Lessons in Reggaetón
Dr. Cloe Gentile Reyes in her office at New York University. She researches Latinx sound studies, reggaetón, Puerto Rican and Nuyorican history, and diaspora studies. Gentile Reyes teaches the class, “Reggaetón: A Decolonial Movimiento.” Photo by Yunuen Bonaparte for palabra
Women scholars open up about the challenges and possibilities of studying and teaching reggaetón in higher education.
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Once outside of the mainstream, reggaetón is currently one of the most popular music genres globally. Bad Bunny’s recent ‘Most Wanted Tour’ grossed approximately $208 million. Karol G was just named Woman of the Year by Billboard Latin Women in Music 2024. And the popular reggaetón dance style perreo was added last year to the Real Academia Española’s dictionary.
But despite its popularity, studying reggaetón within the academic world continues to be challenging.
“The disciplines of ethnomusicology and musicology are extremely Eurocentric and voyeuristic/exploitative toward cultures of the Global South,” said Dr. Cloe Gentile Reyes, faculty fellow at New York University. She researches Latinx sound studies, reggaetón, Puerto Rican and Nuyorican history, and diaspora studies.
Gentile Reyes grew up in Miami Beach in a Boricua family in what she describes as a “very communal Caribbean upbringing,” where she would often go to parks with her friends and dance to the music of Ivy Queen, Daddy Yankee, and Tego Calderón.
She studied music and sociology at Emory University, and continued her musicology graduate studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As a student, she started with a focus on voice and classical music, but said feeling like she belonged or like her background was being respected was a struggle.
Dr. Gentile Reyes with a güiro from Puerto Rico.The güiro is typically used in genres like salsa, son, and trova, and sometimes by reggaetón artists. Photo by Yunuen Bonaparte for palabra
“Growing up with Afro-diasporic and Indigenous culture and music, my awareness of my body and what it means for me to feel free to move and be would clash with a very stoic, strict, and rigid classical music world,” Gentile Reyes added.
Her worldview, informed by growing up low-income, was also part of what led to tensions in her music scholarship, since she felt she had a different way of speaking, dressing, and even being, than others in music.
“There were no Latinx faculty in my department, and thankfully my adviser connected me with someone in the Chicanx Studies department,” she said. “There was also a lot of racism in the way certain faculty would speak to me, often being coded as the "angry Latina" in a room full of white students whenever I disagreed with a scholar (often also white).”
Gentile Reyes felt there was almost a philosophical difference in the way she viewed her research and how she wanted to pursue her academic inquiry.
Dr. Gentile Reyes with some of her books from her studies. Photo by Yunuen Bonaparte for palabra
“For instance, I love talking to my mom and using that in my scholarship, right? And people just kind of don't understand that. They're like, what's your archive? What's your documentation? My mom is my documentation. It's a different world view of what scholarship is. And a lot of that is rooted in oral histories, Indigenous knowledge, right? And so even just the way that we do scholarship is a battle at times.”
According to Gentile Reyes, reggaetón was a sort of antidote to the issues she was encountering in her classical music training. It gave her a sense of home in grad school. Her dissertation,“Reggaetón as Resistance: Negotiating Racialized Femininity through Rap, Miniskirts, and Perreo,” includes elements of memoir, family archive, and critique, and celebrates the musical innovations of working class, Black and Brown queer communities.
Scholars in Latin Music
There’s a lack of academic research on reggaetón and Latin music more broadly, according to Dr. Petra Rivera-Rideau, associate professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. While in graduate school, she realized reggaetón was an effective entry point to talk about issues of race, gender, and socioeconomic class. Now, as an interdisciplinary scholar studying race, identity and popular culture in Latin America and U.S. Latinx communities, reggaetón is instrumental to her research and teaching.
Dr. Petra Rivera-Rideau, co-author of the “Bad Bunny Syllabus,” has been teaching "Bad Bunny: Race, Religion, and Empire in Reggaetón" at Wellesley College since 2022. Photo by Joel Haskell, courtesy of Wellesley College
Rivera-Rideau said that reggaetón has a long history of being marginalized within the Latin music industry. Within academia, she sees this as an overall problem, in the lack of attention popular Latin music receives, whether it's banda or norteño or salsa in the United States.
