Felipe Luciano (born 1947, East Harlem, New York City) is a poet, community activist, journalist, media personality, and politician.
[2] He is known for his significant involvement in both the Young Lords Party and The Last Poets, and more generally, as "an early and important participant in the awakening of the new consciousness-raising radicalism among Puerto Ricans in New York and across the country in the late 1960s and 1970s.
[4] At age 12 he became part of a gang called the Canarsie Chaplain Division, which was made up of "guys who would go hard if forced to, but would rather look good, go to school, and talk to the ladies.
The Last Poets, whose name was inspired by a poem by K. William Kgositsile and chosen by founding member David Nelson,[8] was "An ensemble of African American and Afro–Puerto Rican poet-performers... known for the powerful and vigorous vernacular immediacy and rhythmic, spoken-word presentations of [their] street-wise, nimble verse, which preceded any formal articulation of a Nuyorican aesthetic and early anticipated the rap compositions of a later era.
[9] Luciano joined founding members Gylan Kain and Abiodun Oyewole who were looking to replace their third co-founder, David Nelson, who had left the group after disagreement about its structure and direction.
"[8] Simultaneous to his involvement with The Last Poets, Luciano was also a member of the Boricua Artists Guild, thereby helping to connect the Nuyorican and Black Arts Movements.
"[4] The organization often used direct action to bring these changes about, most famously occupying the First Spanish Methodist Church in East Harlem for 11 days under Luciano's leadership.
"[11] As for Luciano's role in the group in particular, editor of Puerto Rican Poetry: An Anthology from Aboriginal to Contemporary Times, Roberto Márquez writes that, "He was instrumental in its success in promoting an agenda of militant direct action and community empowerment, ethnic pride, and civil rights, which fought against the discriminatory typecasting of “Puerto Ricans as a community of rural immigrants.
"[9] Editors of The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, Juan Flores and Miriam Jiménez Román agree, writing "The ascendancy of the Young Lords Party in the late 1960s attests to the participation of Latin@s in the African American Civil Rights and Black Power movements and to the first generalized affirmation of Blackness among young Puerto Ricans born in the United States.
"[10] In the brief biography and analysis of his work that accompanies Felipe Luciano's poems in Puerto Rican Poetry: An Anthology from Aboriginal to Contemporary Times, editor Roberto Márquez writes that Luciano's "verse brought fresh urgency; novel dimension; and significantly new stress, passion, and popular authority to the scene with its unequivocal assertions of black pride, its ethnic self-assertion, and its unambiguous denunciations of an unjust society whose social inequities, racism, class hierarchy, disenchanting conceits, and moral hypocrisy '.
'"[3] Luciano has not yet published a collection of his poems in book-form, but his poetry "most frequently reached its intended audience and achieved its broad general effect and popularity through the oral, visual, and compelling immediacy of its presentation in public readings, on records, in film, and as contributed to Pa’lante, the alternative newspaper of The Young Lords.
"[3] Luciano's most famous work is titled "Jíbaro, My Pretty N*****", which "[challenges] Puerto Ricans to accept their Blackness, island roots, and shared plight with African Americans.
[3] His work compares to that of Pedro Pietri, Sandra María Esteves, Victor Hernández Cruz, and other Nuyorican poets of the 1970s who similarly "[incorporated] a strong sense of Black cultural identity in their proclamation of a United States-based Puerto Rican reality.
[12] He was one of six candidates who ran in the primary election for the same office in 2005, his opponents being Nelson Antonio Denis, Joyce S. Johnson, Edwin Marcial, Melissa Mark-Viverito, and John Ruiz.
[12] The issues he emphasized were affordable housing—preserving "the character and diversity of our neighborhoods" with the help of rent control and stabilization—and improving education, including the quality of teachers and facilities, and increasing after-school programs.
"[14] Felipe Luciano worked as a reporter for WNBC-TV's "NewsCenter 4," making him the first Puerto Rican news anchor of a major media network station in the United States.