36 Hours in San Juan, Puerto Rico: Things to Do and See
8:30 a.m. Stroll on the avenue by the sea More
Puerto Rico
Subterms
Latest story
More stories
- in Music
Myke Towers Is Seizing His Moment
In just a few years, the rapper has become one of the most sought-after collaborators in Latin music. His new album, “La Vida Es Una,” surveys his many aesthetics.Myke Towers could tell you that he never knew he would make it big, but that wouldn’t be true. Because back in 2014, six years before the rapper would put out his debut, he was preparing for a make-or-break show in his hometown, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and breaking wasn’t an option.“Puerto Rico is the most difficult crowd to please,” he said this month, video-chatting from a Miami hotel room a few weeks before the release of his new album, “La Vida Es Una” (“Life Is One,” a reminder that we only live once). “They don’t just give out approval, you have to show that you are good enough. If you make it in P.R., you’re going to make it anywhere.”Over the course of two back-to-back albums, he did just that. “Easy Money Baby” from 2020 went triple platinum, building off the success of his 2016 mixtape, “El Final del Principio” (“The End of the Beginning”), while incorporating reggaeton, Brazilian funk and Colombian melodies. “Lyke Mike,” released in 2021, was a firm statement of purpose that strung together harder trap bangers. It peaked at No. 3 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart and cracked the Top 50 on the all-genre Top 200. With his new album, out Thursday, Towers aimed to marry the two approaches, striking a balance that illustrates his creative flexibility.“In this album, I want to make music to perform live,” he said, speaking animatedly in a casual white tee and a gold chain. “I want to give energy to people so they can go out and forget about their problems, forget about what’s stressing them.”Almost a decade ago, Towers, now 29, was still waiting for his shot. Raised in the barrio of Caimito in south San Juan, he grew up surrounded by music, mainly his grandmother’s: salsa, merengue, old school boleros — if it was classic Latin music, she was playing it. But Towers wanted to cut his own path in rap, and by the time he graduated from high school, he’d started releasing music on SoundCloud, initially fairly anonymously. “At the beginning, I didn’t even want to show my face,” he said with a laugh. “I just wanted to show my skills. I knew that I had to put in a lot of work to be in the mix.”“Wherever I go, I make music from Puerto Rico,” Towers said. “When I’m making music, I’m listening to the people who came before me.”Ysa Pérez for The New York TimesHe didn’t just practice music, he analyzed it, dissecting every move idols like Daddy Yankee and Jay-Z made, and seeing how he could apply them to his own life. “I studied the game,” he explained. “I have my own identity, but I started with them, and the respect that I had for them.”As his SoundCloud releases gained more traction, he began putting his name on the tracks — styling “Mike” as “Myke” — and performing around the city. He viewed his first shows as tests, and by 2014 he was ready for graduation: that important hometown performance, in La Perla.For artists who grew up in the area, performing in La Perla, the island’s famous slum — located on a stretch of rocky coastline in Old San Juan — is a rite of passage. In video of Towers’s set posted to YouTube, the rapper is dressed in all black, standing under a white beach canopy as he confidently delivers the verses of the aspirational “Dinero En Mano.” (He later released the track, filled with ominous strings, on “El Final del Principio.”) By the end of the song, the crowd is singing along with him.“It was one of my most important shows,” he recalled. He shook his head and grinned, almost as if he was still in disbelief that he had pulled it off. “A lot of people, they didn’t even know my songs, but they were like, ‘Who’s that? Why is he confident performing like that?’”Even before he released his first full-length album, Towers had already teamed up with Bad Bunny and Becky G, laying the groundwork that would make him one of Latin music’s most in-demand collaborators. Since then, the rapper’s features with Rauw Alejandro, Luis Fonsi and Farruko have all been certified platinum.With “La Vida Es Una,” Towers agonized over the track list, sifting between more than 50 songs to select the set that could demonstrate his transition from a vanguard of Puerto Rico’s grass-roots trap scene to a self-assured hitmaker. His versatility is what first grabbed the attention of Orlando Cepeda, known as Jova, one of Towers’s frequent co-writers and the co-founder of the Puerto Rican label that first signed him in 2018. After hearing his rap music, Cepeda asked if Towers had anything more commercial. He was impressed.“He’s an artist without limits,” Cepeda said in a phone interview. “He’s a writer, he’s a composer, he’s a lyricist. I think that hearing someone who comes from the hood like he does, when you listen to his music, it inspires, it excites, it makes people want to work with him.”By the time Towers graduated from high school, he’d started releasing music on SoundCloud.Ysa Pérez for The New York TimesIn addition to tapping some of his past collaborators, including Ozuna and J Balvin, for “La Vida Es Una,” Towers also enlisted producers from across the Latin music diaspora, including Sky Rompiendo (from Colombia) and Tainy (Puerto Rico). “I want to show my fans the difference between ‘Mike’ and ‘Myke,’” he said, explaining his efforts to blend his grittier rap roots with his mainstream ambitions. “In the beginning, my fans would say things like, ‘Oh, you went commercial. What are you doing?’ Those comments would get in my head, and I felt like I was losing who I am, but I like to challenge myself. I took a lot of risks on this album, but I feel confident that when people listen to it, they’ll hear something they needed from me before.”The new album includes songs for his more pop-minded fans: “Sábado” and the Daddy Yankee collaboration “Ulala (Ooh La La),” two dance-floor-ready tracks produced by the Texas duo Play-N-Skillz. Towers heats things up on “El Calentón,” a sparse track that begins as a reggaeton jam before building to a display of his lyrical dexterity. And as its title might suggest, “Flow Jamaican,” produced by Di Genius, dives into reggae rhythms, with Towers switching up his flow in the lead-up to the song’s earworm of a hook.The album was primarily recorded in Puerto Rico, a place with such a long, diverse musical history, Towers said, that anyone who taps into it comes away overflowing with ideas, influences and potential: “Wherever I go, I make music from Puerto Rico. When I’m making music, I’m listening to the people who came before me.” He lit up, a wide smile spreading across his face as he described his usual routine of returning home from tour to his wife and son, and then heading to the studio.“My family is my home base,” Towers said. “Going back to them is spiritual to me. Before I had my son, I would be in the studio until 7 a.m., every day. I’ll always have that hustler spirit, but when I found out I was going to have a kid, it was about working smarter, not harder.”Towers ends the album with a triumphant celebration, “Lo Logré” (“I Made It”). “It’s an anthem that a lot of people are going to relate to,” he said.“People think I made it and it was easy, they forget the process, everything that it took to make it happen. I value every moment in my career because years ago I was even crying trying to make it come true. There are trials you go through, but when you come out on the other side, people just see that you made it. And I have, but I haven’t. I have more dreams to achieve.” More
- in Movies
Bad Bunny, No. 1 Again, Puts a Spotlight on Inequities in Puerto Rico
Days before his latest album notched its 11th week atop the Billboard 200, the pop superstar released a music video paired with a documentary by Bianca Graulau.Another week, another hundred-odd-million streams and yet another No. 1 for Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican pop superstar whose album “Un Verano Sin Ti” has dominated the upper rungs of the Billboard chart since it came out in May.In its 19th week of release, “Un Verano” notches an 11th time at No. 1, the most at the top since Drake’s “Views” had a 13-week stint in 2016. The runs for both albums are nonconsecutive, but Bad Bunny has the distinction of never dipping below No. 2. (“Views” fell as low as No. 4 during its first 19 weeks out.)In its most recent week, “Un Verano” had the equivalent of 97,000 sales in the United States, including 132 million streams, according to Luminate, the tracking service that powers Billboard’s charts. Since its release, the album has had the equivalent of about 2.4 million sales, and its songs have racked up 3.3 billion streams.The accomplishment comes as Bad Bunny is selling out stadiums across North America — including two nights at Yankee Stadium last month — and has become increasingly outspoken about political and social issues in Puerto Rico. On Friday, he released a 23-minute video, which segues from a music video for his song “El Apagón” to an 18-minute documentary by Bianca Graulau, a journalist, called “Aquí Vive Gente” (“People Live Here”).Her film looks at inequities in Puerto Rican real estate, including the eviction of some low-income residents of San Juan to make way for million-dollar homes that cater to mainland speculators and cryptocurrency traders. “They’re evicting Puerto Ricans to get rich with what’s from here, with what’s native from here,” one woman, who said she was given 30 days to leave her apartment, tells Graulau in the film.Bad Bunny’s video also explores the longstanding problems with Puerto Rico’s power grid, which has struggled to recover after Hurricane Maria in 2017. Outages this year led to protests against Luma Energy, a private company that took it over in 2021. The video arrived as Hurricane Fiona knocked out power across all of Puerto Rico, and led to widespread flooding.Three new albums placed high on this week’s chart. The Canadian rapper Nav opens at No. 2 with “Demons Protected by Angels,” while Ozzy Osbourne, the 73-year-old metal god and onetime reality-TV star, starts at No. 3 with his latest, “Patient Number 9.” The country singer Kane Brown debuts at No. 5 with “Different Man.”Also this week, Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 4, extending its historic chart run with an 87th time in the Top 10. More
- in Music
Overlooked No More: Sylvia Rexach, Puerto Rican Singer and Composer
