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Our Latin American Art & Culture series continues this Friday 15th at 7:30 p.m. with two more screenings of videos directed by Toronto based Jorge Lozano.

Puerto Rican Obituary - Pedro Pietri
Upon his discharge from the Army, Pietri affiliated himself with a Puerto Rican Civil Rights activist group called the Young Lords. In 1969, he read for the first time his most renown poem, "Puerto Rican Obituary". The poem which was published in 1973, tells about five Puerto Ricans who travel to New York in search of a better way of life only to find hardships and suffer heartbreaks.

Pietri, helped found the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, together with Miguel Piñero and Miguel Algarín. The Cafe is an institution where many Puerto Rican intellectuals perform. Pietri wrote the play "El Puerto Rican Embassy". The theme was that an island, which was neither an independent nation nor a state of the United States, should have an embassy. The idea for the play came about Pietri's nationalistic views.

During the performance, he would sing "The Spanglish National Anthem" and hand out simulated "Puerto Rican passports".

Paquita La del Barrio
She started her career in Ciudad de México in 1970. In her songs she takes a stance against Mexico's sexist male culture, which has made her popular especially with female audiences. She is known for her common song themes of women empowerment and man bashing; her signature phrase, with which she often teases male spectators in her shows, is "¿Me estás oyendo, inútil?" (Are you listening, good-for-nothing?). Many of Paquita's albums and songs are jukebox staples in Mexican clubs and cantinas, probably her best known song is Rata de dos patas (Two-legged rat)

Labels: Tinto Coffee House

# posted by Taodhg @ 11:17 pm