Puerto Rican poetry
Sean Lynch
Issue date: 4/28/09 Section: Entertainment
High School kids? Screaming babies? Music in a language I couldn't understand? This had all the makings of several hours of torture. I was contemplating leaving until the host; Jose Efrain Rivera took the microphone and opened the show. When he did, I was glad that I had stayed.
The Batey Urbano is a Puerto Rican Youth Center in the Humboldt Park neighborhood that was founded seven years ago. It was created to give young people a place in which they could freely express themselves in a healthy environment, instead of the streets, as seen in their unspoken rule: before you say anything sexist, racist, or homophobic, think about what you are saying, and why. It hosts an array of events that includes dancing, hip-hop, Latin music and poetry.
I went to this show thinking that the students from Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School would be doing light, fluffy poems about boys or not getting along with someone in one of their classes. I couldn't have been more wrong. They may have been young, but they were far from uninformed. Their poems were full of depth and had meaning. From Janine Arteaga's "White Bitch," about growing up a light-skinned Mexican and facing ridicule from fellow Latinas, to Jessie Fuentes's "So Called Line," which dealt with the devastation of the street life; it was very apparent that they drew from vivid life experience and hardships. The members of the "Louder than a Bomb Team" lived up to their name because they blew me away. They all had charisma and stage presence and they were so powerful with their words that even a minor slip-up couldn't dissuade the crowd from the raw talent that was presented to us. Their coach, Awilda Gonzalez said that what led to her coaching them was her passion for words and poetry. From the look of it, she passed it on to them as well.
Organizer Michael Reyes also performed two of his own original pieces that got the crowd going. The first was a fun, improvisational, piece that elicited words from the crowd such as cabbage, milk duds, Twinkies, candles, and Bernie Madoff. Without skipping a beat, he turned this assortment of random words into an impressive freestyle that left everyone wanting more. He then performed and older throwback piece called "Take It Back" which criticized the idea of taking it back to the "good old days" of racism, which had the crowd cheering for more.
The Batey Urbano is a Puerto Rican Youth Center in the Humboldt Park neighborhood that was founded seven years ago. It was created to give young people a place in which they could freely express themselves in a healthy environment, instead of the streets, as seen in their unspoken rule: before you say anything sexist, racist, or homophobic, think about what you are saying, and why. It hosts an array of events that includes dancing, hip-hop, Latin music and poetry.
I went to this show thinking that the students from Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School would be doing light, fluffy poems about boys or not getting along with someone in one of their classes. I couldn't have been more wrong. They may have been young, but they were far from uninformed. Their poems were full of depth and had meaning. From Janine Arteaga's "White Bitch," about growing up a light-skinned Mexican and facing ridicule from fellow Latinas, to Jessie Fuentes's "So Called Line," which dealt with the devastation of the street life; it was very apparent that they drew from vivid life experience and hardships. The members of the "Louder than a Bomb Team" lived up to their name because they blew me away. They all had charisma and stage presence and they were so powerful with their words that even a minor slip-up couldn't dissuade the crowd from the raw talent that was presented to us. Their coach, Awilda Gonzalez said that what led to her coaching them was her passion for words and poetry. From the look of it, she passed it on to them as well.
Organizer Michael Reyes also performed two of his own original pieces that got the crowd going. The first was a fun, improvisational, piece that elicited words from the crowd such as cabbage, milk duds, Twinkies, candles, and Bernie Madoff. Without skipping a beat, he turned this assortment of random words into an impressive freestyle that left everyone wanting more. He then performed and older throwback piece called "Take It Back" which criticized the idea of taking it back to the "good old days" of racism, which had the crowd cheering for more.
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