Xochitl Gonzalez on 'Anita de Monte Laughs Last' (Get Lit)
[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]
Kousha Navidar: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart, who's out on medical leave. This hour, we're airing highlights from our March Get Lit with All Of It book club event. In just a bit, you're going to hear a special performance from Caridad de la Luz, the poet, singer, rapper, and executive director of the famed Nuyorican Poets Café. First, let's get this started with author Xochitl Gonzalez.
[music]
Kousha Navidar: In the new novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, author Xochitl Gonzalez drew inspiration from a real-life tragedy to tell a story about what art gets valued, remembered, and exhibited, and why. One protagonist is Anita de Monte, a Cuban-American artist whose star is on the rise. Her photography and body art are disturbing, profound, feminist, and challenging to the majority white art world in the 1980s.
Her career stalls after she begins a romantic relationship with the famed minimalist sculptor, Jack Martin, who seems unwilling to support Anita's art. Their volatile relationship comes to a tragic end when Jack pushes Anita out of a window killing her in 1985. The other protagonist of the novel is Raquel. She's an art student at Brown University in 1998, who's never heard of Anita de Monte until she starts researching Jack Martin for a thesis project. The more Raquel learns about Anita, the more she wonders whether her own life and her own relationship with her artist boyfriend, Nick, might be mirroring Anita's own.
The novel is based on the real story of Cuban-American artist, Ana Mendieta, who died in 1985 after falling out of a 34th-story window here in Greenwich Village. Her husband, the famed sculptor, Carl Andre, was acquitted of her murder. He died earlier this year actually. Xochitl Gonzalez joined All Of It producer Jordan Lauf for a Get Lit book club event in front of a sold-out crowd at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library. Here's Jordan's conversation with Xochitl about her new novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last.
[music]
Jordan Lauf: You've spoken before about how this novel was inspired by Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-American artist who fell to her death from the 34th floor of a building in Greenwich Village in 1985. Her husband, sculptor Carl Andre, was acquitted for her murder, but he actually died earlier this year. When did you first learn Ana's story? Because I have to admit, I was not familiar until I read this book.
Xochitl Gonzalez: Oh, yes. I learned about Ana Mendieta when it was my senior year of college. They don't have any required classes at Brown. I just took a lot of what I liked, which I don't know was the point. I took a lot of art history and art classes. The minority community like the BIPOC community at that time was really microscopic. We all knew each other and people knew I was the art person.
A friend that had graduated gave me a copy of this book on Caribbean art. She'd already been living in New York, whatever. It was like this weird revelation. There was something of Ana Mendieta in there, but there was a lot of artists. It was this crazy revelation in my entire curriculum that was focused on Western art that was almost all just white males like European white males, American white males.
Jordan Lauf: How diverse it is.
Xochitl Gonzalez: Yes, exactly.
Jordan Lauf: Europeans and Americans.
Xochitl Gonzalez: [laughs] Yes, isn't that amazing? It was this bizarre revelation that concurrently made me feel astounded and stupid. I was like, "Wait." I was like, "It didn't occur to me that we have a whole lineage of art and art history," because it just was never given any space, right? I think I was just wandering around ranting about this book. Then an art teacher, a hip-to-it art teacher was like, "Oh, you got to look up Ana Mendieta."
In that way, it played out a little bit like the book because it was like the art department and the art history department were together but then at odds constantly and goes like, "Those clowns." [laughs] She was like, "Of course, they're not teaching her there." I just remember being horrified and then I was just having this conversation with Caridad. Then it was this time in the '90s where I think, especially in New York, we would be hanging out at Nuyorican. There was a lot of teaching each other about our own history at that time on campus, off campus, in the city because we realized there was a lot that we were not being taught in the classroom.
Then it was interesting how you would just then finally encounter more of her work or whatever. She kind of lingered. Then fast-forward 20-something years and, now, I'm in Iowa City and she had been sent on the Operation Peter Pan, which is the Catholic Church and the CIA trying to save Cuban children from communism and airlifting them to America where they spread them around the Midwest in orphanages and foster homes. When I got to Iowa, I was like, "Oh, my God, this poor little girl. This 12-year-old girl just dropped here." It just stuck with me in a completely different way. That was around the time that the book came to me.
