“Yo la bomba no la bailé, la bomba yo la vivé” (I Didn’t Just Dance Bomba, I Lived It): The Pedagogy of Daily Puerto Rican Life, Black Feminist Praxis, and the Batey

Abstract

After Hurricane Maria had passed, Puerto Rico found itself in the eye of a media whirlwind due to governmental scandal and earthquakes; still, bomberas (women bomba practitioners) would continue organizing. This article examines how in the wake of catastrophe, and since its inception on sugar plantations in Puerto Rico, bombeando (practicing bomba) offers individual healing and prompts the mobilization of Afro–Puerto Ricans on the island and in the States. Bomba is thus a system of mutual relief, which offers a model of structural repair. I examine how bombera pedagogy is more than something to be applied to a genre of music and dance but a lifestyle and practice that acknowledges, repurposes, and releases wreckage of the embodied experience of colonial trauma. Drawing on practices of care in the Black feminist tradition, I deploy ethnography to render how bomba allows scholars to collectively reimagine and address interpersonal and infrastructural violence.