September 2021 – Latinx Screens: Film, TV, and Video

Asynchronous Screening and Blog Post on Gun Hill Road

In this film written and directed by Rashaad Ernesto Green, a Puerto Rican ex-con, Enrique, returns home to the Bronx to find that his wife Angela has had an affair while he was away, and his child is exploring a gender transformation that tests his notions of masculinity, gender, sexuality, and the bonds of family.

ASYNCHRONOUS ASSIGNMENT (Deadline: 10/5 before the class)

Instructions:

1. Watch the film Gun Hill Road (Rashaad Ernesto Green, 2011)

2. In the comment section down below answer ONE of the following prompts (175-words minimum).

OPTION ONE

In Gun Hill Road the different characters have their own distinct understanding of gender and sexuality. How the film addresses with nuance the topics of machismo, trans lives, and role definition within a Nuyorican family and Latinx community?

OPTION TWO

Discuss how performance poetry and her chosen queer community helps Vanessa navigate her gender transformation while she faces transphobia and bigoted views?

OPTION THREE

How lighting and the use of close-ups in this scene enhance the emotional struggles and ties of the different characters? Discuss both mise en scene elements and content.

OPTION FOUR

Respectfully interact with ONE of your classmates’ responses. Do you agree with their points and interpretations? Do you disagree? What other observations about Gun Hill Road do you want to bring to the discussion?

The Radiant Child and The Writing on the Wall

Entry Question

Filmmaker and Caribbean and Puerto Rican Studies scholar, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, reads Basquiat through a “popular boricua logic.” She argues that contrary to general belief Basquiat’s actions were “not irrational.” She considers that they “bear a great resemblance to Puerto Rican laborers’ resistance to capital’s demands” In specific she identifies that similarily his “sense of personal dignity seemed to clash often with the requirements of the work discipline.” (121-22)

What do you think Negrón-Muntaner is trying to convey?

Introduction

Few figures from this—or indeed any—era embody the torment of becoming a commodity as a racialized subject more intensely than the Brooklyn-born son of a Haitian accountant and a Puerto Rican art lover, the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat.

As with hip hop culture in general (to which he had an ambivalent relationship), Basquiat has been primarily studied as an African American artist. Calling him “the most financially successful Black visual artist in history” and the integrator of “African-American culture,” the majority of critics who have to date reflected on Basquiat generally ignore the potential significance of the artist’s Caribbean roots for his production and the construction of his Star persona.

Given Basquiat’s constitutive relation to boricua culture and growing importance as a painter, it is even more mystifying that Puerto Rican critics have to date ignored him.

This oversight reveals how “black” symbolic practices and artists (with the notable exception of musicians) are often construed as outside the pale of boricua culture due to their “low” (raced) identity and notorious “American” tendencies. (115-16)

How do these statements relate to previous discussions in our class in relationship to the erasure and neglect of Afro-Latinx people?

Oral/slide presentations

Cruz,Brandon

Cruz,Janice

Cuenca,Christian

Why Negrón-Muntaner place a lot of importance on his collaborative work with Al Diaz as SAMO?

5:25-8:30

A collaborative endeavor between Basquiat and his school friend Al Diaz, SAMO anticipated Basquiat’s career on various levels. Not only did their tags allude to the “same old racism,” these were strategically placed outside art galleries or on the pathways of influential people, even if the writing entailed a critique of greed and white privilege. (117)

Consistent with alternative definitions of what is worthy and how to measure value, Basquiat rejected regulated forms of labor …True to SAMO, Basquiat craved attention on his own, non-normative terms, and dismissed “prevailing definitions of property and propriety.” Complementarily, Basquiat resisted spatial stability, living as a drifter for most of his life. (118)

These practices of flight were not the result of lacking a home, but articulated a desire to be free from subjecting structures, be they school, family, or capital. (119)

Basquiat’s erratic behavior toward people in positions to assist him was noted as a symptom of individual mental instability, yet his tense relation ship with his body as an instrument of labor is common to Puerto Ricans and African Americans, as both groups have experienced different forms of labor coercion, including slavery, colonial subjection, undesirable work, and even the inability to obtain work. (120)

16:35-20:30

Open Discussion

.Why Negrón Muntaner sees “Basquiat’s paintings [as] a significant canvas for bilingual written expression and an Afro-Latino diasporic cultural competence?” (137-8)

.How the topics of colonization, slave labor, the Spanish conquest, and religious oppression are presented in Basquiat’s work? (138-9)

Minutes 1:04:15- 1:06:40

Conclusion

Contrary to most critics, who see in Basquiat either a primitive or a primitivist, the artist demonstrates that U.S. culture is not homogeneous, coherent, or “white.” In his paintings, assembled from disparate physical and symbolic materials, Basquiat’s chaotic synthesis and the world it brings forth resemble the way that Puerto Rican and other migrant Caribbean identities are made up of seemingly opposite elements in the ruins of modern utopias (capitalist or communist).

