Remixing Reggaetn: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico

About this book

Puerto Rico is often depicted as a "racial democracy" in which a history of race mixture has produced a racially harmonious society. In Remixing Reggaetn Petra R. Rivera-Rideau shows how reggaetn musicians critique racial democracys privileging of whiteness and concealment of racism by expressing identities that center blackness and African diasporic belonging. Stars such as Tego Caldern criticize the Puerto Rican mainstreams tendency to praise black culture but neglecting and marginalizing the islands black population while Ivy Queen the genres 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 reggaetn to its subsequent mass marketing to U.S. Latino listeners Rivera-Rideau traces reggaetns origins and its transformation from the music of San Juans slums into a global pop phenomenon. Reggaetn 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.