“Cuando la tiranía es ley, la revolución es orden, es la hora suprema, es la hora de la disciplina, es la hora de la intensa preparación, es la hora del silencio, del silencio que precede a las grandes tempestades. Cuando los pueblos se encierran en el silencio de sus almas, infunden temor a los más grandes déspotas de la tierra.” – Pedro Albizu Campos
Amidst the unapologetically Puerto Rican album DeBí TiRAR MáS FOToS by Bad Bunny and his residency non-tour, No me quiero ir de aquí, Puerto Rico’s robust culture has been celebrated, and it is set to be enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of people this summer. As listeners rush to Puerto Rico, most look for places to dance and to feel a connection to the music and the sweating bodies next to them, strangers but kin across a rhythm all the same. La Placita has come across my “for you page” more times than I can count as people recount their visits to the archipelago. A town square with homes, coffee shops, and a strip of bars and venues in Santurce, which is a historically black space in Puerto Rico, La Placita is known today for its dance floors and reggaetón, where the rhythm will find you and your body will move into a kaleidoscopic relation with others on the dance floor (1). On social media, people are participating in salsa TikTok dance trends, while others are looking for salsa classes in their local areas or even scheduling salsa lessons to attend during their stay in Puerto Rico. Dance, celebrated by popular Puerto Rican artists, sought by tourists, and embraced by diasporicans as a nexus of relations to each other, the archipelago, and loved ones in the Caribbean, allows Puerto Ricans to feel united with one another and the archipelago even as they navigate life in the States. In Puerto Rico, dance is not limited to the stage or exclusively considered a “high art”; though it can be both, it is fundamentally a part of everyday life; something Puerto Ricans, like many Caribbean people, have practiced naturally since they first stood in their kitchens, salas, and marquesinas.
This attention to the dancing Puerto Rican body or the movement elicited by Puerto Rican rhythms comes just after the 2024 proposed bill, PC2107. The bill aimed for legislation to systemize, surveil, and streamline all dance professionals via a regulatory board of certified dancers. PC2107 was jarring to many cultural workers. However, it was not surprising. The founder and house father of the Puerto Rican Ballroom house, laborivogue, Edrimael Delgado Reyes, joined other cultural workers in opposition to the proposed bill, poetically and pointedly declaring, “Tratar de regular la danza es cómo cercar un bosque o canalizar un río. Se puede, pero al final la naturaleza siempre hará lo que le venga en gana.” Delgado Reyes situates PC2107 within a broader cartography of dispossession, aligning the regulation of dance with the ongoing enclosure of beaches and rivers—both practices embedded in a historical pattern of extracting, surveilling, and commodifying Puerto Rican life. These gestures toward containment reveal a persistent misunderstanding: that dance, like geographies, resists static boundaries, constantly reasserting itself as profoundly alive, rebellious, and uncontainable.
Although PC2107 was created under the guise of unionizing dance professionals, the details harken to the colonial history and matrix of carcerality that Puerto Rico will likely remain in for the foreseeable future. However, thanks to the rapid mobilization of cultural workers and allies, the law did not pass. This short essay highlights the intentions and consequences of such a law by examining Puerto Rico’s dance history. In the wake of PC2107, the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (ICP)—a living archive of cultural expression and collective memory—faces administrative pressures toward absorption into the Department of Economy. This signals yet another moment wherein cultural labor and the preservation of collective memory risk reduction to market logic, echoing historical patterns of extraction, erasure, and enclosure. In its initial framing, PC2107 may have been rooted in good intentions—aiming perhaps to honor and safeguard dancers’ labor and artistry. Nevertheless, its underlying logic reproduces colonial legal structures, privileging the interests of an elite, potentially lighter-skinned few. Such seemingly benevolent gestures have historically paved the path toward Puerto Rico’s enduring coloniality, perpetuating vulnerability while selectively protecting and benefiting the bourgeois class and particular bodies.
The bill, recognized by María de Lourdes Ramos Rivera and introduced by Juliana Ortíz, proposed establishing a governor-appointed council empowered to certify dancers. This body would grant licenses exclusively to individuals over the age of 18, deemed physically and mentally ‘healthy,’ trained in formal techniques and cleared of criminal records, effectively legislating whose bodies may move freely, whose cultural legacies can be valued, and whose expression counts as legitimate cultural labor. The council would have been able to fine people or dancers for not abiding by their regulations, for example, paying for a license renewal every four years. The idea of technique certification alone suggests which type of dancers were deemed fit to be protected or be considered dancers; this leaves out a large number of bomba talleristas and mayores who have developed their pedagogy and inherited their technique via their own families and community elders.
The bill seemed to privilege classically trained dancers, which, in a place where the oldest dance genre is Afro-Puerto Rican bomba, is a choice loaded with meaning. Moreover, the bill’s associated fees, recertification processes, and emphasis on particular bodily standards explicitly reproduce ableist and classist logic. However, the bill was petitioned by Juliana Ortíz, who had gone on record in 2021 discussing the anti-black racism she faced during her career and training in classical dance (ballet) spaces. Furthermore, the bill mandated a clean criminal record to obtain licenses to dance or teach dance professionally, contradicting Ortíz’s stance against prisons and her commitment to rehabilitating incarcerated individuals through movement.
