Academic literature on the topic 'Music, puerto rican'

Abstract. Understanding human phenomena requires an in-depth analysis of the interconnectedness that arises from a particular culture and its history. Subjectivity as well as a collective subjectivity emerges from human productions such as language and art in a specific time and place. In this article, we explore the role of African-based popular music genres such as bomba and plena as ways of negotiating narratives about Puerto Rican society. Popular music encompasses diverse meanings. Puerto Rican folk music’s subjectivity provides narratives that distance Puerto Ricans from an individualistic cosmovision, allowing us to understand the social and political dimensions of this complex Caribbean culture. The events of the summer of 2019, which culminated in the ousting of governor Ricardo Rosselló from his position, illustrate how music can foster social change.

Rosario Ferré’s 1986 novella Maldito amor takes its name from a famous Puerto Rican danza written toward the end of the 19th century by composer Juan Morel Campos, who had both African and Spanish heritage. This article explores the tradition of the danza, the significance of Ferré’s use and mirroring of Morel Campos’s danza in the narrative, as well as the signifying process she explores and manipulates in an effort to question official versions of Puerto Rican history. By using the composer’s danza as a subtext for the structure and themes of the novel, Maldito amor creates another set of signifiers for how we consider this traditional piece of music. The title of the novel also demonstrates the ambivalent attitudes that Puerto Ricans often have toward the ruling elite on the island itself: the bourgeoisie function as both hegemonic power but are also oppressed under that of the United States. By re-writing history via the “Maldito amor” danza, the novella recognizes the constant chain of signifiers that constitutes reality, and adds a new and subversive one to include in the chain of discourse surrounding Puerto Rican history and identity.

Margarita “Doña Margot” Rivera García (1909–2000) was a black working-class Puerto Rican woman whose labor as a composer, healer, midwife, and spiritual medium made her an esteemed community leader among her neighbors from Santurce, a predominantly black enclave in San Juan. Through her bomba and plena compositions, she helped forge modern black Puerto Rican music amid the rapid industrialization of Puerto Rico after the 1950s. However, her story has been overshadowed by the aura of her son, the legendary Afro–Puerto Rican singer Ismael “Maelo” Rivera (1931–87). Although Doña Margot is praised as a maternal figure who gave Maelo the gift of rhythm, her story as a woman and artist has remained widely unheard. This essay examines her parallel presence and erasure in salsa historiography, taking her testimonios about her musical gift as offering a counternarrative that defies masculinist music histories and serves as a site of memory that endures erasure.

In order to bring music of Puerto Rico to the general music classroom, it is important to understand the sociocultural and sociohistorical context of the music. The traditional genre of plena shares cultural threads with West Africa, Spain, and indigenous (Taíno) culture. Commonly known as El Periodico Cantado (the singing newspaper), plena songs give updates on what people are feeling and current events effecting the community. The plena song Que Bonita Bandera (What a Beautiful Flag) is explored for its potential uses in elementary and secondary general music classes.

Based in a sociophonetic analysis of lyrics performed by eight male Reggaeton artists of Puerto Rican origin, this study combines raciolinguistic and variationist frameworks to examine the frequency of occurrence and underlying linguistic, musicological, and poetic factors conditioning the distribution of the lateral variant of syllable- and word-final alveolar tap /ɾ/. Given that this trait is regarded as a distinctive characteristic of Puerto Rican Spanish capable of indexing in-group membership alongside positive assessments of Puerto Rican national identity, the study explores the implementation of this feature in popular performances of Puerto Ricanness in the context of global Latin Urban Music (Delgado Díaz et al. 2021, Medina Rivera 1997, Valentín Márquez 2015).The results show that lateralization is more frequently used by contemporary reggaetoneros like Bad Bunny and Ozuna, whose professional careers began in an era in which Reggaeton enjoyed global accessibility, contrasted to the pioneering artists of the genre such as Daddy Yankee and Nicky Jam, who use the variant significantly less frequently. Additionally, the results suggest that, while the most recent tracks performed by newer artists exhibit the highest rates of occurrence, the inverse is true for artists whose careers began in the early 2000s before the global consumption of Reggaeton, who are documented as decreasing use of [l] in what is interpreted as an attempt to distinguish their works from younger performers. This work contributes to the growing literature regarding the linguistic construction of performative identities permeating the popular music industry, offering insight into the racialization of [l] as a distinct Puerto Rican feature relative to expressions of ethnonational pride