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When José Ángel Santiago Ríos decided to get out of the car to mark in white paint a huge hole that crossed one of the streets he traveled in Puerto Rico, he never thought that it would go viral and that he would end up receiving photos of other Puerto Ricans doing the same. The holes in the streets of the island are a constant and, for him, proof that the governors do the job halfway. Or they don't even do it. The response of Puerto Ricans? To struggle, something like pushing forward. Drivers learn to drive around the gaps and, on a day-to-day basis, with the other problems of Puerto Rico, the same thing: more and more struggle. The Brega Podcast It is born from this way of understanding the world and also from a hole; of a huge gap in the international narrative about the island. “In the United States they imagine that we are that Caribbean country that spends its time dancing salsa or lamenting colonialism,” explains Alana Casanova-Burgess, host of the program. “But Puerto Rico is much more than that and we had to tell it.”
For this reason, after Hurricane María, which devastated the island and left more than 4,600 dead, Casanova returned to Puerto Rico with the purpose of telling the story of the search for normality and even humor after the tragedy. “We realized that there was an appetite for more serious and cooler conversations,” this Puerto Rican in the diaspora says by phone. That was the first seed.
His own experience was key to thinking about a bilingual podcast; one of the first back then. “I thought that if it is for Puerto Ricans and of Puerto Ricans, it could not be done only in Spanish or only in English. We knew it was going to be very difficult but we had to do each chapter in both languages,” he says. “We were building the plane while it landed.” Another struggle. For Ezequiel Rodríguez Andino, one of the producers of the podcast, the decision was made “with treachery”: “The gringos They are also our interlocutors. We have a need to tell them the problems they have created and for them to understand it. clear. “It was a political act.”
Basketball heroes, betrayal between friends and resilience to force are some of the topics discussed in the first season of the Futuro Studios and WNYC Studios program. It aired in 2021 and was a success. Recommended by the New Yorker and selected as one of the top 10 podcasts for Apple Podcast and the New York Times, La Brega Podcast brought the Puerto Rican accent to the entire world. “We received a lot of support and nice messages from people who were outside and inside the island, it was something very beautiful,” says Rodríguez, who criticizes that the concept of “Puerto Ricanness” seems to be weighted. “People think that if you speak English or live in New York, you're less from here. As if speaking Spanish had nothing colonial about it,” he says ironically. And he adds: “Puerto Rico will never be understood without the diaspora, we even chose our flag there.” The island look and the struggle itself, which migrated with each Puerto Rican in the suitcase, are the only guarantee.
After those initial eight episodes, the second season arrived, released in 2023 with a somewhat more complex idea: telling about the island through eight songs. Quite a challenge when we talk about the island of music, from which hundreds of world-famous singers have emerged, such as Calle 13, Héctor Lavoe, Ile, Bad Bunny, Jennifer López or Ivy Queen. “Thank you for putting us in the worst situation in the world and having to choose only eight. Come on, come on, Alana,” Rodríguez remembers saying to Casanova. The selection of topics to discuss alleviated responsibility. Blackness, gender identity and the privatization of public beaches are some of the themes that run through this vitiating season. This series has one million downloads and has been nominated for the IHeartRadio awards.
“People think that there are no blacks in Puerto Rico”
'The pretty faces (of my black people)' is one of those beautiful and combative episodes from the first minute. What begins as a dissection of racism in Puerto Rico through music in which the racialized population is sung – always criminal, always sexualized – ends up being a first-person essay by researcher Bárbara I. Abadía Rexach, professor in San Francisco State University. This Puerto Rican has been studying the relationship between music and racialization for years and the result of the podcast is a small piece of her master's thesis that she completed in 2006 and which later ended up materializing in the book 'Musicalizing Race'.
Casanova explains in the episode how skin color is something that is not talked about in Puerto Rico. “On the island, many still believe that black people are not Puerto Rican, that there are no black people here,” says Bárbara. While taboo in conversation, they were never invisible in music. It has been sung about black people, although always from the point of view of judgment or exoticization. “The guard hid the bemba and told him: that is no reason to kill the bembón” (El negro bembón); “I married a charming black woman and although we are rubber-colored, our product came out black too” (Carbonerito); “Black eyes, cinnamon skin, that make me desperate” (Cinnamon skin). “These songs criminalize, degrade and stereotype black people or exoticize miscegenation,” says Abadía.
However, there is one song that is very different: Las caras lindas, by Tite Curet, a Puerto Rican author who composed more than 2,000 songs for Cheo Feliciano, Celia Cruz and Héctor Lavoe, among others. This song is an anthem that dozens of singers have performed all over the world and that embraces those who were not born “brown” white. “With this topic, we started talking about being black as a good thing. It is simple and very beautiful,” says the author, who recognizes how difficult it is for her to celebrate her blackness amidst so much internalized racism. “I never celebrated it because, since childhood, my blackness was distanced from beauty. My existence was always questioned,” laments the researcher.
Susana Baca, Rubén Blades and Curet's own daughter are some of the voices that emerge from the 38 minutes of podcast, to talk about the look of the Puerto Rican composer who honored his color in each letter. “It was a great gift to do the episode and to be given so much freedom to do it my way. I thought they were calling me to give them some clue or contact, but it ended up being an episode about my story. It was a very nice process,” Casanova says by phone. For her, that has been the greatest gift along the way. “We have had a great team. There was a lot warmth, very warm. And with this episode many people's eyes were opened. That's what journalism and art are for. People already have a voice, they already have a microphone, what they need are ears that listen.”
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