My research focus on the intersection of race, gender, colonialism, and musical expressions in Puerto Rican and Caribbean societies.

Research Abstracts:

This research aims to fill this gap by exploring the connection between plena, collective memories, and the construction of historical narratives in the so-called plenazos callejeros (unplanned plena gatherings). I argue that, although ephemeral, these socio-musical spaces are venues where participatory-based music-making implicitly creates representations of the past. Therefore, I also propose that plenazos callejeros become foundations for historical narratives among the genre's practitioners and enthusiasts. The research draws on an autoethnographic reflection as a musician in impromptu plena gatherings and music performances, textual analysis of plenas songs, and open and semi-structured interviews with contemporary plena practitioners and enthusiasts. Some of the questions that guide this research are: What resources does plena provide to foster collective memory? How could a community of practitioners, possibly unassumingly, agree on what should be preserved and pass on to younger generations? How plena become a mnemonic resource that links past and present realities? In what way does plena work as an intermediary between the past and the present?

Dissonant Discourses: The Afro-Puerto Rican Bomba and Racial Ideology in Puerto Rico at the dawn of the 20th century.

At the end of the 19th century, the discourse of socio-racial harmony, euphemistically coined as the Great Puerto Rican Family, sought to create and celebrate a harmonious conciliation of all members of Puerto Rican society. The Great Puerto Rican family resulted from the dominant group's rhetorical manipulations to perpetuate their social and political privileges. This social construct concealed the fissures, divisions, and scarce political participation of Afro-Puerto Ricans. This research aims to contextualize the relationship between the alleged racial harmony advocated by the elite and the Afro-Puerto Rican musical genre of Bomba. What practical and symbolic effects had the socio-racial discourse about this musical practice? Based on archival work, the research highlights that Bomba—an essential reference of Afro-Puerto Rican identities—was subject to regulations and prohibitions of state institutions. On the one hand, I proposed that these regulations pointed to the exclusion of these musical practices from their community and the national imaginary. Yet, on the other hand, the suppression of Bomba was a paradoxical recognition of black Puerto Ricans' culture. Finally, it argues that paradoxically, the elite's recognition became necessary to legitimize and justify the racial discourse of homogeneity.

Listening to our new Possessions: Music and Imperial Writings on Puerto Rico and Cuba, 1898-1930

The imperial gaze that followed the United States invasion of Puerto Rico and Cuba after 1898 nurtured a literary corpus that both speculated about the islands' economic possibilities and revealed an exotic fascination about the customs and life of its inhabitants. The written descriptions made by war correspondents, journalists, military personnel, adventurers, and opportunists alike were incisive and anchored on premises of cultural and racial superiority that nurtured an imperial discourse that reinforced uneven power relations between the United States and Puerto Rico and Cuba. Under this new colonial paradigm, not only would the United States economically benefit, but Puerto Rico and Cuba would also obtain the necessary tutelage to become politically, socially, and culturally “civilized.” Therefore, the imperial discourse implied a hierarchical order in which the United States held a higher political, economic, social, and moral position while concurrently suggesting the absence of civilized culture and society in both Islands. This discourse was strengthened by the use and popularity of certain aesthetic ideas that classified the Caribbean Islands' music. The pregón of a bread or fruit vendor or the strum of a guitar or the Tres Cubano were listened to and culturally decoded in books, magazines, and newspapers. This decoding occurred in the translation between what the colonial agents heard and what they wrote: an ideologically process that hierarchized sounds and music according to a Europeanizing aesthetic canon. This article suggests that the sonorous discourse—a dimension of the emerging US colonial discourse towards the Caribbean—was racially and politically suitable to fit the United States' political and economic agendas towards Puerto Rico and Cuba. Therefore, the transformation of the sonorous world into texts was not a politically innocuous description of cultural manifestations but a subtle subterfuge to justify and perpetuate new ways of domination in the Caribbean.

The Fluctuations of Danza: Music as a Contested Terrain of National Identity in Puerto Rico during the 1930s

This research traces the efforts of the most conservative Puerto Rican society to renew the decaying genre of the Danza during the 1930s. It argues that this elite-driven revitalization was in response to the gradual incorporation of the otherwise socially and racially marginalized sectors of Puerto Rican society into national culture and politics. In the 1930s, a decade of significant political and social changes, validating a sense of cultural and social hegemony, was fundamental for an emerging ruling class that aimed to lead the country out of economic depression and consolidate its political, economic, and social power. Symbolically, the new Afro-Cuban sounds, then in vogue, represented a sonorous menace to the hierarchical socio-cultural order that the Danza evoked. Music and the intellectual debate that it prompted became a contested terrain where national and cultural identities were debated.