Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico - Hardcover

"Remixing Reggaeton makes an extensive contribution to the literature on both Puerto Rican and African diaspora studies. . . . The book offers a refreshing take on the potentiality of cultural production to rewrite the narrative of la gran familia puertorriquena and generate more inclusive notions of Puerto Ricanness. In the end, Rivera-Rideau not only decenters whiteness in her work, but also foregrounds the messiness of Puerto Rican identities." -- Julie Torres * Latino Studies * "Petra R. Rivera-Rideau's Remixing Reggaeton presents an insightful reading of reggaeton as a discursive cultural practice inextricably linked to the experience of blackness in the African diaspora.... Well written and organized, and convincingly argued, her timely study resonates with and contributes significantly to current academic understandings of music, race, gender, sexuality, and nation, and their intersections within the context of the African diaspora." -- Francisco D. Lara * Notes * "In Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico, Petra R. Rivera-Rideau has created an insightful and engaging work of music scholarship that forms an important contribution to the literature on Caribbean and Latin American music." -- Gregory J. Robinson * Music Reference Services Quarterly * "Remixing Reggaeton adroitly accomplishes the twin tasks of providing readers with a comprehensive chronological account of reggaeton's development until the present, while at the same time placing its trajectory within the context of changing race relations and contested racial identities in Puerto Rico and beyond." -- Deborah Pacini Hernandez * Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies *

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