Urban/Global Politics

Pepe Flores is a swirling ball of energy, usually dressed in a guayabera, bowtie, and some variation of fedora or Yoruban fila on his head, always looking to manifest some flash of the spirit to capture what’s left of the Latinx Lower East Side, or Loisaida. Most often you’ll run into him prowling along Avenue […]

In her first week as governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared the use of the word “Latinx” must be eliminated from official government document use. Her executive order “to respect the Latino community by eliminating culturally insensitive words from official use in government” is part of a thinly disguised “anti-woke” agenda adopted by a number of conservative Republicans. […]

In the fall of 1947, Dizzy Gillespie called on his friend, the trumpeter-arranger Mario Bauzá, in search of a conga player for an upcoming Carnegie Hall concert where he planned to debut songs exploring the connection between Afro-Cuban music and jazz. Bauzá suggested Chano Pozo, a swaggering master of Yoruba rhythms, who had just arrived from Cuba. […]

Pablo Milanés, who died in Madrid this week at 79, left behind a body of work that was deeply personal even as he navigated one of the 20th century’s most tumultuous political experiments, the Cuban Revolution. His career was an open dialogue with the revolutionary government that had once disciplined him, then propped him up as one […]

Over a balky wireless connection that seemed to symbolize how fleeting human contact has become, Natalia Lafourcade smiled as she showed off her garden in Xalapa, the capital of the Mexican state of Veracruz. She had emerged from the recording studio she built there, rattling off the trees that surround her home — guayabo, higuera, mulato — […]

“Puerto Rico is [expletive] great!,” exclaims Bad Bunny in “El Apagón (The Blackout),” a song from his best-selling album, “Un Verano Sin Ti.” His edgy exuberance and irresistible rhythmic brilliance are evident, but the boasting has a protective function, one that coaxes Puerto Ricans to persevere through bad times and puts the island’s longstanding problems […]

Early on in her masterful book Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer alludes to a double meaning embedded in her subtitle: “History in the first sense refers to what happened; in the second, to what is said to have happened.” Cuba’s history, Ferrer tells us, is likewise two histories. It is simultaneously a narrative of freedom […]

One day Artemio Morelia, a singer and maracas player for an obscure Colombian salsa band called Grupo Renacimiento, awoke and found himself transformed into a robot. Haunted by visions of HAL 9000, he was suddenly acutely aware of the coldness and the distractions of a constantly plugged-in world. “Memory is dying,” he sings on his […]

Last week actor John Leguizamo voiced strong opposition to the announcement that James Franco had been cast in the role of Fidel Castro in the upcoming independent film, “Alina of Cuba”, based on the life of Castro’s daughter Alina Fernández.  “How is Hollywood excluding us but stealing our narratives as well?” lamented Leguizamo on an Instagram […]

In the late 1990s, when Ricky Martin dominated the record industry with a new kind of Latin pop stardom, he captivated everyone with a song laden with postmodern irony. “Livin’ la Vida Loca” was more based on arena rock and Jamaican ska than it was on “Latin,” or Afro-Cuban music, and it gave a slightly […]