Journal articles on the topic 'Puerto Rican Folk poetry'

Abstract This article reads the affective charge of ethnonationalism and antiblackness in Puerto Rican poetics and performance. Moving from the “legible” affect in Afro–Puerto Rican feminist poet Julia de Burgos's ethnonational poetry to the “illegible” affect experienced on stage by Afro–Puerto Rican queer theater and performance artist Javier Cárdona Otero, this article provides a fragmented trajectory of the antiblack and white supremacist affective violence constitutive of art-making in Puerto Rico. In doing so, it locates an aesthetic collusion between ethnonationalism and antiblackness that in turn illuminates how the aesthetics of Puerto Ricanness can be antiblack, a claim that calls into question Puerto Rican nationalism's desire or need for ethnic difference.

Working as principal investigator and head of the translation team for El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña / the Puerto Rican Literature Project (PRLP)—a free, bilingual, user-friendly, and open access digital portal that anyone can use to learn about and teach Puerto Rican poetry—has provided the author with insight about the colonial conditions that structure translation as word-making practice, survival strategy, and decolonial methodology. In collaborating with Puerto Rican writers, translators, investigators, and scholars and sustaining a dialogue with a long history of personal and collective archival work, the author has at times found, in collaboration with literary peers, that Puerto Ricans often act as self-translators, archivists, and historians, while navigating the conditional visibility and general invisibilization of their modes of speech, their literatures, and their lives.

This study aims at tracing the effect of the two worlds, Puerto Rico and the United States of America, on the poetry of the Latin American poet, Victor Hernandez Cruz (1949 - ). The study begins with a cultural background about the Puerto Rican indigenous culture and the Puerto Rican diaspora in the City of New York. The study, then, discusses one of Cruz’s poems focusing on the ideas of alienation, nostalgia, consciousness, and bilingualism tracing his cultural adaptation throughout the process. It is concluded with the fact whether Cruz culturally adapted to the U.S. literary mainstream or not.

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.

Abstract The effects of neocolonialism, multilingualism, and forced migration on the United States Puerto Rican community have produced notable literary expressions that merit further study for their use of code-switching and hybridization. Using Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the “Borderland” as a framework, this paper explores “Nuyorican” poetry as well as the bilingual, bicultural reality for Puerto Ricans in the United States who cross both physical and metaphorical borders and who find liberation living in between languages and cultures.

The objective of this article is to study the texts on the polemic generated between 1932 and 1933 about the existence of Antillean poetry and the presence of the black theme in Puerto Rican national literature. The main texts of the controversy have been analysed from the perspective of socio-critical theory to identify the social-historical themes addressed by the writers involved. This research has made it possible to establish a relationship between the debate that arose and the conception of the Puerto Rican national imaginary defended by its main participants: Luis Palés Matos and José I. de Diego Padró.

This collection of nine poems highlights the highly-charged political landscape of Puerto Rico through pointed criticism and poignant nostalgic imagery. Curet follows in the vein of decades of Puerto Rican resistance poetry, and the reality and scope of the nation's struggle seethes through each line and stanza. These poems are replete with repetition, utilized effectively to illustrate the ongoing instability of the nation across generations.

Abstract Vincent Toro’s poetry and essays critique the ways that US actions in the wake of natural disasters damage Puerto Rican ecologies and culture. The entwinement of colonialism and natural disaster is the subject of Toro’s two collections, Stereo. Island. Mosaic. (2016) and Tertulia (2020). These collections instruct readers to toggle between close reading of language and formal analysis of genre and shape. In Stereo, Toro produces a geo-formal poetics that takes a Taíno hurricane zemi as its central organizing form, an aesthetic choice that foregrounds non-Western literary forms in communicating Puerto Rican economic and ecological atmospheres. In Toro’s collections, the air and atmosphere are sites where anti-colonial critique and aesthetic innovation merge.

Bomba is an emblematic Puerto Rican musical genre that emerged 400 years ago from the colonial plantations where West African slaves and their descendants worked. It remains one of the most popular forms of folk music on the island and serves as significant evidence of its rich African heritage. This article explores the main components of bomba by making them more accessible to those that have not experienced it from an insider’s perspective. The material presented in this article provides a learning sequence that could take the form of several lessons, or even a curricular unit. Transcriptions of rhythms typically learned aurally are also included.

