If you've heard of the Nuyorican Poets Café before, the small but iconic space on East Third Street in the historic Boricua “Loisaida” (the Puerto Rican moniker for Lower East Side, in Manhattan) neighborhood, probably its founding poets Pedro Pietri or Miguel Piñero or its famed poetry slam competitions first come to mind. Karen Jaime's The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida elegantly corrects this long-held equation between Nuyorican and cisgendered, heterosexual, Puerto Rican males by presenting us with a comprehensive archive of queer performers, audiences, politics, and aesthetics within the café’s walls that transcends them and extends globally.
The book's captivating title points toward the breadth held in the term Nuyorican. As Jaime explains, Nuyorican was a pejorative term used by island-based Puerto Ricans to describe those with Puerto Rican heritage based in the continental United States. The term was appropriated by Miguel Algarín and Miguel...
