Dimitri Reyes’s poetry collection Papi Pichón is a sharp and lyrically inventive exploration of living in the United States as a Puerto Rican.
Where there is Miles Morales, the Blue Beetle, and La Borinqueña, here enters Papi Pichón in this growing literary canon of superheroes. In a book that centers itself around people as well as the traditions and sociopolitical ties between mainlands and borders, Papi Pichón becomes the people it aims to protect, from Puerto Rico, the United States, and beyond. Delivered in multivocalities spanning the languages of English, Spanish, and Yoruba, the non-verbal languages of music, natural disasters, pop culture, and what can only be described as this bird-myth flying us into alternate Latin realities, Papi Pichón aids in uncovering a current American history in ways that are refreshingly new through honest poems that are made to make others laugh, cry, sing, and beat their chests.
The aim of this book is to have readers feel the personal struggle of being from two places at once while offering the Puerto Rican people a platform. A perch for Papi Pichon’s people to rest their wings and hope for a better tomorrow.
Marc Anthony – Aguanile
“AAAAGGUUUUUAAAANIIIIIIILLLLLLEEEEE!” Is my impersonation of Marc Anthony’s intro whenever I read the poem, “Papi Pichón Seeks Counsel” that takes place in a botánica. A botánica (which translates to “botany” in English) is commonly seen in areas with large Caribbean and Latin American populations. These stores sell plant medicines as well as spiritual candles, jewelry, and statues of deities. The song, originally by Hector Lavoe, is interpreted as a spiritual cleanse via brujería, a school of witchcraft which calls upon the cultures that made up Latin America— Indigenous, African, and European peoples. I feel the work I create — both in process and performance — is a spiritual cleansing, therefore it’s usually one of the first poems I read to bless the space and pay homage to the ancestors and orators before me.
Balún – El Espanto
This song, which translates to “the amazement,” amazed me when I first heard it from a friend of mine a few years ago. I resonated with this group of Puerto Ricans who were creating something that I first called “scholar pop.” Taking so many influences from the island and the mainland from traditional bomba sounds, to pop melodies, electronic synth, and dancehall dembows. To me, Balún was a happy signifier of the multitudinal Latin dual-identity complex: what writer Vincent Toro mentions in the book’s forward as, “that state of being ni de aqui ni de alla (neither here nor there.)”
Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee, Justin Bieber – Despacito Remix
This is a song that just warms my heart, and as such, found it’s way into one of the first poems of the book. But unlike many other songs on this list, it wasn’t because of how it added texture to the story, but because of a particular part of my memory this song lives rent free. Nowadays, I’m a teaching artist mostly in high schools and colleges, but many don’t know that I worked for several middle school Summer programs throughout my 20’s.
The summer this song came out, “Despacito” was on regular rotation of an instructor’s playlist that would play through the speakers during recess. During this song, there would be a bit of a lull in the yard, where basketballs would bounce a bit less, jump ropes would slow down, and there’d be a sense of waiting until two thirds into the song where Luis Fonsi would activate our entire Black and Latinx student body and they’d all chant, “This is how we do it down in Puerto Rico, I just wanna hear you scream ¡Ay, bendito!” And the teachers would laugh. Some— like me— would scream it in unison. It was community. It was unity. For my own Puerto Rican pride, I had to have that easter egg in the book.
Lisette Melendez – Together Forever
I have very fond and vivid memories of freestyle music being played while growing up. In apartments, cars, houses, on stoops, in bodegas, on the bus. The last time I heard this song coming out of someone else’s speakers was when I went to my mechanic back in Newark on North 6th Street. It was a balmy Spring weekday and someone was blasting this out their 4th floor apartment window across the street, where a few minutes after they leaned a mop out of the window to dry. Sunday cleaning doesn’t need to be done on Sunday, and I say this because our culture associates music like bachata and salsa as “cleaning music.” But as time keeps on moving, music that gets people going (and cleaning) changes. And I’m happy that freestyle will be the soundtrack to brooms, mops, bleach, and Fabuloso for years to come.
