El Abayarde: Tego Calderón and the history, nationalism and negritude in Puerto Rico's Reggaeton

It is in recent years that Reggaeton has taken the spotlight and has become one of the most famous, influential and listened music genres in the world.

Reggaeton as a music genre was created in the early 1990’s where many artists from Puerto Rico transformed it into a worldwide phenomenon that is still nowadays one of the most listened to genres. From the old school generation of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s with legends like Daddy Yankee, Don Omar, Tego Calderón or Hector “El Father” to nowadays reggaeton main names like Bad Bunny, Anuel AA, J Balvin or Rauw Alejandro, we see that this phenomenon is worth researching as we see that, despite all the obscene lyrics and eccentric appearance, puerto rican reggaeton is a tool that has served as a mean to create a space for the negotiation of many topics that affect Puerto Rico’s citizens being gun violence, sexuality, freedom, independence, racism, imperialism and slavery.

We will start our research by exploring the history of Puerto Rico and how it has transformed from an indigenous land habited by the “Indios Tainos” to an unclaimed territory that belongs to the United States.

Although Puerto Rico is a really diverse place, racism has always been present on the island as, despite most people being of mixed race, most of them see themselves as white and do not wish to be seen as black. Reggaeton in this matter has always been against this as many artists in the early 2000’s were black and were proud of it as most of them dressed and shouted on their songs that they were proud to be black. Negritude as a social movement has helped afro-caribbean individuals to take pride in their african heritage. In this paper, we are going to define what a “race” is and the complexity of the term and we will look at how Cesaire and Fanon’s ideas of Negritude helped shape not only Reggaeton but also other urban movements.

In this paper we will focus on the figure of one of the most recognized reggaeton artists in the history of the genre, Tego Calderon.Tego Calderon was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico although it was at an early age when he moved to Miami, United States, where he would come in contact with multiple cultures, which would influence his work. It was in 2002 when Tego Calderon released his most famous album and one of the best known in the history of Reggaeton, "El Abayarde" (2002).It is through the album “El Abayarde” that Tego Calderon portrays the nationalism, blackness and caribeaness of Puerto Rico. Tego Calderon uses the negritude movement in his album to show that Puerto Ricans should take pride in their blackness and caribeaness.