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Puerto Rican Music: A Journey Through History and Identity

  • Writer: yannick-robin eike mirko
    yannick-robin eike mirko
  • Jan 31, 2025
  • 5 min read

The first page of sheet music for El Coqui by Jose Quinton in 1901

Music is more than sound; it’s memory, language, and resistance. For Puerto Ricans, music is how we remember our past, navigate the present, and express who we are in the face of colonial legacies and global change.


The Museum of Puerto Rican Music in Ponce, Puerto Rico, offers an incredible foundation, tracing the roots of Puerto Rican music from Indigenous beginnings to its global influence. Still, like many cultural spaces in Ponce, its timeline pauses due to funding limitations. Here, I’ll share what I learned from the museum, then expand the narrative with a deeper dive into the more contemporary chapters of our musical history, all while maintaining a clear distinction between what was covered in the exhibit and what I’ve added for context.


A picture of the view from the entrance to the museum out to the street, from a dark hall and an arch-shaped hole in the walls with gates on them.

The Indigenous Beat: Taíno and Pre-Taíno Rhythms


One of the first exhibits in the museum captures the musical world of the Taíno people, who were the Island’s primary inhabitants before colonization. Taíno music was deeply spiritual, closely tied to rituals and ceremonies. Instruments like the mayohuacán (a hollow wooden drum) and the guamo (conch shell trumpet) carried the voices of ancestors, while maracas and güiros created rhythmic layers that mirrored the sounds of nature.


What struck me most was the museum’s emphasis on music as communication. Taíno songs, or areítos, weren’t just entertainment; they were oral histories, woven into chants that told stories of survival, migrations, and mythologies. Unfortunately, much of this knowledge was violently interrupted by colonization.


Contextual Note: Outside the museum, scholars like Ricardo Alegría (1997) and José Juan Arrom (1989) have studied areítos as a way to reconstruct the fractured cultural memory of the Taínos. These musical traditions echo today in rhythms found in bomba and other Afro-Caribbean genres that embody the Island’s layered identity.


A wall of framed drawings of earlier taino instruments carved from dried fruits and wood.

The African Legacy: Bomba and Plena as Resistance


If the Taínos gave Puerto Rican music its foundation, enslaved Africans gave it its soul. The museum dedicates a significant portion of its exhibit to bomba and plena, two genres born from struggle and resilience.


Bomba: The Drum as Freedom

The exhibit beautifully explains how bomba was created by enslaved Africans working in Puerto Rico’s sugar plantations. Using barrel drums, maracas, and call-and-response singing, bomba became a communal outlet for expressing joy, mourning, and rebellion.


What makes bomba extraordinary is its dialogic nature. The dancer and the lead drummer engage in a back-and-forth conversation, where the dancer’s movements command the beats. This improvisation wasn’t just art—it was defiance. Colonizers tried to suppress bomba, fearing its power to unite enslaved people. Yet, it survived, evolving into regional styles like sicá and holandés.


Plena: The People’s Newspaper

Moving through the exhibit, I was struck by the description of plena as “the people’s newspaper.” Originating in coastal towns like Ponce in the early 20th century, plena told stories of everyday life—romance, hardship, and political unrest—set to lively rhythms.


While bomba often carries spiritual weight, plena brings levity and critique, making it a vehicle for social commentary. The museum highlights key figures like Manuel “El Canario” Jiménez, whose compositions helped spread plena beyond its working-class roots.


Supplemental Context: Musicologist Ruth Glasser (1995) underscores the political significance of bomba and plena, noting that their survival reflects Puerto Rico’s enduring fight against cultural erasure. Today, these genres are kept alive by groups like Los Pleneros de la 21, bridging traditional sounds with contemporary activism.


A lineup of string and percussion instruments, sitting on displays surrounded by walls with framed images of musicians.

Jíbaro Music: The Voice of the Mountains


The museum’s journey into jíbaro culture paints a vivid picture of rural Puerto Rico. The cuatro, a small ten-stringed guitar, becomes the centerpiece of this tradition, alongside the güiro and vocals steeped in aguinaldos (Christmas carols) and seises (folk songs).


What I found most moving in this section was the recognition of jíbaro music as a form of storytelling. Each seis variation—whether fajardeño or milonga—is tied to specific regions, revealing how geography shaped Puerto Rican identity. The museum rightly calls the jíbaro music “the soul of Puerto Rican mountains,” where farmers turned their struggles into poetry.


Expanded Note: Scholars like Juan Flores (2000) argue that jíbaro music carries a nationalist undertone, embodying resistance to U.S. cultural imperialism during the early 20th century. This becomes particularly significant in understanding how Puerto Ricans define themselves against external pressures.


Salsa: The Caribbean Symphony


As the museum’s timeline moves into the 20th century, salsa takes center stage. Born from the African rhythms of son and plena, salsa became a Caribbean symphony, blending Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican influences into a genre that transcends borders.


Pioneers like Héctor Lavoe and Willie Colón—both of Puerto Rican descent—shaped salsa into a global phenomenon during the 1970s. The museum highlights their contributions, but it’s their ability to carry Puerto Rico’s spirit into diaspora communities that resonates most deeply.


Supplemental Note: Salsa’s evolution as a genre of resistance is explored in César Miguel Rondón’s The Book of Salsa (2008), which chronicles how musicians used the genre to address issues like racism, inequality, and identity.



a vejigante floating above wodden barrel instruments


Disclaimer: The museum’s timeline pauses before fully addressing Puerto Rico’s contributions to modern music. What follows is my brief addition to honor this continuation of our history.


