Listening Speaks (I)

Abstract

Some ten years ago I was living in the Washington Heights area of New York City, in what local Dominican New Yorkers refer to affectionately as Quisqueya Heights, when I received a call from someone I’d known nearly twenty years earlier. It was Juan Rivera, whom I’d known from my years as an undergraduate at Yale. I belonged then to a student organization, significantly named after a Puerto Rican independence rallying call, ¡Despierta Boricua!, had an insurrectional afro, and political ideals to match; and as part of our community outreach, we’d go into the New Haven Puerto Rican neighborhood to tutor students at the local high school.

Listening, your heart is in your throat.

—Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat