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José Blanco F. and Raúl J. Vázquez-López, "Dress, Fashion, and National Identity in Puerto Rico: Taínos to Beauty Queens" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Dr. Jose Blanco
Hello, everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today because we get to talk about a really interesting book that's got a whole bunch of things in it, and it's written by two authors and they're both here. So the book was published by Bloomsbury in 2025 and is titled Dress Fashion and National Identity in Puerto Rico, Tainos to Beauty, Queensland. And it uses case studies, it uses all sorts of things, really, to explore some really specific questions around particular festivals, for instance, as well as some really big picture questions like national identity formation and what this means in terms of fashion and visual culture and interweaving of traditions. There's a ton of rich things for us to discuss here, and so I'm very pleased to welcome both of the authors to the conversation today. Dr. Jose Blanco and Raul Vasquez Lopez are both here to tell us about their work. So, Jose Raoul, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:07]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Thank you for having us. We're very excited.
- [02:09]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm very excited to have you both, too. But before we get too far into the book, could you each please introduce yourselves a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book and why do it Together.
- [02:20]
Dr. Jose Blanco
Sure. My name is Jose Blanco. I'm an associate professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Although my degrees, all of them are in theater. I. I started teaching in fashion about 20 something years ago. I teach fashion history, both European and global. I teach courses on cultural aspects of dress and fashion. And I also have some experience with fashion show production and history. Collection management.
- [02:49]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Yes. And I'm Raul Vasquez Lopez. I also teach at fit, but in the languages department. And before I was teaching here, I worked in publishing for many, many years and also doing some research on Puerto Rican popular culture and passion.
- [03:08]
Dr. Jose Blanco
So about how we started to work on this book, it goes back to, I think about 12 years ago.
- [03:15]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Yeah, something like that.
- [03:16]
Dr. Jose Blanco
I was spending Christmas in Puerto Rico with Raul and I guess this is a good moment to clarify to everybody that we're not just a research team, but we are a couple. We've been together for 25 years, married for 10. And so I was visiting the in laws and then Raul very casually told me about this festival, the Festival de Mascaras, which is one of the things we cover in our book. And he said, oh, it's just this festival that is going on in my town right now or in the town next door. And we had already done some work together, but I told him, well, this would be a great opportunity for us to work together on that. Which brings me to another super important thing to mention, which is that I am not Puerto Rican. I am from Costa Rica. And I am very honored to have had this opportunity to learn so much about Raul's culture. He is Puerto Rican.
- [04:11]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
I am Puerto Rican. And even before that I was working already on some Ribaros, which is the Puerto Rican peso. And I was exploring that through literature and dance and a little bit of dress.
- [04:27]
So yeah, I don't know. I am Puerto Rican. So this actually for me is quite an honor to actually explore my culture in this in depth way.
- [04:38]
Dr. Jose Blanco
We started doing some presentations at conferences. So one of the first things we explored was the representation of national customs for Miss Universe contestants. And also at that time we were living in Chicago and we knew about the Young Lords, which was a group of.
- [04:55]
Puerto Rican youth, a youth group in the 70s in Puerto Rico. They kind of modeled themselves after, I mean, in Chicago. Sorry. Thank you. And they kind of modeled themselves after the Black Panthers and collaborated with the Black Panthers. So this was another one of the first things we started researching. And from that moment on we knew we had to research both the diaspora and the people back in the island.
- [05:20]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Yes. And ultimately that's how we ended up writing the book. It's really a combination of new material and previously published essays where we discuss a variety of aspects, as you mentioned, related to different elements of visual culture in Puerto Rico, both past and present.
- [05:36]
Dr. Jose Blanco
It took us about 10 years to finally publish the book.
- [05:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I mean, to be honest, having read it, that's not hugely surprising given the breadth of things covered in it. So I'm glad that there's so many things there because it obviously gives us a lot to talk about if we're ready to start to move into some of the specifics of the book.
- [05:56]
Dr. Jose Blanco
Absolutely, let's do it.
- [05:58]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
All right. So the first thing I want to talk about is kind of, I guess, an overarching point. It comes up in multiple of the sections of the book. And I want to make sure that we discuss it here too, which is clearly, I mean, this isn't even implied in the book. This is something actually stated in what you both have written, which is that Puerto Rico is the last Spanish speaking colony. This comes up, as I said, multiple times. Why is this such a key part of how you've approached this project and brought all these pieces together?
- [06:28]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Yes, it is definitely a central idea to the book. As you mentioned, as the last Spanish speaking colony, Puerto Rico then presents a unique environment to study national identity and nation formation through dress and fashion, which is the lens we use. And one thing to clarify too is that we do a lot of emphasis on the island, or technically archipelago. Puerto Rico is an archipelago, but we have 3.2 million people living in Puerto Rico. However, we also explored the diaspora because as opposed to the island, there are at least 5.9 million Puerto Ricans living in the United States alone. So it was very important for us to. To make that.
- [07:19]
Statement also very visible and clear. So Puerto Rico is one of the clearest examples of a nation that goes beyond geographical borders. For that, we follow Arjun Apadurai's idea that the nation can no longer be confined between the borders of a country. In this case, Puerto Rico, as I mentioned, the diaspora is much larger. So Puerto Rican dress and identity are then built outside those geographical bounds and by anyone, anywhere who is Puerto Rican. And a lot of this movement of diaspora is informed by the colonial status.
