Miguel Piñero

Puerto Rican playwright, actor, and leading member of the Nuyorican literary movement.

• Born: December 19, 1946
• Place of birth: Gurabo, Puerto Rico
• Died: June 16, 1988
• Place of death: New York, New York

Biography

Miguel Antonio Gomez Piñero is an important member of the Nuyorican (New York and Puerto Rican) literary and political movement that crystallized in the late 1960s and early 1970s in New York City. Born in Puerto Rico, Piñero moved to New York City with his parents when he was four. His father, Miguel Angel Piñero, abandoned the family four years later, and Piñero subsequently experienced the poverty, marginalization, and crime of New York’s lower East Side. Piñero remained devoted to his mother, Adelina, as his poems and his opening dedication to Short Eyes—an excerpt from “El Cumpleaños de Adelina,” a poem by Miguel Algarín—reveal.

At an early age, Piñero fell victim to his harsh environment: he began hustling and taking drugs and soon entered the world of petty crime that was to shape his future. A truant, shoplifter, and drug addict by his teenage years, Piñero never graduated from junior high. He was convicted of armed robbery at age twenty-four and was sent to Sing Sing, the notorious New York prison. It was in prison that Piñero experienced his literary awakening, thanks to a theater workshop established at Sing Sing by Clay Stevenson. Like that of most Nuyorican authors, Piñero’s experience as a marginalized Puerto Rican in the United States was to become the source of much of his literary output.

Through Stevenson’s prison workshop, Piñero began his first and most recognized play, Short Eyes (1974). While still in prison he came into contact with actor and activist Marvin Felix Camillo, who had formed the Family, an acting troupe of former inmates, and who encouraged Piñero’s writing and acting. Once out of prison, Piñero worked with Camillo and the Family to develop Short Eyes for performance. The play moved from its opening in the Riverside Church to Off-Broadway, to the Public Theater with the help of producer Joseph Papp, and finally to the Vivian Beaumont Theater. In 1974 Piñero received the Drama Desk Award for outstanding new playwright and the Obie Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best American play.

Piñero’s success in playwriting put him in contact with the thriving Puerto Rican literary and political community. In the mid-1970s, as a member of the Nuyorican artistic community, Piñero cofounded the Nuyorican Poets Café with poet Miguel Algarín, and he and Algarín also edited Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings (1975). After a return to Puerto Rico, Piñero's work began to reflected the displacement of the Puerto Rican experience in the United States: he and his fellow artists felt accepted neither in their homeland nor in the country to which that land belongs. Such alienation is a major tenet of Nuyorican literature. Like the dialogue of his characters, Piñero's poetry—and the poetry of the Nuyorican movement—was characterized by oral performances in an apparently improvisational style, reflecting the influence of the Beat poets, of Puerto Rican street culture, and of the emerging African American rap and hip-hop styles. Piñero continued to write and see his plays performed, but none were to have the success of Short Eyes.

Piñero wrote the screenplay and performed in the film version of his play Short Eyes, released in 1977. From the early 1970s into the 1980s, he made multiple guest appearances in television and cinema. Most notably, he played a series of drug smugglers and ne’er-do-wells in such television series as Miami Vice (1984), The Equalizer (1985), and Kojak (1973). On film, he appeared in Breathless (1983), Exposed (1983), and Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981).

In addition to working in Hollywood, Piñero also taught writing at Rutgers University and received a Guggenheim Fellowship for playwriting in 1982. Such activity and influence in his community could not help in his battle against addiction, however, and Piñero continued to struggle with drugs and alcohol. He died in 1988 of cirrhosis of the liver.

Piñero’s Short Eyes remains his most successful and enduring contribution to American playwriting and reveals his primary concerns with ethnic and racial alienation in the United States, the all-controlling power of violence, and the hope of individual triumph against such terror. In addition, it offers a window into the language—a mixture of Spanish, English, street language, and profanity—that in many ways embodies the world of New York’s Lower East Side, where Nuyorican literature developed and thrived. His later works, although virtually ignored by literary critics, reveal Piñero’s continued focus on the language, alienation, and perseverance of his community. Despite his close dealings with the New York and Hollywood elite, Piñero remained rooted in his lower East Side, Nuyorican experiences.