Jordan Lauf: When that idea came to you, did Raquel come with Anita-
Xochitl Gonzalez: Always.
Jordan Lauf: -or did she come later?
Xochitl Gonzalez: No, Raquel came first because I was concurrently trying to work on turning my first book into a TV show. It was very difficult. I think Latinos might be the most underrepresented group on television, particularly compared to our population size. It's really like you're trying to do cultural translation with executives that don't speak that cultural language at all. I remember feeling like I wanted to bang my head against a wall after one particular call. Suddenly, somebody said something about art and commerce and it reminded me of a textbook title.
I found myself transported back into my art history classroom. This is deep in the pandemic. I felt like, "Oh, my God," mad. I felt really mad because I thought, "How would this be different, had work like hers and art been told that it was valid? How would that change the way that we see things? How would that change the way that I fight in these calls or don't don't fight but can persuade, whatever?" I just felt like I had been robbed. The idea was born always that it was about the way in which this one individual relationship and the loss impacts Raquel, who represents a whole generation of people.
Jordan Lauf: It was interesting. Reading your book was making me think about another book that I actually had to read for the radio show. A work of nonfiction. The author's name is Bianca Bosker. The book title is, Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See. She is investigating the world of fine arts today.
It was uncanny how little has changed even since your book is set in the '90s in terms of what voices are valued. There was something that she highlighted in the book that really stuck with me was she was interviewing a gallerist, who said something along the lines of, "I wouldn't want to exhibit or work with an artist who I wouldn't want to hang out with." That's so coded in so many ways.
Xochitl Gonzalez: Oh right, it's so coded. It's so coded, yes.
Jordan Lauf: What did you want to explore in this novel about artistic gatekeepers and who decides what gets put up?
Xochitl Gonzalez: Also, I think how little it changed is I think I really wanted to show how gatekeeping and the ways in which these codifications-- In the academic sense in Raquel's storyline, she's studying the artist, Jack Martin, who is based on the Carl Andre-esque character and person because she studies him, but he studies him because it personally meant something to her. Now, she's stuck studying him because it personally meant something to this other guy, right?
Jordan Lauf: Right.
Xochitl Gonzalez: Then when she says, "I'd like to study this other thing," he's like, "Well, there's not enough scholarship for that." The lack of academic history is often used as a way to diminish something as being a legitimate field of study, but then that's how underrepresented communities continue to exist as "enigmas," right?
Jordan Lauf: Right.
Xochitl Gonzalez: It's like these excuses that get set up to invalidate areas of inquiry. Then in the art world, you see because it's not really that different, but it's a pseudo business and that it's done basically based off of relationships.
Jordan Lauf: That was very clear in this book too.
Xochitl Gonzalez: I think you can tell. There was a piece in New York Magazine not that long ago about how it's relationships that drive what goes into people's collections. It's like people's judgments about artists and what their actions and opinions are that judge if they-- They can withhold who they even then sell to. It's very much about the persona of not just the artist, of the owner, and the mutual prestige that goes back and forth. If you were from a group at one point, they're having Anita de Monte's first solo show opening. They invite two male artists to come and talk about women's art. By the way, that was taken from an actual research thing that happened.
Jordan Lauf: That's unbelievable.
Xochitl Gonzalez: It was at a feminist art gallery, right? They were like, "You know what? We don't know that you'd be a draw. You're a third-world woman artist. Who knows if people will come out for that?" The fear and commercial fear is also always used as a justification to not change things or to not take a risk or to silence somebody, right? This is a big gain in this moment. I'd like to have a gain for forever, right?
Jordan Lauf: Right.
Xochitl Gonzalez: Why does it have to be in a passing measure of time? I think that those are still the kind of justifications used. I think what I was trying to do was show how, to an individual, it makes a lot of sense. It doesn't feel like there is part of a system. Done in repetition over the course of time, it is a system. When you have power, that is a system.
Jordan Lauf: Exactly. You mentioned being silenced. Someone who really won't be silenced is Anita.
Xochitl Gonzalez: Oh, yes.
Jordan Lauf: I was interested in the book that Raquel's voice and Jack's voice are written in the third person. Anita is always first person. How did you arrive at that decision?
