Luz María Umpierre
Encyclopedia
Luz María Umpierre-Herrera
(born 1947) is a Puerto Rican poet, scholar, and human rights activist who lives in the United States. She is also known as Luzma Umpierre. She is widely recognized for her open exploration of her lesbianism, immigrant experience, and bilingualism, and for her poetic exchange with leading Nuyorican
poet Sandra María Esteves
. Umpierre has experienced a number of well-documented legal struggles due to workplace discrimination. She currently resides in Windermere, Florida
.
, Puerto Rico
, and grew up in a working-class neighborhood called "La veintiuna" (Stop 21) in a household with sixteen people. Her mother was a return migrant who was born in Puerto Rico but grew up in New York City
; for this reason, Umpierre was exposed to English and Spanish as a child.
Umpierre studied at the Sacred Heart Academy and at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, graduating from both with honors. After several years of teaching at Academia Maria Reina
, she came to the United States in 1974 to pursue a Ph.D. in Spanish at Bryn Mawr College
in Pennsylvania
, which she completed in 1978. She has described her migration as partly motivated by homophobia in Puerto Rico. After receiving her Ph.D., Umpierre went on to teach at several institutions, including Rutgers University
and SUNY Brockport
. She experienced discrimination at both of these. She has done Post Doctoral work at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
, the University of Kansas
, and at Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy
. More recently, she has focused on her work as a human rights activist and received recognitions for her efforts.
s or "hojas poéticas". She has received significant critical attention, particularly from women and feminist and queer scholars. Her work has not received the same kind of attention in Puerto Rico, where she is not commonly included in leading anthologies or mentioned in literary histories.
Umpierre is a bilingual poet who writes in English and Spanish and sometimes mixes both languages in the same poem. In her work, she establishes a conversation with many American, Latin American, and Puerto Rican women poets and writers such as Sylvia Plath
, Virginia Woolf
, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Ana Castillo
, Julia de Burgos
, and Sandra María Esteves
.
Umpierre started out her poetry career with the publication of Una puertorriqueña en Penna (1979), whose title can be translated as "A Puerto Rican woman in Pennsylvania" or "A Puerto Rican woman in pain." In this book, the author offers poems that comment on the discrimination that the Puerto Rican community faced in Philadelphia. She also comments on the prejudice against Puerto Ricans in institutions of higher education, particularly in Spanish departments that judged Puerto Rican Spanish as deficient or incorrect. She also explores these topics in her second and third books, En el país de las maravillas (Kempis puertorriqueño) (1982) and . . . Y otras desgracias/And Other Misfortunes. . . (1985), which shows a marked turn towards more bilingualism.
Umpierre's best-known book is The Margarita Poems (1987), where she openly discusses her lesbianism and offers highly erotic poems about lesbian love. The book also discusses issues of feminist sisterhood, madness, Puerto Rican independence, and immigrant experience. In the 1990s she published her book For Christine (1995). In the first decade of the 2000s, she published two chapbooks or "hojas poéticas": Pour toi/For Moira (2005) and Our Only Island—for Nemir (2009). A volume of her complete works edited by Carmen S. Rivera and Daniel Torres was published in 2011.
; the same critic also recorded a radio program for the Modern Language Association
on this topic. Umpierre has criticized the reading of these poems offered by the scholar William Luis, stating her strong disagreement with his interpretation and went as far as to sue him for defamation of character.
. She developed her ideas further on this topic in an article on Carmen Lugo Filippi's short story "Milagros, calle Mercurio" [Milagros, Mercury Street].
Herrera
-Places:*Herrera de Pisuerga, a town in the province of Palencia, Spain*Herrera Province, Panama*Herrera, Spain, a municipality in the province of Sevilla*Enrique Olaya Herrera Airport*Herrera, Entre Ríos in Argentina*Herrera, Santiago del Estero in Argentina...
(born 1947) is a Puerto Rican poet, scholar, and human rights activist who lives in the United States. She is also known as Luzma Umpierre. She is widely recognized for her open exploration of her lesbianism, immigrant experience, and bilingualism, and for her poetic exchange with leading Nuyorican
Nuyorican
Nuyorican is a portmanteau of the terms "New York" and "Puerto Rican" and refers to the members or culture of the Puerto Rican diaspora located in or around New York State especially the New York City metropolitan area, or of their descendants...
poet Sandra María Esteves
Sandra María Esteves
Sandra María Esteves is an American poet, playwright, and graphic artist. She was born and raised in the Bronx, New York, and is one of the founders of the Nuyorican poetry movement. She has published numerous collections of poetry and has conducted literary programs at organizations including the...
. Umpierre has experienced a number of well-documented legal struggles due to workplace discrimination. She currently resides in Windermere, Florida
Windermere, Florida
Windermere is a town in Orange County, Florida, in the United States. As of the 2000 census, the town population was 1,897. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's 2006 estimates, the town had a population of 2,019. It is expected that the 2010 census will show the town with almost 3000 people...
