Abstract
Listening to the Puerto Rican migration in the late 1940s and the 1950s, I provide in this chapter an example of the larger context in which audible difference operated in the era preceding CB radio’s mass popularity. The first major postwar migration from outside the mainland United States began in 1948, when many thousands of Puerto Ricans left home for New York City in search of economic mobility and better opportunities than their island territory could offer. New York had not experienced a mass migration of this sort since the turn of the twentieth century. So when Puerto Ricans came to New York in large numbers from 1948 to 1958, their presence represented certainly an audible, if not always a visible, sea change in many working-class neighborhoods—places already under increasing pressure in that same decade from urban planning initiatives to rid the city of “blight” by demolishing vital, if poor, tenement neighborhoods.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
One excellent example of such work is Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
- 2.
Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 10. On race in sound studies, see also Gustavus Stadler, “Never Heard Such a Thing: Lynching and Phonographic Modernity,” in Social Text, no. 102 (Spring 2010): 87–105.
- 3.
Tony Schwartz quote from record sleeve notes, “Nueva York: A Tape Documentary of Puerto Rican New Yorkers,” New York: Folkways Records and Service Corp., 1955. Schwartz’s work has received very little attention from scholars though I hope that will change. The other scholar who has published on Schwartz is Jennifer Lynn Stoever. See her article “Splicing the Sonic Color Line: Tony Schwartz Re-Mixes Postwar Nueva York,” Social Text 102, vol. 28, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 59–85. She and I both presented on Tony Schwartz at the 2006 American Studies Association annual meeting though unaware of each other. Stoever’s article on Tony Schwartz is notable also for her early articulation of the terms “sonic color line” and “listening ear” she goes on to deploy so effectively as analytical tools in her book The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (New York: New York University Press, 2016).
- 4.
Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century immigration to the United States, and the negative portrayals of those immigrants, is covered extensively in works such as Matt Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1999); Angela (now Art) M. Blake, How New York Became American, 1890–1924 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
- 5.
Nadine Hubbs, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
- 6.
I use the terms “keynote” and “soundmark” here in the manner developed as part of an analytical lexicon developed by R. Murray Schafer, the Canadian composer and one of the first scholars of sound, in his groundbreaking work The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (originally 1977; Toronto: Destiny Books, 1993).
- 7.
Jacobs, Death and Life, 153.
- 8.
The history of cruising, like the history of effeminacy, is not well developed in academic studies despite the large body of scholarship on various aspects of gay, lesbian and queer histories and cultures. An academic history of hustlers’ sexuality can be found in Barry Reay, New York Hustlers: Masculinity and Sex in Modern America (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010). See also Mark Turner, Backward Glances: Cruising Queer Streets in London and New York (London: Reaktion Books, 2004).
- 9.
For a detailed account of the FCC’s intentions regarding citizens band radio, see Carolyn Marvin and Quentin J. Schutze, “The First Thirty Years” [“CB in Perspective,” special section], Journal of Communication 27 (Summer 1977): 104–77; especially 109.
- 10.
Citizens Band Radio and the Future of the Portable Telephone (New Canaan, Conn.: International Resources Development, 1977), 54–55.
- 11.
Most magazine and newspaper articles about CB radio published at the height of national interest in CB, from 1975 to 1977, made reference to the recent introduction of the speed limit, the truckers’ strike and the use of CB to avoid police and highway patrol speed traps. See, for example, “The Bodacious New World of C.B.,” Time, 10 May 1976, 78–79; “Citizen’s-Band Radio: Danger of Air Pollution?” U.S. News and World Report, 7 March 1977, 76–77; “Hey Good Buddy: CU Rates CB Radios,” Consumer Reports 42, no. 10 (October 1977): 563; Brock Yates, “One Lap of America,” Car and Driver, February 1975, 27–30, 75–77; “Nuisance or a Boon? The Spread of Citizens’ Radios,” U.S. News and World Report, 29 September 1975, 26–28; William Jeanes, “Tuning in Justice on Your CB Radio Dial,” Car and Driver, July 1975, 10.
- 12.
Articles about CB radio published during the years of the building CB craze commented on the rapidly rising sales of CB radio sets. See, for example, “The Newest Hobby: Kibitzing by Radio …,” Forbes, 15 July 1975, 16–17; J. D. Reed, “A Big 10–4 on the Call of the Wild,” Sports Illustrated, 29 March 1976, 36–38, 47–48.
- 13.
“The Bodacious New World of C.B.,” 78.
- 14.
An article written a few years after the CB craze of the 1970s discusses the gender politics of CB handles: J. Jerome Smith, “Gender Marking on Citizen Band Radio: Self-Identity in a Limited Channel Speech Community,” Sex Roles, 7, no. 6 (1981): 599–606. The author argues that “differential analysis of a sample of male and female handles reveals that men project virility, while women collectively refrain from any significant degree of gender marking” (599). The choice of a handle bearing a close connection to one’s “real” identity was not always typical among CB users in the 1970s. Many CB users chose handles that achieved a certain amount of reimagining and repackaging of themselves. The power to rename oneself as an adult within this new communications environment of (potentially) total anonymity provided CB users the chance to reinvent themselves in the oral/aural nonvisual world of CB. The use of handles also served to connect CB users to the intrigue associated with other uses of code names, such as the world of spies and secret agents; for some CB users, renaming themselves through a handle might have served to override the memory of unchosen names they had been given in their lives, such as unwanted nicknames from childhood. This aspect of CB culture also anticipates the widespread use of online user names on the Internet and of carefully constructed “avatars” in online games such as Second Life. On the construction of online identities, see Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Michael Rymaszewski et al., Second Life: The Official Guide, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, N.J.: Sybex, 2008); Jesper Juul, Half Life: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).
- 15.
Citizens Band Radio and the Future of the Portable Telephone (New Canaan, Conn.: International Resources Development, 1977), 60.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Blake, A.M. (2019). America in Color: The Postwar Audible Spectrum. In: Radio, Race, and Audible Difference in Post-1945 America. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31841-3_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31841-3_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-31840-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-31841-3
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)