Xochitl Gonzalez: I had a spiritual encounter with a ghost.
Jordan Lauf: Oh, say more.
Xochitl Gonzalez: I was told that Anita de Monte's ghost lived in this place and I went to visit with it. I said, "I would like to borrow your story in order to give voice to the way the experience felt." The ghost was like, "Okay, but you have to use my voice," and then I felt that that made the most-- I immediately understood what it meant. I'd already written two-thirds of the book.
Jordan Lauf: Oh, wow.
Xochitl Gonzalez: It was all in third person. By the way, it was all in third person. Because when you go to get an MFA, that's the thing that they tell you is good craft. Good craft and good feeling aren't the same-
Jordan Lauf: Totally.
Xochitl Gonzalez: -because the book was so depressing when it was all written in the third person. Because no matter how close, I write pretty close third where it's as close to writing first as you can get with third. You're still like, "Oh, you're having judgment." In that tiny bit of distance, you're having judgment. That judgment is sadness that this person is dead. Then the second that you go to first, now, she's like, "That puta."
Jordan Lauf: Yes, she's angry.
Xochitl Gonzalez: She's mad. It's her feeling. She's not sad about it. She's raving mad. She's like, "You should be mad too." She's showing you and telling you personally, "This is what I would have done. Now that I have a little power, I'm going to use my afterlife power and I'm going to show you and I'm not going to let anything go." She gives her agency. It embodied her with agency. I wouldn't have thought to do that had I not had that experience. I am so grateful for it because then, it's not a person that something happened to you now. It's a personality.
Jordan Lauf: Absolutely.
Xochitl Gonzalez: It's not a personality remembered either. It's a personality in present.
Jordan Lauf: Yes, I really felt that. I think there was one chapter that ended with a couple of lines that were just repeated like, "I want to be alive."
Xochitl Gonzalez: "I want to be alive."
Jordan Lauf: "I want to be alive."
Xochitl Gonzalez: She goes back to torment the woman that tormented her. She has this ability to come back in a different format and she's just picking it. It's like everything that she hated about this woman, she's being perfect, being perfect. Then she's like, "What do you want me to do?" She's like, "He's alive and you're dead." She's like, "I want to be alive." She's like, "What do you think? I don't know I'm dead? I know I'm dead." I think it enabled me to access emotion. A lot of it was because, in a lot of ways, it's a book about domestic violence.
Jordan Lauf: Absolutely.
Xochitl Gonzalez: It's a book about dysfunctional relationships. I think so often when a woman in particular is the victim of violence, they get flat. This was a way to give her dimension.
Jordan Lauf: I wanted to ask about that actually because I loved Anita. I loved reading her. I loved her voice. You did get the sense that she wasn't always the easiest person to get along with.
Xochitl Gonzalez: No.
Jordan Lauf: I think at one point, she even says, "I want them to remember what a fabulous, annoying bitch I was."
[laughter]
Jordan Lauf: Something like that. You're right that when we think about domestic violence, especially victims of domestic violence, they get flattened. Sometimes I think we have this tendency to want to make them seem perfect like a perfect person and a perfect victim, whatever that means. How did you want to challenge that with Anita's character?
Xochitl Gonzalez: Well, I think it's frankly a little bit of a dishonor to the person when you make them perfect because it's not like you can say, "Oh, my God, she would drive me crazy." I had a friend and she was so paranoid about turning 40. She unfortunately passed at 39. I remember every year on her birthday, we'll text. We'll be like, "She'd be so mad. She'd be 46."
We remember how irrationally paranoid about aging she was. It was so annoying in life. Now, it's like this thing that we missed that she was annoying. I think that, for me, keeps her more real than just being like, "Ugh." I think I didn't want to hide that she was difficult and I didn't want to hide that some of the dysfunction of the relationship-- Again, this also is true.
The dysfunction of the relationship ran in a two-way street. The violence was one way, but it ran in a two-way street. I think that felt important to illustrate. I don't know. I think, to me, it felt like a bigger-- to create a character, to really see women. If we're going to write feminist literature, and I really don't mind being categorized that way at all, I think it's like, then write women as complicated and sometimes unlikable.
