Inauguration poet Richard Blanco on the music of his Miami childhood

By Alex Frank On Oct 10, 2014

When he read his poem “One Today” on the steps of the U.S. Capitol at Barack Obama’s 2013 inauguration, Richard Blanco became the country’s first immigrant, first openly gay, first Latino, and youngest ever inaugural poet. The life that preceded this achievement is the subject of Blanco’s new memoir and first published work of prose, The Prince of Los Cocuyos (Ecco Press), a book filled with stories about wrestling with sexuality and identity while growing up in a Cuban family in Miami. To commemorate the book, we asked Blanco to provide a sound track to his childhood and reminisce on the songs that filled his young life in Miami.

On my first visit to Cuba, after telling my cousins that I was a poet, they said, “Well, then, sing with us.” They dusted off an old guitar and we began singing décimas poems to the moon. Music, poetry, and life were one that night, as they have been all my life. As a child in Miami, I remember my abuela in her apron singing Agustín Lara’s ballad,“Solamente Una Vez,” while she cooked or did the dishes. “That’s how I fell in love with your abuelo—he used to whisper that song in my ear when we were in our twenties,” she told me once—and I’ve been in in love with it ever since.

Years later, in my twenties, Luis Miguel remade that song and other ballad standards. His album Romance is still one of my favorites. Timeless, indeed. As timeless as “Guantanamera,” the Cuban classic (based on a poem by José Martí) that my cousin Brenda would play on the piano for la familia; as well as other oldies like “El Beso,” inciting my parents to break into a pasodoble, a dance modeled after the drama of Spanish bullfights.

One summer, my father installed an eight-track player under the driver’s seat of his Malibu, and we hit the road; my parents sang along to Celia Cruz’s “Quimbara”over and over again, all the way from our home in Miami to Walt Disney World. Long before Enrique Iglesias, there was the tender, lullaby voice of his debonair father, Julio Iglesias. His melancholy song “De Niña a Mujer” (“From Girl to Woman”), dedicated to his daughter, was a real tearjerker. It was a standard at every quinceañera where the father—and everyone in the banquet hall—would break into tears as he danced with his daughter, no longer a “little girl.”

In the early eighties, I danced in a lot of quinces, and for the salsa number, the all-time hit those years was “Brujería” by El Gran Combo. I don’t know how those poor girls could sway their hips in those hoop skirts—but they did! Years before the salsa craze, before Miami was hip, music was a big part of my life. And before I ever wrote my first poems, music was already my living poetry.

Agustín Lara, “Solamente Una Vez”