José E. Cruz, O'Leary Professor of political science at UAlbany's Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, has spent a lifetime studying and practicing the politics and music of his native Puerto Rico. When Bad Bunny launched from a global musical star to political lightning rod at the Super Bowl this year, José saw in the controversy some of the same forces that shaped his youth as a revolutionary and garage band drummer.
If you’ve found your way to a podcast inspired partly by Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show and haven’t yet seen it, be sure to check it out so you can understand the full context of our conversation with José.
And if you also missed the controversy swirling around the performance, Rolling Stone is a good place to start unpacking that. The Conversation also had a good explainer.
But this didn’t start with Bad Bunny. During our conversation, José mentions a 1978 musical collaboration between Panamanian singer Rubén Blades and Puerto Rican trombonist Willie Colón, an album called Siembra, that he said in many ways foreshadowed the message of a hemispheric American identity highlighted by the flag bearers at the end of Bad Bunny’s performance.
Specifically, it was the song Plástico from that album. The roll call begins around the 6:00 mark.
As José noted, the roots of that message go back much further — at least as far back as 19th-century Cuban writer José Martí, who before he was killed in the island’s fight for independence wrote an 1891 essay on the topic titled Nuestra America, which translates to “Our America.” Read it in English, or its original Spanish.
José also mentioned the work of musicians Ray Barretto and Eddie Palmieri, and the poem Arte poética by Jorge Luis Borges.
We asked José to share a few favorite examples of the music he spoke about, including the plena songs he described as “the people’s newspaper.” Here’s the short version of his playlist:
The bilingual version of José’s book, Con la Música a Otra Parte, was released earlier this year.
If you want to hear José perform, he’s also president of Jazz/Latino, Inc., a nonprofit that promotes appreciation of jazz and Latin jazz by organizing performances around the Albany area.
He’s also written extensively about the political experience of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States, specifically in the northeast. Read more about his political science scholarship.
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman
Photo by Zach Durocher
Hosted and written by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist
[0:01] Host: Welcome to The Short Version, the UAlbany podcast that tackles big ideas, big questions and big news in less time than it takes to cross the Academic Podium. I'm Jordan Carleo-Evangelist in UAlbany's Office of Communications and Marketing.
[0:18] José Cruz: What would the Beatles and the Rolling Stones have anything to do with growing up in Puerto Rico in the 1950s and 60s? But that was the music; that was my cultural mantra in Puerto Rico, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
[0:34] Host: In the unlikely event that you missed it, popular and political culture spectacularly collided last month over Bad Bunny's much-anticipated Super Bowl halftime show. It was as much a celebration of punditry as it was music and dance. Critics, politicians and fans hyperbolically parsed every reggaeton beat, every Spanish lyric and every shoulder shimmy from one of the world's most popular musicians in front of its largest and most valuable TV audience.
As is often the case with these things, people saw and heard what they wanted to. Many interpreted the performance as a political and social commentary and what it means to be American and the heated U.S. politics around immigration and policy toward Latin America. But to José Cruz, O'Leary Professor of Political Science in UAlbany's Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, it was simply the latest example of the heady blend of music, literature, and politics that shaped his youth in Puerto Rico as a garage band drummer and an activist for independence.
In his latest book, Con la Música a Otra Parte — Taking Music Somewhere Else — José writes eight fictional short stories inspired by Spanish-language songs that moved him. To the extent that those stories take on political or social themes, it's not because that's what he intended. It's because that's how art — filtered by the experiences of the people who created it — works.
He has described his work as truth refracted by imagination, but he also wonders whether the opposite might be true. And ultimately, the direction might not matter. As an expert on the political experience of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the U.S., José told us that politics is as much a cultural expression as music and literature. And while you could study politics without also studying the art that surrounds it, it's a lot more interesting if you do.
We talked to José about his book, Puerto Rico's rich, co-mingled traditions of music and politics, and why he thinks Bad Bunny found an audience for notes — both musical and political — that many Latino musicians have been playing for decades. Here's our conversation.
[2:50] Host: You are longtime faculty member who is approaching the end of your active career as a faculty member. How did you end up in Albany? How did you end up as a political scientist?
