Ramón López
Now that the Puerto Rican people number seven million, the once-distant shores of the Island and the Mainland—the realms of the People and the Diaspora—draw ever closer. The ease of air travel and the shared bonds of U.S. citizenship, together with the rapid advances in communication, place Puerto Ricans on both sides of the sea in new and intimate proximity. After nearly a century as a divided nation, this divided people gathers once more in a shared will toward reconnection.
Recent struggles—whether for the release of political prisoners or against the Navy’s presence in Vieques—have laid bare the necessary interdependence and complementarity of Puerto Rican political life across both lands. At the same time, an exuberant, effervescent cultural nationalism—so vividly expressed in music, sports, and fashion—has ignited the most intense identification with patriotic imagination that we have seen in our history.
Yet, there remains another consensus, one that limits the possibilities of reunion and the unfolding of a people in motion toward itself: the divisive dissatisfaction over the persistence of colonialism as the essential bond between Puerto Rico and the United States. All Puerto Ricans share the need to democratically transform this current condition, though there is no agreement on the precise mechanisms to achieve that goal. Thus, we are seven million people, eager for unity, yet burdened by deep divisions. The contradictory energy of this collective effort finds its fullest expression in the passionate, overwhelming display and agitation of the Puerto Rican flag—transformed into the most unmissable visual presence of our shared life.
There is yet another space of coexistence that generates confusion and division among Puerto Ricans: the differing daily realities of life in Puerto Rico and the United States. Despite the constant contact between these two historic-cultural territories, much remains unknown, much diversity remains to be embraced, and many stereotypes persist to be overcome. Puerto Ricans on the Island are not as “insular,” nor are Puerto Ricans in the U.S. as “Nuyorican,” as they might appear at first glance.
This volume takes up that complexity. Its purpose is twofold: on one hand, it highlights the immense resilience and cultural creativity of Puerto Rican popular sectors in the diaspora, countering the uninformed and simplistic vision that imagines—and then accuses—Puerto Ricans in the U.S. of having squandered their identity in unfortunate struggles toward assimilation. On the other hand, it demands attention to the diversity and transformation of that identity, opposing the outdated, folklorizing view that equates and reduces the cultural work of Puerto Ricans in the U.S. to desperate, traditionalist struggles.
Here are gathered studies on Puerto Rican popular culture in the United States. Popular culture is that which ordinary people create on their own initiative, in response to and in relationship with other sectors of society, especially the dominant ones. The field of study here is the culture generated by the people themselves—not the culture made for the people by government, churches, corporations, academia, agencies, or other institutions.
These investigations are grounded in ethnographic work conducted between 1994 and 2001. The research focuses on key aspects of Puerto Rican everyday life, especially as they manifest in the major U.S. cities home to large Puerto Rican communities. Unlike most existing literature, the main focus here is not solely on the life of Puerto Ricans in New York, though that is certainly considered. This distinction is vital, for there is a vast population in the U.S. that identifies as Puerto Rican but not as “Nuyorican.” These individuals recognize and affirm themselves as Puerto Rican, Boricua, and Latina—not as “Puerto Rican-American.” This identity is shared across generations—even young children identify this way, especially in working-class neighborhoods. To account for all this, extensive fieldwork was conducted in the neighborhoods of Chicago.
Collected here are Puerto Rican bregas—struggles and negotiations—that are culinary, musical, funerary, artisanal, festive, visual, spiritual, territorial, educational, and poetic, among others. Here you’ll find the smell of fritters and the beat of bomba drums, bold T-shirts and neighborhood hip-hop, intimate domestic spaces and scandalous street scenes, spiritist dolls and santería objects, flags worn as necklaces and altars on sidewalks, recycled milk crates and formidable patriotic sculptures, avenues packed with parades and alleys riddled with gunfire, stage-bound popular poetry and Three Kings in new costumes, sorrowful memories of the dead and Pentecostal rejoicing, history alive in plena rhythms and politicized vejigantes, municipal chants and spanglish counterpoints.
All of it comes together in an unmistakable flavor and an inevitable atmosphere: it is the life of the Boricua barrio in the United States, a life bursting with the will to live. Many things were left out of these pages, but step inside and join us—we are, and will always be, puertorros.
