La Brega: Our Cuatro (And Why It Makes Us Cry) — Episode Transcript
Alana: Luis Sanz was only four years old when the cuatro first called out to him.
A cuatrista, one of his parents’ neighbors in Bayamon, brought the musical instrument over to play after church.
Luis Sanz González: Y hacia diferentes montunos como que – [plays music]
Alana: The neighbor, the cuatrista, was marking the tempo with his foot…
Luis Sanz González: Y yo le miraba a los pies como él marcaba el tempo y como tocaba.
Alana: Luis remembers he was a very shy child. He’d usually stare at the floor instead of looking people in the eye.
Luis Sanz González: Yo ni miraba a los ojos a las personas, yo siempre mirando al piso.
Alana: But at some point, the cuatrista put the cuatro down, and Luis made a bold move – he reached out to touch it. He was transfixed by the ten strings, pulled taught across this blend between a mandolin and a guitar. Puerto Rico’s best-known national instrument.
Luis Sanz González: Como que vi en el instrumento, no sé, una oportunidad.
Alana: His parents weren’t sure if he was too young, at just four, to learn to play the cuatro. But the cuatrista insisted on giving him lessons.
And Luis couldn’t resist the cuatro. As he learned how to play, he would try to stretch his little fingers to reach the strings more easily. His teacher would tell him to wait, to be patient, there were some songs that were too difficult to play at his age. His abilities would grow with his hands. But Luis didn’t want to wait.
Luis Sanz González: Yo no voy a esperar, yo lo quiero hacer ahora.
Alana: There was one song that challenged him the most. Luis was six, and his teacher had said he’d be able to play it when he was nine. He practiced and practiced and practiced.
Luis Sanz González: Y era “El Gallo, la Gallina y la Guinea”, del Maestro Ladi. [plays music]
Alana: It was a complicated composition by one of Puerto Rico’s greatest cuatristas: El Maestro Ladí.
Luis Sanz González: Y es una pieza complicada. ¿Verdad? Retante.
Alana: Finally, he unlocked it. Here he is at six years old, accompanied by his father and grandfather.
ARCHIVAL – Luis Sanz music
Man: “Qué aprenda.”
Alana: It was around that time (around the year 2001) that his teacher gave him a gift. It was a cuatro that had belonged to El Maestro Ladí, that legendary cuatrista, the one who had composed that piece that Luis had worked so hard to learn. Maestro Ladi had died in the 1970s and this was, apparently, the last cuatro that he had ever played.
Luis Sanz González: Y llorando el me dice mira, toma el cuatro.
Alana: Luis’ teacher cried when he gave him the instrument.
Luis Sanz González: Toma este cuatro que tú tienes que tener este instrumento.
Alana: El Maestro Ladí had been a small man in stature, and his cuatro suited the young Luis. He kept learning, his talents kept growing. He recorded his first album at age 9. And then he kept going.
ARCHIVAL – Maribel Delgado
Luis Sanz González: “ Mi nombre es Luis Sanz, buenas a todos…
Alana: Music felt like something bigger than him, like a force.
Luis Sanz González: De hecho, yo soy fanático de Star Wars.
Alana: The maestros of the cuatro were guarding this legacy for another generation. And Luis was one of several young cuatrista prodigies in Puerto Rico, now training to be guardians of the legacy as well.
He’s come to understand this music isn’t his. It belongs to Puerto Rico.
Luis Sanz González: Esperate, esto no es mío, esto es del pueblo. Esto es de la gente.
Alana: In 2024, after two decades of playing the cuatro, Luis arrived at a recording studio. He had been summoned to lend his musical talents to a mysterious project; he didn’t know who the artist was, or even what the song was about.
Luis Sanz González: Como que, wow, no sé para qué es, pero sé que va a ser algo grande.
Alana: He sensed it was going to be a really big deal.
Luis Sanz González: Okay, I start listening, like a quinto al aire harmony.
Alana: He was going to play the cuatro, and another traditional Puerto Rican instrument: the bordonua, which is featured prominently in the song.
ARCHIVAL – LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii: Bad Bunny
Luis Sanz González: Pues ya sé que tiene que ver con el Puertorriqueñismo, este, con lo patriota.
Alana: He knew this was going to be patriotic, all about Puerto Rico. Then, he recognized a voice.
