LeAna López’s hips cue the musician, who, in a direct and improvised exchange, mirrors her movements on the primo, the lead drum of Puerto Rican bomba. The rhythm — born on Puerto Rico’s slave plantations in the 17th century — reverberates on this occasion inside a church in East Harlem, the Manhattan neighborhood known as El Barrio. The roar of the barrel drums builds, and, as the music reaches its peak, the scene seems to shift to the northeastern coast of the Caribbean island, to Loíza, the cradle of Afro–Puerto Rican culture. But in an instant, the traffic on Lexington Avenue breaks the spell, serving as a reminder: this is New York.

Another 15 participants dance alongside López in a workshop organized by Los Pleneros de la 21, a community organization and artistic collective whose mission is to promote awareness in New York of bomba and another genre native to Puerto Rico, plena. Those who play plena are known as pleneros — hence the group’s name. Since its founding in 1983, Los Pleneros de la 21 has cultivated Puerto Rican culture at the heart of the city’s diaspora community. More than 1,500 miles from the island, Puerto Ricans have left an indelible mark on New York’s history. So much so that Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue hosts the world’s largest Puerto Rican pride parade, drawing more than a million people every summer for nearly 70 years to celebrate the Caribbean island and its diaspora.

It is the same diaspora that Bad Bunny sings about in the opening track of his latest album, NUEVAYoL, and the same one he honored during his Super Bowl performance, when Toñita — the matriarch of Puerto Rican nightlife in New York — appeared on the nation’s biggest stage to serve him a drink as he sang: “A shot of cañita at Toñita’s house, ay / PR feels so close.”

A journey through the neighborhoods most emblematic of this community underscores the extent to which New York’s essence is Puerto Rican. The city sounds like Puerto Rico: from the traditional rhythms preserved by Los Pleneros to salsa and reggaeton, both of which took shape here with the help of the diaspora. And the city also tastes like the island — from the bakery in East Harlem selling traditional sweets where Mayor Zohran Mamdani has stopped for coffee, to the fried street foods sold along Brooklyn’s Puerto Rico Avenue.

Creating and claiming spaces

LeAna López was the first in her family to be born in the diaspora, in East Harlem. It is a place where Puerto Rican accents can be heard on every corner, blending with Nuyorican slang while retaining their distinct character: the drawn-out double r and the rolled single r softened into an l. Here, a street bears the name of Tito Puente, the king of the timbales and mambo, who was born and raised on these blocks lined with comida criolla restaurants and draped in Puerto Rican flags.

Growing up surrounded by all of this, López never questioned her connection to an island she had visited only sparingly as a child. Her parents, both born in Puerto Rico, always instilled in her the importance of keeping their culture alive from New York. That was how, at age seven, she arrived at her first bomba and plena class with Los Pleneros de la 21.

Sitting atop a drum stool at the group’s headquarters, as she speaks, López shifts between English and phrases that emerge naturally in Spanish, colored by a distinctly Puerto Rican accent. Nearly three decades after that first class, she says she remains grateful for finding in Los Pleneros a place where she could “connect with and continue the traditions” of her island — work that has shaped her entire artistic career.

“This organization always allowed me to feel that I was as Puerto Rican as someone who was born on the island,” she says. “I never felt like I didn’t belong. That came later, when I started hearing terms like Nuyorican.”

That word — “Nuyorican,” a play on the English pronunciation of “New York” and “Puerto Rican” — was for many years used by Puerto Ricans born on the island as a sort of insult against those who, like López, were born outside Puerto Rico, or against those who, after years away, tried to return and were seen as different, as outsiders because they came from the diaspora.

During the second half of the last century, New York became the mecca of Puerto Ricans in the diaspora. Between World War II and the 1970s, the city’s Puerto Rican population grew from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. It reached its peak in 1970, when Puerto Ricans accounted for more than 10% of the city’s total population. At the time, nearly 70% of all Puerto Ricans living on the U.S. mainland resided in New York.

When they arrived, they faced marginalization. They were U.S. citizens — Puerto Rico has been an unincorporated U.S. territory since 1898 — but many did not speak the language. They spoke Caribbean Spanish and little to no English; they were mixed-race and Afro-Caribbean people who had never experienced the harshness of winter. In the face of rejection, they planted their flag and built communities of their own so that those who came after them would know they were not alone. Out of that experience, a new identity began to take shape: New York Puerto Ricans.