El Gran Combo De Puerto Rico – Un verano en Nueva York
A staple of the Puerto Rican Day Parade. A staple party song from a staple salsa ensemble. This period of salsa reminds me of piña colada and kebab stands. Why piña colada or kebab stands, you may ask? Because El Gran Combo is notorious for solos, and in the city I grew up, wherever there was a food stand, there was a speaker nearby with several older men from the neighborhood sporting hand drums, maracas, claves, and cowbells. Their street-corner musical accompaniment surely transported them back to an earlier time. In a book where the titular character acts as a vehicle that allowed me to seamlessly travel back and forth through history and time, El Gran Combo and other bands like them were the vehicles that allowed the old folk in the community to travel back as well.
Celia Cruz – La Vida es un Carnival
Raised in a household riddled by all of the mentally/physically/spiritually deteriorating outcomes of being from a socioeconomically strained community created an environment of suffering, apathy, and delusion. It’s only natural for people to use and/or enjoy the arts (such as music) to heal and create joy. I sure did. First it was listening to music, then experimenting with composition, and later I turned to writing where I began healing, learning, and unlearning. There’s beauty in that creation, as Celia Cruz mentions in her song, “There’s no need to cry, because life is a carnival, it’s more beautiful to live singing.”
Africa Bambaataa, The Soulsonic Force – Planet Rock
Hip hop turned 50 last year. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention its influence on the book’s storytelling, as well as hip hop as an extension of my own artistic style. One of the many threads the book follows is the quest in answering what exactly is “Puerto Rican”— or more generally— what plays into the Latinx identity, especially for someone who wasn’t born and raised on their island of origin. In the city of Newark, everything from the vernacular, to the street art, to the way one expresses themselves through their clothes was very hip hop. Even in high school, when I was really into the emo and metal subculture, I now realize that it still had a very East Coast urban edge to it. Africa Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” making an appearance late in the book was a nod to hip hop’s inception, as well as the experimentation that goes hand in hand with self discovery.
Grupo Afro Boriqua, Director William Cepeda – El Doctor Guenaga
I’d say the heartbeat of the book is felt when this bomba song is evoked in the libretto, “Papi Pichón Prescribes Bomba.” Bomba, a traditional musical style and dance in Puerto Rico that is rooted in the history of African slavery and storytelling converges with the mythos of Papi Pichón in the book’s climax, bringing the spirits of our past, present, and future together. This bomba song talks about the summoning of the vejigante, another Puerto Rican folkloric character that also falls into the trickster archetype. Sections of “El Doctor Guenaga” are interwoven throughout the libretto that discusses the historic connection of music from precolonial to postcolonial times. These periodic interruptions from the vejigante act as disruptions in the libretto, as if to say the vejigante is making sure that it’s memory isn’t lost in the timeline.
Jamiroquai – Virtual Insanity
Though Balún is the most contemporary artist on this list, Jamiroquai’s “Virtual Insanity” was ahead of it’s time, charting the 1990’s dive into technology as well as where we were headed. Shortly after “Papi Pichón Prescribes Bomba,” after the climax where we’ve surveyed much of the romantic commercialization of Puerto Rican culture and experienced the bomba libretto where we ventured into our precolonial/colonial histories, Papi Pichón takes a stab at creating different futures: venturing into technologies that evolve colonialism and commerce into our present crypto-colonialism. Papi Pichón begs the question as to what’s to happen next, but even our counter-hero falls into this perpetual history.
Dimitri Reyes is a Boricua multidisciplinary artist, content creator, and educator from Newark, New Jersey. Dimitri’s book, Every First and Fifteenth (2021) is the winner of the Digging Press 2020 Chapbook Award and his poetry journal, Shadow Work for Poets, is now available on Amazon. Some of his work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and you can find more of his writing in Poem-a-Day, Vinyl, Kweli, & Acentos among others. He is also the Marketing & Communications Director at CavanKerry Press.