ARCHIVAL – LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii: Bad Bunny
Bad Bunny: “Esto es un sueño que yo tuve.”
Luis Sanz González: So I start recording the bordonua and suddenly Bad Bunny shows up at the recording studio.
Alana: Bad Bunny greeted Luis, but he didn’t share what the song was about. Instead, he gave instructions.
Luis Sanz González: You listen and then when that melody repeats, you like get crazy.
ARCHIVAL – LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii: Bad Bunny
Bad Bunny: “Ten cuidao Luis, ten cuidao.”
Alana: Benito gave a specific prompt to guide Luis’ solo on the cuatro. It was based on how important the instrument is to Luis.
Luis Sanz González: Imagine that your cuatro is bleeding. For me, the cuatro is everything. (laughs)
Alana: The cuatro that Luis was playing that day is elegant, with a mother of pearl inlay on the front. The wood on the back almost looks like the fur of a jungle cat, with deep brown and velvety black.
Bad Bunny was asking Luis to play a solo as though that cuatro, the one in his hands, was bleeding out. Bleeding to death.
Luis Sanz González: Es algo serio. I felt sadness, depression. But kind of hope. The cuatro can be healed.
In seconds, you know. And I express myself very intimate. I played this kind of trémolo is like a presentation like “Hey, listen – suffering.” Then la borinqueña. [plays music] Y entonces por ahí segui.
When I finished that part I – I was like shaking like a little bit – with a lot of energy.
Alana: He did one take, and Bad Bunny said it was perfect. The song would turn out to be Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii, a lament for the loss of Puerto Rico’s culture, for Boricuas being pushed out.
ARCHIVAL – NPR Tiny Desk Concert: Bad Bunny
Bad Bunny: Quieren quitame el río…
Alana: In that sense, the image of the cuatro bleeding out, dying, but fighting for its life, is key to that track. And not just because the instrument is important to Luis, but because it’s important to all of us. It strikes, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, a chord.
It’s as though the cuatro casts a spell. The vibrations of those ten strings, plucked and strummed for generations by cuatristas, hum a special incantation.
The spell makes us instantly nostalgic. It takes us back to mountain rivers rushing past boulders, to rocking chairs on balconies. It makes a knot in our throats, fills our chests with air.
And cuatristas are the ones who master that incantation, not for their own sake, but for the cuatro.
Luis Sanz González: No somos nosotros. Pero queremos que el instrumento llegue.
Alana: They’ve carried it wherever they’ve gone, wherever Puerto Ricans are, from New York to Hawaii. But how, exactly, does the magic of the cuatro work? Where does its power come from? And how did it become ours?
From Futuro Studios, I’m Alana Casanova-Burgess, and this is La Brega. In this episode, our champion is the cuatro itself.
Fabiola Mendez started learning how to play the cuatro when she was six years old, but it was with her even before that. It would come out at Christmas time.
Fabiola Méndez: I have these blurry memories of me being super young at my bis-abuela’s house and listening to this music and seeing the players. Eran todos bien viejitos, gathering around the altar of the Three Kings, playing aguinaldos and singing aguinaldos.
Alana: When she was first learning to play, it hurt her small fingers to press into the steel double strings.
Fabiola Méndez: You know, it’s hard and you get like the mark of the two strings, you know in the tip of your finger and you’re like, oh my God, am I gonna bleed? And it’s like, of course you won’t.
Alana: Fabiola is now one of Puerto Rico’s most celebrated cuatristas. Calluses protect her fingertips, but she still feels the cuatro in her body. And she can feel where it comes from.
Fabiola Méndez: So the cuatro before it’s a cuatro is a tree. And before it’s a tree that’s grown and bloomed it’s a seed, and it’s a seed that’s inside the earth. And as that tree grows and goes through different phases, maybe it’s cut, maybe it falls, but it’s reborn into an instrument.
And the way that, you know, the cuatros are made traditionally using that one piece for the entire body and neck of the instrument, keeping that core of the one tree alive. Some modern ways of making the cuatro, which is using different pieces as we call it, madera doblá. then you have this blend of different trees that were once one, that now multiple become one.