Asynchronous Screening and Blog Post on Jean Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child

Centered on a rare interview that director and friend Tamra Davis shot with Jean-Michel Basquiat more than 30 years ago, this documentary chronicles the meteoric rise and fall of the young Afro Caribbean artist. The film looks at how in the marginalized New York City of the 70s with Puerto Rican artist Al Diaz, Basquiat covered the city with the graffiti tag and writings ‘SAMO.’ In 1981 he put paint on canvas for the first time, and by 1983 he was an artist with global status. He achieved critical and commercial success, though he was constantly confronted by racism from some of his peers and art institutions.

ASYNCHRONOUS BLOG POST (Deadline: 9/28 before the class)

Instructions:

1. Watch the documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child(Tamra Davis, 2010)

2. In the comment section down below answer ONE of the following prompts (2o0-words minimum).

OPTION ONE

Discuss the integration and dialogues of Afro-diasporic, Puerto Rican, Haitian, and/or Latinx arts within Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work by referencing scenes or sequences from the documentary.

OPTION TWO

Compare Basquiat’s beginnings as a downtown interdisciplinary artist with his eventual experiences as an Afro-diasporic painter in the predominantly white-owned art market.

OPTION THREE

Select and analyze the function of two different documentary techniques in Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (archival footage or images; Basquiat’s testimonies; interviews; montage; analysis of paintings; soundtrack). How do these techniques add nuance and complexity to the artist’s portrait?

OPTION FOUR

Respectfully interact with ONE of your classmates’ responses. Do you agree with their arguments and interpretations? Do you disagree? What other observations about Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child do you want to bring into the discussion?

The Get Down and Between Blackness and Latinidad in the Hip Hop Zone

Entry Question

Before watching The Get Down and/or reading “Between Blackness and Latinidad in the Hip Hop Zone” did your conception of Hip Hop included other cultural groups besides African-Americans? Why? Why not?

A Hip Hop Definition

Raquel Z. Rivera, Puerto Rican author of New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone, argues that “hip hop is most often historically defined in terms of music, visual arts (graffiti), and dance (breaking, popping, locking, rocking). Language, mannerisms, fashion, and other expressions of culture are considered by some to also be defining aspects of hip hop. Hip hop, like earlier cultural expressions, has in many senses served as a bridge between Puerto Ricans, other Latina/os, West Indians, and African Americans.” (354)

Davey D Cook, an African American who grew up during this time in the South Bronx, explains: “Hip Hop was multicultural in the sense that it was Blacks and Puerto Ricans who put this whole thing down. We lived next to each other and for the most part shared the same urban problems. We also shared the same legacy of exploitation, oppression, and colonization. (354)

(Watch from 33:40-40:55)

When New York Puerto Rican youngsters began participating alongside African Americans in the early development of MCing as a lyrical/musical style, they were not exactly “defecting” from Puerto Rican tradition. In terms of social function and aesthetics, Puerto Rican oral and musical styles can be invoked as precursors of MCing as much as African American ones.

Island musical traditions like plena, bomba, and música jíbara can be invoked just as easily among rap’s forebears. Verbal duels featuring boasting, trading insults, sexual innuendoes, and improvisation are common in all three. Like rap, they are notorious for historicizing everyday events.

What would breakbeats be without the decades-old influence of Puerto Rican and Cuban musical traditions on African Americans in New York City? Those timbales and conga solos that were the heart of so many breakbeats got into soul and funk records from Africa via the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. (357)

Oral/ Slide Presentation on The Get Down and the essay “Between Blackness and Latinidad in the Hip Hop Zone”

Caruso,Carty

In her essay, “Between Blackness and Latinidad in the Hip Hop Zone,” Raquel Z. Rivera argues that the Puerto Rican input to Hip Hop has been depreciated or plainly erased because of ethnic and racial constructions in the U.S., the Caribbean, and Latin America. There is a marketing factor to the Puerto Rican exclusion. The U.S. music industry and the media centralized English-speaking African Americans over Puerto Ricans and Latinxs. But Rivera also posits that although conceived as multi-cultural and multi-racial, the Puerto Rican and Latinx identities (formed collectively,) tend to reject the African heritage while celebrating Europeanness. This social process has created a false cultural divide between African Americans and Puerto Ricans. (352)