- [07:59]
Dr. Jose Blanco
So, yeah, I guess that's where this aspect comes from because so Puerto Rico, it's still a colony, it's not a nation. But people in Puerto Rico feel like they are a nation and certainly we agree with that. And people in the diaspora also feel that. So we decided to frame our book using a decolonial perspective. But I guess it's important to clarify that one of our main goals was to make this book accessible to anyone outside academia. A note here about deciphering theory and how surprised we were when researching for this book that even Latinx academics write about decolonization and decoloniality in impenetrable terms. It was really difficult to read some of these writings. So we aim to write in simple terms because we think that that's an act of true decoloniality to write a book that can be read by anyone and not just by intellectuals and academics. So of course decolonization has to do with the idea of returning land and resources to the people that, that they were taken from. And it seems like at the moment the United States is not willing to let go of its commonwealth. So we emphasize the idea of decoloniality, which is about ways of thinking and practices that persist even after a geographic area has been decolonized. But there's still cultural colonization that remains. And by that we mean the discourses that maintain colonial structures of powers which we see all over Latin America. For centuries we have maintained colonial structures of powers of power even though we are independent nations. You know, in these continuous practices that discriminate against people based on their social class and race and ethnicity. All of those are inherited from colonization. But in the case of Puerto Rico, it remains a colony. So we find it super interesting that there's this sort of like double sided.
- [10:04]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Yes. So that double sided is like Puerto Rico exists in a permanent state of hybridity, if you may. It has its colonial reality and then it has its imagined nation and both things that are always mutating and in contrasting with each other.
- [10:22]
Dr. Jose Blanco
And you know, like there's an author, Laura Briggs, that talks about the idea that Puerto Rico is the most important place in the world precisely because of that, because of this entanglement between Puerto Rico as a quote unquote nation and a colony. So.
- [10:37]
Really that's central, as we said to our comments.
- [10:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, I think it's really helpful to have kind of laid out as the foundation of our conversation. And I'm especially glad as well that you have mentioned how the book is written and that that's not an accident. And that's also not just sort of a nice to have because we want people to read it who are not academics. There's a political point to it as well. So again, very glad that that's foregrounded early on in our discussion I think the other key aspect of sort of introductory information I want to make sure we cover is around the structure of the book. Because obviously, with the ideas that we've mentioned so far, there's a lot of ways you both could have taken this and put this all together. So I was very curious to know. The book is split into three sections. Dress, Costume, and fashion. Why that structure, and how can we understand each of those terms defined sort of in comparison to each other?
- [11:34]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Yes.
- [11:37]
We needed some guardrails. We needed some organizational structure. But at the end of the day, really, when we looked at the questions that we had and the work that we already had published elsewhere, we realized that looking at one aspect would be insufficient. So we wanted to look at the overarching practices. And that's why we organized the book in those three sections.
- [12:01]
Dr. Jose Blanco
And I would say for anyone who's not. Who's listening and is not a fashion scholar, that fashion and dress scholars are constantly fighting over terminology. You go to a conference and, like, half of the time people are arguing whether we should call something fashion or we should call it dress. And so there's this obsession with terms in academic conferences and social media. People find each other in social media about the terms fashion, costume, and dress. So we wanted to address all of them. But one thing that is really important for us is to understand that these are fluid terms. So, for example, we place our conversation about the Miss Universe contestants under the chapter of fashion, and we can talk about that later. But it's also clearly a custom. So this. These terms are not, you know, just very clearly.
- [12:58]
Delimited.
- [12:58]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Yes, they offer a certain degree of flexibility that allowed us to organize.
- [13:03]
Dr. Jose Blanco
But the way we use the term dress comes from anthropology. And basically, they define the idea of dress as any modifications and supplements of a person's appearance. And we like that because it really packs the body with meaning. So we can talk about not just clothes, but the body as ideas of beauty and how people handle modesty and race and ethnicity, and in our case, national identity. So that we use in the book, in contrast to the concept of fashion, which I guess can be described in two different ways. One is the capitalist, industrialist, industrial complex of fashion, or the fashion business. And the other one, it's sort of like the artistic, creative expressions that people put on their bodies. You know, that can be in the past or present. And we usually associate that with Europe and the US and, let's say, the West. But we know that fashion has been part of global history in every single continent for centuries.
- [14:13]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Yes.
- [14:13]
Dr. Jose Blanco
And Then there's the.
- [14:14]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
And then we have costume left, which is, I think, the most problematic of the terms, precisely because it lends itself to colonialist interpretations. It kind of relegates the aesthetic developments of dress outside of the west to this realm of traditions that are trapped in a romanticized time and place. So it assumes stagnation. Right.
- [14:39]
But it is for us. We define, or is defined rather as styles of dress peculiar to a nation, to a period or to an occasion. And this is where we place things like the festivals, like the mascaras, the vegigantes, and some of the chapter on dance and dress.
- [14:58]
Dr. Jose Blanco
So that's our introduction to those three terms, I hope. I mean, it's complicated. There's a lot written about this.
- [15:07]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
No.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And of course, I'm not asking you to solve every definitional quandary in the entire field, but it's helpful to have a sense that A, there is a definitional quandary and B, sort of how you're navigating it in this context.
- [15:19]
Dr. Jose Blanco
So I promise you that someone will be disappointed by our explanation and will be reading with us over the over as they're listening.