Then you have the player that finds this piece of wood and puts it close to its chest. And as my heart is beating and my lungs are filling with air, the instrument is also feeling that energy. And then it’s vibrating through the sound hole and going out in the world again. So it’s this cycle of being born inside the earth, but then blooming out and then even like breathing out, the sound, to everyone else to breathe it in. So to me the cuatro is that.
Alana: The cuatro wasn’t always what it is today. There are early versions with four strings, hence the name. Luthiers – people who make stringed instruments – added and added and added, until it got to five double strings, so a total of 10. At times, it had a keyhole shape, flat on top, near the neck. And now they’re all curves.
There are old cuatros that are rough and rustic, hewn with a machete, with animal guts for strings. Today, they’re smooth and polished, with inlay and varnish, and look more like a violin you hold like a guitar. But they still, at their heart, come from that wood, from the earth.
And from jibaros – a folkloric figure in Puerto Rico, someone from the mountains, who lives and works the land – and of course, who plays traditional instruments, especially the cuatro.
There’s a story that’s told about the cuatro’s origins. Early luthiers, these jibaros, were copying a Spanish guitar, so the instrument is essentially Spanish, and the cuatro is a bridge from our jibaro traditions all the way back to Spain.
There are other stringed instruments in Latin America, like the cuatro venezolan, the charango from the Andes, the vihuela from Mexico.
These are the cuatro’s cousins, who are also said to be descended from that Spanish guitar. Fabiola says, it’s really deeper than that.
Fabiola Méndez: I think every person throughout Latin America and probably the world feels that connection to their folk native instrument. They go back to the roots of the guitar, they go back to the basic idea of having an elongated string being plucked by a hand or being plucked by a pick. In the case of the cuatro with the double strings, it’s like you close your eyes and you’re like, ‘yeah, this is like roots, like human roots.’
Alana: In that way, the cuatro goes back to a time before Spain, before countries, before even needing to know where something was from. It has Arab and African influences. Ancient stringed instruments have been found all over the world, there’s something primal that draws us to them. They pull at our heart strings.
Fabiola Méndez: But then you have people from other places in the world that are like, ‘wow, I’ve never heard that instrument before, but somehow it reminds me of home.’
Alana: There’s also the language of the cuatro, the complicated repertoire of seises and aguinaldos, which are subgenres of jibaro music, each with a different tempo and melody. This, Fabiola says, may be where the cuatro’s true power comes from: another reason the sound of the cuatro catches so many of us, stops us in our tracks.
Fabiola Méndez: It has a lot to do with our memory and our emotions as we connect to our identity. And knowing that for most of us as we were growing up, you would hear our cuatro, especially around the Christmas season.
ARCHIVAL – La Murga Live: Fania Records
Fabiola Méndez: You hear that Asalto Navideño album from La Fania All Stars, that I think every person in Puerto Rico has heard and a lot of people throughout Latin America and the world as well.
Alana: It’s an album full of iconic cuatro moments, like this solo from Yomo Toro.
ARCHIVAL – La Murga Live: Fania Records
Alana: We’ve been told that not only the shape but the language of the cuatro is also intrinsically from Spain – that the seises and aguinaldos are adapted from European waltzes and danzas that evolved over time.
Fabiola Méndez: I challenge that, because I am Afroboricua. So then, in the way that I create music and that I love to look at this instrument – it’s not purely European. It’s very much a reflection of who we are, as a people, as puertorriqueños and puertorriqueñas – which is complex because it is not just European. It is not just taíno. It is not just African, it is not just American, you know, after 1898.
Alana: In music that’s derived from European genres – like the mazurka – the emphasis is on the 1, on the downbeat.
Fabiola Méndez: Our jíbaro music is not necessarily on the downbeat. When we are playing a lot of the aguinaldos and the seises, and then when we have the guarachas, and all these other genres that are let’s say more African, there’s a lot of syncopation and you don’t have the emphasis on the one, you have the emphasis on the four beat.
So for example, if I were playing a guaracha, it would be [vocalizes]. So I’m, I’m like snapping on the beat, but you’re never hearing like pa-pa-pa [vocalizes].
And that’s usually what the guitar is doing with the baseline. And the cuatro is playing all these lines that connect and accentuate those kind of upbeats instead of the downbeats. And I say: That’s Africa. That’s Africa, right there.
