DISCLAIMER:

This document does not meet current format guidelines Graduate School at the The University of Texas at Austin. of the It has been published for informational use only.

Copyright by Lorna Judith Torrado 2013

The Dissertation Committee for Lorna Judith Torrado Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Urban Dialogues: Rethinking Gender and Race in Contemporary Caribbean Literature and Music

Committee:

Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez, Supervisor

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel

Gabriela Polit

Jill Robbins

César Salgado Urban Dialogues: Rethinking Gender and Race in Contemporary Caribbean Literature and Music

by

Lorna Judith Torrado, B.A.; M.A.

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Spanish & Portuguese The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin May, 2013 Dedication

For my teachers, family, friends, professors, and my husband because even when I wasn’t sure, they always were. ¡Gracias!

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to my dissertation supervisor, Jossianna Arroyo, for her continuous support throughout this intelectual and emotional journey. ¡Gracias!

I am also indebted to Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel who has helped and guided me since my first graduate school experiences. ¡Gracias!

To the rest of my committee that willingly embarked on this long-term commitment, thanks for your faith in me.

Danny Méndez and Médar Serrata (los dominicanistas), I really appreciate your friendship, and professional encouragement through all of these years. ¡Gracias!

My Poderosa family, you have given me the opportunity to bring together my passion for the arts, education, and service, and turn that into a life project. ¡GRACIAS!

My long life friends from Puerto Rico, ¡Gracias!

My “corillo Boricua” in Austin, ¡Gracias!

Consuelo, ¡gracias por TODO!

Lanie, I could have not completed this work without you. Thanks for your unconditional friendship, and all the long hours we spend together working, talking, laughing, editing, and having fun. Thanks for EVERYTHING, my good friend!

I could have not done this dissertation without the unconditional support of my parents José A. Torrado and Judith Fernández, because it doesn’t matter what I do they have ALWAYS supported me a 100%. ¡Gracias!

Lastly, I have to thank my husband Joel who has been with me throughout the entire graduate journey. You have always believed in me, you have always been there to support me, to wipe my tears (of joy or sadness), and to pick me up every time. -en la calle codo a codo somos mucho más que dos-

v Urban Dialogues: Rethinking Gender and Race in Contemporary Caribbean Literature and Music

Lorna Judith Torrado, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2013

Supervisor: Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez

How are music, literature and migration connected? How are these transnational conversations affecting the way countries construct their national discourses today? This dissertation studies how gender and race are constructed and questioned in the ‘cross- genre’ dialogue among contemporary urban literature, performance, and reggaeton music produced in Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and New York City from the1990s-2000s. This ongoing dialogue of marginalized music and literature, made possible by the accessibility of new media, results in a unique urban configuration in which gender and racial identities are negotiated, resulting in the reinforcement of a trans-Caribbean cultural circuit. Following a non-traditional structural approach this dissertation proposes a new analytical and reading model beginning with the Puerto Rican diaspora’s cultural production in New York City as a point of departure, and from there expands to the rest of the Spanish Caribbean. I specifically focus on the writings of poets Willie Perdomo (NYC), and Guillermo Rebollo Gil (PR), the videos and lyrics of the reggaeton artists Tego Calderón and Calle 13 (PR), and the music and literary work of Rita Indiana Hernández (DR) in order analyze the complex interplay between music and literary texts to convey gender and racial imaginaries. I conclude that these literary, cultural, and performative texts abolish “national” configurations and are being replaced by broader vi definitions of “us,” race, and gender to address the complexities of contemporary Caribbean transnational identitary circuits.

vii Table of Contents

Acknowledgements...... v

Introduction...... 10 Would the real caribeño please stand up? ...... 12 Literature and music ...... 13 Chapters ...... 17

Chapter One: The re-writing of the diaspora’s reality in Willie Perdomo ...... 20 The Incorporation of the Diaspora Experience...... 28 Trapped Between Black and White: The Black Puerto Rican Body ...... 35 The Black Body as a Historical Witness...... 41 The Negotiation of Masculinity...... 48

Chapter Two: Guillermo Rebollo-Gil: questioning race and gender from a blanquito’s point of view ...... 53 The Performance of Racial Dynamics ...... 62 Performing Gender Through Music...... 76

Chapter Three: Commercial Reggaeton Versus Songs of Resistance ...... 87 From Underground to Reggaeton Latino...... 87 Mainstream Reggaeton: Daddy Yankee and Ivy Queen...... 91 Songs of Resistance: Calle 13...... 100 More Songs of Resistance: Tego Calderón...... 114 Calderón’s aesthetic of recuperation...... 122

Chapter Four: Historical Revision in the work of Rita Indiana Hernández...... 127 Patriarcal Deconstruction...... 142 From a Local to a Global Configuration of Race ...... 149 Alternate Urbanity: From the Trujillo City to the Musical City...... 151

viii Conclusion ...... 168

Bibliography ...... 177

Vita 193

ix

Introduction

The present study examines contemporary literary and musical discourses of the Spanish Caribbean and the Diaspora from the 1990s-2010. It focuses on how writers and artists from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and New York City, due to migration, globalization, and media access, articulate movable identities that leave behind and deconstruct national boundaries and configurations to generate a pan-Caribbean and pan-

Latino landscape. This conversation forges a discourse of solidarity that problematizes Eurocentric and patriarchal national imaginaries inherited from colonial and post-colonial relationships. I specifically analyze the writings of poets Willie Perdomo (NYC), and Guillermo Rebollo Gil (PR), the videos and lyrics of the reggaeton artists Tego Calderón and Calle 13 (PR), and the music and literary work of Rita Indiana Hernández (DR). The thread that brings all of these works together is their resistance to the systematic reproduction of whitening and patriarchal discourses that still today underlie and shape the national identity constructions in the Spanish Caribbean and the US Diaspora. Both the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, like the rest of Latin America, base their national racial discourse on the mestizaje ideal as part of their foundational fiction. However, the everyday racial interactions, social power, and uneven economic distribution uncovers evidence of uneven societies that reinforce white privilege and exclude the black population from the national body. In the case of the Dominican Republic the extreme negation and rejection of blackness and the African heritage have extended to the repudiation of anything Haitian-related. These discourses become even more problematic for the diasporic subject when faced with the United States’ racial categorization according to the “one-drop rule,” a combination that creates additional

10 layers and forms of exclusion that force the newcomer to invent new ways to articulate an identity that responds to his or her circumstances. Similarly, both Caribbean nations have been constructed under patriarchal and heteronormative discourses systematically reinforced by religious and moral values supported by the state. These conventions articulate a strong and sometimes aggressive masculinity that needs constant reification through homophobia and misogynist social and ideological behaviors. Thus ‘liminal sexualities’ have been excluded from both ‘imagined nations’ as they are seen as a threat to the national unity and identity. Both blackness and gender articulations that derive from heteronormative practices and the mestizo utopian ideal are criminalized and policed by the state in an effort to expel them from the national body. The artists I analyze share a malleable and transnational Caribbean experience that strays from these racists, and to some extent, male-centric ideals. Responding to their specific socio-economic and national narratives, each of them produces different discursive strategies to construct a contemporary transnational Caribbean subject. In order to support my trans-Caribbean analysis I follow Antonio Benítez Rojo’s definition of the Caribbean as ‘repeating islands,’ and Édouard Glissant’s concept of ‘poetics of relation’ to approach this space as multiple nations united by their common colonial past, and historical and contemporary migration movement (Caribbean Discourse 139).1 I specifically read Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic as spaces interconnected by a strong African heritage manifested through their cultural and musical traditions, as well as their migratory waves within the Caribbean and the United States.

1 There are also important works centered on the friction produced by centuries of Spanish Caribbean interconnectedness. Two important examples are Caribe Two Ways by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, and Valerio-Ortiz article “Las Fronteras del primitivo: identidad cultural dominicana y “limpieza étnica.” Both works analyze the intra-Caribbean frontiers as a result of internal competition, and racism. 11 WOULD THE REAL CARIBEÑO PLEASE STAND UP?

Generally the Caribbean enclaves in the US have been read as an extension and a consequence of the cultural manifestations and discourses of the country of origin. In various works produced about the transnational reality and literary production of the Spanish Caribbean such as Escrituras de desencuentro en la República Dominicana (2005), and None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era (2007)- we find a formal narrative that departs from the islands of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic to later expand to the diaspora’s production.2 This one-directional structure suggests that the legitimate discourses are produced within the national geography, and consequently the diaspora’s contribution appears as an extension of those imaginaries. After decades of studying movement from the Spanish Caribbean to the United States, in one of his latest books, The Diaspora Strikes Back (2009), Juan Flores shifts his attention to the “reverse flow or “counterstream” resulting from massive circular and return migration and the ongoing remittance of the cultural values and practices…”(4) that the diaspora brings when they return home. Although I completely agree with Flores’ perception of the Spanish Caribbean migratory movement as a constant revolving door, and how the experiences abroad shift national paradigms, I begin my analysis with the diaspora enclave as the main point of departure to deconstruct the canonical use of the “here” versus “there” dichotomy that places the Caribbean geography as the “origin” of this cultural exchange. Departing from the literary production of the Nuyorican author Willie Perdomo, the study transits through the Spanish Caribbean to see how the two-way conversation reconfigures national imaginaries and creates new discourses.

2 It is important to clarify that these texts take into consideration the diaspora as an essential part of the Caribbean cultural and national production. Here I am especificaly pointing out to the formal and organizational aspects of the chapters and essays that tend to trace a narrative from the Caribbean to the U.S. enclaves. 12 To support my thesis I use an interdisciplinary methodology that brings together different theoretical approaches –ethnomusicology, literary close reading, and performance studies— in order to analyze a variety of genres such as performative poetry, songs, music videos, and novels as part of the same dialogue. To study poetry and music side-by-side I rely on Juan Flores’ methodology to read musical lyrics as rhythmic poetization and poetry as a deeply musical genre. This is possible due to music’s centrality to the Puerto Ricans’ experience in the Caribbean and the diaspora since the 1920s such that “it needs to be recognized as part of the “literary production” (Divided Borders 147). In addition I incorporate Meta DuEwa Jones’ connection between poetry readings and performances as “spaces where live art and performance art cultures potentially intersect with social and artistic practices…” (4) in order to formulate new socio-political practices. Furthermore, I take into consideration Jones’ approach to the corporeal aspect of art when she insists than performativity cannot be detached from its materiality, and thus race and gender play a fundamental part in my analysis and decodification of the texts.

LITERATURE AND MUSIC

But why focus on literature and music to understand the way contemporary artists negotiate homogenizing national discourses? The two disciplines have crossed and blurred each other’s boundaries artistically, socially, and academically in the Spanish Caribbean for decades.3 In his book Nación y Ritmo (2000), Juan Otero Garabís explains that in order to understand the Spanish Caribbean imaginaries, it is necessary to examine the zones of contact and “contamination” between the different cultural discourses, as they all provide a multiplicity of voices to better understand the realities and complex

3 The anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Kenneth Bilby has studied extensively the historical importance of music within the Caribbean islands; see The Caribbean as a Musical Region. 13 social interactions that configure the national collective. Due to the centrality of music in the Caribbean, and its close relationship to everyday practices and collective cultural capital, this artistic genre is a perfect source to dissect the ever-changing contemporary conventions and configurations (35-42). In the case of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, Juan Flores, Frances R. Aparicio, and Urayoán Noel, among others, have studied the cross-contamination of literature and music as a tool to convey a Puerto Rican identity discourse within the US mainstream culture. When referring to the New Rican Village Cultural Arts Center (NRV) active from the 1970s through the mid-80s, Wilson Valentín explains that manifestations of art in general –literature and salsa music included— were “understood as a series of tactical, decolonial social practices that sought immediate and long-term resolution and liberation from the discursive constructions of otherness to the political labyrinth of colonialism” (16). During the late 70s through the 80s we see a similar tendency in Puerto Rico, when writers like Luis Rafael Sánchez and Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá utilize musical referents and popular jargon to deconstruct national homogenizing discourses embedded in Eurocentric racial imaginaries, to give visibility to a more varied and multicolored Puerto Rican collective. During this period, music played a central role in the new generation’s social and identity practices. As Ana María García explores in her documentary Cocolos y Rockeros (1990), the 1980s youth was sharply divided by their musical preferences. Although salsa was considered an autochthonous cultural expression, it carried a pejorative social and racial marker that the middle- and upper-class rockers rejected. As the documentary shows through interviews, while this division was widespread throughout the younger generations of the 1980s, a shift occurred in the 1990s when this rigid demarcation began to fade with the commodification of Afro-centered musical genres like salsa, plena and bomba. These rhythms began to form part of the youth 14 culture of the time, and through its cooptation became part of the state-supported national folklore. As we will see throughout this study, the racialization and exclusion once felt by salsa fans in the 70s and 80s was felt in the 1990s decade by the urban music genre of reggaeton. Seen as a vulgar and low-taste product of the working class, mirroring the cycle of rejection once felt by salsa, this Afro-Puerto Rican music became the new social threat to the national identity discourses guided by the invisibility and silencing of blackness. In the case of the Dominican Republic, music and literature have been central to the country’s recent political history and social reality. Multiple academic studies like Paul Austerlitz’s book Merengue: Dominican Music and Dominican Identity (1997) analyze the relationship of merengue –Dominican Republic’s national music— to Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s three decade dictatorship (1930-1961), as well as the crucial role of literature as part of his ideological apparatus. Once the regime fell, music also served as a vehicle for popular rebellion, a space for exorcizing the past with the creation of new cultural rhythms and social imaginaries. The anthology titled El sonido de la música en la narrativa dominicana (2012) explores the influence of music in Dominican literature from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present with writers like Pedro Antonio Valdéz, Rita Indiana Hernández, and Aurora Arias to demonstrate how the blend of literary texts and music serves as a space where social groups negotiate their differences, and try to understand what it means to be Dominican (14).4 The Dominican enclaves also have a very strong relationship to music. In their article “Transnational Music and Dance in the Dominican New York,” Thomas van

4 The use of music in Dominican texts became recurrent practice since the 1980s; some examples are Sólo cenizas hallará (bolero) (1981), by Pedro Vergés, Ritos de Cabaret (1986), by Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, Musiquito: Anales de un déspota y de un bolerista (1993) by Enriquillo Sáncez, and Bachata del ángel caído (1999) by Pedro Antonio Valdéz, among others. 15 Buren and Leonardo Iván Domínguez assert that musical tendencies have been central to tracing the Dominican enclave’s cultural, political and social tendencies, as well as their constant negotiation within American culture (Dominican Migration 244-247). Generations of Dominican-Americans of the late twentieth - and early twenty-first century grew up exposed to a variety of rhythms like merengue, hip-hop and rap. This mixed exposure created a demand for new forms of Dominican music that was able to reflect the new generations’ experiences in the United States like meren-rap and other merengue variations. Conscious of the centrality of music, contemporary Dominican- American writers and performers like Julia Álvarez, Junot Díaz, and Josefina Báez incorporate Dominican popular music into their work, such as merengue and bachata, as cultural spaces where national and transnational spaces collide, symbolically recalling migratory hardships. As we have seen throughout this introduction, the confluent spaces of music and literature are fertile sites where national and transnational discourses and epistemes collide and are transformed. These exchanges function as a two-way mirror where culture is produced, while its reflection allows for self-recognition and analysis. I contend that literature and music as a discursive field and as cultural artifacts enable some of the most compelling racial and gender articulations as fundamental to the poetics of Caribbean and Latino representation. Reggaeton music, salsa, merengue, and slam poetry provide a unique vehicle to explore cultural discourses due to their close relationship to social racialization, blue-collar struggle, blackness, and migration. Thus my study is based on a trans-Caribbean and trans-gender (feminine, masculine, and queer artistic voices) analytical approach that concludes that the contemporary writers/performers (re)center the Caribbean subject by (de)centralizing race and patriarchal gender categories imposed historically from colonial and Eurocentric models, moving away from the homogenizing 16 master narratives of modernity. My research is guided by the following questions: How can the intersections of these various cultural artifacts enhance our understanding of discourses of gender and race? In what way do these poems and songs provide an alternate transnational Caribbean and Diasporic reality? Can we read the intersection of poetry and music, both closely related to orality and collective practices, as sites of national and transnational identity struggle?

CHAPTERS

The remaining part of the study will consist of four chapters and a conclusion, and each part will concentrate on a particular writer or performer. Due to the variety of artists, countries and types of texts analyzed, each chapter includes its own historical and social framework in order to understand the text not only as part of the transnational conversation, but also as a local cultural product that responds and reacts to specific national conditions. My textual analysis covers multiple modes of cultural production such as novels, poems, music and videos. Chapter One focuses on the Nuyorican poet Willie Perdomo, analyzing the way he wrestles with the violent city street and all the discourses that systematically maintain him and the Afro-Puerto Rican community in New York City on the city’s margins. In this chapter I argue that Perdomo develops a layered narrative where he first inserts the Nuyoricans’ reality as part of the United States’ collective history to uncover decades of invisibility and silencing produced by racialization. Once the writer puts the Diaspora within the historical contours, he embraces blackness to dismantle the American racial imaginary and Puerto Rico’s mestizaje discourse which privileges fair-skinned individuals. Finally, I analyze how Willie Perdomo rejects the violent masculine models

17 present in his environment and cultural education, breaking with the macho ideal that permeates both in the diaspora and the island. Chapter Two studies the Puerto Rican performatic contemporary poet Guillermo Rebollo-Gil. I argue that Rebollo-Gil’s incorporation of marginal musical referents, like reggaeton jargon and a post-Nuyorican slam poetry aesthetic, serves as a metaphoric gesture which criticizes the exclusion of black Puerto Ricans and the diaspora from the national narrative. While formally he rescues the Nuyorican poet’s tradition of using poetry as a tool of social critique, he also engages with Puerto Rico’s literary tendency of the 1970s of incorporating popular culture into written texts to break cultural production categories. I analyze how the fusion of reggaeton lyrics in Rebollo-Gil’s poetry dismantles its original meaning to create a flexible space where new masculine ideologies and racial imaginaries can flourish. Within this discursive struggle I pay special attention to the body as it functions as the stage and battlefield for this ideological, cultural and discursive disruption. Chapter Three traces and analyzes gender and racial discourses generated through reggaeton music from the 1990s to 2010. I explore briefly how some artists like Daddy Yankee and Ivy Queen have left behind the potential subversive stigma of the genre in order to appeal to a broader audience, while others like Tego Calderón and Calle 13 have used the stigma imposed on the genre as a marginal expression to challenge and deconstruct dominant gender and racial ideologies. On the one hand, Calderón’s revival of Afro-Puerto Rican tropes combined with lyrics that criticize the criminalization and racialization of the working class have designated him as an antiestablishment reggaeton artist. His self-labeling as a black Puerto Rican signals the invisibility of Afro-Caribbeans in contemporary transnational debates, and the urban artistic tendency toward a racial awakening. On the other hand, the multiple Grammy winning duo Calle 13 labels itself as 18 part of the “blue collar” and marginalized working class in order to criticize social injustice and authoritarian regimes, thereby complicating reggaeton’s commercial image and demonstrating the genre’s subversive possibilities. René Pérez, the composer and lead vocalist of the duo, redefines the category of race into a social category defined by marginality. The final chapter examines the work of Dominican writer and musical performer Rita Indiana-Hernández. I argue that she abandons the longing for a cohesive local historical discourse imposed by twentieth-century dictator Rafael Trujillo’s ideology, to substitute it with a new urban space configured by global rhythms and marginal queer inhabitants. Refusing an aesthetic of nostalgia, Hernández leaves behind traditional merengue and bachata musical genres to articulate a post-urban aesthetic by fusing local and global rhythms such as house, electro gagá and palos dominicanos. I argue that the contemporary artist rejects the Trujillo City, the official patriarchal/ heteronormative gender discourse, and an anti- black/anti-Haitian construction of race, as defined by Rafael L. Trujillo’s dictatorial apparatus, to propose an alternate transnational musical city, a queer Dominican urban subject, and a global configuration of race to replace the previous doctrine. Finally, the conclusion presents a summary of the arguments presented in each of the previous chapters. It also includes a panoramic view of the interconnections and two- way conversation taking place between the contemporary authors, artists and performers studied. Together, my analysis points to how these poets and musicians embrace blackness, and in some cases queerness to rearticulate a contemporary Caribbean subject on the move that is always dancing, always performing (race and gender), and constantly changing.

19 Chapter One: The re-writing of the diaspora’s reality in Willie Perdomo

“Even if God did have an afro, I still ain’t got nowhere to live” -Perdomo, You Pay For What You Get, But You Never Get What You Pay For It’s open mic night at the Nuyorrican’s Café in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. It’s Christmas time, and the island’s capital is full of lights and life. Families walk around on this beautiful Sunday night while there is heavy traffic (tapón) congesting the main cobblestone streets. Near the entrance of the Nuyorrican café-pub and cultural performatic space I notice a group of young men and women having drinks and talking in a lively manner. I turn to my mom, my date for the night, and tell her: “those are the poets.” The event is called Baby Grand Slam, an open mic poetry night where anyone can share their work with the audience. The special guest and final reader of the night is the renowned Nuyorican poet Willie Perdomo. Once on stage, Perdomo seems extremely comfortable in front of an audience, projecting a presence that traps whoever is listening inside Willie’s urban universe. Instantly, his voice transports us to East Harlem, its sounds, its smells, and the daily struggle of its people.5 His participation in a poetry reading alongside other contemporary Puerto Rican -born and -raised writers like Guillermo Rebollo-Gil and Urayoán Noel, not a common event, is not a mere artistic collaboration; the gesture articulates a more malleable definition of the national body, one that recognizes the diaspora as an essential part of the Puerto Rican history and cultural experience.

5 Perdomo has publushed five books, innumerable newspapers and journal publications. He has been featured on several PBS documentaries including Words in Your Face and The United States of Poetry as well as HBO's Def Poetry Jam and BET's Hughes' Dream Harlem. He has received a Woolrich Fellowship in Creative Writing at Columbia University, New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry and Fiction Fellowships, and a 2006 Urban Artist Initiative/ New York City grant. He is co-founder of Cypher Books. 20 Willie Perdomo’s style combines the 1960s sociopolitical themes of Pedro Pietri, one of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe founders, and urban musical expressions –like salsa and hip-hop– in order to critique the “legacy of colonialism, segregation, and other forms of racist exploitation” (Jones 40). He writes from the other side of the un-beautified ghetto streets, and transits his part of the city, the Lower East Side, through everyday shores, music, food, and Spanglish. His three poetic compilations –Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (1996), Postcards of El Barrio (2002), and Smoking Lovely (2003)– show the reality of the Puerto Rican diaspora, and the individual and collective implications of stigmatization and racialization in the United States. As Ramón Grosfoguel and Chloé S. Georas assert in their essay “Latino Caribbean Diasporas in New York”: “Puerto Ricans and African Americans are not simply migrants or ethnic groups but rather colonial/racialized subjects in the United States. Both are formally citizens but without being able to exercise their full rights owing to the history of racial/colonial oppression” (Mambo Montage 105).6 Relying on this socio-political reality, Perdomo converts the black body into what Mary L. Pratt has called ‘contact zone’ with all the clashes and shared realities that the interaction produces. In order to orchestrate a poetic musicality and capture social plurality, Perdomo resorts to multiple voices and characters within one text, a technique often used by Langston Hughes, so the reader can experience the barrio experience from diverse points of view. 7

6 The relationship between Puerto Ricans and African Americans is very complex story of cooperation and competition. See Neither Enemies Nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos.

7 Langston Hughes (1902-1967) is one of the most influential figures in Willie Perdomo’s work; not only did he admire the late writer, but they both share their “perfomatively anti-intellectual stance” toward poetry (Jones 36). For a detailed analysis of Hughes’s work see The Muse is Music. He even dedicates several poems to this African American writer. 21 Willie Perdomo was born and raised in East Harlem, and was the youngest member of the 1991 Nuyorican Poets Cafe Slam Team.8 In 1989 the Cafe became the first place in New York City to promote this type of cultural event. As Clare Ultimo explains in “The History of Nuyorican Poet Slam,” the first slam poets were experimenting and playing on stage with a brand new artistic form, and thus a wide variety of styles developed and the Cafe became a “generous space for new ideas and poetic sounds to flourish and grow.”9 Perdomo’s 1990s slam poetry generation is an extension of the Nuyorican Poets, an artistic conglomerate born as a result of the 1960s and 1970s civil rights movements. The Puerto Rican New York-born writers group was later institutionalized with the opening of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe by Algarín and Miguel Piñero in 1974.10 José L. Padilla-Torres and Carmen Haydée Rivera describe the first poets such as Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero, Sandra María Esteves, and Pedro Pietri, among others, as: “…rooted in and emerging from the streets of New York’s urban barrios, [and] who had an important oral-performance and consciousness-raising character. The poets stressed the importance of oral traditions and audience participation while at the same time emphasizing and showcasing the immediacy of their Civil Rights struggles” (Writing Off the Hyphen 7). In addition to being influenced by social and political movements like the Harlem Renaissance (1920-1930) and the Civil Rights Movements (1960s), the poets were deeply inspired by the performances and textual

8 As Urayoán Noel has established in his work: NYPR blues: Experimentalism, performance, and the articulation of diaspora in Nuyorican poetry: “The term neorriqueño, a blend of neoyorquino and puertorriqueño, is often credited as the etymological source for the term Nuyorican. (15)

9 For more information on Slam Poety, its history, and poets see: http://www.verbsonasphalt.com/

10 Although the Nuyorican Poets like Miguel Algarín, Sandra María Esteves, Pedro Pietri, and Tato Laviera, among others are the more visible writers of the time, there’s literature written in the United States by Caribbean migrants since the last decade of the XX Century that capture the multiple realities and challenges of the diasporic experience. See Juan Flores Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity. 22 experimentation of countercultural African-American poets such as Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), David Henderson, and Ted Joans (Noel 28-29). They served as a valuable model of how to negotiate Puerto Ricans’ reality in United States society through socio- politically conscious arts.11 As one of the Nuyorican Poet’s pioneers, Miguel Algarín explains that it was very important for their collective of mostly Afro-Puerto Rican writers to create a space of their own, and to establish a voice within the American society that systematically relegated them into the margins of New York City. Language, and specifically Spanglish, was one of the main tools at their disposal to articulate this sense of belonging, through the creation of a new language that symbolically captured the nuances of the Nuyorican experience.12 In the introduction to the first Nuyorican anthology titled Nuyorican Poetry (1975), he draws a parallel between action and poetic linguistic creation: “If the action is new so must the words that express it come through as new. Newness in language grows as people do and learn things never done or learned before. The experience of Puerto Ricans on the streets of New York has caused a new language to grow: Nuyorican” (15). Almost two decades after Algarín’s declaration, language continues to embody a creative force, an articulation of empowerment, and a sense of belonging between “two linguistic and cultural universes” in Willie Perdomo’s work.

11 For a historical perspective of the African American musical and artistic movements see Meta DuEwa.

12 This was not the first wave of Puerto Ricans migrating to the United States. Following Clara Rodríguez essay “A Summary of Puerto Rican Migration to the United States” in Challenging Fronteras: Structuring Latino and Latina Lives in the U.S. (1997) there have been three historical moments where Puerto Ricans have moved in large numbers to the metropolis. The first one 1900-1945 was mostly for economical reason as a direct consequence of the San Ciriaco Hurricane (1899) and the lack of jobs due to the decay of the sugarcane industry. The second wave was1946-1964 that combines the part World War II aftermath, and the great migration of the 50s as a consequence of Puerto Rico’s governor’s social and economic modernization plans. Lastly, the 1965- to the present massive dislocation put Puerto Rico in conversation with the United States Civil Rights Movement. 23 Similarly to the use of music as an important component of the African American literary tradition, exemplified by Langston Hughes’ “blue-based and jazz influenced poems” (Jones 33), Nuyorican expression also relies on the fusion of music –salsa and hip-hop- and poetic genres to create its poetic and performatic texts.13 Around the same time the Nuyorican Poets Cafe came into being (1974), salsa music, the rhythm born in New York City as a diaspora-island collaboration, was synonymous with Puerto Rican identity on U.S. soil.14 Commenting on the close relationship between these artistic expressions, Frances R. Aparicio has stated that “Both Salsa and Nuyorican poetry derive from syncretic forms of orality: the every-day speech and musical expressions of working class communities and of Blacks in the United States, Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Caribbean” (“Salsa, Maracas and Baile” 44).15 For this reason, the use and incorporation

13 In his book The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W.E.B. Du Bois argues that “the Negro folk-song-the rhythmic cry of the slave” is “the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people” (205), thus tracing the centrality of music to the African American history, experience and sorrow, but also cultural practices. In her book The Muse is Music (2011), Jones explores the African American performative and literary practices from the Harlem Renaissance (1920s) to the Spoken Word (1990s), which have been deeply influenced by the artistic and political strategies developed during earlier epochs, and by blues, jazz, and hip-hop. Due to the intrinsic connection between music, performance, and the body she concludes that musicality is inescapable within the African American tradition. In the Spanish Caribbean most musical genres or what Angel G. Quintero-Rivera has denominated “músicas mulatas” (African inherited rhythms like salsa, bomba, plena, and merenge) also have a very close relationship to the black body performativity, and the historical Afro-Puerto Rican experience. Quintero-Rivera argues, in both ¡Salsa, sabor y control! (1999) and Cuerpo y cultura (2009), that the “músicas mulatas” and their respective dances have represented, since colonial times, performative social spaces that subvert Eurocentric corporeal behaviors imposed from the outside.

14 As of today the Puerto Ricans from the island feel that salsa music is one of the national rhytms, but tend to dismiss its diasporic birth. As Juan Otero Garabís argues: “fue el cruce de migraciones humanas y sonoras, localizadas en las calles del Barrio, el Bronx, Loaizaida, entre otras la que marcó y posibilitó los gustos, ritmos, armonías y estridencias que catapultaron esa música por el mundo. Y más que el Combo o la Sonora, son la Fania y los músicos nuyorquinos los que imprimieron las características definitorias de esta “manera de hacer música”, como la llama Ángel Quintero” (80 grados) http://www.80grados.net/juancito-mi-primo-campesino/

15 For a in depth study of the salsa genre see, Frances R Aparicio, Juan Carlos Quintero-Herencia, and Juan Otero Garabís. 24 of salsa within the literary production of the time was both an organic extension, and a reflection of the Puerto Rican culture of El Barrio.16 This inescapable intersection is clearly stated in the documentary, Our Latin Thing/ Nuestra Cosa Latina (1972) directed by Leon Gasr, which captures the famous music ensemble Fania All Star’s centrality to the Puerto Rican community in New York City.17 Salsa music rarely stops throughout the documentary, which alternates among images from the East Harlem, the Lower East Side, and Loisaida, its people, salsa concerts, and dancing audiences. The visual narrative suggests that there’s no Puerto Rican community without salsa and vice versa, as the music is part of the breathable air that allows for the continuation of life and an identity discourse outside the island. As Wilson Valentín claims in Bodega Surrealism: The emergence of Latina/o Activists in New York City, 1976- Present, the community “was anything but a passive community subsumed by colonial resignation. They constructed themselves as active agents seeking to foster social change through art, and offered a cohesive narrative that collectively proposed an acute sense of historical agency and intentionality through cultural practices” (13). This collective agency articulated through musical creation and the writings of the Nuyorican Poets constitute a socio-political response to the state’s racialization, criminalization, and systematic invisibility of the Puerto Rican community on U.S. soil (Fred Moten 7). With the institutionalized emergence of “minority literatures” in the 1980s, as a direct effect of the Civil Rights, the

16 When referring to El Barrio or East Harlem I am using Arlene Dávila’s geographical and historical delineation of the Puerto Rican enclave: “…bounded by Ninety-sixth and 142nd streets, Fifth Avenue, and the East River. This is a section that is included in the Manhattan Community District designations…But beyond its geographical limits, El Barrio is defined in relation to its Puerto Rican, and increasingly, Latino history, as well as in relation to the West and Central Harlem, the well known Black culture stronghold to the west, and on relation to the upscale and mostly white neighborhood of the Upper East Side to the south.” (Barrio Dreams 5)

17 The Fania All Star is a group ensemble established by the composer Johnny Pacheco in 1964 to showcase the salsa musicians recording for the Fania Record label. 25 Nuyorican movement’s radicalism had to be negotiated as it struggled between its cooption, and canonical visibility, and the preservation of its identity stance against Americanization. With the popularization of performance poetry or the spoken-word in the 1990s (Jones 185), Willie Perdomo and his generation inherit the movement’s struggle against mass media and mainstream commodification. At the same time El Barrio or East Harlem, under neoliberal tendencies, was going through a gentrification process to turn it into an ethnic tourist attraction (Dávila, Barrio Dreams 2-6). As a result, Perdomo crafts his own space between the thin line of commodification using the spotlight to gain visibility, and the stage as a platform for social criticism.18 This struggle is exemplified in his poem: “You Pay For What You Get, But You Never Get What You Pay For” from his collection Smoking Lovely:

Wrecking balls are aimed at the heads of housing projects. The world is getting baggy with brand names and producers Are taking hip-hop speak seminars so they can help us keep It real. There’s an invisible billboard on the side of the State Office building. It’s a promotion for the platinum-selling Single. You Don’t Have to Go Home (But You Got to Get the Fuck Out of Here). (24)

The poetic voice openly denounces the intent to transform East Harlem into an amusement park, and the commodification of poetry readings during the Slam Era.19 Through his poetic universe, Willie Perdomo is able to absorb the socio-economic

18 In response to some critics that categorize the perfomatic poetry as a lesser-quality type of writing Jones asserts that: “It is precisely the negative perception of conventional poetry as an elite and effete academic discourse, however, that lends the contemporary rendering of the label “spoken word” its cachet, making some black poet’s verbal artistic endeavors more palatable-and hence, marketable-to mainstream audiences that might otherwise not be drawn to these performances.” (185)

19 For a complete study of “barriology” see Villa Raul Homero Barrio-logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture.

26 challenges imposed by neoliberalism’s gentrification processes through the engagement with universal themes like poverty, unemployment, and police brutality, to resist the simplified commercial appropriation of his community and craft a strong Afro-Puerto Rican identity. In this chapter I analyze the way Perdomo wrestles the violent city streets and the discourses that systematically maintain him and the Afro-Puerto Rican community in New York City on the margins. To talk about negotiations of black Puerto Rican identity I follow the concept presented in The Afro-Latin@ Reader concerning the triple layered identity challenge that Afro-Latin@s face when living in the United States:

Taking a cue from W.E.B. Du Bois, we might name this three-pronged web of affiliations “triple-consciousness.” To paraphrase those unforgettable lines from The Souls of Black Folk (1903)…a Latin@, a Negro, an American; three souls, three thoughts, three unreconciled strivings, three warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (14-15)20

Perdomo’s poetic character, also named Willie, finds himself trapped between this discourse of triple-consciousness and the simplified ‘black or white’ American racial binary. I argue that in order to create a third space for Afro-Puerto Ricans and the diaspora community, Perdomo constructs a sophisticated narrative where he first inserts the Nuyoricans’ reality as part of the United States’ collective history. The arrival and treatment of the Puerto Rican diaspora is paralleled to slavery and the treatment of the African American community within U.S. history. Besides offering a critique of segregation, it constitutes a direct reference to Puerto Rico’s colonial status and Afro- Caribbean heritage. Although the recognition of the diaspora as a legitimate historical presence agrees with the theoretical framework of reading the Caribbean as a space connected by movement and circulation articulated by Glissant and Benítez Rojo, it goes

20 W.E.B. Du Bois’ double-consciousness concept appears in his work The Souls of Black Folks. It tries to explain how African Americans negotiate a national identity within the U.S. society. 27 against the island’s official national discourse (Duany, “Nation and Migration” 51-52) that does not recognize the communities born and raised outside its geography as part of the national collective. Secondly, Perdomo embraces his blackness and uses his own Puerto Rican black body as a stage to demonstrate the tension between race and culture endured by the “triply conscious” subject. The acceptance of blackness and African heritage, that according to Juan Flores is one of the steps the diasporic subject goes through, also calls into question Puerto Rico’s ‘whitening racial discourse,’ the rejection and invisibility of its black citizens, and reinforces the socio-political solidarity with the African American community. Finally, I analyze how Willie Perdomo rejects the violent masculine models present in his environment and cultural education, breaking with the ‘manly ideal’ that permeates both in the island and the diaspora.

