From Poetry Foundation:
Francisco Aragón: Can you talk about your beginnings in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico?
Victor Hernández Cruz: I was born in this region of the Caribbean
around 1949. There was no such thing as a hospital. In many of the
rural areas of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo, people were born
inside their homes and a curandera—a midwife—would come and deliver you, and that’s how I was born.
How long were you in Aguas Buenas?
I was there about five years. My family took the road of migration,
which a lot of Puerto Ricans were doing at the time because of the
devastated economic situation.
I went to New York by airplane; it took eight hours in one of these propeller-planes that barely made it. We got there in the middle of winter; to go from a tropical country into this cold region of a northern city was another shock. I remember the smell of the air, this cold air that smelled like . . . cold metals, cold steel. I had been in a world that had a whole different aroma: the smell of tobacco and local vegetation.
What part of New York did you settle in?
We went to the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Did you learn English in New York? Did you know any before you came?
I didn’t really learn English until we got a television some two
years after I was in the States. I didn’t go to school till I was seven
and a half or eight years old. My mother didn’t know there was such a
thing as kindergarten. I lived in a Puerto Rican neighborhood; most of
the people were immigrants.
Did you continue speaking Spanish after you learned English?
Oh yeah, I’ve never stopped speaking Spanish, I was able to keep
both Spanish and English, whereas a lot of New York City Puerto Ricans
and Hispanics who grow up in the U.S. lose their Spanish as they learn
English.
What kind of books did you read during your high school years in Spanish Harlem?
You still didn’t have that big movement toward finding relevant
literature in black and Puerto Rican communities. We just read the
regular poetry and stuff that was offered to the generation before us.
We read [Walt] Whitman, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg. I mostly read on
my own, all that I could get my hands on. I read Kafka, I read some of
the Beat poets as a teenager. I read Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka—LeRoi
Jones—I read Kerouac, On the Road, things of that sort.
I’d like to ask you about the title of your third book. How did you arrive at Tropicalization?
That came out of a sense of me trying to tropicalize this
Anglo–North American culture, to put a little heat on it, a little
spice on it, to warm it up a little bit. Of course, now the greenhouse
effect is probably doing that naturally (laughter).
One of your poems is titled “Don Arturo says:”, and it’s about
dance. But what I wanted to ask you is, Who is Don Arturo? He appears,
if I’m not mistaken, in all of your books.
Yeah, he does. He was a real guy. Don Arturo was like my spiritual grandfather. I dedicated By Lingual Wholes
to him. His name was Arturo Vincench. He was a Cuban guy who’d been in
New York many years and was good friends with an aunt of mine. She was
some years younger than him. I think they had a little secret thing
going on for years, and he was always part of the family. He was a
street musician; he’d play music at Macy’s and Gimbels. He had these
puppets and a special whistle, and he put a tambourine on his foot and
a harmonica attached to a thing he had like this [demonstrates an imaginary harmonica mounting for hands-free playing].
He’d sell whistles, puppets—people would give him money, and he made a
living. He also played the guitar, he had his house full of mandolins,
and he liked classical stuff: he would play classical music in the
hallway of the tenement building I was in.
