Urban/Global Politics

Pepe Flores is en la casa

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 […]

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Urban/Global Politics

What Sarah Huckabee Sanders gets wrong with her ‘Latinx’ ban

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. […]

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Urban/Global Politics

The Soaring Legacy of Pablo Milanés

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 […]

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Urban/Global Politics

Allow Natalia Lafourcade to Reintroduce Herself

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 — […]

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Urban/Global Politics

Bad Bunny’s politically charged reggaetón is making waves

“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 […]

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Urban/Global Politics

Our America: Cuba Across the Centuries

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 […]

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