[2:59] José Cruz: Second question first. I ended up being a political scientist as a result of a shift in my interest from the practice of politics to the study of politics. I was an activist in Puerto Rico involved in the anti-colonial movement on the island. I was what you could call a professional revolutionary for 10 years, and then when I and all of the other people, when we realized that the revolution was not around the corner, then we had to figure out what to do with our lives. And so I decided to go back to school.
But initially my interest was not in politics exclusively. I was interested in the combination of literature and politics. That was the focus of my studies in grad school. Then that morphed into a singular interest in politics, but by the time I got my PhD as a political scientist, my Holy Trinity was literature, music and politics.
I got to Albany as a result of three factors: number one, my talent as a grad student and as a student of political science that gave me my PhD in political science; luck; and affirmative action. And that was in 1994 when I started here at UAlbany.
[4:31] Host: Which revolution was your revolution?
[4:34] José Cruz: In Puerto Rico we were interested in not just achieving independence for Puerto Rico, but we wanted socialism as well. I was a founding member of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party on the island in 1971. So we wanted independence and a socialist revolution. We wanted national liberation and the end of class exploitation in society.
[5:04] Host: Over your career as an academic, you've studied the political experience of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States, specifically here in the northeast where we live, but your interest in music precedes that. And I wonder: how do they overlap? Can you study the cultural-political experience of any people in a place without looking at the art that they consume and the art that they produce?
[5:29] José Cruz: Well, you can, but it's more interesting to be sort of interdisciplinary, if you will, and to find ways in which one particular cultural expression, which politics is part of a culture, sort of overlaps and fuses and combines and is shaped, influenced by other cultural expressions. In the anti-colonial movement in Puerto Rico, politics and musics were deeply connected. There was a soundtrack to the anti-colonial movement on the island, and I was part of that at the time, mostly as a consumer and as a listener of that soundtrack.
It's later on that I decide to become more of not just a student, but also a practitioner. I have to say that before all of that, I was a drummer in a rock garage band in Puerto Rico. From playing rock and roll, then I shifted to Afro-Caribbean percussion. Then in 2000, while I was already settled here in Albany, then I started playing professionally locally with a band called Mundo Nuevo, which was a quartet, and we played Afro-Caribbean music in Spanish, and I was the percussionist for that band.
[6:51] Host: Indirectly, we’re sitting here because we ran into each other a couple days after the Super Bowl. Knowing what you studied and your interest in music, I had to ask you what you sort of made of this enormous social and political cultural conversations around Bad Bunny and his performance and what it meant as someone who has thought about this stuff for a long time. What did you make of the sudden interest?
[7:16] José Cruz: Right. He's been around for a long time, so I know that there's a lot of hard work behind that rise to notoriety. I think his success is in part due to the global success of reggaeton, a musical style of which he is only one representative — and not necessarily the best, frankly. I think it's part of sort of a generational shift where young people are experiencing the same kinds of things that I was experiencing as a young person in Puerto Rico. We're living in a period of social and political ferment. A lot of stuff is happening that is provoking and stimulating young people into thinking about different types of ways of conceiving and practicing politics. Bad Bunny, in his latest musical productions, he's kind of tapping into that and riding the crest of that wave by his newfound interest in Puerto Rican history and politics.
[8:22] Host: One of the visually most striking moments in his performance was a procession with people carrying the flags of the many different countries that make up North America, Central America, South America, and it was this sort of broader notion and conception of what America is than just the United States. And what you said to me was people have been saying that for a long time. He's certainly not the first, not the first. What is the history of that?
[8:46] José Cruz: Yeah, it goes back to the connection between politics and music, which is long standing. In Puerto Rico, for example, there is a musical genre known as plena, which is known as “the people's newspaper” because every plena song, it's based on an event or a situation or an issue related to politics and society, and that's been around since the early 20th century in Puerto Rico. The idea of America as a hemispheric concept as opposed to just the United States goes back to the late 19th century and early 20th century in the works of José Martí, the Cuban patriot and intellectual, where he wrote about Nuestra America, our America. He didn't really mean just the United States, but the hemisphere. In music, the first one to do what Bad Bunny did at the Super Bowl was actually a Panamanian singer-composer, Rubén Blades, in this album called Siembra, which came out in 1978. One of the songs at the end lists, just like what Bad Bunny did, the names of all the countries of Central and South America in the context of the desirability of hemispheric unity. So that was the first time, and this was 1978.