.
Life
Umpierre was born in SanturceSanturce, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Santurce is a district of San Juan, Puerto Rico.-Summary:Santurce is one of the top ten most populated areas of the island holding Miramar, Loíza, Isla Grande, Barrio Obrero, and Condado as main cultural hot spots for art, music, cuisine, fashion, hotels, technology, multimedia, film, textile and...
, Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico , is an unincorporated territory of the United States, located in the northeastern Caribbean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of both the United States Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.Puerto Rico comprises an...
, and grew up in a working-class neighborhood called "La veintiuna" (Stop 21) in a household with sixteen people. Her mother was a return migrant who was born in Puerto Rico but grew up in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
; for this reason, Umpierre was exposed to English and Spanish as a child.
Umpierre studied at the Sacred Heart Academy and at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, graduating from both with honors. After several years of teaching at Academia Maria Reina
Academia Maria Reina
Academia Maria Reina is a Catholic middle and high school for girls in San Juan, Puerto Rico.-Educative Mission:Academia Maria Reina is a school of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Brentwoood, New York...
, she came to the United States in 1974 to pursue a Ph.D. in Spanish at Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College is a women's liberal arts college located in Bryn Mawr, a community in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, ten miles west of Philadelphia. The name "Bryn Mawr" means "big hill" in Welsh....
in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
, which she completed in 1978. She has described her migration as partly motivated by homophobia in Puerto Rico. After receiving her Ph.D., Umpierre went on to teach at several institutions, including Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...
and SUNY Brockport
State University of New York at Brockport
The College at Brockport: State University of New York, also known as SUNY Brockport, Brockport State, College at Brockport, or the State University of New York at Brockport, is a four-year liberal arts college located in Brockport, Monroe County, New York, United States, near Rochester...
. She experienced discrimination at both of these. She has done Post Doctoral work at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars , located in Washington, D.C., is a United States Presidential Memorial that was established as part of the Smithsonian Institution by an act of Congress in 1968...
, the University of Kansas
University of Kansas
The University of Kansas is a public research university and the largest university in the state of Kansas. KU campuses are located in Lawrence, Wichita, Overland Park, and Kansas City, Kansas with the main campus being located in Lawrence on Mount Oread, the highest point in Lawrence. The...
, and at Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy
Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy
Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy is a college at The New School within The New School for Public Engagement that teaches Nonprofit Management, Organizational Change Management, Urban Policy, and International Affairs to Master's students, as well as a Ph.D....
. More recently, she has focused on her work as a human rights activist and received recognitions for her efforts.
Poetry
Umpierre has published six books of poetry and two chapbookChapbook
A chapbook is a pocket-sized booklet. The term chap-book was formalized by bibliophiles of the 19th century, as a variety of ephemera , popular or folk literature. It includes many kinds of printed material such as pamphlets, political and religious tracts, nursery rhymes, poetry, folk tales,...
s or "hojas poéticas". She has received significant critical attention, particularly from women and feminist and queer scholars. Her work has not received the same kind of attention in Puerto Rico, where she is not commonly included in leading anthologies or mentioned in literary histories.
Umpierre is a bilingual poet who writes in English and Spanish and sometimes mixes both languages in the same poem. In her work, she establishes a conversation with many American, Latin American, and Puerto Rican women poets and writers such as Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer...
, Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Ana Castillo
Ana Castillo
Ana Castillo is a Mexican-American Chicana novelist, poet, short story writer, and essayist.- Life and career :Castillo was born and raised in an inner city barrio of Chicago, Illinois. After completing undergraduate studies, she immediately began teaching college courses...
, Julia de Burgos
Julia de Burgos
Julia Constancia Burgos García is considered by many as the greatest poet to have been born in Puerto Rico, and along with Gabriela Mistral, is considered as one of the greatest female poets of Latin America...
, and Sandra María Esteves
Sandra María Esteves
Sandra María Esteves is an American poet, playwright, and graphic artist. She was born and raised in the Bronx, New York, and is one of the founders of the Nuyorican poetry movement. She has published numerous collections of poetry and has conducted literary programs at organizations including the...
.
Umpierre started out her poetry career with the publication of Una puertorriqueña en Penna (1979), whose title can be translated as "A Puerto Rican woman in Pennsylvania" or "A Puerto Rican woman in pain." In this book, the author offers poems that comment on the discrimination that the Puerto Rican community faced in Philadelphia. She also comments on the prejudice against Puerto Ricans in institutions of higher education, particularly in Spanish departments that judged Puerto Rican Spanish as deficient or incorrect. She also explores these topics in her second and third books, En el país de las maravillas (Kempis puertorriqueño) (1982) and . . . Y otras desgracias/And Other Misfortunes. . . (1985), which shows a marked turn towards more bilingualism.