- [15:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Oh, don't worry, I'm an interdisciplinary historian. I'm used to that. It's. We all have that in so many fields. So, yes, those of us who are not fashion historians may not know of that one, but I think we can recognise sort of what's going on here and also know that, you know, once we've discussed definitions, we at least know what sorts of boundaries. Guard rails. I think one of you said we're sort of drawing and then can kind of play within them, knowing that some of those rails might be moved, might be debated. But that's not what we're here to do today. Now that you've laid out how you've.
- [16:00]
Dr. Jose Blanco
Approached it, the holidays have a way.
- [16:02]
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- [17:12]
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- [17:42]
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- [18:12]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
We are now able to get into some of the more specifics of the chapters. So obviously I cannot keep you here for eight hours to tell me every detail about every chapter. I wish, but I've picked out some elements I'd love for us to discuss a bit further. So when we're talking about kind of colonial tropes of dress, I think that's maybe the thread I most want to draw first, because there are ways in which obviously looking at indigenous groups, whether historically or in the present or both, can often fall into that kind of trap. And yet dress of Indigenous peoples can also be a really powerful political tool to work against that. And this is something that you both address in the chapter around Taino revival efforts. So can we talk about kind of what some of those efforts are and the role dress has played in them?
- [19:04]
Dr. Jose Blanco
Yeah, absolutely. This is, I think, one of my favorite chapters to talk about, and I'VE been actually teaching this chapter in my classes for a few years, even before it was published. So it has a lot of feedback from the students who love to talk about this, particularly in the US when they become connected to issues related to indigenous groups in the US And Raul and I have actually been able to visit some of the archaeological sites in Puerto Rico. And if we could right now, we would show you some examples of items, T shirts that we have purchased that include Taino symbols. But I will later tell you about who the Tainos are.
- [19:43]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Yes. So the Tainos are an Arawak people, and they were the inhabitants of Puerto Rico and other areas of the Caribbean. You know, their present even extended to modern day in Florida in the United States. And they were there upon the arrival of the Spanish colonizers. So they had the dubious honor of being the ones to enjoy the first encounters they made Columbus before anyone else. Yes. But one thing that is important is that we think of the Tainos in Puerto Rico as these historic figures. Right. Puerto Rico doesn't enjoy established tribes as other parts in the Americas. So the Tainos.
- [20:25]
Kind of exist in this imagination of the past. However, there are clear signs that as Taino people, they still do exist, at least genetically. And there's a lot of efforts from diverse groups to revive and reconnect strongly with their culture. And one of the ways that Taino has survived, Taino identity has survived in Puerto Rico is actually through dress and souvenirs. Daino symbols appear in T shirts, as I mentioned, in baseball hats, in tattoos, for example. And so that's one of the main ways in which they entered the modern imagination.
- [21:11]
Dr. Jose Blanco
And this is interesting because after.
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Assuming or at least telling people that the Tainos had been completely exterminated or they were extinct, then there was a resurgence of interest in Taino culture in the late 1960s and 1970s, which anyways is at the same time that everywhere in Latin America there's a resurgence of interest in indigenous cultures. In the case of Puerto Rico, the main goal was to kind of like establish a presence and gain a political voice in Puerto Rican society as an indigenous group. Yes.
- [21:50]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
So I guess, you know, a strong constituent of the Taino revival movement has actually been the Puerto Rican diaspora. And they have. Which strongly embrace their otherness in the United States. And they do this by highlighting not only their Puerto Rican identity, but also that Taino heritage. And it's actually now, with social media being such an, you know, a main part of our life is actually more common in social media now than in the past. So we see a lot of those efforts proliferating online.
- [22:24]
Dr. Jose Blanco
And this is one thing that we talked about in class with my students, about the idea that diasporas are more likely to embrace these indigenous symbols because they need them perhaps more than people that live still in the country. And that's not just with the indigenous symbols. That's with everything. Diasporas are more likely to embrace custom. I have many students from India that tell me, for example, that they have never worn a saree before until they were here in the US because it was a way to connect back to the country or with other people. But we do say in this chapter something very important, which is that we need to be careful about proclaiming Taino identity as superior or as the original or as the only Puerto Rican identity. We see that as problematic because it implies that any other groups that arrive later to the island can be considered less Puerto Rican. So an emphasis on indigeneity can often work against acknowledging the tremendous impact of, for example, people of African descent and informing our Caribbean and Latin American identities. But it is a fascinating topic and one that we hope to continue talking about.
- [23:45]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean, there's so much there. I'm sure it could probably be its own book, but I want to move on to some other things that are discussed in this one. Something. Jose, I believe it was you that mentioned this earlier. You talked a little bit about some research you were doing with Hebaro imagery, if I'm pronouncing that even vaguely correctly. What are the politics of dress there? Because this is, again, we're talking, as you've just mentioned, not about indigenous populations, but about kind of still older traditions of certain groups, but they're not indigenous ones. Like, are any of these same questions around revival and who's using what symbol where? Is any of that true here, too?
- [24:25]
Dr. Jose Blanco
Yeah, and that was Raul. Raul. Raul's style. So I'll let him talk about. He's the one that was researching Jibaruz before we started working together.
- [24:33]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
And this is actually my favorite chapter to talk about. So, for the uninitiated, Ajibaro is what we call in Puerto Rico a peasant. And so it reflects the image of the peasantry.