Alana: The cuatro has grown up braided with another deep language, the language of the trovadores. The troubadours, who sing improvised songs timed to the music of the cuatro – to those seises and aguinaldos.
Fabiola Méndez: The main difference between the aguinaldos and the seises are actually what the trovador is singing.
ARCHIVAL – Irvin Santiago
Irvin Santiago: Que no suelten la bandera. Me escuchaste ya muy bien, hay que no suelte la bandera. Lo escuchaste ya muy bien…
Alana: There are several rhyme structures, with a different number of syllables on each line.
Fabiola Méndez: In the aguinaldos, the décimas have six syllables on each line. So for example, I’m gonna recite the decimilla:
Flora campesina // Con guiros tambores // de luz y colores // Prende la colina // El rito domina // El mágico edén // Y exalta también // Cadencia y paisaje // En cada paraje // De me Boriken.
Alana: That decimilla that Fabiola recited could be sung to different melodies and it would still fit. There are more than 150 styles of seises, and more than 50 aguinaldo styles, though it’s hard to know for sure. A trovador will ask a cuatrista to play a certain aguinaldo or seis. And an experienced cuatrista will know most of them – and in multiple keys – to play what the trovador requested to sing along to.
Fabiola Méndez: So for example, there’s aguinaldo jíbaro – [music]
…or there’s the aguinaldo cagueño, or there’s the aguinaldo yumac – [music]
…and each one of them have a different melody, a different chord progression. But what’s most important is that I could sing the exact same words I recited over all of those. It would sound differently, but they would all fit in the metric of the aguinaldo.
Alana: What’s even more incredible, is that the trovador will also often be improvising based on a prompt from the audience. That line is called the ‘pie forzado’, but it doesn’t start the song off. It actually ends it.
ARCHIVAL – Irvin Santiago Cuatrista y Trovador Music
Locutor: “Y decidido a vencerte.”
Alana: So the trovador is making up the lyrics on the spot in order to LAND on the pie forzado.
ARCHIVAL – Irvin Santiago Cuatrista y Trovador Music
Irvin Santiago: “En esto de improvisar, en esto de improvisar, he podido conocerte.”
Alana: They have to work backwards, fitting the rhyme structure, with the cuatro accompanying.
ARCHIVAL – Irvin Santiago Cuatrista y Trovador Music
Irvin Santiago: “Ese plan hoy se te invierte…”
Alana: It is a stunning tradition to witness.
ARCHIVAL – Irvin Santiago Cuatrista y Trovador Music
Irvin Santiago: Llegue como la marea, bien puesto pa’ la pelea, y decidido a vencerte, bien puesto pa’ la pelea y decidido a vencerte…
Fabiola Méndez: When you think about the jíbaros and the old trovadores and trovadoras, a lot of them did not go to school or went to school maybe until second grade. They would be often called analfabetas. So they didn’t necessarily know how to read or write, but they understood the rhythm of how you make these words fit and how you create the entire verse.
Alana: The cuatro can do all that traditional magic, but it’s also in a new era of music. Fabiola composes and sings her own songs, she even has an electric cuatro that she’s experimenting with.
The cuatro has been in pop music before, even at the top of the charts in Despacito a few years ago. Those opening notes on the cuatro were heard around the world in the song of the summer in 2017.
ARCHIVAL – Despacito: Luis Fonsi ft. Daddy Yankee
Alana: But there’s no denying that it’s having a moment with the Bad Bunny album.
Alana: How do you think the cuatro feels about being in the spotlight so much right now? Is it shy? Is it nervous about being on tour? Is it –
Fabiola Méndez: I think it’s like, hello about time! [risa] I definitely think so. It’s like, yeah, I deserve this. I’ve been working for, for long, for long enough.
Alana: Coming up next: who would the cuatro be, if the cuatro were a person?
This is La Brega.
BREAK
Irvin Santiago: No olvides el lelolai que la lucha es la que hay….
Alana: Irvin Santiago is both a cuatrista AND a trovador. It’s quite rare to master both of these complicated languages, but Irvin does.
Irvin Santiago: Por eso yo tengo siempre la banderita aquí, pa que sepa que mire esto no es mío, esto es de Puerto Rico…
Alana: He was seven years old when he first played a cuatro. All he had to do was strum the strings…
Irvin Santiago: Y yo me quedé maravillado del sonido…
Alana: And he fell in love with the brilliance of the sound. And also, of the smell.
