Tomorrow will always be / Within reach of us all // Because the many are / Plenty “Wine and Dine in Palestine” — Pedro Pietri (1)
A one-hundred-thirty-one-line free verse poem, Pedro Pietri’s posthumously published “Wine and Dine in Palestine” places the work of this avant-garde Nuyorican artist within a genealogy of Puerto Rican solidarity with Palestinian liberation (2). The four lines quoted above, however, are not meant to inspire hope. They are an intervention—an echo of history reminding us that power belongs to the many. A call to action so that the hands shaping our present and future are guided by collective solidarities, breaking the cycle of suffering imposed by oppression. For, as the poem states, our future depends upon the,
…endless many / Chosen to be born / Chosen to be proud / Chosen to be dignified / Chosen to survive
The use of anaphora with the repetition of the word chosen in these lines of the poem reads like an incantation. Anaphora is also a common feature in Protestant sermons. This is not only apropos as one of the several versions of the poem in Pietri’s papers at Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora is signed “El Reverendo Pedro,” but the repetition also signals the rhetorical strategies Pietri employed in this poem to subvert and counter the imperialism propagated by the American jeremiad tradition.
The American jeremiad tradition is often attributed to John Winthrop’s 1630 “Model of Christian Charity.” Deuteronomy 30:16 is central to Winthrop’s sermon for it provides a vision of the Puritans as God’s chosen people passing over the Atlantic as the Israelites passed over the Jordan. This allusion to a formerly enslaved people who cross into a promised land and the uncertainty of that journey is key to the sermon from the Puritans brought to Massachusetts Bay, which took this biblical narrative to signify their leaving the Old World for the New World or the New Jerusalem (3). To solidify this ideal, Puritan ministers, like Winthrop, employed a rhetoric of righteous indignation to instill within early Puritans an obedience to God’s mandates. Obeying these mandates endowed early colonial settlers with the blessings of earthly Paradise. I am arguing that Pietri’s poem revises this rhetorical tradition by placing Palestine at its center. For, as Winthrop states in his 1630 sermon, “the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it. But if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship other Gods, our pleasures and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good Land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it. (4)” Thus, any deviation from or disobedience of God’s path, Winthrop warned, would turn His wrath upon His chosen people, and their promised land, their Paradise, would be taken away from them.
The purpose of this rhetoric was to use theistic tenets to mold a civil religion and a covenant between God and Americans that substantiated Puritan cultural hegemony and justified early colonial settlers’ territorial occupation and expansion.
As the work of artists and scholars of African descent have professed throughout the centuries, the equation early Puritan ministers made with the enslaved Israelites exposes the hypocrisy ingrained within the American jeremiad tradition: for it is the theft, silence, murder, rape, and forced labor of enslaved Africans and Indigenous Americans that lies at the root of this, America’s paradisiacal ideal. An ideal where the biblical allusion to Israel is central to early America’s symbolic conceptions of haven, home, and self.
As such, Pietri makes an explicit parallel between Palestine and Puerto Rico. One is a place inhabited by a people whose claims of national sovereignty are ignored and invalidated by imperial forces while the other is peopled with those who lack sovereignty over their homeland because they are a U.S. colony (5). In both cases, the ideological concept of Israel as a promised land is central in the rhetoric deployed in mainstream U.S. and Israeli culture to construct a myth that justifies the colonization necessary to establish a home, a nation-state, and an identity for the occupying culture and population. This, of course, is done at the expense of erasing, silencing, and displacing the histories, voices, and bodies of those colonized, in this case the Palestinian and Puerto Rican people.
Turning to Pietri’s work, one encounters an artist who recognizes that a confrontation with History is necessary to dismantle and expose this violent legacy. For Pietri, I want to argue, it was acknowledging the Spanish-American War as the teleology of the American jeremiad tradition. In his essay, “There Was Never No Tomorrow,” Pietri writes, “I was born in 1898, during the climax of the Spanish-American War. I say 1898 because that was the year that the U.S. invaded Puerto Rico, the year when they colonized us.” (6) This rhetorical move aligns with Malcolm X’s concept of “history is a people’s memory,” (7) and James Baldwin’s reminder of how we all carry our history. For, as Pietri writes in “There Was Never No Tomorrow,” recognizing the impact of the Spanish-American War on his development is important for him to not only understand how this historical event moved and shaped him as a second-class citizen of the U.S. but also how it makes all of us casualties of what he terms “the American Inquisition.”
Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico in 1944, Pietri and his family migrated to New York City in 1947 as a result of the U.S. sponsored economic development program, Operation Bootstrap. The U.S. implemented Operation Bootstrap in the years following World War II to modernize and supposedly develop Puerto Rico. It shifted Puerto Rico’s agrarian economy to an industrial one by providing tax incentives to U.S. businesses to encourage investment on the island; an export heavy shift that led to high unemployment rates, forced sterilization to control the island’s population, and the first large, air migration that sent millions of Puerto Ricans to the mainland. Much of Pietri’s work documents the post-WWII Puerto Rican diaspora in New York City, exposing the fallacies of the U.S. government who, through Operation Bootstrap, deceived Puerto Ricans sent to the mainland, at the time, with promises of socio-economic opportunities and prosperity in the so-called “land of milk-and-honey.” (8)
After graduating from high school, Pietri failed the exam required for a job at the post office thirteen times. Faced with the vocational prospects available to a Nuyorican in the 1960s with a high school diploma, Pietri knew he could not “make a career out of earning minimum wage.” (9) Then, in 1966 Pietri was drafted into the Vietnam War. Despite being told by the army that he was incapable of adjusting to military discipline because of a mental health issue, at the height of the war he was sent to the frontline. He served two years before being discharged. Seeing firsthand, the hypocritical, nonsensical violence and death at the core of the U.S. imperial machine, Pietri returned home a changed man. He donned himself in all black and called himself El Reverendo. As he recalls in “There Was Never No Tomorrow,”
It was then [in Vietnam] I realized who the real enemy was…. So, I came back and wrote the Puerto Rican Obituary… and that’s the Vietnam that I wrote about go kick the ass of people who were born warriors; kill women and children first, but only after you rape them. That made no sense. So, what do I think about the war in Iraq? I don’t think about it, because the war never ended then. This is a war that’s been going on since the invasion of North America. (10)
Serving in Vietnam, thrust inside the nightmarish imperial project that is the American Dream, which ultimately shatters his psyche, (11) Pietri returns to the initial invasion of North America as the primal scene of a profound American neurosis, the fever before the melancholia responsible for America’s bellicose culture. It is somewhere there, in the seventeenth-century landscape where Pietri begins to gather the pieces of his fractured self because it is part of a constellation of imperial history not only tethered to the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico but to larger contemporary colonial projects masked as benevolent campaigns of U.S. global democratization, ignited after 1898. It is there that Palestine plays a vital role in a poetics interested in excavating the ghosts buried in the wake of History’s silent tyranny. Ghosts whose histories can move outside a Western, linear, conception of Time, to weave together the destinies of those “homeless” souls affected by this tradition of Western expansion. Those ghosts whose songs sing of the
…human blessing // Existing in us all / On this earth promised / To everyone chosen / To be born to be free / Among the endless many / Living inside of you / Living inside of me / Living inside everybody
As Miguel Algarín writes in “Nuyorican Literature,” an effect of European colonization in the Americas is that it “left whole generations of people, whole tribes of people, dead and without any semblance of a history because all historical records were destroyed” (89)(12). By addressing the voices of these specters, Pietri’s “Wine and Dine in Palestine” implicates the reader, himself, and all humanity within the imperial order. No one is detached from those bodies History needs to consume in its violent forward march toward progress and modernity. In doing so, this poem engages within a Nuyorican aesthetic tradition of perpetuating “rituals and habits that are the remnants of an already badly weakened historical consciousness or historical self” (89). In that way, “Wine and Dine in Palestine” allows us to see and face a colonial language and history that can only subsist by consuming us. (13) In that regard, Pietri is gifted with a Janus head and his work and vision insist that we too look at the past with our faces toward the future. His work tells us to document, record, and speak to our personal experiences and histories to validate our knowledges and preserve our cultural legacies. His work is also a call for Puerto Ricans to remember, establish, and build solidarities and communions with those non-Western nations affected by coloniality, like Palestine. (14) In this, Pietri as a Nuyorican artist is not alone. A similar call is made by Nuyorican poet Cenén Moreno in her poem, “IF ONLY I COULD SAY,” (15) Miguel Algarín’s Time’s Now / Ya Es Tiempo, (16) and in Mariposa Fernández’s performances and activism. (17) In that regard, Palestine plays a vital and understudied role in the Nuyorican literary imagination. Studying the work of our Nuyorican artists is one way to begin to dismantle a legacy of colonial violence and to build coalitions necessary for a powerful liberatory project.
Footnotes
(1) Pietri, Pedro. “Wine and Dine in Palestine.” Los Panfleteros: Poetry Series, Global Publisherllc, 2024, pp. 7-12.
(2) See: Sara Awartani. “Puerto Rican Solidarities with Palestine.” Against the Current 27 Feb. 2024, againstthecurrent.org/atc229/puerto-rican-solidarities-with-palestine/.
———. “In Solidarity: Palestine in the Puerto Rican Political Imaginary. Radical History Review 1 May 2017; 2017 (128): 199–222.
