Ricardo Nazario y Colón wears a suit to his formal, professional dealings in university administration. He did the same in Penfield Library, not to officiate a meeting, but for his other passion: poetry.

“Writing is therapeutic,” Nazario y Colón said. “Especially if you cannot afford a therapist.” The audience giggled in response.

Nazario y Colón, the chief diversity officer for the SUNY system, found it natural to read his vulnerable poetry in front of an audience—he has been writing poetry since the early ‘90s. He has an anecdote about sitting on the arm of his mother’s sofa and his mother grabbing his manuscript lying on a chair. Nazario y Colón remembers hearing his mother’s whispers, reading each poem, until she asked, “Did my ma tell you that?” She set the papers down and left the room.

“At that point I knew it was OK to write about anything,” Nazario y Colón said. “I went into publication with a sense of relief.”

As part of a series on Latino masculinity and poetry, Nazario y Colón presented his poetry to students at Penfield Library, as well as his story of learning to articulate and navigate identity. 

His poetry delves into the intersection of race and gender, of masculinity and being Afroboricua, or Puerto Rican of African descent.

The legacy of colonialism, Nazario y Colón explained, lives on through a stigma of African ancestry. While in the U.S. colonialism continued through racial segregation and laws against interracial marriages, in Latin America, people of color were pressured to marry into white Spaniard families to disguise blackness from their bloodline.

Nazario y Colón found it imperative to “ascribe positiveness to blackness” in his poetry.

“There is a saying in the Caribbean: ‘Where is your grandmother? ¿Dónde está tu abuela?’ Nazario y Colón said. “En la cocina. In the kitchen. You never let her come out.”

Roberta Hurtado, the director of Latin American studies at SUNY Oswego, and librarian Michelle Bishop invited Nazario y Colón to speak with students of Hortado’s junior seminar. Hurtado found it important for students to see the several dimensions of university faculty.

“When we have people who are making decisions for education,” Hurtado said, “we want people who can see what’s happening and also be creative and thoughtful about the approaches we can take.”

The series of talks, titled “No Bad Hombres,” was inspired by Hurtado’s frustration with the lack of positive, accurate representation of Latino men in the media. 

“There’s really no representation of Latinos who are artistic,” Hurtado said. “And poetic and who are raising their families. How do we bring that representation to Oswego?”

A grant from the Library of America funded the series, which consists of four talks by four Latino poets, two in the fall and two in the spring. 

The title “No Bad Hombres” calls to mind remarks by former president Donald Trump about deporting “bad hombres,” a statement critics took as reinforcing stereotypes of Latino men as aggressive and violent.

As Nazario y Colón spoke on masculinity and vulnerability he reminisced on growing up with his brother in the Puerto Rican highlands. His poem “Making Dough” is about his relationship with his brother, with whom he shared a lack of a father figure.

To break from the unemotional, unaffectionate nature of machismo, Nazario y Colón started kissing his brother on the cheek.

“To this day now, when we speak on the phone, we tell each other we love each other, we express how much we care,” Nazario y Colón said. “But it took an intentional act that in a way was a little bit revolting to him because he wasn’t raised this kind of way.”

Nazario y Colón said he is now much more willing to tell his male friends and family that he loves them, as an assertion of masculinity, not a rejection.

The poet’s openness resonated with attendees.

“I like the way he used his poetry and art to convey the thoughts, his processes about what it means to form identity,” Sky Minkoff, a student, said.

“It’s always very wonderful to hear these different stories that differ so much from my life,” Delaney Hillman, another student, said, “because it really puts my world more into perspective.”

“There’s a generosity in bringing that into a space like this,” Laura Donnelly, chair of the English and creative writing department, said. “And also another kind of vulnerability and bravery at the same time.”

The location of the talk at Penfield Library felt special to Nazario y Colón, given that his elementary school librarian, “Mrs. Rosa,” was an important influence on his writing. In fact, because of the event, he was able to find that after she left Puerto Rico in the ‘70s, she moved to Rochester. 

Mrs. Rosa just celebrated her 91st birthday.

Photo from State University of New York