![]() ![]() La fresca música de esos inicios reflejaba una nostalgia agrícola de desplazamiento político envuelta en las luchas de los obreros. ![]() Both displaced migrants, they blazed new trails redefining and rediscovering the role and history of Black and Puerto Rican people in America.Ī pesar de los numerosos garitos, chinchorros, bares en sótanos, restaurantes y clubes, ¿quién habría pensado que San Juan Hill sería el escenario de las batallas musicales entre el bebop y el mambo? Sin embargo, la zona seguía siendo un misterio, un enigma de emigrantes negros y puertorriqueños que trabajaban, vivían y tocaban juntos en una comunidad creativa de raíces, rutas y ritmos compartidos. ![]() While bandleader James Reese Europe 1 broke racial barriers advocating for Black musicians on Broadway’s 53rd Street with his Clef Club, the noted Afro-Boricua historian Arturo Alfonso Schomburg 2 dug up his roots from his San Juan Hill home after campaigning for the independence of his native Puerto Rico from Spain. The music left behind continues to mark the footprints of the creations and collaborations forged in San Juan Hill and other city neighborhoods.Ī cautionary tale for all of Gotham’s creative, working-class communities, let’s take a deeper dive into “Black Bohemia.” The music played New York City's disrespected working-class communities have been the casualties of its financial future, as has the artistry that thrived there. Many residents have been displaced and neighborhoods lost due to financially driven development, and San Juan Hill is one such example. Affordable housing is as hard to find as a public phone booth. Digging through newspapers, theater programs, and literary magazines from those early years reveals the politics under which San Juan Hill's growth and upheaval helped influence Latin and jazz music in New York.Īfter one hundred years, the city is unrecognizable from what it was during San Juan Hill’s heady days. While the up-tempo, polyrhythmic beats of Latin music were recorded in New York at the start of the 20th century, the history of those musical diasporas remains largely untold. Gradually, San Juan Hill became the nexus to better gigs, and better living conditions for Puerto Ricans crowded into politically charged East Harlem. The early music reflected an agricultural nostalgia of political displacement wrapped around working-class struggles. In spite of the many juke joints, basement bars, restaurants, and clubs, who would've thought San Juan Hill would be the arena for the musical battles between bebop and mambo? Yet the area remained a mystery, a conundrum of Black and Puerto Rican migrants who worked, lived, and played together in a creative community of shared roots, routes, and rhythms. ![]()
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