Irvin Santiago: El olor del cuatro.
Alana: That first cuatro smelled of wood, of his grandmother’s farm, of clambering over tree trunks and swimming in rivers in Morovis.
Irvin Santiago: Y yo me acuerdo ese olor a madera, a la casa de mi abuela, a la finca, al la cejadero, a la naturaleza.
Alana: That’s part of the cuatro’s magic, that it’s a portal.
Irvin Santiago: O sea que podemos decir que cuando tiene una magia, una magia cultural, ¿verdad?
Alana: Irvin also hosts a traveling show with live music played all around Puerto Rico, streamed online on Facebook.
Irvin Santiago: Así que usted si anda por ahí échense para acá, pongalo el GPS Kiosko Tropical, carretera 802…
Alana: He has a big following in the diaspora too, for people who are hungry for the cuatro’s sound.
[Irvin Santiago playing music]
Today, that portal opens up onto a roadside restaurant in Corozal, where Irvin is on stage with an invited guest: Alejandro Rivera Santos, a teenage trovador prodigy from neighboring Naranjito.
[Alejandro Rivera Santos singing]
Irvin also directs the music department at the University of Puerto Rico, and he has an idea about why the cuatro is so captivating for young people. There are different elements to music – there’s harmony and melody. And the difference between them is like the difference between people.
There are those who don’t like speaking, they like listening, they’re in the background. The guitar, in this kind of traditional music, is that person. It’s the harmony.
Irvin Santiago: Pero hay personas que somos líderes, que nos gusta aportar a la sociedad…
Alana: And then, there are people who like to lead. And that’s what the cuatro does. It’s the protagonist, it has main-character energy. It carries the melody.
Irvin Santiago: Es lo mismo. El cuatro tiene esa línea melódica. La melodía, fijate…
Alana: Irvin says children pick up on this. He’s had many young students who say the guitar has no music. But they’re drawn to the cuatro.
Irvin Santiago: ”Es que la guitarra no, no tiene música.” Mira esa manera de un niño ver eso…
Alana: Today, Irvin has eight cuatros at home. And while they’re all leaders, they have different personalities, in the same way that no two people are exactly alike. They feel to him like living beings.
Irvin Santiago: Aunque es un pedazo de madera, pero tiene rasgo como un ser vivo, ¿verdad? Y hay que…
Alana: If the cuatro is a living being, it cannot live on its own. Of course, there’s the extended family of other guitar-like forms in our hemisphere. But there’s also the immediate family of Puerto Rican traditional instruments.
I got to listen to the whole family of instruments together in the courtyard of a school in Guaynabo. That’s where the Orquesta Jíbara Doctor Francisco López Cruz was practicing.
Noraliz Ruiz: We are about to hear an arrangement of Turista from Bad Bunny’s latest album.
Alana: Noraliz Ruiz is their co-director, and she also plays with Balún, the band that does La Brega’s music.
Noraliz Ruiz: It’s an arrangement that our co-director, Luis Santiago Bartolomei, did and is written for the instruments of the Orquesta Jíbara, of this ensemble that features the tiple, the bordonua, and cuatros playing different melodic ranges.
Alana: With the sounds kind of filled in by these instruments, even though they weren’t in the original song?
Noraliz Ruiz: Exactly. And, and with some additions too, like some melodic passages and also tremulos from the tiples that are very high pitched and they fill the arrangement in a very particular way.
Alana: That sounds gorgeous. Okay. Okay.
[Orquesta Jíbara practicing Turista arrangement]
Alana: The bordonua, which Nora plays, has this deep sound, which they’re sometimes using as Bad Bunny’s heartbroken voice in this bolero. The cuatro is, as ever, prominent in the original song, and it is here too, reaching high with the sweetness of memories of a lost love.
It’s not a stretch, with all these different voices, for the members of the ensemble to imagine their instruments as members of a family.
Laura Santiago-Bartolomei y Anyeliz Págan: El cuatro es como el adolescente rebelde.
Alana: The cuatro is the rebellious teen – doing whatever they want.
