Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico
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Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822375258 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/17/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Remixing Reggaetón
The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico
By Petra R. Rivera-Rideau
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7525-8
CHAPTER 1
IRON FIST AGAINST RAP
In the 1980s, Luis Armando Lozada Cruz, more popularly known as Vico C, began listening to hip-hop. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Vico relocated to the Puerta de Tierra caserío in San Juan with his family as a young child. Vico C had enrolled in acting classes, and after honing his public speaking skills, began to experiment with rap. He related to the stories about "ghetto life" in songs by African American hip-hop artists such as Run DMC, Sugar Hill Gang, LL Cool J, Slick Rick, and KRS-One. Around 1985, Vico C won fifteen dollars in a hip-hop contest where he met DJ Negro, a young DJ who had been mixing hip-hop records. The two began to record mixtapes on cassettes. DJ Negro would borrow beats from popular U.S. hip-hop songs and Vico C would rap original lyrics over them. The songs ranged from party anthems to social and political commentary about issues facing marginalized youth in Puerto Rico's caseríos, or public housing developments. They would make about twenty or thirty copies of each tape and sell them in the caseríos between San Juan and Carolina, and eventually created a name for themselves in urban Puerto Rico.
Vico C is often described as a rapper rather than a reggaetonero; however, his music is also credited for paving the way for reggaetón. Vico C's popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s occurred with the development of Puerto Rican underground. The music's name referred to the literal distribution of cassettes in the economic "underground," or the informal economy. Musically, underground shares similar vocal styles and the consistent "boom-ch-boom-chick" rhythm with contemporary reggaetón; however, underground did not have the same slick productions and techno, pop, and R&B sounds of contemporary reggaetón. Rather, underground DJs pieced together samples from the popular Jamaican dancehall and U.S. American hip-hop songs of the time while rappers performed over them. Wayne Marshall argues that as underground became more commercialized in the late 1990s, the music grew increasingly "synthesized" when DJs began composing more original beats, relying on fewer direct dancehall and hip-hop samples. Lyrical themes centered more explicitly on sex and parties. During this time, new recordings by DJ Nelson (who is often credited with coining the term reggaetón) and DJ Blass popularized the term reggaetón to refer to their music. Although it is difficult to pinpoint the precise date when underground shifted to what we now know as reggaetón, underground music is often widely recognized as one of its precursors. Underground thus refers to the rap-dancehall fusions that developed and circulated within Puerto Rico's working class, urban barrios and caseríos from the 1980s until the 1990s without the backing of large record companies.
In addition to referring to music, the term underground also connotes a space that exists outside of the "mainstream." As something that is spatially located "below," one can think of the underground as the foundation for the things that exist above it. This idea of "underground" mirrors many of the arguments concerning the position of blackness as the counterpoint to whiteness within constructions of Western modernity. In Puerto Rico, underground is affiliated with an urban blackness understood to represent the opposite of white(ned) Puerto Rican identity in the popular imagination. In many ways, then, we might think of urban blackness as part of the symbolic "underground" of racial democracy, the image against which hegemonic constructions of Puerto Rican identities are founded.
This construction of urban blackness is located in specific places, namely the caseríos, where many underground artists and fans resided. Indeed, just as bomba became a cultural marker for folkloric blackness, underground and, later, reggaetón signified urban blackness in the eyes of many detractors. Many critics viewed underground as detached from Puerto Rican culture. In some cases, denunciations of underground represented the music as "foreign" because of its associations with U.S. rap. At other times, critics charged that underground promoted values and morals that departed from the "mainstream." Ultimately, such criticisms reinforced the alleged relationship between caseríos, urban blackness, and underground.
The power of underground, however, was not that it actually caused individuals to act out violently (as critics of the music claimed), but that underground artists and fans exposed the contradictions of dominant discourses of racial democracy. Although most underground was essentially party music, underground artists also addressed the racist and classist policies adversely affecting caseríos and other working-class and nonwhite communities in their songs. Moreover, underground incorporated a whole host of cultural practices, including fashion, hairstyles, and language, that reflected connections between the music's artists and fans and working-class, black communities elsewhere in the African diaspora. Indeed, underground may have responded to very local issues and places, but it did so by integrating global markers of blackness and engaging in larger diasporic politics. The diasporic nature of underground disrupted the very insular definitions of Puerto Rican national identity that emphasized Spanish heritage and devalued the contributions to the island of Afro–Puerto Ricans and Puerto Ricans living in the United States. Instead, it enabled underground artists and fans to express connections to Puerto Ricanness and the African diaspora simultaneously.
