Call for Papers: The LLC Puerto Rican Forum of the Modern Language Association

invites paper proposals for the 2027 convention in Los Angeles that engage in a

nuanced analysis and reassessment of the trajectory of Puertorriqueñidad in the arts

over the last quarter of a century that critically addresses music, visuality, and

language.

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During the transition between the 20th and 21st centuries, Puerto Rican artists helped

lead the charge of what at the time was denominated the Latin Boom. Artists like Ricky Martin,

Marc Anthony, and Jennifer Lopez became ubiquitous, which led some to sound the clarion call

for further visibility and representation. However, while their careers continued into the present

with enviable success, the energy and fervor of the boom itself fizzled as fast as it appeared. On

the heels of the boom, Frances Negrón-Muntaner published the influential Boricua Pop: Puerto

Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (NYU Press 2004). In it, she posited that

“boricua cultural production is largely made up of the desire to purge, flaunt, deny, destroy,

resignify, and transfigure the constitutive shame of being Puerto Rican from our bodies and

public selves” (xiv). A little over twenty years since its publication, the world is witnessing

another boom in the figure of Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny. In

2026 alone, he won the first Grammy for Album of the Year given to a Spanish-language album

and headlined the Super Bowl Halftime show. A people who as of the most recent census

accounts for 1.78% of the US population has once again been thrust into the spotlight. However,

while in 1999 that spotlight came with the amplification of stereotypes centered on the “spicy

latino heartthrob,” this time Puerto Ricans have faced an amalgam of divergent narratives

including the questioning of their birthright citizenship, their “Americanness,” their language,

and their forms of embodied being. The MLA Puerto Rico Forum invites proposals that engage

in a nuanced analysis and reassessment of the trajectory of Puertorriqueñidad in the arts over the

last quarter of a century. How has the concept of “constitutive shame of being Puerto Rican”

changed in that time? The forum is interested in revisiting the boom and Boricua Pop in the

shadow of the Bad Bunny era.

Possible topics may include:

- The circulation and reconstitution of Puerto Rican Spanish

- Visuality in Puerto Rican pop music and reggaetón

- Whitewashing and challenges against it in Puerto Rican media and music

- Performative Puerto Ricanness and the commodification of identity

- Language as an act of resistance in spaces of exploitation

- Balancing visibility and invisibility in Trans Puerto Rican lives

- Queer Aesthetics in Reggaetón and Beyond

- Puerto Rican Decoloniality on the World Stage

- New critical and theoretical approaches that engage Puertorriqueñidad

- The articulation and critique of “disaster narratives” in the wake of Hurricane María

- Boricua Aesthetic Responses to Colonialism and Authoritarianism

SEND A 250 WORD ABSTRACT TO ISRAEL REYES AT ISRAEL.REYES@DARTMOUTH.EDU BY MARCH 23.