[10:24] Host: And Siembra means…
[10:25] José Cruz: Siembra means cultivating. Sowing seeds.
[10:31] Host: Is there, or can there be any music that is not political?
[10:36] José Cruz: Oh yeah, sure. My interest in literature, music and politics culminates in this book that I just published this year called Con la Música a Otra Parte — Taking Music Somewhere Else. This book is eight short stories, fiction, using as cues for each of the stories eight popular Puerto Rican songs, and I use the songs to spin stories that address social and political issues in Puerto Rico — issues having to do with racial violence, with misogyny, with economic inequality. But frankly for me, that combination was just a byproduct of my experience with literature, music and politics. I did not write the stories thinking, I want to deliver a message, I want to make a social commentary. It just happened because ultimately I think that art should be practiced for art's sake. Music, literature, they are distinctive expressions that can be combined, but they all have their own distinctive logics, histories, techniques that separate them from each other. So you can create art and you can create music that has nothing to do with politics, that is just about language, images, dreams, experiences that are deeply personal, familial, et cetera. So that's possible.
[12:13] Host: Do you think that art, literature, music has a way to reach people and make them think about social issues, political issues in a way that a government report that sort of very clinically, empirically lays out an issue or problem cannot do?
[12:29] José Cruz: I think so. There's a poem by Jorge Luis Borges called Arte poética, the Art of Poetry, and one of the verses he says, “Sometimes in the afternoons we see our faces reflected in a mirror.” Art should be like that mirror that reveals to us our own face. So to the extent that a cultural expression can do that, it's going to speak to people, and if the corollary aspect of that creation has something to do with society and politics, it's going to speak to the person in societal and political terms, and it's going to be much different than reading an article in The New York Times or reading an academic monograph because there's going to be an identification with what the reader, the listener is confronting — what is presented to him or herself. And the other thing is that it has to have an aesthetic component to it. The music of Rubén Blades, the music of Ray Barretto or Eddie Palmieri, who are the really pioneers in this trend of combining music with politics, is effective both because of the content of the message that they're trying to deliver, but also because of the quality of the music in which it is presented.
[14:05] Host: What's interesting about all the attention that Bad Bunny got is that it happens to be happening at a time when this whole political and cultural situation is very fraught around the issue of immigration, which disproportionately impacts Latin American countries. And it seemed like that performance was speaking more to just Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens. It seemed to be talking more broadly to people from other Latino cultures and Latin American countries who are experiencing this now. Do you think that the message was much broader than just an interest in Puerto Rican politics and culture and history?
[14:43] José Cruz: I think so, and what that suggests is the relationship between the particular and the general works sometimes in interesting and sometimes mysterious ways Bad Bunny, his point of departure is Puerto Rico. That particular performance resulted in a product that had a broader appeal by listing all the other countries of Latin America. At the same time, it was very distinctive because reggaeton — it's a global phenomenon, even the Japanese love reggaeton — it's everywhere. But yeah, it's part of an interesting dynamic where sometimes the particular can be a good platform for the projection of universality, and that often happens without necessarily that being the intent. When I wrote the stories of Con la Música a Otra Parte, I wasn't thinking: “I want this to be relevant to people in Cuba or Santo Domingo or the United States.” I was thinking of the songs, of my experience listening to the songs, of my experience growing up in Puerto Rico, and of issues that I experienced in the politics of Puerto Rico or that I've learned about the history and the politics of Puerto Rico as I became involved in politics and then in the study of politics.
[14:43] Host: That was José Cruz, O'Leary Professor of political science in UAlbany’s Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy. José explained the deeply intertwined histories of music and politics in Puerto Rico that long preceded Bad Bunny's blockbuster Super Bowl halftime show — and how a 1978 collaboration between a Panamanian singer and Puerto Rican trombonist may have helped set the stage.
To learn more about José’s book of music-inspired short stories, and to hear some of the songs we talked about, be sure to check out The Longer Version in our show notes.
The Short Version would not be possible without contributions from many people, including for this episode: audio production and editing by Scott Freedman in the UAlbany Digital Media Studio, deep inside the Podium Tunnels.
Come to think of it, we probably should have recorded José on the drums while we had him down there.
We'll be back next week with another conversation about something interesting.
I'm Jordan Carleo-Evangelist here at the University at Albany, and this has been The Short Version.