This panel brings together papers that consider how scholars approach race and Blackness in Puerto Rico. Comparisons between the United States and Puerto Rico have long dominated discussions of Puerto Rican race relations. This approach has produced discourses that represent Puerto Rico as “raceless” in relation to the United States. The papers on this panel challenge this assumption by pointing out the ways that the island maintains its own racial structures that, while certainly in conversation with U.S. race relations, perpetuate racial inequalities in Puerto Rican communities. Panelists will consider how scholarly approaches to race and racism in Puerto Rico might contribute to new ways of thinking about Blackness on the island that, in turn, have larger implications for understanding the connections between Blackness and Latinidad more generally.
In “Haunting La Gran Familia Puertorriqueña,” Carlos Alamo-Pastrana examines the pitfalls of centering analysis of Puerto Rican race relations on comparisons with the United States, proposing the concept racial imbrication as an alternative. Racial imbrication details the structured and relational stories about race and colonialism organized along the ideological borders of the Puerto Rican and American racial regimes. Resisting idealistic readings of these exchanges, Alamo-Pastrana argues that racial imbrication also highlights the relations of power concealed from view in the spaces of overlap and that accentuate national, gendered, and/or class differences.
Zaire Dinzey-Flores’ paper, "Race from the 'Other' Side" considers what race might look like from Black Latina epistemological perspectives. Contesting traditional representations of race/racism that privilege Whiteness, White frames, and White experience, she examines the racial silences, comforts, privileges, and inequities that reside in formulations of race within Latinidad.
In “‘They Don’t Care If We Die’: The Racial Calculus of Policing in Puerto Rico,” Marisol LeBrón looks at how punitive policing in Puerto Rico associated with the island’s “war on drugs” has rendered racialized and low-income communities more vulnerable to premature death through logics and practices of dehumanization and criminalization, thus deepening existing social inequalities on the island. LeBrón argues that drug enforcement promoted an uneven distribution of risk, harm, and death by tacitly allowing the proliferation of violence within and against economically and racially marginalized communities, thus deepening existing social inequalities on the island.
In “If I Were You: Tego Calderón’s Diasporic Interventions,” Petra Rivera-Rideau analyzes Calderón’s 2012 music video for his song “Robin Hood” as one example of the ways that Puerto Ricans express African diasporic belonging. She contends that these forms of expression introduce new ways of understanding racism in Puerto Rican communities, and demonstrate the need to bring African Diaspora Studies and Latino Studies together.
Finally, Marisol Negrón will moderate and offer comments on the papers.