Umpierre's best-known book is The Margarita Poems (1987), where she openly discusses her lesbianism and offers highly erotic poems about lesbian love. The book also discusses issues of feminist sisterhood, madness, Puerto Rican independence, and immigrant experience. In the 1990s she published her book For Christine (1995). In the first decade of the 2000s, she published two chapbooks or "hojas poéticas": Pour toi/For Moira (2005) and Our Only Island—for Nemir (2009). A volume of her complete works edited by Carmen S. Rivera and Daniel Torres was published in 2011.
Exchange with Sandra María Esteves
Umpierre is particularly well known for the poetic conversation she has engaged in with the Nuyorican poet Sandra María Esteves, which consisted of two poems by each woman. In 1985 Umpierre published a poem titled "In Response" which offered a pointed critique of the vision of Puerto Rican womanhood advanced in Esteves's poem "A la mujer borrinqueña" [To the Puerto Rican Woman] (in Yerba Buena, 1980). Esteves, in her poem, focused on a figure called Maria Christina, who is presented as a proud mother and wife that participates in her community's struggle against prejudice and oppression. Umpierre criticizes Esteves (and her character of Maria Christina) for her complacency with traditional social views of womanhood, and presents a poetic speaker that argues that her name is "not Maria Cristina" (spelling Cristina in Spanish, without an h) and who does not depend on men. Esteves would then go on to respond to Umpierre in her poem "So Your Name Isn't Maria Cristina," part of Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo (1990) stating that both women have been victims of the patriarchy. Umpierre subsequently commented on that poem in her own "Musée D'Orsay," published in For Christine (1995), and also wrote an essay stating that she holds a sisterly esteem towards Esteves and considers her an important fellow poet. These four poems have been published together in the fifth edition of the Heath Anthology of American Literature with an introduction by the Puerto Rican scholar Lawrence La Fountain-StokesLawrence La Fountain-Stokes
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is a gay Puerto Rican author, scholar, and performer. He is better known as Larry La Fountain. He has received several awards for his creative writing and scholarship as well as for his work with Latino and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students...
; the same critic also recorded a radio program for the Modern Language Association
Modern Language Association
The Modern Language Association of America is the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature...
on this topic. Umpierre has criticized the reading of these poems offered by the scholar William Luis, stating her strong disagreement with his interpretation and went as far as to sue him for defamation of character.
Scholarship
Umpierre has published two books of literary criticism focusing on Puerto Rican literature and numerous critical articles mostly on Caribbean literature and women authors. She is particularly well known for advancing a "homocritical" theory of reading, which she labels as "Homocriticism," suggesting that homosexual readers can be more attuned to perceiving hidden queer meaning in a literary work. Her first article on this subject, appeared in Collages & Bricolages in 1993 under the title "On Critical Diversity" and dealt with the book Fragmentos a su imán by José Lezama LimaJosé Lezama Lima
José Lezama Lima was a Cuban writer and poet who is considered one of the most influential figures in Latin American literature....
. She developed her ideas further on this topic in an article on Carmen Lugo Filippi's short story "Milagros, calle Mercurio" [Milagros, Mercury Street].
Poetry
- Una puertorriqueña en Penna. [Puerto Rico]: Master Typesetting of P.R., 1979.
- En el país de las maravillas (Kempis puertorriqueño). Bloomington, Ind.: Third Woman Press, 1982.
- . . . Y otras desgracias/And Other Misfortunes. . . Bloomington, Ind.: Third Woman Press, 1985.
- The Margarita Poems. Bloomington, Ind.: Third Woman Press, 1987.
- For Christine: Poems and One Letter. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Professional Press, 1995.
- Pour toi/ For Moira. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Mariita Rivadulla and Associates, 2005.
- Our Only Island—for Nemir. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Mariita Rivadulla Professional Services, 2009.
- I'm Still Standing: Treinta años de poesía/Thirty Years of Poetry, eds. Carmen S. Rivera and Daniel Torres. [Orlando, FL]: www.luzmaumpierre.com, 2011. (Available from Lulu.com)
Literary Criticism
- Ideología y novela en Puerto Rico: un estudio de la narrativa de Zeno, Laguerre y Soto. Madrid: Playor, 1983.
- Nuevas aproximaciones críticas a la literatura puertorriqueña contemporánea. Río Piedras: Editorial Cultural, 1983.
See also
- LGBT literatureLGBT literatureGay literature is a collective term for literature produced by or for the LGBT community, or which involves characters, plot lines or themes portraying male homosexual behavior.-Subgenres:...
- List of famous Puerto Ricans
- List of gay, lesbian or bisexual people
- List of LGBT writers
- List of lesbian literature
- List of Puerto Rican writers
- List of writers in Who's Who in Contemporary Women's Writing
- Puerto Rican literature
- Nuyorican MovementNuyorican MovementThe Nuyorican Movement is a cultural and intellectual movement involving poets, writers, musicians and artists who are Puerto Rican or of Puerto Rican descent, who live in or near New York City, and either call themselves or are known as Nuyoricans...