Abstract
Petra Rivera-Rideau’s Remixing Reggaetón explores the interactions between Puerto Rico’s Africana culture, the racial democratic state and its adherents, and the international community from around 2000 to 2014. The author identifies Reggaetón − a musical genre derived from Jamaican dancehall, US Hip Hop and Panamanian Reggae en Español − as a form of cultural resistance by Africana people against an oppressive state’s attempts to diminish the significance of an urban African experience in Puerto Rico. Throughout the text, Rivera-Rideau documents the struggle of Reggaetón artists and their listeners to construct and validate a contemporary, non-white, Puerto Rican Africana experience in response to the state’s use of ‘folkloric’ blackness. The Puerto Rican government and upper social classes promote a romanticised version of the history, culture and geography of Africana people to put distance between Puerto Rico’s historical African-ness, and their attempt to move towards a culturally Spanish, and in effect non-black, future. The music and dance of bomba, and places like Loíza become resources signifying a static, historical African-ness that flavours Puerto Rico’s present, but do not interfere with Puerto Rico’s culturally white future. The working class and those who live in the caseríos (public housing projects primarily in San Juan) epitomise the ‘authentic’ experience of an urban blackness in Puerto Rico; however, their experiences are tied to stereotypes of extreme violence, hypersexuality and poverty. Reggaetón functions as a conduit of working-class and caserío dwellers’ resistance to cultural genocide, and as a source for a discourse of liberation.
In the first three chapters, Rivera-Rideau describes race relations in Puerto Rico by analysing the social forces that gave rise to Reggaetón, and its development as a cultural manifestation for African diasporic identity. Particularly, she explains the growth of an urban underclass, cultural remittances between the US and Puerto Rico, and reaction by the state to rapidly changing perceptions – both domestic and international − towards race relations. In explaining the government’s response to the existence of Reggaetón, Rivera-Rideau establishes that the government’s racial democracy is a myth. She uses newspaper articles to verify politicians’ attempts to whiten the cultural identity of Puerto Rico, as well as to control the type of blackness that is associated with the island. Policies such as the Manu Dura (Iron Fist) implied that Reggaetón (and the people who listened to/performed it) were morally degenerate, and that it was a music of delinquency. Their prejudice towards certain African cultural manifestations, such as a type of dance that focused on gyrating hips and provocative movement known as Perreo (doggie style), were denounced as dangerous in public discourse. Through published interviews with musicians, video girl dancers, and radio listeners, Rivera-Rideau scrutinises the actions of the state by describing an alternative perspective of Reggaetón in which members of the working class voice their discontent; Perreo is an art form genealogically related to ‘sanctioned’ dance forms like bomba.
The Puerto Rican elite and politicians claim racism as a US import, and therefore not authentically Puerto Rican. Moreover, the state’s efforts to fund certain cultural forms and condemn others are part of the systemic practices to silence claims of black oppression. Chapter 3 interrogates this struggle between the state and Reggaetón artists by looking at how both use the town of Loíza as a symbol of their version of blackness. Loíza is a contested space. It is known as the ‘capital of traditions’ because it is the birthplace of bomba, and other traditional African cultural manifestations. On the other hand, Tego Calderón, a Reggaetón artist, claims it as his hometown; thereby, he marks Loíza as a location where Reggaetón is grown. This repositioning of Loíza as a birthplace of contemporary African-ness in Puerto Rico contradicts the state’s claim that Reggaetón and a rhetoric of anti-blackness is a United States import. In making Reggaetón local, the music genre becomes a tool confirming the homegrown nature of racial hierarchies in Puerto Rico.
Chapters 4 and 5 provide two examples of how Reggaetón acts as an instrument of transformation domestically and internationally. In ‘Fingernails con feeling’, the author interrogates the relationships between Reggaetón, femininity and respectability. She examines the artist Ivy Queen’s multi-dimensional performance of her identity as a woman, a Reggaetón artist, and a person from the working class. Rivera-Rideau remarks on Queen’s difficulty in maintaining these allegedly competing identities, yet that artist becomes an archetype of all three. She is commanding and dominant in her lyrics, feminine in choice of clothes and sexuality, and connected to the working classes through her long and elaborately decorated fingernails. The author claims that Queen is able to resist conforming to either the video vixen, or the woman pop star stereotypes because she uses her fingernails as a way to publicly represent her alternative presentation of a woman identity. While Chapter 4 unpacks the subtleties of maintaining a subversive identity in the public limelight, it is somewhat of a distraction from her overall excellent examination of the racial complexities of Puerto Rico as shown through modern music forms.
In ‘Enter the Hurbans’ Rivera-Rideau argues that Reggaetón undergoes a political shift as it is exported to the US market. She details the political and cultural connections between Puerto Rico and the US, and how the US discourse of race – one that is coupled with language and geographic regions – influences how Reggaetón is read by a predominantly white music industry. When Daddy Yankee’s Gasolina was imported to the US, it originally played on Hip Hop stations. As US media embraced Reggaetón, institutions such as the Grammy Awards and various radio stations created new music categories such as ‘Hispanic urban’ or ‘Hurban’. Rather than Reggaetón remaining coupled with English-language music genres like rap and Hip Hop which may have similar content about racial pride and white oppression, the predominant white music industry classified Reggaetón as a distinct Spanish-language music genre. Rivera-Rideau asserts that this reinterpretation of the music genre segregates Reggaetón from wider African diasporic conversations. It undermines the political intent of the music to define a contemporary African-ness and, despite the best efforts of artists to reframe this within Puerto Rico, Reggaetón becomes an international music that reinscribes separation between Latinodad and blackness.
Remixing Reggaetón describes the manner in which African identity is policed, politicised and experienced, and where non-US based, non-English speaking, African cultural productions are positioned in a racialised international context. A Puerto Rican Africana identity is constantly struggling to become an authentic voice despite the US market’s racial lens that privileges spoken language over diasporic African connection, and violent local governmental policies that suppress the reality of its Africana population.
The text does lack an overall intersectional analysis as it only dedicates a chapter to how womanhood influences the presentation of Reggaetón, while ignoring the issues in the performance and importation of Africana masculinity. Moreover, since the author relies on musicians’ interviews, newspapers, and social media, there is an assumption by Rivera-Rideau that the public discourse is coming from people who listen to the music, are affected by the imagery, and find themselves in the middle of a struggle over the cultural identity of their nation. All of which raises the question: if Reggaetón practitioners and media outlets have a vested interest in portraying a positive image of Reggaetón, wouldn’t those who are not financially invested in this music style have a more nuanced relationship between ‘folkloric and urban blackness’ than the dichotomous relationship that Rivera-Rideau enunciates?
But the strength of the book lies in the way it asks us to remix the concept of the African diaspora. By showing the similarities between African American and AfroLatinidad musical and political realities, it demonstrates that the cultural location of the African diaspora is homegrown, international, and replantable.