Spring 2022 BCC Puerto Rico Research Tour

Licia Fiol-Matta traces the careers of four iconic Puerto Rican singers--Myrta Silva, Ruth Fernández, Ernestina Reyes, and Lucecita Benítez--to explore how their voices and performance style transform the possibilities for comprehending the figure of the woman singer. Fiol-Matta shows how these musicians, despite seemingly intractable demands to represent gender norms, exercised their artistic and political agency by challenging expectations of how they should look, sound, and act.

Puerto Rico is often depicted as a "racial democracy" in which a history of race mixture has produced a racially harmonious society. In Remixing Reggaetón, Petra R. Rivera-Rideau shows how reggaetón musicians critique racial democracy's privileging of whiteness and concealment of racism by expressing identities that center blackness and African diasporic belonging.

Portrays the complex politics of gender, sex, class, and race in Puerto Rican salsa music.

A hybrid of reggae and rap, reggaeton is a music with Spanish-language lyrics and Caribbean aesthetics that has taken Latin America, the United States, and the world by storm. Superstars--including Daddy Yankee, Don Omar, and Ivy Queen--garner international attention, while aspiring performers use digital technologies to create and circulate their own tracks. Reggaeton brings together critical assessments of this wildly popular genre. Journalists, scholars, and artists delve into reggaeton's local roots and its transnational dissemination; they parse the genre's aesthetics, particularly in relation to those of hip-hop; and they explore the debates about race, nation, gender, and sexuality generated by the music and its associated cultural practices, from dance to fashion.

As the populations of Latin American and Caribbean background in the USA proliferate, it becomes all the more important to understand the distinctions among nationalities and regional groups. To this end, this text investigates the historical experience of Puerto Ricans in New York.

"Examines the history and contributions of hip hop to American and global culture"
Link provided is to entry on Reggaetón

Puerto Rico's rich musical history is chronicled in Donald Thompson's translated texts, a history that is often unavailable to those who do not read Spanish easily. Music in Puerto Rico details the Caribbean island's musical roots from Christopher Columbus' second voyage to the New World in the late fifteenth century to twentieth century developments. It explores a multitude of topics, including native instruments, the introduction of music in schools, folk traditions, the legendary salsa, urban pop, and commercial music. The volume also examines musical differences in various regions, including mountains and plains.

The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edition will be the largest, most comprehensive reference publication on American Music.
Entry on Puerto Rico includes the following:
1. Pre-Columbian societies.
2. Early church music.
3. Bomba.
4. Seis.
5. Secular festivities and institutions.
6. Danza.
7. Plena.
8. Salsa.
9. Reggaeton.
10. Bolero.
11. Classical composition since the 1950s.
12. Musical institutions.