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- [00:00]
Blue Apron Narrator
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- [00:30]
Michael Olinger
Hey, I'm Michael Olinger for the podcast Extra this week we are featuring the work of our WNYC colleague and former OTM producer Alana Casanova Burgess. She's the host of La Brega, a podcast series all about Puerto Rico. Her team is calling Season two the Puerto Rican Experience in eight Songs. We think you're going to love the first episode of the new season. Here's Alana.
- [00:56]
Alana Casanova Burgess
Not long ago I was on a flight to San Juan. I was sitting on the left side of the plane with a clear view over the orange glow of street lights and traffic below. And as the wheels touched down, everyone who was grateful to be back in Puerto Rico applauded, as we always do. And then while we were sitting there taxiing or whatever, I heard someone just a few rows behind me start to sing. I rushed to record it on my phone. A few people craned their necks, a few stood up. Every passenger was under a spell listening to Preciosa. The most Puerto Rican of songs come from nowhere. I was flying to Puerto Rico to do some reporting for the second season of La Brega, a season about music. Every episode will be based on a different Puerto Rican song. And right away I get this musical blessing on a plane. Magic Puerto Rico Estacabron. Everyone knows that Puerto Rico Estacabron that Puerto Rico is fucking awesome. Because Bad Bunny has been saying and everybody is singing along. The biggest artist in the world right now doesn't just happen to be Puerto Rican. He's uncompromisingly Boricua, refusing to change his language or his accent.
- [02:53]
Michael Olinger
Tell me, how do you sum up like the past year or so for you?
- [02:59]
Alana Casanova Burgess
I don't understand what you say. Always talking about us, always bragging about us. He's sharing so much of Puerto Rico as he tops the charts over and over and over again. Bad Bunny, Bad Bunny, Bad Bunny, Bad Bunny. He's changed pop music and made it ours. The chart topping rapper from Puerto Rico was just named Apple Music's Artist of the Year. Well deserved too. In some ways this isn't new as an island that's just 100 by 35 miles, we've consistently punched above our weight. Puerto Rican music has long been everywhere, from the boleros that get people to sway to the reggaeton that makes them grind. We write lyrics so lovely that they're sung all over the world. We perform at the super bowl and we sweep at the Grammys. And I say we because when someone Puerto Rican takes the stage, it can feel as if your own cousin were up there. Benito. Congratulations. The VMA MTV award. The artist of the year represented for the Boricuas. Yeah, and all that music is doing a lot. Tucked into the lyrics are stories about who we are and what we want about Puerto Ricanness and what that means. That's as true of Ben Bunny's songs as it is about Preciosa, the song from the plane. So this season we're looking at ourselves through our music. Iconic songs that tell us about home and what it means to stay or leave. Songs that teach us about race and belonging or about freedom and our bodies. Songs about losing what should be ours and fighting for. And we should start actually with Preciosa. It's really the unofficial anthem, more meaningful to many of us, including to the plain singer Maiso, than the actual anthem. That's what he told me at baggage claim. Preciosa is about how beautiful Puerto Rico is. Miborinking hermosa. It's like a love song to a place instead of to a lover. The waves from the sea that bathe you Call you Preciosa because you are a delight, you are an Eden I will always call you Preciosa Llamare Preciosa. I have this recording From July of 2019 in Old San Juan of thousands of people singing Preciosa at a protest to get rid of the governor. They were singing the Marc Anthony cover. There's a long part at the end that he improvises a soneo. It's epic. This has been the iconic version of the song for over 20 years after he recorded it for a television music special from banco popular in 1998. He's in a kind of 1940s costume, pocket watch and everything, in a kitschy fake living room in front of a piano. Nothing about it feels authentic, except for Marc Anthony's passion for Puerto Rico. The man sounds like his soul is on fire. Fire. The original version was written in 1937, not by Marc Anthony, but by Rafael Hernandez, an artist who you could say was like the Bad Bunny of his time. No, I'm kidding. I mean, they're very different people from very different times. But they do have some things in common. Two Puerto Rican icons, both hugely influential, beloved everywhere, who use their Puerto Ricanness to shine. They're both uncompromising. The more I learn about Hernandez's genius and the different places he shows up in music history, the more I feel that swell of pride, like when your cousin takes the stage, like he was there at the birth of what would later become jazz. Though a lot of people don't know that part of the story.
