[News] Puerto Rico - A Portrait of an Island as Gentrifier's Playground

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://queenmobs.com/2017/10/toro-portrait/


  On Puerto Rico

by Vincent Toro
------------------------------------------------------------------------


    *A Portrait of an Island**as Gentrifier's Playground*

/This essay was written months before Hurricane Maria. In the aftermath 
of the hurricane, the tensions I tried to articulate have become 
amplified, and for the first time in decades Puerto Rico and its 
colonial situation have become part of our national discourse. Much has 
been said of the President’s lack of action and his comments about the 
Puerto Rican people, but I fear his attitudes toward the island are 
being branded as the actions of a lone crazy person drunk on his own 
power, when history shows us that his treatment of the Puerto Rican 
people is in line with how American political leaders have dealt with 
the island since 1898. His behavior toward Puerto Rico may feel like a 
caricature of this oppressive relationship between the island and the 
U.S., but this caricature speaks a truth about how the American ruling 
class truly feels about the country's non-white, non-English speaking 
citizens./

*RINCON*

My first time in Rincon was back in 2003. My wife and I had not yet 
married, but I was eager for her to meet my family that still lived in 
Puerto Rico. While there, she expressed a desire to try her hand at 
surfing, and though Puerto Rico is home to literally hundreds of 
beaches, Rincon is the only one that holds claim to a dedicated surf 
culture. We went to Rincon so she could surf, but found so much more 
there. Or perhaps much less.

With the nearest major city a thirty minute drive away, Rincon is less 
congested and more serene than the tourist ridden coasts near San Juan. 
We appreciated that people there were not rushing around in an attempt 
to knock things off their sightseeing list or peddling cartoon coqui 
t-shirts on every street corner. It seemed to us that people go to 
Rincon to do absolutely nothing, a state of being that is all too 
welcome, and rare, for overworked city folk like ourselves.

So ten years later when we agreed to create our own personal writer’s 
retreat, we decided to go back to Rincon. My wife and I rented a cozy 
one room flat from Joe, an American retiree from New Orleans who married 
a Puerto Rican school teacher and bought a home in the Corcega area of 
Rincon. The flat’s most appealing feature was its generous patio that 
stretched out across a hill perched directly above the beach. Each night 
as we dined on the terrace we caught a sunset we were sure was more 
astonishing that the one we saw the day before.

All around us life blossomed at a seemingly exponential rate, as if it 
were impossible for things to not grow there. Mangos trees were so 
fertile that most just fell off the trees and rotted on the roadsides 
faster than anyone could collect and consume them. Lizards, birds, 
coquis, cats, and insects all took up residence in and out of our 
cabana’s front yard. Each night we dined on the terrace as we witnessed 
the sun set over Desecheo Island.  More than once my wife called Rincon 
paradise.

Rincon, which means “corner” in Spanish, is in fact a hidden little 
corner on the Northwest tip of the island. But the place actually takes 
its name from Don Gonzalo de Rincon, who founded the city in 
approximately 1770. Don Gonzalo inherited the land, which was originally 
a sugar plantation, from Don Tomas de Castellon. Gonzalo was Castellon’s 
most loyal employee. Castellon rewarded this loyalty by leaving the 
plantation to Gonzalo when he died. What Don Gonzalo did with this 
inheritance from Don Castellon was truly remarkable: He gave it all 
away, returning the land to the poor jibaros (farmers) whose families 
lived in service to it for generations. To fully appreciate the 
magnitude of this giveaway, we need to bear in the mind some details 
about Puerto Rico’s colonial history.

Spain officially made Puerto Rico a colony in 1493. Through permits 
given out by the Spanish crown, known as /cedulas/, Spain created legal 
means to take the land from the natives and distribute it to Spanish 
vassals who would colonize the island for the crown and take control of 
the territory. But the /cedulas/ were only land grants. The King still 
“owned” the land up until 1778. When the crown finally did remit the 
territory that year as a tactic to appease those crying for autonomy 
from the crown, it certainly was not to those at the bottom of the 
colonial hierarchy. Most of it was ceded to the vassals and Spanish 
noblemen who created a hacienda plantation system in which the majority 
of the general population was forced into slavery or serfdom. To just 
give away thousands of acres of land to the poor is certainly a good 
deed, but to do it during a time of colonial slavery was nothing less 
than revolutionary.

