The NY Times Celebrates Tato Laviera's New Home

Tato Laviera poetry reading
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Months of community awareness, celebratory readings and social efforts have helped famed Nuyorican Poet Tato Laviera settle into a new home.

The New York Times City Room: A Homecoming in a New Home
By David Gonzalez

Tato Laviera may be a standard-bearer for Puerto Rican poetry and literature, but for most of this year he had no place to plant the flag — or hang his favorite Panama hat — after a medical emergency last December left him homeless.

Last week, he finally had a homecoming. He has moved into a bright studio in East Harlem, long the spiritual home of the city’s Puerto Rican population. While he would have preferred to have stayed closer to his beloved Lower East Side, he is no stranger to the area.

“I was supposed to be claimed by Loisaida, by my community, but they couldn’t find a place for me there,” Mr. Laviera, 60, said Tuesday. “In the end, you get claimed by whoever claims you, and El Barrio claimed me. They lifted me up. And it is definitely the center of Puerto Rican-hood in America!”

Complete story is at the New York Times City Room Blog.

Related Links
• Details of Tato Laviera's struggle to find a new home are here.
• Three Poems by Tato Laviera are here.
• Tato Laviera's obra de poesia at Google Books.

The NY Times on Tato Laviera

Poet Spans Two Worlds, but Has a Home in Neither
By David Gonzalez for The New York Times

His poems, in countless anthologies and five of his own collections, are considered part of the Latino literary canon. His plays and lectures have earned him honors etched in flowery superlatives on plaques. But Tato Laviera would rather possess a more prosaic document, written in legalese.

A lease.

Mr. Laviera has known his share of troubles in recent years, including diabetes, blindness and dialysis. But in December, life became infinitely more complicated when he underwent emergency brain surgery. Too unsteady to return to his Greenwich Village apartment, he checked into a nursing home for physical therapy.

Two weeks later, he fled.

Complete story is here.

Laviera reads from his latest book, AmeRícan