Reggaetón (on our side of the street, I know it didn’t start with us) emerged in the 1990s from marginalized communities in San Juan, blending Jamaican dancehall, Panamanian reggae, and hip-hop. Artists like Tego Calderón infused Afro-Caribbean pride into reggaetón’s lyrics, while Ivy Queen broke barriers as the genre’s first female superstar.


Today, artists like Bad Bunny reimagine reggaetón as a platform for cultural expression, weaving themes of mental health, colonial critique, and gender fluidity into their work. Beyond reggaetón, Puerto Rican musicians like Rauw Alejandro and Kany García continue to innovate, blending traditional and contemporary sounds.



Stained glass windows across a living room area with benches and chairs of wood.

The museum in Ponce—and others across Puerto Rico—are vital spaces for preserving our history. However, they rely heavily on donations to expand exhibits and continue sharing our stories. By supporting these institutions, we ensure that Puerto Rican music remains a living testament to our resilience and creativity. Being anti-colonialism and anti-tourism doesn't mean I'm against exploring and appreciating the corners of our own towns that are waiting for us to explore: Mi Gente, get out here if you can!





Resources


• Alegría, R. E. (1997). Puerto Rico: A cultural and historical perspective. Editorial Universidad de Puerto Rico.



• Rondón, C. M. (2008). The Book of Salsa: A chronicle of urban music from the Caribbean to New York City. University of North Carolina Press.


• Rivera, R. Z. (2003). New York Ricans from the hip hop zone. Palgrave Macmillan.


yannick-robin eike mirko [who communicates in Spanish, English, + ASL] is a Manhattan-based Biawaisa/Yamoká-hu/Maorocoti multidisciplinary artist, choreographer, writer, doula and disability justice activist with a rare disease. His work sits at the intersection of movement, access, queer and indigenous survival, death care, and institutional accountability, using the body as archive, protest, and living evidence.

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Her relationship with dance and movement has never been linear or purely technical. From Off-Broadway to online, their work has been shaped by access, interruption, advocacy, and forced stillness. Movement and progress, for yannick-robin, is not simply choreography or activism; it is testimony, how a marginalized body speaks when institutions fail to listen. 
 

In 2021, yannick-robin participated in Drawing Breath, a visual and embodied project by Risa Puno that centered marginalized voices during COVID, with yannick-robin representing disabled people. The work focused on breath, endurance, and visibility at a time when disabled lives were being openly treated as expendable. This project cemented their understanding of movement as political: presence itself became resistance.
 

In 2022, disability justice became inseparable from his professional life. He was the first physically disabled actor/musician [acoustic and electric guitar, accordion, glockenspiel, xylophone, tambourine] to play a physically disabled role written through an ableist lens and publicly fought the theatre and writers for accountability. This work was documented in his blog and a documentary, a social media movement, and ultimately led to his inclusion in the University of Minnesota’s Tretter Transgender Oral History Project, archiving his contributions to disability, gender, and labor justice in theatre (the most recent edition/collection of years awaiting entering the public access archive due to funding and completion of editing. Help fund the preservation of non-cis history here).
 

That same year, he worked on Mr. Holland’s Opus at Ogunquit Playhouse as an actor/musician [bugle, trumpet, drum kit], a fully captioned production where his lived experience as a non-cis deaf and physically disabled artist directly informed their performance rhythm, physical storytelling, and musicality. Also in 2022, she performed in the inaugural Breaking the Binary Theatre Festival on Theatre Row under the direction of L Morgan Lee, delivering work as an actor involving monologuing about wheelchair use, access failure, and systemic injustice, using their body not as metaphor, but as evidence. 
 

In 2024 after a year and some change prioritizing deathcare work, they returned to theatre at New York Stage and Film (NYSAF), contributing to the work of disabled choreographer Jerron Herman as an actor/dancer. They also released their multi-genre EP passing that year, which catalogs their multi-instrumental writing and use of music for processing as they fall deeper into grief, hearing loss and deafness, and a world of being misunderstood for not being cis.

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In 2025, yannick-robin worked on the developmental process for Jay Alan Zimmerman’s upcoming show Songs for Hands on a Thursday, following Jerron Herman’s recommendation. The project included a residency at New York Theatre Barn’s Choreography Lab and a music workshop premiere, where yannick-robin served as both choreographer and dancer. The piece centered a Deaf father’s death and a CODA grappling with silence; yannick-robin’s role was to integrate sign language into choreography and bridge gaps between sound, access, and movement for d/Deaf performers.
 

Alongside his performance work, yannick-robin has been active in nonprofit and advocacy spaces since 2020. She worked for Imara Jones of TransLash Media, one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2023, where they were nominated for a Webby Award as an associate and digital producer for The TransLash Podcast, contributed to The Anti-Trans Hate Machine series, and wrote obituaries for TGNC siblings lost to violence. He has written for TalkDeath on racial disparities and discrimination in death care and other deathcare and injustice related topics and now offers obituary writing, death doulaship, and bereavement counseling for TGNC decedents and their families, people with rare diseases, and disabled communities.


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yannick-robin eike mirko is represented by Arise Artists Agency

© 2026 yannick-robin eike mirko

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