Over the course of a few hundred years the impact of this “socialist” 
act of returning the land to the rightful owners has been undone. 
Colonialism has evolved along with the rest of the world, the invaders 
developing new, more sophisticated, less brutal tactics for imposing its 
will and seizing what it wants. The current face of Rincon, while still 
inhabited by working class native Puerto Ricans, is littered with 
English speaking “immigrants” from the mainland Unites States. Ernest 
Hemingway would have called these people, as he called himself and his 
American friends living in 1920’s Paris, “Ex-patriots.” (I read online 
recently someone saying that an “Ex-patriot” is someone who looks down 
upon the population that they have chosen to move next to, while an 
immigrant is someone who looks at their new neighbors with admiration.)

The hills of Rincon are home to dozens of inns and small stores that are 
almost entirely owned by American ex-patriots. The first wave of these 
immigrants from the North found their way to Rincon due to the 
popularity it garnered from surfers after Rincon hosted the World 
Surfing Championship in 1968. The laid back, bohemian lifestyle of the 
surfing subculture has since taken hold over the area, an attitude 
visible in every retired yuppie, beach bum, middle-aged divorcee, and 
white champagne liberal fed up with the workaholic tendencies and 
conservatism of mainstream America.

Wherever they came from, they must have made their way to Rincon with a 
bountiful savings account, as they clearly had enough resources to 
purchase property and establish businesses there; funds most natives 
certainly don’t have available to them. Gentrification, the new 
colonialism, is in full effect along the area’s two main roads, 115 and 
413.  The narrow, snakelike roads weave up into the hills, back down 
along the beaches, and back again. Along these routes you’ll find Banana 
Dang, the town’s very popular smoothie shop, The Lazy Parrot Inn, The 
English Rose Inn and Breakfast Restaurant (where you can have a 
traditional English breakfast. How very colonial!), Tamboo Seaside 
Grill, The Wine Cellar Café, and The Shipwreck Grill, which is near the 
ironically named Taino Divers, a company that provides snorkeling and 
scuba diving expeditions at prices most indigenous Boricuas could never 
afford. Admittedly, in these establishments the food was sometimes 
delicious, the staff was usually polite, if not friendly, and the 
ambience was as relaxing as a mid-day siesta on a cozy hammock. It’s 
hard to complain about good food, breathtaking views, fun music, and 
friendly conversation. But it is even harder to ignore that there is 
nothing remotely Puerto Rican about these establishments. The town still 
has a few Puerto Rican owned businesses, such as the restaurant Rincon 
Criollo, and E.C. Panaderia (Bakery). However, we rarely saw Ex-pats 
frequenting those spaces.

Three years after our writers retreat in 2013, we returned to Rincon for 
a family vacation, only to find that the white American owned businesses 
had multiplied.  The town is now rife with establishments that are not 
owned by native Puerto Ricans and do not pretend to cater to them. 
Having ourselves a date night away from the rest of the family, my wife 
and I went to the town square for a drink and found ourselves at The 
Rincon Beer Company.

In the bar there was not a single conversation occurring in Spanish, and 
though my own Spanish is terrible, I found this to be unsettling given 
where the bar is located. The bar’s owner, Sage, approached us with a 
beer and asked my wife and I how we liked Rincon. To signal to him that 
we were not ex-pats or tourists, I explained that I come to Rincon 
regularly and that I have family all over the island. Sage responded 
with a non-sequitur by inviting us to the art fair that is held every 
Thursday in the square.

Within minutes he was gringo-splaining  to us how “nothing was here” in 
the plaza just three or four years ago, how he and others are trying to 
make the place more exciting, that they were there to “help” the town’s 
economy. I had to bite my tongue. My urge was to interject with some 
Fanon and Galeano, school him on the history of colonizers casting 
themselves in the role of savior, but I was supposed to be having a 
pleasant night out with my wife. So instead, I smiled and nodded, 
silently marveling over how more than five hundred years since the first 
colonization, whites have never lost their superpower of voluntary 
blindness, of not seeing anything that they don’t want to see.

My wife, trained as a journalist, has always told me that she likes to 
remain quiet and friendly in those situations because if you let people 
keep going they will eventually reveal more. This proved to be 
absolutely correct, for as Sage felt more comfortable talking to us, he 
eventually backpedaled from his speech on his gentrifying heroics by 
confessing that, though business has been “okay,” it’s been difficult to 
get Puerto Ricans to come into the bar.

