No, I am not a Niuyorican; though, I once told a borderline-fascist island Puerto Rican friend that I was, in order to annoy him -he could have not stood the idea that I would be so. He knew that I was born, raised and university educated in the island and -according to his limited vision- could not be a Niuyorican: my Spanish was not like “theirs’” (had he been better informed, he would have known that many Niuyoricans spoke Spanish with more fluency and ranges than he did, and become aware that the formulation of a concept/idea/slogan never exists in a vacumn, including his poorly informed conceptualization of the Puerto Rican communities in the USA: “That’s how rumors start.”
Summers 1965, 1966: vacation trips that changed my life forever. At my uncle’s house in -currently sanitized and made fashionable by dressed up Millenials in 1980’s black outfits- Bushwick, Brooklyn, I met my cousins. They were born and raised in New York, and when I met them, they were dancing to Johnny Colón and Joey Pastrana’s boogaloo’s; not much later, replaced by the more commercialized salsa -mass produced, cleaned and depoliticized by the Fania mentality, eliminating self reflection, “LSD got hold on me”, remembering the time “when I felt the world was mine” or their social criticisms, “don’t listen to them, beeiibi, beeeibi; don’t listen them now.”
Colón and Pastrana’s boogaloos had a different mood; a mixture of Black America’s musical sadness, “a la blues”, and a great deal of diverse voices,”why don’t you leave him alone”, and stories “a lo plena puertorriqueña en una barriada de Ponce”, where “bochinche de la calle’ was integrated into the story, lyrics, “did you hear about that thing, man, did you hear about that thing”; became part of a song, a dance.
And yes, they/we danced; and how my cousins and their friends were dancing also made a mark in me, to never again follow the basic plena and guarachas’ steps I used to master back in the island. Suddenly, my arms and feet were following intricate arms and body movements that were -without losing the freedom- more geometric, interwoven and creative on the floor. My cousins were not only dancing, they were bringing what I knew to a different sense of joy, pleasure, and body possibilities, “what you talking about?”
Talking about a place where I found links to my past and open spaces for my future sense of my "self": from conservative, rigid, homophonic Guayama to the search for freedom in the City, even if it meant facing the past and transforming my views and ways of being or identifying its worth and be grateful for having been exposed to it.
I realized that I was educated with stories -Guanina, Tembandumba, cimarrones and arahuaco; crónicas de conquistadores, cuentos sobre revueltas de esclavos; Alonso, Hostos, Betances, Bracetti, Capetillo, Sarmiento, Rodó, Gallegos, Martí, Ibarbourou, Rodríguez de Tio, Palés Matos, Vasconcelos- recreating, describing, criticizing colonization, defending mestizaje as the foundation of our history and culture- was quite different from the black-white binary opposition told in USA narratives that were used to educate my cousins in the USA. And yet all those differences fusionned and became one, when Pastrana sang, “we’ve got to get together, beiiibi.”
Boogaloo Blues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXQm-QzJ7ig
That’s how rumors start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXrF3zttGC8
No comments:
Post a Comment