Pedro Julio Mir Valentín was a Dominican poet and writer, named Poet Laureate of the Dominican Republic by Congress in 1984, and a member of the generation of "Independent poets of the 1940s" in Dominican poetry.
Background
Pedro Mir was born in the town of San Pedro de Macoris in the Dominican Republic on June 3,1913. His Cuban-born father was a mechanical engineer who worked in the sugarcane processing plants of the island. His mother was from Puerto Rico. An understanding of his formative years in San Pedro de Macoris is essential to explain the later literary production of this distinguished writer. The city of San Pedro de Macoris is located in the eastern region of the Dominican Republic. During the earlier part of the twentieth century, the city boasted some of the biggest and most productive sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean. As was often the case in other Caribbean islands, these plantations were owned by members of the Spanish power elite who had stayed after the independence of the island and by other wealthy European foreigners who exploited the agricultural resources of the island. Local peasants who worked as agricultural laborers were forced to cultivate the crops under a harsh working environment, where they were often exploited and abused. Because of his father's work, Mir was exposed as a child to the many hardships suffered by sugarcane laborers working in the plantations around the city. These experiences strongly influenced the development of Mir's social and political conscience and eventually shaped his socialist philosophy, calling for social justice and equality for all Dominicans.
Education
The next years Mir kept writing and studying, obtaining a Doctor Degree in Law from the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (UASD) State University in 1941 and starting a practice in an office of the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo.
Career
By the 1930s, he was already well known in literary circles for the controversial critical political and social tones that his poetry conveyed against the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. He sought political asylum in Cuba in 1947. While there he published what is perhaps his best-known poem "Hay un País en el Mundo" (There Is a Country in the World) in 1949. Tortured by his exile, he expressed his longing for the beauty of his island, spoke against its political and social illnesses, and spoke to the need to for political change.
Mir took advantage of Iris exile in Cuba to organize opposition against Trujillo's regime. He also lived in Mexico and traveled throughout Latin America and Europe raising awareness of the precarious political situation faced by the Dominican Republic. In 1962, after 15 years in exile, and shortly after Trujillo's 1961 assassination, Mir returned to the Dominican Republic. He immediately became involved with the Popular Socialist Party, which proposed a political platform to bring substantial changes to the economic and social orders of the island. Unfortunately, after the American invasion of 1965 and the tumultuous events that followed, Mir had to go into exile once again. This time he sought refuge in New York.
Toward the end of his life, Mir started voicing his displeasure with what he perceived as a decadence that characterized these times: "The 20th century has fallen in the deepest disgrace, its ideas have been exhausted, and the chaos is a sign of these times". He encouraged the next generation to make their voices heard in the same way he had done. He was awarded the National Prize for History in 1975, and the National Prize in Literature for his life work in 1993. Mir was also appointed Poet Laureate of the Dominican Republic in 1982 by congressional decree. Hunter College of the City University of New York awarded him an honorary doctorate in literature in 1991.
At the time of his death on July 11, 2000, Ylonka Nacids-Perdomo, Director of the Center for Literary Research at the National Library in the Dominican Republic said: "Pedro Mir was, without doubt, the vital voice of Dominican poetry of the 20th Century, and a universal poet: meditative, and purifying".
Personality
Mir was an inquisitive and sensitive child. In an extensive critical profile of the author's life and work published after his death, reporter Daryelin Torres, from the Santo Domingo Listín Diario, told a story that revealed the extraordinary sensitivity of the poet. Mir used to say that his first disillusion with the world occurred when he was six years old. One night, he felt alone in the darkness of his house at night, and he called his mother, hoping and praying to God that she would answer. When she didn't answer, he became disenchanted, and from then on, he felt deceived by her, by God, and by the world.