A few days later I would find myself glad that Sage at least expressed a 
desire to engage with the islanders. Looking to catch a sunset on the 
last day of that family trip, my wife and I went to The Beach House, a 
seaside bar with an absolutely exquisite view. The Beach House, like The 
Rincon Beer Company, was almost entirely devoid of native Puerto Ricans. 
But at The Beach House, both the patrons and the staff made it clear 
that the presence of natives, or anyone who wasn’t a white, English 
speaking, American, was not welcome there. Neither the bartenders nor 
the owner would look my wife in the eyes the entire time we were there. 
Being an Afro-Latina in the U.S., my wife is no stranger to this 
attitude. She’s gotten such responses in places like Wisconsin and 
Texas, but it felt absurd that a Latina should be made to feel 
ostracized in a Latin American country by those that are foreigners.

I suppose in some respects I prefer these new hipster immigrants in 
Rincon to the time share occupiers on Isla Verde or the cruise ship 
tourists who commit daily consumerist drive-bys in Old San Juan before 
they set off to the next “Third World Shopping Mall” on their itinerary. 
There are few places as beautiful as Rincon. I couldn’t fault anyone for 
wanting to spend the rest of their life there. I dream of doing just 
that myself.  Yet I can’t help but consider the narrative arc of a land 
that was taken from the indigenous population, to be given back to them 
a few hundred years later by a man of the people, only to be 
re-appropriated another 150 years later, through the modern day 
imperialism of real estate development, by people who consider 
themselves rebels turning their backs on the American Dream.

The presence of the American immigrant in Rincon is empirical evidence 
that Magical Realism could have only been born in Latin America. In 
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ “100 Years of Solitude” the fate of the people 
of the town of Macondo is forever changed with the coming of the 
railroad. Once the outside world has access to their village, their town 
becomes a hurricane of inexplicably odd events that lead them all 
simultaneously to prosperity and tragedy. I recall cruising along the 
road that cuts through a mango farm, strewn with Burger Kings and 
Walgreens, and in front of me a kid in a Kobe Bryant jersey riding a 
horse while a a retired yuppie in a mint condition Ford Mustang shoots 
past us, and thinking to myself, “Puerto Rico is Macondo. Macondo is 
Puerto Rico.”

*PALMAS DEL MAR*

Juncos, where my uncle Mario and aunt Chi-Chi and their families live, 
is on the eastern part of the island, about 45 minutes southeast of San 
Juan. The last time we stayed with them we arrived on the night of Noche 
de San Juan, an annual event where tens of thousands of Puertorriquenos 
jump into the ocean at midnight to wash away their sins. Mario agreed to 
drive us to Naguabo to see the festivities, but he insisted that he 
first take us to Palmas Del Mar, “to see the big houses.” My aunts and 
cousins applauded his suggestion by waxing poetic about how celebrities 
like Bruce Willis vacation there. They obviously didn’t know or remember 
that I had been there several times in my life, and I was starving and 
had no interest in waiting longer to eat so we could stare at other 
people’s homes, but it had been years since I’d seen them and did not 
want to spoil their excitement, so we obliged.

As a child I stayed at one of the hotels at Palmas del Mar with my 
parents on a couple of occasions. My abuela’s house in Juncos had no air 
conditioning and it often lost water for long stretches of time as a 
result of the house being built so high up in the mountains, which 
sometimes irritated my very American mother to the point of her 
insisting to my father that they rent a hotel room just to shower and 
cool off. Palmas del Mar was quite an expensive shower, a shower that 
also conveniently left them a stone’s throw from their beloved casino, 
but when you’re a bunch of Sorta Ricans from Nueva York used to a 
certain amount of mass produced convenience, a kind of illogical 
desperation for comfort can consume you. Admittedly, my younger self 
looked forward to these overnight visits, primarily because as a child I 
had a fear of the sea and enjoyed that I could swim in a pool, but also 
I had never seen anything like Palmas del Mar in my short life. You 
certainly weren’t going to find this kind of luxury in my working class 
New Jersey neighborhood. At ten years old, I had only seen places like 
Palmas del Mar in movies; movies usually involving gangsters.