She was especially known for reinventing boleros — songs of stringent, abiding love — amid Puerto Rico’s sexist and militaristic society in the mid-20th century.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.A woman positioned close to a microphone announces a title into the silence, as if preparing to read a poem: “En Mis Sueños” (“In My Dreams”). A guitarist plays a precise and dramatic introduction to a bolero.At modest volume, the woman, Sylvia Rexach, begins to sing, with a smoky voice and non-virtuosic authority. She describes a fantasy loop in which an ex-lover briefly visits her in her dreams, leaving behind a “wake of love” (“estela de amor”). The dream will return again when she wants it to, which she will. She may not want more than the fantasy. (She may even want less: to be free of repetitive desire.) There is no sense of possession nor, really, of loss. There will be no reciprocity in this relationship, and she seems not only to accept the situation but to be an adept within it, a powerful expert.This description could pertain to more or less every track on “Sylvia Rexach Canta a Sylvia Rexach,” a luminous, séance-like record made in a San Juan studio in July 1958 by the Puerto Rican singer-songwriter, then 36, and her friend the guitarist Tutti Umpierre. The tempos remain similar, as do the images and themes: moons, night and oblivion; celestial flashes; troublesome desire; waves and what they leave behind.The album, after it was released in the mid-1960s by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña — a government-funded operation and the island’s equivalent to the Smithsonian Institution — was barely distributed outside Puerto Rico and has only recently appeared on streaming services. It is the only commercially issued recording of Rexach performing her own songs, and it was not even intended as such: It was a reference document for posterity attesting to how her songs should sound, made at the behest of the studio’s owner. It includes “Olas y Arenas” (“Waves and Sands”), “Alma Adentro” (“Inner Soul”) and “Y Entonces” (“And So”), which over the years have been taken up by other performers in many styles.Rexach (pronounced reck-SAHTCH) was a gifted composer of boleros — songs of stringent, abiding love in slow 2/4 time. The bolero began in Cuba at the end of the 19th century and gained popularity across Latin America in the late 1920s. But by the ’40s and ’50s it could reflect a more modern sensibility, one in tune with the wild subconscious. It could just about accommodate someone like Rexach, an artist to the core, “una bohemia” — not a casual description but a committed identity.“It meant that she liked the nightlife, and sang with her friends in groups, and saw the sun come up,” her daughter, the actor and singer Sharon Riley, said in an interview.There had been important female bolero composers before Rexach, most famously María Grever of Mexico. But Puerto Rico’s sexist and militaristic society in the mid-20th century created particularly difficult circumstances that forced women artists like Rexach and the poet Julia de Burgos to invent their own tradition.The eminent musicologist Cristóbal Díaz Ayala described Rexach as virtually unclassifiable within the Latin American music of her time. Her lyrics projected a frank sexuality and a near-indifference to shame. They could look like passionate resignation, or calm defiance. “I am the sand that the wave never touches,” she laments in “Olas y Arenas.”She could destabilize and diffuse what the scholar Elaine Enid Vázquez González has called “the boleristic ‘I’”: In her songs, the narrator’s desire doesn’t entirely travel outward toward its object, as had been common in bolero lyrics. It travels inward, more toward her own memory and the senses. The listener follows it there.Rexach was 36 when she recorded an album with the guitarist Tutti Umpierre. The songs on that record have been performed by many other musicians, including Linda Ronstadt and Tito Rodríguez.Archivo General de Puerto RicoSylvia Regina Rexach González was born on Jan. 22, 1922, one of seven children of Julio Rexach, who was of Catalan descent and ran Farmacia Rexach, a drugstore next door to the family’s home, and María Teresa González, a society woman and organizer of annual carnival activities. Her well-to-do family lived in Santurce, the district east of San Juan’s Old City known for its density of musicians and artists.At Central High School in Santurce, Sylvia proved an indifferent student but one who was indispensable to the school’s performing-arts programs. One afternoon in the mid-1930s, while on a school outing, she played her song “Di Corazon” (“Tell Me, Heart”) on a piano at the Escambrón Beach Club. The bandleader Rafael Muñoz, who was on a break from rehearsing for an evening performance, heard it and asked her who wrote it. Her father signed a contract on her behalf with the publishing company Peer International, and Muñoz recorded the song before Rexach finished her junior year.In 1943 she enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps for three months, working as a desk clerk. Around this time, while publicizing a brand of rum outside a grocery store, she met Bill Riley, an Army cook from Connecticut. They fell in love, quickly married, had three children and were legally joined for 13 years, mostly unhappily, with a long separation toward the end. According to Sharon Riley, her father was often violent with her mother, especially when both had been drinking.In the 1940s and ’50s, Rexach worked in clubs as