Though ostensibly designed to protect dancers, the legislation operated as a Trojan horse, introducing penalties rooted in economic exclusion, steep permit fees, and the policing of genres positioned outside the colonial canon. Thus, a policy framed around needed safety became instead a mechanism of disruption, unsettling the very relationships and communities that dance inherently cultivates. Culture being policed is not anything new for Puerto Rico. And it has always been presented as “benevolent oversight.” As an academic, I constantly worry about the politics of citation—but so does the empire. Citation as a means of governmental strength and policing those deemed unfit by assigning infractions. The Slave Codes, which regulated drumming on Sundays, were supposed to protect owners from rebellions and also provide respite and time for enjoyment to the enslaved Puerto Ricans, but further policed their designated spaces for joy and grief. We see this again in the Picó Papers, where noise ordinances are issued in predominantly Afro-Puerto Rican neighborhoods for failing to obtain permission to host a dance or gathering in their homes. In more recent history, former Governor Pedro Roselló implemented “Mano Dura Contra el Crímen”, which also targeted reggaetón and Afro-Puerto Ricans in the archipelago, due to their preoccupation with colonial moral decency cloaked as a “war on drugs.” These campaigns and surveillance practices consistently endeavor to “erase any trace of Blackness and evidence of colonial violence that reflected negatively back onto the government” (Vazquez 2024). I underscore this because Puerto Rican musical traditions, beyond jíbaro forms (such as aguinaldo and décimas), are predominantly situated within the sonic lineage of Black cultural production. The empire’s impulse toward regulation implicitly acknowledges Puerto Rican music and dance as transformative acts, embodied expressions capable of unsettling colonial order and catalyzing radical change.
The siege against culture is not over; lawmakers seek to dissolve el Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña and transfer it to the Department of Economic Development and Commerce. And while my intention here is not to uncritically champion the ICP, recognizing how la gran familia puertorriqueña has historically mobilized blanqueamiento through celebratory yet white washed portrayals of Puerto Rico’s poor and working classes, I nonetheless affirm the necessity for an institution dedicated explicitly to cultural stewardship to remain autonomous. The absorption attempts by the Department of Economic Development exemplify the ongoing privatization and commodification of Puerto Rican culture amidst the attempts of the ICP to nurture artistic expression and preserve archival practices that hold and honor Puerto Rican memory; practices urgently require protection. The Summer of 2019 showed what bodies brought together against the current of neglect could do. Perreo was present, bomba, plena, and all the people found themselves united after an onslaught of imperial violence.
Thus, amidst the profound cultural celebrations unfolding in 2025, we simultaneously navigate relentless surveillance, accelerating gentrification, a fragile electrical infrastructure, and an economy already precarious under the escalating burdens of living costs. This is not a contradiction, it is the terrain. To protect dance and culture is to safeguard our archives of resistance, the embodied knowledge passed through generations that teaches us how to live, remember, and imagine otherwise. These are not just aesthetic practices; they are political tools, modes of gathering, and strategies for survival. As the state intensifies its attempts to commodify, control, and erase, our response must be one of collective discipline, coordination, and care. The joy we uphold, the rhythms we move to, and the spaces we reclaim are not distractions—they are acts of mitigation against imperial erasure, carried out every day by Puerto Ricans and allies who refuse to let celebration be separated from the struggle.
Footnotes
(1) Some people believe that because of this new tourist focus in La Placita, there is a change in the sonicscape there shifting to cater to tourists. This shift being a prime example of why gatekeeping Puerto Rican cultural arenas is important during this age of rapid gentrification.
References
“A Statement on Senate Bill 273 and El Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña.” CentroPR, 3 Feb. 2025, centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/news/a-statement-on-senate-bill-273-and-el-instituto-de-cultura-puertorriquena/.
Cabiya, Pamela Hernández. “Buscan Regular La Profesión de La Danza En Puerto Rico.” Noticel.com, 2024, noticel.com/legislatura/ahora/top-stories/20240601/buscan-regular-la-profesion-de-la-danza-en-puerto-rico/. Accessed 26 May 2025.
Crutchfield, Joshua L. “The Erasure of Blackness in Reggaeton – AAIHS.” Www.aaihs.org, 14 Feb. 2024, www.aaihs.org/the-erasure-of-blackness-in-reggaeton/.
Hernandez, Jeanette. “Los Tigres Del Norte Announces ‘Aquí Mando Yo’ Tour Dates.” Remezcla, 3 June 2024, remezcla.com/music/los-tigres-del-norte-announces-aqui-mando-yo-tour-dates/. Accessed 26 May 2025.
“Laboratoria Boricua de Vogue Inc. On Instagram: ““Tratar de Regular La Danza Es Como Cercar Un Bosque O Canalizar Un Río. Se Puede, Pero al Final La Naturaleza Siempre Hará Lo Que Le Venga En Gana”. Reflexión de Nuestro Fundadorx Edrimael Delgado Reyes. Representado La Cultura Del Ballroom Boricua. Ayer, En La 1ra Convocatoria Para Profesionales de La Danza Y El Arte Escénico En Puerto Rico. Llevado a Cabo En La Sala Multiuso de La Escuela de Arte Y Diseño de Industrias Creativas de La Universidad Del Sagrado Corazón. @Edrima_elle Tuvo El Honor de Ser La Primera Persona En Abrir Para Comunicar Sus Puntos En Oposición al Proyecto de Ley de La Cámara P. C. 2170 Que Buscaba Regular La Profesión de La Danza En La Isla. Nos Vemos En La 2da CUNTvocatoria!! Video 🎥 Por @Shadielo.reyes #NOalPC2170 #LaDanzaNoSeRegula #BallroomBoricua #LaPerreríaEsPolítica #PateríaCombativa #Bólrüm.”” Instagram, 2020, www.instagram.com/reel/C76gtg3AN6V/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==. Accessed 26 May 2025.Pérez, Dennise Y. “Juliana Ortiz: La Bailarina Clásica Que No Querían Por Negra.” Noticel.com, 2024, www.noticel.com/top-stories/pop/vida/20211023/juliana-ortiz-la-bailarina-clasica-que-no-querian-por-negra/. Accessed 26 May 2025.