The Welfare Poets are a New York City poetry collective. Founded in 1990 by Hector Rivera and Ray Ramirez, the Welfare Poets continue to perform, record, and be involved in their community.
EN: What’s the Welfare Poets’ history?
HR: Ray Ramirez and I started listening to Last Poets, to Bob Marley, checking out salsa music and socially conscious music from the 70’s and 80’s. These things gave us permission to write and to express our political voice creatively.
We’ve done educating, organizing, and performing for the past fourteen years. We’re teaching, doing workshops, doing anthologies with the kids and giving them a way to express themselves and communicate, the best way to do it, the fun way, through hip hop and poetry. We deal mostly with hip hop with the kids, because that is what they’re singing and doing, because that’s what they’re saturated with all day. It’s a way to bring critical thinking in youth.
We deal with environmental justice, police terrorism, with the prison boom, with Puerto Rican independence, and political prisoners: Puerto Rican, Native American, African, and all types of anti-imperialists.
EN: You mentioned hip hop as one of your tools for educating and organizing. What exactly is hip hop? Is it an institution, a commodity, a culture, or a movement?
HR: It’s definitely a culture. There’s the art part, the visual art part, the dance part. Hip hop was created by people with no music classes, with the legacy of poetry in their veins, and with the music of the Caribbean also still living within them, mixed with African culture and urban culture. They put it all together. Now it is the voice of black and Latino working class youth.
EN: Where are you trying to take it?
HR: The Welfare Poets have a new album, Rhymes for Treason, and we have around fifteen great tracks, a lot of slow hip hop tracks. There’s a twelve-member band, a whole percussion section. The Welfare Poets want to continue educating, organizing, and performing. We’re going to do summer camps and after school programs. Soon we’re going to be fifteen years doing what we’re doing, and we’ll put out the next album after that.
EN: What are you thinking about this president here and what are you planning on doing in November?
HR: I believe in the diversity of struggle, but one thing that I never had illusions about is the electoral process. My opinion is that we do need the vote to get out, but do much more than that. We need to build accountability systems and keep organizing and pushing politicians after the vote.
So is Kerry going to be better than Bush? Yeah, because Bush is a nutcase and so are the people he represents. We also know that the president is just the guardian of the system, and the real rulers are undemocratic, monopolistic corporations. So vote, and take that fuck out of power, hold these motherfuckers accountable, organize, get down, be creative, heal yourself, heal the earth, and keep moving, keep laughing, and get stronger.
EN: What role do you think that culture can play in bringing people together, especially in the youth movement?
HR: Inspiration and information! Culture is like energy, so we hope to move people to reflect, to move people to move, and to hope for those things. Culture is so important these days because it reaches farther than a pamphlet, it reaches farther than chalk. And I’m talking about culture in general, not just rap or music, but all the different creative ways that we have. We’ve got to build people, and we’ve got to love at the same time, and be guided by this love. If we fail to look at that we’re missing a whole dimension.
Estevan Nembhard is a member of the National Council of the YCL and a leader of the New York City Uptown YCL Club.
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