SOURCE: Cruz, Victor Hernández. “Mountains in the North: Hispanic Writing in the U.S.A.” Americas Review 14, Nos. 3-4 (Fall-Winter 1986): 110-14.

In the following essay, Cruz explores the influence of a rich cultural heritage on contemporary Puerto Rican American poetry, concluding, “It is the job of writers to perceive and explain the truth.”

The earth is migration, everything is moving, changing interchanging, appearing, disappearing. National languages melt, sail into each other; languages are made of fragments, like bodies are made of fragments of something in the something. Who'd want to stand still, go to the edges where you see clear the horizon, explore the shape of the coast? Are poets not the antennas of the race? Then tune into the chatter, the murmur that arises from the collection. Add and subtract, submit it to your mathematics. Take and give. Enlarge, diminish. The Romans ate everything up and...