SPOTLIGHT: Salima Rivera, Puerto Rican Poet & Latino Institution Builder

Rivera wrote thoughtful and powerful poems that would scatter about the literary landscape and eventually, against all odds, come to be considered among the enduring works of her era. She also activated bold and desperately needed ideas to combat social injustice and create institutions that would give the Latino artist community the kind of support that appeared unlikely to come from anywhere else. -Marc Zimmerman

The impassioned poetry reading by Salima Rivera (Salima Rivera Moya, 1946-2004) was a highlight of the 1979 Festival, captured on video by Eleanor Boyer and Karen Peugh. In their Festival production, we hear Rivera read two poems: one, “Pilsen,” would be published three years later in ECOS, University of Illinois Chicago Circle’s Latino journal, in an issue with poems by Sandra Cisneros and Carlos Cortéz and photos by MLEA’s Diana Solís. “Pilsen” would become Rivera’s most recognizable poem, according to the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame upon her 2019 induction. The poem addressed the neighborhood where she lived as a Puerto Rican soon-to-be mother, cultural activist, poet, and organizer. Exemplifying the inter-ethnic bonds in a city with numerous Latino diasporas, “Salima Rivera always emphasized her Mexican ties, from her Mexican foster parents to her Mexican husband [artist Oscar Moya] and friends” (Zimmerman, Defending Their Own, 4).  Interdisciplinary artist and researcher Nicole Marroquín (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), who designed this poster, alerts us to Rivera’s performance of this “scorching poem about Pilsen gentrification, so hold on to your hat, because she goes hard” (Festival de Mujeres Part 1). Also captured in the Festival video, Rivera reads her poem “The Crazy Women from Plaza Mayo” about the mothers of the disappeared who started demonstrating in the public square in front of Argentina’s presidential palace only two years before. 

This choice of poems and featured readings of Chicago Puerto Rican poets Rivera and Marta Collazo reflect the Festival’s rootedness in the Pilsen neighborhood, its vision that included Puerto Rican women and Latinas of other ancestries, and the inclusive feminism of MLEA staff beyond national borders towards Latin America and the Caribbean.

Rivera was born in the small town of Isabela, Puerto Rico and arrived on the mainland with her parents soon after. During a strike at her father’s workplace, Utah’s Anaconda Mining Company, her family moved to Chicago; Rivera was raised in Little Italy, near Pilsen. Like most Puerto Rican women of her generation, Rivera had limited formal education, graduating from Crane Technical and Richard Vocational High Schools but not completing her college degree. A “largely self-taught” poet, she “played a vital part in Chicago’s Latino literary renaissance of the 1960s and 70s” (Chicago Literary Hall of Fame). Alongside her mentor David Hernández, Rivera founded the literary workshop Los Otros Poetry Collective and El Taller. This Puerto Rican cultural center was one of many groups and organizations started in the late 1960s with the purpose of empowering Chicago’s Puerto Rican community politically, socially, and culturally after the 1966 Division Street Uprising against police violence (Zimmerman, Defending Their Own). “It was difficult for Latino artists in Chicago,” said her brother Jaime Rivera. “There weren’t many venues. We had to start creating our own. Salima became one of the preeminent organizers in the Latina community” (Chicago Literary Hall of Fame).

In the Festival video, Rivera also tables for El Taller, where she displays and sells silkscreen posters and T-shirts and the Spring 1977 issue of Revista Chicano-Riqueña, the first US Hispanic literary magazine co-founded by Nicolás Kanellos (who would later found Arte Público Press). This special issue, “Nosotros,” featured poetry and visual art by Puerto Rican and Chicano cultural workers of Chicago and is where Rivera’s poems and artwork were first published. At the time of the Festival, Rivera was assistant director of Casa Aztlán’s Art Center; she had also been involved in the community organizations Movimiento Artístico Chicano (MARCH), and the Association of the Latino Brotherhood of Artists (ALBA), the first Latino arts organization in Chicago. 

From 1985, Rivera worked as project coordinator for the Harold Washington mayoral administration’s Office of Special Events. The city’s first Black mayor was part of an multiracial movement that included African Americans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and progressive Whites for change and the political empowerment of people of color. As part of this effort, Rivera was instrumental in organizing the early, free Viva! Chicago Latin American Music Festivals in the downtown Loop area’s Grant Park. This annual event, which continues today, features a panorama of Latinx and Latin American music and makes visible the centrality of Latinos and their rich cultures in the city.

After years of balancing writing poetry, raising a family, and laboring as a “Latino institution builder,” (Chicago Literary Hall of Fame), Rivera-Moya died prematurely of ovarian cancer in 2004. Rivera’s wide-ranging cultural work “leads us not just to nationalism, but to perspectives that move beyond to a vision of Latinidad, and then still further toward internationalism as well as the possibility of a future mulitracial coalition” (Zimmerman, Defending Their Own, 89).

TO LEARN MORE: Salima Rivera, Chicago Literary Hall of Fame (2018 Inductee) https://chicagoliteraryhof.org/inductees/profile/salima-rivera

For more about proposed urban renewal in Pilsen during the 1970s and opposition to Plan 21, the focus of Rivera’s poem “Pilsen,” see An Echo of Pilsen: ‘The Call’ Against the Chicago Plan 21 by DePaul University Library Staff. 

To learn about the history of Puerto Ricans and racial politics in Chicago, including the Division Street Uprising of 1966: Pérez, Gina, "Puerto Ricans and postwar racial politics in Chicago"

For more on Mayor Harold Washington’s transformative election and administration: Achieving the Dream: Harold Washington (WTTW)

For Rivera’s poem “Pilsen” and other early work by Chicago’s writers and artists including Sandra Cisneros and Diana Solís, see the Winter 1982 ECOS volume.

SOURCES

Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. “Salima Rivera.”“Salima Rivera.” Accessed June 16, 2022.

Marroquín, Nicole. "Festival de Mujeres Part 1.” Last modified January 22, 2018 

Hernández, David, ed. “Nosotros.” Special issue, Revista Chicano-Riqueña 5, no. 1 (Winter 1977). 

Pérez, Gina. “Puerto Ricans and postwar racial politics in Chicago.” Centro Journal. XIII, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 47-71.

Rivera, Salima. “Pilsen.” ECOS: A Latino Journal of People’s Culture & Literature. 2, no. 1 (Winter 1982): 13-14.

Zimmerman, Marc. Defending Their Own in the Cold: The Cultural Turns of U.S. Puerto Ricans. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011.