Based on fieldwork in Puerto Rico, this article examines the views on health hazards of residents in a semi-rural community in relation to the influx of industrial development since the early 1970s. It is suggested that “folk” terminology and particular aspects of Puerto Rican culture are less significant in this instance than many studies in medical anthropology suggest. The focus is on the emergence of a protest movement concerned with health problems which community residents and workers attribute to a nearby Union Carbide factory. Residents of El Ingenio, Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, have brought a law suit against Union Carbide and, the management of the plant has attempted to dispel the conflict. The article argues that health concerns of residents, industrial workers, and plant management cannot be interpreted without taking into account problems of unemployment, political affiliations, and company policies and their impact over time.

In the past, popular Catholicism in Latin America and the Caribbean was perceived with suspicion by liberation theologians and official Roman Catholicism for its eccentricities, lack of doctrinal coherence, and fears of syncretism with folk religions. Nowadays, popular Catholicism in Latin America and the Caribbean has been a source of theological reflection, ecumenism, and religious revitalization. The apparition of the Holy Mother in 1953 at barrio Rincón in Sabana Grande, Puerto Rico, is a case study in global Catholicism that exemplifies this turn to see popular Catholicism as a source of liberation, perseverance, and deep spiritual devotion by the faithful. Using cultural, social, and reception historiography, the article argues that the Puerto Rican faithful were not passive recipients of the literary narratives of journalists covering the events as narrated by the main protagonists, the children/seers, but rather themselves formulators of history through their reception and participation. This is demonstrated by the allegiances of the faithful to popular Catholicism and their rejection of the official mandates of the clergy to ignore the events taking place at barrio Rincón regarding the apparition of the Virgin.

Abstract This article traces the figure of polvo (dust) across the writing career of Puerto Rican and New York writer Manuel Ramos Otero. Polvo heralds the macabre sensuality of his early short stories, long before his diagnosis with HIV, and persists and morphs through his later essays and poetry up until his eventual death in 1990 from AIDS complications. Writing defiantly as a queer, a feminist, a Puerto Rican, and a sidoso, he produced work that invites death and desire to commingle through a figuration of dust, as a scattered substance that covers skin, coats translation, and dirties conventional genres. Polvo illuminates the dimensions and risks of relation as a particulate matter that exposes our porosity—clinging and hovering in the space between bodies, between the past and the future, between life and death. As the dust settles in the wake of Hurricane María, so too can polvo be read as prescient for how coloniality lingers as enduring conditions of debility and precarity. Ramos Otero's affinity for finitude, figured through polvo, counterintuitively conjures a relational desire that privileges the porous, the marginal, and the always precarious possibility of survival. Polvo moves across the different genres and phases of Ramos Otero's work as a matter that refuses to disentangle the material realities of queerness and coloniality.

In literary theory, the works of (ethnic) minority authors–and similarly, the works of authors dealing with minorities–are often referred to as “assimilation narrative.” This term tends to suggest that minority authors, who write in the language of their country, seek a place in society through assimilation. Assimilation, however, means melting up in the majority nation by adopting all the values, customs and way of life characteristic of the majority, and abandoning, leaving behind, giving up the original traditional values, ethics, lifestyle, religion etc. of the minority. Assimilation means disappearing without a trace, continuing life as a new person, with new values, language, a whole set of new cultural assets. In this paper an effort is made to show that this is in fact not what many of the ethnic minority writers look for, so the term assimilation narrative is in many, although certainly not all, the cases, erroneuosly applied. It is justified to make a distinction between assimilation and integration narratives, as the two are not the same. In the paper examples are provided from Hispanic-American literature (Mexican-American, Puerto Rican and Dominican), across a range of genres from prose through drama to poetry, and also, examples are discussed when the author does in fact seek assimilation, as well as stories in which neither assimilation, nor integration is successful.