Juan Gutiérrez — known as Juango — founder of Los Pleneros de la 21, arrived at the height of that migration wave. Born in 1951 in the Santurce neighborhood of San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital, he moved to New York in 1976 to further his musical training. “Ever since I can remember, I was interested in music, though not specifically in bomba and plena,” he says. “But once I got to New York, I got bitten by the Puerto Rican bug. I said to myself, I aspire to musical excellence, but I have to immerse myself in Puerto Rican music.”

From that point on, he trained in plena and bomba under diaspora masters such as Marcial Reyes Avelo, with whom he founded Los Pleneros de la 21 forty-three years ago. He soon recognized the need to share that knowledge with the broader community, and, in 1989, the organization began offering dance and music workshops that continue to this day. The classes have become so popular that this year they moved to the People’s Church, a community temple that served during the 1960s and 1970s as a gathering place for Puerto Rican activists in El Barrio — particularly the Young Lords, a social justice movement inspired by the revolutionary Black Panther Party but focused on the struggles Puerto Ricans faced in the city: marginalization, poverty, and hostility.

For Gutiérrez, preserving Puerto Rican culture in New York stems from a need for self-preservation in the face of adversity. Now 75 and semi-retired, the musician divides his time between Puerto Rico and New York, while his daughter, Julia, has taken up the mantle at Los Pleneros. Speaking by phone before heading back to the island for a time, he reflected: “When you leave Puerto Rico, you confront many realities of living in another culture — one that is often hostile to our identity, not only as Puerto Ricans but as Latinos. And how do you defend yourself? By looking more deeply into your identity and grounding yourself in the pride of who you are.”

The Nuyorican boom

Another guardian of that identity has been José Flores — or Pepe, as he is known in Lower Manhattan. A contemporary of Gutiérrez’s (the two first met in Puerto Rico and later crossed paths again in New York), Flores arrived — “fortunately,” as he puts it — in the Lower East Side, or Loisaida, a name that merges the word “Loíza,” Puerto Rico’s historical Afro-Puerto Rican municipality, with the English pronunciation of “Lower East Side.”

Back then, Loisaida was a rough neighborhood. Drugs ruled the streets — first heroin, then crack. It bore little resemblance to what it is today, with its vintage shops and high-end restaurants. When Flores arrived, he rented a two-bedroom apartment for $75 a month and, while cleaning it before moving in, found used syringes beneath the linoleum floor.

“But at the same time, this place was entirely Puerto Rican. I could walk out my front door and, before reaching the corner, greet 10 or 15 people in Spanish,” he recalls from the living room of his current apartment, still in Loisaida.

Flores arrived in the city as a devoted music lover — “I’m a born dancer. I dance even during commercials,” he says — and in the Puerto Rican Loisaida of the 1970s, he found a creative world in full bloom: art, poetry, theater, music. He witnessed the emergence of a cultural and artistic movement that embraced Nuyorican identity as its banner. He saw the birth of institutions such as the Nuyorican Poets Café, founded in 1973 by poets Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero, and, three years later, New Rican Village, a music and theater space led by Eddie Figueroa.

It was a moment born out of “a generation that didn’t feel fully from here or from there. And so they give birth to this new nation, and the term ‘Nuyorican’ goes from that pejorative to being worn as a badge of honor,” explains Aníbal Arocho, head librarian at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, the first research institution dedicated to the Puerto Rican diaspora, which opened its doors in El Barrio during that same era.

Against the backdrop of that cultural renaissance, Flores began building a vinyl collection in his apartment. He collected anything he could find: Puerto Rican music, Cuban records, African sounds, jazz. Back then, records cost only a few cents, and Flores steadily amassed an enormous archive through flea markets and music shops. Today, his collection exceeds 5,000 records.

Among them are genuine treasures, which he has always made available as archival material for students and music enthusiasts. “I’m only the holder, I’m not the owner,” he says. “There are music collectors who won’t even let you through the door, much less touch a record. But as long as there’s respect, that door will always be open.”