the leader of the vocal group el Combo Las Damiselas (later known as el Combo de Sylvia Rexach) and with musical-theater revues, both on the island and occasionally in New York City. She helped form a publishing organization through which she advocated for composers’ rights; wrote scripts for radio and television comedy shows, as well as advertising jingles for aspirin and detergent; and wrote a cultural criticism column for El Diario de Puerto Rico, praising the unsung and the local while reacting against exploitative business practices.She also raised her children as a single mother, and she wrote songs. About 50 have been published, though a friend, the singer José Luis Torregrosa, believed that many more “were left on the tabletops of the cafes where we were drinking.” Several were recognized during her life through versions by well-known singers — particularly Lucho Gatica’s “Y Entonces,” released in 1959 — but many more came later, as performed by Tito Rodríguez, La Lupe, Cheo Feliciano and others. The song “Alma Adentro” alone has passed through many sensibilities: Linda Ronstadt covered it on her Grammy Award-winning 1992 album, “Frenesí,” as did the New York-based jazz saxophonist Miguel Zenón in 2011. on a record named after the song. Miramar, the bolero revivalist band with roots in Puerto Rico, researched her life before creating their own subtle version, included on their album “Dedication to Sylvia Rexach,” released in 2016, which drew some attention to the composer in the United States. And the Spanish singer Angela Cervantes and the Cuban jazz pianist Pepe Rivero recently released their own version, spreading her work to audiences that barely knew her music.Aspects of Rexach’s life have created around her an aura of tragedy. But those who knew her spoke of a different set of qualities, including hilarity, bravery and loyalty.Archivo General de Puerto RicoRexach died on Oct. 20, 1961, of stomach cancer. She was 39.Her position in history remains unfixed — somewhere between institution and cult, often rediscovered and sometimes not discovered at all. A Telemundo mini-series about Rexach’s life, broadcast in Puerto Rico in the early 1990s and starring Sharon Riley, told her story in dramatic tones. There have been two theaters named for her in San Juan; the current one, inside the Centro de Bellas Artes, Puerto Rico’s major arts center, is built roughly on the site of her family’s old house. A well-researched Spanish-language biography, “Sylvia Rexach: Pasión Adentro,” by Virianai Rodríguez Santaliz, was published in Puerto Rico in 2008, but it has not been translated into other languages and has gone out of print.Rexach was a woman of integrity who continues to resist easy definition and enshrinement. She was melancholic, and aspects of her life have created around her an aura of tragedy: her troubled marriage and divorce; her long illness; her son Billy’s opiate addiction and prison time in New York City; her early death at the Women’s Hospital of Santurce.Yet those who knew her well, as detailed in Santaliz’s biography, have stressed a different set of qualities: hilarity, bravery, generosity, loyalty, perfectionism. Marta Romero, one of her bandmates in el Combo Sylvia Rexach, once called her “a volcano of mercy in constant eruption.” The great songwriter Tite Curet Alonso also compared her to nature, calling her “a true cultural bruma.” The word “bruma,” which she used in “Olas y Arenas,” means mist, and implies that she has become part of the atmosphere. More
- in Theater
Asked to Adapt a Classic Play, This Writer Rethought Her Life
As she sought the truth for her characters on the page, Mara Vélez Meléndez’s real self began to emerge. Now she’s making her Off Broadway debut.In 2018, as part of a masters program in playwriting at Hunter College in Manhattan, Mara Vélez Meléndez was given a life-changing assignment: adapt a classic play. She chose “John Gabriel Borkman,” a rarely revived late Ibsen play about an ambitious banker, and in her reworking, the characters became members of the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, created in 2016 by the U.S. federal government to resolve the island’s debt crisis.The resulting work, “Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members,” recently opened at Soho Rep in Manhattan. But when Vélez Meléndez, now 29, embarked on the project, she knew little about the board, or “la junta” as it’s known colloquially in her native Puerto Rico, other than that a large percentage of the population was against its unelected power to oversee the island’s budget.Working against the clock — “I had one week until the deadline,” she recalled — the playwright hit a wall. No amount of research helped her understand who the board members were or why they were appointed by the Obama administration. The board’s mission — to put the island on a path to sustainable economic growth — has led to fiscal austerity and criticism that it has taken away the island’s sovereignty, effectively creating a modern colonialism.