Between Blackness and Latinidad

Abstract

New York Puerto Ricans have negotiated their spaces and identities within hip hop through various creative approaches, most of which evidence an effort to balance two identity categories—blackness and latinidad—that are frequently imagined to be mutually exclusive. Their strategies of negotiation have shifted during the course of hip hop’s three-decade history in response to the predominant understandings regarding cultural “entitlement” and “authenticity.”