Northeastern Celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month
The Socio-Sonic Circuitry of Afro-Latino Music in the Caribbean: From Bomba, Son Jarocho and Palos to Hip Hop and Reggaeton with Raquel Z. Rivera, Ph.D.
Drawing from her work as a scholar and performer of Afro-Caribbean music, Raquel Z. Rivera explores the histories and contemporary contexts of various Afro-Latino music genres such as Puerto Rican bomba, Mexican son jarocho, Dominican palos as well as Caribbean hip-hop and reggaeton, paying particular attention to the multiple and overlapping musical circuits along which these genres travel.
This lecture is in collaboration with Dr. Emmett Price’s African American Music class and Latino/a Heritage Month.
Partners: Northeastern Center for the Arts, Music, Media and Screen Studies, Communication Studies, Latino/a Student Cultural Center
Raquel Z. Rivera
Raquel Z. Rivera, Ph.D. is an author, scholar and singer-songwriter.
She is co-editor of the anthology Reggaeton (2009) and author of New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone (2003). Her academic articles on popular culture have been published in various books and journals. (Click on CV for complete listing.) A freelance journalist, her articles have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers, among these: Vibe,One World, Urban Latino, El Diario/La Prensa, Hoy, The San Juan Star,El Nuevo Día, Claridad and Diálogo. She blogs about her creative process at Cascabel de Cobre and about reggaeton and hip-hop atwww.reggaetonica.blogspot.com.
She has a Ph.D. in Sociology and is a Visiting Scholar at the University of New Mexico’s Sociology Department and an Affiliated Scholar at theCenter for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, New York City. Her areas of scholarly interest are popular music and culture, race and ethnicity, nation and diaspora, and the intersections between Latino and Africana studies. She has taught courses in Sociology, Anthropology, Africana and Latino Studies at Columbia University, Hunter College and Tufts University. A sought-after lecturer and panelist, she has done numerous presentations at colleges, conferences, schools and community-based organizations throughout the United States, Cuba and Puerto Rico.