The door he is referring to is the one to his apartment, which he says he often leaves unlocked in case he forgets his keys on the way out. Records cover the walls of his living room, stacked on wooden shelves stretching to the ceiling. Until recently, however, many of them were housed in his gallery, opened in 2022 in the storefront of the building where Flores had lived for more than 40 years. He called the space La Sala de Pepe, or Pepe’s living room — an extension of his home transformed into a cultural hub dedicated to Puerto Rican music, photography, art, and activism.

Pepe does not know whether he will reopen the gallery. He laments the gentrification of Loisaida, which has pushed many Puerto Ricans out of the neighborhood. “Back then, this avenue was full of immigrant businesses — a butcher shop, a fish market… All of that went to hell,” he says. The area is now known as the East Village, where the average monthly rent has climbed to around $5,000.

The collector cannot resist reaching for a metaphor to describe Loisaida’s endangered Puerto Rican roots: “What I’m telling you about are things that don’t exist here anymore. That garden is gone now — and without it, those flowers can no longer bloom.”

“We’re still here”

Now it falls to people like Caridad de la Luz — considered one of the guardians of Nuyorican culture in the city — to tend that garden. The 49-year-old poet, better known by her stage name La Bruja, arrives at the Bronx Music Hall wearing a long green lace dress and what she calls “peculiar” shoes. “Do you know La India? She gave me this dress and the shoes. They’re very witchy, right?” she says with her trademark laugh as she walks into the cultural center, where in a few hours she will perform before a sold-out crowd, marking 30 years of her career.

The La India she is referring to is singer Linda Bell Viera Caballero — known as the Princess of Salsa — one of the genre’s most beloved voices, who was raised in the same Bronx neighborhood where De la Luz was born, an area known as the County of Salsa. “The Bronx is like a little Puerto Rico,” the poet explains in Spanglish. “The Bronx is the one borough that is green enough that it’s like you could make it look like Puerto Rico; you feel it here.”

The resemblance is so strong that it is one of the few places outside Puerto Rico where people can eat at an authentic Puerto Rican lechonera: La Piraña, run by Ángel Jiménez, whose nickname gave the business its name. Every weekend, customers wait for hours in line to buy plates of roast pork served with rice and gandules (pigeon peas). Jiménez begins roasting the pigs before dawn and starts selling around noon — only on Saturdays and Sundays, and only until everything sells out.

The Bronx has produced some of the most prominent names in the Puerto Rican diaspora, including Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina to serve on the nation’s highest court; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, widely seen as a leading figure in the future of the Democratic Party; and Jennifer Lopez.

De la Luz’s love of poetry dates back almost to infancy. She learned from her great-grandmother, an illiterate woman who was nonetheless a poet, and began reciting verses in her family’s living room. Growing up in the Bronx, more than an hour by subway from the Lower East Side, De la Luz was unaware of the Nuyorican movement that had been taking shape in Lower Manhattan during her childhood.

That changed when a friend, after hearing her recite, told her she had to perform at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. “And I was like, Nuyorican? What?” she recalls. She was taken aback that a place would carry the name Nuyorican — a word she had always known as an insult. “But when I went there, it gave me a new appreciation for the contributions Nuyoricans have made,” she says. “It changed my life.”

She first stepped onto its stage at 19, unaware that three decades later she would become the executive director of the café — one of the last enduring pillars of the Nuyorican movement and a place that, for more than 50 years, has nurtured the talents of poets, actors, filmmakers, and musicians.

De la Luz took the helm in 2022. A year later, the venue closed its doors for an extensive renovation project costing $24 million, funded by New York City. For La Bruja, amid gentrification and the displacement of the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York, the fact that the city invested in rebuilding an institution like this “is a testament to the cultural contribution the Nuyorican Poets Cafe has made to the fabric of New York. It is a temple of culture in the city.”

The glowing tower to the north

Puerto Rican New York endures. It does so thanks in part to artists like Bad Bunny, who, as Aníbal Arocho — head librarian at the CUNY Center for Puerto Rican Studies — notes, “recognizes and celebrates New York as the glowing tower to the north” of Puerto Rico. It is a place where Puerto Rican culture “refused to die, where it grew and thrived and evolved and continued to perpetuate the beauty of our people.”