- [07:58]
Bobby Sanavaria
Rafael an incredible musician, lost to the dust of time.
- [08:03]
Alana Casanova Burgess
Bobby Sanavaria is a multi Grammy nominated percussionist and an educator. He says Rafael Hernandez was a musical polymath.
- [08:11]
Bobby Sanavaria
He wrote pieces for symphonic orchestra, for chamber ensembles, string quartets. He was a supreme musician and he.
- [08:19]
Alana Casanova Burgess
Could play several instruments. Violin, piano, cello, the trombone, even something called a bombardino.
- [08:25]
Bobby Sanavaria
It's a small concert tuba.
- [08:28]
Alana Casanova Burgess
He grew up in Aguadilla at the turn of the century and then moved to San Juan to play in a municipal marching band. We used to have a lot of those.
- [08:37]
Elena Martinez
What do people do for recreation? Entertainment? You go to the plaza and hear these bands.
- [08:44]
Alana Casanova Burgess
Elena Martinez is with the Bronx Music Heritage center and is married to Bobby. So around this time when Hernandez was in these bands, World War I was raging in Europe. President Wilson signed the declaration of War on April 6, and America's Manhood was drafted. A lot of men are enlisting, including a lot of African American soldiers who sign up believing that it would change how they were perceived in a very segregated United States. In New York, there was this all black regiment led by a white commander who was really into music.
- [09:17]
Elena Martinez
He loved music and he wanted to create a really incredible regimental band.
- [09:21]
Alana Casanova Burgess
And he already had this big star, the composer and bandleader, James Reese, Europe. James Reese, Europe the most popular black band leader of the time. So the commander starts to recruit to get more of the best of the best.
- [09:37]
Elena Martinez
So he's looking into the scene that he plays with all the musicians locally, but he just realizes that he needs work on the clarinet section. The clarinet section needs some work and he needs a really soon as possible. Where can I get like really great clarinet players? So he goes to Puerto Rico.
- [09:53]
Alana Casanova Burgess
Wait, so he's like, where do I get clarinet players? I have to go to Puerto Rico?
- [09:57]
Elena Martinez
Well, yeah, everyone asked, why does he go to Puerto Rico? Why Puerto Rico? You know, there's a lot of black musicians on the scene there and they have citizenship.
- [10:07]
Alana Casanova Burgess
One of those black musicians was Rafael hernandez. He and 17 other Puerto Ricans sign up so of the 44 members of the regimental band who go to Europe, nearly half of them are boricua. They're sent to France as part of the 369th Infantry Regiment, which became later.
- [10:27]
Bobby Sanavaria
Known as the Harlem Hellfighters.
- [10:29]
Alana Casanova Burgess
Hellfighters, possibly named by the Germans out of fear. They spend longer in the trenches than any other unit and are awarded lots of honors. But a big thing about them was their band. It played a new kind of music, one that was just taking shape.
- [10:56]
Bobby Sanavaria
What today we call jazz.
- [11:02]
Alana Casanova Burgess
This band, made up largely of black Puerto Ricans, is seen by historians as being an essential part of the creation of the great American art form.
- [11:11]
Bobby Sanavaria
Every jazz festival that exists, every jazz club that exists, every jazz musician that has come from Europe exists because of the monumental performances that this military band did. If that band didn't have those musicians from the island, it wouldn't have sounded the way it did.
- [11:36]
Elena Martinez
I think there's two things going on that come out in the hellfighter story.
