Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. They come from Central America, especially Guatemala and El Salvador. And now they've been coming from Southeast Asia as well. So it's an extremely diverse city, and as I mentioned before, very poor housing stock, very poor. They were greatly in need of legal services in the area of housing. And it was quite a struggle, as the title poem of this book makes clear.

The "city of coughing and dead radiators" is Chelsea itself. The inspiration for the title came from a morning when I walked into my office and there were a number of people in the waiting area. As I passed them and sat down in my office, I could hear the coughing coming from the waiting area, and people were one right after the other coughing. They were all sick because they were living in apartments without heat. And then, in my mind's eye, I multiplied all those coughing people in the waiting room by a factor of 1000, because certainly for every person that came into our office coughing and seeking legal services, there were 1000 who did not come. And I imagined an entire city sick and coughing because of the lack of heat. And you'll notice that the title refers to dead radiators, not cold radiators. Cold radiators means there's no heat. Dead radiators means there's no heat forthcoming. So it was a situation where I saw a great deal of human despair, and we did what we could to fight it.

LiP: Can you talk about your views on the status of Puerto Rico? As you know, on the rare occasion when the U.S. media even mention Puerto Rico, the independence movement might as well be invisible. Puerto Ricans, we're told, want either statehood or the status quo. Those are the only options presented. Those advocating independence, when acknowledged at all are portrayed as terrorists, or as having links to terrorists. The fact is that the independence movement attracts little support from the citizens of Puerto Rico. In spite of this, you remain a supporter of independence for Puerto Rico.

Espada: The current political picture in Puerto Rico cannot be understood without understanding the history of Puerto Rico in the 20th century. The percentages at the polls in favor of independista candidates and of independista parties cannot be understood without understanding the repression of the independence movement both in the U.S. and Puerto Rico during the 20th century. And, conveniently, that history has been omitted from the history books in this country to a great extent. The fact of the matter is, if you repress any movement, as the independence movement has been repressed, and then, once that movement has been safely repressed, safely locked away, you ask people what they think, it's a farce, it's a charade, it's a sham. The fact of the matter is that independence was the explicit choice of the Puerto Rican people for the first half century of U.S. domination. Most of your readers probably know that the U.S. took Puerto Rico as a prize of war in the Spanish American War of 1898. Fundamentally, nothing much has changed.

LiP: The US. simply took up where the Spaniards left off in terms of a colonial relationship.

Espada: Yes. Puerto Rico is the oldest colony in the world. Four centuries under Spain and now a century under the U.S. We'll be hearing a lot about this in 1998 because of the centennial of U.S. occupation. Now, what happened was, in the 1 930s there was a significant independence movement that rose with the Nationalist party and the leadership of Pedro Albizu-Campos and his top lieutenants. In the mid-1930's, they were all rounded up and thrown in prison. Albizu Campos spent most of the last 30 years of his life imprisoned. The fact of the matter is that that sort of repression continued unabated for a number of years. People were thrown into jail, people lost their jobs, people were harassed, surveilled, and sometimes turned up dead. The reality is that the people of Puerto Rico were not given an opportunity to say anything about their status until 1967, with the first plebiscite, and by then, the independence movement had been safely locked up, repressed, silenced and otherwise gagged.

LiP: Neutralized.

Espada: More than neutralized, mutilated. And so, sure, at that point it was safe to ask people "What do you think?" I think that's an extremely cynical ploy politically. The fact remains that I would be pro-independence even if I were not Puerto Rican because I believe in the right to self-determination. I believe that people should be able to govern themselves, and as long as Puerto Rico is a territory of the U.S., a colony of the U.S., Puerto Rico will not govern itself. It does not govern itself in any significant way. The fact is that Puerto Rico is an anachronism, a political embarrassment for the U.S. The fact is that Puerto Rico does not have a voice in the U.S. Congress. It has one non-voting representative, called a resident commissioner, and yet the people of Puerto Rico can be sent to fight and die in the wars of the U.S. More Puerto Ricans have been sent to fight and die in U.S. wars per capita than from any state in the U.S. in the 20th century. The fact of the matter remains that the people on the island of Puerto Rico cannot vote for president. The fact of the matter remains that the people of Puerto Rico have very little voice in their daily lives, their daily government.

I think we have to put aside this naive faith in electoral politics, in the polls, in the numbers, and take a look at the hard history, the hidden history, which I've tried to write about in my books. Now there's no excuse, because there are good books available in the English language on the history of the independence movement. Ronald Fernandez is the foremost authority on the independence movement writing in English. You can pick up any of his books, and you can get an education on the subject.

LiP: Are there any tides in particular you would single out for recommendation?

Espada: Fernandez wrote a book called Los Macheteros. The Wells Fargo Robbery and the Violent Struggle for Puerto Rican Independence about that clandestine pro-independence movement which was repressed by the U.S. in the mid-1980s. He also wrote a book called Prisoners of Colonialism (Common Courage Press), which I highly recommend. It brings people up-to-date on the violations of civil liberties of the people who've been thrown in prison for their pro-independence activities and beliefs.

LiP: One often hears the argument that Puerto Ricans are essentially satisfied with their status as a colony of the US., as a territory of the US., because of the financial and economic relationship it enjoys under this status. What's your response to that?

Espada: My response is that although Puerto Ricans do not have to pay federal tax, most of them are too poor to qualify in the first place! You only hear half of that equation most of the time. You may hear that Puerto Ricans are exempt from federal taxation. What you don't hear is that most of them are too poor to pay federal taxes in the first place, ha ha ha! There was a time not too long ago when, statistically (more statistics), the majority of Puerto Ricans on the island were on food stamps. That, to me, describes an island economy that has failed. What the U.S. has done in the 20th century is taken many Puerto Ricos out of Puerto Rico, especially as a form of cheap labor.

The time has come to pay Puerto Rico back, especially in terms of what I and other independence advocates propose, which is a gradual transition, a peaceful transition, toward independence for the island of Puerto Rico, with the active assistance of the U.S.

LiP: Let's talk about the history of your relationship with National Public Radio. I was first introduced to your work by NPR back in 1993 when City of Coughing and Dead Radiators came out. There was a story about you on All Things Considered that I heard, and you were also interviewed by Terri Gross that year on Fresh Air. You've since written a number of poems for broadcast on All Things Considered. So your relationship with NPR was a bit different back then than it is now. Why don't we go ahead and tell that story