Clemente Soto Vélez
Clemente Soto Vélez was a significant Puerto Rican poet, journalist, and political activist, born in Lares, Puerto Rico, in 1905. Orphaned at a young age, he was raised by his godfather, a political refugee from the Dominican Republic. Initially pursuing a career in electrical engineering, Soto Vélez found his true passion in writing and became a key figure in the avant-garde literary movement called Atalayismo during the late 1920s. This movement sought to innovate Puerto Rican poetry by challenging traditional forms and embracing radical themes, often intertwined with nationalist sentiments and calls for independence from U.S. colonial rule.
Soto Vélez was politically active, aligned with the Nationalist Party, and faced multiple arrests for his revolutionary efforts, including attempts to incite labor strikes and political uprisings. His activism often led to tensions with authorities, resulting in imprisonment and forced exile to New York City, where he continued his advocacy for Puerto Rican independence and worked as a journalist. Despite his challenges, he remained prolific as a poet, publishing notable works that explored themes of identity and social justice, including "Caballo de palo" and "La tierra prometida." Soto Vélez’s legacy endures as a vital part of the Puerto Rican literary and political landscape, symbolizing the intertwined nature of cultural expression and the fight for autonomy. He passed away in 1993, leaving behind a rich body of work and a commitment to social and political justice.
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Subject Terms
Clemente Soto Vélez
Puerto Rican-born writer and activist
- Born: January 4, 1905
- Birthplace: Lares, Puerto Rico
- Died: April 15, 1993
- Place of death: San Juan, Puerto Rico
Poet and journalist Soto Vélez is best known for cofounding the avant-garde literary movement La Atalaya de los Dioses and his radical activities on behalf of Puerto Rican independence. A lifelong innovator of language, he was dedicated to both literary and political revolution, searching for a socialist promised land in both his poetry and his political commitment.
Early Life
Clemente Soto Vélez was born in Lares, a small town in western Puerto Rico known for being the seat of a revolt for independence from Spanish rule in 1868. Orphaned at the age of seven, he was taken in by his godfather, Francisco Mercano, who had escaped from his native Dominican Republic in disguise after being imprisoned for rebelling against the dictator Ulises Heureaux.
At the end of World War I, Soto Vélez’s brother returned from the battlefields and suggested that he apprentice himself to a painter in Arecibo. Soto Vélez lived with the painter for more than a year, but soon Soto Vélez realized that his true talent was in writing.
In 1918, Soto Vélez moved to San Juan, where he lived with his sister and studied electrical engineering. After graduation, he found a position at the American Colonial Bank but preferred frequenting the literary and political gatherings at the Ateneo Puertorriqueño (Puerto Rican Athenaeum) and the Carnegie Library, one of the few free libraries in the city.
Life’s Work
In the late 1920’s, Soto Vélez and his friends created an avant-garde literary group called La Atalaya de los Dioses (Watchtower of the Gods), which spearheaded a literary movement known as Atalayismo. Much like Dadaism in Europe, Atalayismo attempted to break from traditional Puerto Rican poetry with unusual rhythms, themes, and imagery. The Atalayistas polarized Puerto Rican intellectual society in the 1930’s by disparaging the work of traditional poets, wearing their hair long, using strange pseudonyms, and dressing in outlandish clothing.
La Atalaya was also firmly grounded in Puerto Rican nationalism and the overthrow of U.S. colonial rule. One of the most militant members of La Atalaya and the Nationalist Party, Soto Vélez was arrested several times throughout the 1930’s for his revolutionary activities, including an attempted takeover of the capital building in San Juan in 1932 and the instigation of a sugar workers’ strike in 1934.
In the meantime, his Atalayismo poems were published in numerous Puerto Rican periodicals, among them índice, Alma Latina, and El Nacionalista, the official paper of the Nationalist Party. In 1928, Soto Vélez was hired as a journalist and later editor-in-chief of the newspaper El Tiempo but was dismissed after writing an editorial that favored laborers over sugar-company interests. He also founded Armas, a weekly pro-independence newspaper, which he edited until 1936.
That year, in the aftermath of the assassination of U.S.-appointed police chief Colonel E. Francis Riggs, Soto Vélez was arrested for seditious conspiracy with seven other prominent members of the nationalist movement, including fellow poet Juan Antonio Corretjer and party leader Pedro Albizu Campos. A local jury found them innocent, but the verdict was overturned by a second jury handpicked by the notorious Governor Blandon Winship. Soto Vélez was sentenced to seven years in federal prison. Escalio (fallow land), a series of philosophical essays that he wrote while awaiting retrial, was published by his friends in 1937, when he was shipped to the federal prison in Atlanta, Georgia.
In 1940, Soto Vélez was released and, upon returning to Puerto Rico, immediately violated the conditions of his parole by delivering four fiery speeches for the Nationalist Party. He was arrested again and served the remainder of his sentence in Lewisville, Pennsylvania.
Released in 1942, Soto Vélez was not allowed to return to Puerto Rico. Moving to New York City, he quickly became immersed in radical politics. He was an organizer for radical politician Vito Marcantonio and founded a Puerto Rican wing for the American Labor Party. The many Puerto Rican political, economic, and social groups that he organized included the Puerto Rican Merchants’ Association, Casa Borinquén, and Casa Cultural del Bronx.
Soto Vélez also returned to journalism, working as an editor for the important literary weekly Pueblos Hispanos from 1943 to 1944 and contributing to the progressive journal Liberación from 1946 to 1949. In the 1950’s, he founded and edited a magazine called La Voz de Puerto Rico en Estados Unidos.
Soto Vélez was most prolific as a poet in the 1950’s. His first book of poetry, Abrazo interno (Inner Embraces), was published in 1954, and was followed by Árboles (Trees) in 1955. Considered his masterwork, his 1959 book of poems Caballo de palo (Wooden Horse) is an aching search for Puerto Rican identity. The paradoxes and dreamlike imagery in these works is interspersed with invented words and uniquely coupled with a socialist vision. In his epic work La tierra prometida (The Promised Land), published in 1979, the promised land is not only an independent Puerto Rico but also an egalitarian socialist society.
In the late 1980’s, Soto Vélez returned to Puerto Rico and joined the Committee in Defense of Culture, which opposed the political movement to make Puerto Rico the fifty-first state. He died in 1993 at the age of eighty-nine.
Significance
Soto Vélez’s poems are considered some of the best examples of the Puerto Rican literary movement Atalayismo. He lived his life serving the Atalayista belief that literary revolution went hand in hand with political revolution. In both his writing and activities on behalf of Puerto Rican independence, Soto Vélez attempted to bring about a promised land that was free of oppression and injustice. He was an innovator of language, who admired the use of Spanglish and searched for a way to spell words so they would always be pronounced correctly. Forced to relocate to New York City, he became the bridge between the independence movement in Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican community in the United States.
Bibliography
Espada, Martín. Zapata’s Disciple. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 1998. This book includes several references to Soto Vélez in this book of essays by Espada.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “The Lover of a Subversive Is Also a Subversive: Colonialism and the poetry of Rebellion on Puerto Rico.” In The Lover of a Subversive Is Also a Subversive: Essays and Commentaries, edited by Annie Finch and Marilyn Hacker. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Essay on Soto Vélez’s life and work by poet Espada.
Soto Vélez, Clemente. The Blood that Keeps Singing/La Sangre Que Sigue Canta. Willamantic, Conn.: Curbstone Press, 1991. The only collection of Soto Vélez’s poetry translated into English, with a foreword by poet Martín Espada.