Rappin' Writin', and Breakin': Black and Puerto Rican Street Culture in New York

...One such early intersection of the popular cultures was evident in rhythm-and-blues music of the late 1950s...

...Small wonder, then, that young blacks and Puerto Ricans started liking the same kinds of music, doing the same dances, playing the same games, and dressing and talking alike...

...they lived in the same or bordering neighborhoods, attended the same schools, and together occupy the most deprived and vulnerable place in the economic and cultural hierarchy: they are the reserve of the reserve...

...Starting in the late 1950s and extending through the 1960s, doo-wop or harmonizing prevailed in the same neighborhoods that later gave rise to rap music...

...The great Cuban bandleader, who since the 1940s had performed with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and stood at the juncture of Caribbean and Afro-American musical traditions, must surely have recognized an exciting new stage in the dual heritage he had made his own...

...With such hints of a longer historical trajectory in mind, it is to this period of the late 1950s and the 1960s that the origins of present-day hip-hop must be traced...

...With rap music, of course, the relative contributions are the opposite...

...ethnic relations includes no sustained treatment of the interaction between Puerto Ricans and blacks...

...A more circumspect account, though, would recall that these years saw the dawning of the secondgeneration black and Puerto Rican communities in New York...

...They were mostly artisans, with a high level of political education, and many were black...

...Though the represented content often derives from cartoons and television commercials, those samples of mass culture take on a transformed meaning when posted in defiance of established rules...

...Determining the relative ethnic sources of subway graffiti is the most complicated of all, partly because the first subway writer to attract media attention was Taki, who is GreekAmerican, and because some of the best subway artists are youths of Italian and other national origins...

...There is a pleasurable sense of depth to the elusiveness of meaning...

...Here, in scenes set in the 1950s, we witness a young Puerto Rican saying the dozens and hanging out with his black friends...

...Gaining a sense of historical background is mainly important in counteracting the sense of miracle attached to these phenomena as they are represented in the dominant, mediated culture, which portrays these practices and stylistic novelties as though they sprang up suddenly out of thin air...

...The intellectual antecedents go back even before Machito's beginnings to the early 1900s, when the first contingents of Puerto Ricans began arriving in New York...

...Despite the momentous hype with which the dominant commercial culture would doom it to quick oblivion, that appeal promises to carry and to flourish...

...Similarly, Mailer seems to have been thinking of the Puerto Ricans when he described graffiti art as "a movement which began as the expression of tropical peoples living in a monotonous, iron-gray and dull brown brick environment, surrounded by asphalt, concrete and clangor...

...Mailer was accurate, too, in pointing out that it is also a matter of color and ecological aesthetics...

...The same is true of the boogaloo craze of a decade later, though in this case it was mostly Latin musicians like Pete Rodriguez, Joe Cuba and Joe Bataan who were responsible, and the Latin influence was even stronger...

...The proximity of the two groups is perhaps more striking today than ever before, especially among teenage youth...

...And like rap, doo-wop was a form of black urban music that was accessible to young Latin musicians, as a recent recording of Totico y Sus Rumberos singing "What's Your Name" illustrates...

...Still part of break routines, up-rock was first danced as an alternative to violent street fighting...

...In groping for a new idiom, young blacks and Puerto Ricans discarded rural trappings and nostalgic "down home" references, but retained the African rhythmic base and improvisational, participatory qualities of their inherited cultures...

...And the performance styles of James Brown and Frankie Lymon were of course key models...

...582 • DISSENT THE CULTURE OF THE CITY Such, then, are but a few of the many forerunners and early manifestations of the triple-form style called hip-hop, which is not to say that rap, graffiti and breakdancing are not qualitatively new modes of cultural practice...

...580 • DISSENT TILE CULTURE OF THE CITY Another black Puerto Rican pioneer, who came to New York in 1917, was Jesus Colon...

...On the contrary, the innovations brought to each area of popular expression are substantial indeed...

...A long-time journalist and revolutionary activist, Colon in his literary sketches and political campaigns stressed the common historical and cultural experience of Puerto Ricans and blacks...

...Perhaps the "pop" ascendancy of hip-hop, which stems directly from that interaction, will provide a needed impetus...

...Norman Mailer captured this motivation well in his 1974 essay "The Faith of Graffiti": "Your presence is on their presence, your alias hangs on their scene...

...One of the Puerto Rican rappers, Rubie Dee (Ruben Garcia), who started off in street music as a conguero and a lover of salsa, illustrated this congruence to me, and he was convincing...

