“Tropical Mix”: Afro-Latino Space and Notch's Reggaetón

Abstract

I examine how reggaetón artist Notch incorporates oratorical, visual, and musical cues in his music video, “Qué te pica,” to establish connections between Latino and Caribbean communities in the United States that typically have been disavowed by hegemonic racial categories that distinguish between them. While Notch's music disrupts these particular racial hierarchies, he also maintains heteronormative patriarchal relations in his video. I propose the analytic, Afro-Latino space, to account for the ways that reggaetón as a musical genre, and Notch more specifically, unsettle certain distinctions between blackness and Latinidad, while simultaneously relying on stereotypes of black hypermasculinity.