“Puerto Rico es la isla que se repite (is the repeating island),” Vélez Meléndez said, alluding to the Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo and his seminal reflection on the interminable colonial impositions laid upon Caribbean islands since Columbus’s arrival. “We’re always going back to the same thing,” she added.Christine Carmela, left, as Lolita and Samora la Perdida, who plays outlandish versions of the board members.Julieta CervantesIntrigued by the lack of information on the board members, Vélez Meléndez wrote a play that employs what she called a queer lens to investigate how “Puerto Rico was turned into a neoliberal playground.” (The play, a coproduction of Soho Rep and the Sol Project, is running through June 19.)Every trace of Ibsen disappeared in the process. It’s all Vélez Meléndez now. The play takes place in the office reception of “la junta,” a liminal space that conveys the timeless vacuousness of bureaucratic hellscapes. Lolita (Christine Carmela), a trans woman, arrives with one mission: “to decolonize the island of Puerto Rico.”On Being Transgender in AmericaPhalloplasty: The surgery, used to construct a penis, has grown more popular among transgender men. But with a steep rate of complications, it remains a controversial procedure.Elite Sports: The case of the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has stirred a debate about the nature of athleticism in women’s sports.Transgender Youth: A photographer documented the lives of transgender youth. She shared some thoughts on what she saw.Corporate World: What is it like to transition while working for Wall Street? A Goldman Sachs’ employee shares her experience.Throughout the play, Lolita meets various characters, including a Nuyorican receptionist whose gender identity is unresolved and outlandish versions of board members (all played by Samora la Perdida). They not only fail to take Lolita seriously but try to convince her that they know more about her needs than she does.The playwright realized in trying to decolonize Puerto Rico, she was also learning how to decolonize gender identity, including her own. When she started writing the play, Vélez Meléndez had not yet begun to transition and identified as “cis, queer, question mark,” believing she didn’t have the right label to give herself.“I’m a political writer whose plays aren’t about politics,” Vélez Meléndez said.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesGrowing up in Puerto Rico, she had learned that being queer meant she had to like men, “but I never wanted to be around them,” she says laughing. She began writing for pleasure while pursuing a double major in journalism and theater at the University of Puerto Rico. “I wasn’t dating and really didn’t like sports,” she explained, so she found solace and unexpected joy in the works of Beckett and Ionesco.This in turn led to an interest in modern theater, including works like “An Octoroon” by her future Hunter professor Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. One of her mentors, the Puerto Rican playwright and performer Sylvia Bofill, suggested she should write her own plays.Upon moving to New York City for grad school in 2017, Vélez Meléndez found that gay and transgender people were everywhere. “There were trans girls on the subway, lesbian couples holding hands in the street, everything felt like a possibility,” she said. Soon, she added, she found a safe space among fellow theater-makers and new friends who allowed her to experiment with her gender expression in ways that would have seemed forbidden in Puerto Rico. Once she sat down to write, her sister had begun transitioning, and Vélez Meléndez wanted to include a trans character as a homage.Originally, it wasn’t Lolita who was trans but the receptionist character. Lolita is inspired by the real-life Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebrón, who, in 1954, led an attack in the U.S. Capitol, which resulted in the wounding of several members of Congress. Writing scenes in which Lolita talks to the receptionist about decolonization made the playwright feel horrible.“It’s the TERF-iest I’ve ever been with myself,” she explained, using an acronym for “trans exclusionary radical feminists,” a term used to describe feminists who are transphobic. “Here I was telling this trans character they have to decolonize themselves when they had done it years ago.”Dissatisfied with the draft she presented at Hunter, Vélez Meléndez said she was shocked by the encouragement she received from her classmates and professor. Jacobs-Jenkins then introduced her to the director David Mendizábal, overseeing the Soho Rep production, who helped the play take a turn by asking, “what if it was Lolita who was trans instead?”Suddenly, as Vélez Meléndez was able to identify more with her lead character and her pleas, the play took on a life of its own. “It was a beautiful journey to witness,” Mendizábal said, “the truth of these two characters emerged on the page as she was emerging more and more in real life.” It was around this time that Soho Rep first showed interest in producing the play, but then the pandemic happened.This forced period of isolation allowed the young playwright to open up her spectrum of presentation. She started wearing more dresses and skirts, fully shaved her facial hair for the first time since high school, and when she tried on a crop top, she realized she looked like the kind of girls she crushed on. “Seeing myself in one of those women I was attracted to I knew that I could love myself,” she said.One day at the post office, when a clerk referred to her as “ma’am” everything clicked. “It kept clicking through the play,” she explained, recalling the effect this had on Lolita’s agency as well. Last July, she came out to her partner by saying, “I’m not trying to copy my sister, but I think this is happening.”