Juan Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity, New York, Columbia University Press, 2000, 265 pp.

Abstract

From Bomba to Hip-Hop is a collection of essays written over the last five years by Juan Flores, the leading Puerto Rican cultural critic in the Unites States and a professor of Black and Puerto Rican studies and sociology at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center. As the title suggests, music is a connecting thread that runs through the whole book. The ten chapters are united by the common theme of Puerto Rican identity and the survival of cultural memory, especially as these are defined or constructed through popular cultural practices among Puerto Ricans in the United States: the bomba y plena musical groups, Puerto Rican rap and hip-hop, community dances, the casita movement, the writing of ‘Nuyorican’ literature and the annual Puerto Rican Day Parade. The different chapters are peppered with snatches of interviews with artists, writers, musicians and intellectuals. Combining sociological insight with Latin music history and a participant-observer's keen eye for complexity and tension, Flores draws a cultural map of Puerto Rico, a ‘national imaginary’, sensitive to the nuances of struggles over identity and representation, both on the island and in the United States itself.