PUYA and the boomerican generation

While I was hanging out in NYU's CLACS department with economists working at the UN Cuban Mission, advisors to the Sandinists, and your run-of-the-mill academia babes and nerds, Puerto Rico was starting to see the bounty that came out of the assimilation wars of the 1980s.

As a teenager growing up in Puerto Rico during the 1980s you had to make a choice between the rockeros or cocolos.

As a rockera, I would have had to hold myself up as an English-only, gringo loving, boricua denying, wanna-be whitey. As a cocola, I would be reaffirming my negritude, paying homage to my family and my country's salsa roots and more importantly, upholding my country's cultural heritage as a Spanish-only creation.

I was one of those, just like the founders of Puya, who didn't see it as an either/or proposition.

Yet this cultural tension was very real and it happened for a very specific historical reason.

Puerto Rico became an official commonwealth of the United States in 1952; giving Puerto Ricans full citizenship rights since the island's occupation in 1898. People like my parents took advantage of the full citizen status and had migrated to places like New York running away from the poverty and squalor 90% of the population lived in. People like me, were born after this 1950s mass migration and were being "returned" to the island by parents who were coming in as a new wave of working and middle class islanders.

This coming and going of Puerto Ricans was novelized by Luis Rafael Sánchez in his 1992 novel, La Guagua Aerea (The Air Bus). As a joke, I've tossed the word boomericans to my Latin Americanist friends : The 1960's and 70's say a massive baby boom im Puerto Rico, but it also saw the emergence of a boomerang-like migration and economy between the US mainland and the island.

The 1970s saw an emerging populations of baby booming Puerto Ricans.

The 1980s saw an emerging culture of boomerang Puerto Ricans.

This is what gave way to the rockeros vs. cocolos culture wars.

The group you see here today, Puya, emerged right after I had left Puerto Rico in 1986 to continue my bachelor degree studies at NYU. The first iteration of the band appeared in 1988 and by 1990, at the dawn of the last decade of the modern millenium, Puya emerged at the rightful inheritors of Carlos Santana's transnational and transcultural fusion of salsa, jazz and rock.

In the 1970s and 1980s you would have never, ever had a 'rock' group playing a protest war about Vieques. There were local reggae and nuevo latino bands fusing salsa, samba, reggae, ska; but rock?

Latino Rock in Puerto Rico really didn't happen until the 1990s and until my generation looked at bilinguism, transnationalism, multiculturalism not as the markers of a white-washing cultural assimilation push but as the embrace of the best and the brightest of a new world culture.

This is why Pa tí, pa m&iacute is so significant. As a song protesting the occupation of Vieques by the US Navy and as an anthem for environmental justice, this is one of those songs that completely redefined Puerto Rican culture as a country struggling to free itself from its colonial status by identifying itself as part of a larger world movement.

I hope you enjoy it.

See also : Authenticity Over Novelty (2001 Interview with Puya)

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