If I Were You: Tego Calderón's Diasporic Interventions

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.... [ view full abstract ]

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 “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.