IRON FIST AGAINST RAP

In the 1980s, Luis Armando Lozada Cruz, more popularly known as Vico C, began listening to hip-hop. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Vico relocated to the Puerta de Tierra caserío in San Juan with his family as a young child. Vico C had enrolled in acting classes, and after honing his public speaking skills, began to experiment with rap. He related to the stories about "ghetto life" in songs by African American hip-hop artists such as Run DMC, Sugar Hill Gang, LL Cool J, Slick Rick, and KRS-One. Around 1985, Vico C won fifteen dollars in a hip-hop contest where he met DJ Negro, a young DJ who had been mixing hip-hop records. The two began to record mixtapes on cassettes. DJ Negro would borrow beats from popular U.S. hip-hop songs and Vico C would rap original lyrics over them. The songs ranged from party anthems to social and political commentary about issues facing marginalized youth in Puerto Rico's caseríos, or public housing developments. They would make about twenty or thirty copies of each tape and sell them in the caseríos between San Juan and Carolina, and eventually created a name for themselves in urban Puerto Rico.

Vico C is often described as a rapper rather than a reggaetonero; however, his music is also credited for paving the way for reggaetón. Vico C's popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s occurred with the development of Puerto Rican underground. The music's name referred to the literal distribution of cassettes in the economic "underground," or the informal economy. Musically, underground shares similar vocal styles and the consistent "boom-ch-boom-chick" rhythm with contemporary reggaetón; however, underground did not have the same slick productions and techno, pop, and R&B sounds of contemporary reggaetón. Rather, underground DJs pieced together samples from the popular Jamaican dancehall and U.S. American hip-hop songs of the time while rappers performed over them. Wayne Marshall argues that as underground became more commercialized in the late 1990s, the music grew increasingly "synthesized" when DJs began composing more original beats, relying on fewer direct dancehall and hip-hop samples. Lyrical themes centered more explicitly on sex and parties. During this time, new recordings by DJ Nelson (who is often credited with coining the term reggaetón) and DJ Blass popularized the term reggaetón to refer to their music. Although it is difficult to pinpoint the precise date when underground shifted to what we now know as reggaetón, underground music is often widely recognized as one of its precursors. Underground thus refers to the rap-dancehall fusions that developed and circulated within Puerto Rico's working class, urban barrios and caseríos from the 1980s until the 1990s without the backing of large record companies.

In addition to referring to music, the term underground also connotes a space that exists outside of the "mainstream." As something that is spatially located "below," one can think of the underground as the foundation for the things that exist above it. This idea of "underground" mirrors many of the arguments concerning the position of blackness as the counterpoint to whiteness within constructions of Western modernity. In Puerto Rico, underground is affiliated with an urban blackness understood to represent the opposite of white(ned) Puerto Rican identity in the popular imagination. In many ways, then, we might think of urban blackness as part of the symbolic "underground" of racial democracy, the image against which hegemonic constructions of Puerto Rican identities are founded.

This construction of urban blackness is located in specific places, namely the caseríos, where many underground artists and fans resided. Indeed, just as bomba became a cultural marker for folkloric blackness, underground and, later, reggaetón signified urban blackness in the eyes of many detractors. Many critics viewed underground as detached from Puerto Rican culture. In some cases, denunciations of underground represented the music as "foreign" because of its associations with U.S. rap. At other times, critics charged that underground promoted values and morals that departed from the "mainstream." Ultimately, such criticisms reinforced the alleged relationship between caseríos, urban blackness, and underground.

The power of underground, however, was not that it actually caused individuals to act out violently (as critics of the music claimed), but that underground artists and fans exposed the contradictions of dominant discourses of racial democracy. Although most underground was essentially party music, underground artists also addressed the racist and classist policies adversely affecting caseríos and other working-class and nonwhite communities in their songs. Moreover, underground incorporated a whole host of cultural practices, including fashion, hairstyles, and language, that reflected connections between the music's artists and fans and working-class, black communities elsewhere in the African diaspora. Indeed, underground may have responded to very local issues and places, but it did so by integrating global markers of blackness and engaging in larger diasporic politics. The diasporic nature of underground disrupted the very insular definitions of Puerto Rican national identity that emphasized Spanish heritage and devalued the contributions to the island of Afro–Puerto Ricans and Puerto Ricans living in the United States. Instead, it enabled underground artists and fans to express connections to Puerto Ricanness and the African diaspora simultaneously.

Underground thus exemplifies the ways that diasporic resources circulate across geographic sites and become incorporated into a cultural practice that developed in part out of experiences with racism on the local level. Several scholars including Mayra Santos-Febres, Jorge Giovannetti, and Raquel Z. Rivera have discussed the development of underground in Puerto Rico, including its creation as a youth culture, expression of life in the caseríos, and the impact that the Mano Dura Contra el Crimen campaign, a government-led anticrime initiative, had on its development. In this chapter, I do not intend to rehash the history of underground in Puerto Rico. Instead, I am interested in using underground to think about how diasporic resources work in local contexts. To fully grasp underground's interventions into Puerto Rican racial politics, it is necessary to examine both the music's ties to local places and its relationship to the broader African diaspora. I first explore the diasporic connections to hip-hop in the United States and dancehall in Jamaica, both of which not only serve as important musical influences on underground, but also developed from disenfranchised communities that faced similar circumstances as underground artists and fans in Puerto Rico. Then, I provide a brief...