Analyze the poem "Puerto Rican Obituary."

"Puerto Rican Obituary" is the obituary speech that the speaker might have given for the five Puerto Rican people he gives only first names—"Juan/Miguel/Milagros/Olga/Manuel"—in the poem. He wants to honor the Puerto Rican culture of the dead in a way in which it was never honored in their lifetimes. The names of the people he is honoring don't appear until the second stanza. In the first stanza, he doesn't name them but speaks about how hard they worked. Their lives were spent working without being fairly paid. The poet writes, "They worked/ten days a week/and were only paid for five." Despite their hard work, they never protested, and Pietri emphasizes their hard work through his repetition: "They worked/They worked/They worked/and they died." These lines are a simple summary of their lives spent toiling for nothing until death.

In the second stanza, after the poet provides the subjects of his obituary with names, he says that "All died yesterday today and will die again tomorrow." This seeming contradiction emphasizes that the five people in the poem stand for more than just five individuals but for all the Puerto Ricans who live in poverty in New York. He also repeats the words "All died" to speak about their dreams and the way in which their dreams, such as "your name is on the winning lottery ticket for one hundred thousand dollars" never came true. In later stanzas, the poet talks about how their reality was harsh on the streets of New York "where the mice live like millionaires and the people do not live at all are dead and were never alive." Here the poet compares the poor Puerto Ricans of New York to people who never really live and instead walk about like the dead.

In the fifth stanza, the poet talks about the long ride that the relatives of the dead people must take by bus from Spanish Harlem, where they live, to the cemetery in Long Island. The poet lays out each step in the day: "First the train/and then the bus/and the cold cuts for lunch and the flowers/that will be stolen/when visiting hours are over." The flowers that are placed on their graves and then stolen are symbolic of the lives of the dead, which the society around them also values very little.

In the remainder of the poem, the poet speaks about the "empty dreams" that the dead had about the United States, including the dream to return to Puerto Rico and the dream of "the new anti-poverty program." These were promises in America that never came true. Instead, their deaths were listed by "newspapers/that misspelled mispronounced/and misunderstood their names." Even in death, the American newspapers do not honor the dead, as the writers misspell their names.

At the end of the poem, the poet insists that the dead died "Never knowing/that they are beautiful people." He believes that they lived dead lives because they didn't understand how beautiful they were as Puerto Ricans and because they bought into the American Dream. In the penultimate stanza, he says, "If only they/had used the white supremacy bibles/for toilet paper purpose." In other words, he thinks they would have lived better lives if they had recognized the beauty of being Puerto Rican. In the very last stanza, the poet uses Spanish, repeating the word "Aqui," meaning here, to show that in the afterlife, the five will live in a way that celebrates their culture. They will, for example, speak Spanish all the time. The poem ends, "Aqui to be called negrito/means to be called LOVE," meaning that black is celebrated as beautiful in the place the dead have gone.