My Music Is My Flag: Puerto Rican Musicians and Their New York Communities, 1917-1940 (Latinos in American Society and Culture, Band 3) - Softcover

Glasser, Ruth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520208900 ISBN 13: 9780520208902

Verlag: University of California Press, 1997

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

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'This book joins the 'must see' list of exciting new historical work on Latin American music and identity...A successful combination of theoretical sophistication and empirical research that will hopefully find many imitators among students of Latin American popular culture.'--John Charles Chasteen, Latin American Studies

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My Music Is My Flag

Puerto Rican Musicians N.Y. CommunitBy Ruth Glasser

University of California Press

Copyright © 1997 Ruth Glasser
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520208902
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" Jiminez recorded Rafael Hernandez'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 Hernandez 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 beauty within 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 migration experience. It is also meant to encourage the reader to reevaluate the structure of ethnic history in general and the place of ethnic cultural expression within it. For contemporary writings about Puerto Ricans and other ethnic North Americans, whether...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1997
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520208900
• ISBN 13: 9780520208902
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 298
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag; orders-books@degruyter.com; ; Genthinerstr. 13; Berlin; 10785; Deutschland