Tuning Out Blackness

Tuning Out Blackness fills a glaring omission in U.S. and Latin American television studies by looking at 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 ideology of a racially mixed heritage that pervades Puerto Rico's national culture and positions the island's alleged egalitarianism in opposition to racial conflicts in the United States. White performers in blackface have often portrayed "blackness" in local television productions, while black actors have been largely excluded. Drawing on interviews and archival research, 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, as well as with 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 Ramon 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. By the 1990s, all of the tv stations on the island were owned by U.S. and multinational corporations. Rivero suggests that in diminishing the role of local television productions in programming, this development threatens to erase a crucial forum for the expression and negotiation of racial tensions.