Built in the 1970’s just at the apex of the Caribbean Resort boom, 
Palmas del Mar is a 2,750 acre resort, casino, and “master-planned 
community” less than 20 minutes from Juncos at the end of Route 30. Like 
the town of Rincon, Palmas del Mar also existed on territory that was 
once a sugar plantation- the largest on the island, in fact. This isn’t 
exactly a coincidence, as Spain had turned nearly half of the island 
into sugar plantations by the mid-1700’s. Though it’s no surprise that 
the two regions had parallel fates, they stand as twin symbols, 
empirical evidence of colonization’s far reaching impact.

We were greeted at the front gate to the resort by two guards. Mario 
explained to them in Spanish that we were all headed to the casino. When 
I asked my tio why he lied about going to the casino he told me, “if 
you’re from P.R. they won’t let you in unless you’re going to spend 
money in the casino.” Minutes after the guard’s inquisition of our three 
tailgating vehicles, we were cruising through the unlit roads to catch 
glimpses of the manors, most of which were designed to emulate the 
Spanish colonial design brought by the island’s first colonizers. While 
the designs evoked the Spanish architectural tradition, it was mostly 
veneer. The structures were nonetheless void of any cultural or 
historical resonance, a reminder that Puerto Rico is very much part of 
the American Technopoly, where, to paraphrase Neil Postman (from his 
book /Technopoly/), one must exist as an ahistorical being in order to 
garner the privileges of a state that trades away a life of meaning for 
technological comfort.

The buildings and their roads, mostly uninhabited in a gated community 
where the majority of the homeowners live for just a few weeks every 
year, felt frigid, even in ninety degree heat. The vacancy of it all was 
more than literal. This feeling would later be juxtaposed by the 
electricity of Naguabo during the festival, the roads packed with thirty 
year old Hondas, local bands jangling out bomba and plena tunes while 
kids run through the dark kicking up sand, the adults sipping from cans 
of Medalla and ordering another plate of pinchos.

Out of nostalgia mixed with intellectual curiosity, we returned a few 
days later to this “master-planned community” hoping to learn something 
more about the island’s resort culture and the people who inhabit these 
spaces. As American tourists in a rental car, we were able to enter the 
resort with much less explanation than when we had been there with our 
family. What we saw in daylight was also considerably revealing. We 
learned that the houses my uncle took us to were not the “big” houses, 
just the ones we were allowed to get near. Now we could see that most of 
the housing communities were sectioned off and protected from the 
general public by electronic gates. In essence, Palmas del Mar is a 
series of gated communities within a gated community, fortresses within 
fortresses within fortresses, like a Borges story with a spa and happy hour.

The parts of Palmas del Mar that we did have access to were essentially 
strips of pre-fab mansions, golf courses, and corporate hotels that 
serve as the offensive line perched between the line backers (the pesky 
natives) and the quarterback (the beaches). Buzzing between them were 
schools of golf carts, most of them not en route to the golf courses. My 
wife, upon seeing the townhouses and mansions, remarked that she was 
shocked at how boring two million dollar homes could actually appear. I 
agreed that two million dollars should at least buy you living quarters 
that look different from all the other houses on your block. Palmas del 
Mar had far more money and far less charm or imagination than Rincon.

While having lunch at the resort’s boat harbor, I couldn’t help but 
crave a return to the less polished, quirkier, decidedly more 
ecologically sensitive ambience of Rincon’s café’s and bars. Palmas del 
Mar is like every resort on every island in every country around the 
globe, a symbol of excess built by the local peasants to appease the 
pleasure centers of the world’s ruling class, but like a McDonald’s or a 
Starbucks, it promises that ruling class that there will be nothing 
unexpected or original. You won’t live like a king, you’ll live like how 
you think a king lives. Or more accurately, you’ll live like how an 
advertiser has told you king’s live. Yes, Palmas Del Mar insures comfort 
and a semblance of luxury, but it also insures that you will feel 
“better than,” that what you are indulging in is only accessible to 
those who have the kind of bankroll that can only be earned with a 
fervent dedication to exploitation. It reminds me of something I heard 
Chris Rock say about being on Broadway where most people of color could 
not afford to see him perform, “In the old days, they used to have signs 
up that said ‘Whites Only.’ Now they have a new thing. It’s called prices.”

