Súbete la minifalda hasta la espalda: Femme Fashion Ancestries in Perreo
Mariana “Aida” ready for a dance, wearing a sweetheart neckline black velvet knee-length dress with fringe, black translucent tights, and a chunky red necklace. Photo courtesy of the author.
My Boricua grandmother loved many things: her “girls” (me, my mom, and my titi), salsero Marc Anthony, her monthly dances at the senior center, and fashion. Ever since I first laid eyes on her bedroom closet, it has been packed to the brim with her many steals and clearance items. If you can crabwalk well enough to get to the middle section, you will find her dancing dresses: rhinestoned, ruffled, sequined, tassled, and flowy, that moved with her body as one. My grandmother was known for her salsa dancing into her old age and we all often brag that she was on Stars of Tomorrow, a local TV program from the 1950s that showcased young talent in the Bronx. Dancing and fashion went hand in hand for her. One would not be enjoyable without the other. My lifelong intimacy with her closet and her dancing dresses gave me an awareness for understanding culture. To locate femme agency, we must prioritize the relationship between sound and sartorial practices. Growing up in a matriarchal family structure, fashion and dancing have always been ways of exerting power and reclaiming control over our bodies, asserting belonging in new and ancestral lands, and being loud when colonial patriarchal structures wish to silence us. In the midst of my grandmother’s posthumously dilapidated house, her dresses are where I literally and metaphorically “find sequins in the rubble.” Her closet is an archive of racialized femme world-building.
My grandmother’s salsa is my reggaetón. For her, the transnationality of salsa closed the distance between New York City and her lovely island, Borikén. Her clothes and the way she moved her body were her means of survival in heatless winters. Reggaetón acts in similar ways for me. I grew up in Miami Beach in the late 90s-early 2000s when reggaetóneres like Ivy Queen, Daddy Yankee, Wisin y Yandel, and Don Omar were dominating the airwaves. As I have moved around the continental United States for many reasons (including poverty, eviction, college, grad school, covid-19, and career opportunities), reggaetón has moved in and out of my life. It has always been a reminder of where I come from when I need it most, and has taught me lessons on how my body has been colonized and how I can free myself from that imposition. I believe perreo is an ancestral gift and a decolonial epistemology of being in my body. At a young age, dancing perreo was when I first felt another body pressed up against my own, first opened myself up to the idea of sex and the vastness of sexuality, and first felt the pleasure of gyrating hips uncaging themselves, popping and unlocking new meanings for my future and our collective past. As a disabled femme in a (post)pandemic world, dancing reminds me to value my body’s unique way of moving through the world, even when fatphobic doctors, solitude, fear, and chronic pain lay their claim on me. Perreo has trained my back, hips, thighs, waist, and knees to move in a way that memorializes my sacredness. Perreo and reggaetón have also empowered my queer femme sartorial practices. The following exploration of one femme-centric garment ––the minifalda––and its ancestry in reggaetón and bomba is a practice in “listening to flesh,” asserting that the adornment practices of brown and Black femmes are deeply instructive for liberation through both sound and movement.
Glory’s self-titled album cover, Glou, 2005. Image courtesy of Machete Music Records, Universal Music Latin Entertainment.
I center the minifalda as a means to recover lost lineages of femme innovation in now male-dominated (post)colonial sonic cultures. In reggaetónera Glory’s self-titled album cover above, she displays her two sides: one in ripped jeans and a bikini top with her rizos out, and the other in a perreo-ready white flowy minifalda. The minifalda pictured here was the quintessential garment worn to dance perreo in the early 2000s. The minifalda frees the legs and thighs for bending and adds a flounce and flair to each booty pop. Under the strong thumb of the Mano Dura contra el Crimen in 1990s Puerto Rico, reggaetón was highly policed and Black femme sexuality surveilled. Created primarily by Black artists from the caseríos, reggaetón was viewed by government officials as delinquent, backwards, and hypersexualized, and this view was reflected in the 2006 “Anti-Pornography” campaign against reggaetón championed by Senator Velda Gonzalez.
Glory’s album cover presents a binary between the woman in the minifalda who is perreo ready, and the woman in jeans, man-spreading and ready to talk business. This artificial binary, as a product of state-sanctioned surveillance of racialized femininity, erases femmes and invalidates their embodied survival mechanisms as unserious and unintellectual.
In another example from Puerto Rican duo Calle 13, their 2009 hit song Atrevete-te-te, features the group’s frontman, Residente, telling women in the video, “súbete la minifalda hasta la espalda.” The music video shows a chorus line of white/light-skinned women with minifaldas just like the one Glory wore as they body roll through a suburb while Residente and his crew catcall them from a car and beckon them to let loose.
The classic minifalda can also be seen in Carolina Caycedo’s documentary on El Gran Perreton, a dance competition that took place in Rincón, Puerto Rico in 2004. Throughout the video, several femme dancers don minifaldas of various kinds. The femme dancer from the winning couple, pictured above, wore a minifalda in red.