THE INCORPORATION OF THE DIASPORA EXPERIENCE

The first poem I analyze to show how Perdomo includes the Puerto Rican community within the historical events of the United States is “Nuyorican School of Poetry” from his first poetry collection Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (1996). The title suggests that the poem will be about the Nuyorican Poetry movement, but plays with the meaning of “school” to also refer to the didactic tone of the verses from which we are going to learn about the real history of the Puerto Rican diaspora, neglected by American and Puerto Rican historical discourses. The necessity for a re-learning of history implies that there are events that have been left out, and thus Perdomo challenges both the Puerto Rican and United States national memory as they, for different reasons, have silenced the diaspora’s history and presence. From the American perspective the island of Puerto Rico has served as a political, economic, and ideological territory since the early nineteenth century. In his

28 book Divided Borders the critic Juan Flores summarizes some of the main historical events of their colonial relationship to prove that the political, economic, and social ties have shaped the historical reality of both countries and are impossible to ignore:

Its occupation in 1898 after four centuries of Spanish colonialism, the decades of imposition of English, the unilateral decreeing of American citizenship in 1917, economic and social crisis during the Depression years, externally controlled industrialization, unprecedented migration of the work force and sterilization of the women, ecological depletion and contamination, relentless cultural saturation– all these events pertain not only to Puerto Rican historical reality but to the recent American past as well. (142-43)

This problematic relationship has affected all aspects of Puerto Rican life, ideologies and identity, and demonstrates how problematic its omission is as part of the official America history. It shows that Puerto Ricans have always been treated as invisible second-class citizens.21 The marginality, racialization and criminalization of the diaspora community in the City of New York are just an extension of this treatment.22 Along the same lines, Puerto Rico’s historic discourse tends to ignore the negative side of its relationship with the United States as politicians and the ruling class tirelessly stress the economic stability the island has enjoyed in comparison to other Latin American and Caribbean countries, thanks to its colonial status. Consequently, the mass migration and relocation of almost one million Puerto Ricans from the 1940s-1960s to the mainland as expendible labor for the manufacturing sector is generally perceived as a positive event as at the moment it appeared to relieve the unemployment crisis and removed numerous poor, unskilled black and white peasant Puerto Ricans from the

21 In juridical terms the relationship is as problematic because Puerto Ricans living in the island are directly affected by the United States rulings, but they can’t vote in presidential elections. Similarly, Puerto Ricans have a representative in Congress, but the person occupying this position has a voice but not a vote.

22 For a complete analysis of the Puerto Rican colonial relationship, and the history of the diaspora see, Mambo Montage: The Latinization of New York and, Divided Borders. 29 island.23 The conditions of poverty and social alienation suffered by generations of Puerto Ricans on U.S. soil is hardly discussed as part of the national narrative. All migratory waves and their subsequent U.S. born generations have felt, in one way or another, excluded and racialized by the United States’ national discourse, while at the same time they are not recognized as “real Puerto Ricans” by the island’s national imaginary that stubbornly rests on geographical placement and language to define who belongs to the national collective and who does not. In sum, both sides of the Caribbean Sea have systematically ignored the migration of millions of Puerto Ricans to settle in various bastions across the United States, and more specifically those relocated to El Barrio in New York City. This national rejection responds to racism and a national identity discourse based on geographical immobility that does not speak to Puerto Rican reality. Based on historical patterns of movement and circular migration between the island and the continental United States, Jorge Duany has defined the Puerto Rican community as a “nation on the move.” As a result, multiple generations of Puerto Ricans born and raised in the United States are perpetually in an ‘identity limbo’ between being ‘not-quite- Americans’ and ‘not real Puerto Ricans.’ In an effort to completely re-write both Puerto Rican and American recent histories, Perdomo’s Nuyorican School is in session. Perdomo acknowledges silenced and marginalized voices through the use of the first person plural that recounts the dreams and hopes of millions:

Looking for happy endings we came over-extended families with secrets named sofrito y salsa

23 Today there are more Puerto Ricans living in the United States than on the island. Recent migrations or enclaves have developed in the states of Florida and Texas. See Jorge Duany’s article: “Nation, Migration, Identity: The Case of Puerto Ricans” and “Nation on the Move: The Construction of Cultural Identities in Puerto Rico and the Diaspora.” 30 that made broken homes smell good from the outside (my emphasis 41) The first two verses are the “genesis” of the travesía (trip), and the relocation of the group in search of the American Dream, which shortly after will prove to be a lie. The language selection for each of these verses is intertwined with both the formal and the textual aspects of the poem. The use of English allows for the understanding of the general population, and makes the poem an “official document,” taking into consideration the patriotic weight of the American monolingual tradition. At the same time, the use of English works as a marker of difference between the Puerto Ricans from the island and those born and raised on the “other side.” The ability to manage both languages comfortably provides a space for the creation of an identity discourse that combines the New York urban landscape and its tropicalization, through the combination of these linguistic imaginaries.24 In this sense, the multilingual verses function as a symbolic manifesto of second and third generations that are better represented through combinations that resist the “English-only” American pride, and island-based ideologies. It follows then that the use of each language throughout the stanzas is strategically positioned and used in the creation of the Nuyorican identity both spatially and discursively. As this poem shows, the use of Spanish enables this double connection; on one hand it links the speaker and the collective diaspora to the cultural imaginary of the island, and on the other hand it locates them inside El Barrio. This maternal space is constructed by Perdomo as a safe place that shelters the Nuyorican from the city streets

24 Frances Aparicio uses the term "tropicalization" or hispanification of American poetry when discussing Víctor Hernández Cruz’s Nuyorican Poetry in her article: “Salsa, Maracas, and Baile: Latin Popular Music in the Poetry of Víctor Hernández. She distinguishes the “tropicalization” of poetry through the inclusion of music, Spanish and Puerto Rican referents born from the Latin community from Hollywood’s attempt to “tropicalize” their movie images as a mass media marketing strategy without having any real connection with Latino realities. 31 and is capable of reproducing the “smells of home.” The kitchen’s ability to build a fortress so strong that it can even fix broken homes is challenged by the American urban reality:

Signs of life were up on the wall NO LOITERING NO RADIO PLAYING NO SELLING DRUGS NO TRESPASSING NO SMOKING We came to this skyscrapped city to live to survive to die in concentration camps. (41)

The positive diaspora genesis of the previous verses is now confronted by the state’s “urban commandments” for proper living. The teacher-student relationship established by Perdomo in his quest for the Nuyorican inclusion within the United States’ official chronology is abruptly contested and inverted by the host country. The all-capitalized list of prohibitions leaves no space for dialogue; its directness and simplicity infantilizes and humiliates those who need to be kept in order, exercising what Foucault refers to as biopolitics where the individual becomes “the site of new apparatus of control and regulation” (Globalization 15). Formally the confrontation is reproduced when a defeated collective voice responds to the rules with lowercase one-line verses that reveal the process of disillusionment and unequal power relations. The change in tone of the response and the lack of Spanish words shows the collective’s mental and physical deterioration process and the systematic abjection Puerto Ricans have to endure. In the last verse of the poem, the reference to “concentration camps” works on multiple interpretative levels. When discussing the limits of sovereignty over civilian

32 bodies the anthropologist Achille Mbembe argues that “…the concept of the state of exception [when the sovereign transcends the law in the name of the collective’s good] has been often discussed in relation to Nazism, totalitarianism, and the concentration/extermination camps. The death camps in particular have been interpreted variously as the central metaphor for sovereign and destructive violence and as the ultimate sign of the absolute power of the negative” (“Necropolitics” 12).25 Perdomo’s description of the diaspora life inside the New York City landscape resembles Mbembe’s reading of concentration camps as spaces wired by the state’s oppressive order at both the physical and ideological levels. In a more symbolic reading this reference denounces the extinction of the community’s hopes and dreams thorough their social death produced by their forced marginalization into urban “concentration camps.” It is impossible to ignore the dialogue of Perdomo’s poem with Pedro Pietri’s famous poem “puerto rican obituary” (1973), a text that describes the “living death” existence of Puerto Ricans in the diaspora due to their precarious economic and social conditions. Perdomo accepts the poetic challenge of Pietri’s legacy and is willing to re- write the future of Puerto Ricans living abroad. While the “puerto rican obituary” finishes with a defeated tone: “Always broke/Always owing/ Never knowing/ that they are beautiful people” (23), Perdomo’s poetic voice comes back with a more aggressive tone to claim its place within the urban landscape and America’s collective memory.

We Boricuas Porta-Rocks Spics Goya-bean-eatin’-muthafu- us was the first

25 For a historical study of the “state of exception” see, A Brief History of the State of Exception (2005) by Giorgio Agamben. 33 to come in planes no chains just one-way tickets to a sold-out dream. (43)

Formally this stanza is divided between a “self-affirmation” section, and a historical summary of the mistreatment suffered by Puerto Ricans in U.S. soil. The first three verses combine a proud collective identity, based on their heritage as well as their American reality. As the list goes on, the positive names turn into stereotypical terms used throughout history to ridicule and exclude the Hispanic population.26 These pejorative names work as an extension of the “urban commandments” to maintain the alienation and abjection of the community through their linguistic circulation. In order to fight the accusations Perdomo responds with a negative historical association that allows him to insert Puerto Ricans into the historical discourse as well as denounce their marginal state. This time he compares the Nuyoricans’ situation with the slaves brought to America as forced labor. The use of this event is crucial because the repercussions of slavery are palpable through the inequality suffered by African Americans in the United States today. Both communities are kept in “concentration camps,” the marginal spaces of New York City under the most deplorable socio-economic conditions. I am not suggesting that the slavery period is the same as the immigrants’ realities, but there is a clear pattern of racism and exclusion from what Michael Omi and Haward Winant have described as the racial state, where race determines benefits and social placement (77-79). Thus, Perdomo takes up the challenge of Pietri’s “puerto rican obituary” in revealing and denouncing the socio-economic conditions of the Puerto Ricans in the United States, but

26 In the mid 1980s, some American sectors with a big Latin population, like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, deicded to change the name “hispanic” to “Latino.” The discussion had two main concerns, first, a lot of people did not like the name “hipanic” as it was created by the United States governemt as a census tool. Secondly, the Latino population considered the term stressesed the Colonial past of Latin America and its relationship with Spain (Levine 428-29). 34 instead of ending with a line full of tombstones, Perdomo brings them to life through a strong plural first person, and the rejection of a system that failed them, and not the other way around.

TRAPPED BETWEEN BLACK AND WHITE: THE BLACK PUERTO RICAN BODY

This analysis has showed how the ideological abjection of the diaspora is solidified through popular speech and linguistic interaction, a system that maintains social and racial immobility. But how is triple consciousness negotiated through the body? How is ethnic “otherness” translated to the corporeal and how does it affect social interaction? The poem “Niger-Reecan Blues”, one of the most famous and emblematic poems of Willie Perdomo, exemplifies the ongoing identity struggle of a black Puerto Rican living in the United States. The plot converses with the pioneering novel by Piri Thomas Down These Means Streets (1967) and the perpetual dissonance between his Puerto Rican self-identification and his African American external classification. 27 The tension is palpable from the title’s hyphen, which can be read as a dividing wall or conciliatory bridge between cultural heritage and race. In Juan Flores’ essay titled “Life Off the Hyphen,” he argues that Puerto Ricans in the United States, different from other Latino communities, resist the hyphen (“Puerto Rican American”) as a sign of their bipartite cultural experience:

For if the Latino hyphen as a sign of equilibrium stands for this interplay of cultural politics at an international level, Puerto Ricans in the United States live

27 The text is a memoir of Piri Thomas’ experiences growing up in El Barrio. Down these means streets shows the struggles of Piri and his poor family on U.S. soil. Piri constantly struggles to negotiate his Puerto Rican and Cuban heritage with his dark-skinned complexion that people automatically associate with African Americans. To see Willie Perdomo’s reading of the poem go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7An4hEmRHTk. It is extremely interesting to read the comments posted below the video. The debate among the viewers revolves around the common belief that Latinos are not black. Even though some of the comments show an acceptance of the dual category of Black Latinos it is easy to notice that the conversation is guided by racial imaginaries racial that privilege whiteness over blackness. 35 ‘off the hypen.’ As is frequently noted, of all the ethnic groups it is the Puerto Ricans who pointedly refuse the hyphenation of their identity despite generations of life here and a rich history of interaction with U.S. culture at all levels. (From Bomba to Hip-Hop 180)

Although I agree with Flores’ reading of Puerto Rican’s rejection of a hyphen that “officially” manifests the socio-political relationship with the United States as a territory, and its rejection as a political and identity gesture, there is another equally important hyphen that defines the struggle of Puerto Ricans living in the metropolis. As Perdomo’s title shows, racialized Puerto Ricans have to negotiate their Afro-Puerto Rican or Afro- Latino relationship as well as their collective political commonwealth “in-betweeness.” Bhabha’s use of the term “in-betweeness” is particularly useful as it allows including both Puerto Ricans and African Americas as minorities that ‘interrupt’ society when conceived as a whole (Culture’s in Between 167). Thus, minorities are always ‘out of place,’ ‘foreign’ bodies in perpetual necessity of proving that they belong as part of the social collective. The title “Niger-Reecan Blues” captures the space between the national myth of mestizaje, known as “la gran familia puertorriqueña” (the great Puerto Rican family) which states that Puerto Ricans are products of the Taíno Indian, Spaniard, and African blend; and the American bi-racial imaginary, where ‘one drop’ of African blood makes you an African American. At the same time, the use of the historically and socially charged word ‘nigger’ produces an alliance between both communities based on a linguistic solidarity maintaining the tension with the island whitening discourse vis-à-vis the Caribbean’s undeniable African heritage.28 Here Saidiya V. Hartmam’s reading of

28 The word ‘nigger’ functions as an extension, and a reminder, of slavery institutions and white superiority. According to Jabari Asim the word was first found in the XVII century as part of the colonialists’ notes. Some argue that it was meant to function as a neutral term to refer to black people, as it derived from the word ‘niger’ in Latin. With time the word became an insult associated with the supposed inferiority of the black community. Today some artists, like Dave Chappelle, use the word in order to confront its oppression while at the same time create stretch its limits. For a complete study of the word throughout time see Asim, Jabari. The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't, and Why. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. 36 emancipation as a transition “between modes of servitude and racial subjection” is useful as she reminds us that racial inequality never disappeared, as it stayed inscribed in the vocabulary used to talk about “persons, rights, and liberties” (6). Following the idea of repurposing historically oppressive vocabulary as a grammar of solidarity, with the use of the word blues Perdomo stresses the role of music as an important contribution to mainstream culture, and a creative space of convergence among African Americans and Nuyoricans throughout most of the twentieth century. To maintain the tension introduced in the title between race and heritage, the black Nuyorican character is constantly challenged by multiple individuals that demand his identification with only one group. Willie is forced to wrestle his way throughout the poem in order to define the title’s hyphen in ‘nigger-reecan’ as a frontier:

-Hey Willie. What are you, man? Boricua? Moreno? Que? Are you Black? Puerto Rican? -I am. -No, silly. You know what I mean: What are you? -I am you. You are me. We the same. Can’t you feel our veins drinking the same blood? (19) In these opening verses an African American subject demands that Willie identify himself using the American “one-drop rule” paradigm. Willie is forced into the monochromatic imposition that does not recognize the separation between cultural heritage and skin tone, perpetuating the “foreigner” label on anyone that does not fit the black or white scheme. This exchange points to an even more problematic discursive dilemma captured by the interlocutor’s inability to accept the black Puerto Rican body as legitimate. The ideological dissonance is greatly constructed and reinforced by the reproduction of fair-skinned Latinos in the media. As Arlene Dávila argues in her book

Latinos, Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People, by the 1980s Latinos were a commercially attractive group, and as part of this commodification process, physical 37 appearances are manipulated and mass-produced as a “non-threatening” consumable product. Thus, black Puerto Ricans are relegated to the margins of invisibility within the American popular imaginary. A similar process takes place on the island through the discourse known as “la gran familia puertorriqueña” (the great Puerto Rican family), based on the mestizaje ideal that limits the African component in the cultural sphere, but actual black Puerto Ricans are criminalized and marginalized. According to this imaginary, Puerto Ricans are the result of a perfect mix of the Taíno (Puerto Rico’s indigenous people), the Spaniard, and the African ancestors, but the physical traits privileged are those that resemble a tanned but not black skin color. Thus, through different discourses and means, both the island and the metropolis reinforce the invisibility and un-readability of the Puerto Rican black body. Initially the main character resorts to highlighting his culture to articulate his identity, but once he realizes that in the United States identity is mainly fought from corporeal readability, he resorts to the body to negotiate his “triple consciousness”:

If you look real close you will see that your spirits are standing right next to our songs. Yo soy Boricua! Yo soy Africano! I ain’t lying. Pero mi pelo is kinky y curly y mi skin no es negro pero it can pass…(19)

Perdomo leaves behind the Boricua versus Black division to rearticulate a language of solidarity, but not total fusion or invisibility. This constructive tension is linguistically maintained by the use of Spanish and English to complicate visible appearances. The Spanish interstice creates a third space within the racial discourse where bilingualism functions as a double symbol. On one hand it reiterates “resistance to complete incorporation,” by formally marking the Puerto Rican heritage as a traceable difference, and on the other hand places the Spanish words as part of the American reality represented by the English words.

38 Thematically these verses show a discursive inversion that dismantles the racial superiority of light-skinned individuals over dark-skinned ones. The term “passing” has a long history in the United States’ history. As Elaine K. Ginsberg explains in her book Passing and the Fictions of Identity, “The genealogy of the term passing in American history associates it with the discourse of racial difference and especially with the assumption of a fraudulent “white” by an individual and legally defined as “Negro” or black by virtue of a percentage of African ancestry”(2-3). The action of passing reflects the limitations on social categories available to an individual, and the struggle to negotiate his or her own identity. The idea of masking and contouring racial traits is very common in the Spanish Caribbean as well, but in a more flexible manner because it is based on observable traits rather than the notion of “blood” used in the United States. Thanks to its malleability, African roots can become invisible, making “passing,” from Afro-Puerto Rican to mestizo common and accepted social behavior through hair straightening practices. This is also possible because contrary to the “one drop rule” most shades of Puerto Ricans are considered mixed or even white. But why identify with blackness? In this case, Perdomo opts to invert the racial hierarchy and “pass” from Puerto Rican to black, an action that symbolically dismantles whitening and Eurocentric discourses as the primary emulation model both in the United States and Puerto Rico that insist on blackness’ invisibility. Even if this gesture allows for a momentary and symbolic shift in power relations, reality forces the poetic voice to identify within the available categories when the other character interrupts him: “-Hey, yo. I don’t care what you say. You Black” (19). Throughout all of his work Willie will strategically embrace his blackness, without denying his Puerto Ricanness, in order to expose and criticize the racial dynamic in the United States, thus always maintaining his cultural difference through the incorporation of Spanish and specific references to the Nuyorican experience. 39 When the poem is performed on stage the poet’s body becomes a platform of enunciation to demonstrate centuries of shared history among African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Puerto Rican blackness. 29 The black body becomes an extension of the text and a live example of the binary system the poem dismantles. A black Latino reading in Spanish and English while talking about race extends and demonstrates the identity struggle confronted by the poetic character. By becoming his own “show and tell” subject -and object- Perdomo allows his audience to consume his black body as form and content. Through this process he becomes the title’s hyphen, now clearly presented as a bridge between both the Puerto Rican and the African American communities through his Puerto Rican blackness.

In this section I have analyzed how Perdomo’s performative black body complicates the bodily aspect of “ethnic otherness” of triple consciousness through his poem “Niger-Reecan Blues”. The use of the hyphen in the title points to the dual racial and cultural identities that Afro-Puerto Ricans have to negotiate in Puerto Rico and the United States, where both U.S. “one-drop” ideology and the Puerto Rican ideology of “la gran familia” refuse a space for black Puerto Ricans. Perdomo’s poem embraces, but does not collapse or synthesize, the ethnic and racial components of identity-negotiation, symbolized through the double use of Spanish and English and the constant reference to

29 In a personal interview when I asked Willie Perdomo how he labeled himself, this was his response: “I'm Puerto Rican, but a distinct type of Puerto Rican. I'm telling you--I've been all over the country and I can't tell you how many times someone recognizes the timber of my voice as distinctly black, distinctly Puerto Rican, distinctly East Harlem. In fact, you could argue that the transnational Diaspora that we know as the Puerto Rican mainland started in East Harlem. I am a post-Boogaloo, post-Civil Rights baby. I was marching down the street to black power anthems by the time I was 9. My generation of Puerto Ricans is the post-Salsa, early hip-hop, non-Spanish speaking generation. If you sat down with me and the folks I grew up with, we all sound like Ricans who have best friends that are morenos. We live and loved and fought and had babies with each other. In fact, of all the Latinos, we seem to be the first to embrace other cultures and ethnicities more readily and lovingly. I can identify with the term "Afro-Latino" for the sake of that particular discourse, but my relationship to the "Afro" in me is more condition and culture than it is theory.” 40 Puerto Rico’s cultural capital. As an extension, Perdomo’s performative black body becomes the bridge that spans the divide between cultural and racial identities for his audience.

THE BLACK BODY AS A HISTORICAL WITNESS

He extends this idea in the poem “Dreaming, I was only Dreaming” (60) where the black body becomes a historical mirror of social and political values and beliefs, as a vessel that travels through time provoking and proving that racial discourses in the United States are based on colored hierarchies that place both African Americans and Afro-Puerto Ricans in the bottom of the social structure. As in many of Perdomo’s poems, the title plays an important role within the overall poetic structure. “Dreaming I was only Dreaming” recalls Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous 1967 speech “I have a dream,” where King called for racial equality and the end of racism. In a sense, Perdomo’s poem places this hope-filled message face to face with historical racial violence. The poem is narrated through a young poetic voice, showing how from a very early age racial discourses inform the formal and emotional education of American youth, shaping the images that they have of themselves and their role in society. Thematically the text oscillates between a student and his teacher while they discuss racial history in the classroom. Temporally the poem travels back and forth in time, while the poetic voice becomes indistinguishable from every black American body throughout history. Conversing with Foucault’s idea that there is no subjectivity outside of power, Perdomo shows how power is reconfigured into new disciplinary manifestations that respond to historical and social specificity. The official discourse of history is challenged through the young boy’s voice when he questions its veracity:

My history professor has a bad habit 41 of looking at me when discussing slavery I can’t relate to fields of slaves making America I can hear their cries beautiful and strong All the facts are lies. (60)

This is another show-and-tell body, as he is marked by his racist professor as possibly the only black student in the class. There are two discourses competing in the opening verses: the student’s perception of history produced by his sensorial connection to the events acquired through the corporeal black vessel, and the official version supported by the professor’s privileged power position. This “scholarly” confrontation resembles the conflict presented in the previously discussed poem “The Nuyorican School of Poetry” between the state and the collective, where order is used to silence and marginalize the diaspora both spatially and ideologically. The two verses that convey the suffering of the slaves are formally dislocated from the “official poetics,” gesture that perpetuates the silencing of a multi-voiced historical perspective that would be able to challenge the utopian anti-racist discourse. The professor’s embellishment of a horrific past with a hedonic and romanticized aura is slashed by the student’s repeated objection to being used as a representative symbol of black oppression:

Professor Why do you keep looking at me when you discuss slavery Last I heard I was free. (60) The student’s black body as the recipient of the professor’s constant panoptic stare –a surveillance mechanism- is on display as an extension of the text’s critique to prove the

42 continuity of slavery through contemporary educational practices that reproduce the criminalization of black bodies. In her article “Legal Slaves and Civil Bodies” Colin Dayan argues that today’s legal system represents the continuity of slavery, as it criminalizes race. She continues that: “Confinement of prisoners in the United States thus became an alternative to slavery, another kind of receptacle for imperfect creatures whose civil disease justified containment” (15). Perdomo is able to demonstrate this historical continuity by showing how the editing of history -through its pretensions to universalism- allows for the constant criminalization and never ending policing -either inside the classroom, the prison or the city- of the black subject. 30 The impossibility of breaking free from racial paradigms inherited from slavery is signified in the poem through a chronological collapse where the student travels through different historical periods. As in a dream, the lyrical voice seamlessly transits through different scenarios, but the outcome is always the same: segregation and criminalization of the black body. Perdomo thus shows that history serves the powerful, the police, and the military as they help to contain the black body by making sure it is always sacrificed to the state:

The chief of police held a news conference on the steps of City Hall. He held my hand up like a boxer who just won a championship. He told the crowd that I was the one who shot the policeman. (Or someone who looked like me) […] “Even the bullets were black” he cried as they escorted him to the Bellevue Psychiatric Clinic. (61, my emphasis) Once again, the official text is annotated by the lyrical voice, therefore dismantling its veracity through information given in parenthesis. Here not only is the black young man arrested for a crime that he must have committed due to his blackness, but the bullets are

30 Perdomo presents an Althusserian reading of the "Repressive State Apparatus" (RSA) to control the marginal subject. 43 also painted black, as if they were already predestined to be the perpetuator of the crime. This allows for a clear dichotomy between the good/legal bullets and the bad/criminal ones based on the “color mark” carried by the black bodies as an interrupted social codification of slavery now reinterpreted as objectification based on social ‘disruption’ (Hartman 186-87). The dream-like narration ends in a very concrete and real place that fuses the classroom and the prison, depriving the black body of its freedom:

I held out my fist between the cage bars, raising my arm high like I wanted to ask a question. […] The policemen swam out of the blood pool and called my name. He wiped his red neck and smiled with his yellow teeth. Then he said, “Get up, boy. This ain’t no dream. It’s time to see the judge.” (62, my emphasis)

From a conventional classroom where knowledge is repeated and recycled, and questioning is rejected, the young man is displaced into the judicial system, an institution that will segregate him from the “free” community and transform him into a sacrificial body in order to provide justice and peace at his expense. In other words, Perdomo proves how the slavery system has been replaced with contemporary forms of repression that are maintained by the systematic criminalization and exclusion of black individuals. This discourse has now extended to the Afro-Latinos living in the United States as their bodies link them with American’s history and racial discourse. Perdomo takes this critique further when he assumes a collective Black-Diaspora voice in his poem “Forty-One Bullets OFF-Broadway” to denounce the annihilation of the black “out-of-place” body. The text is written in remembrance of Amadou Diallo, a twenty three year old Guinean immigrant killed by four officers of the New York City Police Department in 1999. This poem is a protest against injustice and racism, but it is also a call for unity among the immigrant communities. The poem resembles the cinematic crime trope of ‘good guys versus bad guys,’ but this demarcation between

44 “good” and “bad” becomes blurry as the reader witnesses the story through the point of view of the criminalized and excluded youth.31 The first inversion between the “good” and “bad” guys is presented through an alternative concept of justice, 32

It’s not like you were looking at a vase filled with plastic white roses while pissing in your mother’s bathroom and hoped that today was not the day you bumped into four cops who happened to wake up with a bad case of contagious shooting. (39, my emphasis)

Here the violence produced in the name of justice and social order is described as an illness fueled and maintained by the criminalization of race that ends up annihilating the immigrant boy’s life. Similar to the previous poem where the poetic voice connected with the injustices suffered by the slaves through the black body connection, here as well he becomes a sensorial witness to the victim’s collapse:

From the Bronx to El Barrio we heard you fall face first into the lobby of your equal opportunity forty-one bullets like silver push pins holding up a connect-the-dots picture of Africa forty-one bullets not giving you enough time to hit the floor with dignity and justice for all forty-one bullet shells trickling onto a bubble gum-stained mosaic where your body is mapped out. (39)

Conversing with Paul Gilroy’s trans-Atlantic cultural frame, these verses trace the mapped out body back to Africa, symbolically desentering nationalistic discourses and

31 For a detailed study of visual images of African American’s on the big screen see: Donalson, Melvin. Hip Hop in American Cinema.

32 This poem also dialogues with Pedro Pietri’s poem “Telephone Booth Number 905 ½.” Here Pietri makes fun of the not so “equal opportunities” available for minorities. The poem is available online: http://www.worldofpoetry.org/usop/life1.htm 45 bringing together all the black poetic characters under one ironic “inclusive” label: “the out-of-place” community. Perdomo re-articulates his “time travel” narrative tactic to insist on the direct relation that exists between slavery and the treatment received by contemporary black subjects. He uses the hyphen once again to illustrate social tensions: on one hand it represents the violent bullets that replicate the discursive and ideological violence of the state, while on the other hand the repetition of the ‘forty-one bullets’ function as an echo throughout the verses that build a bridge of solidarity among marginal communities. The excessive use of violence against one individual versus dozens of bullets stresses the historical injustice lived by the African immigrant community and as a loud reminder of justice’s tilted scale. Even though the picture of East Harlem presented by Perdomo is mostly negative, and the racial state conspires to keep the individual trapped between/behind walls/bars, the poem “Save the Youth” provides a glimpse of hope. What happens once the Nuyorican finds a voice through the struggle over identity? How does this new narrativization allows for new productive and affirmative spaces that leave behind exclusionist ideologies? This poem provides an alternative reading to the systematic racialization and criminalization of urban youth and exhorts the reader to re-think social frames supporting Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s reading of Gramsci’s term war of maneuver defined as “a situation in which subordinate groups seek to preserve and extend a definite territory, to ward off violent assault, and to develop an internal society as an alternative to the repressive social system they confront” (81). Using an autobiographical tone Perdomo writes about the younger generations:

I can only speak about the youth growing on the corners of my block 46 They stay up way past bed time selling brand-name poison keeping the economy healthy and making new rules Just like the men who built this country (“Where a nickel costs a dime” 48, my emphasis)

The use of the “corner” as the central location provides multiple interpretative layers of convergence. Generally, the corner is socially constructed as a problematic “in-between” territory and a space where illegal transactions are performed due to its peripheral views that provide an easy escape. When reading the relationship between urban spaces John Friske argues that:

The city is a mix of freedom and constraint. It is designed to promote certain ways of behaving, of moving, of thinking. It is the ultimate text, produced and reproduced by the forces of capital and law and order, designed for the efficient exercise of what these forces should constitute everyday life. Yet its very complexities make it also the place of a great disorder, its multiple systems of control and discipline open up gasps where life can be lived out of control, beyond discipline.” (204, my emphasis)

In the poetic context my reading coincides with Friske’s view of the corner as a liberating territory and point of convergence, a geography that allows for various roads to come together and create a new space. But within this instance of possible resistance comes the reality of the ‘multicultural’ state, that like David Bennett and Homi Bhabha remind us, does not allow for the inclusion of the marginal, as it is always seen as a problematic ‘add-on’ to society at large and a constant reminder of the falsehood of a homogeneous ‘nation.’ 33 The poetic voice points out that those positioned on the corner do not necessarily follow the rules because they create their own, ones that respond to their particular

33 For a discussion of the different models of representations managed by the idea of multiculturalism see Multicultural States. 47 reality. Even though their behavior is not always welcomed by the establishment, Perdomo reminds us that the kids from the corner are the visible part of the drug chain; they are not the only ones participating in the transaction but are the only ones being blamed through a negative and criminalized visibility. The poetic text provides an interesting twist, a perverse suggestion that provides an empowerment discourse that transforms these outlaws into pioneers of the new American landscape. With this suggestion Perdomo implies that the social structure and organization has to be re- thought as American reality changes, and that change has to come from the symbolic “corner” as a productive and transformative space and not from the institutions that maintain them on the corner as a street with no outlet.

THE NEGOTIATION OF MASCULINITY

In addition to Perdomo’s claim for the inclusion of Puerto Rican diaspora within the United States and Puerto Rican history and his critique of the racial state, he problematizes the inherited masculine discourse centered on strong and violent figures. The social construct of masculinity presented in Perdomo’s poetry is closely related to cultural practices, and in the case of Puerto Ricans and other Spanish Caribbean communities, music. As I mentioned before, the salsa genre was recorded and marketed from New York City in the 1970s, is a vital component of the Puerto Rican community in New York City as an identity symbol. In this sense, this music shared a cultural space with Nuyorican Poetry, as both expressions speak about and from a collective blue-collar position, thus nurturing a solidarity among the working class. As Frances Aparicio has stated in her article “Salsa, Maracas and Baile: Latin Popular Music in the Poetry of Víctor Hernández Cruz”: “The presence of Salsa in Nuyorican poetry not only questions the definition of literature as an elitist Western paradigm of cultural expression; it is also

48 a recognition of the differential role that so-called "naive knowledges" can play within the margins of erudite culture” (46). Thus, the genre came to forge a strong connection within the diaspora community as a recognizable sound recuperated in Nuyorican poetry that blurred the distinction between literary production and popular culture manifestations. In the case of Willie Perdomo’s work, the musical element is integrated in various ways; one of them is through the creation of a private referential universe through the inclusion of salsa icons into the verses. The intertextuality resists the ideological and concrete city that relegates the Latino community to the margins, erecting a proper sensorial urban space. An example of both, the use of iconic figures and the direct quotation of salsa lyrics, is present in his poem titled “The Day Héctor Lavoe Died.”34 The text narrates the personal reflections of a mother and her junkie son when they receive the news of Lavoe’s death. The iconic salsa figure not only serves as a kind of cultural glue among generations, but also as a historical reflection of the achievements and losses of the whole community, and a mirror for the poetic character:

…I will stop to see the voice that helped me when I was trying to sing my own song about mi gente en el barrio y la vida de las putas, los tecatos, y las brujas, los dichosos, los tiburones, los cantantes y los soneros… (50)

Lavoe’s figure brings together multiple cultural and social elements that prefigure El Barrio and its people elevating and transforming everyday life into a hymn of solidarity among those individuals that go breagando (struggling) through life. Lavoe’s lyrics

34 Héctor Lavoe (1946-1993), also known as El cantante de los cantantes, is one of the most famous Puerto Rican salsa singers of all time. He moved to New York City when he was seventeen years old, when he started to sing for several salsa bands. During the 1970s, when the salsa genre was at its peak, Hector Lavoe became one of the central figures of the time. Due to the genre’s close relationship to Puerto Rican identity in the United States, Lavoe is considered a popular culture iconic figure. The movie El Cantante (2006), directed by Leon Ichaso, narrated the troubled life of the singer. 49 invade the text, adding musicality to the poetic cadence, and a sense of familiarity for those who know his repertoire. This enables Willie, the poetic character, to transform the day-to-day hassle into a poetic universe. Unfortunately, the genre is also known for its patriarchal, homophobic, and misogynist tendencies. This discourse reproduces and reinforces cultural practices, socially accepted conduct and gender relationships on U.S. soil as well as the island. A canonical example of the hyper-masculine and abusive male figure traditionally exhibited in salsa music is Ismael “Maelo” Rivera’s song “Si te cojo” (1976):

Yo me paso sudando por ti pa' que tu coquetees por ahí si yo llego y no te encuentro aquí pau, pau, pau, te voy a dar.

