Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, “Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico” (Duke UP, 2015)

New Books in African American Studies · Apr 12, 2017 · 1h

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: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico (Duke University Press, 2015), 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. From censorship campaigns on the island that sought to devalue reggaeton, to its subsequent mass marketing to U.S. Latino listeners, Rivera-Rideau traces…