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I think the first mention was.
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Somewhere in the 18th century. I think that's when the term first appeared. So it belongs to a relative of the person of Spanish descent. It's generally from the mountain regions of the island. It's connected to the hacienda landowner system established by the Spanish colonies, in which.
- [25:13]
Dr. Jose Blanco
A landowner will have control of the land and the people living in the land. Kind of like an expansion of feudalism in a way.
- [25:21]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Sorry.
- [25:23]
But there's key elements that define the hebero, and one of them is poverty, which essentially defines what sort of, like, dress practices they would adopt. The Jivaro clothing, if we like, the Jivaros themselves, is not static. So they kept, you know, changing and moving with the times. But one thing that is very important is that the Jivaro became the de facto symbol of Puerto Ricanness at some point in the 1940s, 1950s. And every incarnation of the Jivaro responds to a cultural, political or geographical circumstances. For example, we see the Jivaro in art. There's a famous painting called El Panuestro, which is in reference to our daily bread, and it presents a Jivaro as this gigantic figure in the mountains carrying a bunch of plantains. But without ignoring it's the poverty that. That this person goes through is barefoot with the pava hat, which is a straw hat, iconic straw hat that I'm sure will come up at some point in this conversation. It's present in politics. For example, the logo of the Partido Popular Democratico, or the Popular Democratic Party of Puerto Rico, is actually a Jivaro wearing the pava hat. And this is really the moment when the Jivaro becomes institutionalized as an image of Puerto Ricanness. And coincidentally, this party is the one that offered the first elected governor of Puerto Rico. We see the Jivaro in business. For example, if anyone is familiar with Menudo, one of the original members, Rovi Draco, he has a line of coffee and it's called Jibaro banguardista. So the Rivaro is a very malleable, is a very useful image to express Puerto Ricanness in whichever way you want.
- [27:28]
Dr. Jose Blanco
But as is often the case, then there's kind of like a romantic or a stereotypical image of the Jivaro and their dress, the way they dress, that has been frozen in time. And we see that very clearly in the Puerto Rican Barbie. When we did a talk at FIT about two months ago, I think. And so they were promoting the talk on Instagram and they had like, different posts of things that we were going to talk about. And they posted an image of the Puerto Rican Barbie. And that Instagram post was.
- [27:57]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
It blew up, it was so popular.
- [27:59]
Dr. Jose Blanco
And so that taught us that people were really interested in hearing about the Puerto Rican Barbie. And so we talk about the Puerto Rican Barbie on this chapter about the Jibaro. When that Barbie came out I forgot the year. But when it came out, it angered many people, it made many people happy. There were a lot of conversations. She's too dark, she's too light, she should be darker. She doesn't represent darker Puerto Ricans. She doesn't represent light skinned Puerto Ricans and so on and so forth. But the other conversation was about what she was wearing. And we talk about this in our chapter about Miss Universe. The idea that Mattel promotes on their national dolls around the world is that you can represent a country in one dress. And so that is always something that is difficult. We argue against the idea of representing one country in one type of national dress. The national custom of Puerto Rico is supposed to be inspired by Jivaro clothing. But that, as we were saying, is really a romanticized version of the peasants that was created by intellectuals in the 19th century when Puerto Rico became independent. Well, many countries around Latin America became independent of Spain or other colonial powers and they were exploring ways to create a nation. So even though Puerto Rico was still a Spanish colony, finding out something that could represent the country was essential and that became the river. But the Barbie, besides that has many other issues. You know, she's dressed all in white.
- [29:40]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
She is dressed all in white, which would be very difficult for a person to achieve. She has tons of lace, which would be financially prohibitive. Like they could not afford that. And one of the is interesting things is that she wears heels. High heel shoes. White high heel shoes. Oh yes, pink, which I mean, he were us. If we look at historical photographs and some artistic representations from the period, they are barefoot. So there's a lot of, like, there's a lot of fallacies, if you may, around this Barbie.
- [30:15]
Dr. Jose Blanco
But people still feel very emotional. Like when I brought that to my class, there were students that were Puerto Rican and they wanted a photo of the Puerto Rican Barbie. We took it out of the box.
- [30:29]
To use it for the book and photographs. And a lot of people gave us a scolding because apparently it's a collector's item and you're not supposed to take.
- [30:36]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
It out of the box, but to wrap it up and bring it to the present. The jibaro. Now the image of the jibaro or components of the jivaro now appear in fashion design. And I would say that this is not in small part because of Bad Bunny's use of hibaro in promotion.
- [30:56]
And performance.
- [30:58]
One of the designers that we talked about, Ector Omar, one of their last Collection, Romeo Act 2. There is Hibar apava hat that is Part of one of the looks and that hat actually combines the. The peasantry with one of their favorite pastime, which was cockfighting. So the Hebrew image continues to migrate.
- [31:22]
Dr. Jose Blanco
In time, and it's been very much embraced by a lot of young people at the moment. We can more about that later.
- [31:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely an interesting evolution over time from being sort of stuck in one place to then being adopted Now. There's clearly a lot going on there, and that's not just for the Hebaro imagery as well. There's a lot of other things happening. So I'd love to pull now on the thread around festivals, because it sounds like that was kind of the origin for a lot of this Anyway, so we have to talk about festivals. But I think the part of the festival analysis that you have in the book that I'd love to discuss is around the way in which, looking at festival costumes, obviously you can see a ton of things. There's clearly a lot going on, even just from the photographs in the book that was clear. But what about the ways in which histories of colonization of African and cultural influences that one of you mentioned sort of earlier is something we don't want to lose with a focus on Taino revivalism. How do we see these sorts of histories and influences in festival costumes?
