New York Puerto Ricans have been an integral part of hip hop culture since day one: from 1970s pioneers like Rock Steady Crew's Jo-Jo, to recent rap mega-stars Big Punisher (R.I.P.) and Angie Martinez. Yet, Puerto Rican participation and contributions to hip hop have often been downplayed and even completely ignored. And when their presence has been acknowledged, it has frequently been misinterpreted as a defection from Puerto Rican culture and identity, into the African American camp. But nothing could be further from the truth. Through hip hop, Puerto Ricans have simply stretched the boundaries of Puerto Ricanness and latinidad.

This volume explores the significations and developments of the Salsa consciente movement, a Latino musico-poetic and political discourse that exploded in the 1970s but then dwindled in momentum into the early 1990s. This movement is largely linked to the development of Nuyolatino popular music brought about in part by the mass Latino migration to New York City beginning in the 1950s and the subsequent social movements that were tied to the shifting political landscapes. Defined by its lyrical content alongside specific sonic markers and political and social issues facing U.S. Latinos and Latin Americans, Salsa consciente evokes the overarching cultural-nationalist idea of Latinidad (Latin-ness). Through the analysis of over 120 different Salsa songs from lyrical and musical perspectives that span a period of over sixty years, the author makes the argument that the urban Latino identity expressed in Salsa consciente was constructed largely from diasporic, deterritorialized, and at times imagined cultural memory, and furthermore proposes that the Latino/Latin American identity is in part based on African and Indigenous experience, especially as it relates to Spanish colonialism. A unique study on the intersection of Salsa and Latino and Latin American identity, this volume will be especially interesting to scholars of ethnic studies and musicology alike.

Will Chanel stick with the group, or go with her dream of becoming a prima ballerina?

In a mice-infested tenement in Spanish Harlem, a young girl finds solace in the pages of classic novels and photographs of distant horizons. With her mind's eye focused on her personal visions, she takes chances against overwhelming odds, because some things happen only once in a lifetime. This is the autobiography of a girl uprooted from Puerto Rico to El Barrio in New York at the age of three. Isabel and her siblings are raised by their temperamental mother and nurturing grandmother in a stifling, claustrophobic upbringing that paradoxically fosters her imagination. Without support and guidance in a teeming metropolis where few understand their language and culture, Isabel learns to rely on her inner strength to overcome adversity against reason and others' discouragement. The roads she takes are paved with fated events as she forges forward with blind faith, unaware that her childhood fantasies would eventually be recaptured in the crowning pages of her own life story. Told with panache and comedic flair and saturated with the color and vibrancy of life in El Barrio in the turbulent 60s and spirited 70s, Isabel immerses us in her proud cultural heritage while asserting her conviction that it's never too late to find happiness.

Caribbean Dance is an overview of the dances from each of this region's major islands and the complex, fused, and layered cultures that gave birth to them.

These essays bring home the most challenging observations of postmodernism-multiple identities, the fragility of meaning, the risks of communication. Sommer asserts that many people normally live-that is, think, feel, create, reason, persuade, laugh-in more than one language. She claims that traditional scholarship (aesthetics; language and philosophy; psychoanalysis, and politics) cannot see or hear more than one language at a time. The goal of these essays is to create a new field: bilingual arts & aesthetics which examine the aesthetic product produced by bilingual diasporic communities. The focus of this volume is the Americas, but examples and theoretical proposals come from Europe as well. In both areas, the issue offers another level of complexity to the migrant and cosmopolitan character of local societies in a global economy.

The Corso: The Real Nuyorican Salsa Story is a must-read book not just because it’s a fantastic and incredible story of success but also it’s a historic legacy of how it was at the beginning of the salsa movement. It is narrated firsthand by someone who was there and was an important part of it, if not the most important. Pete Bonet was born in a very humble, extremely poor part of the island of Puerto Rico. Even the police would not go in there. It was too dangerous. It is a place called El Fanguito, “the Muddy.” His mother, Olga, was abandoned there with her six children, ages fifteen down to a newborn baby. Pedrito, as he was called, was the fourth child; he was six years old when his father left for good. Olga was left alone with no money, no food, no man to protect the family, no government help, no nothing, not even shoes for the kids to go to school. The neighbors would say, “Poor Olga, she’s going to die along with all the six kids.” Pedrito left that part of the world at the age of fifteen to go to New York City, not knowing how to say no in English. At the age of twenty-one, Pedro graduated from Central Commercial High School with honors in bookkeeping and business law, typing sixty words a minute without errors. He then took the test in order to enter the United States Air Force and qualified in administration and thus entered the United States Air Force. Upon returning home with an honorable discharge, Pedro went to work for different construction companies as a timekeeper onsite—Marshall Const. Co., Arc Electric Co., Turner Const. Co., Melnick Const. Co., among others. He would go dancing on weekends to different nightclubs in New York City, from the world-famous Palladium Ballroom called the home of the mambo and cha-cha-cha, located on Broadway and Fifty-Third Street, the Manhattan Center on Thirty-Fourth Street, the Hunts Point Palace in the Bronx, and this was where Pete met the love of his life, Margie. They fell in love at first sight while dancing to the wonderful music of Tito Rodriguez and his big band orchestra. They got married six months later and still together today, in the year 2019, fifty-seven years and still counting. Pete Bonet, as he got to be known, got into music by mere chance. He started singing with Alfredito Valdez and his charanga, then Ray Barretto and his charanga, La Moderna. Then he went with Mongo Santamaria and his orchestra under the musical direction of trumpet player Marty Sheller. He formed his own big band together with the great Louie Ramirez as his arranger and musical director. After a couple of years, he got a call from Tito Rodriguez and went on to sing with the one and only Tito Rodriguez and his big band. Upon Tito Rodriguez’s death, he joined the Joe Cuba Sextet. He also sang with the king of Latin music, Tito Puente and his big band, and over forty other Latin orchestras in New York, Hollywood, and Puerto Rico. By reading this book, you will get to appreciate that great era, an extraordinary moment in time, the very beginning when the term “salsa” was born and started to be used instead of all the different names of all that great Cuban music. You will feel all the excitement of non-Latins dancing in clubs like the Corso that most likely will never be repeated again.

Dorinda, Galleria, Anginette, and Aquanette become concerned when it looks like Chanel's interest in ballet is going to cause her to leave their singing group, the Cheetah Girls.