Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico.
Lara, Francisco D.
Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico. By Petra R. Rivera-Rideau. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. [xii, 224 p. ISBN 9780822359456 (hardcover), $84.95; ISBN 9780822359647 (paperback), $23.95; ISBN 9780822375258 (e-book), varies] Notes, bibliography, index.
Petra R. Rivera-Rideau's Remixing Reggaeton presents an insightful reading of reggaeton as a discursive cultural practice inextricably linked to the experience of blackness in the African diaspora. In her analysis of reggaeton artists, song lyrics, music videos, and media coverage, she describes how the genre's origins and development, representation, and perception at the same time illuminate, challenge, reify, and transform conceptions of blackness and national identity in Puerto Rico. Well written and organized, and convincingly argued, her timely study resonates with and contributes significantly to current academic understandings of music, race, gender, sexuality, and nation, and their intersections within the context of the African diaspora.
Reggaeton presents a rich and unique lens through which to explore these intersections. A discursive and multivalent genre with local roots and transnational linkages connecting Puerto Rico, New York, Jamaica, and Panama, reggaeton resists facile categorization, thanks to its multiple racial, ethnic, and national associations. At the same time, and as a result of its origins and popular association with blackness, the genre is discursively linked to hegemonic racial hierarchies reified in dominant discourses of race and national identity in Puerto Rico, the United States, and throughout much of the African diaspora.
Thoughtful in its approach, Remixing Reggaeton consists of five chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion. While the introduction and conclusion serve to contextualize the study and outline the limitations of the analysis, the five remaining chapters each explore a different aspect of reggaeton's development, addressing its complex origins, reception, key figures, and diverse manifestations as they relate to the dynamics of race and racism that inform political, popular, and academic perceptions of the genre in Puerto Rico and the United States.
In her introduction, Rivera-Rideau presents the major questions, issues, and theories that fed her research, as well as her primary arguments and a chapter outline. In the process, she problematizes the Puerto Rican myth of racial democracy and reggaeton's perceived association in the popular imagination with either blackness or Latinidad. She argues instead for an understanding of reggaeton as a "cultural practice of diaspora" (p. 11), or a multivalent form of expressive culture that allows its practitioners to challenge and reshape local notions of blackness in making meaningful connections with other marginalized communities in diaspora. As Rivera-Rideau argues, reggaeton "constitutes a space for Puerto Rican youth to engage in practices of self-fashioning that respond to local racial politics and express an affinity with African diasporic populations" (p. 13). In subsequent chapters, Rivera-Rideau meticulously bears out this argument through her analysis while also noting the limitations of reggaeton's ability to upend racial stereotypes.
Chapter 1, "Iron Fist against Rap," explores global diasporic connections and local dynamics of race and racism in the formation, representation, and reception of underground, a genre of Puerto Rican urban rap considered a precursor of reggaeton. Originating in the late 1980s and early 1990s, underground emerged from the Puerto Rican caserios, the predominantly black urban public housing developments that became the focus of a governmental anti-violence campaign referred to as mano dura contra el crimen (iron fist against crime) during the 1990s. As Rivera-Rideau shows in the first third of the chapter, underground's characteristic musical elements, associated cultural practices, and aesthedcs reveal the complex links between Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Panama, and New York City that resulted from migration and transnational circuits of cultural exchange. Establishing underground as an "exemplary circum-Carribbean music" (p. 33), Rivera-Rideau proceeds to show, through an analysis of newspaper articles and underground song lyrics and music videos, how underground artists made use of the resources of the diaspora in challenging perceptions of blackness and Puerto Ricanness. At the same time, however, Rivera-Rideau is careful to note that underground likewise served to evince the dominant structures of race and class in Puerto Rico. Significantly, the gradual transformation of underground into reggaeton by the late 1990s and early 2000s coincided with the gradual proliferation and acceptance of underground beyond the caserio.
