English below.

Español: Acaba de salir un nuevo libro escrito por una gran amiga de OURMedia: Yeidi Rivero. Su libro (en inglés) es sobre cuestiones de raza y racismos en los medios puertoriqueños.  Se llama "Tuning Out Blackness: Race and Nation in the History of Puerto Rican Television".

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English:
Tuning Out Blackness: Race and Nation in the History of Puerto Rican Television
Yeidy M. Rivero


280 pages (June 2005)
24 b and w photos

Tuning Out Blackness fills a glaring omission in U.S. and Latin American television studies by looking at the history of Puerto Rican television. In exploring the political and cultural dynamics that have shaped racial representations in Puerto Rico's commercial media from the late 1940s to the 1990s, Yeidy M. Rivero advances critical discussions about race, ethnicity, and the media. She shows that televisual representations of race have belied the racial egalitarianism that allegedly pervades Puerto Rico's national culture. White performers in blackface have often portrayed "blackness" in local television productions, while black actors have been largely excluded.


Drawing on interviews, participant observation, archival research, and textual analysis, Rivero considers representations of race in Puerto Rico, taking into account how they are intertwined with the island's status as a U.S. commonwealth, its national culture, and its relationship with Cuba before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and the massive influx of Cuban migrants after 1960. She focuses on locally produced radio and television shows, particular television events, and characters that became popular media icons-from performer Ramón Rivero's use of blackface and "black" voice in the 1940s and 1950s to the battle between black actors and television industry officials over racism in the 1970s to the creation, in the 1990s, of the first Puerto Rican situation comedy featuring a black family. As the twentieth century drew to a close, multinational corporations had purchased all of Puerto Rico's stations, and they threatened to wipe out locally produced programs. Tuning Out Blackness not only brings to the forefront the marginalization of non-white citizens in Puerto Rico's media culture; it also raises important questions about the significance of local sites of television production.

"This book not only provides a cultural history of 'blackness' in Puerto Rican television, it also locates Puerto Rico as a critical blind spot in both Latin American and U.S. television studies, one that can offer new insights into the televisual representation of race, family, and nation."-Chon Noriega, author of Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema

"Tuning Out Blackness offers an astute and very well informed analysis of Puerto Rico's unique 'racial' programming, which in turn provides a valuable look at the deep ambivalence at the heart of the country's sense of national identity in the shadow of U.S. ideological and cultural power."-Juan Flores, author of From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latin Identity

Yeidy M. Rivero is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Clemencia Rodriguez
Associate Professor
Department of Communication
University of Oklahoma
610 Elm Ave Room 101
Norman OK 73019
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Phone 405 325 1570
Fax 405 325 7625