- [32:24]
Dr. Jose Blanco
Oh, this is a great question. Okay. You know, the festival that I mentioned that started this all when I was visiting the old family is in Puerto Rico. That festival is traced to the Canary Islands. So is the Mascaras festival. So it is really very, very European. It is absolutely connected to any other carnival traditions during Lent in. In Europe. So that one is like, I would say 100% of European descent, of Spanish.
- [32:56]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
That one. With that one, we can like that. That one is easily traceable. And it's. It's a very. It's very exciting and lively.
- [33:04]
Dr. Jose Blanco
Yeah. And then we also talk in the book about a festival that is very different from this one. The Fiestas Traditionales Santiago Postal, which translates as Help me.
- [33:16]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Yeah. To the traditional festivities in honor of Saint Saint James.
- [33:23]
Dr. Jose Blanco
I think it's Saint James the Apostle.
- [33:25]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
There you go.
- [33:26]
Dr. Jose Blanco
So, okay. Together we sort of, like, made it. So this is one of the best known events in Puerto Rico. Rico. And this happens in the town of Loiza, which is very close to the capital of San Juan and Loiza. It's a place where the population is largely descending from enslaved Africans. So it's a very interesting place to talk about Afro Puerto Rican identity, which we explore in more detail when we talk about this festival. But there is still a lot more that can be explored about Afro Puerto Rican identity in dress. But this festival is very interesting because it's been described by people as the most Spanish Catholic event in Puerto Rico. It's sponsored by the Catholic Church, but it's also the one that has more pagan and African elements. There's African masks, and there's, like, African, you know, dress and costume and ribbons and sounds. So it is really this place where you see the religious and the sacred coming together. And then really the history of Puerto Rico, it's also a very important festival. It brings a lot of money into this area.
- [34:38]
The town booms economically at that time.
- [34:42]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Yes, And I would say that just a little side note here, I mentioned about the Taino imagery in souvenirs. I mentioned the pava hats also. But I think the second or even, I don't know, arguably one of the most.
- [34:58]
Common things that you see in tourism, it is like replicas of the masks used in this festival. So it is a very, very important national identity component.
- [35:09]
Dr. Jose Blanco
We have a few hanging on our wall here at home. So.
- [35:12]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Yeah, yeah. So one thing is that this festival actually has a counterpart on the south in the southern town of Ponce, and it varies a little bit. It's this one takes place in February, really, during the regular Carnival season of preceding Lent, but the materials are different. So in Loiza, in the north, we have the masks with horns, and it's all made out of coconut husks or girds. Whereas in Ponce, in the south, they tend to be more ornamented and they're made out of papier mache. But, you know, stylistically, in general, they are similar.
- [35:54]
So in another chapter of the book, we talk about how the festival customs, just like the costumes used for dances, are diverse and complex as the population. So our argument here is that each of these costumes worn on the body reflects that complex system of cultural signifiers and connected to that hybrid nature of Puerto Rican bodies, which, as we said, is a result of colonization. I think at this point, we already mentioned three groups. We've mentioned the Spanish, we've mentioned the Tainos, and we've mentioned the African, which, as a side note, in the Instituto de Cultura Puerto Rican, the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, on their official logo are three bodies, one of the Spanish, one of the Taino, and one of the African American. So they are recognized as the three main ingredients of Puerto Rican identity.
- [36:50]
Dr. Jose Blanco
And the other thing that I think we should mention with festivals is that the diaspora, the Puerto Ricans in The United States have used music and dance and these festivals as symbols of their identity. You see these masks, you see these festivals and the dances. Walking down Fifth Avenue on the day of the Puerto Rican National Day, the parade, along with, you know, many other symbols of Puerto Ricanness. And we think that, that, you know, this is not. It's not necessarily like a second skin, as some people describe it, but it's like a new skin that allows Puerto Ricans in the diaspora to enter these spaces and participate almost in, for many of them, in a sacred way, which is particularly important. On the dances which you are an expert.
- [37:41]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Yeah. So the, the Africaness on the, of the. On the. Or the origin of these dances coming from African cultures is unquestionable. And I don't think there's anyone that would argue otherwise. The body and the costumes, you know, that social body, the cultural body, really embodies that. That connection to the African heritage.
- [38:06]
Dr. Jose Blanco
And that's particularly clear in bomba and.
- [38:08]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Bomba and plana, which are two very important sounds in Puerto Rico. They're influenced by traditions brought by enslaved Africans. And these are the rhythms of some of these festivals, like the Luiza and Ponce. And these sounds, this music persists and thrives in the collective Puerto Rican culture. While not necessarily successful at a commercial level like big celebrities like Bad Bonnie or Ricky Martin, they do reign supreme in our understanding and definition of Puerto Rican culture.
- [38:38]
Dr. Jose Blanco
And the customs that are worn for them are also essential to Puerto Rican identity.
- [38:42]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Absolutely. And so there's never a denial of the impact of African contributions to our culture. Yeah.
