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<h1 id="reader-title">On Puerto Rico</h1>
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<div id="reader-estimated-time">by Vincent Toro </div>
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<h2><strong>A Portrait of an Island</strong><strong> as
Gentrifier's Playground</strong>
</h2>
<pre><i>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.</i></pre>
<p><strong>RINCON</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Spain officially made Puerto Rico a colony in 1493.
Through permits given out by the Spanish crown, known as
<em>cedulas</em>, 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 <em>cedulas</em>
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.</p>
<p>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.)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p><strong>PALMAS DEL MAR</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>Technopoly</em>),
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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!</p>
<p><strong>DON’T YOU WISH YOUR ISLAND WAS HOT LIKE MINE?</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>This is why Jesus Colon wrote in <em>A Puerto Rican in
New York and Other Stories</em>, “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…”</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p><strong>Post-<i>Hurricane Maria</i></strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
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<pre><strong>Vincent Toro</strong> is the author or <em>STEREO.ISLAND.MOSAIC.</em>, 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’s <span class="aBn" tabindex="0" data-term="goog_2047933247"><span class="aQJ">Saturday</span></span> Program, and is a contributing editor at <em>Kweli Literary Journal</em>.</pre>
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