-Selwyn R. Cudjoe, John Thieme, The web of tradition: uses of allusion in V.S. Naipaul's fiction,-A. James Arnold, Josaphat B. Kubayanda, The poet's Africa: Africanness in the poetry of Nicolás Guillèn and Aimé Césaire. Westport CT: Greenwood, 1990. xiv + 176 pp.-Peter Mason, Robin F.A. Fabel, Shipwreck and adventures of Monsieur Pierre Viaud, translated by Robin F.A. Fabel. Pensacola: University of West Florida Press, 1990. viii + 141 pp.-Alma H. Young, Robert B. Potter, Urbanization, planning and development in the Caribbean, London: Mansell Publishing, 1989. vi + 327 pp.-Hymie Rubinstein, Raymond T. Smith, Kinship and class in the West Indies: a genealogical study of Jamaica and Guyana, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. xiv + 205 pp.-Shepard Krech III, Richard Price, Alabi's world, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. xx + 445 pp.-Graham Hodges, Sandra T. Barnes, Africa's Ogun: Old world and new, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989. xi + 274 pp.-Pamela Wright, Philippe I. Bourgois, Ethnicity at work: divided labor on a Central American banana plantation, Baltimore MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1989. xviii + 311 pp.-Idsa E. Alegría-Ortega, Andrés Serbin, El Caribe zona de paz? geopolítica, integración, y seguridad, Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad, 1989. 188 pp. (Paper n.p.) [Editor's note. This book is also available in English: Caribbean geopolitics: towards security through peace? Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner, 1990.-Gary R. Mormino, C. Neale Ronning, José Martí and the émigré colony in Key West: leadership and state formation, New York; Praeger, 1990. 175 pp.-Gary R. Mormino, Gerald E. Poyo, 'With all, and for the good of all': the emergence of popular nationalism in the Cuban communities of the United States, 1848-1898, Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1989. xvii + 182 pp.-Fernando Picó, Raul Gomez Treto, The church and socialism in Cuba, translated from the Spanish by Phillip Berryman. Maryknoll NY: Orbis, 1988. xii + 151 pp.-Fernando Picó, John M. Kirk, Between God and the party: religion and politics in revolutionary Cuba. Tampa FL: University of South Florida Press, 1989. xxi + 231 pp.-Andrés Serbin, Carmen Gautier Mayoral ,Puerto Rico en la economía política del Caribe, Río Piedras PR; Ediciones Huracán, 1990. 204 pp., Angel I. Rivera Ortiz, Idsa E. Alegría Ortega (eds)-Andrés Serbin, Carmen Gautier Mayoral ,Puerto Rico en las relaciones internacionales del Caribe, Río Piedras PR: Ediciones Huracán, 1990. 195 pp., Angel I. Rivera Ortiz, Idsa E. Alegría Ortega (eds)-Jay R. Mandle, Jorge Heine, A revolution aborted : the lessons of Grenada, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990. x + 351 pp.-Douglas Midgett, Rhoda Reddock, Elma Francois: the NWCSA and the workers' struggle for change in the Caribbean in the 1930's, London: New Beacon Books, 1988. vii + 60 pp.-Douglas Midgett, Susan Craig, Smiles and blood: the ruling class response to the workers' rebellion of 1937 in Trinidad and Tobago, London: New Beacon Books, 1988. vii + 70 pp.-Ken Post, Carlene J. Edie, Democracy by default: dependency and clientelism in Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, and Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991. xiv + 170 pp.-Ken Post, Trevor Munroe, Jamaican politics: a Marxist perspective in transition, Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann Publishers (Caribbean) and Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991. 322 pp.-Wendell Bell, Darrell E. Levi, Michael Manley: the making of a leader, Athens GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990, 349 pp.-Wim Hoogbergen, Mavis C. Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655-1796: a history of resistance, collaboration and betrayal, Granby MA Bergin & Garvey, 1988. vi + 296 pp.-Kenneth M. Bilby, Rebekah Michele Mulvaney, Rastafari and reggae: a dictionary and sourcebook, Westport CT: Greenwood, 1990. xvi + 253 pp.-Robert Dirks, Jerome S. Handler ,Searching for a slave cemetery in Barbados, West Indies: a bioarcheological and ethnohistorical investigation, Carbondale IL: Center for archaeological investigations, Southern Illinois University, 1989. xviii + 125 pp., Michael D. Conner, Keith P. Jacobi (eds)-Gert Oostindie, Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and in Surinam 1791/1942, Assen, Maastricht: Van Gorcum, 1990. xii + 812 pp.-Rosemarijn Hoefte, Alfons Martinus Gerardus Rutten, Apothekers en chirurgijns: gezondheidszorg op de Benedenwindse eilanden van de Nederlandse Antillen in de negentiende eeuw, Assen/Maastricht: Van Gorcum, 1989. xx + 330 pp.-Rene A. Römer, Luc Alofs ,Ken ta Arubiano? sociale integratie en natievorming op Aruba, Leiden: Department of Caribbean studies, Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology, 1990. xi + 232 pp., Leontine Merkies (eds)-Michiel van Kempen, Benny Ooft et al., De nacht op de Courage - Caraïbische vertellingen, Vreeland, the Netherlands: Basispers, 1990.-M. Stevens, F.E.R. Derveld ,Winti-religie: een Afro-Surinaamse godsdienst in Nederland, Amersfoort, the Netherlands: Academische Uitgeverij Amersfoort, 1988. 188 pp., H. Noordegraaf (eds)-Dirk H. van der Elst, H.U.E. Thoden van Velzen ,The great Father and the danger: religious cults, material forces, and collective fantasies in the world of the Surinamese Maroons, Dordrecht, the Netherlands and Providence RI: Foris Publications, 1988. xiv + 451 pp. [Second printing, Leiden: KITLV Press, 1991], W. van Wetering (eds)-Johannes M. Postma, Gert Oostindie, Roosenburg en Mon Bijou: twee Surinaamse plantages, 1720-1870, Dordrecht, Netherlands: Foris Publications, 1989. x + 548 pp.-Elizabeth Ann Schneider, John W. Nunley ,Caribbean festival arts: each and every bit of difference, Seattle/St. Louis: University of Washington Press / Saint Louis Art Museum, 1989. 217 pp., Judith Bettelheim (eds)-Bridget Brereton, Howard S. Pactor, Colonial British Caribbean newspapers: a bibliography and directory, Westport CT: Greenwood, 1990. xiii + 144 pp.-Marian Goslinga, Annotated bibliography of Puerto Rican bibliographies, compiled by Fay Fowlie-Flores. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1990. xxvi + 167 pp.