...Thomas's novel Down These Mean Streets, published in 1967, is a work in the autobiographical manner of Native Son and Manchild in the Promised Land that probes intensely the complex and not always harmonious relations among black and Puerto Rican youth in New York...

...Nevertheless, a majority of the practitioners are black and Puerto Rican, and graffiti experts like Henry Chalfant and Manny Kirchheimer agree that most of the early styles originated with the Puerto Ricans...

...They are further testimony to the shared cultural life of African-descended peoples in New York City, which for the past generation, at least, has centered on the interaction of Puerto Ricans and blacks...

...More pertinent, in my view, is the Nuyorican preoccupation with language in its semantic and graphic aspects, and the need to manifest a sense of idiosyncratic presence in the face of imposed anonymity...

...The reliance of "Nuyorican" writing and public readings on the language and cadences of black poetry was evident then, and is still strong today in poets like Louis Reyes Rivera and Sandra Maria Esteves...

...But some experienced breakers, like Dennis Vazquez (the original Rubber Band Man), often hark back to the days of "up-rock," danced to James Brown's "Sex Machine" and Jimmy Castor's "Just Begun," as the initial innovation in popular dance style...

...q This article has been excerpted from Callaloo, 1986...

...This social function of breaking as a surrogate for destructive and self-destructive physical confrontation has remained...

...Graffiti-writing also began to become widespread in those years of the early 1970s, and I would associate this movement of naming and identifying with the assertive political tenor of the times...

...Their common experience of racist exclusion and social distance from their white-ethnic peers drew them even closer together...

...So, too, is breakdancing, the first recognizable signs of which also appeared as far back as the early 1970s...

...One of these very early arrivals was Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, who came to New York in the late nineteenth century...

...Precisely because of its grounding in black and Puerto Rican street culture, hip-hop harbors a radical universal appeal...

...Felipe Luciano would associate the vitality of the pictorial medium with the Puerto Ricans' remote Taino legacy, and call to mind the Chicano mural and "placa" movement as a parallel indigenous FALL • 1987 583 THE CULTURE OF THE CITY experience...

...His brother Orlando has composed bilingual, "Spanglish" rhymes for the Funky Four, which indicates how close rap is to the contemporary Nuyorican experience...

...As with the popular music, black forms of verbal expression lent themselves perfectly to articulation of Nuyorican experience, and are enriched by the inclusion of Spanish and bilingual usages...

...Early on in this century he moved up to Harlem, there to become one of the foremost scholars of the African diaspora...

...Aside from some studies of language convergence, the voluminous literature on U.S...

...In the spectacular surface of Broadway and Hollywood, one thinks of West Side Story and Blackboard Jungle, the scene of gang wars, drugs, and juvenile delinquency...

...In so doing, black and Caribbean peoples came to recognize the complementarity of what seemed to be diverse origins...

...For example, there is some ground for emphasizing the impetus lent by Puerto Ricans to the origins of breaking...

...Graig Castleman in his book Getting Up indicates a similar view, though he does not speculate as to reasons and rightly argues against the futile attempt to treat it as an exclusively Puerto Rican movement...

...from them he learns that, according to the color code operative in the U.S., he is black and had better start liking it...

...But I think Herbert Kohl had good reason to center his discussion of the graffiti impulse on Johnny Rodriguez, the young Puerto Rican who went to him for reading lessons and from whom he came to learn so much about naming and public identity...

...It's a "doo-wop rhumba," and as Totico and his group recall, it fits perfectly...

...But the distinctive Puerto Rican dimension is not absent here either...

...The cultural affirmation following from the work of the Lords and the Panthers needs to be emphasized, since the assertion of racial pride and black and Puerto Rican rights inform the social stance of hip-hop...

...But, I'll say with all necessary caution, the impulse toward a radical change in the physical center of gravity in popular dance and toward a "break" in the formalizations of couple dancing seems to follow largely from developments in Latin dance styles...

...It is no accident that today's rappers and breakers adore James Brown, whose unforgettable "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud" has resonated ever since the late 1960s...

...Rather, all aspects of hip-hop belong to the ongoing traditions of black and Puerto Rican experience, and to their convergence and cross-fertilization in the New York setting...

...The music itself was basically black rock and roll, but with a good deal of mambo and other Afro-Caribbean features blended in...