I won’t deny that Palmas Del Mar is pretty, but for me it feels more 
like the title of the Sex Pistols song, “Pretty Vacant.” It is void of 
the constant chatter and booming laughter of the bars and cafes in town 
further inland. You probably won’t get eye contact from guests, 
residents, or staff. And Unlike Rincon, those who have come to occupy 
space at Palmas del Mar don’t even pretend to have any interest in 
Puerto Rico’s heritage and cultural gifts. Here Puerto Rico is 
completely reduced to island pastiche. They want the palm trees, the 
serenity of the beaches, the perfect weather, occasionally a taste of 
the local cuisine, but everything else they can do without. It makes me 
wonder why such people venture thousands of miles away from their homes 
to live, permanently or temporarily, where they don’t want anything to 
do with the people who live there. Are the weather and the view that 
enticing? I could never imagine myself handing over a small truck full 
of money to travel to a country that I had no interest in learning 
about. Why not get a five star hotel in your own country? Is the home 
they come from that ugly and repressive? Does it produce a stimulating 
flood of endorphins in their brain to know they’ve taken something from 
someone else and denied them access to it?  Or do they just like paying 
to see brown people serve them? I ask all this with genuine interest, 
void of sarcasm (okay, maybe with a little sarcasm).

Rincon and Palmas Del Mar are two of the faces of Global Neoliberal 
Capitalism. Both are implemented through real estate development 
contracts, marketing strategies, and branding. Both depend on forcefully 
destabilizing the economy of a territory in order to seize the resources 
at a bargain. In Rincon, the culture of hipster gentrification reigns, 
where all things, though given unequal value, are welcome at the table 
to mix and mingle, as long as the colonizer makes a profit. If you are a 
native you can play there too, but you can’t own any of it. Palmas del 
Mar however, is the embodiment of the ultra elite and conservative brand 
of colonialism that seizes the land and resources and cuts the native 
population almost entirely out of the equation (save the bell hops and 
pool cleaners).

This is what is what happens to land when it is not owned and controlled 
by its native residents. It is class stratification disguised as luxury 
and glamour available to all, if you have the cash to pay for a piece of 
it. And who among us can really afford that? Sure, they’ll let you in to 
leave your weekly paycheck at the card table or to have a drink at the 
poolside bar to fantasize for 5 minutes that you live like the 1 
percent, but who do you have to be and what do you have to do in order 
to gain entrance to the gate within a gate within a gate? And isn’t this 
a much more pleasant way of keeping the undesirable natives out. The 
“Whites Only” sign just wouldn’t fly anymore, it’s too brutal and can 
get ugly. Now the colonizer has something much more savvy and 
sophisticated. Like Chris Rock said, now they got prices!

*DON’T YOU WISH YOUR ISLAND WAS HOT LIKE MINE?*

Rincon and Palmas del Mar are two vastly different environments sprawled 
across the same tiny island. One is a bohemian hideaway for foreigners 
(and a few natives) in search of the perfect wave or refuge from the rat 
race. The other is a 3000 acre V.I.P room at the night club where the 
patrons get to place themselves at the top of the imaginary social 
hierarchy they’ve constructed in their minds (though a few come for a 
$200 shower). Both are former sugar plantations, wrought with the class 
struggles and concentration of wealth implicit in any capitalistic 
center of mass production. Ironically the two communities of invaders 
see themselves as different. The white hippies of Rincon would judge the 
white resort crowd as conservative and dull, and the resort crowd would 
look down upon the Rincon hippies and hipsters as without culture or 
ambition. Yet they both serve the same gentrifying/colonial master.

Now with La PROMESA, after U.S. interests have forced a bankruptcy of 
its economy, Puerto Rico is being carved up, sold off to Wall Street 
vulture fund capitalists, and versions of Rincon and Palmas Del Mar are 
going to sprout on the landscape like hives faster than you can yell 
“bomba!” And to insure that there are plenty of pool cleaners and 
porters, the vulture fund invaders have already forced the closure of 
184 schools on the island and are pushing tuition hikes at the 
University of Puerto Rico, because it’s hard to come by cheap labor to 
serve as waiters and hotel maids if the population is educated. But 
remember, we have to be thankful about all this because, as Sage made it 
clear to us, there was “nothing” here before the immigrants from the 
north came to the island anyway. First they made this “nothing” into a 
plantation, then into a military outpost, and now it is a playground for 
the global elite.