These lyrics, from one of the most important salsa performers of all time, promises his wife a beating if she does not behave as a conventionally perfect housewife. He works hard for her so in return she has to “behave” or she will suffer the consequences of her audacity. This machista and abusive attitude sneaks into Perdomo’s verses through family violence. Similar to those salsa tunes that originate inside the Barrio’s apartments and let themselves out the windows and into the New York streets, my reading of the poetic masculine discourse informed by musical themes, begins at home and spreads out to the public space, but with a call for change. The poem “Unemployed Mami” illustrates a dysfunctional family that struggles with economical vulnerability, alcoholism, and domestic violence. The patriarchal salsa universe is translated onto the page where the maternal figure has to put up with an aggressive husband. In this family portrait, however, Willie Perdomo breaks with the abusive masculinity model:

Even though she don’t have a job mami still works hard. 50 She walked behind my drunken father, in the rain, as he stumbled into manhood and oblivion… […] He beat my mami, he beat my mami, stop beating my mami! […] I still hear the same salsa blaring out the same social club where I use to fall asleep and dream happy lives. (29) The use of Spanish to refer to his mother is very important as it denotes an affective relationship with her and a more distant and generic relationship with the abusive male, while at the same time creating a third place that represents the son’s identity. Both the Spanish language and the salsa music pertain to a safe and happy place that is disrupted by domestic violence. Perdomo’s masculine figure seems to act on Rivera’s threat of resorting to domestic abuse, but the son infantilizes the patriarch when he describes him as a “stumbling” drunk, thus rejecting the violent and abusive manhood model. The masculine figure feels threatened by the woman’s domain of the domestic space, and responds with violence. The use of physical strength as a punishment situates these verses within the slave-abusing tradition that as Sadiya Hartman argues still marks the black body today. There is an attempt to break with the cycle of violence when the son, representing a new generation, rejects the abusive patriarchal figure, the misogynist salsa tradition, and the historical violent narrative. In other words, the musical and poetic discourses collide as part of the same cultural practices, but Perdomo’s character is the piece that won’t allow the continuity of this masculine cycle. The sexualized and objectified mami of Rivera’s prose is appreciated and protected by a more sensitive masculinity in “Unemployed Mami.” Although the son is still normative in his function of protectiveness he does not recognizes physical aggression as a masculine trait. In sum, as part of the Slam Poetry generation Willie Perdomo keeps alive Pedro Pietri’s critical use of poetry, and Langston Hughes’ musical aesthetic, thus resisting and denouncing racist and violent masculine discourses both from Puerto Rico and the United

51 States. As a black Puerto Rican, the poetic character always finds himself in the middle of national and racial discourses that systematically exclude him, and those who “look like him” from the national imagery. Always maintaining a tension between his African descent and his cultural heritage, Perdomo is able to deconstruct Puerto Rico’s racial myth of mestizaje, and rejects the United States’ “black-and-white” discourse. Through the use of his body as a platform, he takes a stand against the criminalization of black bodies throughout history to show that social stratification is still based upon racial hierarchies. Besides rejecting Eurocentric models of social and political privileges, Perdomo denounces culturally inherited masculine models based on violence learned through cultural manifestations like salsa music. In order to dismantle the violent macho masculinity he ridicules, infantilizes and rejects the abusive patriarchal figure. He thus proposes a masculine subject that does not replicate the abusive behavior unproblematized by previous generations. He poses a type of “new black man,” one that is creative and sensitive. While putting El Barrio in the spotlight he resists its commodification through the poetization of crude and violent images that invite the reader to either extend the invisibility and discriminatory discourses suffered historically by its inhabitants, or recognize the necessity of new discourses that accommodate migration as part of the historical events and contemporary realities of the United States. Perdomo is able to create a provisional space “on the corner” as a possible productive space for those who are not allowed on the urban main streets.

52 Chapter Two: Guillermo Rebollo-Gil: questioning race and gender from a blanquito’s point of view

RAP IS POETRY-and its spoken essence is central to the popularization of poetry. -Bob Holman, Aloud.

The Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico (MAC) is hosting a Poetry is Busy poetry reading night. When I step into the room where the readings are going to take place it feels cold, spacious, and quiet. But as expected, that doesn’t last for long with the arrival of people of all ages, families, friends that noisily choose their seats and greet each other. One after the other the poets and performers take the stage to share their creation in front of a room that’s full to capacity. One of the last poets to read is Guillermo Rebollo-Gil. Dressed in a simple white shirt with rolled-up sleeves and jeans, he begins his reading. His body moves slowly from side to side with every couple of words, while his voice creates a beat that resembles a collage between hip-hop, salsa music, and reggaton, a combination that traces a long history of social exclusion, and cultural empowerment both in the United States, and Puerto Rico. This Puerto Rican poet of the 1990s novísimos generation has published five books of poetry: Veinte (2000), Sonero (2003), Teoría de la conspiración (2005), Carencia (2008), and Sobre la destrucción (2012). His prolific production addresses a variety of subjects, from his struggle as an upper class white boy to be recognized as a “legitimate” poetic voice, to Puerto Rican racism and Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the United States. Together with other contemporary Puerto Rican writers like Urayoán Noel and José Raúl González “Gallego,” Guillermo Rebollo-Gil has been called a “performative poet,” a term which not only describes his reading style, but also refers to

53 his literary work’s cadence as it is constantly moving between the page and the stage.35 This combination of text and performance should be understood, as Charles Bernstein suggests: “as a performative event and not merely as a textual entity [that] refuses the originality of the written document in favor of “the plural event” of the work…” (Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word 9). As a performative poet, Rebollo-Gil utilizes his body as an extension of his social and racial critique, while the rhythmic reading alters and redefines the written text with each interpretation. Rebollo-Gil’s performace follows in the footsteps of the Nuyorican Poets using his art as a social and political tool, and enters in direct dialogue with Willie Perdomo’s slam poetry generation through the incorporation of urban music like salsa and reggaeton. Like Miguel Algarín, one of the founders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, he positions himself as “a catalyst through which social change is made” (Aloud 9), and in order for it to work as such, the poetry had to be accessible to all types of publics through live performances. In an attempt to connect with people’s socio-political and cultural realities Rebollo-Gil, similarly to Willie Perdomo, incorporates popular music into his texts as a manifestation of the shared culture between Puerto Ricans and the diaspora community. Bridging the significance and social impact of working-class musical manifestations, and the slam poetry tradition as tools for identity negotiation, Guillermo Rebollo-Gil combines the written and the musical word to denounce Puerto Rico’s socio-political injustices and contradictions.36 But how does he incorporate these cultural discourses in a way that separates him from his predecessors?

35 This name was given by Áurea María Sotomayor -Miletti in her article “Hipótesis sobre cuatro maneras de poetizas: poesía puertorriqueña contemporánea”. Revista Iberoamericana.

36 Guillermo Rebollo-Gil is interested in the Nuyorican poetic tradition as both a poet and a scholar. His master’s thesis is titled: The New Boogaloo: Nuyorican Poetry and the Coming Puerto Ran Identities where he studies Pedro Pietri’s and Willie Perdomo’s work focusing on identity discourses. He has also participated with Willie Perdomo in various ‘open mics’ and poetic appearances. 54 In this chapter I analyze how Guillermo Rebollo-Gil incorporates the urban genres of salsa and reggaeton into his work- two musical genres that are racialized and rejected due to their Afro-Caribbean and blue-collar origins- in order to reject heteronormative and whitening discourses. Rebollo-Gil’s use of salsa and reggaeton is not coincidental, as both genres share strong patriarchal imaginaries and have a long history of racialization. Departing from Ronald L. Jackson’s reading of the black body as a surface of assigned social meanings historically imposed by slavery and recycled by negative media constructions, my analysis will concentrate on the material body as well as its ability to reflect socio-political and cultural discourses. I apply José Esteban Muñoz ‘disidentification’ strategy, as a minority performance survival tool that “works on and against dominant ideology” (11) to read Guillermo Rebollo-Gil’s poetry as a battlefield for the formation of new racial and gender conceptualizations. Following Frances Aparicio’s reading of “Musical space as another discursive site to produce, reproduce, subvert and negotiate identity and culture,” (9) his blend of salsa, reggaeton, and poetic verses break the strict articulation of Puerto-Ricanness via a white, heteronormative imaginary constructed in “traditional” musical genres. Instead, Rebollo-Gil’s incorporation of urban musical genres proposes a transnational vision of the Puerto Rican nation that bridges the island and the diaspora, the privileged and the marginalized, the literary and the popular. As we have seen in Chapter One, there is an African American and Nuyorican tradition, especially after the Civil-Rights era, that incorporates popular music like blues, jazz, hip hop, and salsa into the poetic texts in an effort to make the genre accessible to a wider audience (Jones 7). Concurrent to the development of this style in the US, Puerto Ricans writing from the island begin to include popular and urban musical manifestations into their texts in order to break the rigidity and formality of the literary text in an effort 55 to converse with the Puerto Rican and Latin American cultural practices. Luis Rafael Sánchez is the pioneer of this literary exploration with his novel La guaracha del Macho Camacho (1976), that as Frances Aparicio argues produced “una revolución estilística basada en la poética de lo soez y en la presencia subversiva de los ritmos populares caribeños” (Entre la guaracha y el bolero 73).37 A couple of years later Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá publishes his famous chronicle El entierro de Cortijo (1983) where he explores Puerto Rico’s popular and racial discourses through the narration of the wake, procession and burial of the popular bomba and plena musician, Rafael Cortijo. Another famous example of this discursive fusion is Luis Rafael Sánchez’s more recent novel La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos (1988). This narration traces the route of the singer Daniel Santos throughout Latin America as he casts a unitary spell using bolero music as a comfort space for the masses. Through the popular icon, Sánchez recuperates and critiques the strong Latin American and Caribbean heteronormative, deeply misogynist and patriarchal mythology that informs the bolero and salsa genres, revealing the close relationship of popular discourses to national imaginaries. Rebollo-Gil’s contribution to this conversation is his ability to seamlessly weave the emblematic salsa universe and also reggaeton lyrics into his verses, revealing the circulation of popular patriarchal values into the collective ideology for the last four decades in order to problematize these popular literary imaginaries. I propose that Rebollo-Gil’s use of salsa as a poetic axis, a genre synonymous with the diaspora’s Puerto Rican identity, creates a conscious liminal space between the island and the “other island of Puerto Rico”, New York City; the oscillation between the

37 Following Luis Rafael Sánchez pioneering literary and linguistic style, other writers from the 1970s generation incorporated music into their written texts. Some of these writers are: Rosario Ferré, Ana Lydia Vega, Carmen Lugo Filippi, Magalia García Ramis, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, and Manuel Ramos Otero, among others. 56 two spaces exemplifies Benedict Anderson’s concept of nation as an imagined community that exceeds its geographical delimitations.38 This notion of the “national” in the Puerto Rican context as negotiated via border crossings and exchange with communities outside the island is central to Jorge Duany’s notion of “transnational” as a definitive marker of the Puerto Rican community: “In addition to its unresolved colonial dilemma, Puerto Rico is increasingly crisscrossed by migrants ...[…]“This… makes Puerto Rico a test case of transnationalism, broadly defined as the maintenance of social, economic, and political ties across national borders” (Nation and Migration 51). Under these circumstances, Rebollo-Gil’s rearticulation of slam poetry’s musical and literary tradition from both the island and the U.S. serves as a way to deterritorialize the ‘national’ island-based artistic production. This modality can be situated as part of a bigger tendency shared by another poet of this generation, Urayoán Noel, also determined to explore the text and the stage, simultaneously formally playing with the form. Furthermore, their linguistic exploration with English, Spanish and Spanglish, like the Nuyorican poets, foments a literary continuum that acknowledges the diaspora as part of the Puerto Rican literary tradition, playing with identity notions of puertorriqueñidad. Even though Rebollo-Gil’s poetry shares the musicality, performatic aspect, and the social critique of the Nuyorican Poets, the latter do so from the vantage point of a racialized underclass relative to the hegemonic US, while Rebollo-Gil, as a white upper- class male, criticizes the social dynamics that have given him an unquestioned comfortable position. As I have discussed in Chapter One, the mestizaje discourse called “la gran familia puertorriqueña” claims that it includes every color shade in the Puerto Rican family. Racial mestizaje is a necessary “foundational fiction” for Latin America

38 As I have previously discussed, as a result of Puerto Rico’s political relationship with the United States, back and forth displacements between the two territories are part of the migratory cycles of the last two centuries resulting from diverse socio-political, and economical reasons. 57 and the Caribbean, as Jossianna Arroyo declares, because it allowed the national identitary imaginaries to be born (Travestismos Culturales 11-12). However the everyday racial interactions, social power, and uneven economic distribution show how distant reality is from this foundational fiction of an egalitarian society, and in the case of Puerto Rico it reinforces white privilege and the exclusion of the black population from the national body. Although it is true that racial divisions in Puerto Rico are more complicated than the binomial racial system of the United States (the one drop rule), social hierarchies are still organized upon color shades that place a higher value on “white” subjects, as Yeidy Rivero indicates: “behind the comforting screen of racial mestizaje lies the racist ideology and process of blanqueamiento (whitening) where racial mixing with white (European) people makes populations either whiter, thereby improving on or lessening the supposedly inferior black or Indian racial traits” (14). The whitening hierarchy that underlies Puerto Rico's false racial democracy is not an issue that is openly discussed by Puerto Ricans, because its problematization could result in the disintegration of a false unity that has served as a political tool to maintain the status quo since the first decades of the twentieth century. It is not a coincidence that the black and mulatto communities continue to be criminalized and marginalized, as their dark bodies mark them as suspicious and dangerous. Furthermore, Puerto Rico has never seen organized black and mulatto civil rights movements, and thus there is no collective mechanism to deal with racism and racial discrimination. This silent treatment has led to a hypocritical social coexistence on an island where the popular saying “el que no tiene dinga tiene mandinga” points to the impossibility of tracing one’s racial linage back to solely white- European descendants. 39

39The term white here refers to Puerto Rico’s definition of whiteness. This category is based on the fairness of the person’s skin color and not necessarily to his or her racial linage. 58 Guillermo Rebollo-Gil’s social position make him intelligible in the island’s racial paradigm as both “white” and a “blanquito” defined by Isar P. Godreau as a Puerto Rican term used “to refer to a person of the upper class, often times with pejorative connotations…although bearing some relationship to skin color, [it] does not depend on phenotypic variations […] When a white person is called a blanquito, the charge has to do with an elitist, snobbish attitude or lifestyle”(6). The word is a tool of blanqueamiento (whitening), as it provides mobility and greater social status to those who can “buy” the blanquito adjective through economic means without having to be blancos. Conscious of his socio-racial position, Rebollo-Gill labels himself as a blanquito to prevent any possible criticism to his rearticulation of the racialized slam poetry tradition. His assumption of the blanquito marker preempts any possible external criticism by problematizing his own social place: “Rebollo hace añicos el feeling de la simulación, el populismo de las clases altas, el syndrome Guaynabo City, los referentes culturales diversos, y asume para sí la “tiraera” o el ataque personal…” (Sotomayor Miletti 1068). He is willing to place himself in the middle of the racial debate, and goes face to face with the auto-proclaimed abject Afro-Puerto Rican poet Miguel Piñero in his poem: “Piñero o cómo un blanquito de la isla lee a un poeta nuyorican”: 40

cómo decir te amo cuando mi span- glish

40 The movie Piñero (2001) by director León Ichaso shows the chaotic life of Miguel Piñero, his constant struggle to fit in within the American mainstream culture, and his struggle with addiction. Portrayed by Benjamin Bratt, Miguel Piñero is constructed as an individual who found inspiration within his own human struggles. 59 es moda… cómo decir te amo si sentirme nuyo- rican es pura película… teatro, lo mío es puro teatro cuando digo amo con esta boca de blanco. (16-17)

The wordplay created by confusing the indirect object pronoun “te” of the phrases “decirte amo” (call you master) and “decir te amo” (to say that I love you) articulates the author’s “social whiteness” as a conscious beating, and uncovers the double racial hypocrisy toward Afro-Puerto Rican’s and Nuyorican’s racialization. The word “amo” (master) invokes the institution of slavery and its contemporary rearticulation through social stratification. As the “amo” (master) Rebollo-Gil assumes personal responsibility for decades of social and racial oppression lived by Afro-Puerto Ricans. This poetic character that occupies two simultaneous and contradictory social spaces reappears throughout all the collections and has become Rebollo-Gil’s trademark to show the

60 writer’s struggle between his socio-economical position and his sense of social justice. The first poem from his collection Veinte, “blanquito de caparra” shows this contradiction, but while the previous poem oscillates between the island and New York City referring to the racialization of the diaspora, now these verses are specifically located within the island’s racial dynamics narrated from a collective blanquito perspective:

somos los chicos privilegiados, bebemos all through high school porque cualquier cosita papi es abogado y tú sabes […] somos la gran partida de inútiles, comprometidos con la escalera burocrática que estratifica nuestra ignorancia. (17-18)

By accepting his blanquito condition, Rebollo-Gil exorcises the guilt he feels as a result of his social positioning systematically renewed generation after generation without any questioning. Furthermore, the addition of English sharply contrasts with the bilingual tradition of the Nuyorican poets as an identity staple that reproduces cultural “in betweenness,” and here it serves as a social marker that highlights the blanquito’s easy access to a private education. The formal aspect of the poem works toward its content and its scolding tone with a long stanza of forty-one short verses that when read out loud, creates a fast and sharp rhythm that goes hand in hand with Rebollo-Gil’s critique of the upper-class attitude that ignores social inequality in order to keep its privileges. This rhythmic element makes this poem stage-ready, adding force to the performance as well as its social critique of the oblivious upper class. But besides pointing out social stratification, how does his poetry problematize Puerto Rico’s racial imaginaries and national discourses? 61 THE PERFORMANCE OF RACIAL DYNAMICS

The Sonero collection thoroughly explores race through the use of popular music and performance, especially the mulatto and black racialized corporalities as articulated through folklore.41 The author’s transformation into a sonero, a singer with the ability to improvise to the beat of the son, conveys a racial transvestism through the simultaneous assumption of the working-class black or mulatto musical icon, and the blanquito subject.42 This overlap between the blanquito and the mulatto/black subject problematizes “la gran familia puertorriqueña” discourse, making a musical spectacle out of Puerto Rico’s racial dynamics by explicitly exposing it to the public view, rather that ignoring its hegemonic operations. The poem “Guillo”, narrated in first person by the poetic voice named Guillo (a nickname for Guillermo), describes Puerto Rico's folklorization, and exclusion, of the Afro-Puerto Rican population:

yo soy uno destos individuos que adoptó el puertorriqueñismo como souvenir de su primer concierto ´e bomba y plena en el parkin' del bithorn. (21)

41 The documentary Cocolos y Rockeros (1990), directed by Ana María García explores the intrinsic relationship between music and class in Puerto Rico in the1980s. Mainly based on musicians and young people’s interviews, García is able to clearly demonstrate how musical taste serves as a class and racial marker in a country that has not developed a direct vocabulary to talk openly about race. In general, the 1980’s Puerto Rican collective perceives salsa music as an autochthonous form of expression, while rock music is an imported American genre. Some seem to prefer one genre over the other because of the musical or danceable qualities, while others choose their music as a conscious class ‘way of life.’ In addition to presenting interviews from Puerto Ricans living in the island, the documentary briefly interviews a group of young people in New York City who ironically listen to both salsa and American music, thus showing how musical choices have to do more with personal socio-economical identification and experiences rather than concrete national discourses. In the 1990s this changes and salsa music and dancing become part of Puerto Rico’s mainstream culture. 42 The best visual example of this iconic representation is Ismael “Maelo” Rivera (1931-1987), known as El sonero mayor (The biggest sonero,) one of the most important musical figures of the twentieth century and an advocate for Afro-Puerto Rican pride. 62 Guillo is attending a bomba concert, traditional music associated with African heritage, that, as a white and blanquito Puerto Rican, he experiences only as part of the audience. Bomba represents, in this context, sanitized folkloric evidence of the African influence on the island, packaged for national consumption. As Isar Godreau emphasizes, “These rhythms, previously characterized as “local” and “primeval,” acquired recognition as “national” genres over the years, constituting the most explicit, celebrated link to the island's African presence” (284). Guillo is conscious of the state's appropriation of this musical genre when he declares that has adopted the “puertorriqueñismo” (Puerto Rican culture or being Puerto Rican) as a commodified souvenir that can be admired, bought and sold, but which he cannot experience as a participant. In her book Sponsored Identities: Cultural Politics in Puerto Rico (1998), Arlene Dávila explains how due in part to Puerto Rico’s colonial status and its constant necessity to differentiate itself from the American culture, some autochthonous products –like music– receive a high cultural value on the island as “real” representations of puertorriqueñidad, thus going through systematic commodification and incorporation into the national discourse (15-18). Within this process, identities and social roles are crystallized, and blackness is incorporated as an essentialized cultural component. While Guillo softly stirs a Palo Viejo drink with his blanquito finger, the black performer entertains the audience with his gifted hands on the drums. The scene works as a historical and social metaphor, where the white Puerto Rican consumes a cultural dose while the black Puerto Rican performs it through physical effort. This corporeal juxtaposition of inclusion and exclusion plays a central role in materializing Puerto Rico’s racially based national discourse:

…ese negro viejo experto en los utensilios 63 del ritmo. el viejo le va dando rienda suelta a su ascendencia enloque yo le meto mano a otro pincho y no visualizo la dinámica de nuestras razas como la historia… (21-22)

While the blanquito and the black subject perform racial difference through passiveness and corporeal labor respectively, the drumbeat exposes the African heritage shared by all Puerto Ricans, but it fails to allow for a serious conscious awakening of the racialized structures due to its reduction to an empty spectacle. This is especially true due to the close relationship of ideas of race and musical production. As Yeidy Rivero, Raquel Rivera and Deborah Pacini Hernández, among others, have concluded, throughout the twentieth century music has served as a safe space for the non-white population to gain some visibility in the artistic scene, and become part of the social collective. Today, black and mulatto Puerto Ricans continue to be essentialized as naturally musically and rhythmically talented individuals. In this sense, folklore makes Afro-Puerto Ricans visible through their artistic abilities, corporeal movement, and musical fluidity while their blackness is diluted in the whitening national discourse.43 The grasp of an intermittent visible performatic corporeality converses with Brian Masummi's concept of the “virtual body,” as the body itself is trapped in a series of performatic instances, glances or photographic frames that

43A large scale commodification of blackness as a folkloric sellable product occurred in the United States and Puerto Rico during the 1990s with musical genres like hip-hop, bomba, and plena, respectively. Both Bárbara I. Abadía-Rexach in her book, Musicalizando la Raza. La racialización en Puerto Rico a través de la música (2012), and Jossianna Arroyo in her article: “’Roots” or the virtualities of racial imaginaries in Puerto Rico and the diaspora” (2010) discuss how music and musical dynamics in Puerto Rico constitute a rich site to discuss race, racism, and racial imaginaries. Not only are negative constructions of blackness repeated and recycled through music, but the Afro-Puerto Rican musicians are judged by how they identify racially. 64 are lost when movement erases them. Similarly, the black and mulatto body is incorporated into the national collective through commodified frameable photo-ready instances when it is captured as a “folklorized” moment by the “blanquito” gaze. Of course this dynamic works hand in hand with the “gran familia puertorriqueña” ideal, where everybody has a determined place inside the colorless collective, thus making mulatto and black subjects invisible through false inclusion. Due to this lack of inclusiveness, Puerto Rico’s history is conceived as alienated events, where Afro-Puerto Ricans are trapped in the foundational fiction, and the afro element is seen as part of the whole, but not as a whole in itself. Due to the whitening ideal, black and mulatto Puerto Ricans are relegated to the past, and don’t have a place in the imaginary of the contemporary national body :44

paso por alto exactamente cómo mi árbol genealógico se quedó cojo y por qué mis manos, ya tentáculos, fueron incapaces de palpar lo “folklórico.” (22)

The spectacle is over, and Guillo finally comprehends the need for the African element in order to articulate a coherent national discourse when he admits that his family tree is incomplete (“cómo mi árbol genealógico se quedó cojo), but due to a surrealist poetic twist, his hands become clumsy tentacles and he is unable to recuperate, and incorporate,

44 The term black can also be used to express solidarity among the Afro-Puerto Rican community as stated by Isar Goreau: “…racial terminology is highly situational and intimately linked to context of usage. Negro, for example, often carries pejorative connotations because of its association with slave status. Yet, in certain interpersonal exchanges…it can also be used to mark racial solidarity or “sameness” among those who openly identify themselves as black” (“Slippery Semantics” 6). As Tomás Blanco discusses in his essay “El prejuicio racial en Puerto Rico” in some other contexts it is also used as a term of endearment, as in “negrito” or “negrita.” 65 the Afro-element outside the folkloric platform and into the “gran familia puertorriqueña.” Once the musician re-enters the social national space as a “negrito,” he goes back to being a racialized and stigmatized subject that needs constant proof of his honest intentions as a hard-working decent citizen. Thus, even though music has been read as a safe space for black and mulatto subjects, it also serves as a “silencing element,” as an enchanting spell for the national racial amnesia. The selective reappropriation of folkloric Africanness confines Afro-Puerto Rican reality into the realms of music and folklore. Everyday racial dynamics and whitening cultural practices preserve the dormant racial consciousness of difference and false inclusion. The black or mulatto subject is seen as part of a cultural past that can be “recuperated/incorporated” through its folklorized performance of blackness but not made visible and empowered as a contemporary subject. As Jossianna Arroyo argues, black and mulatto males have being feminized to deprive them of any real or symbolic national social power (Travestismos 74-75). If the black and mulatto male is virtually visible through the entertaining musical scene, where is the black woman? In Puerto Rico the female black and mulatta bodies carry the double mark of race and gender, thus submitting them to even more marginalization from the national imaginary. Their exclusion from national white, patriarchal models places them even lower on the racial caste system, as Mariluz Franco Ortiz and Doris Quiñones Hernández indicate:

Hay diferentes formas de racismo que sufren las mujeres negras, si no son lo suficientemente oscuras, se les obliga a negar su herencia étnico-racial para lograr acceso al poder. Si son evidentemente negras se convierten en objeto de represión. Ambas formas son destructivas y colocan a la mujer negra en el eslabón más bajo de la jerarquía social por el determinismo étnico racial y sexual. (232)

66 Rebollo-Gil’s poem “pancha plancha” explores this double social exclusion through the symbolic and contextual union of a popular tongue twister that objectifies the black female, and a plena song as the Afro-musical genre par excellence. The popular word game goes like this: Pancha plancha con cuatro planchas con ¿cuántas planchas Pancha plancha?” (Pancha irons with four irons, with how many irons does Pancha iron?). The difficulty of the word game resides on the acoustic similarity between Pancha (a female name), and her iron (plancha); Rebollo-Gil visually recreates the confusion between subject and object by not capitalizing the proper name (Pancha), or the iron (plancha), a gesture that ends up killing pancha’s subjectivity both literarily and symbolically. The use of the domestic worker narrative not only articulates contemporary social hierarchies, but it revives a long history of black female exclusion, racism and exoticization. This type of work has been considered a feminine space since Puerto Rico was under Spanish rule. Black female slaves were exploited through labor, and were forced to have sexual relations with their masters. During the first two decades of the 20th century domestic work continued to be the main source of employment for women, but there were more black than white women doing this type of job. As Elizabeth Crespo asserts: “Racial division in the work force reinforced and confirmed the historical association between domestic work, sexual exploitation, poverty, and blackness” (39). Thus, Rebollo-Gil’s use of a female black domestic worker as the main character uncovers how Puerto Rico’s contemporary racial dynamics are still molded by racist patriarchal imaginaries. In addition, the incorporation of plena music, a genre identified with Afro-Puerto Rican heritage, symbolically situates the poem in the city of Ponce, and specifically in the San Antón barrio. As Isar Goudreau has indicated, this barrio has been folklorized and made into the “living testimony” of a black past that is kept alive by the official narrative, while it is simultaneously rejected by the blanqueamiento ideology that guides the 67 contemporary definition of a real Puerto Rican. Furthermore, the verses are very similar to the famous plena by Manuel Jiménez titled “Cortaron a Elena,” creating a direct link with the Afro-Puerto Rican tradition, and the ideological and physical violence toward the black body that both texts expose through corporeal mutilation.45 Rebollo-Gil combines elements from both the tongue twister and the plena song to make his racial critique of the violence suffered by the Puerto Rican black female:

mataron a pancha y no sé dónde irán a velarla enque casa prendan vela por su alma de pancha muerta con plancha en casa llena ‘e losetas negras por sacro luto a mapo y cubo. (49)

Pancha was murdered while completing a cleaning job, and nobody knows who is the perpetrator. Her unknown origins as well as her tragic death are part of the same violent and recyclable circle suffered by the black and mulatto bodies, as they are easily replaceable by the next anonymous black body waiting to be born. Rebollo Gil commits this poetic murder in order to comment on the “bodies that matter” to the national imaginary and on those that don’t. Parallel to the tongue twister “Pancha plancha con cuatro planchas con cuántas planchas Pancha plancha,” Pancha can be replaced by another Pancha by simply reciting over and over again the same racial imaginary that blurs the distinction between national black bodies (Pancha) and objects (plancha). What is the value of the black and mulatta body outside the labor market? How does it fit within the traditional social structures? We have already seen how the poet uses cultural

45 Manuel Jiménez (Canario) was a Puerto Rican composer and a precursor of the plena genre. In 1964, the “Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña” (The Puerto Rican Institute of Culture) hired him to make a plena compilation and to go around the island giving concerts. His compact disc is considered a national classic that includes famous titles like: "Bun Bun", "Cuando las mujeres", "Santa María", "Cortaron a Elena" and "Santa María". 68 references and music to criticize the circulation of unchallenged racist dynamics, and popular imaginaries that inform the official national image. The use of plena music and the San Antón Barrio as central elements of his critique allows the reader to identify the clear relationship between slavery and its contemporary rearticulations as social inequality, racialization, and the exclusion of blacks and mulattos from the national body. The use of popular music extends to the salsa genre, thus reinforcing Rebollo- Gil’s formal and thematic relationship with the Nuyorican tradition, and the Puerto Rican diaspora. The poem “la boda della” (her wedding), yet another cannibalistic derivation of a very famous salsa song titled “La boda de ella” by Bobby Valentín, shows how the mulatta is treated by the blanquito male.46 The original song tells the story of a lost love from the male perspective, and although he describes his love negatively, he would like to marry her. This stereotypical love and hate relationship follows the normative patriarchal salsa and reggaeton thematic where we only hear the male’s point of view and the female is just a shadow that triggers the male emotions and erotic memories, and thus reinforces the construction of these imaginaries through the popular musical genre.47 Rebollo-Gil undermines the patriarchal discourse with the inclusion of an interracial relationship between a young blanquito and his pregnant mulatta girlfriend. In opposition to Bobby Valentín's chorus: “la boda de ella tiene que ser la mejor” (her wedding has to be the best one), which emphasizes the inevitability of the ex-lover’s wedding, Rebollo- Gil's text begins with the impossibility of the wedding:

andy no se casa hasta que no pase por agua

46 Bobby Valentín (1941) is a Puerto Rican musician and salsa bandleader.

47 It is interesting to note that although Bobby Valentín is black, race is never mentioned as an explicit reason for the couple's split, but this can be always a valid reading, due to Puerto Rico’s collective racial silence. 69 y lave con ace el pelo cafre, porque aunque andy no sabe de salsa, quien sabe sabe. (29)

These verses address how the racial ideology of “la gran familia puertorriqueña” manifests itself through social interactions. Andy is not going to marry his girlfriend unless he can tame and cover her cafre curly hair, the most visible proof of her blackness. Socially this term has a negative connotation, as Jossianna Arroyo explains, assigning the lack of “taste” and “manners” as the social meaning of the texture of her curly hair (“Roots” 199). Thus the word cafre manifests how Puerto Rico’s racism is deeply rooted in interactions, unspoken social norms and assumptions. “Bad hair” is the most common expression of racism in Puerto Rico, and it is an easy way to talk about race without using racial terminology or skin color categories.48 Although undeniably racist and highly problematic, using “hair” to read race represents a more malleable way for Afro-Puerto Ricans to deal with and maneuver race and its social implications. While a person's skin color can’t be changed, hair can be styled in different ways to hide its curly roots. Andy knows that in order to get his family's approval she has to camouflage her racial history. Here her curly hair, also called pelo malo (bad hair) represents excess, which parallels the female body’s need to be disciplined through whitening efforts. The mulatta girl serves as a surface on which to display Puerto Rico’s racial imaginary on multiple levels. Like the female character from “pancha plancha,” the girlfriend does not have a voice or even a name. The poem thus reifies Gladys M. Jiménez’s observation that through Puerto Rican history the black woman has been constructed by the patriarchal and Eurocentric society as a sexual object in need of domestication by the white male, and simultaneously as the counterpart of the civilized

48 In her book Black Behind the Ears, Ginetta Candelario explores the importance of hair in the Dominican Republic’s racial construction. As in Puerto Rico, hair treatments like relaxing and straightening are systematically used to cover the African heritage trace. 70 white female (83-84). Her body is a sexual tool where the “white” man can exercise his power and satisfy his sexual needs until she becomes pregnant, and then her visibility constitutes a problem:

cuando dio voz el ángel del globo que la muchacha se había vuelto y andy cayó redondo en el mismo suelo donde hizo y deshizo de su vestido y vio volando pajaritos como volaron botoncitos cuando en pos de negrero bravío, andy hundió su primer grito y quedó hecho todo un hombrecito. (29-30)

Here the sexual transaction is doubly marked by Andy’s reinforcement of national patriarchal and racial dynamics. Rebollo-Gil turns the carnal moment into a historical materialization of black subordination. Andy becomes the “negrero,” the slave trader, and turns the girlfriend into an enslaved colonial body. Through the sexual act, Andy becomes the colonizer and master of the black female. On the one hand the black pregnant body serves as proof of the normative racist inter-racial transgression. On the other hand, the corpus delicti exposes the way in which the black body is seen as disposable and thus a national problem that needs to be “worked on.” Conversing with

Aníbal Quijano’s notion of the “coloniality of power,” Rebollo-Gil demonstrates how the idea of ‘la gran familia puertorriqueña’ is an extension of the racially-based social division system forged by coloniality that still supports Eurocentric and patriarchal patterns, or what Michael Omi & Howard Winant call the racial state. Rebollo-Gil transforms Bobby Valentín’s wedding song into a serious historical recounting of slavery and racist contemporary discourses. Is it possible for the black female to form part of the

71 national body? And if so, how can she be incorporated in a way that questions and deconstructs her invisibility imposed by ‘la gran familia’ racial myth? The poem “triste y vacía,” brings to the forefront the social exclusion of the black and mulatta Puerto Rican female, while at the same time shows her virtual integration as a sex symbol and domestic worker. I use the term virtual integration to describe the ambiguity of desire and rejection, the false inclusion of the Afro-female subject into the national discourse through its ‘incorporation’ as a souvenir, as virtual glances of folklore and colorful notes of exoticism. This integration works to affect the invisibility and social exclusion of the living subject behind picturesque anachronism. Once again the poet borrows the title of the poem from a song of one of the most famous salsa singer of all times, Héctor Lavoe, which we have seen already present in Willie Perdomo’s work. The original text tells the story of a female character that suffers from a broken heart, but in Rebollo-Gil’s version the mulatta is affected by cultural racism.49 The poetic character doesn't have a proper name either, and the only direct reference to her black body is made through the word negrita, a diminutive used to denote sentiment toward the black person while trying to wash out its blackness. Besides being a sad negrita she is described as empty, thus she can be read as an empty trace, a canvas that acquires different meanings through social interactions. The poetic character has to deal with this double discourse of sexualization and rejection. As she walks down the street we witness how her interactions are mediated by race, and how her body becomes an urban spectacle:

que dizque quería ponerla como ready-to-wear de revista gringa, osea que ya la veía como pret-a-porter de revista francesa

49 For the purposes of this analysis I define cultural racism in Puerto Rico as the materialization of racial exclusion through everyday social practices that works toward the same racial blindness that we saw being performed by Guillo. 72 osea que ya la tenía en fila pa' la competencia de negrita más bonita entre todas las negritas de la isla. (25)

These verses illustrate how the mestizo body becomes the perfect territory from which to impose the blanqueamiento imaginary and social paradigms on race and gender. The negrita in the poem is juxtaposed against the white ideal represented in the magazines. Since she cannot approximate this ideal, her social value lies in her bodily offering of sexuality, rather than beauty, as Yeidy Rivero indicates:

Mestizaje not only delimits sexual mixing between distinct sectors of the population, it also permeates the ways in which gendered racial bodies are socially constructed...the Eurocentric-patriarchal gaze has informed discourses of beauty and sexuality, situating whiteness as the epitome of elegance for the female body. […] Conversely, in Puerto Rico and Cuba, black and mulatta women have been socially constructed as hypersexual and sensual bodies. (14) The poetic character embodies the racial irony of being negrita enough to awaken men’s sexual desire, and at the same time too negrita to be considered a beautiful and elegant female by Eurocentric standards. Both Gladys M. Jiménez and Frances Aparicio have explained how according to the Hispanic marianista tradition, where women are reduced into the virgen/whore dichotomy, the black female body has been reduced to a domestic worker or a hyper-sexualized body in need of order and discipline. This need to discipline the black female body inserts it into the juridical system, where it is either “reformed” or put away from socially visible circles.50 At the same time the black body becomes a commodity within the national economy and its market value is subjected to offer and demand.