Jordan Lauf: Something I know also from trying to produce segments about art is that it's really hard to describe something visual like visual art or photographs or sculptures in a format that's not visual. What was your approach to getting the descriptions of Jack's art, of Anita's art, of Nick's art to feel vivid and real for the reader on the page?
Xochitl Gonzalez: Well, I think, finally, I can say I used my undergraduate major.
[laughter]
Jordan Lauf: Very few of us get to say that.
[laughter]
[applause]
Jordan Lauf: That's a rare honor.
Xochitl Gonzalez: It only took 23 years and I finally really used that undergraduate major. All those papers describing paintings and sculptures were not for naught.
Jordan Lauf: Yes, there you go.
[laughter]
Xochitl Gonzalez: It was really great. I had a harder time describing the architecture at Brown because I managed to never take an architecture class. I ended up ordering a history of architecture on Brown's campus book to try to learn what things were called because I felt like that scene where you just see Nick's art. Nick's art was hilarious to describe because it was like I would think about somebody and then I'd be like, "What would be the best derivative version of that?" Then I just imagined what it was and it was so fun to dumb things down 100%. To anybody that's familiar with Providence, that is a sister city to Venice.
One of his art pieces is all-white gondoliers. He calls it "The Great Gondoliers." It's these big sculptures. [laughs] I had a lot of fun with that. I think it felt important to me though that the way in which they'd be described somewhat evoke either character or move story ahead. I think it was important that Anita's art feel really visceral. It was important that Jack's art feel really cool, right? I think there's one part where Raquel's teacher walks out of the building. He exits through Nick's long white shaft, right? It was made by a sculpture, but it still was a long, white shaft. What are these?
Jordan Lauf: Can we say that on the radio? [chuckles]
Xochitl Gonzalez: Yes, about a sculpture.
Jordan Lauf: Yes, of course.
Xochitl Gonzalez: About a portal created by a sculpture.
[laughter]
Jordan Lauf: Let's get to Raquel. We haven't talked about her much yet. We're going to fast forward. We've been in the '80s, talking about the '80s. We're going now to the '90s. You were a student at Brown as well. What was something about your experience there that you wanted to capture through Raquel's experience?
Xochitl Gonzalez: Oh, my gosh. First of all, I was really fixated. Well, first, I have to say, I think I needed to explain to a reader that was really both precious and also insidious that it was a deeply segregated experience because most of the minority students were first-gen. A lot of them were first-gen. A lot were lower-income. Where we worked, the kinds of jobs we worked, the majors that we did, most people were in a pre-professional or trying to help enroll in ethnic studies, to give us ethnic studies.
We were always double-existing. It's like you were existing as an advocate and as a student. You were existing as an activist and as a student because you're like, "We can't stay with this being 6% of this class forever." It was a lot of collective action around that stuff and seeing us in curriculum. I really wanted to highlight the separateness, but I also wanted to talk about feminism and the bizarre time that was presented. I ordered a ton of ladies' magazines from that time when I was working on this. I texted a group of my girlfriends and I was like, "We're lucky we got out of the '90s alive."
[laughter]
Xochitl Gonzalez: It was like, "You want to be powerful? Put on a suit."
[laughter]
Xochitl Gonzalez: These very weird performative ideas of empowerment that were totally performative. I thought it was important to put that in a context because I think it's harder for younger women now to understand how new feminism was and how it came with, "Here's ways to be a woman that's empowered while still being very appealing to a man," right?
Jordan Lauf: Right.
Xochitl Gonzalez: That was '90s feminism. [laughs]
Jordan Lauf: It was interesting too reading it. I felt that Raquel both had many parts of herself that she had to suppress while she was at Brown, but also parts of herself that opened up for the first time while she was there.
Xochitl Gonzalez: Totally.
Jordan Lauf: I wondered what you wanted to explore about that dichotomy. There's part of me that I have to hide here, but I'm also getting a new exploration of myself for the first time.
Xochitl Gonzalez: Yes, I think that is completely it. I think there was also a little bit of pain in that and part of why I made sure to write her family into the story because her growth feels to her mother, in particular, like all growth is growing away. Both the difficulty explaining the reality of her day-to-day and also this inherent wedge, this paranoia that your growth means growing away, and the recognition that it does to some extent.
