The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music by Licia Fiol-Matta

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music by Licia Fiol-Matta Maja Horn KEYWORDS Puerto Rico, Popular Music, Gender, Myrta Sylva, Ruth Fernandez, Ernestina Reyes, Lucecita Benitez, Queer, Race, Ela (Estado Libre Asociado) licia fiol-matta. The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music Duke UP 2017, 312 pp. Popular music and performers have long fascinated the field of Hispanophone Caribbean literary and cultural studies, not least because of their feature role in some of the most seminal literary works of the region. One may think of Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante's novel Tres tristes tigres (1967), Puerto Rican Luis Rafael Sánchez's novel La guaracha del Macho Camacho (1976), and more recently Puerto Rican Mayra Santos-Febres' Sirena Selena vestida de pena (2000). Alongside [End Page 255] these fictional accounts of Caribbean popular music and performers, writers in the region have creatively approximated the lives (and deaths) of "real life" musicians, such as Puerto Rican Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá's El entierro de Cortijo (1982) and Sánchez's La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos (1988). Besides the impressive corpus of literary criticism these works have elicited, literary and cultural studies scholars have produced interdisciplinary studies of specific Caribbean music genres and their cultural ramifications—one may think of Frances R. Aparicio's Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures (1998) or Juan Flores' From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity (2000). Notably, Licia Fiol-Matta's study The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music follows neither of these predominant critical strands and in more than one way stands innovatively on its own in our field. Her study neither foregrounds popular music through its literary adaptations nor is it a genre study—in fact, the study addresses a range of genres as diverse as the guaracha, the bolero, operatic Afro-Cuban music, Afro-Puerto Rican music, jíbaro music, and the balada. More importantly, perhaps, the book does not take popular music as a point of departure for understanding and reflecting on broader issues of Caribbean and Latin American identity; instead, it foregrounds four Puerto Rican woman singers—Myrta Silva (1927–1987), Ruth Fernández (1919–2012), Ernestina Reyes "La Calandaria" (1925–1994), Lucecita Benítez (1942)—and how through their creative repertoires they negotiated in different ways the specific historical and cultural context in which they were inscribed. This is to say, the book foregrounds the conceptual contributions of these singers that resulted in what the author calls their "thinking voice." As Fiol-Matta describes, she aims to "really listen to women's voices, in the sense of paying attention to their conceptual dimension, away from notions of natural or intuitive performance" (4). And she considers these performers in particular "'great women singers' because a thinking voice took up residence in their careers, unleashing questions and providing answers—consciously or not—in response to the cultural moment of their time" (7). The cultural moment that these performers shared is the backdrop of Puerto Rico's new status as Estado Libre Asociado (ELA) in 1952 and the hopes and disenchantments it produced. This political project also newly invested "popular music with a degree of power and prestige" (10), and these singers had to negotiate their interpellation into this national cultural project, and were "under some kind of pressure to perform values" (3). Fiol-Matta traces how these artists pushed in different ways against this interpellation and critically interrogated it, thereby giving "lie to normative functions of music, showing the parallel ability of music to disrupt and reorder a variety of injunctions, among them how enjoyment should proceed and where, how patriotic allegiances should be expressed, how obscenity should appear in the repertoire, how politics should enter music lyrics, and how consumption should become the main activity of subjects in capitalism" (10–11). The first chapter foregrounds the life and work of Myrta Silva, a singer and renowned TV entertainer. Silva was "arguably the single most successful Puerto Rican twentieth-century pop star" (18), especially celebrated for her guarachas. Yet Puerto Rico was "viciously split about its biggest...