In the mid-1980s, as graffiti and the “breakdancing” craze faded into the media background, hip hop music became commercial popular music and was thought of as almost exclusively African American. Back then [the 1980s], rap’s blackness was a big part of its commercial appeal. But it was not clear if Latina/os were a lighter version of black or not black at all. The industry gatekeepers were not often willing to take a risk by signing Latina/os. That is, until Latina/os, and particularly Boricuas, became a ghetto-tropical fad in the mid-1990s, and then it became trendy for Latina/os and non- Latina/os to include words in Spanish and references to Latina/os in rhymes and have Butta Pecan Rican mamis adorning videos. (355)

Group Discussion

How The Get Down shows this joint Afro Diasporic cultural movement? Which characters represent better the cross-cultural dynamics of Hip Hop as describe by Raquel Z. Rivera?

Asynchronous Screening and Blog Post on The Get Down: Episode One

Creator and the director of the pilot, Baz Luhrmann, and a team of collaborators -Catherine Martin, MC Nas, DJ Grandmaster Flash, playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis, and hip-hop historian Nelson George – set The Get Down as a music-driven drama that documents the emergence of a new art form. Set in the late 1970s, when New York was at the brink of bankruptcy, the rise of hip-hop is told through the lives, art, music, and dance of a group of young people in the South Bronx.

ASYNCHRONOUS ASSIGNMENT (Due on 9/21 before the class)

Instructions:

1. Watch the first episode of the Netflix show The Get Down: “Where There Is Ruin, There Is Hope for a Treasure.”

2. In the comment section down below answer ONE of the following prompts (200-word minimum).

OPTION ONE

Describe the different artistic engagements of intersecting Nuyorican and Black communities in the Bronx that led to the creation of Hip Hop culture? Refer to specific characters and scenes from the first episode of The Get Down.

OPTION TWO

Hip Hop parties became healing spaces to deal with the marginalization and turf wars in the Bronx. Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Refer to the title of the episode and to specific scenes from the first episode of The Get Down

OPTION THREE

Analyze the elements of mise en scene in this scene

How does the director uses the setting, lighting, costumes, props, camera, and/or actor movements or positions to portrait Ezekiel’s potential as a poet/MC?

OPTION FOUR

Respectfully interact with ONE of your classmates’ responses. Do you agree with their arguments and interpretations? Do you disagree? What other observations about The Get Down do you want to bring into the discussion?

Decade of Fire

Entry Question

Have you seen similar disinvestment as the one presented in the documentary in your borough or neighborhood? What are some common signs of this urban marginalization?

.What are the central ideas of this writer, thinker, and/or filmmaker?

In the documentary Decade of Fire, Vivian Vásquez look at how during the 70s the systemic disenfranchisement of the Bronx as well as the criminalization of black, Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and Latinx people contributed to the literal burning of the borough and further displacement of these historically marginalized communities. Using Vasquez’s account, the filmmakers also pay attention to the ways grassroots organizing led to an ongoing project of revitalization, cultural affirmation, and sustainability.

5:15-11:00

.Analyze one specific section of the film with an excerpt by your assigned author that best communicates what you identified in the question above. What analogies and critical connections can you establish between the audiovisual work and the essay?

Necropolis- J. Chang (Page 13)

https://youtu.be/tRdZFPMZDc4

38:00-42:00

Both Chang and the filmmakers bring evidence of how landlords benefitted from burning their own buildings to collect insurance money. They proposed that this type of corrupt economy went on for many years with no accountability of repercussions against those who destroyed and displaced whole communities in the South Bronx.

.Select one specific element of mise-en-scene (costume, lighting, camera frames or movements, sound, music, actors’ movements, or positions) and examine how this artistic choice enhances or adds nuance to the central concerns of the audiovisual piece.

A mise en scene element that stands out from the documentary is the use of maps with archival footage to demonstrate and see the scale of its arguments (see 12:00-13:40 / 42:00-43:00). In these two sections we see on one side how redlining was part of a concerted effort of the state, the city, developers, and insurance companies to neglect black and Latinx communities, and on the other side, the amount of money made from the fires.

.Pose a critical question about the audiovisual piece or the essay to the group.

What were some of the community initiatives against the “mathematics of destruction” (Chang 14) that stood out for you? How the current wave of gentrification in the Bronx is connected to this story? (01:08:00-01:11:00)