My Own Private West Side Story: What I Learned from Puerto Rican Outlaw Artist Miguel Pinero
Although I haven’t seen Steven Spielberg’s new “West Side Story” movie, I saw the original when I was 10 and loved it. It didn’t surprise me, though, to read a couple of reviews of the remake by critics who resent its caricature of Puerto Rican people and culture, and feel outraged that 60 years after the Oscar-winning film opened, “the overwhelmingly White world of Hollywood,” is still stifling the voices and stories of “actual Puerto Ricans,” as Julio Ricardo Varela’s piece in The Washington Post complained.
This has me scratching my head and wondering what one actual Puerto Rican that I once knew — a Puerto Rican who was also an acclaimed playwright, poet and actor in multiple Hollywood films and TV shows, and who had his own life turned into a movie — would have said about this controversy.
Unfortunately, I’ll never know, because Miguel Pinero, author of the award-winning prison drama “Short Eyes,” and a driving force behind the Nuyorican Poets Café and Nuyorican Literary Movement, died of cirrhosis in 1985. At only 41, he succumbed to a stereotypically sex-, drugs- and crime-riddled mean-streets lifestyle that seemed to fuel his decidedly atypical creative life. “I have to keep doing bad to keep the writing good,” he once said.