50 See Frances Aparicio “Desiring the Racial Other: Rosario Ferré’s Feminist Reconstructions of Danza and Plena”. Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music and Puerto Rican Cultures; and Gladys M Jiménez, “Carmen María Colón Pellot: mujer y raza en Puerto Rico entre las dos guerras” in Contrapunto de género y raza en Puerto Rico.

73 Guillermo Rebollo-Gil’s “sad and empty” mulatta is trapped in this patriarchal Eurocentric discourse that makes it visible through social interactions rooted into the system’s unspoken racism. But even under these circumstances she courageously continues her daily fight:

…nuestra protagonista taconea triste y vacía ya de ganas para llorar la traición de una isla que la quiere linda pero amarga, fuerte pero flaca, fácil pero pura pa’ seguir pariendo espaldas que produzcan una fortuna en estatuas. (26) As a double marginal subject, the mulatta needs to constantly (re)negotiate her validity outside of her labor value to produce more mulatto subjects for the national corporeal economy. This poetic scene converses directly with Mayra Santos-Febres’ essay “Sobre cómo hacerse mujer,” where she relates her own personal “initiation” into the racial consciousness of her social circles. She realized from an early age that in order to be accepted she needed to perform different degrees of “womanhood”. Santos-Febres, similar to the triste y vacía mulata, describes herself as “…negra fuerte pero tímida, grácil pero bullanguera, trabajadora, pero reflexiva, delicada, pero guerrera” (27). All of these different malleable qualities allow her to navigate social and power dynamics as an urban contemporary black woman wrestling with restrictive national discourses. Although the poetic mulatta seems to be trapped inside the two stereotypes society provides her, I read her strut as a performance of disidentification, an act of resistance against cultural racism. Her firm steps have a voice of their own that resist her invisibility through the disruptive ‘toc-toc’ as an audible form of self-expression.

74 Following Juan Otero Garabís’ formulation of travel through the city as an empowering act that allows for the creation of new discourses, I argue that the mulatta’s ‘toc-toc’ draws a new cartography of the city that symbolically incorporates the echoing of the Afro Puerto Rican heritage into the present through the drumbeat of her steps. Throughout this section I have discussed how Rebollo-Gil’s poems expose the way in which everyday practices in Puerto Rico relegate the black and mulatto subjects to the margins, and how they are perceived as an excess of the national body. The mulatto and black population can be read as a “reserve of folklore” that exist primarily to inject the discourse of the “gran familia puertorriqueña” with a dose of authenticity, whenever it is convenient to reconnect with a harmonic past, the one that gave birth to a perfect combination of Taíno Indian, the Spaniard, and the African. But no matter how these three historical characters are combined to create the image of the true Puerto Rican, the physical traits visible to the eye have to conform to the Eurocentric aesthetic model. The mulatta’s strut questions this homogenization and erasure of the black body through its every day wrestling with social racism. In the case of gender construction the categories get blurred as a direct consequence of the racial practices. The black female body is sexualized and objectified and is therefore unable to break with the marianista dichotomy. Although the author constructs a strong black woman in the poem “triste y vacía,” she is still trapped within the racially hierarchical social structure. She is also masculinized through her inclusion in society as domestic labor or to procreate the next generation of workers. At the same time, in the poem “sonero” black masculinity is feminized by his exclusion from the social power spheres and his value relies solely on his performatic abilities. In Rebollo-Gil’s poems the racist treatment concealed through the mestizaje myth is shown to be in crisis, a precariousness directly felt by Afro Puerto Ricans. This notion of “mythology in crisis” proves how the racial national discourse is 75 disconnected from social realities, and does not correspond to the racial diversity of the Puerto Rican people; it allows for the rejection of a large part of the population based on Eurocentric models. The dismantling of racial imaginaries also implies the questioning of gender construction, especially those masculine models recycled by popular music.

PERFORMING GENDER THROUGH MUSIC

This next section explores how, through the use of salsa and reggaeton elements, Guillermo Rebollo-Gil is able to expose and dismantle the heteronormative patriarchy discourse, which as we have already seen is mutually implicated in racial patriarchy, in order to articulate a more fluid masculinity. As Larry La Fountain-Stokes asserts, historically, liminal sexualities have been rejected by the Puerto Rican “imagined nation”

(Queer Ricans xvi). Félix Jiménez also draws attention to gender as a performatic act under “constant construction,” which eliminates the heternomative rigidity, opening a space for the invention of multiple masculinities (Las prácticas 18-31).51 Rebollo-Gil’s use of salsa and reggaeton to problematize gender is an essential part of this criticism, due to the two musical genres’ legendary uber-patriarchal imaginaries that reproduce homophobic, misogynist, and sexist norms by allowing minimal feminine participation.

51 “In his canonical essay “El puertorriqueño dócil” (1960), writer René Marqués accuses men of the lack of virility and of docility if they permit without the greatest resistance the implantation of the North American feminist model on Puerto Rican terrain. For the writer, the arrival of the United States interrupts the discourse of honor and pater familiae inherited from the Spanish metropolis, weakening “Puerto Rican manliness”. Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Agnes I. Lugo-Ortiz, among others, assert that the discourse of a “Puerto Rican masculinity” based on lack is directly linked to colonial history and the patterns imposed by the various colonial metropolises. The “manliness” learned first from the Spanish empire (1493), later redefined by the United States (1898) and finally promoted by the Free Associated State (1952), creates a queer category in itself, in which the body serves as the mediator of an identity imposed by foreign models. Precisely from this liminal condition of the “masculine”, writer such as Luis Rafael Sánchez and Manuel Ramos Otero dialogue with Marqués’ “discourse of virility” in order to problematize it and open a literary space that exposes a range of masculinities.”

76 To explore the way in which the author proposes a discursive plurality I analyze four poems from Rebollo-Gil’s collection Sonero. The order of the poems responds to my reading of the poet’s rejection and deconstruction of what I call the macho salsero (the salsa macho man). The first text introduces this traditional uber-masculine male, recuperating the genre’s imaginary and tradition. Then, I present how throughout the next poems the macho salsero image begins to disintegrate, until a total inversion occurs in the poem “cocolo de closet: poema suave para la salsa.” I argue that through the disarticulation and the disclosure of the macho salsero, Rebollo-Gil exposes its porosity, thus proposing a new kind of masculinity that breaks with the traditional patriarchal and heteronormative patterns of salsa and reggaeton. His use of Spanish, English, and salsa as the lingua franca describes poetic practices that reject insular territoriality as a pivotal element of the national discourse, thus connecting his work with the Nuyorican Poets. The opening of the poem “muñeca” resembles a cinematic slow motion bar scene, where all the action stops when a beautiful girl enters. Combining the salsa-exacerbated masculinity and evoking the visual symbology associated with the urban subculture of reggaeton music, the masculine narrative voice depicts the female disruption, encompassing the opinions of the collective:

…los muchachos en la barra dicen quede su plato hasta al pegao se lo llevan, quesa diabla tiene puesta unas caderas […] …apoteósico sistema de tránsito carnal ataponao 24/7 por tanto macho enchulao en su carrito pimpeao buscando montar su cuerpazo acaramelao…(31)

The deeply aggressive objectification of the female body, marked by the colloquial and more informal carnal metaphors, in her unattainability, embodies the marianista

77 dichotomy presented in the previous poems. On the one hand, the girl is described as a piece of meat, image easily identified with the buyable body of the prostitute; while on the other hand, she is seen as an unreachable monument, an image closely related to the untouchable mother figure. An almost imperceptible racialization takes place when the body is referred to as a “carnal transportation system,” an image that converses with Gloria Anzaldúa’s reading of the mestiza body as an intersectional road. Here, the body is the recipient of two evident crossings: the female dichotomy (mother/whore), and the collapse of the salsa and the reggaeton imaginaries that support this reading. An example of this is the reference to reggaeton’s visual trope of expensive “pimped” cars (“carrito pimpeao”), as a symbol of both the man’s wealth and worth. On one hand, the “carrito pimpeao” is an extension of the man’s sexual power, and on the other it works to perpetuate the stereotype of the materialistic female lover, the whore who provides pleasure for material gain. But the heteronormative performance doesn’t go farther than the visual and oral aggressiveness because even though the female body is consumed as a carnal spectacle and turned into a sensual territory that incites conquest, it is unattainable. Following Judith Butler’s idea of the necessity of continuous repetition to form a cohesive gender performance, the woman’s instant rejection of the men shakes up the masculine ideal, uncovering it as a an empty act of what the famous Cuban singer La Lupe would call puro teatro (Bodies that Matter 1-4). The masculine circular performance resembles the famous vellonera (jukebox), always present in the typical bar scene where the dancing takes place, and the musical sexual dynamics materialize into dance patterns. For Frances Aparicio, “…while going dancing establishes a space outside social dictates, normative and naturalized gender expectation still informed the different ways men and women engage in such pleasure and freedom and in the movement of their bodies” (97). With the male being rejected by the female character, there is an annulment 78 of any possible reenactment of patriarchal gender roles inside the bar space through dance or physical contact because the man’s desire never finds consummation. The references to expensive cars, the female’s voluptuous body, and the male’s explicit desire to mount her inside the bar spatiality demonstrate a continuum in contemporary urban music, where salsa and reggaeton share the same material and discursive dance floor and sexual dynamics. Rebollo-Gil’s critique of the patriarchal performance as an empty tautology extends to an over-the-top poetic and parodical speech that reveals the falseness of the macho salsero masculinity:

y es que esta mujer es un monumento al orgasmo y a su hemorrágica belleza primitiva, un testamento al placer para aquellos afortunados herederos de su desnudez dios los ha puesto en esta barra…[…] sino por todos los santos de los santos varones que se quedarán solos y acongojados esta noche. (32)

The use of religious vocabulary –like “dios” and “santos”– exposes the monotonous gender performance that reproduces itself without being questioned, the empty repetition as the patriarchal creed carried century after century, generation after generation (amen) in order to maintain its hegemony intact. But of course, once the masculine cult is intersected by the female’s rejection (“de los santos varones/ que se quedarán solos y acongojados/ esta noche”) the ineffectiveness of the macho salsero posture is exposed:

con ese tronco de bombón que ahora mismo lo está mirando con cara deque pa ti no hay ni hoy ni nunca, deque yo soy pa’ mi misma, […] 79 así que date media vuelta, súbete el zipper y vete a tu casa para que practiques con el matre de la cama antes de atreverte a venir donde mí. (my emphasis, 32)

Without pronouncing a word, thus following the salsa and reggaeton female normally imposed silence theorized by Frances Aparicio, Raquel Z. Rivera, Deborah Pacini- Hernández, and Quintero-Rivera, the feminine poetic character is able to disarm the men’s performatic act. As she leaves the bar, the space transforms itself into a homoerotic place, where horny macho men discuss their unfulfilled desires and sexual fantasies. As an example of masculinity promoted by musical and urban popular discourses deeply rooted on patriarchal stereotypes, Rebollo-Gil’s use of exaggeration and caricaturization exposes how the male’s performance is based on a one-way violent speech act that repeats itself infinitely in order to stay alive. But this time the doll comes to life and rejects its systematic objectification. She refuses to take part in the classic dichotomy of being categorized as mother/virgin or prostitute. Rebollo-Gil escalates the destabilization of masculinity with the poem “bolero,” where the character leaves the space of the patriarchal discourse of the salsa genre. Here the main character named Gugo, like the bar crowd from the previous poem “muñeca,” molds himself through female desire:

gugo jura que la chica medalla lo ama, macho se las jacta deque tiene los ojos puestos en la espalda y la chamaca dizque no despega pupila e’ su placa. Gugo es guardia e’vaya en caparra y jura que acaba cuando anda brindao como brinks, hasta los dientes armaos en gold leaf, portando fantasia como en joyería, con el diente ‘e oro alumbrando toa’ la avenida. gugo parece estar aquí tos’ los dias y promete que cuando bebe

80 le mete justo porque pa’ bravo él… (57) 52

His performance goes in accordance with that of a truly macho salsero. The girl and the Medalla bottle, the name of Puerto Rico’s national beer that literally means medal, become one under the male’s gaze as both represent the ultimate prize. But Gugo’s performance breaks down with the alcohol he consumes, as his act collapses into bolero music. Once more, through the blending of salsa lyrics (in italics) into his verses, Rebollo-Gil deconstructs masculinity as a rigid category, and the bolero musical genre works as the perfect accomplice. This romantic music style, as opposed to salsa, functions as a cathartic space where masculine sensibility can be expressed. Frances Aparicio emphasizes the transgressive potential of bolero as opposed to salsa: “In this ‘libidinal economy’ articulated by the bolero, male desire seems to have the upper hand. However, the fissure lies in the act of singing, of uttering a language that has been ascribed to the ‘feminine’ (135). In the case of Rebollo-Gil I read the bolero as a counterpoint of the salsa genre where a man can allow himself to be overly sentimental. This posture is what I call the bolero performance that works to destabilize and question macho salsero masculinity as the only legitimate category, through the expression of masculine sentimentality through a social-sanctioned musical genre. With this I am not saying that the bolero lies outside of the patriarchal and heteronormative ideology, but it definitely loosens the seams of the macho performance through a queer suffering voice. Because it is not embraced among its masculine audience with the same enthusiasm as salsa, as Iris Zavala comments, “…the heteronormative rejection of the bolero works as a

52 Rebollo-Gil includes parts of famous salsa lyrics (in italics) to compose his verses, saturating his work even more with urban musical referents. For example, the verse “con el diente ‘e oro va alumbrando toa’ la avenida” is a line from the song titled “Pedro Navaja” from the Panamanian Rubén Blades. In addition, the fragment “pa’bravo él,” is a slightly modified verse from Justo Betancourt (Cuba), and Johnny Pacheco’s (Dominican Republic) song “Pa’ bravo yo.” 81 homo-erotic transaction among men (124),” thus creating a more bendable gender category. In the poem, Gugo is suffering from a broken heart and to treat his illness he drinks, accompanied by a jukebox’s bolero, to bring back his romantic memories:

y tampoco recuerda el ron que lo hizo piso anoche, el ron que lo trató como a gringo anoche, que lo sembró y por poco creció flores anoche como si por amores también un hombre marchitara del roce. (58)

Both Gugo and his manhood are shattered via the sentimental language usually used for women –like flores and marchitarse– by a bad romantic relationship, and now he is suffering the consequences of the physical and emotional hangover. He is so unrecognizable that even his good friend, the rum, treats him as a foreigner, as a gringo. If we read these verses carefully it seems that Rebollo-Gil is following Iris M. Zavala’s analysis of the homoerotization of the bolero space by suggesting a homosexual relationship between the main character and an American man. Through the musical travel from salsa infused with reggaeton to the soft bolero music the gender performance keeps changing, thus providing a space for ambiguity and multiple masculine identities. The patriarchal discourse is questioned and rearticulated as a collection of performatic instances capable of testing each other’s veracity and fluidity. After the melodramatic slip presented in “bolero,” Gugo continues his emotional and masculine journey in the sequel text “sonero.” The poem articulates a more private Gugo performing a ritual to exorcise his “mal de amor,” the catalyst of his masculine crisis:

luego, ya fijo en su canción

82 se paró de lao frente al espejo y tarareando terminó por darse entero de cuero. en su cabeza héctor aun sonaba fino. pasó rápido, sin bombo ni platillo. todo tiene su final nada dura para siempre. (59) These verses recount the culmination of Gugo’s mourning period, thus he is done with the bolero performance as a feminizing act. Through this new sonero ritual, and guided by his guru Héctor Lavoe, Gugo is able to re-establish his salsero masculinity and re- appear as a sonero. Is important to emphasis that Rebollo-Gil writes Hector’s name in English, without adding the Spanish accent mark on the “e” (Héctor); this gesture supports the transnational dialogue taking place in Rebollo-Gil’s production through his recuperation of the Nuyorican tradition. The poet is stressing the importance of the Puerto Rican community in New York and their cultural contributions to the salsa genre. Is essential to point out that in order to perform a normative masculinity, the bolero performance has to disappear or at least be concealed. Although mitigated by salsa’s uber-macho behavior, the bolero is always latent, always waiting in the margins of the macho salsero masculine performance to dismantle it under a broken heart episode and re-appear as an alternate discourse. In other words, the bolero signals the limits of the salsero, the space where he can no longer perform his hyper-masculinized identity. Both manifestations work as complements of each other as they demark each other’s territory,

83 while at the same time produce a space from where to negotiate the dominant patriarchal imaginary. The inclusion of multiple masculinities is clearly stated by Guillermo Rebollo-Gil in his poem “cocolo de closet: poema suave para la salsa” (salsa fan that hasn’t come out of the closet: slow poem for salsa):

tengo el closet lleno’ e soneros muertos aunque confieso de música sé menos que de sexo: Hector Frankie Maelo y quedó corta la lista e’ compras. de ser un tipo distinto diría que esos son los nombres de mis pistolas, pero la verdad es que canto con cepillo en el cuarto por falta de un vicio cool…(23, my emphasis)

The poem articulates a different type of man, one that admits to being a less than exceptional lover (“de música sé menos que de sexo”), an unimaginable confession for salsa and reggaeton singers and imaginaries. For the poetic character neither sex nor violence defines his masculinity. On the contrary, the character articulates a different masculine performance, an imitation of the sonero, but in a cartoonish feminized representation of the original model implemented by Héctor Lavoe, Frankie Ruiz and Ismael ‘Maelo’ Rivera (“pero la verdad es que canto/con cepillo en el cuarto/por falta de un vicio cool”). The patriarchal and heteronormative masculine category finally disintegrates as the only possible gender articulation, and the territorial division becomes as blurry as the rigid gender demarcations. This disarticulation becomes even stronger when studied alongside the poem’s title: “cocolo de closet: poema suave para la salsa” (salsa fan that hasn’t come out of the 84 closet: slow poem for salsa). Here the poetic voice “comes out of the closet” to confess to being a man who doesn’t know much about salsa and who doesn’t represent a conventional salsero masculinity based on violence, street behavior and women. Is Rebollo-Gil implying that Puerto Ricans leave behind part of their cultural capital in order to question and re-shape contemporary conceptions of gender, or is the poem simply mapping this cultural capital into new generational models of masculinity? Even more important is the play of words used on the title that makes a clear reference to the moment where a person decides to ‘come out’ to the public sphere as a homosexual, leaving behind the normative space of heterosexuality. Rebollo-Gil is playing with the ‘coming out’ moment and his exposition of different types of masculinities not limited by the traditional gender categories. The more feminized male confined inside the bolero spatiality is now free to ‘come out’ into the public salsa genre. The author performs an inversion of the traditional masculine values through his refusal to emulate their macho salero masculinities. His soneros are dead and kept inside the closet through the rejection of their uber-macho performance and imaginaries. Instead of having a drug habit, like Héctor Lavoe and Frankie Ruiz, he decides to have a cool vice performing in his room, a gesture that dismantles the systematic repetition of the macho-centric performance. This male doesn’t need a female character in order to express himself and articulate his manhood. His concert in front of the mirror, more than a tribute to the dead soneros, seems like an imitation of the band boy group Menudo who with brilliant spandex pants performed multiple liminal masculinities in Puerto Rico and Latin America beginning in the late seventies (Jiménez 118). As we have seen, through the manipulation of salsa and reggaeton’s imaginaries and references, the dominant gender discourse is weakened in Rebollo-Gil’s work. The poems serve as a stage where the gender performances that circulate between the island 85 and the metropolis can be articulated while conversing with the masculine stereotypes proposed by popular discourses. Through the deconstructions of the mythical macho salsero masculinity, the reader is faced with a tragic and melodramatic masculinity in crisis, where the bolero has impregnated the rigid category. The bolero points to the subject’s breakdown, and his openness to multiple masculinities. Thus, his poems are musical hybrid texts where the normative patriarchal categories don’t appear as the main note, but as the fractioning of a global musical score that demands to be revised.

86 Chapter Three: Commercial Reggaeton Versus Songs of Resistance

“...our cities already sound so and the musical communities might as well act as political communities” -Wayne Marshall, Reggaeton 63

I remember the rush and excitement: it was 1992 and my friend Raúl has given me a copy of an underground cassette. There was no way that my parents would have let me listen to those sexually explicit lyrics filled with violent stories of the drug underworld. This urban music, later called reggaeton, evolved with Puerto Rico’s 1990’s generation, providing youth with a rebellious space to express their frustrations, illegal activities, sexual acts, and desires. Since its birth, the genre has struggled to obtain recognition and acceptance from the upper classes and the authorities. This was especially true in the mid 1990’s, when it was labeled by the state a ‘pornographic’ and vulgar genre responsible for ‘corrupting’ the minds of the younger generations with its harsh and violent lyrics. As reggaeton music became more popular among all Puerto Rican social classes, the former official stance opposing the genre diminished as many politicians began to use reggaeton songs, and even performers, for their political campaign jingles and activities.

FROM UNDERGROUND TO REGGAETON LATINO

Although today reggaeton, previously known as underground, is seen as a primarily Puerto Rican genre, it was born from a transnational collaboration and Afro- Caribbean connection. Drawing from hip-hop, reggae, Jamaican and Panamanian dancehall, and other Caribbean rhythms, reggaeton comes together as the pulse of an

87 urban, marginal, Afro-descendant transnational youth.53 As the introduction to Reggaeton argues: “…underground, and reggaeton are best described as trans-Caribbean genres whose history and aesthetics do not abide by nation and language as chief organizing principles” (11). In Puerto Rico, underground music became popular in the early nineties among the lower working classes, marginalized, and mostly Afro-Puerto Rican youth, as a way to air social and political frustration.54 Similar to hip-hop, the genre’s lyrics revolve around the roughness of the life on the streets, women, and the drug culture. As Raquel Z. Rivera explains: “Underground, as an expressive form was developed as hypermasculine, violent, foul-mouthed, hard, street savvy, ghetto identified, and lawless- the very same adjectives that in the public discourse define urban marginality” (Reggaeton 115). This primarily “improvised” genre became known through informal private concerts, and its circulation depended on the homemade reproduction of cassettes among fans. As a blue-collar cultural manifestation, most of the performers and fans of underground and reggaeton on the island were black and poor. As I have previously discussed, as a direct consequence of Puerto Rico’s ‘mestizo’ and blanqueamiento racial ideals, class and race go hand in hand. For this reason, dark-skinned individuals pertain to

53 Although a lot of animosity has been created historically between Puerto Ricans and Afro-Americans in New York City, both groups collaborated in the creation of hip-hop during the seventies. These influences are visible in underground and in reggaeton. The easy movement of Puerto Ricans from the mainland to the island offers easy access to influences from both communities. For more on this subject see: New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone, Raquel Z. Rivera.

In addition, although hardly ever mentioned, Dominicans have also been active collaborators in the reggaeton genre, and the most visible proof of this is the production team of Luny Tunes. Furthermore, reggaeton is permeated with merengue and bachata rythms. See Deborah Pacini Hernández’s chapter “Dominicans in the Mix: Reflections on Dominican Identity, Race, and Reggaeton,” in Reggaeton.

54 Although some critics like Wayne Marshall and Raquel Z. Rivera consider the underground genre separate from reggaeton I am not interested here in tracing the genre’s genealogy. Whether seen as one or two separate genres, what interests me is its urban, marginal, and Afro-influenced roots. In addition, underground and reggaeton stress a historical transnational collaboration infused in its beats and rhythms. 88 lower classes and have less access to social and political power.55 In her chapter “Policing Morality, Mano Dura Stylee,” Raquel Z. Rivera explains that this music was seen as social pollution, where the periphery was spreading to the organized and well- behaved center” (Reggaeton 125-26). As a result, the genre and its followers were systematically ostracized and criminalized by the dominant white elites and the State. Once reggaeton made it big in the international arena with Puerto Rican performer Daddy Yankee’s song “Gasolina” (2004), the genre has become a symbol of puertorriqueñidad and national pride. This ‘national’ status does not come without its contradictions, and it follows the cooptation pattern suffered by the salsa genre, once rejected by the upper classes and later recognized as a national symbol as well. While reggaeton has put Puerto Rico on the international musical map, and its beats are heard everywhere across the island, prejudice still exists. While internationally it is perceived as a national product, locally it still works as a class and racial marker, distinguishing its consumers from their whitened and upper-class counterparts. Formally, what distinguishes the 1990’s scene from today's reggaeton musical scene is the fact that the underground productions were primary compilations and collaborations of numerous singers. In this sense, the tribal performances were an act of solidarity, a brotherhood pact signed to make music and be heard by the middle and upper classes.56 Musically, reggaeton presents a more varied rhythmic collage that the dem bow- hip-hop beat-based earlier tracks of the nineteen nineties, which developed through the fusion of other Latin American and American genres like bachata, cumbia, merengue, salsa, and hip hop,

55 This social hierarchy goes hand in hand with Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s concept of the racial state previously discussed in Chapter One.

56 At the time none of them, except for Vico C., Luis Armando Lozada Cruz, was able to bring together enough followers to make a solo career. Vico C. is considered one of the Puerto Rican founding fathers of rap and underground throughout Latin America. It is import to point out that he was born in New York, supporting the genre’s transnational and diaporic attributes. 89 among others; making it more economically viable and accessible to a broader audience.57 Throughout decades since reggaeton’s emergence, academics like Mayra Santos- Febres, Félix Jiménez, Alfredo Nieves Moreno, and Raquel Z. Rivera, have recognized the cultural impact of the genre in newspaper and academic articles about reggaeton, but it was not until the end of the first decade of the 2000s that an academic compilation about the subject was published. The book edited by Raquel Z. Rivera and Wayne Marshall and titled Reggaeton (2009), covers a wide range of themes from the genre’s origins as a transnational and pan-Latin American musical manifestation to critical views on reggaeton’s constructions of gender, politics, and aesthetics. Using this seminal work as a point of departure, I explore the gender and racial discourses that have been produced by four specific reggaeton artists from 1990s to 2010. My analysis is guided by the following question: Are there new discourses created in reggaeton music that counteract Puerto Rico’s national ideologies? This chapter will consist of two sections: first I briefly analyze two examples of commercial performers to show how mainstream raggaeton tends to crystallize normative patriarchal and whitening discourses. I concentrate on Daddy Yankee and Ivy Queen, two artists that have evolved with the genre from a ‘home-produced’ artistic expression of the working classes, as a vehicle to voice collective social frustration and discontent, to the global phenomenon that the genre is today. I suggest that both artists have left behind the potential subversive stigma of the genre in order to appeal to a broader international audience of pop. The second section analyzes two more recent artists, Tego Calderón and Calle 13, examining how they have used the marginal stigma imposed on the genre to

57 In the Introduction to Reggaeton, Wayne Marshall, Raquel Z. Rivera, and Deborah Pacini Hernández explain that “dem bow” is one of the various names used to call reggaeton before in went mainstream in 2004 with Daddy Yankee’s song “Gasolina.” 90 challenge and deconstruct dominant national racial ideologies. On one hand, Calderón’s revival of Afro-Puerto Rican tropes combined with lyrics that criticize the criminalization and racialization of the working class have make him an antiestablishment reggaeton artist. His self-labeling as a black Puerto Rican in a county where most people negate their African heritage points to the invisibility of Afro-Caribbeans in contemporary transnational debates. On the other hand, the multiple Grammy-winning duo Calle 13 labels itself as part of the marginalized working class in order to criticize and deconstruct whitening discourses. The duo frequently denounces social inequality, politicians and authoritarian regimes, changing commercial reggaeton’s image of bling-bling and fancy cars, to retrieve its subversive possibilities. Calle 13’s musical fusion of reggaeton with urban beats, jazz, bossa nova and salsa challenges the “nationalizing” of the genre to de- territorialize it, proposing a pan-Latino musical community.

MAINSTREAM REGGAETON: DADDY YANKEE AND IVY QUEEN

Daddy Yankee, Ramón Luis Ayala Rodríguez, is one the most internationally recognized performers who have been able to make a successful crossover to the United States’ music industry. The performer was the first to reach platinum status in the United States with his 2005 album Barrio Fino (Fine or Fancy Neighborhood). Due to his lyrics that promote heteronormative and mysoginist values, his support of the 2008 Republican candidate John McCain in the U.S. presidential elections, and his constant reinforcing of the traditional family and organized religion, I consider him a conservative artist, a promoter of the status quo.58 He made his position clear in an interview given to the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día when he advised his fans on how to overcome

58 The reggaeton singer officially endorsed the Republican Party Candidate, and called him “a fighter for the Hispanic community” and “a fighter for the immigration issue.” See “MacCain’s Daddy Yankee Endorsement” in The New York Times. August 25, 2008. 91 life’s obstacles: “Hay que combatir la depresión visitando la iglesia, busquen ayuda, que con la unión familiar todo se puede” (“Mi trabajo es cantar” 2009). This posture extends to his songs, which show a complete lack of criticism toward patriarchal and chauvinistic discourses, following the genre’s conventions of gender construction. I will concentrate on his song titled “Lo que pasó pasó” to show how he promotes misogynist and patriarchal gender dynamics through his artistic production.59 Like most of the songs in this male-dominated genre, “Lo que pasó pasó” vocalizes the male perspective of a failed romantic relationship. The song is a reaction to an act of betrayal performed by a past female lover. Daddy Yankee begins recalling the great time they both had one night, but later he discovers that she had had another lover. The title, “Lo que pasó pasó” points to a past action that can’t be changed and the expression in Spanish also adds a desire to leave the event behind, to overcome it and keep moving forward. But this is not the case in Daddy Yankee’s song, since he stops idolizing the female character (he claims he treated her like a goddess) as she rapidly falls in his eyes and the masculine voice repeats over and over again as part of the chorus how she “failed him”: “Esa noche contigo la pasé bien/ Pero yo me enteré que te debes a alguien/ Y tú fallaste pero ya es tarde [...] ...yo que la traté como una diosa/ Me engañó...” (“Lo que pasó pasó”). This automatic conversion from goddess to mere mortal, from a being worthy of admiration to becoming a whore locates her in a permanent “fallen witch state” within the virgin/whore patriarchal dichotomy. Thus betraying a man is seen as the ultimate unforgivable crime from the dishonored male perspective.

