Reggaeton and Censorship in Puerto Rico

Reggaeton is a Puerto Rican popular dance music whose street identity is inseparable from its signature dance, perreo—also called sandungueo—a low, grinding, hip-driven step whose sensual vocabulary fuses Jamaican dancehall (itself a descendant of the reggae that crystallized in Jamaica in the late 1960s) with salsa and merengue.^[3] The music evolved out of dancehall while absorbing hip hop and a wider field of Latin American and Caribbean rhythms, and its vocals move fluidly between toasting, rapping, singing, and rap-singing, delivered chiefly in Spanish.^[2] It crystallized in Puerto Rico in the early 1990s, descending from the Spanish-language reggae that Afro-Caribbean diaspora communities had developed in Panama during the late 1980s before the sound circulated northward into the island's housing projects and urban neighborhoods.^[1] From the start the genre carried the imprint of working-class and street life—an inheritance from the hip hop it borrowed, which had emerged from the block parties of Black, Caribbean, and Latino New York as a vehicle for voicing the poverty, exclusion, and social disregard that mainstream institutions had rarely represented—and that association shaped how cultural authorities across the Spanish-speaking Caribbean received it.

State censorship: the Cuban case

The most fully documented instance of formal censorship in the available scholarship belongs not to Puerto Rico but to Cuba, where reggaeton's arrival generated open friction with state media.^[4] Taking the suppression of a music video within Cuban broadcasting as its point of departure, research has traced how the genre staged a transnational, youthful, and cosmopolitan Pan-Latin identity—one organized around consumption and display—that appeared to unsettle the island's self-image as a singular socialist nation.^[5] The music's recurring protagonist, the 'successful man' who owns mansions and cars, sat uneasily within an economy heavily mediated by the state, and its imagery clashed with the values of older, established Cuban genres.^[6] Unofficial circuits of production and distribution, which made these global, consumerist aspirations explicit, were read by the state as eroding the very policies that defined what it meant to be Cuban.^[7]

The Puerto Rican reading: colonialism, race, and diaspora

Puerto Rico had its own early chapter of suppression: the artists now regarded as the genre's founding generation worked under official censure through the 1990s, and only by the early 2000s did the music cross from its underground cassette networks into commercial recording contracts. Even so, Puerto Rican scholarship has tended to read reggaeton less through outright prohibition than through the island's colonial relationship to the United States.^[8] The music remains strongly anchored in the Caribbean diasporas of the United States, a position that blurs any clean line between island culture and mainland markets and frames continuing debates over its politics.^[9] Ethnographic work in San Juan and New York has read the form as a way for Puerto Rican youth to engage an African diasporic space, fashioning expressions of blackness that answer to local experiences of racial exclusion and that refute the official portrait of Puerto Rico as a colorblind 'racial democracy.' Within this frame the genre appears less as an object of regulation than as a vehicle of cultural assertion—a reading carried into the classroom, where its most prominent artists are used to teach Puerto Rican history and politics.^[8]

From street form to global mainstream

The genre's later trajectory dissolved much of that early hostility. By the 2010s reggaeton had spread across Latin America and won acceptance within mainstream Western popular music.^[10] Its most visible contemporary figure, the Puerto Rican performer Bad Bunny (Benito Martínez Ocasio), reached the standing of an international superstar and discussed his work on United States network television in October 2023.^[11] By then the music had also entered the university curriculum: a course titled 'Bad Bunny: Race, Gender, and Empire in Reggaetón' uses his catalogue to examine United States colonialism and Puerto Rican resistance.^[12] The arc from a censured, cassette-traded street form to an object of formal scholarly study measures how sharply the genre's institutional standing shifted within a single generation.