PAPOLíTICO, Poems of a Political Puersuasion by Jesús Papoleto Meléndez

Another example is “The Flood Came to Puerto Rico” (p. 109). Papoleto speaks of the devastating
flood in 1971 in Puerto Rico. He sees this weather event with a wide angle lens, tying the flood to
the Rockefeller family’s land holdings on the island. Their wealth and plans for tourist development
necessitate the strict law and order policies that continue to repress Puerto Ricans today. In that very
year of the poem’s creation, the family heir, New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller reacted to the
Attica prison uprising with vicious brutality against prisoners and guards alike, as corrections officers
and the National Guard retook the prison. It is as ironic as it is sad that the original context of a poem
written over forty years ago remains intact, and the Rockefeller reference was simply changed to
“Donald Trump”:
“the flood came to Puerto Rico/
& with it came the red cross
/after the flood
to search for Donald Trump’s golf courses
& summer homes.”
(p. 110)
Papoleto is not a poet in a garret, but a vibrant community activist. Over the years, his poetry has
traversed from New York, to San Diego and Mexico, and to New York again, with intermittent visits to
Puerto Rico. He has given poetry a key role in barrio life on both coasts. As one of the founders of the
Nuyorican Movement, Papoleto has always supported the idea that the arts is a form of activism that
exists in a system that continuously attempts to drown people out.
When Papoleto lived in the San Diego/Tijuana region, he was a Nuyorican ambassador to the Chicano
and Mexican communities. We remember when Papoleto read his poetry at the “Che Café” and at
the legendary events at the La Jolla Museum/UCSD curated by Quincy Troupe and Margaret Porter.
He organized a musical trio, “Exiled Genius,” with Eugene Mingus and M’Chaka Uba performing at
the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park and El Nopal in Tijuana. From the moment we met, we
became close friends and over the years, and have supported Papoleto’s work.
When he returned to New York and to El Barrio (East Harlem) in the early 1990s, the Nuyorican and
Black Arts movements had morphed into a multicultural movement. While Papoleto continued to write
2
JESÚS PAPOLETO MELÉNDEZ