59 I am using Daddy Yankee as the most visible example of the genre’s attitudes toward women and patriarchal relations, but this approach is displayed in almost every reggaeton singer. Like salsa music before, reggaeton has served as a cultural space to produce and promote an unequal, violent and exploitative culture toward woman. 92 The masculine voice gives us only one side of the story; the female response is completely absent. This “empty trace” is typical of the way women are generally constructed in reggaeton lyrics. As Félix Jiménez points out when referring to power relations in this musical genre: “Strategically, the built-in female response in reggaeton's choruses operates against the mythic femme fatale's freedom of action, thus assuring that the female intervention would not run counter to the songs' implicit goal of male sexual pleasure” (Reggaeton 232). Conversing with salsa’s patriarchal imaginary, women are either present as a sensual moan, celebrating the male capacity to fulfill his own sexual desires, or they are invisible counterparts only valuable as they serve to receive the man's praise or insults.60 Once the masculine voice has made clear that he won’t take his former lover back he makes a list of all of her qualities and characteristics calling her: asesina, engañadora, abusadora and maliciosa. She is a specialist in the art of love, or fatal love I should say, and her weapons of choice are the bewitching bullets. The female violence is perceived as a real threat to the masculine lyrical voice in a discourse that constantly produces, as Alfredo Nieves Moreno comments, “…the superiority of the “barriocentric macho…a male domination, one that enhances the figure of the man and situates him in a position of constant symbolic authority” (255). Daddy Yankee realizes that he has fallen under her spell; she is the fallen goddess now turned into a witch. It is clear that the female figure is a goddess as long as she stays in her place as a complement of the male counterpart, but the minute she demonstrates any kind of independent subjectivity she becomes the enemy. But Daddy Yankee is not going down without a fight, especially when his artistic name refers specifically to the popular phrase “That guy’s a Yankee,” to denote

60 For a more detailed analysis of the singers behind reggaeton ‘moans’ see “(W)rapped in Foil: Glory at Twelve Words a Minute” by Félix Jiménez in Reggaeton. 93 someone’s physical dominance (Jiménez 126). His masculine ego has been hurt and as a wounded macho man his revenge is not to please her sexually anymore. He insists in the chorus of the song, which is repeated two times –the same number of repetitions as the accusation of infidelity– that she still wants him back but he is not going to fall under her spell again. She doesn’t deserve him, or more importantly, his sexual expertise. Besides reinforcing the patriarchal imaginary through the lyrics, the music video associated with the song exemplifies the contemporary racial aesthetics of the genre. In the video the marginal “calle” is taken out of the barrio (hood), and is replaced by two very different types of streets: Puerto Rico’s main touristic street, and the pan-Latino commercial street. The ease with which the video travels from one place to another visually encompasses multiple historic narratives of travel and migration: the history and constant flow of Caribbean migrants, Florida’s Latino enclaves, and the circulation and influence of music and culture within the communities. These roads also symbolize mainstream reggaeton’s tendencies toward portraying commodified Latino images. Artists like Daddy Yankee leave the barrio street, the one that does not lead anywhere, for the cobblestone streets of Old San Juan, and the Miami Beach oceanfront transnational highway that leads to international success and recognition. Visually, “Lo que pasó, pasó” transits between these two exterior locations of San Juan and Miami. The spaces are clearly divided between the local and Puerto Rican and the transnational and pan-Latino. In Old San Juan, Yankee wears a baseball cap, jeans, a white t-shirt and a simple black jacket, while surrounded by musicians, colorful “vejigantes”, and people dancing on the folkloric and festive street.61 This frame contrasts with the shots on the

61 The vejigante is a folkloric character of Roman Catholic origins. A yearly carnival called Fiestas de Santiago Apostol is held in the town of Loíza each year in which the vegigantes, in colorful bat-winged jump suits and masks, are the main attraction. There are three main characters: El Caballero (the knight), los vegigantes viejos (the elders), and las locas (the crazy women). Due to its colonial past as a slaves’ enclave since the sixteen century, the vijigante character is culturally associated with Puerto Rico’s African 94 Miami Beach streets where the singer’s clothes reflect his latinidad with a stereotypical Fedora hat, an open bright shirt with a white t-shirt underneath, baggy jeans, and bling- bling accessories.62 Simultaneously, commercial reggaeton’s tendency towards the whitening of the singers, as well as the female dancers, is evident in this pan-Latino narrative. Although not universally the case, and the stereotypical sensual mulatta is still an iconic figure of reggaeton; and yet this video presents fair-skinned women. This image works harmoniously with the U.S.-based Spanish-language television channels Univision and Telemundo’s construction of the ‘white’ Latino in the United States. Wayne Marshall has noticed “…reggaeton's aesthetic shift toward latinidad and away from (explicit) negritude...” (60). This displacement from “música negra” to “reggaeton latino,” like Don Omar’s famous chorus “Sientan el poder / del reggaeton latino,” is represented in this video in both spaces. Daddy Yankee constructs his Puerto Rican identity through the mestizaje ideal that privileges light skinned individuals, and his latinidad is also communicated through a washed out image that distances itself from blackness. Thus, once again, the “calle” and its people have been left behind to embrace normative discourses of race and racial hierarchies. The international image of the Latino continues to rearticulate the fair-skinned individual, more similar to the sexy Latin lover Don Juan, than to the dangerous ghetto-dwelling gang member. Complicating Daddy Yankee’s macho-centric discourse, but also speaking from a commodified and “whitened” reggaeton space we have Ivy Queen, Martha Ivelisse heritage. See, Harris, Max. “Masking the Site: The Fiestas of Santiago Apóstol in Loíza, Puerto Rico” in The Journal of American Folklore.

62 “Latinidades” is a concept created by Frances Aparicio to stress “shared experiences of subordination, resistance, and agency of the various national groups of Latin American descent that comprise the U.S. Latino/a sector.” It also serves as a theoretical tool against the homogenization of the Latino experience in the United States. 95 Pasante, the most important feminine figure of the genre since its early stages in the nineteen nineties. At the early age of eighteen she was collaborating with DJ Negro and the music production The Noise composed by performers like Baby Rasta and Gringo, Las Guanábanas, among several others pioneer figures. With her petite figure, denim overalls and dark shades, not following the genre’s tendency to “sexify” the female artist, Ivy Queen has always conveyed a positive social message against domestic violence toward women: “Por todas las mujeres quiero yo hablar, que paren el maltrato al conyugal. Si tú juras amor por qué has de matar y dejar cicatrices que no sanan” (The Noise 2, 1995). Her presence in a male-dominated misogynistic space takes a symbolic stance, especially when female “voices” are mainly heard as sexual interjections in most reggaeton songs. Alexandra T. Vazquez has noted that when females participate in recordings they “usually lay down a “dame/dale” response to a phallocentric call” (304). Thus Ivy Queen’s presence allows for a much-needed feminine perspective within the urban musical world. After several years of participating in all-male collaborations, like The Noise 2, Ivy Queen debuted her solo career with En mi imperio (1997) and was named “The Peoples Favorite Rap Singer” by Artista magazine. Since then, she has compiled a total of ten compact discs, multiple collaborations with national and international artists from a variety of musical genres, a clothing and makeup line, and her own production company (Filtro Musik).63 Alongside her successful solo career, Ivy Queen has undergone a noticeable evolution in her physical appearance. She is still very slim, but her tomboy look has changed into a very feminine, plastic doll presence. As Juan Carlos Pérez-Duthie reported for Hispanic magazine in 2006: “As befitting her diva profile, Queen herself has become

63 Ivy Queen has a total of eight CDs: En mi imperio (1997), The Original Rude Girl (1998), Diva (2003), Real (2004), Flashback (2005), Sentimiento (2007), Drama Queen (2010), and Musa (2012). 96 more polished and glamorous. Butch-like street wear gave way to sexier outfits…” (49). This transformation occurred after being signed with Universal Records for her fourth album Real (2004), which ironically change her real (natural) appearance, and lyrics concerned with the working class and female empowerment to pop romantic themes. Although some critics like Jillian M. Báez argue in favor of Ivy Queen’s transformation as a vehicle of increased agency, I disagree with this reading. I believe that the singer’s plastic surgeries conform to norms of blanqueamiento and Pan-Latino discourses to fit the American commodification of Latina/os’ images into popular culture, even though in her interviews with the press she attributes it to her “growth as a person.” Ivy Queen’s physique revives the 1997 discussion of race and identity surrounding U.S. toy company Mattel’s Puerto Rican Barbie doll released that year.64 Like Barbie, the Queen’s skinny frame, new big boobs, blond hair, and ultra-sexy clothes contain her within the acceptable images of Latin beauty for the American mainstream. Although her body is still marked by ‘difference’ through her black roots, the performer’s overall appearance reads as ‘acceptable-exotic’ to an international audience. For the purpose of this study I read Ivy Queen’s image transformation, especially since her album Real (2004), as an example of her tamed-down agency. Similar to Daddy Yankee, the Queen was part of the evolution of the genre from its humble beginnings to its international fame, and as the most important female artist, she is responsible for the circulation of reggaeton from a female perspective. Through the analysis of her production I ask several questions: does she subvert patriarchal roles? How is she different from Daddy Yankee’s female configuration?

64 For a more detailed account of the identitary debates around the Puerto Rican Barbie on the island and the Diaspora see Frances Negrón-Muntaner chapter eight: “Barbie’s Hair: Selling Out Puerto Rican”, from her book Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture. 97 Ivy Queen’s album Real (2004) is a nineteen-song compilation that includes several collaborations with renowned Puerto Rican and Latino artists like Héctor El Father, Fat Joe, and La India, among others.65 These collaborations have appealed to a larger audience than just Ivy Queen due to the established international fame of these other Latino performers. Most of the songs are set on the dance floor, where Ivy Queen feels comfortable hanging out with her “corillo” (group of female friends). This space, one of the most common settings for reggaeton songs, gives Ivy Queen the opportunity to speak from a male-dominated nocturnal setting. Like Jillian M. Báez, Ejima Baker and Alexandra T. Vazquez have pointed out, the Queen’s mere fame and recognition within the male world of reggaeton music allows for a more complex female construction in her songs. The song “Soldados” is a perfect example of this spatial transgression. Here Ivy Queen enters the historically masculine space of “war” with her own army to support her, symbolically referring to herself and her incursion into the reggaeton territory:

Mira y qué se creen y qué te crees Que yo soy fácil no papi nah (ah) Trátalo (trátalo) Soldados yeah marchando. Ivy Queen (¡yo yo!) Ivy Queen (¡dale hey!) Ivy Queen (con mis soldados) Ivy Queen (mira mira marchando). (Soldados)

These verses present various interpretative levels that construct a strong and independent female figure who strikes back against misogynist discourses. First of all, she begins by clarifying that she is not easy, and if he does not believe her, he can try to break her. I read the masculine figure she is responding to as the reggaeton world, and the patriarchal

65 La India, Linda Viera Caballero, was born in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico in 1969. She is the female artist with the most hits in the Billboard’s Tropical/Salsa category, and is one of the most famous tropical female singers. La India is known for her strong female-oriented lyrics 98 discourse that supports it. As I demonstrated in Daddy Yankee’s hit song “Lo que pasó, pasó,” being ‘easy’ is one of the most common tropes of reggaeton lyrics informed by patriarchal discourses, where woman are either whores or goddesses. Ivy Queen opens her song responding to these accusations that have been made historically without allowing women to respond. This is followed by the reaffirmation of her voice and presence with the repetition of her name and the first-person personal pronoun “yo.” Even though these lyrics corroborate a feminist reading of the artist, several of her songs construct a more docile and less conflictive feminine figure more attuned with the genre’s dynamics:

Me quieres fina soy elegante. Si tú me quieres pecar, yo me convierto en toa’ tu gangster. Baby, sólo tienes que llamarme cuando me busques, sabes voy a responderte. No te preocupes que yo puedo entenderte, y mis deseos sólo son de complacerte. (Chika Ideal)

Although the female character has a proper voice, she is the ‘ideal woman,’ the one that is willing to do whatever it takes to please her man. Even though the female is the one that does the talking, as opposed to Daddy Yankee’s lyrics, she is being molded by the patriarchal desires: “y mis deseos sólo son de complacerte.” The song, once again, gets trapped in the same reggateon dynamics of sexual interaction when the female part becomes an object of sexual pleasure. I suggest that although Ivy Queen presents glimpses of individuality and a female voice that courageously transgress into a male- dominated space, she also gets trapped into the old patriarchal formulas used by her male counterparts through the lyrics where she molds herself to male desire. Furthermore, her physical transformation that includes big breasts, blond hair, and sexy clothes, situates her within mainstream commercial reggaeton that conforms to norms of blanqueamiento

99 and Pan-Latino discourses to fit the American commodification of Latina/os’ images into popular culture. Through this first section of the chapter I have shown how Daddy Yankee and Ivy Queen, as commercial and international reggaeton artists, subjugate their music and artistic image to patriarchal discourses, and blanqueamiento aesthetics. In the music of these two figures, reggaeton’s subversive potential and Afro-Caribbean visibility disappear into a danceable international pop-formula suitable for discos everywhere. But there are reggaeton artists that have been able to maintain the genre’s stigmatization, racialization and liminality as tools to criticize the status quo, like Calle 13 and Tego Calderón.66

SONGS OF RESISTANCE: CALLE 13

The duo Calle 13, composed of the Puerto Rican half-brothers René Pérez (Residente) and Eduardo Cabra (Visitante), appeared on the music scene in 2005 with their first musical compilation titled Calle 13. This album serves as a letter of presentation inserting the duo’s innovative style into a well-defined and narrow urban musical scene that had defined reggaeton up to that moment. Consciously distancing themselves from commercial reggaeton, the seventeen songs on the album range from dem-bow rhythms, associated with the earlier movement of underground music, to the use of eighties beats and rap, to accompany Calle 13’s lyrics. The group’s second compact disc Residente o Visitante (2007) shows a more developed musical style that relies less and less on the underground and reggaeton formula to gain an audience. Through the blend of various Latin American rhythms, like Argentine tango and

66 Although for the purposes of this study I limit my analysis to the duo Calle 13 and the musician Tego Calderón there are other artists that use urban beats and regggaeton to convey a critical social and political project. For example: Welmo, Siete Nueve, and Mariposa, among others. These artists still need to be studied as part of the contemporary urban conversation that uses the genre to criticize the status quo. 100 Colombian cumbia, they widen their scope into a more transnational and global musical arena. In an interview with Eduardo Cabra, the duo’s musical director and composer, he mentioned that the musical blend is a metaphor of their Latin American project that intends to bring together the whole continent through lyrics with critical socio-political content.67 Like their first CD, this compilation still contains some of the tiraera (bickering with other urban artists) and sexual encounters typical of mainstream reggaeton, but it clearly shows Calle 13’s interests in social concerns with themes like guerrilla violence and immigration in “Llégale a mi guarida” (featuring Vicentico), and “Pal’ Norte” (featuring Orishas, To the North).68 Following their Latin American unity discourse, the compact disc titled Los de atrás vienen conmigo (2008) includes various collaborations with Latin American musical giants like Café Tacvba (México) and Rubén Blades (Panamá).69 What distinguishes this album is the incorporation of a transnational conscience through the Latino migration into the United States. The duo’s most recent production, Entren los que quieran (2010), demonstrates the group’s musical progression from a local preoccupation with Puerto Rico’s social and racial dynamics to an openness

67 This interview took place in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico. Eduardo Cabra was generous enough to sit with me for more than an hour before departing again to Europe to continue their Tour during the Summer of 2011. I was able to travel to Puerto Rico thanks to the Summer Research Funds I received from the Spanish & Portuguese Department at the University of Texas at Austin.

68 Gabriel Julio Fernández Capello (1964), better known as Vicentico, is an Argentinean musician and composer. He was the co-founder of the famous band Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. In 2001 he began a successful solo career. Orishas is a Cuban hip-hop group based in France. They are extremely popular in Europe and Latin America. Their music and message resonates with the urban youth, and reinforces an Afro-Cuban identity.

69 Café Tacvba (1989-present) is a band from Ciudad Satélite, México. The group, which mixes many different music styles like punk, ska hip-hop, and regional Mexican genres gained popularity in Mexico and all throughout Latin American in the early 1990s. They are known for their infectious rhythms, and their denouncing of social injustice and inequality. Rubén Blades (1948) is a Panamanian songwriter, salsa singer, and activist. He has been very active in his country’s politics, and he is recognized as an artistic icon throughout Latin America. In 2008 Blades collaborated with the Puerto Rican duo in the song “La Perla,” and since then he has become a sort of artistic godfather for Pérez and Cabra. 101 towards the marginal communities across national lines in songs like “Latinoamérica,” and “Baile de los pobres,” among others. For my analysis of the duo I depart from a liminal subject position defined by Caroll Smith-Rosenberg as a person who “… in movement between two states…consequently posses[es] the roles and responsibilities of neither” (166). In the case of the Puerto Rican duo this ‘in between’ condition translates literally to their artistic identification as simultaneously being Residente (René Pérez) and Visitante (Eduardo Cabra). This vacillation between belonging and not belonging allows the duo a permanent ambiguity to speak from a more subversive space, less attached to social order and decorum. I will analyze specific songs that demonstrate how the duo uses this liminal position when talking about race and gender in order to destabilize Puerto Rico’s official discourse of blanqueamiento (whitening). I argue that Calle 13’s front man, René Pérez, equates race with social class, thus uncovering the social stratification of the island. In his lyrics the use of the word race is synonymous with collectiveness, with the ‘people’ (pueblo), thus in order to serve as the people’s voice, he constantly needs to prove that he belongs to the Puerto Rican ‘race,’ the dark-skinned working class. René Pérez’ identification with Afro-Puerto Ricans dialogues with the act of ‘passing,’ as a subversive strategic performance of assuming a different socially constructed category. This term, like I already mentioned in Chapter One, comes from the American racial history and refers to a black individual trying to pass as “white” (Ginseberg 2-3). In the case of Pérez, his artistic persona embodies the blue-collar community, and his racial stratification moves between “blanquitos” (upper and privileged classes) and the ‘pueblo,’ the marginalized due to economic and racial reasons. Therefore, Calle 13 deconstructs ‘la gran familia puertoriqueña’ ideal, and turns it into a segmented and divided community based on material capital. As Raquel Z. Rivera states: 102 Marginality has both a behavioral and a class or racial component. Never will white-collar criminals, for example, be defined as marginal. The very definition and construction of crime are implicated in class and racially based hierarchies and structures of oppression. In short, you are marginal if you break the social contract of order, but you must also belong to the lower, phenotypically “darker” classes” (Reggaeton 121) I also argue that this construction of marginality as a ‘racial category,’ and their performance of ‘passing’ allow the duo to transcend the local and find a broader audience, calling for an awakening of the ‘marginal pan-Latino race.’ I will begin by examining two of their earlier songs, where they expose and critique Puerto Rico’s ‘gran familia puertorriqueña’ imaginary. They dismiss this unitary discourse to replace it with a national collective brought together by a common history exemplified by folkloric elements and shared cultural capital like food and boxing, among others. Then, I will show how the duo turns race from a phenotypical category to a social construction related to class and acquisitive power to open a dialogue with the transnational marginal pan- Latino community. Finally, I discuss how Pérez creates a new vocabulary to talk about Latin American immigrants based on a heroic narrative that leaves behind their systematic criminalization. In their first album titled Calle 13 (2005) the duo’s front man makes sure to separate himself from the social privilege that comes with being considered ‘white.’ Even though René Pérez is jincho (pale complected) and has a graduate degree from a United States institution, he does not belong to the ‘blanquito’ upper class because his family belongs to the lower middle class. This fact appears as a constant reminder to prove that he pertains to the urban marginal music landscape:

No te confundas con mi cabronas hinchera porque yo soy el estelar en esta cartelera. Mi rima es certera, sincera de a de veras, nunca fequera… (“Tengo Hambre,” my emphasis)

103 Through the use of the ‘self-othering’ label, based on his socio-economic status, Pérez is able to argue that although his skin is fair (jincho) he is not ‘white’ because his working class status colors and positions him within the social margin. Pérez’s gesture corresponds to the urban music and reggaeton cosmogony, where blackness and marginality are a required common denominator, and whiteness is synonymous with being fake (“fequera”), and not real. This reggaeton racial reversal as marginal solidarity, similar to Willie Perdomo’s embrace of blackness as a deconstructive tool, devaluates the ‘blanqueamiento’ imaginary, uncovering it as a false discourse that promotes socio- economic inequality. If the ‘gran familia puertorriqueña’ is nothing but a sham that promotes social injustice and extends white privilege, how does Calle 13 construct a more inclusive Puerto Rican identity? The song “Vamo’ animal” (Way to go, dumbass) displays several of the folkloric elements used to forge a more heterogeneous national collective that includes boxing, the jibaro’s machete, and cockfights, among others.70 “Traigo el sóngoro cosongo/ Tres tazas de mondongo con mofongo […] Y de blanco lo único que tengo son los dientes…” (“Vamo’ Animal”). These verses centred on African inherited food, and the inclusion of the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s poesía negra verse “sóngoro cosongo,” from his famous collection titled Sóngoro Cosongo (1931), later musicalized in Héctor Lavoe’s song by the same title, create a very complex transnational imaginary based on shared African-influenced cultural practices.71 These deceptively simple lines revive Puerto

70 The jíbaro is the Puerto Rican national identitary symbol. The white peasant icon was constructed in the 19th Century by the island’s white elite’s to stress direct linage with a European past, reiterating its centrality and excluding the African presence’s centrality. 71 The Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén (1902-1989) is best known for his poesía negra (back poetry) and the use of onomatopeya to evoke drum sounds. Sóngoro cosongo (1931) was the poet’s second poetry compilation.

104 Rico’s colonial past, embracing and giving visibility to the presence of the African heritage connecting the island with the rest of black Caribbean history, and include the Diaspora as part of the Puerto Rican reality and cultural treasures through the salsa reference. Altogether, the African and musical elements are included into the mix of Puerto Rican identity configuration. This Afro-identification supports Pérez’s rejection of the upper-class blanquitos who have to constantly prove their superiority using social practices fuelled by material power:

Desde la Perla hasta Miramar. Si tú eres más blanquito que yo, tú no trabajas, a ti te lo hacen tó’. Dale, lúcete con el cadenón. Tú te criaste en el barrio, ¿ya se te olvidó? (“Vamo’ animal”) These lines reiterate René’s “passing” strategy as a way of distancing himself from the privileged class as he accuses other reggaeton artists of forgetting where they come from, the barrio and the working class. He argues that in contrast to these sold-out singers, he stays true to the ‘people’: “yo me voy con el pueblo / con los que se joden pa’ ganarse un sueldo” (Vamo’ animal). It would be very naïve to believe that Calle 13 is more ‘real’ or more ‘Puerto Rican’ because they use folkloric elements in their songs, instead of talking about cars, ‘bling-bling’ and the barrios’ drug wars. But they evidently produce a thematic rupture, an interesting value inversion with the recuperation of the African element as an essential component of the Puerto Rican experience, and the affirmation of working class realities. For these reason their construction of contemporary Puerto Rican identity is anchored in cultural experience as a common, relatable space.

Héctor Lavoe include the song “Sóngoro Cosongo” as part of his third solo album titled Comedia (1978). The song follows the typical salsa structure where the male voice sings about his infatuation with a black woman’s body and sensual dance movements. 105 The song titled “La crema,” from their second compilation Residente o Visitante (2007) reiterates the configuration of a national identity through cultural referents of popular public figures, corrupt politicians, food, and activities shared by most Puerto Ricans. There is an interesting new addition to his national configuration, the Dominican migration, normally rejected, criminalized, and racialized by the national discourse. Its incorporation into everyday reality gives it visibility and acknowledges the community as part of Puerto Rico’s reality: “La fiebre, yuca, jangeo en Plaza, los spoilers del aro, corillo, melaza./ Carlitos Colón, el jengibre, la salsa, arroz pegao’, dominicanos en balsa” (“La crema”). Although this song still an example of their earlier work geographically located inside the island’s experience, it includes the Caribbean historical and contemporary shared reality of movement and migration (“dominicanos en balsa”).72 Within the configuration of a Puerto Rican identity it is impossible to ignore the island’s relationship with the United States, and Pérez addresses it through a literal and symbolic encounter between musicians in the song “Pi-Di-Di.” Using humor and the fabrication of an absurd confrontation between Calle 13 and the North American rapper P. Diddy, the singer criticizes the colonial reality of Puerto Rico creating a forced lost-in- translation encounter. The first communication problem is due to a difference in cultural capital. The song opens with what seems like a cordial invitation to Puerto Rico, but when the lyrical character mentions specific local food, the confusion begins:

Entren, entren bienvenidos a mi nido, no me tienen que pagar na’, yo los invito…. la receta de hoy es la especialidad de la cocina… y pa’ que aguanten el pico, un poco de yuca frita con mojito. “Do you have some Doritos?” No, yuca frita con mojito.

72 Dominicans are openly marginalized in Puerto Rico. The relationship between the two islands has been studied extensively by critics like Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Jorge Duany. In the next chapter on the Dominican artist Rita Indiana Hernández I will talk about this relationship in more detail. 106 “Do you have some Coca-Cola?” No… (“Pi-Di-Di,” my emphasis)

Obviously Calle 13 understands the questions, because they are answering what is being asked, but the speaker refuses to answer in English. These verses show the colonial situation from a different perspective, where the black American performer is the one out of place, and the Spanish language has more symbolic power. The title also supports this idea using the Spanish phonology of the rapper’s name, Pi-Di-Di. This ordeal revives the never-ending political manipulation of English and Spanish as a symbolic step to show either support for statehood through the incorporation of English, or exalting Puerto Rico’s own culture through the Spanish linguistic heritage.73 “Pi-Di-Di” also exemplifies one of the most important components within Calle 13’s identity discourse, food. Every time P. Diddy asks for something to eat or drink, the Puerto Rican interlocutor responds with a ‘local’ food or beverage. Obviously Coca-Cola and Doritos are common in Puerto Rico, but their rejection is an act of defiance and a symbolic re-colonization of the cultural space through local products and traditions. On this important gastronomic reappropriation Díaz-Zambrana states in her article “Gastronomía, humor y nación: estrategias retóricas en las letras de Calle 13,” that food becomes a national symbol from which to negotiate Puerto Rican identity (138).74 Continuing with the ‘them’/U.S. versus ‘us’/P.R. narrative, Calle 13 mentions the racial division, seen simultaneously from a Puerto Rican historical perspective as well as the North American racial configuration:

73 Due to its political and economic dependency on the United States, maintaining difference through the Spanish language and culture have been two of the main pillars of the identity discourse that define and legitimize “la puertorriqueñidad.” For a detailed analysis of the relationship between political agendas, language, and national imaginaries see “Nationalism, Language Policy, and Nested Games in Puerto Rico” (2002), by Amílacar Antonio Barreto. 74 In Puerto Rico’s popular culture, beauty pageant stars, sports and entertainment figures have come to occupy the places of historical and national heroes in the common imaginary. Most people are more knowledgeable about Miss Puerto Ricos through the years than “próceres” (national heroes). 107 Piénsalo dos veces antes de meterte con un cacique […] Aquí en Puerto Rico casi to’ el mundo es molleto. Aquí aunque seas blanco eres prieto… (“Pi-Di-Di”)

On one hand, Pérez stresses the mark of marginality carried by African Americans by referencing the American performer of African heritage. On the other hand, he accepts blackness as Puerto Rico’s common denominator. I am aware that the use of the ‘Afro’ element as a unifying factor is highly problematic because, as the anthropologist Isar P. Godreau mentions, the Afro-Puerto Rican element is used as cultural folklore but the black individual is criminalized and rejected through everyday social dynamics (“Folkloric “Others”). But here the singer is reminding all Puerto Ricans that they are black in spite of their possible pale appearance, or their “passing” performance. This suggestion not only rescues the Afro-Puerto Rican discourse, but also goes against the “blanqueamiento” official discourse. Another way Pérez forges the national identity in this song is through an aggressive masculinity. After the confrontation, P. Diddy returns to the United States degraded and ‘less of a man.” The emasculation is accomplished through the American rapper’s feminization and the hyper-masculinization of the Puerto Rican culture:

Y después de eso Puff Daddy regresó a los New Yores un poco sato, menos hombre…aquí está tu bibi. Pa’ que chupes un poco de leche borinqueña. […] Piénsalo antes de meterte con un cacique. (“Pi-Di-Di”)

I am not interested in analysing the genre’s tendency to make every situation hyper- masculine; this would be a repetition of the patriarchal tendencies of the reggaeton genre. Nevertheless, it is essential to point out that although René Pérez ends the power relation between the American and the Puerto Rican people through the previously discussed ‘forced’ lost in translation encounter, here Pérez follows the normative patriarchal model to construct identity when he invites the American rapper to "suck his dick” as an act of

108 homosexual submission. The national body is presented as a very virile and violent manly corporality in order to expel the colonial excess. Thus, Pérez’s Puerto Rican identity is primarily articulated through cultural capital, a shared marginality by the working class, and through the coloniality of the Puerto Rican black body. Embracing blackness through a discourse of marginality is central to Calle 13’s participation on the Banco Popular Christmas Musical Special: Sonó Sonó Tite Curet (2011), in honour of the late Puerto Rican compositor Tite Curet Alonso (1926-2010), with the interpretation of the theme “Sorongo.”75 The single utilizes Alonso’s original chorus of the late Puerto Rican while adding new lyrics and musical arrangement that shows the new generation’s questioning and denouncing of physical and discursive racial violence exercised by the white/black dichotomy. The single is a collaborative effort between the Puerto Rican duo alongside Sammy Tanco (NYC), and Kuti (Nigeria), a union that traces a Diaspora-African connection to Puerto Rico and the rest of the Caribbean. The collaboration of Kuti is very significant in terms of the international and African scope of the musical theme. This London born and Nigerian raised musician is the son of the famous musician, pioneer of Afrobeat music, and political activist Fela Kuti (1938-1997). In an interview given to the Puerto Rican newspaper Primera Hora (see note 18), René Pérez expresses the importance of Kuti’s collaboration due to his international visibility, family history, and his own socio-political involvement in humanitarian causes.76 Evidently this collaboration influences the lyrics:

75 For a discussion on the lyrical and musical innovation done by René Pérez, Eduardo Cabra, and Ileana Pérez (vocalist), see the interview by the newspaper Primera Hora. http://www.bumbia.com/primerahora/calle13enespecialdelbancopopular-124887.html 76 Sammy Tanco is an island-born Puerto Rican who moved to New York City in 1941. He has been in several musical ensembles since he moved to the United States. He explains that he gained a socio-political conscious when he moved to New York City where he joined the Black and Puerto Rican Coalition and was active within the artistic community of the Taller Boricua, a collectivity that later founded El Museo del Barrio. For more on Sammy Tanco’s story see: http://www.prensacomunitaria.com/gente/1232-la- historia-de-sammy-tanco 109 qué es lo que el negro tiene de blanco y qué es lo que el blanco tiene del congo (x2) Qué es lo que tiene el boricua del congo misma neblina, mismo futuro, la policía nos pega igual de duro […] mismo perfume, misma colonia (“Sorongo”) The verses propose a solid demarcation between whites and black that translates into power exercised by the state’s police vis-à-vis the abused black body. Furthermore, the singer collapses the national frontiers based on the global inequality and physical abuse suffered by black subjects. Through the music arrangement, Cabra extends this transnational reading with the incorporation of Seven Kuti Afrobeat alongside the typical Puerto Rican plena and bomba instruments for the creation of one song that traces a common history. Pérez includes Puerto Rico within the black-marginal collectivity through its actual political relation to the United States, and its colonial past bound to Africa and the African slaves brought onto the island. The video takes place in Loíza, a small town on the north eastern coast of the island known for its tradition of bomba and plena Afro- rhythms. Loíza is composed of mainly black Puerto Ricans and, as a former slave, enclave it reiterates the duo’s construction of race as a product of marginality and exclusion during the celebration of their annual patron saint Santiago Apóstol, where the colorful vejigantes dance among the people, and drum-based music is played on the streets. In their more recent work, the duo’s articulation of a solidarity discourse based on a colonial marginal heritage and racial exclusion has extended to a pan-Caribbean and pan-Latin American identity that looks to the south, as opposed to Daddy Yankee and Ivy Queen’s whitening practices. This shift seems to be directly related to Pérez’s and

110 Cabra’s Latin American trip shown in the documentary Sin mapa (2009), in which the two travel to some of the most impoverished and marginal communities on the continent.77 The Latin Grammy-winning song of the year titled “Latinoamérica” (2011) exemplifies the duo’s shift to a more inclusive socio-political agenda, as they leave behind the primarily localized denunciation of social and racial inequality to expand their gaze toward the rest of Latin America.78 The song treats the American continent as one soil united by historical injustices, dictatorships, wars and American invasions. Visually, the video expands on this idea through a collective character constructed by people from all around the continent. This character acknowledges its violent history, accepts its harsh and tenuous present, but looks into the future with hope and the symbolic strength of millions:

Soy lo que sostiene mi bandera, la espina dorsal del planeta es mi cordillera. Soy lo que me enseñó mi padre, el que no quiere a su patria no quiere a su madre. Soy América Latina, un pueblo sin piernas pero que camina. (“Latinoamérica”) The Latin American community is constructed as a severely wounded body that still stands proud amid historical adversity. Even without legs, this collective is able to stand and keep walking. This description takes a symbolic importance and powerful stance when read together with the song “Pal’ Norte” (To the north, 2007) where that same

77 From a cinematographic point of view, Sin mapa (Without a Map) is a beautiful compiled visual excursion through a contemporary Latin America. Although they do visit common tourist site like Machu Picchu in Peru, they visit the mines. The places they visit have a critical overtone toward exposing social injustice. Personally, I think the documentary captures a genuine awakening of René Pérez toward marginal communities in these countries that really shows how out of touch most Puerto Ricans are in relation to the rest of the Americans reality. 78 This song is collaboration with Totó La Mamposina, Susuna Baca, and María Rita.

111 injured body is able to walk north in search of a better life.79 Here the immigrant becomes the star of Calle 13’s rebellious agenda, as he or she inverts the historical and economic exploitation and political impositions of the United States south of the border.80 Pérez presents a narrative of resistance against the systematic criminalization and racialization of the immigrant subject. Using once again the idea of a collective main character, Pérez follows what David Spener calls ant resistance, or everyday practices performed individually that challenge power dynamics that separate the continent between the North and the South (Clandestine Crossings 23). More powerful than the juridical vocabulary that extirpates the newcomer of any rights, Pérez arms the immigrant with supernatural powers that outwit territorial divides and provides him with the legs that were taken away from him in the previous song:

[…] Por debajo de la tierra como las ardillas, yo vo’a cruzar la muralla… […]… y por eso me convierto en buzo… y buceo por debajo de la tierra… Pa’ que no me vean los guardias y los perros no me huelan… abuela no se preocupe que en mi cuello cuelga la virgen de la Guadalupe… (“Latinoamérica”)

The poetic chameleonic ability given to the immigrant to trespass any border without been caught by the immigration police works also as a discursive resistance that creates a powerful subject given superhuman powers. But this symbolic resistance is

79 The video was shot at the outer edges of the Juyjuy province located in the north of Argentina. It borders with Chile in the east through the Andes, in the north it borders with Bolivia, and to the east and south with the Salta province. This location was chosen because, according to the duo, their music and lyrics are better received in these lands.