She is learning all these things. There was an alternative ending to the book where it's her going to campus dance for her own commencement and just how at ease she feels there and making her mom feel comfortable there. It was a little bit too sweet of an ending. I imagine that existing as a thing that happened and that was like being able to take up space. I feel her whole journey is like, "I'm learning to take up spaces that I didn't originally feel comfortable in."
Kousha Navidar: You're listening to Get Lit producer Jordan Lauf's conversation with author Xochitl Gonzalez from our March Get Lit book club event. We spent the month reading her novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last. We're going to hear more of that conversation plus some questions from the audience after a quick break. Hey, stay with us.
[music]
Kousha Navidar: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart. Let's keep going. Airing highlights from the March Get Lit with All Of It book club event with author Xochitl Gonzalez. We spent the month reading her novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last. Our sold-out audience had some really good questions for our author. We're going to hear a few of those in just a minute. Before we get to that, here is more of Get Lit producer Jordan Lauf's conversation with Xochitl Gonzalez.
[music]
Jordan Lauf: Raquel and Anita are two incredibly creative and intelligent and powerful women. They both find themselves in these toxic relationships. They can't seem to fully extricate themselves or even recognize fully at first like, "This is wrong." Why do you think they both end up in this kind of situation?
Xochitl Gonzalez: I think that when you are ambitious and you are trying to navigate your way down a path that nobody forged for you, there's a certain amount of loneliness that comes with that and isolation. I think that they meet this other person and there's a part of them that feels recognized and feels understood or related to. They get a humor. They get a joke. They feel less alone.
Then it's that thing of like, "I don't want to feel alone." That can be addictive in its own way. In both cases, there's a line where Anita says he found something in her heart and opened it up and it was like a sail and he was the wind. I think it's like she had been living this small life and he made it bigger. In both cases, I think that they just didn't know how to get there because nobody had forged that path.
This person does walk them down a little bit. There's a certain amount of gratitude too that's like, "Thank you for doing this, but now you're killing me actually." Anita calls Jack a well-marked bottle of bleach that she keeps drinking from. I think that in both cases, it's a little bit of isolation though. It's like, "This person helped me see this." It's hard to walk away from that.
Jordan Lauf: It feels almost, especially in Raquel's case, like a point of entry into a world that she didn't feel she had access to before.
Xochitl Gonzalez: That's right. I think I didn't want to write characters the way that we wished that people behaved. I wanted to write them more the way that they typically do. [laughs] That felt important.
Jordan Lauf: Absolutely. I did want to take a moment to talk about The New York Times piece about Ana Mendieta's family. I want to just read from my notes to make sure I get it right. Her niece, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, who is the administrator of Ana's estate, expressed some frustration with your novel. She said that she felt like the book blurred the line between fact and fiction. She told The Times that, "Not only are we forced to relive her death over and over again, but we have no say in how she's being portrayed." Now, of course, Anita is not Ana.
Xochitl Gonzalez: No.
Jordan Lauf: You don't have any legal obligation to get the estate's permission to write this book to draw inspiration from her life and work. You dedicate the novel to Ana. I just wanted to give you the opportunity to respond how you felt about what the family had to say. Also, what, in general, do you think is the responsibility of a writer, of an artist, of a creative when drawing inspiration from someone's life?
Xochitl Gonzalez: Well, first of all, I think there have been cases where people have done this with the intention to negatively portray a person.
Jordan Lauf: Right, which is not the case here.
Xochitl Gonzalez: The entire case here was to give this woman, who'd been flattened by something, a chance for that story to have a different ending and an ending where they're empowered. Anita really does have the last laugh in this book, right?
Jordan Lauf: Right.
Xochitl Gonzalez: I think I felt if I had to ask them for permission then, do I have to ask Carl Andre's estate for permission? I think that they'd have some things to say and I think that they'd say, "Don't write this book." I'm not going to ask for permission to be inspired by somebody. One day, I hope I see something and it's like, "I was inspired by Olga Dies Dreaming. I was inspired by Anita de Monte Laughs Last."
I would have to say, that is part of art being in conversation. One day, somebody who loved me even as a kid and who's now an adult will administer my estate and they will feel a way. I, as an artist, it's like you have to just do your art. I walked into it with my heart being set. I got on an international flight to talk to a ghost because somebody told me that my intention was to feel respect for this tragic end, but to give it a continuation. I feel at peace with it.