- [11:39]
Alana Casanova Burgess
For one thing, there's the shared experience of this segregated regiment, the racism that they all faced, and also colonialism comes out right.
- [11:49]
Elena Martinez
Why are we good in everyone else's music? Not only are we good, we excel in everyone else's music.
- [11:54]
Alana Casanova Burgess
Elena and Bobby say that's true of Puerto Rican excellence with jazz or with Cuban rhythms or with hip hop.
- [12:01]
Elena Martinez
When you live on the margins, you have to know a lot of other things to survive. And I think Puerto Ricans have done that very well. They've been able to reach out from the margins and learn and survive and thrive in places that they need to.
- [12:15]
Alana Casanova Burgess
And that's just the beginning of Rafael Hernandez's story. He keeps popping up all over the place. After the war, he came back to the US with the hellfighters and stuck around Harlem to play jazz. He spent a while in Mexico. You can catch him in films from that golden age of Mexican cinema right there with Cantinflas. Hernandez composed many of his most famous songs while living in Mexico, including El Cumbanchero Aoresa, Remo Felices and Perfume de Gardenias. Throughout his life, he wrote literally thousands of songs.
- [12:56]
Bobby Sanavaria
You're talking about a person that became not only Puerto Rico's greatest composer, but Latin America's most beloved composer after the war.
- [13:06]
Alana Casanova Burgess
And his songs were so, so, so specifically Boricua, like Bad Bunny does today. He was using Puerto Rican language to tell Puerto Rican stories and reached a huge audience. And he didn't just do it with Preciosa. Take another one of his songs, Lamento Borincano Literally has Puerto Rican in the title and centers on a very Puerto Rican word, a loving term for someone from the mountains. And yet that didn't stop its popularity. You know who's covered this song? Everyone. Brazil's Caetano Veloso, Argentina as Facundo Cabral, Victor Jara from Chile, even the great Chabela Vargas. But back to Preciosa, this anthem to loving Puerto Rico, but specifically to loving it from afar, because Rafael Hernandez wrote it in Mexico. It's about yearning to return and it has this nostalgic energy. In fact, many of our most famous anthems are exactly like this, infused with the longing that comes with displacement in diaspora that gives them this quality of gauziness. Because when you aren't in Puerto Rico, you tend to remember it with rose colored glasses. When I miss a place, I don't think about the power outages that can make life impossible there. And there's something else that today sounds off in Preciosa, the way Rafael Hernandez depicts race in Puerto Rico. In the lyrics, he praises two groups. We get the nobility of the Spaniard and the bravery of the Taino Cantillo. There's no mention of African roots in Puerto Rico at all. Very cringy. Hernandez was Afro Boricua himself. But there appears to have been no room to praise blackness in the 1930s Puerto Rico that Preciosa describes. But in another line of the song, he erases nothing. Tucked in behind the glimmering waves is a dagger of a lion about the United States. No importanto tetra te con negra maltad. You'll be beautiful even if the tyrant treats you with black malice. It's such a pointed critique of the United States. And that leads to a story. There's this moment in the early 1950s when the Puerto Rican government needed a new national anthem. There's a rumor that Luis Muno Marin, the first elected governor, was. Was really into Preciosa for the anthem. Juan Otero, a musicologist, told us about it. The lyric that said that no importa.
- [16:18]
Bobby Sanavaria
Altirano te trate con negra vandadne. It doesn't matter that the tyrant treats you bad.
- [16:24]
Alana Casanova Burgess
No, the governor wanted to swap tyrant for destiny destino. It doesn't matter if destiny treats you badly.
- [16:32]
Bobby Sanavaria
But Hernandez refused.
