Member-only story
Touching Up My Roots
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 metronomic beat that kept the band on point. Years of “Pa, pa, pa, pause, Pa, pa” had gradually worn away the center of the left stick; the wood splintered like an opened wound. This constant sonic process had left a raw, jagged beige in contrast to the rest of its polished brown; both sticks indented to the sound of music.
My clave strikers had been with me since I’d started the band seven years before. They’d traveled to the Pyrenees Mountains in Toulouse, France, keeping time in a bullring where we performed for 20,000 people. They’d been with me when we opened for the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden. And when some suited-up professional a-hole tried to touch my tush at a restaurant, it was the brunt of my right clave that hit his left arm hard. So watching him rub it as he danced to our music felt good. They’d been through a lot.
Right now, my sticks looked like a pair of raggedy, poorly polished, chipped nails. There was a big festival in East Harlem that day that ran ten blocks downtown from 116th street. Hundreds of thousands of people were expected. We were to perform…