I think, yes, it's difficult, but people relive her death in much more scandalized ways where it's just much more exploitative ways. I felt at peace with the way in which it portrayed. Anita de Monte, it's equally as much about my frustrations as a creator being out there in the world. That was such a part in my frustrations in love and romance being lived as a woman as much as it was the base of this and what made sense to me reading about that story. I get it, but I also feel comfortable with myself.
Jordan Lauf: I think part of what you get from art that you don't get from a documentary or even, say, the family coming forward and saying, "This is what our relative was like," is there's the artistic connection there because you're making a character. She's in the first person and she feels real to you as the reader. As I said at the beginning, I had not heard of Ana before reading this book.
Xochitl Gonzalez: I think that that was also my hope. It's that people would then find her because it's written. I made up artwork even inspired by, but not exactly. Then people can go to it and, I don't know, think of this person as a lived person and not a dead person, right? I don't know. That's the difference between art and scholarship. That job on my other side is journalism, right? It was a forum to not have to hedge or say, "Well, it's alleged in a jury trial." It was like, "No, here's how it felt when I felt I was pushed out of a window. This is how it felt to go down 34 flights of stairs." He thought it was an end and it wasn't.
Jordan Lauf: For what it's worth, I'm very glad that you wrote it, so thank you for that.
Xochitl Gonzalez: Thank you so much.
[applause]
Jordan Lauf: All right, do we have questions from our audience?
Audience Participant: Thank you. There was a lot to think about in both books, but specifically on Anita de Monte's, there was one scene where I actually had to stop reading for a little bit because it was like, "This is very disturbing." It was a scene with Raquel and the art history girls who I thought that was a hilarious thing because I think we all have art history girls in our lives and the scene where she's bullied. It was just harrowing. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about particularly the art history girls because I really found that disturbing.
Xochitl Gonzalez: I had a crazy incident happened to me in my freshman year at college. It was not art history girls. The art history girls loomed. They just loomed. I'll see them at reunion this year. They'll know who they are.
[laughter]
Xochitl Gonzalez: I wouldn't even say more banal incident, but it's just a dorm-room issue, a dormitory issue. I remember going to a counselor and making the blatant like, "This person's behaving really weird and it's making people uncomfortable." Then the next thing you know, it was like I was locked in a room with the counselor and this kid. They're threatening to sue my family.
Of course, I find out that they had known each other for three generations and giant wealthy family and whatever. I was raised by my grandparents. My grandfather was a retired custodian and my grandmother was a lunch lady. I'm like, "Sue?" You're just like, "What?" The process of trying to get myself let out of that room was a nightmare. I just remembered that being the end of a shattered myth that we were all on equal footing or that it was the same experience for everybody there.
I felt it was really important to borrow that feeling and put a different incident on it. I think the only hurtful thing that I'll say, you put out a book and it's challenging because people review it. People leave Goodreads and you're not supposed to go on there, but the only challenging thing to me was that one reviewer so that they didn't find that plausible. I almost threw my computer when I read that line and was like, "You've got to be--" I was like, "It's plausible because it happens," right?
I know that it happened to other people. The number of people that have already left their own reviews on Instagram or they've sent me notes, it was like, "Something like this happened to me." I knew that this had happened to others, maybe not that dramatically where they were told, "You took something from me. I had something I wanted and you took it from me." I don't know. People don't like to feel that that could be true, but it is absolutely true.
I'd love to say that it doesn't happen anymore. Just a couple of years ago, I was helping somebody with their college something and they were like, "Everybody says I'm only going to get in because I'm Puerto Rican." I was like, "Oh, my God, we're still saying this? I can't believe we're still saying this." A lot of this is like a pain collage. You just tell something from here and throw it over there. Anyway, that was definitely taken from something that actually happened.
Kousha Navidar: That was Get Lit producer Jordan Lauf's conversation with author Xochitl Gonzalez from the March Get Lit with All Of It book club event. We spent the month reading her new novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last. Up next, we're going to hear a special performance from singer, rapper, spoken-word poet, and executive director of the famed Nuyorican Poets Café, Caridad de la Luz. Please stay with us.
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