It has thrived in Los Pleneros de la 21 in East Harlem, in Pepe’s living room in Loisaida, and in the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. In La Bruja’s poetry and in La Piraña’s lechonera in the Bronx. In San Germán Shop, Radamés Millán’s store in Brooklyn, where he has sold records, clothing, and Puerto Rican food for more than half a century, and in Toñita’s club, which she refuses to sell despite receiving multimillion-dollar offers. It also lives on in the thousands of bodegas scattered across the city — the corner stores where New Yorkers buy their bacon, egg, and cheese every morning and whose name traces back to the Puerto Rican bodegueros who created them.

Bodegueros like Arocho’s family, whose grandparents arrived in New York in the 1950s and opened grocery stores along Manhattan’s Ninth Avenue. Over time, those shops came to be known as bodegas, a term that has since become synonymous with the city itself. Every New Yorker has their trusted bodega. And although most owners are no longer Puerto Rican — now many belong to newer immigrant communities, such as Yemenis — they are still called bodegas, in Spanish.

“In my neighborhood I know of exactly one Puerto Rican bodeguero who’s a holdout,” Arocho notes. “And whenever I walk by 10th Avenue and I see his store and I see the Puerto Rican flag hanging there — it’s tattered and faded because he hangs it outside —it’s very poetic because it’s very much faded but not gone.”

April 23, World Book Day. A morning of brilliant Caribbean sunshine in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, and across the island. Luis Rafael Sánchez, 89, the most important living writer in Puerto Rico, who will turn 90 next November, suggests beginning the conversation — later to continue on the cozy terrace‑balcony of his home — at a discreet and elegant restaurant, where everything seems to pause when the staff catch sight of “Wico,” the affectionate nickname by which the writer is known on the island.

With admiration and affection, some shake his hand, others embrace him — everyone calls him maestro. No matter how small the gesture from those attending to him, the writer responds with generous tips. Wrapped in dim light, the scene evokes a sequence from The Godfather, but without any hint of menace.

The immediate reason for the interview is the release of a commemorative edition marking the 50th anniversary of his most emblematic novel, La guaracha del Macho Camacho. At the time of the meeting, there is only a single copy available, which the author contemplates in satisfied silence as it is handed to him.

A playwright, essayist, and novelist, Luis Rafael Sánchez is, like Cervantes in Spain, James Joyce in Ireland, or Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia, a writer whose work embodies the spirit of his nation.

Everything he has written — whether non-fiction (No llores por nosotros, Puerto Rico / Don’t Cry for Us, Puerto Rico), short stories (En cuerpo de camisa / In Shirt Sleeves), novels (La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos / The Importance of Being Daniel Santos), and especially his groundbreaking and powerful theatrical work (La pasión según Antígona Pérez / The Passion of Antígona Pérez) — is a joyful celebration of puertorriqueñidad (Puerto Rican identity), a word that, at his request, was incorporated into the Royal Spanish Academy’s dictionary in 2016.

He has lived in several cities. In San Juan, he began as a radio drama actor, but his career was cut short when, with the arrival of television, he was denied any leading man roles because he was mixed-race. He pursued doctoral studies in Madrid, received scholarships that enabled him to live in Rio de Janeiro and Berlin, and in New York — a city that “captivated” him — he completed a master’s degree, took classes at the Actor’s Studio, met James Baldwin, staged plays and musicals, and held a university chair as a distinguished writer.

At different points in his work, he has forcefully denounced racism and homophobia. In Escribir en puertorriqueño (Writing in Puerto Rican), a valuable anthology of his writings, one piece stands out in particular: Bad Bunny sí, written before the singer achieved the level of visibility he enjoys today.

Praised in glowing terms by Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Alfredo Bryce Echenique, among others, Luis Rafael Sánchez’s work draws simultaneously on the legacy of Cervantes, the great tradition of the Latin American novel, the theater of Tennessee Williams and Valle‑Inclán, the language of radio dramas, and the classics of bolero and other forms of popular music.

A defender, through Spanish, of the linguistic, racial, and cultural hybridity that defines caribeñidad (Caribbean identity) — one of the key concepts in his vocabulary — it is no exaggeration to say that the language of Cervantes owes him a great debt.

Question: Can you talk about your origins?

Answer. I’m a mulatto from a housing project, which is what they call the houses assigned to low-income families here. My mother was a seamstress and my father a baker, so I bear two stigmas: race and class. Even today, racial prejudice in Puerto Rico is still very noticeable, but I’ve always been proud to come from a poor background and to be mulatto because it’s something that has given me strength and the tools to create and survive.

