From: NY Times

The word sounds retro, but its corrosive power lingers. Once a cruelly common taunt that mocked the way Spanish speakers pronounced “speak,” it set off fights, shattered friendships and trampled feelings.

Now that word forms the title of a poetry series — “Spic Up/Speak Out” — at, of all places, El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, on Saturday.

Organizers say that the provocative title is intended as a postmodern take, inviting dialogue and debate over issues of identity. Some of the participating poets have embraced the title as a symbolic inversion of the word, that neutralizes its sting. But others are not so sure.

“I guess I get it, but I don’t like the joke,” said Aracelis Girmay, a young poet who declined to participate. “It would be one thing if it were some underground place, but it’s at an institution. El Museo del Barrio is supposed to be the place that I would expect would guard our culture respectfully. This is giving dangerous permission to that word. It’s inviting it through the front door.”

Julian Zugazagoitia, the museum’s director and chief executive, said in an e-mail message that the spoken-word series was aimed at a young, urban audience interested in social issues and political concerns. The museum, he added, was “proud and excited to act as a platform for all of these issues to be discussed.”

The word is no stranger to creative uses. In his poem, “Beloved Spic,” Martin Espada chronicled how he heard it more often than his name when he moved to Long Island around 1970. The word was the title of an acclaimed collection of short stories by Pedro Juan Soto. A young John Leguizamo was praised for his one-man show “Spic-O-Rama.”

Emanuel Xavier, the poet presiding over the spoken-word event on Saturday, said that the title pushed boundaries in a safe setting. A booklet of featured poems will also include an e-mail exchange among various poets and their feelings about the word.

“For me, it’s about empowerment,” Mr. Xavier said. “Look at everything we have done and accomplished. And it is a play on the word. We are speaking out our truths and identities in very perfect English.”

On one level, the word was a painful part of his childhood, hurled at him by angry classmates when he was bused from Bushwick, Brooklyn, to school in Maspeth, Queens.

But it is equally about today’s teenagers, he said, noting how some Latinos toss around the most common anti-black slur in everyday encounters.

“We never went through the atrocities of slavery,” Mr. Xavier said. “We do not have the right to use that word among ourselves. But spic is a word that we can re-appropriate, that was used to oppress us and box us in a negative way.”

Indeed, its Latino equivalent never had a similar slang life, said Ana Celia Zentella, a linguist who is a visiting professor at Swarthmore College. If anything, she said, it diminishes the experiences of older Puerto Rican migrants, on whom the word was used like a bludgeon.

“It never had any good meanings to it,” she said. “They may be trying to be cutesy, but it really is a jab at the immigrant who spoke Spanish-infused English. That is what makes it a little harder to take.”

Sandra María Estevez still recalls the word from her youth, when it accompanied jabs about pointy-toed shoes and cockroaches. And although she is participating in El Museo’s poetry series, the title upsets her.

“None of the artists, writers and creative thinkers that I know feel anything wholesome or praiseworthy about this choice,” she said. “On the contrary, it reinforces ideas we’ve worked fiercely at challenging and moving beyond from. The choice is unfortunate, not creative, not artistic.”

Julio Marzan, the poet laureate of Queens, saw the use of the word as a comment more on the status of the Puerto Rican literary community than of any single institution. He noted that the term Nuyorican — itself an insult turned proud banner — is often invoked as the only mainland Puerto Rican poetic tradition, even though it overlooks other writers in New York and beyond.

“There is a complete lack of consciousness,” Mr. Marzan said. “There is no adult intellectual attitude. It is a kid’s way of looking at it, but we’re too old for that now. If youth is too dumb to know people already came before and already defined this stuff, there’s a problem.”

But Arnaldo Cruz-Malave, chairman of the Modern Languages department at Fordham University, said that the use of the word was part of a literary tradition; he did not see any reason to be alarmed or to protest.

“You do not want to fall into this dogma where all Puerto Rican or Latino writers have to be serious,” he said. “These two sides exist. But this can be a moment of reflection. I don’t think we have to burn the place down.”

In the weeks since Ms. Girmay declined to take part in the series, she has discussed her concerns with other poets. She was especially concerned about how the word could be used by the young people she encounters in her after-school workshops in the Bronx.

Two weeks ago, she found out.

One of her students, a 17-year-old boy, had written SWA on his notebook. The initials stood for Spics With Attitude, a riff on NWA, an early West Coast rap group. She said he planned to get a tattoo of the initials.

“So, we sat down and had a conversation,” Ms. Girmay said. “Who gave us that word? Just because someone calls us something doesn’t mean we have to include it as part of our identity.”

She asked the boy what his grandmother would say.

“He said, ‘She’d roll over in her grave,’ ” Ms. Girmay said. “It really is not that complicated.”

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