Redalyc. Brothels, hell and Puerto Rican bodies: sex, race, and ...

This article offers a cultural analysis of Mayra Santos-Febres' Nuestra Señora de La Noche (2006), and Calle 13's "Átrevete te te!" (2005) and "Tango del pecado" (2007). These works ask us to understand sex, race, gender, and nation in novel ways. What is most compelling, and the reason I chose to read them side-by-side (not comparatively), is the fact that they invite us to spaces outside social convention. These places are deemed antisocial: they are the brothel and hell respectively. Inviting us to imagine other alternatives for a Puerto Rican social politic. I explore the ways in which these artists conceptualize the Puerto Rican body politic today (right now) and also remind cultural workers of other theoretical possibilities for the reading of cultural politics—mainly, that art and artists offer cultural workers another space from which to draw cultural data. Also, I recognize that art, in its various forms, always works as mirrors or renderings of ourselves