- [38:50]
Dr. Jose Blanco
And as I said, we see that in the Puerto Rican Day Parade hitting New York. You see that combination. And this is why we thought it was very important. We ended up our book, as you know, with a chapter where we talk about how everything that we talk about in the book we see once a year parading down fifth Avenue celebrating.
- [39:13]
The Puerto Rican diaspora.
- [39:16]
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- [39:46]
Dr. Jose Blanco
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- [39:49]
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- [40:03]
Dr. Jose Blanco
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [40:06]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Cut the camera.
- [40:07]
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They see us.
- [40:08]
Dr. Jose Blanco
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- [40:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it's a very evocative chapter that kind of brings together so many different things that we are discussing and probably will discuss as well. And the images are pretty undeniable. I mean, Fifth Avenue is like, iconic. And so are so many of the things that you're talking about here kind of, as you said, all in one place. So I'm glad that you've mentioned that aspect of the book. But of course, both of you are at fit, so we have to talk about fashion at least somewhat directly. So can we talk about fashion not just conceptually, but like as an actual industry? How, when and why did this develop in Puerto Rico?
- [40:51]
Dr. Jose Blanco
How much time do we have for these months? This is a difficult question. We cover a lot of the history of Puerto Rican fashion and fashion design in the book, and then yet there is a lot that we do not cover. We cover some of the history, including the development of local retailing and fashion design and then schools that teach fashion and ateliers. And then we talked, for example, about formal attire and carnival costumes that were worn by local elites in events such as masquerade balls. Masquerade balls were very popular in the 1930s and 40s when they thought that all these festivals that we were talking about were. This is under a US Governor that was kind of like sent to Puerto Rico to.
- [41:39]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Winship.
- [41:40]
Dr. Jose Blanco
Winship, yes. To sort of put this.
- [41:45]
Into shape because they thought that the festivals made Puerto Rico look too unruly and too connected to the past. So the elites were really working with the US Governor to sort of like present a different image of the carnival. And so we see a lot of the design, fashion design appear at that time because the elites need designers to make clothes for them for this super fancy events that. That. That would take place.
- [42:18]
To sponsor by the US Government.
- [42:20]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Which also brings us. It's a nice segue because it is through these carnivals. And when we look at some of the advertisement of the period, we have a store come up, pop up. It's called Gonzalez Padin. And that coincidentally is considered to be the first department store in Puerto Rico. And it opened, it was in business up until 1995. It lasted for almost 100 years. And it went out of business really when other large us I don't know, glitch like Sears, JCPenney, Macy's came to Puerto Rico. So it was difficult to survive that. But it was considered to be the first department store and the one that introduced a new way for consumers to access fashion goods.
- [43:06]
Dr. Jose Blanco
Yeah, I mean, and there's a traditional fashion system that emerged in Puerto Rico from colonial times, and that. That, again, is supported by the Puerto Rican elites, which are mostly connected to Europe, are mostly. Almost 100% European blood. But so if you strictly look at the urban upper classes, then the history of fashion design in Puerto Rico mostly follows the history of fashion design as an industry in Europe. But as Raul was saying then, when Puerto Rico is switching from a colony of Spain to a colony of the United States, then there is an influx of American goods that really kill a lot of those industries. There is a really good book about the history of Puerto Rican fashion by Delma Arigoitia. And we owe her a huge debt because she kind of guided us through the history of Puerto Rican fashion. And she indicates a couple of milestones. Like the first really big designer in the 1950s was Luisa Matienso. And then in the 1960s, we see an influx of Cuban designers coming to Puerto Rico, including Pedro Sorilla, one of the most famous Puerto Rican designers. And then in the late 60s, we see the appearance of Carlota Alfaro, who was also a fashion educator and created a school, a fashion design school, in the 1980s. And she's one of the most iconic fashion designers in Puerto Rico.
- [44:39]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Yes. She was recently awarded by the government as, you know, as a procer de la moda or.
- [44:45]
Dr. Jose Blanco
Or a national hero of Puerto Rican fashion. So you can be declared national hero of fashion. And so this woman definitely deserves this. And there's an exhibit of her work.
- [44:55]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
There's currently an exhibit, a retrospective show of her work in Puerto Rico right now. Now, one crucial component of Puerto Rican fashion and style is mundillo, which is a type of bobbin lace. And today it straddles the line between fashion and folklore.
- [45:13]
But we can, I think, Ellen Fernandez Sacco on her paper, she cites examples of this type of lace making in Puerto Rico as early as the 18th century. And it was used by women's dresses, veils, globes, handkerchiefs, and some household pieces. But it was made in the island with thread imported from Europe and Japan. So it was, you know, very fine. And there is, in fact, a mundillo festival and a museum dedicated to the art in the town of Moca now, bringing it back to today. Fashion activities have accelerated in recent years, and even more so during the last several months. Actually, so much has happened since we submitted the last draft of this to the publisher for publication. Like so much has happened. But, for instance, there's now two concurrent fashion exhibits. The Carlota Alfaro retrospective that we just mentioned and an Antonio Lopez show. Also a very famous fashion illustrator from Puerto Rico, a graduate from fit. Yes. And then there's plans for a dedicated fashion museum, for example. Very recently, the government also established the month for the fashion designer.
- [46:32]
There is a ton of organized Runway activity going on in Puerto Rico every year in different regions. And in the past, we saw fashion production move around formal levels, like Jose was saying in the Masquerades. But current designers are really producing pieces that are for the moment and not necessarily fancy events.