“This was a case where the play was just writing itself. I was writing it, writing me, writing itself,” she added.With the newfound confidence she discovered during her transition, as well as the joy and elation of making her Off Broadway debut, Vélez Meléndez is looking forward to spending her summer working on a batch of new plays. “I’m going to write about my experience as a trans girl from the diaspora,” she explained. “I’m a political writer whose plays aren’t about politics.”Although she didn’t uncover much about how the oversight board works, writing “Notes on a Killing” allowed Vélez Meléndez to realize “there are many things we need to decolonize within ourselves before we actually get to start the country we dreamed of.” That in itself feels like the ultimate kind of political awakening, a revolution in the making. More
- in Theater
‘Notes on Killing’ Review: For These Puerto Ricans, Promises Never Kept
Mara Vélez Meléndez’s “Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members” ferociously explores the intersection of the personal and the political.“Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members,” a hot and bothered new play by Mara Vélez Meléndez, is a psychodrama with an emphasis — and I mean psycho in the nicest possible way. A coproduction of Soho Rep and the Sol Project, the show imagines a young woman with a personal mission to assassinate the bureaucrats responsible for restructuring Puerto Rico’s debt and the queer receptionist who abets her. A political allegory, a savage drag show and a folie à deux with far too much gunplay for anyone who has lived through the past week’s news, “Notes” is a trigger warning writ large and in glitter, a fever dream with streamers.For those who don’t follow Puerto Rico’s political and economic fortunes, a brief history lesson will prove useful. By 2016, Puerto Rico’s credit crisis had worsened significantly, with the island owing more than $70 billion. In a move with celebrity backing — Lin-Manuel Miranda was at the time a supporter — Congress passed the Puerto Rican Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act, known as Promesa, which gave an unelected board the power to restructure the island’s debt and impose fiscal austerity. Few of that board’s members lived in Puerto Rico, which added to criticism of the act as colonialist.These circumstances have brought Lolita (Christine Carmela), a trans Puerto Rican woman, to the New York City offices of the Promesa board, with a gun in her purse. Lolita is not her real name, but she has styled herself, she tells us, after Lolita Lebrón, a Puerto Rican nationalist who participated in an armed attack on the House of Representatives in 1954. That attack wounded five members of Congress; our Lolita aims for a greater body count. Yet before she can assassinate anyone, a receptionist (Samora la Perdida) intercepts her and takes her firearm away.The receptionist doesn’t have a name and their gender identity is unresolved.“I haven’t found, haven’t been satisfied? With any word that represents myself maybe,” they say.A drag performer, the receptionist suggests that Lolita should prepare for her task by pretending to shoot a drag version of each of the seven board members. Conveniently, they have a prop gun coated in gold glitter in a handy drawer, which she can use in their playlet. The receptionist then provides a fabulous interpretation of each member — dancing and lip syncing, makeup immaculate.Demented, exuberant and appropriately angry, Vélez Meléndez’s play borrows from European absurdist theater, like the plays of Jarry and Genet, as well as a tradition of Latin American surrealism. As directed by David Mendizábal, who also designed the irrepressible costumes, the show takes place less in an office than in a shimmering theater of the mind. Is any of this real? Does that matter? Shh! They’re playing “Spice Up Your Life.”“Notes” is queer in its aesthetics, if not exactly in its form. The drag personae emerge tidily, one after the other, and the scenes take on a kind of sameness. But the play challenges Carmela and la Perdida to negotiate realism, fantasy and everything in between, a challenge they giddily accept, occasionally finding genuine poignancy even in the midst of the irrational and bizarre. And there’s delight, of course, in seeing la Perdida emerge in each new get-up. (This is likely a show in which the backstage action — the frantic donning and doffing of wig and makeup and costume — is probably just as exciting as what’s onstage.)Ultimately, Vélez Meléndez cares less about political consequence than about individual identity. Will Lolita accomplish mass murder? Maybe! Will she push the receptionist toward self-determination? Now there’s a question.The moral of “Notes,” simply stated by Lolita, is both provocation and invitation: “The journey of decolonization starts with the self!” Few of us can meaningfully affect Puerto Rico’s fiscal crisis or its vexed journey toward either statehood or independence. But can we shake it, shake it, shake it, with authenticity? Can we self-govern in our private lives? “Notes” suggests that, with enough glitter, we can.Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board MembersThrough June 19 at Soho Repertory Theater, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More
- in Music
