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Notes Introduction 1. Thanks to Ben Pacheco for some details here. 2. Claridad is Puerto Rico’s most read independentista newspaper. 3. In an e-mail note dated June 1, 2010, Adal Maldonado wrote me the following: In your text . . . you mention that Pedro and Papoleto presented you with a passport to Loisaida [Manhattan’s Lower East Side]/They may have articulated it to you in that way . . ., but the passport is a document that represents “El Spirit Republic de Puerto Rico” [which] could be seen as a metaphor for Loisaida, but . . . to stay in the spirit of the concept that distinction needs to be made clear. I remember you from Viequethon of course and am grateful to all of the poets and musicians who collaborated in the effort. But you may not have been aware of some of the behind the scenes stuff that made El Viequethon possible. [In fact,] the Viequethon idea was brought to El Puerto Rican Embassy by Ricardo Leon Peña Villa, who was our Ambassador of Journalism Without Border; and the steering committee of El Puerto Rican Embassy—Rev. Pedro Pietri, Adal Maldonado, Jesus Papoleto Meléndez, Sheila Candelario, and Alma Villegas —made it happen. Also, I personally was able to get from then Governor of Puerto Rico, Sila Calderón, a Proclamation proclaiming Vieques ‘La Isla de los Poetas.’” 4. For a take on gay performance, primarily by U.S. Puerto Ricans, see Larry La FountainStokes , Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (2009), with chapters on Luis Rafael Sánchez, Manuel Ramos Otero, Luz María Umpierre, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Rose Troche, Erika Lopez, Arthur Aviles, and Elizabeth Marrero. This book came out too recently for me to review in relation to my final draft. This is also the case with another recent take on Puerto Rican life and literature, Ramón Soto-Crespo’s Mainland Passage (2010). It would be interesting to note how this book reinforces or contradicts mine. 5. For a recent effort to relate Díaz-Quiñones’s arte de bregar to contemporary Latin American cultural studies theory and then apply the concept to cultural politics under Muñoz-Marín, see Catherine Marsh Kennedy, 2009. 6. For a pioneering effort to evaluate Jewish–Puerto Rican relations and attitudes, see Jesús Colón, “The Jewish People and Us,” in Colón 1993, 65–66. i-xxx_1-202_Zimm.indd 145 7/14/11 10:43 AM 146 N O T E S T O C H A P T E R S 1 A N D 2 chapter 1. puerto rican and chicano crossovers in Latino Film and Music culture 1. Another recent take on Lopez and Selena, including the Afro-colonial question underlined earlier in Rodríguez Juliá, is found in Negrón-Muntaner’s Boricua Pop (2004), 228–46. 2. On a related note, just as Marc Anthony was touted as the Rican Sinatra, Hector Lavoe ’s professional name is a Boricua version of Sinatra’s nickname, “The Voice”—though clearly the “colonial difference” (and the “coloniality of power”—see note 6, below) must ultimately mitigate against overplaying any Italian-Rican connections, unless we wish to get into Sicily’s role as an Italian colony. Still, on some levels, as I’ve noted, “Latin” once referred to both Italians and Puerto Ricans—though clearly the African American connection was to be key (see further on in this essay and in subsequent notes). 3. Even though some Mexican males may seek Puerto Rican women in the quest for legalization or welfare benefits, I would venture that the number of lasting marriages between U.S.-based Puerto Rican men and Mexican women is much higher. When confronted with Latinos of mixed national origins, researchers frequently ask about the nationality of the mother, to determine the stronger identity. In Chicago, a Mexirican answer to my purposely mumbled, almost inaudible question is eight times out of ten, “¿mande?” Now if that isn’t erasing the Puerto Rican, what is? 4. For a study of Mexican–Puerto Rican relations in Chicago, treated in terms of Chicago ’s initial Rican settlement, see Elena Padilla’s dissertation of 1947; for later developments , see Félix Padilla (1985), and the recent book by Nick De Genova and Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas (2003). A book edited by Mérida Rua centering on Padilla has just been published by the University of Illinois Press. 5. See Laó-Montes, “Introduction: Mambo Montage,” and above...