New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone

Abstract

This dissertation explores the ways in which New York Puerto Ricans have navigated the murky waters of ethno-racial identification within the hip hop realm. Have they highlighted or deemphasized their Puerto Ricanness? Have they carefully tip toed around the identity minefield or recklessly stomped through? What have been the consequences of the strategies chosen? How have they thought of their identity as Puerto Ricans vis-à-vis the larger pan-ethnic Latino label? Have they constructed Puerto Ricanness as in tandem with or in contradiction to African Americanness? My main contention here is that Puerto Ricans who take part in New York's hip hop culture construct their identities, participate and create through a process of negotiation with the dominant notions of blackness and latinidad . Puerto Ricans in the United States are commonly thought of as being part of the U.S. Hispanic or Latino population. But Puerto Ricans are also considered an exception among Latinos. Their exceptionality is based on a history that diverges from what has been construed as the Latino norm and which happens to bear much in common with the experience of African Americans. However, Puerto Ricans are also cast out of narratives of blackness, since often times blackness in the United States is only thought of in terms of African Americans. Caught between latinidad and blackness, Puerto Ricans may fit in both categories and yet also in neither. I further argue here that the meanings given to blackness and latinidad by the young New Yorkers involved in hip hop have a complex relationship with those predominant among the older Puerto Rican and African American generations, as well as with academic and mass-mediated representations of these ethno-racial identity fields. Hip hoppers partly deconstruct and reconstruct "official" ethnic and racial categories; but they are simultaneously deeply influenced by the dominant formulations.