Q. Last year saw the publication of one of your most striking books, Piel sospechosa (Suspicious Skin), in which you examine the issue of racism from multiple angles.

A. This is a collection of some 30 texts, written between 1973 and today, in which I address the ignominy of racism, which I consider one of the most serious problems on our continent, a world of different races that still struggle to respect one another. I dedicate the book to my uncle, Evaristo Lois Pagán, a Black man of usted and tenga [formal terms used to show respect] as we say here, an extraordinary, respectable, and respected man, an imposing Black man who always wore a suit, tie, waistcoat, and watch chain, and who rose to hold important positions of civic responsibility.

Q. Would you say that Puerto Rican literature has always been ignored in both Spain and Latin America?

A. We have great writers, like Eugenio María de Hostos, René Marqués, and Luis Palés Matos, but they aren’t recognized enough outside of Latin America. One example that particularly pains me is that when discussing great Latin American poets, Alfonsina Storni, Juana de Ibarbourou, Gabriela Mistral, and others who deserve it are always mentioned, but no one remembers Julia de Burgos, who is an immense figure. I believe all of this is related in some way to the fact that we have been colonized, and as a consequence, some people think we are incapable of greatness, whether literary, artistic, or economic. We are denied the possibility of one day becoming a republic, as if we were lacking something intellectually, morally, or spiritually.

Q. Is Puerto Rico a nation or a colony?

A. Puerto Rico is unfortunately a colony, but within that colony are all the constituent elements that encompass the concept of a nation. Puerto Rican identity is lived with fervor and enthusiasm.

Q. What is your position regarding independence?

A. The ideological question has been at a standstill for a long time, due to the presence of several successive pro-statehood governments. We’ve already had three elections in which the pro-independence party I always vote for comes in third or fourth place. An ominous question mark hangs over us. It pains me to see that statehood is gaining more and more supporters every day, but that doesn’t mean the fight is lost. One of the reasons I don’t believe we’ll become part of the United States tomorrow is that Republicans can’t stand the idea of ​​Puerto Rico becoming a state of the American nation. In other words, ironically, right now, the Republicans’ contempt for who we are is what’s saving us.

Q. How does that affect the issue of Spanish?

A. The language issue has been a major uphill battle for years, but some things are undeniable. In Puerto Rico, we speak Spanish, we write in Spanish, and it will always be that way. We have never produced a great writer in English. Those who support the idea of ​​Puerto Rico becoming the 51st state of the Union are bothered when I say this. According to them, we are a bilingual country, but that’s nothing more than a vulgar political maneuver. Puerto Ricans have never needed to speak English. To live my life, I have never needed English, nor do I think anyone here needs it. Our literature is in Spanish. Our best press is in Spanish. Our daily life is in Spanish.

Q. In one of your most insightful works, Sones del Caribe (Sounds of the Caribbean), you explore the idea of ​​Caribbean identity.

A. We are a Caribbean country with a large, often denied, Black presence, yet Blackness and mixed-race identity are the hallmarks of Caribbean identity. In the book, I discuss the four mother countries of this sea: Spain, England, the Netherlands, and France. We are part of an archipelago that also includes islands where Spanish is not spoken, such as Saint Thomas, Saint Lucia, Martinique, and many others. The Caribbean has produced great writers in French, like Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant, and in English, like Derek Walcott and Naipaul. In Spanish, there is a veritable plethora of writers who wield the language with complete freedom, such as Alejo Carpentier, Severo Sarduy, Cabrera Infante, Reinaldo Arenas, Pedro Mir, and so many more.

Q. What does it mean to write in Puerto Rican?

A. Writing in the Spanish of Puerto Rico. Just as there is Argentine Spanish, Colombian Spanish, Mexican Spanish, or Spanish from Spain, there is Puerto Rican Spanish, which is the one I speak and write in. There are many prejudices about it. When I was studying at the Complutense University in Madrid, a renowned professor congratulated me on how good my Spanish was, and I respectfully asked him what language he thought I was speaking, how could I not speak my own language well? The same thing happened to me on the street. When the owner of the boarding house where I lived in Madrid heard me speak, she was amazed because I didn’t drop my consonants, and I told her, “Ma’am, in the Caribbean we don’t drop our consonants.” This prejudice affects literature. There are those who maintain that we are ruining Spanish, and conversely, many times, when one of my books is reviewed, I am congratulated for my good use of Spanish, as if it were an anomaly, when what I do is write in the living language spoken by my people.