Tito Matos, Virtuoso of a Puerto Rican Sound, Dies at 53
A lifelong champion of the plena genre, he helped rejuvenate it for a new generation both in Puerto Rico and in New York.Tito Matos, a master percussionist, revered educator and lifelong champion of the Puerto Rican style of music known as plena, died on Jan. 18 in San Juan, P.R. He was 53.His wife, Mariana Reyes Angleró, said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Matos was a virtuoso of the requinto, the smallest and highest-pitched hand-held drum, or pandereta, used in plena. Rooted in African song traditions, plena emerged in the early 20th century on the southern coast of Puerto Rico and came to be known as “el periódico cantado,” or “the sung newspaper.” In street-corner style, it narrated stories, some gossipy, about love and the concerns of everyday working-class and Black Puerto Ricans. In its early years, wealthy elites maligned the genre.Mr. Matos was a member of multiple plena groups but first gained wide recognition with the band Viento de Agua, founded in New York in 1996. It reimagined plena and bomba, another Afro-Puerto Rican style of music and dance, by infusing them with jazz textures, exuberant horn sections and Cuban batá rhythms.For Mr. Matos, the band’s first album, “De Puerto Rico al Mundo” (1998), opened the door to a dynamic career that transformed him into one of the foremost plena practitioners of his generation.Héctor René Matos Otero was born on June 15, 1968, in the Río Piedras district of San Juan, one of three children of Héctor Matos Gámbaro and Hilda I. Otero Maldonado. His father was an accountant and a salsa enthusiast; his mother is a homemaker.Raised in Villa Palmeras, a barrio of the Santurce section that is considered a nexus of bomba and plena, Héctor embraced plena as an 8-year-old when his grandfather gave him his first pandereta, for the Three Kings Day holiday. Héctor had no formal musical training and could not read sheet music, but his love for plena was planted.He moved to New York in 1994 and eventually completed a degree in landscape architecture at City College. He entered a new diasporic community of musicians, joining Los Pleneros de la 21, an intergenerational East Harlem ensemble, and learning from plena masters who had migrated to New York in the 1940s and ’50s.Mr. Matos, third from left, playing the pandereta in 2014. “He got a lot of young people to just pick up a pandereta,” a friend said, “who were not necessarily interested in plena.”Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesIn New York, he met Ricardo Pons and Alberto Toro, two saxophonist-arrangers. “Tito was addicted to plena,” Mr. Pons said in a phone interview. “Un fiebrú,” he added, laughing, “like he had a fever.”Historically, only certain families were custodians of plena, charged with keeping its traditions and rhythms alive. “It was a problem, because they were very restrictive,” Mr. Matos said in an interview in 2010.Instead, Viento de Agua sought innovation. “It was not about conserving plena or bomba,” Mr. Pons said; “it was about doing whatever we wanted with it.”The group’s album “De Puerto Rico al Mundo” was infused with an irreverent, imaginative spirit. Writing in The New York Times, Peter Watrous praised it as “exuberant and raucous.”The group performed in Mexico, Cuba and across the United States, sometimes accompanied by a full jazz band.“Tito was super, super gregarious and charismatic,” Ed Morales, a journalist, author and friend of Mr. Matos, said in a phone interview. Mr. Matos, he added, had a special ability to reach Puerto Ricans both on the island and in the diaspora and instill in them a sense of communion — particularly when he performed at a biennial concert at Hostos Community College in the Bronx.“You really got to feel the connection between people in Puerto Rico and people in New York more than almost any other place,” Mr. Morales said.In the early 2000s Mr. Matos returned to Puerto Rico, where he became an educator and cultural advocate. He co-founded Plenazos Callejeros, a monthly initiative that gathered musicians across Puerto Rico for spontaneous plena performances on street corners.“He got a lot of young people to just pick up a pandereta,” Mr. Morales said — “people who were not necessarily interested in plena, because maybe they thought it sounded corny or something, or it wasn’t like salsa or hip-hop or reggaeton.”Today, plena is undergoing a cultural renaissance; in recent years it has played a central role in progressive political gatherings and protests in Puerto Rico, including those in the summer of 2019 that led to the resignation of Gov. Ricardo Rosselló.Subsequent projects led Mr. Matos to collaborate with stars like Eddie Palmieri, Ricky Martin and the jazz saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenón. Mr. Matos later founded the band La Máquina Insular, which focused on returning plena back to its roots.In 2015, he and his wife founded La Junta, a bar and performance space in Santurce, where they hosted live music and plena workshops. Hurricane Maria destroyed the space in 2017, but its spirit was revived in “La Casa de la Plena,” a historical exhibition, curated by the couple, that opened in May 2021 at the Taller Comunidad La Goyco, a community center they established in an abandoned Santurce school building they had renovated.In addition to his mother and his wife, whom he married in 2013, Mr. Matos is survived by their son, Marcelo; two children from previous marriages that ended in divorce, Celiana and Héctor; a brother, Yan Matos Otero; and a sister, Glennis Matos Otero.A procession this month honoring Mr. Matos in San Juan drew hundreds.Taller Comunidad – La GoycoOn Jan. 21, Mr. Matos was honored with an immense procession in Santurce. Friends, family members and dozens of fans walked the streets, drumming on panderetas and singing words of gratitude. “Muchas gracias, te amamos,” they chanted — “Thank you very much. We love you.” More