“One of the courses I teach at Wellesley is a course about Latin music and one of the themes that comes out in that class is how little scholarship there is for me to assign (students). Why do they see the same names over and over again in the syllabus? Because there really are not very many of us,” she said.
Rivera-Rideau adds,“If you're going to study Latin music, sometimes people are like, you should study historical stuff like mambo or Latin jazz, right? Often it's the contemporary music, the popular music, particularly of working-class communities, Black communities, that gets sort of neglected in academia.”
'When music is new... sometimes scholars do not see it as worthy of study yet.'
Dr. Xóchitl C. Chávez is incoming chair of the Latin American and Caribbean Music Section of The Society of Ethnomusicology, a network dedicated to the study of music from different cultural contexts and academic perspectives. She says it can be complicated to know exactly how many people in academia are working in Latin music studies due to several factors, including how the genre is even defined.
As assistant professor in the Department of Music at UC Riverside, her current work focuses on transborder relationships, Indigenous communities, and Oaxacan music reinterpreted in the U.S, but she says she is sometimes left out of spaces where scholars might be studying Latin music. “I’m on the borderlands right there, because, one, I’m not often invited to some of these other, popular Latinx sounds because I work with Indigenous people. And they have a lot of these preconceived stereotypes … and they’re always thinking of Indigenous as in the past. But yet I work with living Indigenous communities from Oaxaca who are making music and are quite well known.”
Maestra Leticia Gallardo Martínez after being interviewed by Dr. Xóchitl C. Chávez in the mountain community of Santa María Tlahuitoltepec in Oaxaca, Mexico. Dr. Chávez works closely with the Banda Femenil Regional “Mujeres del Viento Florido,” a female brass band from the Sierra Mixe in Oaxaca to document education processes and migration patterns for female musicians in music-oriented opportunities outside of Oaxaca. Photo by Stan Lim, courtesy of UC Riverside
Dr. Xóchitl C. Chávez rehearses with other band members at the home of Maestra Leticia Gallardo Martínez in Santa María Tlahuitoltepec in Oaxaca, Mexico. Photo by Stan Lim, courtesy of UC Riverside
Reggaeton studies in academia
Gentile Reyes believes several factors contribute to this lack of study of reggaetón in academia. She sees a disconnect between what scholars see as artistic and as worthy of study, and what is popular and connects with communities outside of academia. “I think that disconnect is an elitist disconnect … like ‘This is not real music. This is noise.’”
She says there are many reasons for this: an elitism that views what is popular as simple and easy, Eurocentric ideologies about music that favors complexity, the devaluation of what youth subcultures listen to by academia, and a generational divide between faculty and students.
Dr. Cloe Gentile Reyes presenting at the pop music conference PopCon in March. Her presentation was titled, “Reggaetón Realities and Imaginary Dance floors as Queer, Disabled, or Color Liberatory Praxis.” Photo courtesy of Dr. Cloe Gentile Reyes
Dr. Vanessa Díaz, associate professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University, believes there is another factor: timing. When music is new, she says, sometimes scholars do not see it as worthy of study yet. As a cultural anthropologist, she points out what the problem with this is.
“When we study the past, we cannot get the full story. Records are lost, people pass away. Studying the contemporary helps to ensure that we can maintain the most complete record of our culture possible, so that we can continue to understand it on even deeper levels over time, as historians turn to it. Historians study hip-hop now. But hip-hop was not studied as a cultural phenomenon as it was first developing.”
One of the first times professor Díaz remembers bringing reggaetón songs and music videos into the classroom was for an introduction to Chicano and Latino studies class, specifically to discuss alternative ideas about masculinity with students. Since then, she has included works by artists like Wisin y Yandel, Tego Calderón, and Bad Bunny as part of class discussions on immigration, race, and diaspora. The way her students responded to Bad Bunny's music, coupled with the artist’s participation in the 2019 protests that helped to oust then-governor Ricardo Rosselló, led her to develop a class called “Bad Bunny and Resistance in Puerto Rico." Along with Rivera-Rideau, Díaz co-created The Bad Bunny Syllabus to educate not only students but also the public “on Bad Bunny's global impact and how it reflects political, artistic, and cultural triumphs and struggles within Puerto Rico”.