- [16:34]
Alana Casanova Burgess
Tyrant stays in uncompromising, like Bad Bunny. And so we ended up with La Borinquena as our official anthem, which, let me tell you, not as great. It's a song in which Columbus shows up in a conveniently unpopulated landscape and exclaims, oh, oh. Oh, this right here is the beautiful land I've been looking for. It is the daughter of the sea and the sun. It's all very colonial. So much so that there's another pro independence version of the anthem that tells boricuas to wake up already, grab their machetes and fight for liberty. If Columbus showed up here, his ooos may have been screams. El ruido de cano nosotros queremos la libertad nuestro macer de nos la dara. It's not surprising that a national anthem for a colony would be so fraught. Patriotism hits different when you're non sovereign. Meanwhile, the song we all seem to be able to agree on, the song people sing when they can't hold back, is Preciosa. It has just enough bite and still plenty of pride. Coming up, drawing a line from the Bad bunny of the 1930s to actual.
- [18:31]
Bianca Grollo
Bad Bunny.
- [18:36]
Alana Casanova Burgess
Stay with. Hola. I'm Angelica. And I am Jose from Balloon.
- [19:10]
Bianca Grollo
And you are listening to La Brega.
- [19:15]
Alana Casanova Burgess
We're back with La Brega, a show with a name we need to define because it's not a word people really use anywhere else. But in Puerto Rico, when I hear or use La Brega, I'm referring to the struggle. The struggle.
- [19:31]
Bianca Grollo
Grinding.
- [19:32]
Alana Casanova Burgess
You know what it means. You need to do it. Bad Bunny doesn't explain anything in his lyrics, just like Rafael Hernandez didn't explain Jibarito or Borinquen. And people liked his music anyway. Listening to Benito is like doing a word puzzle for Puerto Ricanisms, spotting la pichaeira, the pichotes and piquetes, even la bellaquera. There's all this Puerto Rican slang making its way around the world. Does everyone know what they're singing? No. Is it sometimes really dirty? Yes. Is it kind of fun? Anyway, also yes. Preciosa may be the unofficial anthem, but there are a couple of Benito songs that could fit the bill too. And I think because he is writing from the island at this particularly difficult time, they strike a different note. Many older songs like Preciosa or Sona no con Puerto Rico, are about this idealized, gauzy memory of home where everything is perfect and breezes caress your face. There's no austerity policy in these songs, no potholes or blackouts. But there are potholes and blackouts in Bad Bunny's Puerto Rico. This is estamo bien. We're good. Said in the same tone as Aqui Bregando. It came out the year after Hurricane Maria. Give it up for Bad Bunny. He introduced it during his debut on Jimmy Fallon, one of the few examples of Benito speaking English. He used his appearance to underscore both the urgency of the situation and the sense that life has to keep going. After one year of the hurricane, there's still people without electricity on their homes. More than 3,000 people die, and Trump is still in denial. But you know what? And the potholes are there again in Elapagon, which means the blackout tucked in after an unexpectedly tender line about a kiss for your abuela. The bitter mixed with the sweet. There are things Bad Bunny has said and sung that I don't agree with. He's often held up as a kind of saint, literally San Benito. And nobody deserves that pedestal. But there are things I really admire when I hear him sing about Puerto Rico's failed energy grid in packed arenas. It's not just a form of protest. I think it's a kind of honest love. Like, this place is not okay, but it's still preciosa. When Benito and fans all over the world scream Puerto Rico tabien cabron at the top of their lungs. The whole world is screaming about La.
- [22:44]
Bianca Grollo
Brega because, as you know, Italian cabron can mean it's amazing. And it can also mean it's so hard and it's so difficult.
- [22:54]
Alana Casanova Burgess
Bianca Grollo is an independent journalist based in Camui.
- [22:57]
Bianca Grollo
We drive to the beach and we see this amazing paradise and we're like Puerto Ricobrung. And then we have another power outage and we're like Puerto Ricobrung. Because it's so hard to live here, you know? So I just think, again, it's just hard for that to not resonate with people living here.