This is why Jesus Colon wrote in /A Puerto Rican in New York and Other 
Stories/, “So when you come to the door of a Puerto Rican home you will 
be encountered by this feeling in the Puerto Rican, sometimes 
unconscious in himself, of having been taken for a ride for centuries. 
He senses that 99 persons out of 100 knock at his door because they want 
something from him and not because they desire to be his friend…”

My Cuban mother-in-law says that of all Latin Americans, she finds 
Puerto Ricans to be the sweetest. Of course my bias leads me to agree 
with her. Yet I know this sweetness is understandably served with a hint 
of bitterness, of the kind of skepticism that Jesus Colon wrote about. 
And I wonder if maybe we’ve been too welcoming, too friendly. Perhaps 
then maybe we wouldn’t live with the painful history of erasure and 
forced transition from autonomous paradise to outpost to plantation to 
playground for the wealthy.  And I worry that the fate of this U.S. 
territory with an unemployment rate twice as high as the mainland is to 
forever serve for the pleasure of the global elite. And I have to think 
that in some respect the blanquito immigrant occupiers must feel a 
little jealous that their points of origin were lacking in this kind of 
flavor. Consider this: If Puerto Rico was just a dead block of dirt and 
ice in the South Pole, would the Arawaks, Caribes, Spanish, English, 
Dutch, Portuguese, French, and Americans all have spilled so much blood 
trying to possess a piece of land only one hundred miles by thirty five 
in length?

*Post-/Hurricane Maria/*

Now that Puerto Rico’s infrastructure has been completely destroyed, the 
mechanisms of disaster Capitalism are ready to be set in motion. Before 
the hurricane, Wall Street was already pushing to take control of the 
land and resources through the PROMESA Bill. The decimated economy will 
now make it easier for this corporate takeover of the island to take 
place. Way back in 2005 when the current President was just a failed 
businessman and reality TV blowhard, he went on television in the 
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and said what the business world was 
already thinking: that the Hurricane would be good for he and his 
associates because it will be easier for them to get past bureaucratic 
red tape and community resistance to their projects. The community 
doesn’t resist when they’re too busy looking for clean drinking water.

As I watch the news come in about the situation in Puerto Rico, my 
thoughts keep returning to his claim, because I know that is exactly 
what he and others are thinking right now: that Puerto Rico is once 
again ripe for the taking. So when I see the delay to temporarily lift 
the Jones Act, the lack of action on the part of FEMA and other federal 
agencies, I can’t help but see the feigned incompetency and idleness as 
a sophisticated form of aggression.

And yet I have hope, if not in U.S. leadership, then in the Puerto Rican 
people and our millions of allies. I have hope that we will learn from 
this and become unified. Puerto Ricans have long been torn about our 
relationship to the U.S. 1/3 of us are complacent and okay with the 
Commonwealth status, 1/3 are for independence, and 1/3 support 
statehood. Perhaps the aggressive mishandling of Hurricane Maria relief 
and the President’s overt racism and hostility might get some of us to 
see that we cannot rely on America to be our caregiver.

Many private citizens, as well, have been generous in a way the federal 
government has not. One, Orlando Bravo, a Puerto Rican tech billionaire 
based in the Silicon Valley, has donated 10 million dollars to relief 
efforts and is bringing medical supplies to the island with his private 
plane. Donations have been pouring in by non-billionaire, non-Puerto 
Rican citizens as well. I have been deeply moved by people’s acts of 
kindness and solidarity. Their willingness to help and their desire to 
understand has helped me through the despair I have felt the last two 
weeks. But then I read that it will take 30 years for the island to 
completely recover. I’ll be 72 years old. How many people will die of 
neglect before there is recovery? And who will the island belong to when 
we get there?

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Vincent Toro*  is the author or/STEREO.ISLAND.MOSAIC./, which was awarded the Sawtooth Poetry Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He is recipient of a Poet’s House Emerging Poets Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, The Caribbean Writer’s Cecile De Jongh Poetry Prize, and the Metlife Nuestras Voces Playwriting Award. Vincent teaches English at Bronx Community College, is poet in the schools for Dreamyard and the Dodge Poetry Foundation, is writing liaison for Cooper Union’sSaturday  Program, and is a contributing editor at/Kweli Literary Journal/.

-- 
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