- [46:57]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is really cool to hear about and clearly something we should all keep paying attention to. The book is sort of giving us some directions to examine. But there's obviously much happening now and probably will continue, too. But in fact, I would like to talk about the fancy things, if we can, for a moment, or. I don't know, Fancy is the moment is the word, or shiny is definitely the word, because I want to talk about Miss Universe for a moment. Pageant land. All the shiny. Raoul, I believe it was. You mentioned right back at the beginning that one of the pieces of analysis that you both did was around the way in which all these questions of national identity have been imagined on that very specific shiny stage. What can we learn by analyzing not just one Miss Universe, but a whole bunch of them?
- [47:44]
Dr. Jose Blanco
And before Raul answers that, I'm gonna say that watching the Miss Universe contest is a Puerto Rican national sport? I would say it's really funny to see Raul watching this event and then texting his family. And it's really. So this is something that we chose because it was very Puerto Rican.
- [48:03]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
It's very Puerto Rican. It's one of those. As a colony, Miss Universe represents an opportunity for Puerto Rico to shine by itself, not as part of the United States is we have that and we have the Olympics, right? So we have these two global events where Puerto Rico stands amongst all of these independent nations. So it's very, very important for us.
- [48:27]
But, you know, in selecting this, we're speaking specifically about the parade of nations, which is where the contestants are outfitted with national customs in one way or another, right? So some of these customs that we list and explore here have been received with great excitement and celebration, and others are received with controversy. And we go back to the idea of the Barbie, right? It's this concept of, like, how are we presenting an entire nation in one dress in the body of one woman, right? So we do know. We understand that these are all works of fantasy. Right. None of these dresses are not necessarily considered traditional in any way. And they might not even exist outside of that context at any other point in the future.
- [49:17]
Dr. Jose Blanco
Yeah, like a couple of contestants have dressed in what is supposed to be Taino dress. But when we were talking to you about Taino dress, we explained how this was very simple. But you see the contestants wearing elements that are more of like Maya and Aztec and other, you know, more, More flashy. And so a lot of people are.
- [49:37]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Okay with that, but a lot of.
- [49:38]
Dr. Jose Blanco
People say, well, that's not Taino. That doesn't represent us, really.
- [49:43]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
And then we have other costumes that correspond to important moments in history. For example, after the hurricane Maria.
- [49:52]
We had a national costume that was informed by that, by the hurricane and the resilience of the Puerto Rican spirits in surviving.
- [50:02]
And surviving the hurricane.
- [50:05]
Dr. Jose Blanco
There are others that reference famous people like Walter Mercado, who was an astrologer.
- [50:12]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
An astrologer. A famous, famous astrologer in Puerto Rico and all over Latin America. He was very flamboyant with brocaded capes, aquanet hair and lots of jewelry. So definitely primed for a national costume.
- [50:29]
Dr. Jose Blanco
They did that when he passed away. So.
- [50:33]
And, and, and there's, you know, sometimes there was one that was about the adoquines, the.
- [50:38]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
The cobblestones of old San Juan, for example. You know, old San Juan is. Old San Juan is not the rest of Puerto Rico. But, you know, it represents something that is recognized, immediately recognizable as, as being of Puerto Rico.
- [50:51]
Dr. Jose Blanco
And this is, this was so important to us. And as you say, it's also shiny and flashy. That. That's the COVID of our book. So our cover. The COVID of our book was from. I forgot the year. But one of the contestants, the first black Puerto Rican woman to represent Puerto Rico in the Miss Universe contest. And she is dressed in garments that reflect the African dances. Bomba and plan. Mostly bomba in a very over the top, let's say, way. And, and we know she has seen the book because she read. Re. Regrammed.
- [51:29]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
She reposted her post with the book.
- [51:31]
Dr. Jose Blanco
So we were. That was a moment when, when time stopped. When. When the woman in the COVID of our book. Acknowledge. Acknowledge that. And then this year, the. What was this year?
- [51:41]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
A hummingbird. It was inspired by hummingbirds, which. I've seen them in Puerto Rico many times, but I would never, you know, immediately connect them to the island. So, you know, it's. Again, we go back to this dialogue with what's of the moment. What are some elements that the Puerto Rico wants to represent?
- [51:59]
Dr. Jose Blanco
And what we argue is that each one of these costumes, fantasy customs by themselves do not represent Puerto Rico, but that if you put them all together and look at them collectively, then you can get an idea of what Puerto Rico is. An idea that will continue changing and will add, I suppose, every year with new national customs used for the event. We love that chapter. And yes, as I said, we can talk about this forever.
- [52:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I have to say, from an author's point of view, having the person on the COVID recognize it too, is a very cool detail. So thank you for sharing that behind the scenes aspect as well. And it's very obvious from everything you've told us, not just about the Miss Universe chapter, that there's a lot to continue looking at and paying attention to and being excited about with Puerto Rican fashion now and going forward. So is there any final things you want to leave our listeners with of kind of what to keep in mind or look out for going forward?
- [53:02]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Yes. So I definitely, you know, think, think that Puerto Rican fashion.
- [53:10]
Is living its moment. And.
- [53:14]
One thing is that in an earlier research we noticed that the door was ajar for employing national symbols in cultural heritage. But now I think that the door has been busted open.