‘A lot of what makes all art valuable is that it stimulates dialogue. It stimulates conversation.’
In class, Díaz’s students learn to understand a range of societal issues through music. For example, they unpack whether female reggaetón artists empower women or whether they play into harmful stereotypes about sexuality and gender norms through their music.
“We look at the lyrics and we think about who's being represented and how they're being represented. And we have these conversations in community, and get into pretty heated dialogue because lots of people feel differently. (...) Different people experience music and specific lyrics in different ways,” she said.
For Díaz, these discussions are part of the point. “A lot of what makes all art valuable is that it stimulates dialogue. It stimulates conversation.”
A ready audience: students
These scholars have found eager audiences in their college students. Gentile Reyes said her reggaetón class at NYU, unlike other classes she’s taught not related to Latin culture, was made up of “almost entirely students of color.”
“The students are paying attention to the versatility of reggaetón, and how this can expand beyond the borders of the limited imagination of those who have studied music beforehand,” said multimedia artist Katelina Eccleston.
Katelina Eccleston, also known as La Gata, DJing at Portland Center Stage in Portland, Oregon, where attendees listened to her set and a history lecture about reggaetón. Photo courtesy of Katelina Eccleston
Attendees enjoying La Gata’s DJ set at her Perreo 101 Tour in Chicago. Photo courtesy of Katelina Eccleston
A self-described reggaetón historian, Eccleston, also known as La Gata, has been touring college campuses for the past three years giving presentations, lectures, and discussions about reggaetón history and ethnomusicology. She added that her podcast, Perreo 101, is discussed in classrooms and that she’s been interviewed by students for their academic research and thesis work.
She spoke earlier this year to a group of students at Stanford University. “The students literally begged to get me on campus for a year.” When speaking to students, she said she encourages them to “put aside their fanaticism” and think critically about these artists, their work, and what they’re contributing to society.
“In Latin music because of blanqueamiento, (whitewashing) a majority of our favorite artists today are white, which convinces them (students) to look past a lot of race-related issues originally associated with reggaetón,” said Eccleston. “I invite students to consider all of this because we owe it to each other as a culture, as human beings to care about these issues collectively.”
“It's pretty clear the students are excited about our course material because they're learning about the artists that they actually listen to. They're learning about the artists that are changing their world right now, that are creating the art of their time,” added Dr. Díaz. “I think when it comes to popular culture in general, institutions like academic institutions do tend to be slower to understanding the value of these things.”
Gentile Reyes said she would love to see students making reggaetón music in academic settings — an interest that she’s already seen among some of them, especially those considering a career in the music business or in production. She sees her students becoming assets to the future of this genre.
“Having had this kind of historical knowledge and a really critical eye to what's going on in reggaetón, I think that they hopefully will have the power to raise up certain artists and communities that are at risk of being erased.”
Until then, Gentile Reyes and her colleagues will continue to advocate for their work as the genre continues to evolve.
Dr. Cloe Gentile Reyes at Washington Square Park in New York City. Photo by Yunuen Bonaparte for palabra
Mariela Santos-Muñiz is a freelance journalist based in Puerto Rico whose writing has appeared in Prism, and Nylon, among others. She works as the Collaborative journalism newsletter and database coordinator at the Center for Cooperative Media. Completely bilingual in English and Spanish, she has an M.A. in International Relations and International Communications from Boston University. @mellamomariela.
Virginia Lora, is an independent audio producer, reporter and editor who works in English and Spanish, and dabbles in French. Born in Peru, she moved to the U.S. at age 13 and grew up in Miami, Florida. Much of her interest in stories that center the margins comes from her early-career experiences interviewing people in communities all over the country for an oral history project, and her own immigration experience. She earned a B.A. in history, French and a certificate in Latin American and Latino studies from Amherst College and trained in narrative audio at the Transom Story Workshop. @VirginiaLoraC