Chapter 2, "The Perils of Perreo," examines how Puerto Rico's Anti-Pornography Campaign of 2002, which predominantly targeted reggaeton music videos, reflected and reproduced racist stereotypes of black female sexuality. Sponsored by Senator Velda Gonzalez, the Anti-Pornography Campaign was an attempt in part to accommodate reggaeton within dominant notions of Puerto Rican national identity. Analyzing the campaign's rhetoric and the ensuring public debate relative to academic theories of gender, sexuality, and race, Rivera-Rideau convincingly argues that criticism of reggaeton's representation of women reflected underlying racialized stereotypes of black female hypersexuality that served to buttress dominant discourses of national identity. The Anti-Pornography Campaign and the debate that ensued, notes Rivera-Rideau, thus reveal the extent to which reggaeton, in its association with blackness, threatened popular perceptions of Puerto Rican national identity.
Chapter 3, "Loiza," and Chapter 4, "Fingernails con Feeling," focus on the music and personae of Tego Calderon and Ivy Queen, reggaeton artists who engage the African diaspora in ways that challenge dominant discourses of blackness and Puerto Rican national identity. Calderon's origins, musical innovations, and commentary on race and racism present a distinct image of Afro-Puerto Rican identity that problematizes the notion of racial democracy and folkloric representations of blackness in Puerto Rico. Queen's physical appearance and lyrics similarly challenge notions of female respectability undergirding discourses of national identity. Of significance in chapter 4 is Rivera-Rideau's unique reading of Queen's artificial fingernails, which calls into question race and racial hierarchies as equally artificial social constructs and serves as means of imagining "more inclusive understandings of Puerto Ricanness" (p. 108).
In chapter 5, "Enter the Hurbans," Rivera-Rideau addresses the reception, perception, and subsequent racialization of reggaeton upon its emergence in the United States commercial music market in 2004. The marketing of reggaeton to Hispanic urban audiences, a then-new niche market referred to as Hurban, led to the genre's dual identification as a Latin music representative of a pan-Latino identity and as an urban music linked to blackness. As a result, artists such as Daddy Yankee, N. O. R. E., and Notch have been able to use reggaeton to articulate their particular identification with Latinidad and blackness, thus challenging hegemonic racial hierarchies in the process.
The possibilities and limitations of reggaeton as cultural practice of diaspora are briefly addressed in the concluding chapter. Using "Danza Kuduro" by Don Omar and Lucenzo as an example, Rivera-Rideau traces the diasporic linkages connecting reggaeton and marginalized Puerto Rican urban youth in New York to kuduro, an Angolan form of popular music, and Angolan and other immigrant African urban youth in Portugal. While representing racial stereotypes relating to gender and sexuality, "Danza Kuduro" and other recent reggaeton fusions, notes Rivera-Rideau, make possible diasporic affiliations that have the potential to transform local conceptions of race and national identity. Indeed, as the author notes, "the history of reggaeton is one of transformation" (p. 168).
Sound in its analysis and conclusions, Remixing Reggaeton resonates with contemporary scholarship on music, race, nation, gender, sexuality, and diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean. Rivera-Rideau situates reggaeton among other similarly discursive and transnational musics linked to blackness and hegemonic constructions of national identity in the African diaspora, such as rap and hip-hop, salsa, cumbia, vallenato, Jamaican dancehall, and Angolan kuduro. Doing so allows her to illuminate not only the relative agency of local communities and individuals vis-a-vis hegemonic structures of power, but also the ways in which the concept of diaspora intervenes in local struggles via expressive forms of culture, such as music, dance, and dress. In signifying and re-signifying the aesthetics of blackness, local communities are thus able to challenge and potentially transform what it means to be black and a citizen within the nation. While these arguments in and of themselves are not necessarily new within the context of the extant literature on the topic of music, race, and nation in Latin America and the Caribbean, Rivera-Rideau's study nonetheless provides a unique and significant perspective on the ways in which the dynamics of race and racism and the counter-hegemonic cultural processes at work in the African diaspora are manifested in a transnational context.
Meticulous in its analysis and insightful in its conclusions, Remixing Reggaeton is a welcome addition to the growing literature on reggaeton and music, race, and nation in the African diaspora. While larking in formal musical analysis and ethnographic perspectives, her findings will be of great interest to scholars of music and culture in the humanities and social sciences, including cultural studies and media and communications scholars, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and sociologists. Likewise, its theoretical foundations, analytical approach, content, conclusions, and accessible writing style make Remixing Reggaeton a useful classroom resource for both undergraduate and graduate level courses and is highly recommended for the collections of academic libraries at both research and teaching institutions.
FRANCISCO D. LARA
University of Memphis