Underground thus exemplifies the ways that diasporic resources circulate across geographic sites and become incorporated into a cultural practice that developed in part out of experiences with racism on the local level. Several scholars including Mayra Santos-Febres, Jorge Giovannetti, and Raquel Z. Rivera have discussed the development of underground in Puerto Rico, including its creation as a youth culture, expression of life in the caseríos, and the impact that the Mano Dura Contra el Crimen campaign, a government-led anticrime initiative, had on its development. In this chapter, I do not intend to rehash the history of underground in Puerto Rico. Instead, I am interested in using underground to think about how diasporic resources work in local contexts. To fully grasp underground's interventions into Puerto Rican racial politics, it is necessary to examine both the music's ties to local places and its relationship to the broader African diaspora. I first explore the diasporic connections to hip-hop in the United States and dancehall in Jamaica, both of which not only serve as important musical influences on underground, but also developed from disenfranchised communities that faced similar circumstances as underground artists and fans in Puerto Rico. Then, I provide a brief overview of the ways that 1990s anti-crime initiatives cemented stereotypes of urban blackness that underground artists addressed. Finally, I examine the debates surrounding underground from both supporters and detractors of the music. Considering the integral relationship between the global and the local in underground sheds light on the ways that diasporic linkages are forged and maintained.
Hip-Hop, Dancehall, and New Diasporic Affiliations
Underground is a typical cultural practice of diaspora. Musically, underground combines aesthetics from various genres and traditions from throughout the African diaspora in the Americas, particularly the Caribbean basin. Such combinations would not be possible without the long histories of cultural exchange and (im)migration throughout the region. Therefore, the very existence of underground is linked to the larger African diaspora both musically and aesthetically. Underground's status as a cultural practice of diaspora signals the music's African diasporic aesthetics as well as the impact of the global circulation of ideas about blackness on local communities.
These African diasporic connections manifested in underground's response to local dynamics of race, class, and national identity in Puerto Rico. As Jacqueline Nassy Brown suggests, local conditions motivate individuals to utilize diasporic resources as they develop new understandings of blackness that speak to their specific circumstances. What results is an expression of blackness that draws from African diasporic influences from elsewhere in order to address local circumstances facing urban black communities in Puerto Rico.
This process is particularly important in Puerto Rico, where African diasporic connections and the long histories of Puerto Rican migration between the island and the U.S. mainland significantly challenge the insular, dominant portrayal of Puerto Rican identity, especially its fraught relationship with blackness. First, situating contemporary Puerto Rico within the larger African diaspora rejects the assumptions that a historic and static "Africa" symbolized by folkloric blackness comprises the only type of black identity compatible with the Puerto Rican nation. Rather, underground's links to Jamaican dancehall, Panamanian reggae en español, and U.S. hip-hop (among other musical practices) foreground experiences with comparable systems of antiblack racism across the Americas as the basis for articulating African diasporic connections. Demonstrating the continued existence of racism in Puerto Rico directly refutes assumptions of racelessness that are integral to discourses of racial democracy. Furthermore, identifying contemporary Puerto Rico as part of the African diaspora also de-emphasizes Spain as the cornerstone of Puerto Rican identity. From this perspective, Puerto Rico's connections to the African diaspora are ongoing and continuous (as opposed to the limited, parochial, and historical perceptions of hegemonic folkloric blackness), offering opportunities to imagine blackness and Puerto Rican identities in alternative ways.
Underground's diasporic connections also bring to the fore experiences of Puerto Rican communities in the United States. Puerto Ricans have migrated to the United States since the nineteenth century; however, the granting of U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans in 1917 and the subsequent growth of labor recruitment programs on the island spawned a dramatic increase in the number of Puerto Ricans living in the United States. Scholars such as Jorge Duany and Juan Flores argue that definitions of the Puerto Rican nation must incorporate U.S. Puerto Rican communities that have maintained connections to the island and have made substantial contributions to Puerto Rico's culture and politics. However, the insular nature of dominant definitions of Puerto Rican identity often excludes the community in the United States. This is particularly evident in the stories of U.S. Puerto Ricans, and, especially, Nuyoricans, who return to Puerto Rico only to find their claims to Puerto Ricanness questioned by many island Puerto Ricans who consider them "inauthentic" or too Americanized. In many instances, Nuyoricans' racial identities and perceived connections to blackness (especially U.S. African American culture) become the primary source of contention regarding their incorporation into the island. Nuyoricans' role in hip-hop furthered assumptions that they were "inauthentic" Puerto Ricans due in part to the ways that hip-hop's expressions of blackness departed from hegemonic definitions of Afro–Puerto Rican identities. Consequently, underground's connections to Nuyorican identities, particularly in relation to hip-hop, not only demonstrate the music's diasporic orientation, but also contest the limited associations between Puerto Rican national identity and blackness.