Q. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of your most emblematic work, La guaracha del Macho Camacho, an oracular novel that is a grand celebration of Puerto Rican language.

A. I wrote it with great freedom, with great joy. I will be forever grateful to Mario Vargas Llosa for being the driving force behind it. Mario was here teaching a course as a visiting professor, and I got to know him quite well. One day, he told me that he had been asked in Lima to coordinate the issue of a magazine dedicated to Puerto Rico. He needed some fiction, which he didn’t have. I had published a book of short stories that had received very good reviews, En cuerpo de camisa. In it was a story titled La guaracha del Macho Camacho y otros sones calenturientos [Macho Camacho’s Guaracha and Other Feverish Tunes]. When Mario read it, he told me: “There’s a novel here.”

Q. Alongside the music, the novel’s central protagonist is language itself — a festive, uninhibited, and transgressive language that embraces every form of expression.

A. Some time ago, I gave a lecture titled “Toward a Poetics of the Vulgar,” which is a vindication of the way ordinary people express themselves. I was always concerned by the fact that some people here have established that a swear word disqualifies you. When I gave that lecture, I remember a colleague, now deceased, telling me, horrified, that it was the first time he’d ever heard so many indecent words at the university. But the language I use, without restraint, is the language people use on the street; it’s pure Puerto Rican, and that’s also the language of La Guaracha del Macho Camacho.

Q. In the novel, as in all your work, there is a constant interplay between the Puerto Rican oracular voice and the legacy of the classics. Many of your texts seamlessly incorporate phrases from the great tradition of Spanish‑language literature, from both Latin America and Spain

A. I’ve just finished proofreading El libro de los elogios [The Book of Praises], a collection of three essays: Elogio de la radionovela [In Praise of the Radio Drama], Elogio del sexo oral [In Praise of Oral Sex], and Elogio del ocio y el negocio [In Praise of Leisure and Business]. It was originally going to be titled Vida, nada me debes [Life, You Owe Me Nothing], after the line in Amado Nervo’s poem: “Life, you owe me nothing. / Life, we are at peace.”

The title Elogio del sexo oral suggests something else, but it’s about verbal pleasure, the joy of the oracular, the celebration of language as desire. The book is mindful of both Cervantes’ legacy and the formidable influence radio dramas had on me. Alongside Cervantes, the first, the very first of our language, I place a whole series of mediocre radio dramas with ridiculous titles like El derecho de nacer [The Right to Be Born], Los que no deben nacer [Those Who Should Not Be Born], and El precio de una vida [The Price of a Life], because that’s what truly nourished me as a child and ended up influencing my writing style. As a child, there was only one radio at home, and we would sit down at 6 p.m. every afternoon. My father, my mother, my sister, and my grandmother would all listen to the Palmolive radio drama. I was in seventh grade, 12 or 13 years old, and I fervently read an adapted version of Don Quixote, so my imagination was forged, nourished by Cervantes’s work as well as by the unspeakable models of mediocrity that those radio dramas represented.

Q. Do you remember the first thing you wrote?

A. When I was a freshman in college, my Spanish teacher told me she saw talent in me as a writer and encouraged me to enter a contest, which I won with a story titled El trapito [The Valet], which was a tribute to the Puerto Rican flag.

Q. You keep a close eye on what’s happening with younger generations. What’s going on with younger Puerto Rican writers?

A. The last article I wrote is titled País mío, país nuestro [My Country, Our Country]. In it, I discuss what I consider a true boom in young Puerto Rican literature, something that is happening right now. At this moment, I feel there is a real explosion of young talent in our literature. I pay tribute to 10 examples, and these are just a sample. It’s time for people beyond our borders to pay attention to what’s happening here.

Q. These days, it’s impossible not to talk about Bad Bunny. In an anthology of your writings, Escribir en puertorriqueño, there is an article titled Bad Bunny, sí.

A. It was published in 2023, but I had already written about him quite some time before, when he was just starting to gain traction. In some way, I sensed he was going to grow.

