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The Puerto Rican Cuatro Project: ![]()
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?
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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.
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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