For the benefit of any blanquitos in the audience, the play opens with a slideshow glossary of Puerto Rican slang, for words like ghost (cuco), mistress (chilla) and several nicknames for male genitalia (use your imaginación).
Five of his best-known mosaics are in East Harlem, including his most recent portrait of Julia de Burgos, the Puerto Rican poet whose words were as influential as her life was tragic.
The words "Puerto Rican" stood out from the rest; they seemed to spring naturally from his mouth, whereas the English words dropped out like stillborns.
A new Puerto Rican superhero spreads the word about social justice and the island's debt crisis.
Although Keats had illustrated other authors' books and had collaborated with Pat Cherr in writing "My Dog Is Lost!" (1960), about a Puerto Rican boy, Juanito — the book featured Spanish words long before "Sesame Street" was broadcasting them — "The Snowy Day" was the first work he created entirely alone.
In them he turned the words of Puerto Rican poets and verses from popular songs into patterns of lacelike filigree, preserving but transforming their messages.
As a Puerto Rican, I find Harry Belafonte's words about Secretary of State Colin L. Powell -- that he is like a slave who has "come into the house of the master" -- offensive and out of sync with the times.
The introduction to the album, as described by Elijah Wald of the Los Angeles Times, "sounds like a lovely Baroque chorale - unless one speaks Spanish, in which case it becomes immediately evident that it's an ornate canon of the filthiest words in Puerto Rican street slang".
In Terrence McNally's 1975 comedy, The Ritz, Puerto Rican spitfire, Googie Gomez, minced no words as she informed one of the bathhouse's clients "I was in a production of Camelot once -- dat show was a piece of chit!" And yet, because of its idealism and some of its musical numbers, Lerner & Loewe's lumbering show continues to exert a strange appeal on audiences.
If anything, she said, it diminishes the experiences of older Puerto Rican migrants, on whom the word was used like a bludgeon.
