Introduction: ‘Horns of a Diaspora’: two Hawai’i Puerto Rican songs
As part of my ongoing research project in the Hawai’i Puerto Rican community, I recorded two song/dance pieces, ‘Un Viaje a Nueva York’ (‘A Journey to New York’), a seis in traditional Puerto Rican Jíbaro highland peasant musical style, and ‘Pua ‘Olena’ (‘‘Olena Flower’), a popular Hawai’ian song set to Cuban bolero treatment. The first embodies the highest degree of traditional Puerto Rican ‘mother culture’ symbolic imagery for Hawai’i Puerto Ricans. The second displays a very high degree of overt diasporic cultural linkage with Hawai’i, the host society. In actuality, neither completely typifies contemporary Hawai’i Puerto Rican musical reality. Together, however, they embody two themes that I consider key to my discussion of Hawai’i Puerto Rican (hereafter ‘HPR’) music and dance culture. I maintain that, in the face of a profound physical, communicative, temporal, and cultural disconnection from the Puerto Rico whence their ancestors had departed, music and dance have served as what I have elsewhere (referring in that case to Afro-Cuban music), neologically referred to as a ‘pathoscape‘: ‘an emotional [sound] landscape’ (Solís 2004: 234). I believe that, for younger HPRs, poignantly aware of the broken link with Puerto Rico, recordings, and music and dance practices have, in a sense, come to serve as surrogate ancestors. In utilising music and dance this way, however, they and earlier generations have repeatedly rationalised, renegotiated and reinterpreted the aesthetic criteria for what they appropriately consider ‘Jíbaro‘. As different as the two pieces are in origin and performance practice, they both represent attempts to come to grips with a diasporic Puerto Rican identity both imagined and immediate.
In Hawai’i parlance the word ‘local’ refers to traditional ethnic groups of long standing and cultural critical mass: native Polynesian Hawai’ians (hereafter ‘Hawai’ians’) or descendents of long domiciled non-haole (Anglo/Caucasian) populations such as Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Filipinos, Koreans, and others brought to the islands as plantation workers. The ‘local’ Hawai’i Puerto Rican population primarily derives from contracted sugar plantation labourers brought to Hawai’i in 1900, with a smaller importation in 1921, and now number some 15,000.