Abstract
Puerto Rican music and dance in Hawaiʻi derives from sugar plantation labor importations circa 1900. Separated from their home island, during the twentieth century, by two oceans, this population was relatively isolated from musical and other cultural currents in Puerto Rico and among Nuyoricans. Hawaiʻi Puerto Ricans largely trace their ancestries to Jíbaros, who in 1900 were largely independent subsistence farmers of the hilly interior. During the Spanish colonial period in Puerto Rico their self-image, embracing music, dance, and poetry, inclined toward the “Hispanic” end of the Hispanic-African continuum. During the twentieth century, however, the polarity between highland “white” Jíbaros and lowland Afro-Puerto Ricans narrowed considerably in Puerto Rico—a cultural coalescence which bypassed Hawaiʻi Puerto Ricans, who clung to their perceived Jíbaro heritage, greatly defined by music and dance. I maintain that the relative lack of communication during much of the twentieth century obliged Hawaii Puerto Ricans to turn culturally both inward and outward. They looked inward in an attempt to sustain their “White,” Hispanic narrative in the face of an encroaching “Black” component in music and dance culture. However, with little conduit to contemporary Puerto Rican music and dance culture, they were obliged to look outward to the wider Latin world for repertoire and instruments. In doing so, however, they repeatedly subjected innovations to what I call a “Jíbaro Filter”: a cultural lens via which they rationalized their local identity and renegotiated and reinterpreted the aesthetic criteria of global Latin cultures.
Presenters
Ted SolisProfessor of Musicology/Ethnomusicology, School of Music, Dance, and Theatre, Arizona State University, Arizona, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2021 Special Focus - Voices from the Edge: Negotiating the Local in the Global
KEYWORDS
Hawaii, Puerto Rican, Music, Dance, Hispanic, Afro-Puerto Rican