Q. What does Bad Bunny mean as a symbol?

A. What happens at one of his concerts transcends the artistic; it’s a sociological, political, even patriotic phenomenon, a defense of the country and the language. In Bad Bunny, Puerto Rico has found a symbol of affirmation. People show up to all his events waving the Puerto Rican flag. They receive him like a national hero. What he does goes beyond music. The music is bait, a lure.

Q. The language he uses in his songs often fits what you once called a “poetics of the vulgar,” for example when he uses terms like perrear. What is perreo?

A. A dance style that mimics the movements dogs make during sex. Bad Bunny says, “Perrea, perrea,” joyfully incorporating the term into his vocabulary.

Q. Is there an element of political rebellion in all this?

A. People associate reggaeton with disorder, daring, boldness, the sexual freedom to which we are all entitled, and the idea that decency shouldn’t be measured solely by sexual behavior. It’s about liberating all that vocabulary.

Q. Will Puerto Rico ever be independent?

A. It’s a difficult and uncomfortable question. I think it’s fine that you asked it, but I don’t know how to answer it.

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It’s not a house: it’s a casita. The diminutive of casa — Spanish for “house” — is important. Not because it minimizes or diminishes what it describes, but because it implies affection, intimacy, and family. In the Caribbean, diminutives have the ability to smooth over complex topics.

In these parts, you don’t ask for a favor: you ask for un favorcito, a little favor. You don’t boast about having a huge sailboat (even if it really is): you simply have a tiny boat. And you don’t go out for a meal; instead, you grab a little something, even if you’re referring to a banquet. So, when the complete stage setup for Bad Bunny’s concert residency — titled No me quiero ir de aquí (“I don’t want to leave this place”) — was unveiled last summer in San Juan, Puerto Rico, it was only natural that everyone started calling it la casita, or “the little house.”

It’s true that its dimensions support the nickname: it’s about 42 feet wide and 42 feet deep, with an 11-foot ceiling. The model is as wide as the real house that inspired it, but less deep.

However, that affectionate diminutive has much more to do with the emotional and historical weight of the structure than with its appearance.

The casita first appeared in the short film (directed by Arí Maniel Cruz and Bad Bunny) that accompanied the release of the album titled Debí Tirar Más Fotos (2025). It stars filmmaker and actor Jacobo Morales — a key figure in Puerto Rican culture — and tells a story about the near future, in which the displacement currently taking place on the island is evident. The Puerto Rico depicted is one in which there are no Puerto Ricans, something that a certain political force today desperately longs for.

The original house was found by designer and art director Mayna Magruder Ortiz in the municipality of Humacao, in the southeast of the island. It was initially intended for the film, but later on, Bad Bunny’s team decided to incorporate a replica of the house into the world tour’s stage design instead. The creative process behind this decision — like almost everything that the singer’s inner circle works on — is a closely guarded secret. This isn’t only to maintain the element of surprise, but also to avoid pushing viewers and listeners toward a specific interpretation. The team also typically requires collaborators to sign confidentiality clauses in their contracts, which is why neither of the two creators of the set piece — Magruder and Rafael Pérez Rodríguez, in charge of construction and logistics — can give interviews.

When asked for comment, the artist’s team explains: “The casita is Bad Bunny’s intellectual creation, open to everyone’s interpretation through his short film.”

During Bad Bunny’s concert residency — which ran from July to September 2025 — the casita sparked all sorts of conversations. First, its location and the visual obstruction it created for part of the audience caused discomfort; then people debated its role as the setting for the concert’s second act, which followed a first part that took place in a rural setting, with native trees, traditional instruments, flamboyant costumes, and typical island dances.

At the beginning of each show, perreo and le lo lai — reggaeton and jíbaro music — merge as interchangeable expressions of the same emotional register, whether festive, melancholic, or defiant. Then, inside the casita, came what most consider the best part of the show: the selection of classic perreo tracks — or, more precisely, the most sexual, the most explicit, the most down and dirty. In other words, when Bad Bunny stepped into the casita, everyone knew it was time to perrear for real. The third act returns to the original stage, now centered on salsa and the full orchestra.

Months later, the casita began touring the globe on the artist’s world tour. For instance, it was installed on the stage of the Super Bowl LX halftime show this past January. And, wherever it’s set up, it’s met with the same reaction: everyone wants to go inside.

