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The Puerto Rican Cuatro Project:   cervant.gif (1447 bytes)
Puerto Ricans rediscovering their own culture...     

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The Puerto Rican Cuatro Project is non-profit organization dedicated to fostering the traditions that surround the national instrument of Puerto Rico, by means of gathering, promoting and preserving its cultural memories --memories of our musical traditions, folkloric stringed instruments and musicians. The Cuatro Project is also dedicated to the promoting  and preserving the Puerto Rican décima verse form and the traditional song as created by its greatest troubadors, living and past.

It has been said that all our human behavior, our social behavior, the way we make and create things, is in some way reflected in our music. Indeed, the legacy of the centuries is deposited within a common memory that is activated and manifested through music.

For Puerto Ricans, this legacy was simply not adequately or comprehensively preserved by the institutions traditionally responsible for this task. Thus, the Puerto Rican Cuatro Project arose from the aspirations of ordinary people of Puerto Rican descent who found it necessary to take on the task themselves.

We are convinced that the success of this task is particularly crucial to the Puerto Rican people. For how else does an island nation of six million people define itself, if it is not homogeneous in either its racial or national heritage, if it retains few traces of its indigenous past, and if it perceives itself as having little else than slavery and colonization around which to crystallize its national memories? How does it record it's past in a way that assures its future? How does it create a vision among its people, a sense of who they are and a sense of their history?

The Puerto Rican Cuatro Project seeks to foster this vision, by  recapturing, promoting, and preserving its most cherished national memories -- memories of its musical traditions, of its beloved folkloric stringed instruments, memories of its culture. These elements of culture thus become a source of strength and a storehouse from which a people may draw resiliency, hope and a sense of interconnectedness.

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Joaquín Rivera "El Zurdo de Isabela" ['Lefty' from Isabela]. This photo was taken in 1916 while Rivera was recording "ethnic records" in New York City for the Victor label. This is the earliest photograph we have been able to find of the violin- shaped cuatro (the modern cuatro's configuration). The cuatro that Rivera holds was made by Miguel Hernández of Arecibo. Hernandez may have been one of the first makers to make cuatros in this shape. We have been able to ascertain that violins were being made in Arecibo at that time, therefore it was likely that he was inspired by the ones that he'd seen.
Photo courtesy Joaquín Rivera, jr.

Listen to a sample of "El Zurdo de Isabela" with the Quinteto Borinquen. playing the 19c. Danza "Ausencia" (Absence) by Juan Morel Campos
(For those with a fast modem, here is a longer sample
)

We learned about Joaquín Rivera from his son. Below, John Sotomayor, chief investigator of the Cuatro Project, examines octogenarian Joaquicito Rivera, Jr.'s (1910-1995) old cuatro.

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