80 Today there are twelve million immigrants in the United States, and the Census Bureau predicts that this number will triple by 2050. Although the Hispanic presence in the country goes back to the Spanish conquest, lately the topic has assumed centrality in the political debates. As Juan González comments in his book Harvest of Empire (2011), in 2006 the U.S. experienced its largest minority demonstration when millions marched against the Sensenbrenner Bill that proposed more penalties for undocumented immigrants living in the Unites States. More recently, the Arizona Law SB7010 (2010) that allows authorities to detain anyone who may “look like” an undocumented individual provoked innumerable reactions among politicians and the larger population. 112 counterbalanced by the images of the music video which captures the ‘other’ side of the migration story: the harsh physical reality of the journey that none of the individuals completes alive. The contrast between the mortality of the body and the lyrical empowerment given to the migrant through supernatural abilities as a collective resistance, allows for a new discourse around immigration. Generally the vocabulary surrounding immigration relies on juridical terms that dehumanize and criminalize the newcomers, but Calle 13’s song injects a new imaginary to the discussion through the inclusion of super-human powers, thus transforming the migrant into a hero. Although this might sound infantile, the iconic figure of the hero is equally complicated as the migrant because they oscillate between two opposite poles: admiration and criminalization by the state’s regulatory institutions. Thus, this description of the newcomer complicates its one-sided negative image through its humanization and admiration as a subject constantly scrutinized and alienated by society. Through the close reading of various Calle 13 songs I have shown how the duo has shifted from a mainly locally-based project of identity formation and social critique into a Pan-Latino, and Pan-Caribbean presence that not only unites several generations and countries, but includes Puerto Rico in the Latin American struggle, and as part of the reality of migration, awakening also its African heritage. Leaving behind the racial fallacy of the ‘gran familia puertorriqueña,’ Pérez reconfigures race as to signify economic and social scarcity. Due to Puerto Rico’s close relationship between social hierarchy and race, Pérez utilizes African heritage as one of the elements shared by the marginal communities, accepting blackness as an essential component of Puerto Rico’s reality. Under his extended definition of race the duo is able to include themselves, despite their fair skin color, as part of the blue-collar community, becoming their leading voice. 113 MORE SONGS OF RESISTANCE: TEGO CALDERÓN

Two years after Calle 13’s first album, Tego Calderón entered the music scene with his CD titled El Abayarde (2007). His music revolutionized the genre, not only for his slower vocal cadence and incorporation of bomba and salsa rhythms, but also for his self-identification as a black Puerto Rican. As I have mentioned, at its beginnings the genre was proudly identified by its singers as a black and working-class musical expression. In Dinzey-Flores’s view, “The most notable urban frame of reggaetón is poverty. The social and economic inequalities experienced by reggaetoneros are rearticulated in lyrics that highlight the plight of people who are poor, stigmatized, and vulnerable to violence” (“De la disco” 48). But with its internationalization and absorption into the mainstream economy, the overall image of reggaeton was tamed to fit the international stereotype of the light-skinned Latino. Thus, ironically, Calderón refreshes the genre by shifting it back to its original utilization as a space of denouncing for and by marginalized individuals. By tapping into a profitable and well-known musical genre, Tego Calderón was immediately embraced by the market, becoming “reggaeton’s poster boy” and “black culture icon” par excellence. Thus the question arises: how, all of a sudden, are politicians and “blanquitos” willing to accept a reggaeton performer who embraces blackness? Understanding the contradictions, but also the power acquired through the establishment’s support of his work, Calderón takes the stage to criticize the system that maintains black Puerto Ricans at the bottom of the social hierarchy. While Calle 13 proposes a transnational race based on a ‘blue collar’/working class condition, in this section I show how through the use of African-inherited music and acceptance of blackness, Calderón denounces black Puerto Ricans’ socio-economic marginalization and criminalization. I propose the following questions to guide my analysis: How does Calderón demystify Puerto Rico’s racial ideology? How is the black Puerto Rican 114 constructed, and what elements does Calderón use to put together an Afro-Puerto Rican experience in a country that has not experienced a black activist movement? Is there a Pan-Caribbean and transnational global racial formation guiding his artistic proposal? The song “Chango Blanco,” from the CD The Underdog/ El Subestimado (2006), functions as a metaphor of Puerto Rico’ racial fallacy that imagines the Puerto Rican as a light-skinned individual, and dialogues with Franz Fanon’s idea developed in Black Skins, White Masks that blackness is rejected by black individuals because they are subsumed under models of white supremacy, thus the only acceptable condition is whiteness. The cover of this collection presents Calderón’s afro from behind while he is seated on a barbershop chair. From the side of his round afro a ‘peineta’ pops out irreverently. Thus, even from the disc’s jacket, race takes center stage. It is important to mention that the Puerto Rican writer Mayra Santos Febres writes various short critical commentaries on some of the songs. This ‘sponsorship’ from an authorized literary voice demonstrates how Calderón is constructed and perceived as a different kind of reggaeton artist. As a black female writer, Santos Febres endorses and supports the singer’s social and racial artistic project, thus helping him to enter more canonical and legitimate cultural spaces. The song tells the story of a “chango” (black bird) that is painted white, and as a consequence its family cannot recognize it. While it is flying rain starts to pour from the sky, and it is restored to its natural color. It is important to notice that the narrative voice, the spokesperson for Puerto Rico’s official discourse, is the one that decides to change the bird’s original color from black to white. To reinforce the impossibility of covering up Puerto Rico’s African heritage, the song is composed of a salsa rhythm that captures the struggle and importance of the African heritage, and the cultural production of Afro-

115 Puerto Ricans in the island. Furthermore, the song is remarkable for its poetization of Puerto Rico’s contemporary racial tension:

Yo me puse a pintar un chango de blanco, cuando terminé, me dio por soltarlo. El chango se fue, volando sereno, pero sus hermanos no lo reconocieron. Que pena me dio, me sentí culpable de que solitario volara en el aire. Pero con la lluvia, que cae de los cielos, se fue restaurando, su color de nuevo. ( “Chango Blanco,” my emphasis)

The fable-style narration exposes the false igualitarian racial discourse, and criticizes official ideology’s constant requirement to ‘cover up’ corporeal traits of blackness in order to “belong” to the national collective. Calderón argues in favor of transforming the official image of the Puerto Rican through self-acceptance and the inclusion of black elements into the mix:

Yo me quiero, me quiero quedar negrito. Nací con este color, me queda bonito (“Chango Blanco”)

This section of the song is central to Calderón’s racial project because the first two lines change their meaning depending on how they are combined, and can be interpreted as ‘I love myself’ (Yo me quiero) or ‘I want, I want to stay black’ (Yo me quiero, me quiero quedar negrito). These statements aggressively challenge the official racial myth that embraces mestizo traits that erase the black element, promoting individual and collective self-acceptance of blackness. The demystifying process of Puerto Rico’s ‘racial democracy’ goes from a discursive level into depictions of Puerto Rico’s literal landscape when Calderón locates blackness within the island’s demographic in the song “Loíza,” from his first album El Abayarde (2003). The singer localizes his song in the town of Loíza, as Calle 13 did in

116 “Sorongo,” to criticize how even though it has been nationally demarcated as a folkloric cultural space, its black inhabitants suffer extreme poverty and exclusion. Using poverty as a product of racial violence as his frame, Calderón’s song opens with a drum-and- maracas-based interlude that transports the local listener to Loíza, and the international listener into an Afro-Caribbean imaginary:

Y es que no bregan con Loíza. No, no bregan. Me quiere hacer pensar que soy parte de una trilogía racial, donde to’ el mundo es igual, sin trato especial. [...] ¿Cómo justificas tanto mal? Es que tu historia es vergonzosa, entre otras cosas, cambiaste las cadenas por esposas. (“Loíza”) The tension between theory and practice surrounding race is palpable. Calderón suggests that there is a direct relationship between slavery and the criminalization of black Puerto Ricans, from enslaved bodies to criminals, a historic connection seen in Willie Perdomo’s poetry as well. This relationship has resulted in the privation of freedom, social inequality, and a violent juridical cycle that Calderón captures contextually and formally through the reproduction of the tautology: “No todos somos iguales / en términos legales / y eso está probao’ en los tribunales” (“Loíza”). Calderón exhorts his fellow black Puerto Ricans to wake up from the empty discourse of the ‘gran familia’ and embrace blackness:

Poco a poco, negrito ponte mañoso. Vive orgulloso, que el To’ Poderoso es como nosotros. Pa’ esos niches, que se creen mejor por sus profesiones, o por tener facciones de sus opresores. […] Nunca va a haber justicia sin igualdad. […] Con qué potestá’ va a quitarme la libertad, si yo no reconozco tu autoridad. (“Loíza”)

Here the singer makes an interesting inversion in order to evade the oppressive system whose effectiveness resides in its capacity to be acknowledged and recognized by its citizens. Calderón replaces the foundational fiction of mestizaje, responsible for

117 contemporary social structures, with a more powerful divine myth that traces its origins to a strong, black and poor God figure as the protector and role model of the black and mulatto community. With this change of narrative, the system is broken, and there is space for the valorization of the black community and Puerto Rican blackness as a legitimate and equal component of contemporary society. Calderón completes the revalorization of blackness, taking it from the ideological and discursive space into the corporeal dimension using his own body to alter the Puerto Rico’s ‘ideal image.’ Noticing the socio-political project of Calderón visibility, Félix Jiménez argues that

…la articulación del Tego con afro a lo Danny Rivera, Lucecita Benítez y Roberto Rohena en los años sesenta y setenta prentende reinagurar la interrumpida tradición de la alteridad negra en la isla, proveer un antídoto premeditado contra el rostro blanco del rap, e iniciar la búsqueda de una estética de la imperfección y fealdad. (145)

It is not by chance that the artist repeatedly describes himself as “feo” (ugly), and “negro” (black), subverting commercial stereotypes, and calling attention to the underlying racism in the way beauty is valued:

Orgulloso de mis raíces, de tener mucha bemba y grandes narices. Ni sufriendo dejamos de ser felices, por eso es que papá Dios nos bendice. (“Loíza,” my emphasis) The acceptance of his roots, both referring to appearance and his heritage, results in a socio-political stance that interrupts the Eurocentric beauty standards that guide Spanish Caribbean images of beauty.81

81 The ‘afro’ became a political gesture during the Civil Rights Era in the United States. This resonated in Puerto Rico as a gesture of blackness acceptance in artists and public figures like Danny Rivera and Lucecita Benítez in the 1970s. The public was not receptive to the afro, especially in the case of the female singer. For the case Lucecita Benítez see Yeidy Rivero. For a discussion on aesthetics and beauty standards in the Spanish Caribbean and the manipulation of blackness see Isar Godreau and Ginetta E.B. Candelario 118 An analysis of his nickname, El Abayarde (fire ant), is useful as a metaphor of Calderón’s corporeal discourse. The name works on two different levels: literally it refers to an explosive and hot ‘fire’ ant whose sting swells into a bump, creating an unconfortable and visible mark on the skin. These large-headed ants look similar to Tego, with his afro, and their prominent bottoms or hips capture the stereotypical mark of the Afro-heritage heritage. Consciously, Calderón destabilizes the public space with his ‘sting’ and his ‘looks,’ and serves as a role model for black Puerto Ricans that are eager to be proud of their appearance. The singer knows he is different from the other “reggaeton faces,” especially from those singers like Daddy Yankee and Tito el Bambino that fit the self-image of the Puerto Rican as well as the mainstream Latino stereotype. Thus, he uses his evident ‘difference’ to construct his lyrical and public persona and separate himself from the mainstream performers.82 Until now we have seen how the artist has made racial struggle in Puerto Rico a pivotal axis. Through his public image, album covers, musical arrangements and lyrics, Tego Calderón makes the African component visible and even more importantly, the black Puerto Rican in contemporary society. He fights what Isar Godreau refers to as ‘black folklorization’ with the uncovering of criminalization and rejection of dark- skinned citizens in contemporary Puerto Rico. But can we find a transnational and global message in Tego’s songs? Can we situate Calderón’s music as part of a pan-Latino, and pan-Latin American project like Calle 13? Even if Calderón’s explicit project is based on the island of Puerto Rico, he did live in the United States during the years of his adolescence. These influences can be traced within his musical style through the

82 Although Calderón has said that in order to fulfill reggaeton’s basic standards and the label’s requirements he has included certain violence and hyper-masculine lyrics, he does not condone the underworld violence praised by most of his colleagues, marking himself with difference once more. 119 incorporation of hip-hop beats, the use of Spanglish, and several mentions of the Latino communities in the United States. But is this enough to say that Calderón’s work proposes a black identity that leaves behind the geographical limits of the island? Calderón’s call for unity using race and racialization as a common ground converses with The Austin School Manifesto: An Approach to the Black or African Diaspora, a “living” document from the early 2000s calling for the articulation of a Black identity beyond national borders, whose authors make explicit that

…our idea of Diaspora focuses on Black agency and the processes of self-making, the Black/African Diaspora as a transnational cultural, intellectual, and, above all, political project that seeks to name, represent, and participate in Black people’s historic efforts to construct our collective identities and constitute them through cultural-political practices dedicated to expressing our full humanity … (Gordon 94) Following the manifesto’s principles to foment Black collective identities through “agency” and self-making processes, Tego Calderón’s reification as a black Puerto Rican and his professed self-love serves as an act of agency in the creation of a proud Afro- Puerto Rican identity. But how does he extend his project to the rest of the Caribbean? How are the other islands represented in his songs and videos? How are they used in order to convey his message? “Son dos alas” (Interlude) is the most obvious choice to show Calderón’s trans- Caribbean message. The most famous verses from the renowned poem “Cuba y Puerto Rico son de un pájaro las dos alas” from the Puerto Rican poet and activist Lola Rodríguez de Tió (1843-1924), is the title of the interlude sang and played by Alfredo Hernández, a Puerto Rican professional drummer: 83

83 Lola Rodríguez de Tió was an important revolutionary who believed in women’s rights, the abolition of slavery, and the independence of Puerto Rico. In 1868 she wrote the revolutionary version of the national anthem “La Borinqueña.” 120 Oye, Cuba y Puerto Rico son, vamo’ a ver, de un pájaro las dos alas. Cuba y Puerto Rico son, óyelo, de un pájaro las dos alas. El mismo sol nos alumbra y el mismo mar nos ampara. The lyrical invocation of a joined colonial past comes together musically through the beating of the drums that represent the vital sound of the African heart that drives the Caribbean today. But this utopian message of unity does not come without problematic gestures and constructions. An example of this is the song “Dominicana”, which can be translated as both Dominican Republic, and a female Dominican citizen. Although Calderón dedicates this number to “mi tierra hermana” (my sister island), neither the Dominican Republic nor its people have a central role; it just serves for Tego and his romantic interest as the destination for a sex-capade. This not only extends the exoticization of a breezy and easy Caribbean life as an oblivious tourist paradise, but also perpetuates the Puerto Rican lack of interest in the Dominican Republic’s history and culture. This problematic relationship not only has to do with the history of immigration between the two islands, but also the notion of superiority based on racial hierarchy, as Puerto Ricans consider themselves ‘whiter’ than their Dominican neighbors.84 In addition to mentioning other Caribbean nations, Calderón includes the Puerto Rican community living in New York in the song “cerca de mi barrio” (close to my neighborhood), where he lived as a young man. Through the use of Spanish, English, and Spanglish, the artist tries to create a bridge of solidarity between the island and the Diaspora, but it does not go deeper than a linguistic and stylistic gesture. Nonetheless, even though Calderón does

84 For more information on the relationship between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic see Jorge Duany and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel. For a literary reading of this problematic relationship between the Caribbean islands see the canonical short stories collection Encancaranublado, from Ana Lydia Vega, and Mayra Santos-Febres’ novel Sirena Selena vestida de pena.

121 not seem to have a strong transnational projection through his lyrics, there no doubt that his videos foment a visual narrative of solidarity through what I call Calderón’s aesthetic of recuperation.

CALDERÓN’S AESTHETIC OF RECUPERATION

As the critic Félix Jiménez has rightly observed, there is a preoccupation with visually recording elements and spaces associated with African heritage. While some of these are specific to Puerto Rico, others represent general ghetto images, and symbols of the santería religion practiced in Cuba and Puerto Rico, invoking a transnational visual narrative.85 An example of this is the video “Los maté” from his third collection The Underdog / El subestimado (2006). This song is conversing with a Mexican corrido titled “El preso número nueve,” that relates the story of a man who was sentenced to death after killing his wife and a friend because they were having an affair.86 The unapologetic masculine voice does not feel sorry for what he did, and he would do it again if he had to. Calderón’s version shares this tone but the lyrics are simpler as they refer to how the reggaeton singer has symbolically killed his competition: “Los maté/ Pero no fue mala fe, hice lo que tenía que hacer” (“Los maté”). Both songs share a patriarchal masculinity based on female possession and violent behavior, an imaginary that places male honor over the law. The video is shot in home interiors and poor neighborhood exteriors. Besides the singer, there are a few provocatively dressed dancers that frolic around sofas and play sexy for the lens, while their expensive clothing clashes with the humble

85 Santería is a syncretic religion of West African and Caribbean origins influenced by Catholicism. Similar to voodoo in the Dominican Republic, it is seen as a minority’s religion and portrayed as sorcery more than a legitimate set of values. The great irony, derived directly from racist social practices of exclusion, is that on both islands the voodoo and santería influences are present in the mainstream religions supported by the states. But it is their connection with a ‘black primitive’ past that does not allow them their recognition. 86 This song was made popular by the singer Chavela Vargas (1919-2012); more recently it has been interpreted by Joan Báez. 122 surroundings. But beyond the gorgeous women, a favorite backdrop for reggaeton artists, the video offers a baroque aesthetic of waste. Calderón surrounds himself by the “barrio” (the hood); he even dedicates his song to “arrabales extranjeros y locales”. Relics surround the poor houses, while the fences are filled with old dolls, religious images of the Sacred Heart and the Puerto Rican flag, among other things. Visually, Calderón is constructing liminality; he is bringing to life marginal spaces and objects left behind by society. Among the things he ‘collects’ in his video are several pictures of a black woman and a small child. What is he saying with this? Calderón seems to recuperate spaces, and people that are systematically thrown away by the official discourse. These people and things do not seem to belong anywhere else, due to their worn-out aspect, lack of value, or race. The singer collects them in this video and creates almost a museum, an altar of important but forgotten things. One of the last shots of the video presents Tego Calderón inside a house divided in the middle. The ‘right’ empty room has a fancy sofa and expensive décor, while the room on the left side shows Calderón surrounded by drying clothes, a bicycle, and hangers, among other objects. It seems like the singer has chosen “his side,” that of the forgotten things, the one that brings visibility to the material reality of the local and foreign margins. And yet, this visual message clashed with the shallow lyrics about masculine competition and sexual exchanges, perhaps getting lost to the listener. This idea of a recuperation of ‘forgotten images’ is also present in Calderón’s video “Chillin” (featuring Don Omar), from the same musical compilation, The Underdog/El subestimado (2006). The video takes place in Jamaica, a country stereotyped as the location of reggae music, marihuana use, and poverty. As Wayne Marshall and Raquel Z. Rivera discuss in the Introduction of their book Reggaeton, despite a lively discussion about the origins of reggaeton, the reality is “…that without 123 Jaiamican dancehall reggae there would be no reggaeton” (11). Thus, the Afro-Caribbean connection that guides Calderón’s artistic narrative comes to life through the images and lyrics of “Chillin”:

De la barriada Hernández a Montego Bay, buscando calma, livin' day by day. Takin' it easy, sanando el alma, matando to'a mis penas con ganja. (“Chillin”)

The song is about the realities of shared aspects of life; it does not matter in what part of the Caribbean or global barrio you are located. The images go along with this message, presenting Jamaicans performing everyday chores like fishing, washing clothes, and preparing food. Once again, the video shows the humble barrio, the trans-Caribbean marginal spaces, and their occupants’ everyday activities. In contrast to the previous video, real people inhabit this space. In addition to the black faces, another important visual element is the iconic Rastafarian: an old man with deadlocks and dense smoke coming out of his mouth. The Rastafari religion or movement originated in Jamaica in the 1930s as a response to Western culture in search of a direct connection with Africa. Thus, this image, although problematic due to its stereotypical overuse to refer to Jamaica as a ganja paradise, rescues a message of unity among black communities through its collective conception of empowerment. The lyrics are also inclusive, and call for patience and a ‘chillin’ attitude toward the hardships of life:

Boricuas chillin', chillin', chillin', chillin' Loíza chillin', el Salvador chillin', latinos chillin'… Cuba 'ta chillin', Jamaica chillin' […] Colombia chillin', Dominicana chillin'… (“Chillin”)

These lyrics show a more inclusive recuperation project, and although still taking from Puerto Rico and the iconic ‘barrio’ of Loíza, the singer includes other Caribbean-basin

124 nations as well as the Diaspora living in the United States. Of course, this effort is reinforced through the use of English and Spanish throughout the song. Without a doubt, Tego Calderón has revolutionized the reggaeton genre. His open “blackness,” black pride, and social critique of the marginalized creates a space where Afro-descendants can come together to celebrate themselves. Calderón is asking for a revision of the racial national discourse that still relies on the racial democracy myth. He is taking the “pueblo negro” out of a remote and crystallized history to insert it into a contemporary reality. With this idea he closes Loíza: “¡Boricua! Este es el Abayarde/ Trayéndola como es/ Metiéndole fuertemente pa’ despertar a mi gente!” (“Loíza”). The Abayarde is calling for unity among the thousands of Afro-Puerto Ricans that, like the fire ants, have to work tersely against a world that seem to reject and isolate them. In addition, although his project call for a pan-Afro-descendant unity based on self- acceptance and denunciation of social inequality, Calderón’s representation of other Caribbean and Latin American countries falls short. Neither the lyrics nor the videos complicate the images of the different places, repeating exoticized and tourist conceptions created by the same whitening and hegemonic discourse he is trying to break away from. His approach to gender is similarly uncomplicated, as it follows the macho- centric and patriarchal normative aesthetic of the genre that systematically objectifies and commodifies women. This chapter has traced some of the contemporary discourses of race and gender taking place in reggaeton and urban music. Like many other cultural manifestations, the genre is used as an anti-establishment tool by some performers while others have exploited its lighter and commercial angle. Born from a transnational collaboration of the urban lower classes and mainly Afro-descended communities, reggaeton music began as a marginal space of expression. With the passage of time and its international co-optation 125 by the global market, reggaeton has become part of an urban transnational soundtrack. Artist like Tego Calderón and Calle 13 have been able to become visible presences in the reggaeton world, both as renowned performers and anti-establishment ambassadors. Calderón’s Afro-recuperation project takes the African element of the Caribbean and Latin America from a “folkloric” element into today’s harsh reality. Through the incorporation of Afro-rhythms, and the embrace of blackness he goes against the grain of the Puerto Rican racial discourse that privileges a mestizaje guided by white features. Simultaneously, he calls attention to the marginalization and criminalization suffered by Afro-descendants, tracing a direct relation from slavery to incarceration. The duo Calle 13, through equating race with working-class and dark-skinned individuals, proposes a more inclusive pan-Latino project. Using the “passing” performance as an act of defiance that dethrones the whitening discourse, Pérez creates a “marginal” race where every liminal and racialized subject can enter his transnational community, a fierce hormiguero. Although both urban artists call for a racial revision of Puerto Rico’s racial categories and oppressive social stratification, they have not extended their critique toward the patriarchal imaginary. Although René Pérez has made commentaries on stage about the importance of accepting everyone’s sexual orientation, his lyrics have not yet explored this message. Furthermore, Calderón still promotes a strong masculine ideal through the construction of his musical character and the sexy female dancers presented in his videos. The embrace of blackness, through social racialization or phenotypical acceptance seems to be a common theme among the urban music I have analyzed, but the genre still depends upon patriarchal imaginaries in order for the singers to construct their public personas.

126 Chapter Four: Historical Revision in the work of Rita Indiana Hernández

Por un momento es delicioso saberse sola en este subdesarollo de mierda -Silvia, La Estrategia de Chochueca

It is a warm, sunny summer day in New York City. I have been in line for more than an hour at the Latin Alternative Music Conference, part of the yearly Summer Stage New York City concert series. The line keeps growing as groups of friends, couples, and entire families with small children and strollers constantly arrive. Once inside I find a nice spot in the shade; immediately, DJ music starts to erupt from the speakers and without any hesitation, the public begins to dance to the beat. The energy is palpable, and everyone is waiting for the main act, the Dominican singer-songwriter Rita Indiana Hernández. After a while she takes the stage, and countless Dominican flags begin to wave proudly in the air. She is wearing a fedora hat, a black t-shirt, and long black pants. From far away, she could easily be taken for a tall, skinny man. Her two male dancers sharply contrast with her manly look in short hot pants, tight sleeveless shirts, small ties, and long straightened hair. Rita Indiana Hernández (Santo Domingo, 1977) is a contemporary urban writer, performer and musician who in her work discusses social injustice, trans-Caribbean relations and racism, among other subjects. She has published short stories in two collections, Ramiantes (1998) and Ciencia Succión (2002), has co-written a theater script titled Puentes in collaboration with Henry Mercedes and Jorge Pineda, and a number of her poems have been published in magazines and websites throughout Latin America, Europe and the United States. She has published two novels, La estrategia de Chochueca

127 (2003), and Papi (2005), and her first music CD titled El juidero came out in 2010.87 Along with Junot Díaz, Aurora Arias, and Josefina Báez, she pertains to the novísimos generation, contemporary Dominican authors and artists who subvert the patriarchal and racist ideologies inherited by Leonidas Trujillo’s thirty years of dictatorship (1930-61). Furthermore, Hernández extends her critique using her own homosexuality and androgynous aesthetic to break with conventional gender roles and visual configurations to negotiate new Dominican subjectivities. Although she is not conceived of as a diasporic writer, in the strict sense of the word, her frequent travels through the Caribbean circuit are visible in her writing and artistic production, both as a recurrent theme, and through her transnational configuration of the Dominican Republic and the Spanish Caribbean. Taking into consideration the Dominican Republic’s history and the central role literature and music have played during the twentieth century in regards to identity formation, I explore the way in which Rita Indiana Hernández rejects the Rafael Trujillo dictatorial legacy, and its associated homogeneous identity discourse based on patriarchal and Eurocentric racial models. I show how the Dominican writer and musician creates a narrative strategy that systematically questions and deconstructs, empties, and finally replaces various of the central tropes imposed by Trujillo’s regime, and later reinforced by Joaquin Balaguer’s presidency (1966-1978).88 Hernández rejects the official patriarchal and heteronormative gender discourse, and the anti- black/anti-Haitian

87 It is rumored that Rita Indiana Hernández is collaborating with the Puerto Rican duo Calle 13, and that Hernández is writing a script for an upcoming film about the urban artists.

88 Joaquín Balaguer was part of Trujillo’s intelligentsia and one of the writers in charge of creating the Dominican Republic’s official ideological apparatus under the Generalísimo’s (The General’s) thirty-year regime. Concrete proof of his work can be found in his book: La realidad dominicana: semblanza de un país y de un régimen que fue re-escrito (1947), and later republished in 1983 as: La isla al revés: Haití y el destino dominicano; after almost four decades since its first publication, it remains an influential anti- Haitian and anti-black text. 128 construction of race as defined by Trujillo’s ideological apparatus, and proposes a rewriting of the Dominican history that produces a queer Afro-Dominican transnational urban subject. The following questions guide my analysis: What type of race and gender narratives are being constructed in Hernández’s work? How are they informed by the Dominican Republic’s history, and how is music used as an antiestablishment tool? Through the incorporation of transnational artistic configurations like the fusion of urban musical genres and the use of Spanglish, Rita Indiana Hernández includes the diaspora, a group normally alienated from the official national discourse, as part of her contemporary Dominican imaginary, taking into consideration those living on the island as well as those living ‘on the move.’89 The “transnational” concept I am dealing with is defined by Jorge Duany as “…the construction of dense social fields across national borders as a result of the circulation of people, ideas, practices, money, goods, and information” (32). In this respect, music’s intrinsic ability to travel globally, and its capacity to appeal to national customs, emotions and feelings, works perfectly in bringing together transnational communities. Furthermore, music can become an antiestablishment force deployed to question and transform national ideologies that have been strictly based on geographic unity and static location.90

89 Since the mass migrations from the Dominican Republic to the United States, the Caribbean and Europe after Trujillo’s death in 1961, Dominicans living outside the island, the dominicanos ausentes, have also suffered marginalization and rejection. But this geographic displacement and the creation of a transnational community that defies notions of nation based on spatial limits have forced the reconceptualization of the Dominican subject in global times. The term ‘on the move’ is used by the Puerto Rican critic Jorge Duany on his book titled: The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and the United States (2001), to refer to the Puerto Rican Diaspora. But here I use it as a general condition of the Spanish Caribbean, where the national experience has been historically shaped by constant movements and displacements. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel explores these connections in her book: Caribe Two Ways: Cultura de migración en el caribe insular hispánico (2003).

90 For more information about the relationship of music to the Diaspora see Musical Migrations: Transnationalism and Cultural Hibridity in Latino/a America (vol1) by Frances Aparicio and Cándida F. Jáquez. Also, for the specific relation of the Dominican Diaspora to its music see Caribe Two Ways: 129 In order to dethrone the dictator’s legacy, Hernández attacks the Trujillo City, which has been a two-fold symbol in recent Dominican history. On one hand, the Trujillo City refers to the physical space of the Dominican Republic that, after Hurricane San Zenón’s devastating visit on September 3, 1930, the newly-elected president Rafael Leonidas Trujillo reconstructed as his first monumental gesture to inscribe himself as a “ruler sent by God.” The new and modern city of Santo Domingo, renamed by the Dominican Congress Trujillo City, allowed the patriarch to affirm himself as the country’s savior. The critic Andrés L. Mateo interprets this messianic narrative that “…dividió la historia de la República Dominicana en dos partes, dio luz al nuevo padre de la república, y creó un prototipo nacional urbano diferente…” (116). With Trujillo’s arrival and simultaneously that of the Trujillo City, the Dominican Republic began a new historic chapter and a new definition of the Dominican subject.91 On the other hand, the Benefactor’s reconstruction was not limited to architecture, but was also consolidated as an ideological apparatus that penetrated every single aspect, public and private, of Dominican life.92 To educate the people under the official doctrines of patriarchy, Hispanic heritage and anti-Haitianism, the State created an aggressive public campaign to establish the new president as the country’s most important historical figure of all time. Assisted by a group of Dominican writers and ideologues like Peña Batlle, Joaquín Balaguer and Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi, among others, Trujillo assembled an

Cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico, especially chapters three and five. In addition read Dominican Migration: Transnational Perpectives, edited by Ernesto Sagás and Sintia E. Molina.

91 For a critical study of the importance of the reconstruction of the capital after the 1930’s hurricane, see Anderson.

92 A very popular pejorative nickname given to Trujillo was El Chivo (the Goat), used by the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa in his novel on the Dominican dictator La fiesta del Chivo (2000) 130 impressive ideological city that even today forms part of the country’s socio-political foundation and structure.93 The new Dominican identity followed three main pillars: patriarchy, an exacerbated fervor for the Hispanic heritage (expressed in religion and Eurocentric values), and the negation and rejection of African heritage (extended to the repudiation of anything Haitian-related, a sentiment known as antihaitianism).94 As studied by Stinchcomb, Néstor Rodríguez, and Torres-Saillant, among others, Trujillo’s intellectual team chose the novel Enriquillo: Leyenda Dominicana (1882), written after the Haitian occupation of the Domincan Republic (1822-44) by Manuel de Jesús Galván, as the national foundational fiction to cement those three main pillars into the national conscience. The text recounts the life of the heroic taíno Enriquillo, the father of the Republic, exclusively emphasizing the indigenous hero’s complete submission to Hispanic heritage and the Catholic tradition. In other words, Enriquillo is re-interpreted as a Hispanicized indigenous hero that leaves behind any trace of the African component. As Stinchcomb explains in her text The Development of Literary Blackness in the Dominican Republic, Galván is able to re-write history and erase the African existence, fictionalizing a nation of whites: “…he forged the redefinition of whiteness to mean not black, which begot the definition of Dominican as opposed to Haitian” (8). Trujillo’s reinforcement of the anti-black identity discourse reached its culmination with the 1937

93 Moya Pons, in his book The Dominican Republic: A National History, emphasizes the importance of literature, especially poetry, in the creation of this messianic Trujillo narrative (376), but it is important to clarify that although Trujillo had a group of loyal intellectuals, there was also a group of writers that opposed his regime. In the 1940s, important poets like Manuel del Cabral, Tomás Hernández Franco, and Aída Cartagena Portalatín, were writing anti-Trujillo poetry. For more information read Néstor Rodríguez’s books: Escrituras de desencuentro en la República Dominicana, and La isla y su envés: representaciones de lo nacional en el ensayo dominicano contemporáneo.

94 For a complete study of antihaitianism or the systematic rejection of everything Haitian as one of the main pillars of the Dominican Republic’s national identity discourse, see Sagás. 131 Massacre, also known as El Corte (the cutting), where thousands of Haitians were exterminated by Trujillo in order to “retake” the border and “clean” the east side of the island.95 The idea of a mixed Dominican race that excludes the African component continued to be reinforced throughout the twentieth century by literary texts and political leaders, keeping antihaitiansm alive. In addition to literature, music, –especially the merengue– played a central role in the consolidation of the Trujillo City and the Dominican subject. Critics like Frank Moya Pons, Debora Pacini-Hernández, Juan Otero-Garabís, and Paul Austerlitz, among others, have studied the centrality of this musical genre to promoting Trujillo’s ideals. Accordingly to Austerlitz: “El dictador dominicano, Rafael L. Trujillo, utilizó el merengue como medio de propaganda ...aprovechó el carácter épico del merengue y así se hizo componer merengues que alababan sus hazañas como si fueran cantares de gesta” (Merengue 103). For this reason, Rita Indiana Hernández’s use of literature and music to deface and dismantle Trujillo’s legacy is both important and symbolically empowering. After the Dictator’s death in 1961, the Trujillo City as a narrative and apparatus of identity remained almost untouched thanks to Joaquín Balaguer’s presidency (1966- 1978).96 Balaguer’s national discourse was a continuation of the anti-black identity discourse manifested in his canonical work La isla al revés: Haití y el destino dominicano (1983), where Haiti is still constructed as a very real threat to Dominican civilization and progress. As late as 1990 this idea was still central to the Dominican

95 As Moya Pons explains in his history book, after receiving significant international criticism Trujillo tried to down play the genocide by claiming it was a minor incident between Dominicans and Haitian living in the border, but the massacre was impossible to conceal easily. He ended up paying the Haitian government an absurdly small amount of money to compensate for the 1937 Massacre.

96 Joaquín Balaguer’s presidency after Leonidas Trujillo’s death is known by “the 12 years”, which ended when he lost the elections to Antonio Guzmán. For more information see Frank Moya Pons’ historical account, The Dominican Republic: a National History 132 identity, as expressed by Manuel Nuñez in his essay: “El ocaso de la nación dominicana” (1990, 2001), where he points out that the Dominicans have transcended the race question because “lo dominicano agrupa a todas las razas, y las trasciende. Porque es la correción de una mentalidad y de un modo de vida fraguado en varios siglos de convivencia entre negros, blancos y mulatos” (22). According to Manuel Nuñez’s highly problematic statement, the “real Dominican” is a perfect blend of all races, and consequently there is no necessity to identify with any of the ‘originary’ components, especially the African side which has disappeared through mestizaje.97 This systematic national rejection of blackness in a country clearly inhabited by Afro-descendants has created an ideological discrepancy that has allowed for the continuation of self-negation, and contradictory identity configurations.98 In the 1980s and 1990s a vocal resistance against Trujillo City emerged from writers in the Diaspora and the island who take a stand against the regime’s remains. More recently this systematical desanctification and rejection of Trujillo’s ideological legacy as an invariable and valid institution is found in contemporary writers like Aurora Arias and Rey Emanuel Andújar. In the case of Rita Indiana Hernández, the critique of Trujillo City is even more pungent, as she uses Santo Domingo as an ideological battlefield from which to articulate a transnational musical city uncontainable by geographical constrictions through a queer Afro-Dominican subject.

97 I will not systematically analyze here how problematic the idea of a “racial blend” as an identitary construction is, and how it only works to maintain the status quo and secure the economic benefits and political power of a selected group. As I have already discussed on the first chapter, the official racial discourse in the Dominican Republic is similar to the idea of “la gran familia puertorriqueña”.

