Rosalía's Cante: (Non-)Gitanidad, Gender, and Anti-Carceral Flamenco Tradition in "Juro Que"

Abstract:

This article intervenes in the emerging field of Rosalía scholarship to demonstrate the viability of reading Rosalía as an experimental flamenco artist and to point to the value of such readings for studies of race in contemporary Spain. In this project, I demonstrate that Rosalía's 2020 single "Juro que" innovates upon flamenco's long tradition of decrying the violence of incarceration, particularly as that violence relates to gitano, or Spanish Roma, communities, and revises the historically masculinist boundaries of this tradition. By analyzing the racial and gendered dimensions of the construction of the poetic speaker in "Juro que," I argue that this text renders audible gitanidad and the critique of anti-gitanidad that is implicit in anti-carceral flamenco tradition while also circumventing a problematic identification with gitanidad itself. In its opposition to the criminal legal system as well as the racist stereotypes produced by the good Gypsy/bad Gypsy dichotomy, "Juro que" resists the historical function of the white Gypsy paradigm as defined by Eva Woods Peiró. Simultaneously, however, I examine the deployment of racially ambiguous aesthetics in "Juro que" in the context of that paradigm and point to the ways in which those aesthetics risk obfuscating anti-gitano carceral violence.