Those lucky enough to receive a coveted invitation can enter the little model house to dance on its balconies and experience the concert from that perspective (it fits about 30 people inside, while the roof can hold 20). There, they can feel like they’re at one of those classic parties in Puerto Rico, the kind of celebration that’s usually advertised as a small gathering of family and close friends, but ends up filling the entire road with more strangers than acquaintances. Still, in that moment, everyone feels like family.

While the focus is on the casita, the guests are — so to speak — family, while the rest of the concertgoers effectively become friends of friends, distant cousins, or neighbors who show up at the party somewhat uninvited, but end up dancing in the middle of it all, helping out in the kitchen, and watching the night go by in a rocking chair on the balcony. The little set piece thus manages to convey the intimacy of a house party within the massive scale of a concert that brings thousands of people together in a stadium.

One of the surprises of each concert night has been discovering who will be in the casita. Figures such as Ricky Martin, Kylian Mbappé, LeBron James, Lionel Messi, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Salma Hayek, Pedro Pascal, Karol G, Cardi B, Young Miko, Jessica Alba, Alix Earle, Diego Boneta, Belinda, Austin Butler, Loreto Peralta, Bárbara de Regil, Ana de la Reguera, J Balvin, Natanael Cano, RaiNao, Eladio Carrión, Félix Tito Trinidad, Miguel Cotto and José Piculín Ortiz — among others — have all been in the set piece, in addition to a long list of influencers and key figures in popular culture.

As they dance around — and as the show moves in and out of the structure — guests can see artwork by Puerto Rican artists like Lorenzo Homar and Alexis Díaz, sit on the sofa to watch one of the screens installed inside, order a drink in the kitchen (which doubles as a bar), or wander around the area where the DJ is playing music. Outside, there are lots of plants, typical of the island’s home gardens. At times, Bad Bunny comes and goes, dances with the crowd, sits and sings in the balcony chair, and climbs onto the roof and walks across it (something much appreciated by concert-goers whose view was obstructed by the prop house). He jokes around with the concert’s key character — Concho the toad — about how he’s gotten a little carried away with his “little party,” which has now become a massive bash.

At the peak of the concert, the audience is invited not only into the intimacy of the space — “I invite you to my casita,” the singer declares — but also into the liberating, transgressive energy of dancing with complete abandon. Whether one comes back up from that level of intensity is another matter.

However, the love affair with the little house was put to the test on September 17 of last year. That was when a lawsuit was filed against the artist and several production companies by the owner of the original house that inspired the casita: 84-year-old Román Carrasco Delgado. The grounds for the lawsuit were unjust enrichment and breach of contract, with Carrasco Delgado seeking damages. It was alleged that the project’s scope was never explained to him and that his signature didn’t reflect his clear understanding of the terms of the contract, which he signed for the use of the property as the central setting for the short film. Meanwhile, the production company maintains that the process for reaching an agreement regarding the use of the property was transparent.

After an attempt at an out-of-court settlement failed, Carrasco Delgado continues to seek $5 million in damages for harm to his economic interests and an additional $1 million for emotional distress, since — according to the legal filing — his daily life has been disrupted by the constant flow of curious visitors who come to look at his property.

The casita — built as an artistic project — not only represents something essential in Caribbean architecture. It has also awakened collective memory, while revealing the power that architecture has to open urgent social conversations. For many from the region, the casita doesn’t simply resemble the one where they grew up, where they went to visit their relatives in the countryside, or where they went to live in a new development: it’s also a symbol of hope. An entire generation thought that they could improve their lives through concrete, only to crash against the reality of a government unable to sustain those promises. In the end, the concrete turned out to be nothing more than cardboard.

The original structure behind this style of house was built by adapting the floor plan of a home in Levittown, one of the first housing developments inaugurated in Puerto Rico. This suburb would become the place that thousands of Puerto Ricans would return to, after years of migration to the mainland United States. It’s also a symbolic place for the working class, who believed in the worn-out project of an unincorporated territory. They either left the countryside for the city, or brought the city’s aesthetic back to rural life.

The casita is one of those universal metaphors for a homeland, but rendered in its most intimate form and through a Caribbean lens: bright colors, open balconies, Miami‑style jalousie windows for the climate and for keeping secrets. Above all, it is an invitation to what a house has meant in Latin America — a place where doormats say mi casa es su casa, and mean it.