Celebrating Boricua Culture in N.Y It was the day before the Puerto Rican day parade, and I needed a new pair of clave sticks. My old ones already had splinters spiking up from the rough patch in their middle where one wooden stick struck the other in a two-bar, five-note…

Boricua Social Philosopher, Educator — Writer — Patriot “Ideals that take days to conceive, mature over centuries of struggles.” wrote Eugenio Maria de Hostos in the late 1800s. Educator, humanist, abolitionist, feminist, philosopher, writer, politician, and above all, an early advocate of self-government for Puerto Rico, Hostos is globally recognized…

West Side Story: Resurrecting a Place for Us Reprinted from NYU’s Latinx Project Intervexions As the family translator, I was surprised when Ma, who didn’t go anywhere without me as a go-between, tore into the living room demanding I stop playing that record. Then, pushing past my deer-in-the-headlights stare, she…

Goin’ down to shoot my ol’ lady. Ya know I caught her (W.A.P.) messing ‘round with another man. The Cardi B controversy. The fallout over Cardi B’s top-charting W.A.P. performance over the Grammy Awards stirred a second sanctimonious tsunami of garment-gashing jazzers and Latin music artists exploding with indignation all…

Facing the music: going home. A founding member of the Fania All-Stars’ supergroup of bad-boy bandleaders, co-producer of the salsa music cult film classic “Our Latin Thing,” storied producer of hundreds of hit recordings and gold albums, and a fierce activist who successfully campaigned the National Academy of Recorded Arts and Sciences (NARAS) to designate…

Time always betrays me.

Will “In the Heights” take us there? From “Our Latin Thing” to “In the Heights:” Colorism & Criticism I’ve always said that history repeats itself but in different ways. The recent bruhaha over “In the Heights” has crystalized that adage. Today’s criticisms over the movie’s lack of Afro-Latinos are the antithesis of the strong opinions against the 1972 movie “Our Latin…

Last night I saw the devil: a cockeyed, cone-headed demon his face contorted from the turmoil of the Orishas that he daily dishonors with his vile contempt for humanity. His ubiquitous beats, as impotent as his will for sustained oppression, cry out in shame with every slap of the demon’s…

You emerged from the dark well, startled by the lights, looking at the sights of different colored faces touching, pulling, yanking you out of me. For 3 days you played hide & seek, dropping deep into the abyss then hitting your head against the birth canal only to retreat back…