Tuning Out Blackness: Race and Nation in the History of Puerto Rican Television
Yeidy M. Rivero
Drawing on interviews, participant observation, archival research, and textual analysis, 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, its relationship with Cuba before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and 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 the performer Ramón 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. As the twentieth century drew to a close, multinational corporations had purchased all Puerto Rican stations and threatened to wipe out locally produced programs. Tuning Out Blackness brings to the forefront the marginalization of nonwhite citizens in Puerto Rico’s media culture and raises important questions about the significance of local sites of television production.
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About Yeidy M. Rivero
Reviews for Tuning Out Blackness: Race and Nation in the History of Puerto Rican Television
Amanda V. Branker
Journal of American Ethnic History
“This book contributes a powerful analysis of the dialectics that forge discourses on race and nation in local Puerto Rican televisual productions. . . . Rivero’s book is a well-documented cultural reading of television as an important force in the shaping of localized forms of collective social imagination. This study represents a milestone in media research in Puerto Rico mainly because Rivero’s analysis is articulated from the inside, not the outside.”
Mirerza González-Vélez
Journal of Communication Inquiry
“Yeidy Rivero’s Tuning Out Blackness provides a well documented cultural history of “blackness” in Puerto Rican television. . . . [S]he makes excellent use of participant observation, interviews, archival research, and textual analysis to critically analyze representations of race in local Puerto Rican television.”
Dwight E. Brooks
Journalism History
"Ground-breaking and complex. . . . Provocative. . . . A rich, engaging, vital contribution to television history and popular culture studies, Puerto Rican and Latino studies, and racial and ethnic studies. Highly recommended."
S.A. Vega Garcia
Choice