African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
184 p, Contents: Introduction : Island sounds in the global city / Ray Allen & Lois Wilcken -- Buscando ambiente : Puerto Rican musicians in New York City, 1917-1940 / Ruth Glasser -- Representations of New York City in Latin music / Peter Manuel -- From transplant to transnational circuit : merengue in New York / Paul Austerlitz -- Recapturing history : the Puerto Rican roots of hip hop culture / Juan Flores -- "I am happy just to be in this sweet land of liberty" : the New York city calypso craze of the 1930s and 1940s / Donald Hill -- Community dramatized, community contested : the politics of celebration in the Brooklyn carnival / Philip Kasinitz -- Steel pan grows in Brooklyn : Trinidadian music and cultural identity / Ray Allen and Les Slater -- Moving the Big Apple : Tabou combo's diasporic dreams / Gage Averill -- The changing hats of Haitian staged folklore in New York City / Lois Wilcken.;
160 p., An analytical study of Burundanga or Cantata Antillana by Jack Délano (1914-1997). One of Délano's most ambitious choral-orchestral compositions, Burundanga was completed in 1989 in response to a commission from the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture and is based on Luis Palés Matos's (1898-1959) extravagant and elaborate poem Canción festiva para ser llorada (A Festive Song to be Wept). Burundanga stands at the foreground of Puerto Rican art-music in the twentieth century. With its neoclassical language and integration of Caribbean folkloric material, it emerges as a unique reflection of the highly complex geographical, social, cultural and musical reality of Puerto Rico and the Antilles. Discerns particular methods by which the composer utilized and adapted Afro-Antillean idioms and combined them with art-music components to portray idiosyncratic aspects of Caribbean culture in a universalistic musical language.
147 p., Discusses how blackness, femaleness and Puerto Ricanness (national identity) is presented in commercial media in Puerto Rico. National identity, no matter how differently defined, is often constructed through claims to heritage, "roots," tradition, and descent. In the western world, these claims, almost inevitably allude to questions of "race." In Puerto Rico, it is the mixture of the Spanish, the Taino Indian, and the African, which come to epitomize the racial/traditional stock out of which "the nation" is constructed, defended, and naturalized. This mixture is often represented by images, statues, murals across the island that display the three racialized representatives, as the predecessors of the modern, racially mixed Puerto Rican people. In their portrayals of black women, figures as Mama Ines (the mammy) and fritoleras (women who cook and sell codfish fritters), Caribbean Negras (Black Caribbean women) contemporary media draw upon familiar representations to make black women bodies intelligible to Puerto Rican audiences.
A benefit-cost analysis was performed on varying levels of standard buildings codes for Haiti and Puerto Rico. It was found that in the two areas studied, the expected loss of life was reduced the most by use of high seismic building code levels, but lower levels of seismic building code were more cost-effective when considering only building damages and the costs for code implementation.
