UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation acts as part memoir, part family archive, part critique, and fully a love letter to the innovations in music, dance, and fashion of impoverished, Black and brown, queer communities in reggaetón and beyond. It focuses on sonic and embodied resistance practices within Latinx popular culture as they take shape across several American metropoles, such as San Juan, New York City, and Miami, from the 1940s to today. This study is the first of its kind to conceptualize Reggaetón Cultura as inclusive of and descended from both Hip-Hop Culture and queer House Ball Culture, yet with its very own distinctive Afro-Diasporic dance, fashion, rhythms, and Black power discourses. I prioritize the resistive labor of queer, trans, and Afro-Latin reggaetóneres and explore the genre’s concurrent commercialization and blanqueamiento (whitening) to examine the consequences of state-sanctioned policing and violence, as well as the ways in which reggaetóneres use La Cultura as a mode of resistance. My dissertation celebrates the sartorial politics of La Cultura and brings to light the interconnectedness of Afro-Diasporic social dance, drum, and dress customs, as well as the ways in which Blackness and queerness are often falsely positioned as mutually exclusive. This dissertation also contributes a reading of reggaetón vocality as a form of liberatory sonic suciedad, which in effect disrupts colonial gender binaries and provides racial healing through what I call “ronca realness,” or raspy realness. I am deeply invested in restoring credit to Afro-Latin artists at the heart of the genre’s political power, as well as recognizing the understated role of Indigeneity in reggaetón discourse, especially potent in social dance and drum circles. My analyses are guided by the personal experiences of being doubly, or triply, colonized, and finding that the many identities I inhabit often rub against one another and scar. This writing heals by uniting visual queerness, sonic Blackness, and poor people’s rich epistemologies for living life according to the dembow rhythm. As a queer perreo dancer since youth, this dissertation is over two decades in the making, and is above all else an ode to the racialized femmes of my culture who continue to resist imperial whiteness by moving their hips, in body and in spirit.