In December 2001, Piñero, a film of the author’s life directed by Leon Ichaso, opened in limited release and prompted renewed interest in the author and actor, particularly in his poetic performances. The film had the support and cooperation of Piñero’s friends and family. Actor Benjamin Bratt’s performance as Piñero, particularly in his “performance” of Piñero’s poems at the Nuyorican Poets Café, suggests the intensity and immediacy of his poetry as performance that mere readings of Piñero’s work cannot impart.

Author Works

Drama:

Short Eyes, pr. 1974, pb. 1975

The Sun Always Shines for the Cool, pr. 1976, pb. 1984

Eulogy for a Small Time Thief, pr. 1977, pb. 1984

A Midnight Moon at the Greasy Spoon, pr. 1981, pb. 1984

Outrageous: One-Act Plays, pb. 1986

Poetry:

La Bodega Sold Dreams, 1980

Screenplay:

Short Eyes, 1977 (adaptation of the play)

Teleplay:

“Smuggler’s Blues,” 1984 (episode of Miami Vice)

Edited Text:

Nuyorican Poetry: An Anthology of Puerto Rican Words and Feelings, 1975 (with Miguel Algarín)

Miscellaneous:

Outlaw: The Collected Works of Miguel Piñero, 2010

Bibliography

Bernstein, Lee. “Miguel Pinero: Prisoner, Playwright.” UNC Press Blog, U of North Carolina P, 19 Dec. 2009, uncpressblog.com/2009/12/19/miguel-pinero/. Accessed 12 June 2017. A brief overview of Piñero's life and career, with a focus on the work he produced in prison. Published in advance of Bernstein's book America Is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s (2010), which discusses Piñero at greater length.

Camillo, Marvin Felix. Introduction. Short Eyes: A Play, by Miguel Piñero, Hill and Wang, 1975, pp. vii–xiii. Helps explain the process by which Piñero moved from inmate at Sing Sing to author and performer, then to award-winning Broadway playwright. Also contains an analysis of the play.

Maffi, Mario. “The Nuyorican Experience in the Plays of Pedro Pietri and Miguel Piñero.” Cross-Cultural Studies: American, Canadian and European Literatures, 1945–1985, edited by Mirko Jurak, English Dept., Edvard Kardelj University of Ljubljana, 1988, pp. 483–89. Primarily a literary analysis of Pietri and Piñero’s works, but also examines the environment of New York City in the 1970s in which Puerto Rican authors developed and against which they constructed identities. Explains the importance of language in Nuyorican works and the centrality of poetry and theater to the aesthetic.

Piñero, Miguel. Interview. By Norma Alarcón McKesson. Revista Chicano-Riqueña 2, no. 4, 1974, pp. 55-57. Piñero explains his purpose in writing, his relationship with Marvin Felix Camillo, his reasons for writing plays, and his desire to write collaboratively. The interview took place while Piñero visited the Free Street Theater of Chicago and while Short Eyes was still on the boards in New York.

Hentoff, Nat. “Piñero: ‘I Wanted to Survive.’” The New York Times, 5 May 1974, www.nytimes.com/1974/05/05/archives/pinero-i-wanted-to-survive-it-took-me-a-long-time-to-admit-to.html. Accessed 12 June 2017. Describes a discussion with Piñero that took place when Short Eyes was on stage at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater. Provides helpful insight into Piñero’s life in New York.

Saldivar, Jose David. “Miguel Piñero.” Biographical Dictionary of Hispanic Literature in the United States: The Literature of Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Other Hispanic Writers, edited by Nicolás Kanellos, Greenwood Press, 1989. Contains a brief biography, a discussion of the major themes of his work, a survey of criticism, and a bibliography.