- [53:28]
And when we look at Puerto Rico, and this door was open, open because of the political situation in Puerto Rico, but also because I think we got a little bit of permission from Bad Bunny, or at least encouragement from Bad Bunny. But but this is also a multilayer question because we need to recognize that in my perception, Puerto Rico, Puerto Rican fashion exists in four levels. We see it at the local in Puerto Rico as a country, we see it within the larger Latin American fashion system. We see it existing in the diaspora. And then we see it within the US Fashion framework due to the colonial status. So Puerto Rican fashion enjoy this potential of movement that other countries may not necessarily enjoy only by virtue of its political reality. This going back to our earlier question about why colonialism is so important here. And like I mentioned, a lot has happened since we submitted this, the final manuscript, to the publisher. We had the Bad Bunny residency as a cultural phenomenon that reignited that desire for Puerto Rican fashion. On a philosophical sense, it has invigorated a desire to support more Puerto Rican brands, and it is promoting a new lexicon of Puerto Rican style. So I am very excited to see where these new definitions, these new lenses will take Puerto Rican fashion. So the moment really aligns with a strong political frustration in Puerto Rico that feeds into this desire to look Puerto Rican, to dress Puerto Rican and to be Puerto Rican through fashion and style. And like the pava hats, they are now fashion. They're not just folklore. So we see this movement of symbols and iconography that is very exciting.
- [55:18]
Dr. Jose Blanco
Rahul was in Puerto Rico in June, so I told him, make sure to buy a pava hat. But you told me the price range was really wide. Right. Because they become so popular that some of them are really expensive.
- [55:31]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Yes.
- [55:31]
Dr. Jose Blanco
And this is the, the, the, the, the, the had that the heber or the poor Hebrew in the mountains, they.
- [55:36]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Would just buy on the streets for, you know, for nothing.
- [55:39]
Dr. Jose Blanco
Yeah, I, I would say that.
- [55:43]
Going back, but probably talking too much about Bad Bunny, but that's. There's many other singers that have follow suit and, and embrace heritage as part of their performance. But one of the things he did for the residency is that the stylist had different Puerto Rican designers dress. The guests at the concerts, many of them were designers from the diaspora. So when we did our talk at FIT a few months ago, we had a few of those designers in attendance and we were able to show some of their work. We were able to show pieces that had just come back, back from the Bad Bunny residency in Puerto Rico. So it is very exciting. And I love this thing that Raul says that we as authors are not cynical in our approach to the state of fashion in Puerto Rico because we're actually inspired by young designers. So to anyone listening that is interested in fashion, I would say Google you do a search for Puerto Rican and for diaspora designers, and you'll see the amazing work they're doing at the moment.
- [56:54]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, speaking of work being done at the moment, as a final question, I'd love to know what work you two are doing at the moment. Obviously not this book, because it's done, it's out in the world, people can go read it. So whether it's together or separately, anything you're currently working on, you want to give a little shout out, sneak preview for.
- [57:13]
Dr. Jose Blanco
So we talk about this on a daily basis because the last five years have been crazy. There were a lot of things that align for both of us and for me particularly, I have been working on several books and they're all coming out next year. So I wrote a textbook on global perspectives in fashion in the 20th and 21st century for Fairchild, and that one is coming out in February of 2026. And then I have been working with Ben Barry from Parsons and Andy Riley from University of Hawaii on editing a book on it's. A handbook of men's fashion with 40 different chapters contributed with men's fashion experts from around the world. That one is coming out in April of 2026. And then I am finishing the last details for the new edition of the book that I wrote on how to produce a fashion show that comes out in May. And then so, you know, it's three books that come out in a row, but they took all together five years. I would say that FIT.
- [58:25]
Does not have a class on Latin American and Caribbean fashion. So the other thing I'm working on at the moment is developing a class for FIT which I should be able to start teaching in August of 26. So that was me, Jose and the.
- [58:42]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Yeah, so we, we're also. We just submitted our, our. A couple months ago we submitted our Chicano a chapter for a exhibit catalog called Chicano Manual of Style. We're very excited about that one where we exploring dress through. Through Chicano art. But one of my favorite projects right now is that is DK we are working on. We're contributing to a DK volume on and a lot of it is in Latin American fashion.
- [59:11]
Dr. Jose Blanco
They're working on a book on global fashion that, you know, one of those like super illustrated, really beautiful books or the Eyewitness series.
- [59:21]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
It's been a joy to work on that one. It's like a treat for my former childhood.
- [59:26]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's exactly what it would be. That's so cool.
- [59:28]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Yes. And you know, from the Puerto Rican perspectives, we'll continue researching. We are considering exploring body queer identities. So I think we intend to look into the queer practices in Puerto Rico and the diaspora.
- [59:45]
Dr. Jose Blanco
Yeah, we don't talk in this book really much about gay and queer traditions. So I think that would be very interesting.
- [59:57]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
And at some point there will be a map somewhere, a long map there.
- [60:03]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That seems well deserved given everything you've currently done and have in the next few months too. So hopefully while you're off having a nice nap, listeners will be reading the book we've discussed titled Dress Fashion and National Identity in Puerto Rico, Tainos to Beauty Queens, published by Bloomsbury in 2025. Jose, Raul, thank you both so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [60:26]
Raul Vasquez Lopez
Thank you so much for having us. This was a blast.
- [60:28]
Dr. Jose Blanco
Yeah, we had a. We had a lot of fun.
- [60:44]
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