Puerto Ricans in north Philadelphia experience marginalization in the larger culture, but also incorporation into the multiple ethnicities that have historically made up Puerto Rican identity. Both of these experiences are reflected in the art of Taller Puertorriqueño, an arts education program for children and youth in the area. Taller permits social and cultural mobility as well as freedom of artistic expression by constantly pushing boundaries, allowing students to represent more authentic reflections of their values as a means of dealing with cultural ambiguity. In addition, they rewrite their oppressive history by leveraging human and cultural values embedded in their artistic language. Taller is a mission-oriented institution that uses art for social transformation in the community and for celebrating a fluid ethnic and social identity. Though not a religious institution, Taller’s art reflects the religious commitments of the Puerto Rican community, enacts the liturgy of art in ways that contribute to God’s transformative kingdom, and thereby helps to promote good stewardship throughout the community.

El presente trabajo plantea un modelo de intervención de musicoterapia comunitaria en el que se utiliza el género musical afrodescendiente de la Bomba como herramienta para medir y aportar al desarrollo de la identidad durante la adolescencia. Se busca que, mediante la integración de la bomba a la sesión de musicoterapia, la visión que el adolescente tenga sobre si mismo mejore. Este modelo de tera- pia propone impactar un hogar para mujeres jóvenes, víctimas de violencia y/o abuso, de edades entre 12 a 18 años, que viven bajo la custodia del gobierno. Utilizando la música correspondiente a un contexto cultural específico se espera atender aspectos de la identidad cubriendo las áreas cognitiva, social, emocional, fisiológica y musical. Con esta propuesta se pretende generar interés en los musicoterapeutas por el estudio de todos los géneros musicales desarrollados en Puerto Rico, lo que les permitirá ganar recursos musicales alternati- vos y adicionales para atender a distintas comunidades del país. Además, este modelo de sesión abre un espacio para que la musicoterapia continúe explorando y estudiando la relevancia que tiene la utilización de la música folklórica en la musicoterapia comunitaria en nuestro contexto histórico actual. Palabras clave: Musicoterapia comunitaria, bomba puertorriqueña, autoconcepto, música folklórica, adolescencia. Abstract The present work proposes a community music therapy intervention model in which the Afro-descendant musical genre of Bomba is used as a tool to measure and contribute to the development of identity during adolescence. It is intended that, by integrating the Bomba into the music therapy session, the adolescent's vision of himself improves.This therapy model proposes to impact a home for young women, victims of violence and/or abuse between the ages of 12 to 18, who live in government custody. Using music corresponding to a specific cultural context, it is expected to address aspects of identity covering cognitive, social, emotional, physiological and musical areas. This proposal also aims to generate interest among music therapists in the study of all musical genres developed in Puerto Rico, which allows them to gain alternative and additional musical resources to serve different communities in the country. Furthermore, this session model opens a space for Music Therapy to continue exploring and studying the relevance of the use of folk music in community music therapy in our current historical context. Keywords:CommunityMusicTherapy,PuertoRicanbomba,self-concept,folkloricmusic,adolescence.