Frances R. Aparicio

Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures

The pulsing beats of salsa, merengue, and bolero are a compelling expression of Latino/a culture, but few outsiders comprehend the musics implications in larger social terms. Frances R. Aparicio combines the approaches of musicology and sociology with literary, cultural, Latino, and womens studies to offer a detailed genealogy of Afro-Caribbean music in Puerto Rico. She compares the music to selected Puerto Rican literary texts, then looks both at how Latinos/as in the United States use salsa to reaffirm their cultural identities and how Anglos eroticize and depoliticize it in their adaptations. The close examination of lyrics shows how these songs articulate issues of gender, desire, and conflict, and Aparicios interviews with Latinas/os reveal how they listen to salsa and the meanings they find in it.

THE BLACKNESS OF SUGAR: CELIA CRUZ AND THE PERFORMANCE OF (TRANS)NATIONALISM

Studies on transnational cultures have shown that local, national identities are not necessarily subordinated to, or erased by, the globalizing forces of the economy. Rather, the local mediates transnational cultures as well as it is transformed by the crossing of cultural boundaries. Likewise, emerging interdisciplinary and cultural studies approaches to Latin(o) popular music examine the ways in which musical production, circulation and reception create cultural spaces that challenge hegemonic notions of national identity and discrete cultural boundaries. This article examines the figure of the Queen of Salsa, Celia Cruz, and the tensions among the multiple, transnational subjectivities that are constituted through her musical repertoire, her performances on stage, the aesthetics of her body, and her public statements in interviews. Having spanned more than sixty years of performances and recordings, Celia Cruzs diverse repertoire and musical selections have served as a performative locus for the negot...

Exposed Bodies: Media and U.S. Puerto Ricans in Public Space

The Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York demonstrates the value that performances of cultural affirmation have for boricuas in the diaspora. As Winn has observed, a joyous occasion and a vibrant parade, with drum majorettes dressed like Middle Americans but moving to syncopated Caribbean rhythms exemplifying the mix of North and Latin American that is today’s “Nuyoricans,” or New York Ricans… “We are here to show our pride in being Puerto Rican and to celebrate our culture,” one man in the crowd explained as others nodded in agreement. “We are both Americans and Puerto Ricans.”1 This public performance of Puerto Rican identity, which began on April 15, 1956 as the Desfile Hispano, has been developing as a social and public institution for more than 40 years. Throughout the history of its organization and planning, the parade has been characterized by tensions between paradigms of hispanismo and puertorriquenismo, that is, between integration and the underscoring of cultural difference. The parade also embodies the simultaneous articulations of Puerto Ricans as both an ethnic group and as a nation. However, whether through integration, difference, or both, the main effect of this collective ritual has been to inscribe the presence of the Puerto Rican subject in U.S. public space and to institutionalize our visibility and our agency as historical minorities in dominant society.

From Boricua Dancers to Salsa Soldiers: The Cultural Politics of Globalized Salsa Dancing in Chicago

Let me begin by sharing an incident particular to Humboldt Park in Chicago, the Puerto Rican neighborhood and the locale of one of the Latin dance studios that I examine in this research project. Along Division Street, between Western and California, the development of Paseo Boricua—an economic project of Puerto Rican-owned restaurants, stores, and businesses—evinces the ways in which urban gentrification is being resisted by ethnic-based economic investments. Within Paseo Boricua, there is a Latin dance studio. One evening in the summer of 2004, white and Latin@ students from other parts of the city and from the suburbs arrived here to learn salsa dancing, while a couple of older Puerto Rican women walking by stopped and gazed into the studio through the glass window to see what was happening. They then read the name of the business, the Latin Academy of Dance, and their facial expressions revealed both surprise, joy, or pleasure, and, simultaneously, a sort of dismay or anger at the studio and at what was going on inside. These ladies are insiders to the community and to Puerto Rican culture, yet at that moment they became outsiders to dance as a performance of culture. As Humboldt Park residents, they were seen as cultural insiders. We, the students who had corne to learn dance, were the cultural outsiders. This moment inverted power dynamics and served as a metaphor for the need to explore salsa dancing as a site in which ethnic and cultural nationalist meanings about salsa dancing for Chicago Boricuas are being restructured and reorganized into more intercultural and global values.

CULTURAL TWINS AND NATIONAL OTHERS: ALLEGORIES OF INTRALATINO SUBJECTIVITIES IN U.S. LATINO/A LITERATURE

This essay traces various literary and scholarly articulations of what I call intralatino subjectivities. First, I examine the power dynamics, identifications and divergences in the interactions and encounters between two latinos of different national origin, and secondly, the identity negotiations and complexities of the intralatino/a subject, that is, the subject that has two or more different Latino national identities, such as the MexiRican. By tracing these discourses of representation in various scholarly texts, I examine the way in which these intralatino/a sites have been represented both as utopian cultural spaces and as sites of complicated and contradictory cultural borrowings and influences. A detailed reading of two novels, Memory Mambo by Achy Obejas, and Mothertongue by Demetria Martinez, proposes that these two fictional texts are allegorical explorations of intralatino/a relations. A reading of these two novels from the point of view of the colonial analogies between groups serves well in understanding the potential that Latinos have as a pan-identity to create points of solidarity and convergence while still maintaining respect for each others differences and specificities.

Judith Ortiz Cofer, Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood

The book Silent Dancing is a collection of poems and short stories that together constitute an autobiographical narrative. Based on the memories of Cofer’s childhood, the poems and stories are reflections and remembrances about her experiences growing up in two places, Puerto Rico and New Jersey. The memories focus mostly on the women in her family, her grandmother and mother in particular, and also on the figure of her father, who served in the U.S. Navy. The movement between her hometown of Hormigueros, Puerto Rico, with the traditional cultural and gender values embodied in its inhabitants, and Patterson, New Jersey, where she lived six months per year and faced different gender values, an urban culture, and the reality of being an ethnic minority, becomes a recurring structure throughout the book.