ABSTRACT
The article addresses the vibrant cross-cultural dialogs between New York's Puerto Rican and African-American communities of the 1960s and early 1970s when common experiences of racialization and social exclusion and the impact of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements manifested itself in the emergence of new cultural products, interethnic alliances, and Nuyorican identity discourses that challenged established boundaries between notions of latinidad and Blackness. By focusing on the role of Black popular music as a platform for African-American-Puerto Rican interactions, the appropriation of Soul music by a young generation of Nuyoricans as manifested in the musical genre Latin Soul/Boogaloo might be interpreted not only as a means of showing solidarity and identification with the African-American freedom struggle, but also as a way of affirming their neglected Afro-Boricua heritage and challenging the Puerto Rican elites' anti-Black racism. Exploring the entanglements of popular music and social movements, the study shows how Latin Boogaloo was related to the emergence of the Young Lords in 1969—a radical Puerto Rican left-wing group that followed the example of the Black Panther Party by organizing Nuyorican and African-American youth in their common struggle for human rights in the streets of Spanish Harlem and the Bronx.
