Full Description
Puerto Rico is often depicted as a "racial democracy" in which a history of race mixture has produced a racially harmonious society. In Remixing ReggaetÓn, Petra R. Rivera-Rideau shows how reggaetÓn musicians critique racial democracy's privileging of whiteness and concealment of racism by expressing identities that center blackness and African diasporic belonging. Stars such as Tego CalderÓn criticize the Puerto Rican mainstream's tendency to praise black culture but neglecting and marginalizing the island's black population, while Ivy Queen, the genre's most visible woman, disrupts the associations between whiteness and respectability that support official discourses of racial democracy. From censorship campaigns on the island that sought to devalue reggaetÓn, to its subsequent mass marketing to U.S. Latino listeners, Rivera-Rideau traces reggaetÓn's origins and its transformation from the music of San Juan's slums into a global pop phenomenon. ReggaetÓn, she demonstrates, provides a language to speak about the black presence in Puerto Rico and a way to build links between the island and the African diaspora.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Iintroduction. ReggaetÓn Takes Its Place 1
1. Iron Fist against Rap 21
2. The Perils of Perreo 52
3. LoÍza 81
4. Fingernails con Feeling 104
5. Enter the Hurbans 130
Conclusion. ReggaetÓn's Limits, Possibilities, and Futures 159
Notes 171
Bibliography 199
Index 215
