Mountain Taínos also dance in Bad Bunny's 'Casita'
This week's social debate seems, on this occasion, to revolve around the controversy affecting the great phenomenon of Spanish-language music. We are talking, of course, about Benito Martínez Ocasio's Casita,...
This week's social debate seems, on this occasion, to revolve around the controversy affecting the great phenomenon of Spanish-language music. We are talking, of course, about Benito Martínez Ocasio's Casita, Bad Bunny: a segment of his concert in which several public figures (until recently mostly women) dance live in front of the cameras.
The event has been criticised by conservative feminists such as Paula Fraga (are the women in the audience who appear in it - Marta Ortega, Ester Expósito... - being objectified?) but defended by journalists such as Ana Requena and Alejandra Martínez. They argue that there is a deliberate interest in putting the spotlight on feminism's contradictions in order to instrumentalise it and, in particular, on the women who attend the concerts of a genre which, although less and less so, is still disparaged today: reggaeton.
At the centre of the controversy, but overshadowed by the ideological dispute at stake, is the physical building itself. And like every detail of the touring project, 'Debí tirar más fotos', it has a strong activist component linked to Boricua, or Puerto Rican, identity.
The Antillean island belongs to the United States as an unincorporated "free associated state", a subject addressed on the tracks of 'DTMF' and in Bad Bunny's public discourse. In practice, this means that its citizens enjoy fewer rights than US citizens in the federal states: they have no vote in presidential elections or voting representation in Congress, and several activists campaigning for the island's independence have been imprisoned.
From indigenous peoples to enslaved labour in the sugar industry
The building, Architecture Digest explains, is based on a real house in Humacao, a town on Puerto Rico's eastern coast where the short film of the same name as the album was shot. The municipality's anthem makes clear its history, linked both to the island's original inhabitants, the Taínos, and to the diaspora and enslavement of its Afro-Caribbean population until the 19th century.
Modern Humacao was founded in 1722 on the ruins of old Macao by settlers from the Canary Islands and jíbaro Taínos, those who came from the mountainous region at the centre of the island. It takes its name from Jumacao, one of the last indigenous leaders to fight the Spanish. Their descendants kept this combative tradition alive when the Canary Islanders arrived and protested against the redistribution of farmland.
Because of its relative isolation until the 18th century, its architecture is distinctive. The urban planning of Humacao follows the grid laid down by the Laws of the Indies on the basis of the spatial relationship between square and church, as historian Norma Medina recounts (source in Spanish), but its inhabitants continued to use materials such as straw, tiles and local timber.
From the 19th century onwards, elements typical of European neoclassicism, such as masonry, were introduced thanks in part to the boom in the sugar trade, built on black enslaved labour that extended beyond Puerto Rico to the rest of Latin America. This style was incorporated into public buildings such as the town hall, the prison, the barracks and the cemetery.
From 22 September 1898, Humacao was transferred from Spanish to US government administration (in what Spanish-speaking contemporaries of the time referred to as the Disaster of 1898, brought about by the loss of other colonies such as the Philippines and, finally, Cuba), changing the island's status quo, which never attained full independence, as well as its architectural development.
It is through this fusion of Taíno, Hispanic, Afro and US influences that the creator of La Casita, Mayna Magruder Ortiz, realised the potential of Humacao's buildings beyond the feature film that Bad Bunny's team had originally produced.
Her inspiration for reinventing the house from the music video for the purposes of the tour, AD reports, comes from the houses that drew on 19th-century heritage to create the housing developments for US expatriates in the 1950s. Specifically, the structure, built by the team led by Rafael Pérez, imitates a house in the white community of Levittown in Toa Baja, the first development planned for Second World War veterans on the island. Fusion upon fusion.
The interior decoration of the house also draws on Antillean pieces and works by Boricua artists such as Lorenzo Homar (co-founder of the Puerto Rican Art Centre after an initial period in the United States and known as "El Maestro") and Alexis Díaz, an artist and muralist who should not be confused with baseball player Alexis Omar Díaz, who was in fact born in Humacao.
Bad Bunny, who follows the anti-colonial tradition of other Puerto Rican artists such as Residente and his siblings, singer iLe and producer Eduardo Cabra, all former members of Calle 13, will continue his Spanish and European tour until mid-July.
