Miguel Pinero

Puerto Rican playwright, poet, film and TV actor, best known as one of the co-founders and leaders of the "Nuyorican" art movement in the mid-1970s. Miguel Piñero (19 December 1946, Gurabo, Puerto Rico — 16 June 1988, New York City, New York) wrote several award-winning theatrical plays and critically-acclaimed books of poetry and co-founded [url=https://discogs.com/release/14461772]Nuyorican Poets Café[/url] in Manhattan's Lower East Side. He was a primary collaborator and early "patron" of his boyfriend, a Chinese-American painter and visual artist [url=https://discogs.com/artist/5353187]Martin Wong[/url] (1946—1999). Piñero also had dozens of secondary and episodic roles in popular TV series and films.

Miguel Piñero moved to New York City with his family in 1950 when he was four. Miguel attended four different schools and began hustling the streets in his early years; Piñero's first arrest was for theft when he was only eleven. In 1959, thirteen-year-old Miguel joined a street gang, increasingly involved in more severe and violent crimes. In 1971, when 25-year-old Miguel Piñero was incarcerated for second-degree armed robbery, one of his first poems, Black Woman with a Blonde Wig On, won a local literary competition. (It was Marvin F. Camillo (1937—1988), a New York-based director and founder of iconic ex-convicts' theater company "The Family," who submitted Piñero's poem without his knowledge). Piñero wrote and staged his debut play Short Eyes (74), at the prison's playwriting workshop. The performance was reviewed by legendary theater and movie critic Mel Gussow (1933—2005) for The New York Times, which became Piñero's breakthrough. When he was released on parole, Miguel already had several offers to stage Short Eyes, which earned numerous awards and accolades.

Around 1973, Piñero co-founded the Nuyorican Poets Café in Manhattan's Lower East Side with Pedro Pietri, [url=https://discogs.com/artist/567990]Miguel Algarín[/url] and several other Puerto Rican writers and poets. It became the cornerstone and epicenter of the eponymous "Nuyorican" movement, bringing together writers, painters, musicians and actors from Puerto Rico who lived and worked in New York. Miguel Piñero began acting in the late 1970s, playing secondary roles in dozens of TV and film roles, including Allan Moyle's music drama Times Square (1980) and two Miami Vice episodes. In 1982, Miguel Piñero met his boyfriend and primary collaborator, Martin Wong, at the opening night of the Crime Show exhibition at ABC No Rio. Piñero introduced Wong to the Lower East Side crowd, and they lived together for several years, mutually inspiring and supporting each other. Several of Wong's paintings were based on Piñero's poems or prose.

Piñero died, aged 41, from cirrhosis and had ashes scattered across Manhattan's Lower East Side of Manhattan, according to wishes stated in his 1985 "Lower East Side Poem:"

Just once before I die,
I want to climb up on a tenement sky
To dream my lungs out till I cry.
Then scatter my ashes thru
The Lower East Side…