The dominant narrative of reggaetón describes the music as the marriage of U.S.-based hip-hop and Panamanian reggae en español by urban Puerto Rican DJs. Generally, this story focuses on Puerto Ricans' involvement in the genre at the expense of acknowledging the multiple layers of migration that inform the music. Moreover, limiting reggaetón to Puerto Rico marks the music as "Latin" or "tropical" in ways that reinforce the restrictive marketing classifications of the music industry while "overlook[ing] its stronger connections to hip-hop and reggae, connections crucial because of their links with a cultural politics based more around race and class and transnational linkages than national or pan-Latin identities." In the rest of this section, I discuss the social moorings and musical elements of U.S. hip-hop, Jamaican dancehall, Panamanian reggae en español, and reggaetón in Puerto Rico in order to elaborate the diasporic links between them. As Mayra Santos-Febres writes, "It is because of these connections with African American and Jamaican exiles, since its beginnings, that the Boricua rap territories cover locations that are regional and global at the same time." In order to fully grasp how underground operates as a cultural practice of diaspora, it is first necessary to briefly explain the circuits of exchange in hip-hop and dancehall that inform it.
THE HIP-HOP CONNECTION
In the popular history of reggaetón, Vico C plays a prominent role as one of the first artists on the scene in Puerto Rico; in fact, many reggaetón artists identify him as one of their primary influences. But, aesthetically, Vico C's music sounds much more like rap than reggaetón, particularly in his vocal delivery and the beats he used. Still, Vico's importance in the reggaetón narrative demonstrates the broader significance of hip-hop in the music's development. In addition, Vico C's personal history of moving from Brooklyn to Puerto Rico exemplifies the importance of migration between the island and the mainland to the development of underground and reggaetón. Indeed, Nuyoricans played a critical role in both the creation of hip-hop and its introduction to Puerto Rico since many return migrants brought the music and stories of their encounters with new forms of racialization in the United States with them back to the island.
Although Puerto Ricans settled throughout the United States, New York City received the majority of migrants. In fact, the city's Puerto Rican population soared from about 245,000 in 1950 to over 700,000 in 1970. Puerto Ricans settled in neighborhoods throughout New York City, but, by the 1960s, most lived in the Bronx. While New York has declined as the primary destination for Puerto Rican migrants, a substantial community of Puerto Ricans continues to reside there, and, until relatively recently, constituted its largest Latino population.
Once in New York, Puerto Ricans were often racialized as distinct from both whites and blacks. Because many Puerto Ricans are racially mixed, they did not fit easily within the "black/white" binary that structures U.S. race relations. As a result, "Puerto Rican" became a distinct racial category in New York. Puerto Ricans were portrayed as racialized others who were subordinate to whites and distinct from, but akin to, African Americans. Several scholars point out that Nuyoricans and African Americans share similar processes of racialization that result from larger histories of colonization and persistent racial inequalities in the United States. However, these systemic inequalities are often ignored in common representations of both African Americans and Puerto Ricans that portray them as delinquent, violent, and hypersexual, among other stereotypes.
Of course, not all Puerto Ricans welcomed these connections with African Americans in the popular imagination, often because some Puerto Rican migrants harbored antiblack sentiment as a result of their exposure to the whitening bias of hegemonic discourses of racial democracy on the island. Afro–Puerto Ricans in the United States have detailed their encounters with racism on the part of U.S. Americans and other Latinos. In addition, individuals' racial backgrounds condition their experiences of migration such that Afro–Puerto Ricans face different issues than Puerto Ricans considered white or racially mixed in the United States. Nevertheless, within the system of racial classification in the United States, Puerto Ricans have been racialized as nonwhite, and similar to African Americans — that is, on the "blacker" end of the U.S. racial binary. As Juan Flores describes, for many Puerto Ricans, migration to the United States thus constitutes a "lesson in blackness." The subjection of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and other African diasporic populations in New York to similar (though not necessarily equivalent) systems of racial exclusion produced the conditions of possibility for these groups to forge new political, social, and cultural alliances that contested this marginalization.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Remixing Reggaetón by Petra R. Rivera-Rideau. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIintroduction. Reggaetón Takes Its Place 1
1. Iron Fist against Rap 21
2. The Perils of Perreo 52
3. Loíza 81
4. Fingernails con Feeling 104
5. Enter the Hurbans 130
Conclusion. Reggaetón’s Limits, Possibilities, and Futures 159
Notes 171
Bibliography 199
Index 215
What People are Saying About This
"Petra R. Rivera-Rideau does an outstanding job explaining the contradictory power dynamics behind the representations of blackness in Puerto Rico. In exploring the ways in which racial identities get restructured, reorganized, and even elided through the music industry, Rivera-Rideau provides a significant contribution and a brilliant intervention into studies on race, blackness, and popular music in Puerto Rico."
"An engaging intersectional exploration of reggaetón in the context of Puerto Rican racial politics, with a focus on how Afro-'diasporic resources' are deployed to counter the insidiousness of racial democracy discourses. Building upon ethnography, musical and performance analysis, and an expansive bibliography focused on racial politics, diasporic blackness, and popular culture, Remixing Reggaetón features a provocative exploration of Puerto Rican blackness(es) and the multiple ways they can be embodied, performed, perceived, and explained."