98 In his work Introduction to Dominican Blackness Silvio Torres-Saillant emphasizes that Dominicans and Haitians have collaborated amicably during numerous occasions, but the relationship has been distorted by later Dominican leaders and writers. A similar historical erasure has happened with the participation of Dominicans of African descent throughout the country’s history. 133 The first way in which Rita Indiana Hernández collapses the Dominican capital in her novel La estrategia de Chochueca is by turning it into an asphyxiating labyrinth, confusing not for its endless possibilities but for the difficulty in finding the exit. The text takes a look inside Santo Domingo during the nineteen-nineties through the narrative voice of a young female named Silvia. As an observer and participant, she recounts the Dominican youth’s habits of partying, using drugs, and wandering around the city. In his article “Rita Indiana Hernández y la novísima narrativa dominicana” Néstor Rodríguez emphasizes how the act of traveling through the urban labyrinth points to the articulation of a new Dominican subjectivity:

El paseante articula un texto propio y siempre cambiante sobre la superficie física de la ciudad; por medio de ese desplazamiento que no cesa, el sujeto que atraviesa la topografía urbana afinca involuntariamente su persona discursiva. El personaje de Silvia, al igual que los demás personajes de la novela de Hernández, activa este proceso por medio del cual el paseante inscribe las señas de su identidad en el texto abierto de la urbe, en este caso una ciudad atravesada por los ecos autoritarios del pasado y el nuevo orden llamado superarlo. (110)

Although I agree with Rodríguez’s use of Michel De Certeau’s reading of walking through the city as an act of creation, and a gesture of resistance against urban impositions, I see music as a more central component in the formation of a contemporary Dominican identity, and walking as one of the alternatives to outsmart Chochueca, a pop- culture character that is said to wait around moribund people to appropriate their material possessions once they die, and the condition that Achille Mbembe has described as a “city of the-living-death,” because the Dominican subject is still subsumed under the dictatorship’s ruins. The novel revolves around a stolen speaker set, and the narrator’s effort to give it back without being caught by the authorities. The centrality of the speakers illustrates the importance of the musical component throughout the story and simultaneously works as a

134 tool to convey Hernandez’s social and political critique towards the Trujillo City status quo. Through the act of stealing from a wealthier acquaintance the characters are openly defying the establishment, the city’s “official” code, and protesting social stratification. Parallel to the illegal movement of the speakers through the city, the characters move around the marginal urban space, creating their own rules and alternative paths. The characters’ liminal positioning can thus be read as a direct commentary on the Dominican reality, caught between a failed political past and a sterile present that offers no ‘official’ viable future. Furthermore, the speakers’ robbery points to the precarious material reality of the collective, and their impossibility of participating in the global economy as ‘legal’ consumers. In other words, this initial displacement is an act of defiance of the establishment, and suggests that the urban contemporary discourses and subjectivities are being produced from the margins of the urban space. Parallel to the displacement of the characters to the peripheries, and with this the rejection of the official discourses, Hernández turns the city into a cemetery as part of the phase of destruction of Trujillo City. The novel opens and closes with death and wounded bodies, and the first glimpse of the city is a street covered by the entrails of a young man who has been run over by a beer truck. Silvia reflects on her experience after witnessing the accident: "Lo que escuché aquella noche quedó pululando en mis sueños. El cuerpo deformado del muerto y sus mil versiones se me aparecían…" (13, my emphasis). This deathly picture is what sets the tone for the rest of the story where the characters seem to be haunted by death. The whole city succumbs under the tragic atmosphere, and people walk around the city like “almas en pena” waiting to be rescued from Chochueca’s spell: “… un mundo aparatoso y terriblemente árido. Un espacio instalado sobre el movimiento, el infame cabalgar de la gente, gente sola que no va a ninguna parte, que coinciden meneando la cabeza con la gran sinfonía del desencanto y el escándalo” (32). The figure 135 of Chochueca, here taken as Trujillo and Balaguer’s sociological lingering presences, still slows down the Dominican people’s mobility with their doctrines and ideological echoes. Until they get rid of it, they won’t be able to escape the cemetery, the failed urban system in which they are buried. In order to evade the spatial confinement of Trujillo City, Silvia and her friends rely on drugs, alcohol, and sex to feel free and alive. Subconsciously the narrator seems to want the destruction of the city, as she dreams recurrently about its apocalyptic end:

La ciudad en llamas, es un sueño que siempre tengo, el de un fuego apocalíptico que se come a Santo Domingo…nadie me cree cuando les digo que arde, que los fuegos llegan a los techos… […] De todos modos se mueren todos cuando yo ya me he despertado… (47)

This post-Trujillato urban cemetery is visually and musically replicated in the music video Encendía (Enightened/ In flames).99 This video was produced in 2008, under the Miti Miti duo, an artistic collaboration between Hernández and the American painter and ceramicist Raina Mast.100 The action takes place in a cemetery, an image that brings to life the Chochueca city, and the metaphor of the urban space as the city of the living dead. Here as well, the action of the video is displaced from the city to the margins, and once both women enter the cemetery they can’t seem to get out of it, or at least, not alive. In the first sequence, they travel through the city streets and alleys full of graffiti on their way to the cemetery, where Raina makes a spiritual offering. The electo-gagá rhythm,

99 It is interesting to point out that this video was shot in Santurce, Puerto Rico. Although I will use the image of the cemetery to read Rita’s rejection of official Dominican discourses, the location of the shooting shows how fluid the Caribbean circuit is and how geography does not limit the different Caribbean nations. Furthermore, the possibility of one island to masquerade as another binds the two together through their colonial past and the legacy of their urban configurations.

100 Miti Miti began as an artistic collaboration between Rita Indiana Hernández and Rina Mast in 2006. For more information see the article Miti Miti lands in NY for Nacotheque (2008), by Miguel Figueroa (http://music.remezcla.com/2008/latin/miti-miti-rita-indiana-nacotheque/) After the duo split Hernández formed the band Rita Indiana y los Misterios, in which she is the songwriter and lead singer of the otherwise all-male ensemble. 136 another cultural manifestation of the Domincan Republic’s African heritage and the influence of Haitian costumes, accompanies the lyrics of the song. The tambora (bass drum) beat, played by Hernández, never stops, serving as the vital sign of the moribund city guided by the African heritage. Once inside the cemetery Raina Mast makes an appeal: “Voy por callejones buscando a lo oscuro buscando una vela que me guíe en lo oscuro. Una candelita que me aluce un poco, que me deje ver lo que no ven otros.”101 Shortly after the invocation finishes, Raina falls into a trance that illuminates her. She becomes the vessel of a message pronounced in English:

A celestial truth! The winds of light from outer space are not so outer anymore! They have told us the truth. It is here! It is here! The gates have been opened, the visitors have arrived the gates have been opened, and we have survived! (my emphasis).

There is no clear reference to who the visitors are, however the verses emphasize the city’s open gates and the singers’ own salvation. In addition, the use of English symbolically opens the national gates into a more global and transnational reality, rejecting the island’s geographical limitations. Once Raina Mast gets encendía, both in terms of openness to new imaginaries (enlightened), and literally is set ‘on fire,’ the ultimate destruction of the Trujillo City can take place, and the video’s final images present Hernández and Mast tied to a pole,

101 In their chapter “Transnational Music and Dance in Dominican New York”, Thomas van Buren and Leonardo Iván Domínguez explain how there was an: “…adoption of less commercial forms, such as ritual practice of Afro-Dominican religious songs, such as the folk-Catholic salves, or the spiritual practice of the maní trance possession ritual, and the Haitian-influenced gaga processional music and dance” (247), due to the large community of Dominicans living in New York City. This transnational influence is clearly present in Rita Hernández’s literary and musical work, thus reviving the Afro-Dominican tradition as well as the Diaspora and the Haitian cultural contributions throughout the years. For more information about the importance of music for the Dominican Republic’s history and identity process see: Merengue: Dominican Music and Dominican Identity from Paul Austerlitz and Bachata: a Social History of a Dominican Popular Music by Deborah Pacini Hernández.

137 consumed by flames. This sacrifice can serve as a double message; on one hand they are burning the Trujillo City to the ground, and on the other, extermination is presented as a gesture that opens a different kind of future impossible to conceive in the ‘cemetery-city’ once the trujillista ideology is left behind. The song reintroduces the idea of renovation, and the video visually reinterprets Silvia’s nightmares of the city in flames, by using fire as a necessary tool to destroy the cemetery-city and start over again. In his dissertation, Médar Serrata comments on how the rhetorical cycle of ‘destruction and renovation’ was commonly employed by the Trujillo intelligentsia to narrate the nation’s history. Here Hernández rescues the cyclical trujillista messianic narrative through the final images of the suicidal deaths, but this time there will be no reincarnation of Trujillo’s ideology, as his city and legacy have been burned to the ground for good. Visually this idea of closure and rejection of the Trujillo influence is supported by the female sacrifice that breaks with the patriarchal male’s messianic image. The urban cemetery is also present in Hernández’s second novel Papi, and the images dialogue with both La estrategia and the video Encendía. Papi is narrated as the non-stop monologue of a young girl, waiting for her dad (papi) to show up.102 The story is a hybrid text of a bildungsroman and a chaotic narration that uses a kitschy style

102 The novel Papi revolves around the patriarchal figure of the Dictator Leonidas Trujillo (1930-1961), and to some degree it also represents Hernández’ dead father. There is history of literature that refers to the Dominican dictator, but most of it has been written by male writers and approach the subject from a more historical perspective. One of the most famous fictional pieces that is an exception to this tendency is the novel titled En el tiempo de las mariposas (1994) written by the Dominican writer Julia Álvarez. This novel recounts the hard times suffered by the Dominican people through the Generalísimo dictatorship from the point of view of the Mirabal sisters. The cruel reality of the dictatorship enters their personal lives when Trujillo attends one of the daughter’s school plays and shortly after one of their friends disappears from school. The sisters learn that she has been taken away by the dictator as one of his various girlfriends. This first incident plants the seed for a long history of political struggle against the dictator, which will end with the incarceration and murder of several family members. These historical feminine voices serve as a testimony of political struggle and courage against Trujillo’s oppressive regime.

138 derived from a society of spectacle. In the words of Duchesne-Winter, the novel empties the meaning and iconic figure of the “papi” figure:

…narra el simulacro convulsivamente reiterativo de una relegere comunitaria aglutinante en torno a la imagen del padre que ha devenido imagen de la imagen, es decir, tautología flotante que anula la inminencia patriarcal del nomos, para emerger-sucumbir ahora como simplemente papi. (289)

Thus, Papi serves as nothing more than a symbol, as a linguistic representation of the absent patriarch that lives through the imaginary of his daughters and sons, the Dominican people. While waiting for Papi, and later living with him and his various girlfriends, the narrator gradually grows into a young adult and learns about Papi’s fraudulent life as the country’s patriarch. 103 He has left the capital unattended, and it has become a cemetery. One day the protagonist-narrator, already a young woman, climbs to the roof of a house to observe and describe the capital city: “Pero no todas las obras se terminan y por donde quiera hay medio apartamento, medio aeropuerto, media plaza comercial, la mitad de un puente con la dentadura varillosa colgando…” (96). Alongside the unfinished architecture a different type of sculpture is forged:

Y por donde quiera las esculturas espontáneas de uno que se ahogó al caer en la mezcla, los sesos embarrados de uno al que una carga con todo y soga y polea le cayó en la cabeza, por todas partes los cuerpos de obreros…[…] Y frente a cada nuevo proyecto un letrero que dice: “ESTO LO HIZO PAPI.” (96)

Similarly to La Estrategia de Chochueca, dead bodies, represented both in the unfinished buildings and the decomposing sculptures, adorn the city, but here the blame is put directly on papi. For the narrator, growing up entails waking up to the reality of Trujillo

103 In his article “Papi, la rofecía, espectáculo e interrupción en Rita Indiana Hernández,” Duchesne-Winter considers the novel from the perspective of spectacle and religion and its manifestation as a decadent religious cult for Trujillo. Duchesne points out that: “El espectáculo es la reconstrucción material de la ilusión religiosa. […] Pero el culto masivo y espectacular de papi…es una religión depurada y reducida ya por completo a religión del espectáculo” (291). 139 City and to the Benefactor’s legacy, a buried city and a moribund urban landscape under de-construction. After each novel outlines the destruction phase of the Trujillo City, a shift occurs and we move from the cemetery to a ‘narrative of national recuperation’ in both works. As I have already discussed, in Estrategia a lifeless body opens the text and a beaten up young man closes the story, thus tracing an unconventional path to recovery through the redemptive possibility of a moribund but not dead national body. In her book: Caribe Two Ways: Cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico, Yolanda Martínez- San Miguel analyzes the image of the city as a cemetery in the poetic compilation Viaje desde el agua (1981) of the Dominican-American writer Chiqui Vicioso. Martínez-San Miguel observes that “Desde ese espacio que se asemeja a un vertedero humano, o a un cementerio, es que se propone el surgimiento de un impulso que renueva la vida, que la convierte en un motivo para salir adelante” (300, my emphasis). Although Chiqui Vicioso’s city makes reference to the conditions of the diaspora living abroad, I agree with Martínez-San Miguel’s reading of the urban ruins as suggesting an impulse toward change and renovation in La estrategia de Chochueca and in Papi. Following a long night of partying, Silvia arrives home, when she receives a call from the hospital with bad news. One of her good friends, Franco, has been taken in after a brutal attack by one of his lovers. While entering the medical facility Silvia narrates the unpleasant experience:

La clínica es horrible. […] Son todos horribles estos templos a la enfermedad. […] En el pasillo el olor a ácido muriático es casi insoportable, las enfermeras de guardia hablan de ovnis y profecías de fin de siglo... oigo los gritos y los golpes de rabia en la madera de alguna puerta, un hombre dando voces de auxilio…. (70- 71)

140 At the end of La estrategia we are no longer in front of a dead body, but one with the possibility of healing and recuperation. This transition from a cemetery to a medical facility, although still a dreadful reality, represents the final rupture and displacement from the Trujillo City. In addition, the mention of the end of the world prophecies serves as a continuum with the video Encendía and its final images of total destruction, and the possibility of new beginnings. Similarly, Papi ends in a hospital, with the narrator’s mother very sick. After suffering papi’s death and later the Dominican people’s criticism of his patriarchy, the mother is diagnosed with two dangerous tumors. One is found in her ovaries and uterus, and the other one in her breast. The daughter refers to them as "las bolas de mami" (mom's balls). This symbolic gesture is significant because by getting rid of the mother’s tumors, papi himself is finally being killed, and his balls have reappeared transplanted as an illness into her body. The tumors are thus a metaphor of the national body still containing papi’s polluted ideology. In order for the mother, a symbol of the nation, to live, the balls need to be removed from her body, the national body. The location of the tumors is also important, as the ovaries, the uterus, and the breast are all parts of the reproductive system. The new generations cannot be conceived with papi’s presence still lingering and his feeding them with his ideology of "milk gone bad. " Hernández, in both of her novels, shows a Dominican Republic slowly getting on its feet. At the end of Papi, the mother is able to stand up to meet with her daughter after enduring two surgical interventions to remove the tumors: "Mami levantó la mano en la que llevaba su bolsa de orina y sangre para saludarme y me sonrió y yo le sonreí y entonces me dijo: ‘ya puedo ponerme de pie y hasta caminar despacito, pero todavía voy a necesitar tu ayuda para ir al baño’" (158). Now the possibility of a healthy future depends on the new generations, on those who are still feeling the effects of papi, but 141 who have the responsibility to bury him and keep going. With this I am not suggesting that Hernández’s message is one of optimism, since with this transition she is describing the difficult situation left by the Trujillo regime and Balaguer years in power, but she does signal the necessity to break with the past in order to move forward.

PATRIARCAL DECONSTRUCTION

As part of their deconstruction of Trujillo’s and later Balaguer’s ideological city, Hernández’s texts present a queer Dominican subject used to narrate the stories, and thus to embody a new Dominican liminal global subject that is not constrained by patriarchal and heteronormative discourses of gender. By narrating her stories through two bisexual or openly queer female characters, Hernández not only criticizes gender categories implemented by patriarchal practices, but also substitutes for Trujillo’s and later Balaguer’s official male-centric voices liminal female subjects, thus questioning, emptying and replacing their authority. My use of the term “queer” does not intend to define a fixed sexual identity, but follows Juana María Rodríguez’s concept of queerness as a practice of defiance: “Queer”…is a challenge of constructions of heteronormativity. It need not subsume the particularities of these other definitions of identity; instead it creates an opportunity to call into question the systems of categorization that served to define sexuality” (24). Furthermore, I take into consideration the term’s transnational implications discussed by Larry La Fountain–Stokes in his book Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora, where he points out that: “The word ‘queer’ itself carries a very specific charge of disruption; its use signifies the reappropriation of an insult and its transformation into something new and different” (xi). In addition to the historical struggle implied in the term “queer” and to its transnational reference, I want to stress La

142 Fountain-Stokes’ transformative reading of the word and how it points to resignification and change. Silvia from La estrategia, along with papi’s daughter in Papi, are individuals articulated through a practice of queerness. By this, I am referring not only to their sexual orientation, but also to their constant rejection of fixed categories through their daring behavior toward authority and their homoerotic relationships. The best example of the authority challenged by a queer female voice comes by challenging papi himself. In Spanish the word papi means “dad,” but it can also be translated as “daddy,” thus acquiring a sexual undertone in addition to its affective connotation. As a result of this semantic play of the title, the novel is surrounded by an ambiguity between admiration towards the “father of the nation,” due to a sexual spell cast by the uber-macho papi figure, and his post-mortem rejection. This initial obsessive admiration, symbolically shown by his daughter, represents Trujillo’s deep-rooted ideological apparatus that still haunts the Dominican collective. It is important to point out that the word papi is not capitalized throughout the novel, a gesture that supports my reading of Hernández’ effort to demystify Trujillo as an untouchable national symbol.104 Hernández constructs papi as an androgynous subject ever since his early childhood: “…casi nunca se le veía la cara sólo el pelo muy largo y en las que sí se le veía la cara parecía una niña con una trenza muy larga…” (17, my emphasis). As a child, the narrator is also described as a liminal subject with an undefined gender, thus equating father and daughter through queerness and in the lack of definition. As an adult, papi is

104 It is interesting to note that the word papi is capitalized on various ocassions, and one of them is on Chapter 9, where after his death, he enters the China’s body (the narrator’s aunt) to speak to his daughther: “Y allí está papi con su pelo largo y negro, con sus tetas como melones con sus chancletas de cuero de vaca, con su anillo de plata en el dedo meñique…y le digo “papi, como has cambiado” y papi…me ordena: peínate”” (112).

143 also described as a liminal subject through his fashion choices: “Porque papi tiene tanto dinero que tiene que usar una cartera de mujer porque en una cartera de hombre no le cabe y por eso anda siempre con una mujer para que le lleve la cartera, y tiene muchas carteras, a juego con las botas…” (26). On one hand Papi is presented as an uber-macho subject, while on the other hand, he is constructed as a queer and androgynous figure, image that deconstructs national heterosexual and patriarchal values supported by papi himself. This contradiction, once again, points to the falseness of fixed gender patterns and the need to perform gender in order to create a cohesive masculine category. Publicly the androgynous little boy grows up to become a super-macho man. His virility is so legendary that its fame lives on after his death: “Los hijos de papi son todos iguales… con uniformes de marinerito…a veces nacen ellos solos por generación espontánea en los vertederos de basura…” (89). These lines are clearly referring to the everlasting effect on the Dominican people of Trujillo’s doctrines through an impossible post-mortem masculinity that reproduces copies of their dead ancestor. The author ridicules the uber-macho model, the man who constructs himself through the art of seduction and his ability to impregnate women. The mockery goes even further when papi’s balls are sold as souvenirs after his death: “El kilómetro que separaba el asentamiento de la ciudad más próxima se había llenado de puestos de comida y gifts shops…donde se podían comprar por un módico precio llaveros del guevo de papi con el símbolo de Mercedes Benz tatuado…” (144, my emphasis). The objectification of papi’s genitals, where he carries his sperm, is deeply symbolic, because therein lies the future generation. Its branding with Mercedes Benz allows it to circulate as part of the economy of commodities; thus, its life span will depend upon the demand for the product from the

144 Dominican people as consumers, and how long they alow his masculinity to be proudly displayed.105 This symbolic castration provokes new questions regarding gender: how does the embodiment of the national body and Dominican masculinity change, and what does it represent? What does this act of violence mean? How does it dialogue with the violence suffered by all the women impregnated by him against their will? From papi’s death and the circulation of his commodified genitals, the story moves into a clinic, as we have seen, where Papi’s testicles are symbolically inserted in the narrator’s mother’s body as tumors: “A mami la bola le había crecido en silencio. Ella ni se dio cuenta. […] Pero todo era culpa de la pelota que le presionaba un nervio, adherida como estaba al útero y a los ovarios… […] Cuando mami estaba lista para salir de la clínica le encontraron otra bola, está del tamaño de una pelota de golf en una teta, un tumor benigno por supuesto” (155). This description of the balls/tumors goes back to the representation of the Dominican nation as an injured body going through a process of recuperation. There is a shift in the construction of the national body, now represented as a healing female body, and most importantly, as a mother who replaces papi (the father), and his dead body.106

105 The aspect of an emotion and psicological attachment to Papi as the nation’s father figure is even more explicit in Chapter 11 during his funeral service: “Para esto han de visualizarse primero los presentes, y las cintas azules como cordones umbilicales que unen al ataúd de los presentes” ( Papi 129). In addition, there is a certain aspect of magical realism when papi dies and his death is converted into a magical moment that resembles Mackandal’s death in the novel El reino de este mundo (1949) by the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier: “El cuerpo no cae. El cuerpo sale volando” (El reino 125).

106 The narrator is so affected by her mother’s illness that she writes a composition titled Las bolas de mi mama (My mom’s balls). This gesture is important because in a way she is re-writing history from a feminine perspective, and making it about a woman’s story. Also, she is reconfiguring her mom’s body by giving her balls, the inherited sick balls from her father. Thus the national collective is transformed into an androgynous body in the form of a woman with male genitalia.

Putting this into writing is significant because Trujillo had writers composing poems about him in order to assure his immortalization through books and cultural archives.

145 The body of Trujillo is also used to question the national racial discourse by exposing the Father of the Nation’s racial ambiguity. His daughter describes him as a caricature: “…cuando era niño era muy rubio, con el pelo casi blanco, casi albino, y muy lacio y muy largo…mientras se iba poniendo como una aceituna negra…Pero ahora lo tiene negro y tupido y corto, un mini afro” (17). The novel ridicules his physical transformation, and thus Hernández opens the possibility of critique of the Dominican Republic’s racial paradigm. In his early childhood the father of the nation exhibits his Hispanic and taíno roots through his fair skin and straight hair. The author exalts these traits to an extreme by making papi almost albino, even whiter than his European ancestors, thus embodying the nation’s foundational fiction based on Galván’s Enriquillo.107 But as he becomes older, other physical characteristic surface, and his pale skin is replaced by a darker complexion, and an afro hairdo. At this point it is impossible to ignore papi’s Afro roots, visibly showing on top of his head. Hernanádez consciously plays with the word roots and its double connotation of both roots, as historical heritage, and the hair roots that in Dominican racial ideology reveal the real race of a person. 108 Here, the body takes center stage, serving as the arena where identitary discourses are exposed and questioned. Hair is central to discussions of racial configurations in the Spanish Caribbean as it can either disguise or give away a person’s racial ancestry. In her book Black behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops, Ginetta E. B. Candelario states that: “For Dominicans, hair is the principle bodily signifier of race, followed by facial features, skin color and, last, ancestry” (223). Following this

107 Rafael wanted to mask his African linage, and his Haitian grandmother from his mother’s side so badly that throughout his rule he “wore pancake make-up to lighten his dark complexion” (Sellers 87).

108 For additinoal critical studies about hair and its social signification in the Spanish Caribbean see the work of Carmen L. Montañez, ISar P Godreau and Mayra Santos-Febres. 146 Dominican classificatory order, is the novel makes a very bold move in explicitly giving an afro to the Father of the Nation, especially when he has been said to have fathered most of the children been born on the island. Thus, metaphorically, all Dominicans share papi’s same roots, and ancestry. Building out from the questioning of Dominican people’s “real” roots Hernández continues to prove that the homogenizing racial ideology does not translate into everyday reality, and that social hierarchy is directly associated with skin color as well as hair texture: “Y papi se desmonta y deja el carro abierto para que los niños, los jóvenes y los ancianos (casi todos negros y flacos y descalzos) puedan subirse…Y, a veces, papi hasta les da la llave…pero son tan brutos que hacen tres piruetas y luego se estrellan…” (15, my emphasis). All through the text, dark-skinned and black individuals are portrayed as ignorant and uncivilized, and they primarily pertain to the lower classes and have service jobs. The narrator describes the black babysitters she has had through the years using their skin color as a detrimental characteristic: “Casi siempre al final mami las bota. Por ladronas, asquerosas, vagas, sinvergüenzas, entrometías, por prietas, por jabás…” (45). According to the narrator, her mother fires these women for their incompetence, but also for their skin color. In short, we are shown a different side of the Dominican ideology as a nation “above color” described by Torres-Saillant. In this respect, the novel’s use of a child as the narrator allows the character to say things that adults would never vocalize, because for the child, there is no need for “political correctness”. What she learns from the adults is what she repeats, thus providing an unfiltered picture of everyday racial dynamics. In La estrategia de Chochueca the racial landscape is extended to the relationship between Haitians and Dominicans. The neighbors from the west are the “arms” and “working force” of the city, but they are social pariahs. One day, while Silvia and her 147 friends are hanging out in the street, she mentions that she prefers to buy whatever the Haitians are selling to make them stop staring at her:

Luego el haitiano en la calle que viene a ofrecerle una estatuica de madera, que mejor comprársela que aguantar esa mirada de niño que odia y que le llena a uno como de miedos el pecho, no porque un vecino me dijera que los haitianos se comían a los niños, pues eso lo superé después de que los vi construir la mitad de la ciudad con sus brazos. (19)

This exchange shows how complicated the relationship between Dominicans and Haitians still is in the late twentieth century. Even after refuting the silly urban legend that Haitians eat kids and acknowledging their contributions in literally constructing the city, Silvia still feels guilty towards the Haitian man. As readers we believe that this man is staring at her with hate, but this interpretation might just be a reflection of the guilt she feels over the historical socio-political relationship with Haiti. But even after showing both guilt and gratitude towards the vendor, Silvia still displays a tone of superiority when she refers to the man as a little boy, thus falling back into the superior versus inferior official dichotomy. The inability to confront and openly question the anti-Haitian discourse reappears in one of the most significant passages of the novel, the only direct reference to the 1937 Haitian Massacre:

Recuerdo a la abuela que contaba lo que le habían hecho a una sirvienta haitiana durante la matanza. Mi abuela estaba sola en casa con la chica que tenía unos meses de embarazo y al oír los gritos en creol se había metido debajo del fregadero, pero cuando la gente esa llegó, "como con el diablo adentro, la sacaron de allí...". (19-20) Silvia's grandmother had been a live witness to the criminal acts committed against her maid, but she did not intervene, choosing to become an accomplice through her inaction. The shame felt by her grandmother is passed on to Silvia, who consciously limits her daily interactions with Haitians. Neither one of them seems to possess the necessary tools 148 to face this historical tragedy, opting to deal with it superficially. Through this passage Hernández seems to suggest that through the killing of the pregnant Haitian girl, the Dominicans metaphorically killed their own future, producing a sterile generation that is still paying for the socio-political mistakes of their parents and grandparents.

FROM A LOCAL TO A GLOBAL CONFIGURATION OF RACE

Hernández’s works translate the conversation about racial politics beyond the local and trans-Caribbean perspective to a larger global arena with the introduction of a white tourist character in Estrategia. As a result, the inter-Caribbean confrontations lose importance and the racial categories change when both Dominicans and Haitians are equally racialized through the tourism industry. This broader scope works like a Matryoshka doll, where the transnational and more global racial articulations contain and redefine the local ideology. With each additional layer, the previous one becomes invisible to the naked eye, and the Dominican Republic’s racial configuration flows into a bigger arena, where bodies and subjects are turned into bronzed commodities stripped of their nationalities. The tourist’s objectifying and racializing gaze while walking through the capital buying cigars and souvenirs makes both Dominicans and Haitians black Caribbean subjects. Not only are the national racial categories completely erased from the Anglo- Saxon racial imaginary but they all, Dominicans and Haitians, become part of the same exotic landscape. This is a rearticulation of what Puerto Rican author Ana Lydia Vega points out in her canonical short story "Encancaranublado" (1983), where a Haitian, a Dominican and a Cuban fighting about national disputes, become indistinguishable Caribbean racialized subjects under the scrutinizing gaze of the North American soldier.

As Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel points out, this fictional story is an allegory of the

149 political history of the Caribbean Islands, and how once the American component enters the scene, they all become a homogenous Caribbean subject (126-130). Silvia, who openly despises the "marshmallow"-colored tourists, knows that their presence introduces them into the global economy as merchandise, as commodities for sale: “…verlos allí de pie ante un montón de objetos made in Dominican Republic era verlos ante nosotoros…[…] A lo mejor nos veían como muñecos de caoba que se ponen en un estante o sobre la chimenea…el cuarto lleno de recuerditos de Santo Domingo y nada más” (19). There is no difference between the bronze statue the tourists purchase as souvenirs and what Silvia and her friends represent from the tourists’ point of view. Their dark bodies enter the global market of desire and exoticization. In his book Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic, Mark Padilla reads the exoticization of the Caribbean as the lost paradise and by extension the Caribbean bronzed body as a global commodification. Padilla traces a continuum from the slave economy of the region to the contemporary exploitation of the sex tourism industry, where the Caribbean subject is inserted into European and American global economies as bodies of pleasure. Some of Silvia’s friends maintain long-distance relationship with tourists, and their value has to do with the dark shade of their skin: “Al llegar a la oficina de correos, que estaba llena de tipos de esos amigos tuyos que gracias a un mayor grado de melanina y culipandeo recibían regalos de mujeres de todas partes del mundo…” (22, my emphasis). Parallel to the hand-made bronze statues, a long-distance black Dominican lover can be an interesting conversational piece. Through the voice of Silvia, Hernández criticizes and ridicules the tourists by portraying then as clumsy and ignorant individuals: “Los turistas salían de debajo de las piedras e invadían la zona con sus cuerpos de marshmallow” (57). While it may appear that there is not much difference between the protagonists’ walking through the city and 150 the walking around of the tourists, Silvia sees a fundamental difference. While the tourist’s walks respond to the traveling made possible by global technology and socioeconomic power, the Dominican teenagers walk aimlessly inside their city as a result of this same global capitalism, in which they are not allowed to participate as active agents rather serving as no more than a background landscape. Thus, there is a clear relationship between race and ethnicity, and the ability to travel around the world as a hobby: “Aunque algunos amigos nuestros tuvieran las mismas cualidades de anfibio de los turistas (la piel transparentosa y cruzada de verdes y azules) no andaban el mundo en tour, como un circo de cucarachas…en este tercer mundo…¿Quéh bonitou nou?” (57- 58). But Hernández defies the tourist gaze by rejecting the whitening discourse. In La estrategia, Silvia looks like a "gringa," a mark of shame, especially when she is seen in public with Salim, one of her best friends, and everyone thinks she is an American tourist: “…la gente se volteaba a mirar a la blanquita y al negro, yo subía la voz como un carro de bomberos, con un acento capitaleño que dejaba flaco al de cualquier tigre de Villas Agrícolas, y mi propio español vociferado me hacía una pared muy alta...” (21-22). Silvia makes use of language and an exaggeration of her native accent from the Capital, to show everyone that she is Dominican, and to distance herself from the white tourist who has come to the Caribbean looking for dark-skinned men.

ALTERNATE URBANITY: FROM THE TRUJILLO CITY TO THE MUSICAL CITY

Music is central to Hernández deconstruction project, because once she questions and destroys the Trujillo City, she replaces it with a different urban space, a musical city. This section will proceed in two parts: in the first section I primary focus on the use of music within Hernández’ novels, and on one specific video. I argue that music serves a

151 double purpose. On one hand it represents an alternative to the physical confinement of Santo Domingo, and on the other hand, the textual incorporation of a transnational soundtrack breaks with Trujillo’s use of music to compose a unified national narrative. The second section of my musical analysis will consider Hernández’ CD El juidero as a text that brings together all the narrative strategies used by the artist in her novels in order to rewrite the Dominican history in an effort to eject Trujillo from the contemporary national imaginary. As I have previously stated, music has been a central component in the Dominican Republic’s identitary discourse since Trujillo incorporated the merengue genre as the state’s official sound. In Estrategia, Hernández breaks with this tradition by creating a new city full of global rhythms and international noises against the old echoes and sounds. The sounds from the past and all their political, historical and social implications are constantly challenged by the "new rhythms" produced in part by the new generation that does not respond anymore to the ideologies of the Trujillo Era. I suggest that through the use of a collage of global music in her novels, Hernández’s characters demonstrate what Torres-Saillant and Hernández refer to as a ‘transnational state of mind’ when describing the experience of the Dominican Diaspora in the United States:

[Dominicans] now can access a larger mental habitat within which to configure their human identity. Their ampler sphere of experience entails an ability to harmonize English with Spanish, snowstorms with tropical rains and merengue with rock, or rap…it also entails the possibility of creating alternative models by rearranging existing ones. (Torres-Saillant and Hernández 1998; 204, my emphasis) The creation of new rhythms and musical genres reflects the new generation’s realities and experiences, as they have access to a global cultural capital.109 Although La

109 On a more autobiographical level, this collage of music also represents the author’s own musical experience as a diasporic individual through the Caribbean as well as the United States. In addition, it reflects the way global cultural products are more accessible through the Internet and new technology. 152 estrategia does not deal with the diasporic experience, I apply this harmonizing strategy to describe the way in which Hernández’s textual characters collapse different musical genres to survive the urban cemetery still governed by the ‘status quo,’ and create an alternate map and identity. For the nineties generation presented in the text, music does not solely respond to their country’s history and cultural memory, but also creates a space that eliminates geographical frontiers and national boundaries, forging a globalized identity that brings together transnational communities. A textual example of this phenomenon occurs in La estrategia when Silvia and her friends are asked to leave a bar because they have been listening to foreign music: "...el dueño nos sacó a todos y que "de ahora en adelante son y salsa es lo que se va a oír, y se acabó ese "ruido" de la porra..." (17-18, my emphasis). What is considered "noise" for the older generations is what the young crowd uses to escape the worn-out songs and rhythms of a past that does not speak to their own reality. The novel presents a wide variety of musical references, from Fausto Rey's merengue, Cuban nueva trova, to Talking Heads and Bjork: "...con su pop de burbujotas ready para el 2015" (44). Music works as an alternative to the reality the characters are stuck with, as an intoxicating tool that allows them to escape the island and become part of the global conversation of rhythms and lyrics. The lyrics integrated into the narration suggest that Hernández's urban subject is in constant contact with the "outside" world through music. In addition, the different musical genres heard by the Dominican youth, work to integrate them into a transnational imaginary, while the traditional urban noises, like the salsa and the son, pull them back into their Caribbean reality. The use of music to challenge the national pillars and the configuration of a Dominican subject based on Trujillo’s image and ideology goes even further in Hernández’s CD El juidero (2010). The songs include themes about the dictatorship and 153 its violence, Dominican identity, the migratory experience, and social injustice. Rhythmically the compilation represents the fusion of fast merengue, mambo, salsa, and ballads, among others. This collage of rhythms, a technique already present in Hernandez’ written texts, is important because as Hernández comments in an interview for the digital journal 80 grados: “el merengue de calle y el mambo violento se instalaron en la República Dominicana como intento de ruptura con el acartonamiento acomplejado que dejó el trujillismo y el balaguerato.” Furthermore, the rhythmical fusion represents the transnational experience of the artist. As a movable artefact it allows the diasporic subject to maintain a close relationship with his nation of origin, while at the same time incorporating new cultural tendencies into the host country’s imaginary. Even though the official Dominican discourse has systematically rejected the incorporation of the Diaspora community as part of the national collective, the history of the Dominican Republic can be traced as a series of migratory moves and returns. In his book El retorno de las yolas: ensayos sobre diáspora, democracia y dominicanidad, Silvio Torres-Saillant stresses the importance of the Dominican exodus from the first decades of the colony (during the second half of the sixteenth century), until the Republican Period (in the mid-nineteenth century) as part of the country’s history. For the ruling class, these first migratory waves have been seen as great national losses because most of the émigrés pertained to the upper ‘white’ class. On the contrary, the exodus of the second half of the twentieth century were seen as a relief because they were composed of poor Afro-Dominicans, seen as national excess (31-34). Hernández’s music rescues migration as a historical axis. The author and singer sees in what Torres-Saillant defines as “el retorno de las yolas” (the return of the yolas, small boats used by the migrants to travel the sea) the “potencial para ayudar a modificar los parámetros

154 conceptuales vigentes en el discurso sobre la dominicanidad” (38) from those leaving the island. Hernández’s music re-writes contemporary Dominican history to propose a new queer, transnational Afro-Dominican subject, resignifying and transforming contemporary Dominican identity discourses. In order to prove this queer articulation I will analyze four songs and their respective videos as revisions of specific moments of Dominican history. The song “Da Pa Lo Do” examines the national foundational myth based on the antihaitian sentiment. The title, the colloquial articulation of the phrase formally pronounced da para los dos (it is enough for the two of us), captures the colloquial language of the Spanish Caribbean, giving it a playful rhythm through the shortened syllables. Despite the title’s light tone, the song is anything but a game, as it presents a recriminatory vision of the ideological and physical separation between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Furthermore, the title “Da Pa Lo Do” contains the word palo in the middle, a direct reference to amusical genre of African descent, the Dominican palos. 110 Visually and symbolically, the syllables “Pa Lo,” simultaneously divide and unite the two syllables on either side, which I read as a graphic representation of the two countries. On one hand, the palos genre stresses the colonial past, and the African heritage that brings the Dominicans and the Haitians together through shared cultural practices, and on the other hand it works as the element that perpetuates the Dominican discourse of separation through the negation of blackness:

Habían dos hermanitos compartiendo un pedacito

110 Literally the word “palo” means stick or tree trunk, but it also refers to a musical instrument. The “palo” drum come in different sizes t produce various sounds, and are mostly used in religious festivities. These different translations are fundamental to understanding Hernández message.

