UC Berkeley

My dissertation examines entanglements of race, place, gender, and class in Puerto Rican reggaetón. Based on ethnographic and archival research in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and in New York, New York, I argue that Puerto Rican youth engage with an African diasporic space via their participation in the popular music reggaetón. By African diasporic space, I refer to the process by which local groups incorporate diasporic resources such as cultural practices or icons from other sites in the African diaspora into new expressions of blackness that respond to their localized experiences of racial exclusion. Participation in African diasporic space not only facilitates cultural exchange across different African diasporic sites, but it also exposes local communities in these sites to new understandings and expressions of blackness from other places. As one manifestation of these processes in Puerto Rico, reggaetón refutes the hegemonic construction of Puerto Rican national identity as a "racial democracy." Similar to countries such as Brazil and Cuba, the discourse of racial democracy in Puerto Rico posits that Puerto Ricans are descendents of European, African, and indigenous ancestors. Yet this conception simultaneously holds that racial divisions in Puerto Rico are obsolete, a notion at serious odds with the reality of persistent white privilege on the island.

I argue that discourses of racial democracy are spatially constituted in a "cultural topography." Different conceptions of blackness are "emplaced" within distinct locations throughout the island such that certain towns or neighborhoods are associated with particular ideas about blackness. These multiple ideas about blackness operate differently vis-à-vis racial democracy. On one hand, representations of a "folkloric" and "antiquated" blackness have been emplaced in the northeastern town of Loíza to symbolize the African component of racial democracy. At the same time, an understanding of blackness as "abject" is emplaced in urban housing projects, or caseríos, as the "primitive" counterpoint to the more "modern" whitened Puerto Rican nation sustained by racial democracy. The perceived connections between distinct conceptions of blackness and particular places throughout Puerto Rico often conflict and, in the process, expose some of the contradictions inherent to dominant discourses of racial democracy. Specifically, mapping out the various emplacements of blackness in Puerto Rico calls attention to racial democracy discourses' simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of blackness into elitist depictions of Puerto Rican identity. At the same time, possibilities exist within these contradictions to express other definitions of blackness that refute racial democracy discourses.

Reggaetón inserts one alternative understanding of blackness into Puerto Rican society. Multiple processes of migration and cultural exchange exposed Puerto Ricans in San Juan to musical practices from various sites in the African diaspora including hip hop, Jamaican dancehall, and Panamanian reggae en español. Puerto Rican youth combined these various musical influences in unique ways to produce reggaetón. At the same time, however, participation in diasporic space also introduced Puerto Rican youth to new ways of imagining blackness. Through their own experiences with migration to the United States, Puerto Rican youth encountered new forms of racialization that, in turn, led to the recognition of comparable experiences of racial exclusion with other African diasporic communities. Reggaetón developed in part through these various diasporic connections, expressing black identities that countered the local processes of racialization in Puerto Rican discourses of racial democracy.

My dissertation begins with the development of underground, the precursor to reggaetón, in the mid-1990s. I discuss the specific ways in which engagement with diasporic space created the conditions of possibility for reggaetón to develop in Puerto Rico. My chapters about the initial creation of underground and the success of artist Tego Calderón demonstrate that diasporic resources give new valence to understandings of blackness that transcend the boundaries of Puerto Rico's cultural topography. In addition, I show how these cultural expressions also transform the meanings of already widely recognized Afro-Puerto Rican signifiers.

History has shown us that radical cultural politics are often met with tremendous resistance, and the constitutive forms of this resistance can tell a story about national and racial imperatives. I analyze two government-sanctioned campaigns aimed at censoring reggaetón to consider the ways that diasporic spaces pose serious challenges to the authority of racial democracy. In the 1990s, the Puerto Rican government confiscated underground recordings as part of a larger anti-crime initiative. Several years later, in 2002, the Puerto Rican Senate launched an Anti-Pornography Campaign that targeted sexual imagery in reggaetón music videos. I consider these initiatives as evidence of the perceived "threat" that reggaetón posed to hegemonic constructions of racial democracy. An analysis of the multiple censorship campaigns against reggaetón reveals the pedagogical moves that the Puerto Rican government employed in an attempt to maintain the hegemony of elitist discourses of racial democracy.

Situated in the intersecting fields of race theory, diaspora theory, and cultural studies, my dissertation employs interdisciplinary methodologies and a multi-faceted theoretical approach to consider the work of diaspora in Puerto Rican reggaetón. My research illuminates the ways that reggaetón articulates understandings of blackness that challenge hegemonic constructions of race and national identity and, in the process, create possibilities for connecting blackness and Latinidad in new ways.