Laura Santiago-Bartolomei y Anyeliz Págan: Es como el loco que puede tocar lo que quiera, que parisea, Que lo encuentras tocando con Bad Bunny, pero también está tocando con los Pancho. Mira, el cuatro es el adolescente rebelde.
The bordonua is the mom, steady and firm. The tiple is the high pitched baby of the family – a babbling toddler.
Laura Santiago-Bartolomei y Anyeliz Págan: Pero no bebé que va llorando, es un bebé que ya habla.
Alana: The guitar is the stern father.
Laura Santiago-Bartolomei y Anyeliz Págan: Y la guitarra, la guitarra es como el papá. “¿Qué hacen? Quédense aquí.”
Alana: Then there are the bad influences of the percussion section: the bongo and the guiro. They’re the cousins who take the cuatro with them to get into trouble.
Laura Santiago-Bartolomei: Pues si fuera, el bongo para mí es el primo mayor. Y el güiro es el primo chiquito, entonces están todos los tres así como el cuatro, el bongo y el güiro para todos, pá.
Alana: ¿Tú has pensado esto antes?
Laura Santiago-Bartolomei: No, lo acabo, lo acabo de pensar. [they laugh]
Alana: And believe it or not, Laura Santiago-Bartolomei, who led the way with this idea, had never thought about it before.
The versatility of the cuatro is clear to Anyeliz Págan, too.
Anyeliz Pagan: Whatever the song calls for, it can play. So, one of my favorite arrangements that we have in the orchestra is Yesterday by the Beatles, and there it cries a little bit.
ARCHIVAL – Orquesta Jibara: Yesterday
Anyeliz Pagan: If you hear Pegate, the Ricki Martin song, right? It has a cuatro, but the cuatro is there. But it’s partying, right?
ARCHIVAL – Pegate: Ricky Martin
Anyeliz Pagan: But then you hear Despacito. And it’s kind of maybe even sensual, you could call it.
ARCHIVAL – Despacito: Luis Fonsi ft. Daddy Yankee
Anyeliz Pagan: If you hear Tu Recuerdo, also Ricki Martin, it’s kind of melancholic.
ARCHIVAL – Tu Recuerdo: Ricky Martin ft. Chambao, Tommy Torres
Alana: That one is actually an adapted aguinaldo jibaro, played by Christian Nieves, with the cuatro pulling a traditional sound into a global hit nearly twenty years before Luis Sanz would do it again for Bad Bunny.
Noraliz Ruiz: There has always been room for innovation and experimentation and I think that the audience has always embraced that reality for the cuatro.
Alana: Again, Nora Ruiz. In addition to being an accomplished cuatrista with the Orchestra Jibara, and with Balún, Nora is also an ethnomusicologist.
And she’s found that the cuatro has adapted to new circumstances, just like Puerto Ricans all over the world. It went, for example, to Hawaii with sugar plantation workers in the 1900s. The cuatros there still preserve the original keyhole shape, but the way Puerto Rican Hawaiians play is different: they have a whole other traditional genre called kachi kachi music, a lively and fast paced take on the jibaro tradition.
ARCHIVAL – kachi kachi music
Noraliz Ruiz: It was the first time that I saw people like dancing to cuatro music like in couples and like dando vuelta and I’m like, this is the way like people dance probably salsa, merengue in Puerto Rico but in Hawaii de were like responding to cuatro music in that way.
Alana: And the cuatro had gone to New York, like so many Puerto Ricans. That’s where a cuatrista, Efrain Ronda, was writing the very first cuatro method in the 1930s – it had all been an oral tradition before then.
Noraliz Ruiz: So that guy Efrain Ronda in New York was saying, “Okay, it’s okay to play rock and roll in the cuatro you can play danza you can play it’s also fine to learn this kind of music as well.”
Alana: But even as the cuatro has been open to adapting, there’s been some anxiety that as a traditional way of life disappears, so will the cuatro.
When electric guitars and rock music from the US became popular in Puerto Rico, some feared that these new genres would displace the cuatro and make it obsolete. So, the cuatro, our champion instrument, had to be championed itself.
Noraliz Ruiz: There was, like, a clear intention of of presenting this as a symbol of national identity from the 1960s. And it has been like a mantra: the cuatro is the national Instrument, we have to keep this instrument alive, we have to fight for for this kind of music. And it has succeeded.
