All Roads Lead to the Fire Escape

Shot in one day on the fire escape and rooftop of the building that original Nuyorican poet Jesus Papoleto Melendez grew up in as a child the poet finds himself back where it all began.

Sitting on that fire escape as a young boy the fascination with words and language took hold of him. In a strange twist of fate that would first take him to the Bronx and eventually to Mexico and California he winds up back in El Barrio on the very same fire escape of his childhood.

On the fire escape Papoleto talks with humor, wit, intelligence and a certain sense of melancholy that reflects the history of the Puerto Rican immigration experience in America, the Beats, the Black Arts Movement and the birth of the Nuyorican poetry movement through his life, his art, his politics and his philosophy.