- [23:15]
Alana Casanova Burgess
In September, Benito put out a music video for the song El Apagon and did something highly unusual. Baked into the video is an 18 minute mini documentary about gentrification in PR, reported by Bianca. She explained how people from the states are taking advantage of tax benefits and displacing boricuas all over the archipelago.
- [23:45]
Bianca Grollo
How Puerto Ricans feel like what belongs to them is being taken away.
- [23:50]
Alana Casanova Burgess
She focused on one particular neighborhood called Puerta de Tierra. Outside investors have bought up residential buildings there, evicting residents and turning the apartments into Airbnbs for tourists. And not only that, the school in.
- [24:03]
Bianca Grollo
Puerta A was shut down, and once that building was empty, the government sold it to an investor who is now turning it into luxury apartments with an ocean view. So two examples of people feeling like they're being pushed out.
- [24:18]
Alana Casanova Burgess
El Apagon ends with this Defiant verse. I don't want to leave here. They should go. But even a song about staying is about the possibility of leaving that choice, a choice so many of our families have made over the generations and continue to make now hangs over everything we do. It's in Bad Bunny just as much as it's in Rafael Hernandez. It's in our reggaeton just as much as in saccharine anthems from Puerto Rico's past. Maybe this Bad Bunny in Rafael Hernandez comparison is a little much. They're a century apart, writing from different places, and only one of them sings frequently about oral sex. But both of them tie this little island to all the other islands, carry us to other shores, and make me feel somehow bigger. And maybe you as well. Bianca noticed the resonance after the video for La Pagon came out.
- [25:26]
Bianca Grollo
I've gotten so many messages and so many interview requests from countries, especially in Latin America, saying, you know, we see. Saw ourselves in that story. Even though we're not Puerto Rican, we have those same issues here.
- [25:38]
Alana Casanova Burgess
If you look at the comments on YouTube, there are declarations of solidarity from all over Latin America. Soy Mexicana. From Chile. Soy Colombiana. Soy Peru. Tor lo queas. Costa Rica. Camino, Manue mano con to. I'm Salvadoran. But this. This made me cry. The idea that you can't live where you're from, from that your government isn't working for you. It's for the powerful and that you get squeezed out. We all get it. I send you strength to continue fighting.
- [26:19]
Michael Olinger
I don't think any other artist defends.
- [26:20]
Alana Casanova Burgess
Their country the way you do. So this season on La Borga, we're going to celebrate that power the way that whether it's Preciosa or Ela Pagon, there are deep lessons woven into our songs. Lessons that resonate across borders, lessons that serve us and sometimes hold us back. Lessons that push us and ask us to imagine more. You get it? There's always more to our music than meets the ear. Sometimes to do a lot of work, you gotta speak all the languages. Is this is what I'm all about, dude?
- [26:58]
Blue Apron Narrator
Un Puerto Rico.
- [27:00]
Alana Casanova Burgess
It's the classic. Gets all the tias moving.
- [27:06]
Bobby Sanavaria
He had this Persona being el malo, right?
- [27:08]
Bianca Grollo
They just strike a chord in your heart and they make you want to just book the next flight home.
- [27:17]
Alana Casanova Burgess
I'm Alana Casanova Burgess, and this is La Brega, the Puerto Rican experience in eight songs. This was track one, Preciosa.
- [27:36]
Michael Olinger
You can hear new episodes of La Brega every Thursday through the end of March. Episodes are available in English and Spanish. Just look for La Brega in your podcast app. Tune in at the end of the week for the latest episode of on the Media. And don't forget to sign up for our newsletter@onthemedia.org We've got a couple new writers at the helm and we're trying something a little bit different. Take a peek and let us know if you like it. Thanks for listening. I'm Michael Lehlinger.
- [28:12]
Ira Flato
This is Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, the science Friday team has been reporting high quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies. Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first and foremost with important news they won't get anywhere else. And our sponsors benefit from that halo effect. For more information on becoming a sponsor, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.