Aguanile
Aguanile
Critical Listening, Mourning, and Decolonial Healing
Like other expressive arts, music and literature allow communities to mourn and heal after a tragic event. In this chapter, I return to Héctor Lavoe’s song, “Aguanile” and explore its social meanings and potential for healing through a sonoroliterary reading of Afro-Puerto Rican writer Amina Gautier’s eponymous short story published in 2014. I conclude that the act of critical listening to salsa music, which Gautier’s protagonist engages after her grandfather’s passing, is central to acknowledging our racial, gender, and generational identities and thus to allow ourselves to grieve for others after Hurricane María destroyed Puerto Rico in 2017. I expand this analysis with a personal testimonio regarding the decolonizing role of Latinx Studies as a field that creates a sense of collective belonging for a Diasporican feminist scholar like me, who has embraced Latinidad in the United States.
Keywords: Puerto Rico, Diasporican, salsa music, Héctor Lavoe, decolonizing, literature, Afro-Puerto Rican, Latinx studies
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