...Writing in the 1940s and 1950s, he was the first Puerto Rican author to publish a book in English, and the first to describe in psychological detail his experience of American racism...

...They comprised, and still today comprise, the two largest nonwhite groups in the city...

...There several street-based groups, like the FALL • 1987 . 581 THE CULTURE OF THE CITY Harptones and the Vocaleers, combined black and Latin members, as did the hugely successful Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers...

...By the late 1960s the political implications of this cultural interaction were becoming more evident...

...Another pioneer of the Puerto Rican migration, the poet Juan Aviles, told me recently that when he first came to New York in the 1920s you could always tell where the Puerto Ricans lived because they were the only ones to put plants in their windows...

...Although both Fats Domino and Bo Diddley had already infused Latin and Caribbean beats into their influential rock-androll sounds, New York was really the site of direct black and Puerto Rican musical interaction...

...Dee, the Puerto Rican emcee from the Fantastic Five, even raps occasionally in Spanish, and is appreciated as a valuable component of the rap repertoire...

...The civil rights movement and the black liberation struggle sparked the organization of the Young Lords Party...

...It is indicative that the Rock Steady Crew, the most accomplished of the many breakdance groups, is composed almost entirely of Puerto Ricans...

...Despite obvious differences in style, and the accompaniment of rap rhymes by ingeniously manipulated sound systems, harmonizing clearly prefigures rap musical practice in significant ways...

...Rap belongs squarely in the blues-derived tradition of black vocals and relies upon rich verbal dexterity in English...

...Unbeknown to many, he was Puerto Rican, and in fact dedicated the first period of his emigrant life to the Cuban and Puerto Rican struggle against Spanish colonialism...

...Input from other sources having more to do with Afro-American experience has been duly noted—such as martial arts, the jitterbug, tap dancing, and African social dance...

...They came from southern, largely rural backgrounds...

...Here the cultural confluence consists of Puerto Ricans joining in the extension of Afro-American styles...

...It is also one of the links between the contemporary North American style and Brazilian capoeira, another African-based dance bearing striking similarities to breakdance and initiated over three centuries ago as a response to slavery...

...An early admirer of Jesus Colon was the Puerto Rican novelist Pin Thomas, and here we draw closer to the contemporary world of hip-hop...

...Around this time, too, black and Puerto Rican poets began to join forces: Felipe Luciano, later a leader of the Young Lords, was one of the original Last Poets, and Victor Hernandez Cruz was with the Third World Revelationists...

...it was the time when the first offspring of both mass migrations, many of them born and raised in New York, were settling into their new situation...

...Though Cubans and other Spanish speakers were their most immediate coworkers, black Americans were already a significant presence in their neighborhoods and workplaces...

...Most of the New York graffitists have been black and Puerto Rican youth, and whatever becomes of graffiti in its commercial and elite transmutations, the movement is part of the ongoing cultural convergence of those communities...

...There is clearly an important working-class basis to the graffiti movement that should not be overlooked...

...Recital of decimas and aguinaldos in the Puerto Rican folk tradition involved methods of improvisation and alternation much like those typical of rap performance, while the tonguetwisting (trabalengua) style of some plena singing is an even more direct antecedent...

...The same is true when considering the later development, when writing moved to the subways and iconography became a public art form...

...Of course this is only to mention the music that came to be recorded, the studio version of what thousands of young Puerto Ricans and blacks were singing in the streets, schoolyards, and hallways...

...For break and rap rhythms, with all their absorption of intervening and adjoining styles, remain grounded in African musical expression...

...584 • DISSENT...

...Graffiti for Mailer, and he might as well have been anticipating the whole hip-hop ensemble, "erupted biologically as though to save the sensuous flesh of their inheritance from a macadamization of the psyche, save the blank city wall of their unfed brain by painting the wall over with the giant trees and pretty plants of a tropical rain-forest...

...The speedy footwork, elaborate upper-body movement and daring dips in up-rock rested on a formative background in rhumba and guaguanco, and was to some extent also anticipated by the Latin hustle...

...More important, perhaps, just as with doo-wop and rhumba, there is a fascinating "fit" between Puerto Rican "clave" and characteristic rap rhythms...

...Despite the decidedly personal and turf-oriented cast of early graffiti, the political and social context of this practice should not be overlooked...

...This may seem surprising, since the more spectacular features of the current style —floor rocking and electric boogie—are indeed phenomena of the past few years...

...His contribution has been memorialized in Harlem's Schomburg Center for the Study of Black Culture...