SOURCE: Allen, Frank. A review of Red Beans. Library Journal 116, no. 16 (1 October 1991): 100.

In the following review, Allen praises Cruz's use of “Spanglish” in poetry and essays which speak in “a hybrid accent as spicy as salsa.”

“Migration is the story of my body, it is the condition of this age,” says Cruz (b. 1949 in Puerto Rico) in Red Beans, a collection of his poems and story-essays that explore the difficult marriage between “Northern Americana” and the “Hispano-Criollo-Caribbean” culture. With a hybrid accent as spicy as salsa, this energetic poet advocates a “society of the Americas,” an enriched “racial and spiritual mixing” of diverse cultural values in which “the popular muse belongs to everybody.” (“The Caribbean is a place of great convergence,” he says.) Using the “person-to-person” voice of the campesino (it's been called “Spanglish”), Cruz discusses Old San Juan, Columbus, low riders, Hispanic-American writers, and colorful Puerto Rican...