"'Pa Los Jodixs: The Anti-Movement of Boriqua Punk"
This presentation utilizes the punk aesthetic to interrogate Puerto Rican hegemonic ethnonationalist sentiment through the sound and visuals of three Borícua punk projects: XUXA SANTAMARÍA from Carolina, Puerto Rico and Oakland, California; Las Sucias from Oakland, CA; and Madd Blake y los Stalins from Aquebradilla, Puerto Rico. These Borícua punk projects emerge from a time and space where historical narratives of the docile yet criminal Puerto Rican has been conjured in the name of ethnonational sovereignty. In light of concerns around the failure of the insular government to relieve the colony’s debt crisis as well as the events of the (un)natural disaster of Hurricane María and its afterlife, the spatial and temporal relationality that presupposes Borícua punk as a whitened and westernized rendition of punk are taken up and refigured in this presentation through the experiences of the Greater Antillean body in the Caribbean and its diaspora.
Judith Rodríguez is an Assistant Professor in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department and the Latino Studies Program. Judith specializes in transdisciplinary approaches to Black critical theory, Afro-Latinx Studies, and Caribbean philosophical thought. Specifically, her work draws together research in Puerto Rican aesthetics and performance studies with Black studies and Black feminist theory, Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, and gender and sexuality studies. Her manuscript, titled Impositions: The Aesthetic Blackening of Puerto Rico and its Diaspora, explores works of literature, music, documentary film, and theatre and performance since the 1930s that have critiqued—and imagined alternatives to—the antiblack and heteropatriarchal violence produced through the various cultural and historical discourses of racial hybridity on the island and its diaspora. Her second book-length project titled Outlaw Performances: Reading Black Dissonance in Puerto Rican Legal Discourse, explores the performance of Blackness and race within juridical interpretations of domestic violence law in Puerto Rico. This project follows the theories and methods of Impositions from the aesthetic to the juridical realm to investigate the legal grammar of Puerto Rican domestic violence law and foregrounds the highly racialized language that drives the law’s court decisions. Judith was an invited participant in the University of California Humanities Research Institute Residential Research Group Queer Hemisphere/América Queer. She was a visiting scholar in the Literature Section at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 2018-2019 and received her PhD in Culture and Theory at UC Irvine in 2019. She has published work in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, Hispanófila: Ensayos de Literatura and has a forthcoming chapter in the anthology Punk: Las Américas through Intellect Books.