Puerto Rican Obituary

Pedro Pietri did an incredible job in writing this poem; the emotions he evoked from me were both of empathy and of anger. He set the scene by describing these five Puerto Rican workers - how they were hard workers, always on time, and never complained or disrupted the environment - even when they were provoked. He continued to build up the tone by detailing their dreams (of winning lottery tickets, effective anti-poverty programs, trips to their homeland) all the while giving the reader the sense that all these dreams were just that; that no matter how hard they worked, how much they hoped for, these dreams were unattainable.

A line that particularly struck emotion in me was on the third page, first stanza: "The first spics on the block / Proud to belong to a community / of gringos who want them lynched..." The extremely harsh tone in these few lines are seen through the referral of the Puerto Ricans as "spics" (a very condescending term for Latinos) and also by explaining the Puerto Ricans' excitement of being among the whites and away from others of their race, not even caring that they would not only be unwelcome, but likely to be harassed and maybe killed off. The tone in which Pietri wrote this stanza almost made it seem as though he thought these Puerto Ricans were pathetic for wanting to live among people who wished for their death.

My favorite lines in the whole poem were the last two, "Aqui to be called negrito / means to be called LOVE". Where I come from, the word "negrito" is not used in any way as an insult, but instead as an affectionate term for someone of dark skin, and it gave me pleasure to be able to say that when those around me and I use the term, it is out of love, rather than disgust as it was used back when the poem was written.

All in all, I interpreted the poem's message to be a warning to show the dangers of conforming, as well as those of internal battles within a group. A unified group is the most effective and invincible, but once members start to give in to racism and question themselves, they begin to compete against each other (as Juan, Miguel, Milagros, Olga and Manuel did) and this has the potential to break apart the group. We saw this same thing happen to the Young Lords after they had switched political goals several times and finally lost membership, instead of staying on one united front with one united political ideal in mind.