Eventos
The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida
A Book Launch and Celebration!
The Hemispheric Institute cordially invites you to an evening of performance and conversation to celebrate the publication of Dr. Karen Jaime’s The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida (NYU Press, 2021).
The Nuyorican Poets Cafe has been a fixture of the arts on the Lower East Side and a home for slam poetry among Latinx New Yorkers for almost half a century. The Queer Nuyorican revises common histories of the Cafe that have tended to elide its constitutive queerness, both in terms of the gender expression of its performers as well as in terms of the aesthetics it cultivated.
Join us as we honor Karen Jaime’s pathbreaking scholarship and reflect on the history of the New York institution that is the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Dr. Patricia Herrera and Dr. Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé will speak to the significance of Dr. Jaime’s book in the fields of Latinx Studies and Performance Studies, and for the legacy of the Cafe. Artists Regie Cabico, Emanuel Xavier, and Andrés Chulisi Rodríguez will perform poems and reflect on their relationship to the Cafe as queer performers.
The book launch also inaugurates our 2022 event series "Queering the Nuyorican and Archiving its Legacy." This series will mark the publication of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Founders Archive in the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL), which Dr. Jaime was instrumental in acquiring and curating.
Participant Bios
Dr. Karen Jaime
Dr. Karen Jaime is Assistant Professor of Performing and Media Arts and Latina/o Studies at Cornell University. She is a former Institute for Citizens & Scholars Career Enhancement Junior Faculty Fellow (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), Visiting Scholar at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, a former Rockefeller Foundation Research Fellow, and Chancellor’s Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her monograph, The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida (NYU Press, 2021) argues for a reexamination of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe as a historically queer space, both in terms of sexualities and performance practices. Her critical writing has been published, or is forthcoming, in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, e-Misférica, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, ASAP/J, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Performance Matters. She is also an accomplished spoken word/performance artist who served as the host/curator of the Friday Night Poetry Slam at the world-renowned Nuyorican Poets Cafe (2003-2005). As a published poet, her writing is included in The Best of Panic! En Vivo From the East Village, Flicker and Spark: A Queer Anthology of Spoken Word and Poetry, a special issue of Sinister Wisdom: A Multicultural Lesbian Literary and Art Journal, “Out Latina Lesbians,” and the anthology Latinas: Struggles and Protest in 21st Century USA. During her residency, she will lead Institute programming on the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Founders Collection in HIDVL and present new research on the impact of HIV/AIDS on the Cafe community.
Andrés Chulisi Rodríguez
Andres Chulisi Rodriguez–poet, author, writer and actor. Brooklyn-born, Harlem-living. Working on his second book and fourth One-Man Show, Prototype Of An Unmothered Maricón.
Dr. Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé
Dr. Arnaldo M. Cruz-Malavé is professor and associate director of the Institute of Latin American and Latinx Studies at Fordham University. He is the author of Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails (Palgrave, 2007); editor of Manuel Ramos Otero: Cuentos (casi) completos (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 2019); and coeditor, with Martin Manalansan, of Queer Globalization: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (NYU, 2002).
Emanuel Xavier
American Latinx poet, author, editor, activist, and spoken-word artist Emanuel Xavier built a reputation as one of the first and most celebrated openly gay poets at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the early ‘90s and founded his own ballroom-esque, spoken-word poetry house, the House of Xavier. Despite this and other successes, including being named an LGBTQ Icon by the Equality Forum, Xavier has remained relatively unknown to wider poetry audiences. The Selected Poems of Emanuel Xavier was published in 2021 and can be found in many bookshops around the country or on Xavier’s website along with his previously published works.
Dr. Patricia Herrera
As a community-engaged educator, scholar, and artist, Dr. Patricia Herrera uses the arts in interventionist ways to produce radical imaginings of resilience, hope, futurity, and justice. She is the author of Nuyorican Feminist Performances: From the Café to Hip Hop Theater (University of Michigan Press). Since 2011 Patricia has engaged with the city of Richmond on a community-based public history entitled Civil Rights and Education in Richmond, Virginia: A Documentary Theater Project, which has led to the creation of a digital archive The Fight for Knowledge, as well as four museum exhibitions and a series of seven docudramas about gentrification, educational disparities, HIV/AIDS, segregation and Latinos in Richmond.
Regie Cabico
Regie Cabico is a spoken word pioneer, having won The Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam and later taking top prizes in three National Poetry Slams. Mr. Cabico received his BFA at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and is a 2006 NYU Asian Pacific American Studies Artist In Residence. Media credits include 2 seasons of HBO's Def Poetry Jam, NPR's Snap Judgement, and a TEDx Talk. His work appears in over 30 anthologies, including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Spoken Word Revolution, and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Mr. Cabico received the 2006 Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers for his work teaching at-risk youth at Bellevue Hospital. As a theater artist, he received three New York Innovative Theater Award Nominations for his work in Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind, with a win for Best Performance Art Production. Mr. Cabico will be a featured poet at the 2022 Whitney Biennial and resides in Washington, DC where he produces Capturing Fire Press and Capturing Fire Slam.