Her Name Was Doña Margot

Margarita “Doña Margot” Rivera García (1909–2000) was a black working-class Puerto Rican woman whose labor as a composer, healer, midwife, and spiritual medium made her an esteemed community leader among her neighbors from Santurce, a predominantly black enclave in San Juan. Through her bomba and plena compositions, she helped forge modern black Puerto Rican music amid the rapid industrialization of Puerto Rico after the 1950s. However, her story has been overshadowed by the aura of her son, the legendary Afro–Puerto Rican singer Ismael “Maelo” Rivera (1931–87). Although Doña Margot is praised as a maternal figure who gave Maelo the gift of rhythm, her story as a woman and artist has remained widely unheard. This essay examines her parallel presence and erasure in salsa historiography, taking her testimonios about her musical gift as offering a counternarrative that defies masculinist music histories and serves as a site of memory that endures erasure.

Evelina Fue Tu Nombre / Evelina Was Your Name

On Thursday, April 18 my students and I coordinated an activity in which we celebrated the National Bilingual/Multilingual Learner Advocacy Month. In this activity, one of our adjuncts professors presented information about the struggle that a Puerto Rican woman, Evelina López Antonetty had in providing access to bilingual education to a monolingual-Spanish community in the South Bronx . The South Bronx is still considered one of the most impoverished boroughs in NYC and it is also where the college I am working at (Eugenio Maria de Hostos CC) is located. As part of the activity, I wrote a poem about Evelina López Antonetty and the poem was translated by my students into three (3) different languages.

Symposium: Memorias de una Vida de Obra (Memories of a Life of Work): An Interview with Antonia Pantoja

Antonia Pantoja is an important activist and educator in the Puerto Rican community, both on the Island and in the United States. Pantoja was interviewed for the Harvard Educational Review by Wilhelmina Perry, an African American educator who has known Pantoja for the last twenty years as a colleague, friend, and coworker. This interview is part of a dialogue around the significant issues of Pantoja's life that reflect her life's work resisting the colonization of the Puerto Rican community. Through Pantoja's memories we are provided with the early and personal experiences that shaped her political and social commitments in her struggle against injustice. Pantoja's contribution to this Symposium brings in a unique voice of a Puerto Rican woman committed to her people.