(3) Bercovitch, Secvan. The American Jeremiad. University of Wisconsin Press, 2012.
(4) Winthrop, John. “Model of Christian Charity.” The American Tradition in Literature, 9th ed., edited by Perkins, Barbara & Perkins, George. McGraw-Hill College, 1999, pp. 34- 41.
(5) As the Middle East Monitor reported on June 11, 2024, Israeli Member of the Knesset, Ohad Tal, told attendees at the Israel Summit in Nashville, TN that Israel will use the “Puerto Rico model” in their efforts to gain control of the land from the river to the sea. Tal stated, once Israel gains control of the land, Palestinian’s can stay. However, they will employ “the Puerto Rico model just like you have here in the States [where Palestinians, like Puerto Ricans] will not be able to vote for the government, but they will be able to manage their own local issues.” This was the second of Tal’s three options for Palestinians in his colonial campaign. The first was genocide, the third was to pay for Palestinians to leave. All reflect what the founder of the Puerto Rican nationalist party, Pedro Albizu Campos once said about American colonization of the island, “they wanted the birdcage, but not the birds.” See: “Israeli Mk: We’ll Pay Palestinians to Leave.” Middle East Monitor, 11 June 2024, www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240611-israeli-mk-well-pay-palestinians-to-leave/.
(6) Pietri, Pedro. “There Was Never No Tomorrow: Nuyorican Pedro Pietri In His Own Words,” www.poetspath.com/Scholarship_Project/pietri.htm.
(7) X, Malcolm. “(1964) Malcolm X’s Speech at the Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity.” (1964), 23 Sept. 2019, www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/speeches-african-american-history/1964-malcolm-x-s-speech-founding-rally-organization-afro-american-unity/.
(8) Pietri, Pedro. “There Was Never No Tomorrow.”
(9) Pietri, Pedro. “There Was Never No Tomorrow.”
(10) Pietri, Pedro. “There Was Never No Tomorrow.”
(11) In the years after his tour in Vietnam, Pietri suffered from schizophrenia. This was confirmed by doctors who diagnosed his condition. Yet despite the findings of medical professionals that legitimized his illness, the U.S. government refused to acknowledge the effects of the war on Pietri’s mental health. Pietri’s papers at Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies Archive of the Puerto Rican Diaspora contain the documentation that show his fight with the U.S. government—a battle that he ultimately lost.
(12) Algarín, Miguel. “Nuyorican Literature.” MELUS, Summer, 1981, Vol. 8, No. 2, Ethnic Literature and Cultural Nationalism (Summer, 1981), pp. 89-92
(13) Janus is the Roman god of beginnings, gates, doorways, passages, transitions, time, duality, and endings. He is usually depicted with two opposite faces.
(14) “Wine and Dine in Palestine” is just one example in Pietri’s oeuvre where an explicit parallel between Palestine and Puerto Rico exist. His papers at Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies Archive of the Puerto Rican Diaspora contain anti-imperialist and anti-war pamphlets and newsletters from various organizations Pietri was a member of and/or created. For example, New Yorkers For Palestinian Independence Now; Anti-Imperialist: Vietnam Veterans Against the War; Veterans for Peace for Vieques; National Committee to Free Puerto Rican Prisoners of War and Political Prisoners; the National Association of Third World Writers; the Black Voice; the New Abolitionist; and Poets Opposing War. Among the literature of these organizations are calls for actions against the occupation of Palestine, the U.S. bombing of Vieques, and the liberation of Puerto Rican political prisoners. Pietri’s archive also contains an issue of the zine The Voices of the Bread is Rising, which he was a contributing editor. The issue contains Latinx poet Carlos Raúl Dufflar’s poem “For the Martyrs of the Intifadah” which calls for solidarity with Palestine and visual artwork calling for the occupation in Palestine to cease and an end of the bombing in Afghanistan. These materials provide evidence of the genealogy of solidarities that Puerto Ricans in the diaspora and on the island have established with colonized peoples in their protest against imperialism.
(15) Moreno, Cenén. “IF ONLY I COULD SAY.” Breaking Ground: Anthology of Puerto Rican Women Writers in New York 1980-2012, edited by Myrna Nieves. editorial Campana, 2012, pp. 281-284.
(16) Algarín, Miguel. Time’s Now / Ya Es Tiempo. Arte Público Press, 1985.
(17) Fernández, Mariposa and Toro, Jonathan, panelist. “Nuyorican Aesthetics: Exploring the Life and Works of Mariposa Fernández.” Friday Forum, 21 February 2025, CUNY Graduate Center’s English Department, New York, NY. Dialogue. (Also see: Mariposa Fernández’s digital archive through the Bronx Historical Society, https://digital.bronxhistoricalsociety.org/msfernandez).