My Music Is My Flag: Puerto Rican Musicians and Their New York Communities, 1917-1940 (LATINO IN AMERICAN SOCIETY AND CULTURE, Band 3) - Hardcover

Glasser, Ruth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520081226 ISBN 13: 9780520081222

Verlag: University of California Press, 1995

Inhaltsangabe

Puerto Rican music in New York is given center stage in Ruth Glasser's original and lucid study. Exploring the relationship between the social history and forms of cultural expression of Puerto Ricans, she focuses on the years between the two world wars. Her material integrates the experiences of the mostly working-class Puerto Rican musicians who struggled to make a living during this period with those of their compatriots and the other ethnic groups with whom they shared the cultural landscape.

Through recorded songs and live performances, Puerto Rican musicians were important representatives for the national consciousness of their compatriots on both sides of the ocean. Yet they also played with African-American and white jazz bands, Filipino or Italian-American orchestras, and with other Latinos. Glasser provides an understanding of the way musical subcultures could exist side by side or even as a part of the mainstream, and she demonstrates the complexities of cultural nationalism and cultural authenticity within the very practical realm of commercial music.

Illuminating a neglected epoch of Puerto Rican life in America, Glasser shows how ethnic groups settling in the United States had choices that extended beyond either maintenance of their homeland traditions or assimilation into the dominant culture. Her knowledge of musical styles and performance enriches her analysis, and a discography offers a helpful addition to the text.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ruth Glasser is a public historian and part-time Lecturer in American Studies at Yale University.

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My Music Is My Flag: Puerto Rican Musicians and Their New York Communities, 1917-1940

By Ruth Glasser

University of California Press

Copyright 1995 Ruth Glasser
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520081226
Introduction

People and their cultures perish in isolation, but they are born or reborn in contact with other men and women, with men and women of another culture, another creed, another race. If we do not recognize our humanity in others, we shall not recognize it in ourselves.
Carlos Fuentes

On July 14, 1930, the New York Times reported that the country's rate of unemployment was at least 20 percent and rising fast. On this day, eight and a half months after the stock market crash, the newspaper also showed that over the past year Prohibition had cost the U.S. government $960 million in enforcement proceedings and loss of alcohol tax revenues.

Just as Americans continued to drink during Prohibition, those who could afford it continued to seek amusement during the Great Depression. Singer and bandleader Cab Calloway remembered that

there were breadlines everywhere and near riots in New York. Everybody was angry with poor old Herbert Hoover. Everybody except people in the entertainment world, I guess. It's a funny thing, when things get really bad, when the bottom falls out of the economy, that's when people really need entertainment. . . . Jazz was swinging, the theaters on Broadway were cleaning up, and in Harlem the nightclubs, speakeasies and jazz spots were packed every night.1

Calloway was in a good position to know. Newly installed in Harlem's Cotton Club, he was earning about fifty thousand dollars a year. Variety reported that the club itself was the most profitable in New York

City, having netted a clear four hundred thousand dollars in the previous season.

That summer the entertainment emanating from New York City seemed boundless. Three Rudy Vallee orchestras were playing on each Cunard cruise ship, while the famous crooner himself had just acquired the first sponsored network radio show. Composer Cole Porter's "Love for Sale" had been banned from the airwaves for its overt references to prostitution, but many of his other songs were skyrocketing to popularity on Broadway. Vaudevillian Molly Picon was the headliner at the Palace theater. And with a flip of the dial, highbrow New Yorkers could hear some of the first live broadcasts of full-scale operas.

On July 14, 1930, still another musical event was taking place in a Manhattan recording studio. While this event would never be noticed by most of the U. S. population, it would prove momentous to speakers of Spanish in New York and Latin America. On that day a Puerto Rican group led by Manuel "Canario" Jimnez recorded Rafael Hernndez's "Lamento Borincano." Canario, his two guitarists, and his maracas and clave players received about twelve dollars apiece for their efforts.

The modest fee notwithstanding, this song had a value that extended far beyond its monetary value. Just as Gorney and Harburg's "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" (1932) became a virtual theme song for the Depression, such was "Lamento Borincano" for Puerto Ricans and other Spanish speakers. More than any other song, this inexpensively made, apparently simple bolero would embody the essence of this era and the hard times it brought for many Latin Americans in both the United States and their homelands. Though it was composed and recorded in New York, "Lamento Borincano" also became a lasting, hugely popular anthem for Puerto Rico, an island with an ambiguous national status.

It is these hidden, quietly heroic, and often ironic cultural moments that I chronicle in this book. Amazingly, Puerto Rican musical production remains nearly as invisible to North American audiences today as it did in the 1930s. Just as Puerto Rico exists in the minds of North Americans, when they think of the island at all, as a kind of nether-world, not quite Latin America but not quite part of the United States, people in the English-speaking world have generally given little thought to the immense cultural wealth produced by Puerto Ricans. Indeed, they have had little opportunity, for while innumerable books and articles in English dissect social problems among Puerto Ricans, few describe their history or artistic expressions.2 Puerto Ricans in general, and Puerto Ri-

can migrants in particular, are found more often in the pages of crisis-oriented contemporary studies than in those of historical works. In fact, scholars casting backward for an explanation for the persistently low socioeconomic status of many Puerto Ricans have often blamed this problem on an ostensible cultural deficit within the group itself. Glazer and Moynihan's 1963 contention that the Puerto Rican heritage is "weak in folk arts, unsure in its cultural traditions, [and] without a powerful faith" still finds its adherents thirty years later.3 Indeed, as problems multiply in North American inner cities, there has been a recent academic and popular revival of this blaming-the-victim approach.4

Ironically, works by ethnomusicologists and music critics on Latin popular music often reinforce this impression. They take Puerto Rican music out of its historical context, a context that properly includes an explanation of what happens to cultural expression within a colonial society. Unwittingly, such writers make Puerto Rican music the loser in an ahistorical Darwinian scheme that closely parallels social science condemnations of Puerto Ricans as a failed ethnic group. To them, Cuban music survived and flourished because it was the fittest. It is as if there were no political or cultural hierarchies between colonies and neocolonies organized first by Spain, later by the United States. It is as if there were no shared history to explain the similar development of musical forms in different parts of Latin America, or the dominance of one set of sounds over another.

With both colonial and migration history unexamined, it has become a truism that popular Latin music in New York equals Cuban music, even though Puerto Ricans have for many years been among the field's most prolific performers and composers. Many popular and scholarly assessments suggest that Puerto Rican musicians have left their own ostensibly meager musical resources behind and "merely" adopted Cuban sounds. Puerto Rican musicians in New York City during the 1930s "imported" Cuban music and were "strong in the hybridizing wing." Their own music becomes more or less a footnote to the history of the rumba and to subsequently popular Cuban genres. A description of the collection of contemporary Latin sounds known as salsa , for example, asserts that "stylistically its backbone consists of Cuban dance music."5

When it comes to Puerto Rican sounds, then, I know of no in-depth histories of such popular music and its practitioners and audiences for any period. And yet the music and history of composers such as Rafael Hernndez and groups such as Canario's are fascinating in their own right, as is the interwar period, when such artists wrote and played many

songs of lasting beautywithin the context of the massive displacement and migration of their compatriots.

This book is intended to fill these narrative and conceptual gaps within the history and culture of the Puerto Rican...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1995
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520081226
• ISBN 13: 9780520081222
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar