Reggaeton’s trajectory from el barrio to mass appeal is repeated regularly: In the late ‘80s, Spanish-language reggae traveled from Panama and established itself as reggaeton in Puerto Rico, where the genre as we know it today evolved from dancehall, rap culture, and local Caribbean music elements. And like hip-hop, reggaeton has endured for decades now, emerging from the ruins of the ghetto and reaching unimagined international ascension thanks in part to pioneer MCs such as El General, Vico C, Tego Calderón, Lisa M, and Ivy Queen, to name a few. But becoming a mainstream phenomenon means the rhythm has captured audiences far beyond its shores and humble beginnings, and its leaders, history, and street politics have sometimes been erased.
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As reggaeton and the way we consume it continues to be industrialized and commercialized, educators are engaging reggaeton around college campuses, using its once-frowned-upon history and politics to explore issues of race, gender, class, colonialism, sexual orientation, and more. For many of them, accessibility is key, so they are democratizing their works and making it available to people outside of the ivory tower, too.
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"As reggaeton and the way we consume it continues to be industrialized and commercialized, educators are engaging reggaeton around college campuses, using its once-frowned-upon history and politics to explore issues of race, gender, class, colonialism, sexual orientation, and more."
marjua estevez
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No educator has done this as famously as Katelina Eccleston, who has used her social media platform, Reggaeton Con La Gata, and her podcast-turned-tour Perreo 101 to tell varied stories about reggaeton’s past and present that center its Black roots.
“The entire point of my platform is accessibility and increasing this information to the public,” Eccleston, a music historian of Panamanian and Jamaican descent, tells Refinery29 Somos. “I noticed a few years ago, while writing a 40-page paper on the implicit biases in the Latin music industry, that reggaeton was beginning to be studied academically.”
Through Perreo 101, the first podcast about reggaeton available in Spanish and English, Eccleston aims to share the history, analysis, musicology, and evolution of reggaeton by breaking down academic research and embarking on her own investigations. Perreo 101 divorces itself from the white-washed narrative that periodically afflicts reggaeton, becoming a refreshing and in-demand space for knowledge-sharing that has led to speaking tours with stops at Ivy League institutions like Harvard, Dartmouth, and Princeton.
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“The entire point of my platform is accessibility and increasing this information to the public.”
Katelina Eccleston
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Like Eccleston, Dr. Sarah Bruno educates students on the genre and its politics around race, gender, and class through her class Latinx in Reggaeton and Hip-Hop: An Exploration of Blackness, Feminisms, and Performance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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“This course surveys Latinx participation in hip-hop and reggaeton, highlighting female artists, the Hispanophone Caribbean, and U.S. urban centers,” the class description reads. “Students analyze texts, performance, and social issues the music addresses from multiple disciplinary perspectives.”
As an Afro-Boricua from Chicago and spoken word artist, Bruno’s course echoes personal experience and is informed by her senior thesis, which centered on the “mami motif” originally introduced by Puerto Rican scholar Raquel Z. Rivera, author of Reggaeton, one of the few published critical assessments of the genre.
For many of these educators, place — particularly Puerto Rico and the larger Caribbean — cannot be erased from political conversations about reggaeton. “It felt urgent to center Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican politics,” Vanessa Diaz, an assistant professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o studies at Loyola Marymount University who teaches a class titled Bad Bunny and Resistance in Puerto Rico, tells Somos over Zoom. “There was a void and thirst for this information, so I started using Bad Bunny.”
In 2018, a year after Hurricane María pummeled the archipelago, Bad Bunny made his television appearance on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, reminding U.S. audiences that Puerto Rico was still recovering from widespread destruction. The trap-reggaeton artist has since made his homeland, an already fragile Caribbean territory under the grips of U.S. colonialism, a recurring theme in his work.
On the heels of Un Verano Sin Ti, Bad Bunny’s Grammy Award-winning 2022 album, Diaz and Petra Rivera-Rideau, an associate professor of American studies at Wellesley College, created the Bad Bunny Syllabus Project, a public education project looking at Bad Bunny's global impact and how it reflects political, artistic, and cultural triumphs and struggles within Puerto Rico.
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“I think it's a very effective tool because it allows students to take something that they're already really interested in and know a lot about and learn to engage with it critically and read it in a different kind of way.”
Petra Rivera-Rideau
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“I have long used popular music and popular culture as an entry point into getting students to think very critically about questions of race, socioeconomic class, colonialism, all of these things,” Rivera-Rideau, author of Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico, tells Somos. “I think it's a very effective tool because it allows students to take something that they're already really interested in and know a lot about and learn to engage with it critically and read it in a different kind of way.”
Rivera-Rideau suggests Bad Bunny was primed to be used as pedagogy for larger issues around the roots of reggaeton and Puerto Rican politics in a way that his predecessors were not. “Bad Bunny is someone whose coming of age took shape in an era where reggaeton is pretty mainstream. He didn’t have to break as many barriers thanks to the people that came before him and race does play a role,” she offers, evoking Calderón, a pioneer reggaetonero famously forthright about Puerto Rican racism and corruption in a way his contemporaries and emerging artists have not been.
Nonetheless, Rivera-Rideau maintains that “some people didn't even know Puerto Rico was a U.S. territory before Bad Bunny entered the mainstream. He becomes really famous at a time when people are starting to reconsider what's really happening with this place. Why is this place in so much debt? Why are they telling us to stop moving there? Why can’t Puerto Ricans vote? He’s been able to integrate more parts of Puerto Rican society in popular conversation today.”
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It’s why both Rivera-Rideau and Diaz felt it important to make their college material equally available to anyone interested in learning more about reggaeton-related issues and Puerto Rican politics.
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"Whether you're in college, retired, or you just heard about Bad Bunny and stan, you can come to this site and you can acquire some of this knowledge — one of the fundamental elements of hip-hop.”
Vanessa Diaz
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“The idea is that this is an open educational product that provides accessible resources for other professors, fans, and researchers around the world. We wanted to make it easier for more people to do this and to justify it, because we believe this is an area of really serious cultural significance,” Diaz adds. “At this stage, these are the kinds of tools that we believe are most useful because it’s not like we have to wait for a book to be published. We don’t. We can put together all of these elements that are educational that provide a framework. And whether you're in college, retired, or you just heard about Bad Bunny and stan, you can come to this site and you can acquire some of this knowledge — one of the fundamental elements of hip-hop.”