- in Music
Roberto Roena, Salsa Percussionist and Bandleader, Dies at 81
His albums and performances with Apollo Sound brought new complexity to the genre in the 1970s. His group was still getting the crowds dancing decades later.Roberto Roena, a dancer who became a bongo player who then became a bandleader, along the way establishing himself as a leading figure in salsa and some of its best-known bands, died on Sept. 23 in Puerto Rico. He was 81.Andrés Waldemar, a singer in Mr. Roena’s orchestra, announced his death on social media but did not specify a cause. Local news reports said he died at a hospital in Carolina, outside San Juan.Mr. Roena was best known as the founder of Roberto Roena y Su Apollo Sound, which released a string of well-regarded albums in the 1970s, salsa’s heyday. He was also a member of the Fania All-Stars, a group formed about the same time to showcase stars of the Fania record label, which was often described as the Motown of salsa.Onstage Mr. Roena was a whirlwind, dancing out front while banging a cowbell when he wasn’t playing bongos. Apollo Sound was still getting crowds dancing decades later.“The music always darted forward, driven by the sound of metal being struck by wood,” Peter Watrous wrote in The New York Times in 1998, reviewing an Apollo Sound show at the Copacabana in Manhattan. “Mr. Roena’s placement of notes, the way they fit into patterns, brought the audience and the musicians together in a form of personal rhythmic transcendence. Mr. Roena has that kind of power.”Pedro Pierluisi, the governor of Puerto Rico, where Mr. Roena was born, declared last Saturday to be a day of mourning in Mr. Roena’s honor. He called the death “an irreparable loss for Puerto Rico and the whole world, but especially for salsa lovers.”“Iconic songs like ‘El Escapulario,’ ‘Cui Cui,’ ‘Mi Desengano,’ ‘Marejada Feliz’ and many more transcended generations,” the governor said in a statement. “His musical legacy of more than 60 years will remain with us.”Mr. Roena started Roberto Roena y Su Apollo Sound, which released a string of well-regarded albums in the 1970s, salsa’s heyday.FaniaRoberto Roena was born on Jan. 16, 1940, in Mayagüez, on the island’s west coast. His family later moved to the Santurce district of San Juan, where as a boy he and a brother worked up some cha-cha and mambo dance routines that garnered enough acclaim to get them onto a local television show.After catching the act, the Puerto Rican musician and bandleader Rafael Cortijo invited Mr. Roena, who was only 15 or 16, to join his orchestra, Cortijo y Su Combo, as a dancer and chorus member. Mr. Cortijo, a percussionist, began schooling him on the bongos, and soon Roberto was part of the band.When Mr. Cortijo’s group dissolved, Mr. Roena became part of the salsa orchestra El Gran Combo, recording and touring internationally. It was in 1969 that he formed Apollo Sound — named, some versions of the tale go, because its first rehearsal coincided with the launch of Apollo 11, the first mission to land astronauts on the moon. The group almost had a different name.“First I wanted to put Apollo 12, because we were 12 musicians,” he told La Opinión in 1996, “but then I thought, if the United States launches Apollo 13, we are obsolete.”With Apollo Sound, Mr. Roena took salsa to a new level of sophistication, working in two or even three trumpets and a complex rhythm section to create a propulsive sound that drew on the music of jazz-rock groups like Chicago and Blood, Sweat & Tears. Its live shows were wild, with Mr. Roena setting the tone, and its albums for Fania were steady sellers.In an interview with The Times in 2014, when he was part of the lineup for a Fania Records tribute concert in Central Park, Mr. Roena credited the label’s founders, Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci, with creating the salsa phenomenon.“Jerry and Johnny gave you the freedom to do your own thing,” he said. “They allowed the musicians to express themselves the way we wanted, and that led to a lot of hit records.”His survivors include his wife, Antonia María Nieves Santos, and four children, Brenda, Gladys, Ivan and Francisco.Mr. Roena was still performing well into his 70s. He had a minor heart attack in 1995, but, he said in the 1996 interview, that wasn’t going to keep him off the stage.“I get tired,” he said, “but when I climb onto a platform, I am a different person.” More
- in Television
‘Fantasy Island’ Returns, Now With a Ms. Roarke
Roselyn Sánchez leads this Fox reboot of the beloved ABC series, playing a grandniece of Ricardo Montalbán’s white-suited steward of a mystical isle.More than 37 years after Ricardo Montalbán finished his run as Mr. Roarke, the debonair concierge of an enigmatic, wish-fulfilling beach resort in the Pacific Ocean, “Fantasy Island” is returning once more to network television. More