Alana: The cuatro isn’t some kind of fringe folkloric instrument, and it hasn’t been for a while. When Nora was growing up, it was on TV. That’s how she first fixated on it. She was 7, and she saw the cuatrista Maso Rivera on a game show.
ARCHIVAL – Maso Rivera: Show de Tiples 1989
Gladys Rodríguez: Yo voy a tener orgullo de ser la asistente de Maso.
Maso: Para mi un placer…
Noraliz Ruiz: And I remember that he was playing and he had a chest filled with cuatros of all sizes.
ARCHIVAL – Maso Rivera: Show de Tiples 1989
Alana: It was the 80s. And Nora immediately asked her mom if she could take classes.
Noraliz Ruiz: It was like a performance. He was playing a regular-sized cuatro and then he changed to another type of cuatro, tiples, and then he ended the show with a bat, a baseball bat signed by Roberto Clemente.
ARCHIVAL – Maso Rivera: Show de Tiples 1989
Maso: Mira para mi hermano puertorriqueño, Maso Rivera, Roberto Clemente.
Gladys: Ah, mira que lindo.
Alana: A cuatrista was so relevant, so essential to Puerto Ricanness, that the country’s greatest baseball hero had called him a brother.
Noraliz Ruiz: There a quote that many people associates with Maso Rivera
ARCHIVAL – Maso Rivera: Show de Tiples 1989
Maso: Que yo me dedico a enseñar un niño para educar a un pueblo.
Gladys: Exacto. Eso está muy lindo.
Alana: “To educate a child is to educate a people.”
Noraliz Ruiz: The cuatro is your flag de cuatro es your weapon, the cuatro defines our soundscape. I mean there are many genres of Puerto rican music but the sound of the cuatro has a potential to define what we are.
Alana: I have no doubt that somewhere, somehow, there’s a child reaching out for the cuatro’s strings. It could even be happening right now, this very moment, as you hear these words.
Maybe the cuatro first called to them through Luis’s heartfelt solo, or through Fabiola’s poetry, or Irvin’s live performances, or Nora and the orchestra. But however it happened, it’ll keep happening.
And we’ll be listening, spellbound, letting the cuatro transport us back in time, yes, but rocking us forward too.
On the next episode of La Brega, when the US president calls for a boycott of the Olympics, how does Puerto Rico answer?
This episode was reported and written by me, Alana Casanova-Burgess. It was produced by Ezequiel Rodriguez Andino, and edited by Maria Garcia and Laura Perez. Our senior producer is Nicole Rothwell.
Original art for this episode is by Raysa Rodriguez Garcia of Colectivo Morivivi. Special thanks this week to Laura Quiñones, Josilda Acosta Figueras, Noraliz Ruiz, Luis Sanz, Fabiola Mendez, Irvin Santiago, Angelica Negron, and Sergio Gutierrez Negron.
The La Brega team includes Nicole Rothwell, Ezequiel Rodriguez Andino, Laura Pérez, Liliana Ruiz, Roxana Aguirre, Maria Garcia, and Marlon Bishop.
Our production managers are Jessica Ellis and Victoria Estrada with support from Francis Poon. And our marketing team includes Anhelo Reyes and Luis Luna with support from Paloma Pérez and Jackie Hill.
Fact checking this season is by Laura Moscoso and Tatiana Díaz Ramos.
Sound design by Jacob Rosati.
Mixing by Stephanie Lebow, Julia Caruso, and JJ Querubin.
Scoring and musical curation by Jacob Rosati and Stephanie Lebow.
Original music is by Balún. Our theme song is by IFÉ. Special thanks this week to Jacob Rosati for remixing our theme song with music from Noraliz Ruiz, and support from Stephanie Lebow.
Our executive producers are Marlon Bishop and Maria Garcia and me, Alana Casanova-Burgess.
Legal review by ProJourn and Clearance Counsel by Fisher Legal Arts; Jonathan Fisher.
Futuro Media was founded by Maria Hinojosa.
La Brega is a production of Futuro Studios. This season of La Brega was made possible by the Mellon Foundation.
Check out our website, labregapodcast.org, for transcripts and more information about this episode.
And if you want access to the entire season right now, ad-free, sign up to support us as a Futuro Plus member, at futuromediagroup.org/joinplus
Talk to you soon, bai.
