Entre llantos: Literary and Embodied Representations of Lamentation in Puerto Rican Popular Culture, examines different facets of Puerto Rican popular culture as forms of lamentation. Lamentation, a female-dominant genre, is a ritualistic remembrance that aims to honor and appease the dead to the living, while giving space to an array of emotions including sadness, grief, and anger. Through a translocation of Ancient Greek and Mediterranean definitions of lamentation, I analyze Puerto Rican dance, music, and literature as immaterial archives, defined by Jenny Sharpe (2020) as intangible qualities that add to material archives. I argue that lamentation is a decolonial liberatory practice due to its powerful and threatening presence in public spheres and its ability to expose un(der)told histories of Puerto Ricans across the archipelago and the diaspora. My work begins in the late nineteenth century with the abolition of slavery and the invasion of the US, then moves to the Puerto Rican intellectual movement of the 1930s, followed by the Great Migration of Puerto Ricans in the 1950s (and the current migration of Puerto Ricans in the twenty-first century), and finally the period after Hurricane María, a category five hurricane that demolished the archipelago and other parts of the Caribbean.My dissertation project consists of four chapters where I analyze bomba (an Indigenous Afro-Puerto Rican dance) alongside popular music, memoirs, and post-catastrophe cultural production. The first and second chapters take up music as a primary source and examine the ways lyrics and rhythms archived the histories of people who did not have access to pen and paper. In the first chapter, I use an ethnographic approach to write about bomba. I argue that the dancing of these rhythms is as a ritual of lamentation, and through the movement of the body, bomba archives the histories of enslaved people in the archipelago. In the second chapter, I analyze the popular Puerto Rican song “Lamento Borincano” (1929) as the first Latin American song of protest and think about the global impact and solidarity Rafael Hernández created through this song. Further, through an examination of the figure of “el jíbaro” known as the Puerto Rican rural farmer, I problematize the Black erasure of the national emblem, and highlight the significance of a Black man being known as the “jibarito nacional.” The third and fourth chapters shift to a more literary approach, as I examine the memoirs of Piri Thomas and Jacquira Díaz, two Afro-Puerto Ricans living in the United States, to center the laments of Black and Brown children. Through a comparative analysis of Thomas and Díaz, an Afro-Boricua girl in Miami, I think beyond the imagined spaces of the Puerto Rican diaspora to include Florida, a major diaspora, especially after Hurricane María in 2017. My main goal is to prioritize the lamentation of children, and bear witness to the ways they survive poverty and instability. The fourth chapter culminates in an analysis of what I call modern/colonial city laments, which I define as decolonial subversions of the ancient tradition of city laments. Through an analysis of Santos Febres’s Huracanada (2018) and the art exhibit No existe un mundo poshuracán (2022), I show how poets and artists archived the reality of Puerto Ricans after catastrophe through a collective mourning of the devastation of Puerto Rico, and how their laments serve as a counter-archive to the state’s recollection of what happened.
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