Defendiendo la (agri)cultura : Reterritorializing culture in the Puerto Rican Decima

dc.contributor.author	Gross, Joan	eng
dc.date.issued	2008-10	eng
dc.description	Hispanic balladry is one of the most prevalent oral traditions in the Americas; one of the strongest examples of this is the Puerto Rican decima. People who sing these ballads today identify with a well-known type in Puerto Rican history call the jibaro. The word jibaro first appeared in print in 1814 according to Laguerre and Melon (1968) and referred to a peasant eking a living off the land in the high country, or center of the island. This paper explores the projection of Puerto Rican cultural identity in decima singing. In particular I show how particular themes evoke an idyllic bucolic past at the same time that formal constraints of the genre are rigidified. I discuss how both these trends relate back to the notion of defending a cultural identity in the wake of colonization and deterritorialization and how through singing decimas about country living, Puerto Rican culture is symbolically reterritorialized.1	eng
dc.description	Note	eng
dc.format.extent	16 pages	eng
dc.identifier.citation	Oral Tradition, 23/2 (2008): 219-234.	eng
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/10355/65155
dc.language	English	eng
dc.rights	OpenAccess.	eng
dc.rights.license	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
dc.title	Defendiendo la (agri)cultura : Reterritorializing culture in the Puerto Rican Decima	eng
dc.type	Article	eng