155 porque eran muy pobrecito’ y no tenían ni mamá Ellos se preguntaban ¿Por qué si somos dos gente nos hacen comernos uno nada más? (“Da Pa Lo Do”)

Through the kids’ quarrel Hernández invokes the history of violence and separation between the two fraternal countries.111 The double tension introduced by the title and explained in the previous verses is reproduced literally through the images of the music video. The opening shot captures an ample field divided by a huge tree whose trunk or palo divides the space equitably in two halves, a representation of the two countries. But this palo that serves as a visual marker is the element that also unites them, as both sides share its roots. The armed confrontations between the nations guide the visual story with two black soldiers who run across the field turned into a battlefield. The only thing that distinguishes the soldiers from one another is their uniforms, symbols of the national discourses that turn them into rivals. Challenging the patriarchal historical voices of the Dominican intellectuals and rulers that maintained the ideological platform that supports the separation, Hernández assumes the father’s (papi’s) voice in the song to scold the two brothers:

Agárrense de ahí que no hay ma' na' Pónganse a juga' o la correa voy a bucá' Uno por alante y el otro por detrás Dios me los mandó junticos pero ustedes na' de na.' (“Da Pa Lo Do”)

Rita Indiana performs a lyrical act of transvestism when she assumes the patriarcal voice and the authoritarian figure associated with Trujillo and Balaguer, dislocating the

111 The Haitian invasion and occupation (1821-1844) produced an identity discourse that “definió los contornos de una nación castiza, hispanófila y católica que se oponía a la supuesta ‘barbarie’ representada por el Estado haitiano” (Rodríguez, La isla 4). As I have already discussed, this discourse was later revived and reinforced by Trujillo, and continued by Balaguer. For a complete study of the Haitian occupation, and the various attempts to recuperate the east side of the island after the Dominican Republic’s independence in 1844, see Moya Pons. 156 historical authority based on patriarchy. The verses expose the use of physical violence of both regimes when she offers to beat the two brothers if they don’t behave. It is important to point out the implicit mocking in this gesture since the commanders in chief used violence to maintain the separation between the two countries, while here they will be punished if there do not reconcile. With this reversal, Hernández demystifies the official patriarchal discourse, and uncovers the childish and irrational arguments behind the anti- Haitian foundational myth. Furthermore, in the video, Hernández pronounces these words dressed as a black virgin. The use of the “blackface” opens various critical levels. On one hand, it recuperates the Spanish Caribbean tradition of negritos as television and theatre popular characters that reproduce the whitening dynamics through the reiteration of a performativity “propiamente negra” (Lane 15; Rivero 27), while on the other hand, this masking works as to mock the Dominican racial discourse that perceives the national body as “white,” represented by Hernández’s fair skin, while her painted face gives away her African ancestry. The discrepancy between the Afro-Dominican body and the national discourse produces an absurd image of the Dominican subject. The father’s voice reminds the children that they both share the same racial heritage:

Una puerta para do' comején […] Un mal de sudor para to' esto’ peces Alé, alé, alé, alé. Vinimos todos en el mismo bote Pujé, pujé, pujé, pujé Siéntelo, el abrazo del mismo abuelo […] (“Da Pa Lo Do,” my emphasis) As sons and daughters of the colonial crash they are all inevitably grandchildren of the sweat, work and exploitation of the African slaves. The word play produced with the word ‘mal’ can be read as “mar de sudor” (sea of seat) or “mal de sudor” (illness, 157 misfortune of sweat) due to the Spanish Caribbean tendency of pronouncing the final “r” as “l.” This linguistic duality opens two possible readings: on one hand the verse “mal de supor para to’ esto’ peces” recuperates the Caribbean’s tragic and violent birth as a combined result of conquest, colonization, and slavery. On the other hand, replacing the word “mal” with “mar” stresses the geographical connection they share as part of the same island. The “mar” (sea) not only contains them but as Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Frances Aparicio, and Jorge Duany, among others, have studied, it unites them with the rest of the Caribbean. This connection defines the brothers as transnational subjects inhabiting interstitial spaces between their country of origin, and the country they live in. Conscious of the discrimination against the Dominican communities abroad, and taking advantage of the lyrical transvestism of the narrative voice, Hernández confronts the two brothers with the Caribbean migratory reality: “Si es que ellos ‘tan bien aquí/aunque tú seas de ahí / ¿tú no tienes doce tíos en otro país?...”. The singer reminds her compatriots that in addition to sharing the African heritage with their Haitian brothers and sisters, they inhabit what Mary Louise Pratt refers to as a “contact zone” to describe the common space where people of different nationalities establish relationships that often involve conflict and unequal conditions (6). The song ends with a call for reconciliation and, like any other children’s fable, with a didactic message:

A besar el palco en el batey Concepción donde los dos hermanitos entonan esta canción Da pa' lo' do' […] Dos ojos, dos pies, dos manos Es que somo’ hermanos (x5) Da pa' lo' do' […] (“Da Pa Lo Do”) Once again Hernández reiterates the Afro-Dominican legacy with the mention of the batey, a space linked to sugar cane production. In this way, this first historical coordinate 158 articulates a new Dominican subject as a product of the colonial African exodus. After the two brothers come to the realization that they are part of the same corporality and geography, at both the literal and symbolic levels, they are ready to face their destinies together because “da pa’ lo do” (it is enough for the both of them). Visually the reconciliation takes place once the two soldiers decide to get rid of their uniforms, symbols of their ideological differences, and are able to acknowledge that their black bodies are identical images of each other. This moment undoes the racial frontier and positions them in a pre-national state that symbolically allows them to reconcile. Once the importance of the diasporic movement and its African heritage is established, Hernández transports the Dominican subject to the violent reality of the twentieth century. From the questioning and infantilization of the foundational myth we go to a world saturated with political corruption musically articulated through the rapid mambo violento song, “El juidero.”112 Although in her article about the song titled “No podía presentar algo wimpy, ¡eso es violencia” Hernández associates this song with the Joaquín Balaguer’s presidency, I analyze the lyrics and the video images as a collapse of a generalized dictatorship narrative based on violence, repression, and state corruption from both Trujillo and Balaguer’s regimes that forces the main character to escape the country:

La canilla preparada pa’ juir La pantalla en treinta mil Me tragué la gasolina con un ambenil entero Sin abrir la boca ‘toy metiendo

112 The mambo is the urban-style modern merengue interpreted by artists like Omega el Fuerte, Julián y Oro Duro, and Tito Swing, among others. 159 miedo. (“El juidero”)

The lack of transparency concerning the rapid escape alludes to the repressive politics, and the impossibility to talk openly during both regimes. This discursive ambiguity reinforces the reading of the line “meter miedo” (to scare someone) without “abrir la boca,” having to pronounce a single word, a phrase that not only alludes to the state’s censorship but that also refers to the non-conventional communication practices developed by the citizenship and other subversive groups in order to evade the system. The desperation to escape the Dominican Republic is musically reinforced by the accelerated rhythm that symbolically breaks with the “official sound” of the whitened merengue cibaeño.113 In addition, the repetition of the chorus functions as a premonitory alarm that announces the collective escape: “Éxodo / voy pa’ Puelto Rico / Éxodo / Má’ lejo’ que Egipto.” The lyrical voice assumes a collective identity and the young Dominican character from the previous song “Da Pa Lo Do” transmutes into this already- grown Dominican body that takes to movement to escape the country’s violence. This exodus symbolically captures the different Dominican migratory waves that resulted from the political and economic repression of the second half of the twentieth century. Thus, in this second historical revision, Dominican identity is articulated as “in transit,” fluid, and transnational. The musical video of “El juidero” adds complexity to the narrative through the inclusion of visual components. Using the African American blaxploitation aesthetics from the nineties seventies the Puerto Rican director Noelia Quintero-Herencia tells the story of a group of criminals that traffic arms in the Dominican Republic. Once again, the video plays with the lack of transparency, and the spectator is never sure if the characters

113 The merengue ciabaeño is the traditional, accordion-based merengue, which Trujillo modified in order to attack the upper class. For a detailed explanation on how Trujillo used the different variations see Sellers and Austerlitz. 160 are part of a leftist revolutionary group, or they are an artistic interpretation of La Banda Colorá (The Red Group), an anticommunist group hired by Balaguer during his third presidency (1966-1978) to repress the Dominican left.114 Taking into consideration the song’s lyrics, and the story illustrated by the video images I answer the following questions: how is the Dominican visually constructed, and how is the traditional ideal of identity challenged by the reconstruction of this historical moment? The character of the hit woman, played by Hernández, figures as a symbolic affront against the patriarchal conceptions of the Trujilla Era perpetuated by Balaguer’s ruling. Her androgynous appearance- short hair and a man’s suit- dialogues with the image of the drag king, defined by Pendleton-Jimenez as the act of temporarily dressing as a man in order to create a liminal space that uncovers the falsehood of gender categories (260). The violent environment filled with guns also takes part in Hernández’ masculinization, and represents a symbolic entrance into the violent space of authoritarian regimes. Departing from the drag king’s body as a space of questioning, the hit woman becomes the liminal stage from where heteronormativity is supplanted by a queer Dominican subjectivity as a practice of resistance. Furthermore, her red suit literally evokes the Banda Colorá, and all the Dominican and Haitian blood spilled during Trujillo’s and Balaguer’s regimes. Movement as a tool to work against the national imaginary is also present in the choreographed dance, which presents the exodus as a symbolic liberation of the national

114 The idea of a group of thugs terrorizing the population is not new in the Dominican Republic’s history. In his book Sellers comments that: “A cornerstone of Trujillo’s repressive tactics was La 42, a group of terrorists that he had formed during his presidential campaign. La 42’s sole purpose was to coerce the Dominican population with violence and terror” (90). Later Trujillo created the SIM on 1957: “[…] an intricate spy network, the Servicio de Inteligensia Militar (Miliary Intelligence Service) […]” (90). About the Banda Sellers comments that: “Over 3000 Dominicans died in terrorist acts between 1966 and 1974. Balaguer claimed he had nothing to do with La Banda and that the government had attempted to control de group without success” (119).

161 body. As I mentioned before, merengue was a population tool of control, and dancing to merengue music became an extension of the state’s control upon the body. On the contrary, in “El juidero” dancing rejects the official narrative in order to become a liberating performance. Dalila Rodríguez Saavaedra comments that the choreography of the video is based on an interpretation of a santería ceremony, as the “traducción de un baile de Yemayá –deidad protectora asociada con el mar y la maternidad […][Hay] una mezcla de tai chi, disciplinas contemporáneas y de la tradición yoruba que simboliza, entre otras cosas el mar que protege a los miles de yoleros que cruzan el Caribe” (“No podía”). Therefore, the choreography of the Dominican dancer Vicente Santos articulates an Africanized maternal space that questions and rejects the violent patriarchal masculinity while protects those who escape. Through this new resignified dance, the body is transformed into a rebellious tool to demystify the authoritarian regimes. It is able to free itself from that historical moment, and escapes to Puerto Rico under the protection of an Afro-Dominican deity. “Pásame a bucá” (Come and pick me up) pertains to the third phase of Hernández’ historical re-writing. This song is a modern version of Cinderella, and encapsulates all the different Dominican migratory waves to Puerto Rico that began in the decade of the sixties, after Trujillo’s assassination (1961), and continues today as an effect of the ups and downs of the Dominican economy. According to Yolanda Martínez- San Miguel there have been three different migratory waves after Trujillo’s assassination in 1961. The first one took place in the 1960s, and was composed of the professional and intellectual class. The second wave occurred from 1970-1982 and primarily consisted of skilled workers looking for better opportunities. The last one began in 1983 as a result of Joaquín Balaguer’s economic crisis that brought thousands of working class Dominicans (151-153). Once in Puerto Rico, the Dominican diaspora is systematically marginalized 162 by the host community due to their illegal status, social class, and evident blackness. This rejection based on class and racial prejudices places Dominicans on the periphery of the socio-racial Puerto Rican imaginary (Duany, Between the Nation and the Diaspora 461). Contrary to the fast beat of “El juidero,” the theme of “Pásame a bucá” starts slowly, recalling the use of the bolero as a more intimate musical genre used to narrate personal experiences115:

yo vine para acá a levantar los chavos y crucé ese canal completamente a nado pero aquí hay que sudar pa’ levantar centavos y ‘toy limpiando una casa allá en Guaynabo. (“Pásame a bucá”)

These lines refer to the harsh labor conditions of the Dominican domestic workers in Puerto Rico. The similarities with the Cinderella story are evident when the character describes the family she works for:

él es veterano, le falta un pie ella es publicista, como lo ves tienen cuatro hija, cual de todita má’ fea, la primera mete un ojo, la otra vive con diarrea la tercera tiene un nombre yo creo que es Anacaona y la cuarta tiene otro que no es de persona es Chiry, o Chily, o Chary o Kany. (“Pásame a bucá”)

115 The bolero has been central to the Latin American and Caribbean identity. As Valerio Olguín comments in his article “El orden de la música popular en la literature dominicana”:“ El bolero no sólo proporciona un imaginario erótico sino también social. In her essay "De héroes y heroínas en lo imaginario social," Zavala suggests that the bolero’s social imaginary refers to the capacity that the characters have to live, at least figuratively, social interactions molded by melodrama. For this reason, Zavala describes the genre as “la fascinación de la seducción y el deseo, que asume este desplazamiento de héroes y heroínas al dominio de lo imaginario, efímero, en cualquier caso, pero asombroso en las fluctuaciones de ilusión, representación y realidad” (124)” (107). For a more detailed analysis of the bolero see, El bolero: historia de un amor, by Iris M. Zavala.

163 Here the narrative voice undermines the violence of social exclusion is through the mockery and animalization of the ugly and defective “stepsisters.” This gesture, typical of the children’s stories and used to underline the moral values of the protagonist, is emulated by Hernández to scorn those in positions of power, elevating the human quality of the domestic worker. Nevertheless, this Dominican Cinderella is not as obedient as the original character, and her linguistic aggressiveness translates into physical violence:

[…] se me quieren subí’ arriba porque soy dominicana cuando lo papá no miran yo le doy macana cuando salgo de esa casa la sangre me hierve […](“Pásame a bucá”)

Once on the neighboring island, it is the Dominican who suffers the rejection and social exclusion that the Haitian experiences in Dominican territory. This shift demonstrates how the marginalization and racialization processes metamorphoses, and is reproduced in the Caribbean as an effect of the migratory movements and struggles based on racism. Thus, the Dominican subject on the move is forced to constantly negotiate his or her identity through the violence produced by migration. “La hora de volver” is the last historical coordinate that re-writes the Dominican history. The song shows the Dominican immigrant’s journey to the United States, and the re-negotiation of identity that takes place when faced with the ‘one-drop’ racial system. The music video presents Rita Indiana and her dancers on a colorful planet full of volcanoes, spitting lava, and strange creatures. The star that aesthetically commemorates the surrealist painting of Salvador Dalí La persistencia de la memoria of 1931, represents the inhospitable and foreign land where it is difficult to move and to live. Using a recriminatory tone, the narrative voice describes the migratory experience in the United States:

[…] en otro país es a comer basura rusa Te la buscaste como todo un león 164 hiciste tanta fuerza que te quedó un cuarto de cojón Pegaste botones y pega hasta con la boca Y le aguantaste vainas a toditas la ‘aquerosa’ Subite nevera con 5 vaca a’ entro Y un inverno en Nueva Yol te vite muelto Caía la nieve sobre el cuerpo adolmecido Tenías hasta los intestinos entumecidos […] (“La hora de volver”)

The cold reality of the Caribbean immigrant in the United States is described humorously in order to deconstruct the utopian discourse of the famous American dream. Similar to the domestic worker in Puerto Rico, the Dominican subject has put up with unimaginable chores and jobs like moving five cows at the same time and gluing buttons with his mouth to survive. The migratory experience is presented as a symbolic emasculation when Hernández refers to it as a castration (pérdida de cojones), losing the masculine body part normally associated with traditional Latin American masculinity and men’s self-worth. Thus the Dominican subject is “wounded” in the migration “battle” and is forced to re-negotiate his traditional manhood allowing for multiple gender configurations. The journey that began as a search for a better life turns into a story of disenchantment, thus the narrative voice exhorts the migrant to return to the Dominican Republic:

Súbete a eta nube y deposítate en tu calle Coge un avión, ¡coño! Una yola al revés Tú no lo ves llegó La hora de volver’ Todos vuelven a la tierra en que nacieron Al embrujo inconfundible de su sol Y quién quiere estar comiendo mierda y hielo Cuando puede estar bailando algo mejol (“La hora de volver”) Similar to “El juidero” this journey also ends in dancing, now performed to enact movement in the other direction. In contrast to the arms used to row to Puerto Rico in the musical video of “El judeiro,” here the extended arms become airplane wings of the

165 returning plane. This idea of returning as a better alternative to the life in the United States supposes a change in the conventional imaginary of constructing the north as geography of limitless opportunities. This final proposal does not present the island as a simple utopian space, but stresses the tensions produced by the migratory movements and realities. Hernández makes clear that it is impossible to capture a definite Dominican identity, and advocates the necessity to rearticulate the national subject from its multiple historical and contemporary realities and experiences. As an analog to what we have seen in her novels, through the musicalization of Dominican history Hernández constructs an Afro-Dominican, transnational and queer subject that rejects the national discourse fomented by Trujillo and Balguer. The courageous taíno Enriquillo is dethroned as the foundational figure, to be substituted by the Colonized African, relocated to the Caribbean. Dominicans are redrawn from their African heritage and their undeniable connection to Haiti. Furthermore, the national subject is in constant metamorphosis and adaptation as a result of the migratory and diasporic realities. The dictatorship’s ideological violence also contributes to a transformation of masculine and gender definitions when the ever-changing Dominican subject uses androgyny as a queer space that rejects patriarchal national configurations. In his chapter I have shown how the Dominican artist Rita Indiana Hernández uses her literary texts and music to criticize and reject three main tropes of the lingering ideology of the Trujillo City. In order to do this, Hernández uses a narrative strategy that systematically questions and deconstructs, empties, and finally replaces the Trujillo City; the official patriarchal and heteronormative gender discourse; and an anti- black/anti- Haitian construction of race with an alternate musical city, a transnational queer Dominican subject, and a global configuration of race.

166 The first section traces the importance of music and literature in the configuration of the dictatorship of Rafael L. Trujillo (1930-1961), a fact that makes the use of these two artistic genres even more important in demystifying the ideologies imposed by the three decade-long regime. Not only does Hernández show that the Dominican Republic is not a nation comprised of “white” citizens, but she also uses the body of the patriarch to prove the African heritage that all Dominicans and Haitians share. Similarly Hernández dethrones heteronormativity through the use of female narrators, to supplant the male authoritative voice that has shaped recent Dominican history. Furthermore, Hernández suggest that Trujillo himself is an androgynous subject who needs to prove his masculinity through the never-ending insemination of the entire Dominican population, in life and in death.

167 Conclusion

Following the Spanish Caribbean tradition of constant dialogue between national imaginaries, literature and musical productions, this study examines diverse cultural manifestations -like reggaeton, poetry, and music videos- from the 1990s-2000s, continuing the work of critics like Juan Flores, Jossianna Arroyo, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Juan Otero Garabís, and Néstor E. Rodríguez. Their multidisciplinary and transnational approaches to the Spanish Caribbean and their respective diasporic enclaves have changed the way in which we think critically about these localities, their cultural production, and how they dialogue and interact with each other. Departing from their work as my stepping-stone this study travels through samples of contemporary literature, music, and music videos from New York City, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Different from many studies on the subject, this dissertation propose a new analytical and reading model beginning with the diaspora’s cultural production as a point of departure. Normally considered an extension or in many cases an excess of their respective countries, here I have incorporated the transnational communities as equal participants of the contemporary trans-Caribbean circuit. I have tried to demonstrate what types of discourses are being produced and how these artists, writers, and performers follow or break with the national imaginaries imposed by patriarchal and mestizaje models inherited from colonial and post-colonial systems. Like any kind of human production, these songs and verses are informed and influenced, but not limited, by previous exchanges and tendencies as well as the socio-political moment when they are born. Furthermore, I explore how these national conventions are negotiated through the sometimes violent migratory experience, a struggle that frequently results in new and enriched cultural manifestations and identity reconfigurations. I have concentrated on 168 urban projects because they tend to mold, change and respond to the latest trends and social conversations, and because generally they have not been yet commodified as ‘national folklore,’ thus they enjoy the freedom of rapid change. In Chapter One I focused on the Nuyorican poet Willie Perdomo, who was able to take advantage of the 1990s slam poetry popularity to criticize and expose the commodification process the genre was going through as well as his neighborhood of El Barrio. I discussed the slam or performatic poetry as a historic space where minority groups have exercised their voice to mark their presence within the America cultural and literary traditions. Using the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Art Movement, and the Civil Rights Era as models, the Nuyorican Poets utilized poetry and poetry readings to build a space within a hostile host society that relegates the community into the margins. Linguistically, the use of Spanish and English combined comprises a formal rupture within the strict use of English as the dominant language of the United States. This linguistic combination symbolizes the inevitable transformation of the national imaginary into a new ‘language’ that includes the Nuyorican diaspora reality. Perdomo’s poem embraces, but does not collapse or synthesize, the ethnic and racial components of identity-negotiation, symbolized through the double use of Spanish and English and the constant reference to Puerto Rico’s cultural capital. Through Spanglish and musicalized salsa-inflected verses, Willie Perdomo builds a poetic space that rightfully inserts the frequently ignored Nuyorican experience within the United States’ and Puerto Rico’s official histories. His verses capture the decades of repression, exclusion and silencing suffered by the Puerto Rican community living in U.S. soil. But it is within this systematic struggle that Perdomo constructs a diasporic subject that is able to simultaneously embrace its Caribbean and African heritage, while at the same time calls the unbeautified ghetto streets of El Barrio home. Furthermore, the poet uses his own 169 black body –in the text and in performances– to demonstrate how blackness is still today read and decoded as symbol of marginality both within the United States and the Puerto Rican national discourses. Through his verses the poet demonstrates how the slavery system has been replaced with contemporary forms of repression that are maintained by the systematic criminalization and exclusion of black individuals today. This discourse has now extended to the Afro-Latinos living in the United States as their bodies link them with American’s history and racial discourse. While salsa music is central to Perdomo’s project as a formal element, and thematically as a strong cultural connection to the Puerto Rican culture in general, its violent masculine imaginary does not go unquestioned by the writer. Perdomo openly rejects this patriarchal model, allowing for a more sensitive and artistic masculinity both in El Barrio, and on the island. During the late 1980s and the mid-1990s Puerto Rico’s musical scene shifted from a strict socio-economically informed division between rock and salsa lovers into a more ‘inclusive’ commodified scene that embraced the African-influenced genres like bomba, plena, and the diasporic born genre of salsa into mainstream culture. This new musical landscape made these genres accessible to the general public, becoming an important part of the national folklore, popular culture, and literature. Chapter Two studies how through musically infused verses the Puerto Rican performatic poet of the 1990s generation Guillermo Rebollo-Gil questions Puerto Rico’s racial and gender imaginaries. Conscious about his socio-economical privileged position as an upper-class white male, Rebollo-Gil uncovers the racism behind the ‘gran familia puertorriqueña’ narrative that presupposes that all Puerto Ricans are equal under mestizaje conventions. Using the folklorized African rhythms of bomba, plena, and salsa the writer demonstrates how the black Puerto Rican is erased from the national body to be marginalized to the essentialized spaces of folkloric culture. Similarly to Willie Perdomo’s positioning of the 170 black body within different oppressive historical moments, Rebollo-Gil traces a direct relationship between today’s criminalization and exoticization of the black body and colonial slavery practices. In other words, both poets trace a clear poetic narrative, pushed aside by the Puerto Rican and American official national histories, that not only highlights the importance of the African component in the Spanish Caribbean’s trans- national circuit, but also points to the systematical invisibility of Afro-descendant subjects. In addition, following the Nuyorican poet’s tradition, the Puerto Rican writer incorporates music into his verses, especially salsa and the 1990s-born genre of reggaeton, to repudiate masculine models based on patriarchy and homophobic discourses. The use of urban musical genres proposes a transnational vision of the Puerto Rican nation that bridges the island and the diaspora, the privileged and the marginalized, the literary and the popular. Through a series of poems, Rebollo-Gil dismantles the strong macho ideal showing that it is a performance like any other that has been supported by national definitions of puertorriqueñidad. His poetic character, Guillo, goes through a series of experiences that allows us to understand gender as fluid performatic instances that leave behind heteronormativity as the only valid masculine model. From the analysis of musically infused poetic verses, the New York based trans- Caribbean journey moves to the analysis the urban genre of reggaeton music in Chapter Three. Born from the black and working-class communities during the 1990s, around the same time other African influenced genres were commodified, this musical form became the underground vehicle to express social discontent, rebel against moral values imposed by the state, and talk openly about sex and the violent drug world. While some singers and performers have used the genre’s subversive potential to talk about race, gender, and social inequality, others have opted to exploit its international commodification in the 171 early 2000s and sing a pop-y, toned-down commercial reggaeton. This is not the case of the two half-bothers René Perez and Eduardo Cabra, also known as Calle 13. While at the beginning of their musical career the Puerto Rican duo was busy developing their distinct musical style to separate themselves from other signers and making sure to prove that even though they were college graduates and were considered white, they had a place within the urban ‘street-based’ genre, their project rapidly transformed into socially motivated music. From a very localized critique of Puerto Rico’s social classes based on race and criminalization of black citizens, Calle 13 has moved outside of the island’s geographical national limits. What began as a denunciation of Puerto Rico’s utopian fallacy of mestizaje developed into a more malleable definition of race synonymous with social marginality, allowing for the incorporation of the rest of the Americas into their project. In other words, through their lyrics and music videos Calle 13 leveled marginal, criminalized, and excluded individuals under one ‘race’ that does not take into consideration phenotypical characteristics, allowing for the formation of a new pan- Caribbean and pan-Latin American subjectivity. Furthermore, the Puerto Rican artists also include migratory movements into their marginal race through a revalorization of those who risk their lives in order to get into the United States. Pérez decodes the negative and criminalizing vocabulary surrounding immigration by giving those ‘on the move’ superhuman powers. This characterization locates them above the law, but at the same time allows them to be admired, complicating the simplistic juridical equation of good or bad individuals based on whether they obey or skirt the law. This chapter also explored the reggaeton artist Tego Calderón, who through his embracing of blackness creates a proud Afro-Puerto Rican discourse in a country that has never gone through a racial awakening. Rejecting the ‘gran familia puertorriqueña’ fallacy as well, Calderón criticizes the abuse suffered by black Puerto Ricans throughout 172 the years. The artist completes the revalorization of blackness, taking it from the ideological and discursive space into the corporeal dimension using his own body to alter the Puerto Rico’s ‘ideal image.’ Calderón restores the Puerto Rican national mestizo body to its original blackness, tired of the racial discourses that keep violently whitening the body through negation, exclusion, and exotization. Although Calderón does constructs a black unitary project that includes the New York City diaspora, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic as evidently black enclaves that need to be revalorized, he falls short in his inclusion. The participation of these different communities ends up being problematic, as Calderón does not problematize the paradisiacal stereotypical gaze toward these countries. Furthermore, the singer does not break with the patriarchal imaginaries of the genre, and the black female body is constantly objectified and commodified through his lyrics and music videos. Finally, Chapter Four travels into the neighboring island of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Through the analysis of the Dominican contemporary writer, performer, and musician Rita Indiana Hernández I showed how contemporary discourses stand up to Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s ideological legacy. Hernández masterfully deconstructs the pillars of patriarchy and racism still holding the structure inherited by the thirty year dictatorship. Using female, marginal, and queer narrators, Hernández’s novels turn the Trujillo City into a decaying cemetery as a symbol of the country’s necessity to bury their past in order to keep moving into the future. Even though both La estrategia de Chochueca and Papi show a Dominican nation still struggling with the patriarch’s ghost ruling over them, both texts open the possibility of a slow recovery of the Dominican collective. If Rita Indiana Hernández’s written work primarily captures the Dominican capital in ruins, her musical compilation in El juidero is more concerned with the re- 173 writing of the Dominican history, and a re-imagining of their gender and racial founding discourses. Like Willie Perdomo, Gillermo Rebollo-Gil, Tego Calderón, and Calle 13, Hernández makes sure to include both African heritage, and the diaspora into her construction of dominicanidad. She re-writes the Dominican foundational fiction using the shared African heritage of the Dominican Republic and Haiti to remind them of their brotherhood, and their common blackness. Then, Hernández recaptures the horrors and violence suffered during the Trujillo years and later the Balaguerato as an exorcising collective rite. She also includes in her re-writing of the Dominican Republic’s history the harsh reality of migratory movement into Puerto Rican and North American soil and the mistreatment and racism suffered outside the country. Finally, the journey ends where it began, in the Dominican Republic. Even though in her novels the island is presented in a moribund state, Hernández exhorts those that have left to come back dancing, and if they are going to suffer, maybe it’s better to suffer under then sun than the cold New York City winter. After all these analyses, what can be said about the New York City and the Spanish Caribbean’s contemporary literary and musical conversation? It seems that the new generations are tired of following national discourses that do not respond to their movable, global and increasingly virtual realities. There is a tendency to recuperate African heritage, and a necessity to come up with a positive Afro-Caribbean discourse that eliminates centuries of trans-Caribbean racism and the exclusion of black bodies. Unfortunately, patriarchal imaginaries are deteriorating at a slower pace than racial ones. Willie Perdomo’s and Tego Calderón’s constructions of black men demand a revalorization of the systematic historical exclusion of the black male both in the United States and the Spanish Caribbean. But even though this subject is more sensitive and artistic, it does fall into old molds of patriarchy and misogynist tendencies through the 174 objectification of women to prove its masculinity. In contrast, Rebollo-Gil articulates a ‘white’ Puerto Rican male that breaks with the silence toward racism denouncing everyday cultural practices, and the folklorization of African-influenced cultural productions. Out of all the male artists that I have studied, Rebollo-Gil is the most daring when it comes to deconstructing the normative macho and patriarchal model uncovering its false homogeneity by showing its different performative instances. In the case of Calle 13, René Pérez has taken a sarcastic and comical approach toward the violent and misogynist tendencies of the reggaeton genre, but ironically still reproduces these stereotypes to create his musical characters, and to construct a virile national body. A violent masculinity still embodies the national collective as a symbolic stance against Americanization and the island’s colonial relationship with the United States. Hopefully, in the near future the Puerto Rican duo will include the rejection of homophobia, machismo, and the objectification of women as part of their social agenda. In the case of Rita Indiana Hernández, there is a total reconstruction of the contemporary Dominican subject through the desintegration of patriarchal models and the openly embrace of a queer trans-Caribbean dancing subject. But although she embraces a queer subjectivity, Hernández, as the rest of the artists constantly resort to masculine voices, characters, and historical figures to construct their identity discourses and imaginaries. Even though the diaspora is still seen by some as a ‘fake’ extension of the ‘real’ national subject, these artists, writers, performers and musicians are leaving behind the territorial definition of nation to replace it with movable communities linked by common social interests, similar histories and a shared wish to re-label inherited oppressive categories. In other words, similarly to how new generations are able to consume music, and images from all over the world, these artists propose a unity discourse based on a shared history of marginalization more than national affiliations. National limitations are 175 being replaced by a broader definition of “us” rather than exclusive local memory. But how firm are these changes, and where are these new discourses going? In order to keep up with the fast changing cultural exchange we will have to ask this question daily, and access alternative spaces of cultural productions –like Facebook, Youtube, and blogs- as a new reading and analytical model in order to keep up with the unfolding conversation.

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192 Vita

Lorna Judith Torrado Fernández was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Since a very early age she discovered her passion for literature and music. After obtaining her diploma from the University High School (UHS), where she also played the clarinet, she went straight to the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus to obtain her bachelor’s degree. As an Environmental Science major she struggled with math and science classes, but finally after two years she decided to transfer to the Hispanic Studies Department, where she felt right at home. She continued her graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she obtained her Master’s Degree, and fell in love with teaching. A couple of years later, and after working as a language instructor in different colleges in the Philadelphia Area, she decided to pursue a PhD in literature at the University of Texas at Austin. This journey took her a little bit longer that she initially expected, but she was able to explore her passion for non-profit work through La Poderosa Media Project, publish three articles, and made a lot of friends along the way.

Permanent email: [email protected] This dissertation was typed by the author.

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