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  • Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico by Petra R. Rivera-Rideau
  • Francisco D. Lara
Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico. By Petra R. Rivera-Rideau. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. [xii, 224 p. ISBN 9780822359456 (hardcover), $84.95; ISBN 9780822359647 (paperback), $23.95; ISBN 9780822375258 (e-book), varies] Notes, bibliography, index.

Petra R. Rivera-Rideau's Remixing Reggaetón presents an insightful reading of reggaetón as a discursive cultural practice inextricably linked to the experience of blackness in the African diaspora. In her analysis of reggaetón artists, song lyrics, music videos, and media coverage, she describes how the genre's origins and development, representation, and perception at the same time illuminate, challenge, reify, and transform conceptions of blackness and national identity in Puerto Rico. Well written and organized, and convincingly argued, her timely study resonates with and contributes significantly to current aca demic understandings of music, race, gender, sexuality, and nation, and their intersections within the context of the African diaspora.

Reggaetón presents a rich and unique lens through which to explore these intersections. A discursive and multivalent genre with local roots and transnational linkages connecting Puerto Rico, New York, Jamaica, and Panama, reggaetón resists facile categorization, thanks to its multiple racial, ethnic, and national associations. At the same time, and as a result of its origins and popular association with blackness, the genre is discursively linked to hegemonic racial hierarchies reified in dominant discourses of race and national identity in Puerto Rico, the United States, and throughout much of the African diaspora.

Thoughtful in its approach, Remixing Reggaetón consists of five chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion. While the introduction and conclusion serve to contextualize the study and outline the limitations of the analysis, the five remaining chapters each explore a different aspect of reggaetón's development, addressing its complex origins, reception, key figures, and diverse manifestations as they relate to the dynamics of race and racism that inform political, popular, and academic perceptions of the genre in Puerto Rico and the United States.

In her introduction, Rivera-Rideau presents the major questions, issues, and theories that fed her research, as well as her primary arguments and a chapter outline. In the process, she problematizes the Puerto Rican myth of racial democracy and reggaetón's perceived association in the popular imagination with either blackness or Latinidad. She argues instead for an understanding of reggaetón as a "cultural practice of diaspora" (p. 11), or a multivalent form of expressive culture that allows its practitioners to challenge and reshape local notions of blackness in making meaningful connections with other marginalized communities in diaspora. As Rivera-Rideau argues, reggaetón "constitutes a space for Puerto Rican youth to engage in practices of self-fashioning that respond to local [End Page 81] racial politics and express an affinity with African diasporic populations" (p. 13). In subsequent chapters, Rivera-Rideau meticulously bears out this argument through her analysis while also noting the limitations of reggaetón's ability to upend racial stereotypes.

Chapter 1, "Iron Fist against Rap," explores global diasporic connections and local dynamics of race and racism in the formation, representation, and reception of underground, a genre of Puerto Rican urban rap considered a precursor of reggaetón. Originating in the late 1980s and early 1990s, underground emerged from the Puerto Rican caseríos, the predominantly black urban public housing developments that became the focus of a governmental anti-violence campaign referred to as mano dura contra el crimen (iron fist against crime) during the 1990s. As Rivera-Rideau shows in the first third of the chapter, underground's characteristic musical elements, associated cultural practices, and aesthetics reveal the complex links between Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Panama, and New York City that resulted from migration and transnational circuits of cultural exchange. Establishing underground as an "exemplary circum-Carribbean music" (p. 33), Rivera-Rideau proceeds to show, through an analysis of newspaper articles and underground song lyrics and music videos, how underground artists made use of the resources of the diaspora in challenging perceptions of blackness and Puerto Ricanness. At the same...

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