In searching for the origins of the minifalda as phenomena, I must contend with the obfuscation of perreo’s roots due to colonial violence. Perreo has a particular West and Central African lineage, yet its exact lineage is widely contested and imagined. The exact origins of perreo are obscured by the colonial homogenization of African peoples and customs, but are affirmed by practitioners and participants in both Africa and the Caribbean. In Kyra D. Gaunt’s essay, Twerking is African?: Origin Myths, she explains that many of our ideas around creative customs that have emerged from the Diaspora are from a racial and ancestral imaginary rather than a reality. Yet, she asserts, this does not necessarily negate the interconnectedness of Afro-descended peoples, but places greater emphasis on embodied ancestries. Thus, I find an avenue for perreo ancestry that is not just sonic, but also visual and embodied, in Puerto Rican bomba.
Melanie Maldonado is one of bomba’s preeminent feminist scholars who centers fashion and specifically the skirt as a means of illuminating women’s roles in the artform. She describes bomba’s quintessential white skirt as a successor to the petticoat, or enagua. She explains, “petticoat (enagua) fashion became an unregulated realm where women could experiment and dictate their own participation.” While the skirt itself can be seen as a conformity to colonial beauty standards and ideals of decency, Maldonado has found that women would lift the skirt as a gesture of “passive aggression” to subvert colonial ideals of modesty. Through this exploration of the minifalda, we can see colonial ideals dating as far back as the middle passage and continuing into modern-day with the Anti-Porn Campaign.
Screenshot of white ruffled bomba enagua from video taken by Tita Vazquez at the 5th Encuentro de Tambores Juncos in Loíza, PR.
White ruffled enagua worn by dancer in Los Pleneros de la 21, an East Harlem-based bomba y plena ensemble.
Maldonado explains how the skirt shaped the types of poses women would take on and “how they created a figura (or elegant pose) while dancing.” The lifting of the skirt “helped create a display space just underneath the skirt that a woman controlled by, when, and for how long she displayed it. Her enagua wowed and tantalized, taunted and inspired.” Indebted greatly to Maldonado’s research, I theorize the perreo miniskirt as a permanent gesture of passive aggression, an unflinching display that tantalizes and inspires. The minifalda may thus be understood as Afro-Diasporic not because of its original design or intent, but because of how women across the diaspora have utilized its design to resist imposed decency. By making the connection between perreo and bomba clearer through fabric, we celebrate the white ruffled skirt’s deep relationship with dancing femmes on the island throughout several centuries of shifting psychosocial misogynoir, slavery, and colonization.
Further, these femmecentric sonic-sartorial histories illuminate how the bomba dancer acts as a conductor, using her skirt to cue the drummers and to structure her stance, innovating music, movement, and fashion at once. As a successor to the bomba dancer-conductor, the perreo dancer also then holds power over her sonic landscape. Her body and the skirt she wears are archives of matriarchal Afro-Indigenous ancestral memory and music-making.
At the same time, the skirt appears in contexts that are predominantly white and light skinned. The disconnection of the minifalda from Black femmes is glaringly obvious in Calle 13’s video, perhaps critically and purposefully, but nonetheless devoid of the Black femmes that gave the bomba skirt meaning.
Screenshot of four white or light-skinned women with blonde wigs and matching white ruffled tops and miniskirts in Calle 13’s video Atrévete-te-te, 2006. Directed by Gabriel Coss.
Photo from @outofservicemiami Instagram.
Cardi B in a yellow, ruffled, high-low minifalda in the front/enagua in the back garment in the video for I Like It, 2018. Directed by Eif Rivera. In the video, yellow is perhaps an ode to Ochún, orisha of fertility, since Cardi was pregnant while filming.
To end, I invoke an image from 2021 during an event hosted by Out of Service Miami, a femme-run organization that hosts reggaetón parties in Miami, Florida. We see, here, the classic white ruffled miniskirt that Glory wore almost sixteen years ago, and in the new context of bomba, we see a shortened version of a skirt worn 400 years ago. We also see that the moves of our ancestors have created a space for queer dance to take place because the queer Afro-Diasporic potentials were always there from the beginning.
The minifalda has provided a matrilineal portal for theorizing inter-island (post)colonial resistance practices undertaken by Black and brown femmes throughout the diaspora. I have also presented the falda as a necessary mode of inquiry that reaffirms the ancestral lineage between perreo and bomba, and even salsa, when we remember my grandmother’s influence on this endeavor. I thank her for the hours she took to get ready to leave the house. I realize now she was donning very heavy armor.
Cloe Gentile Reyes (she/her) is a queer Boricua scholar, poet, and performer from Miami Beach. She is a Faculty Fellow in NYU’s CAS Department of Music and earned her PhD in Musicology from UC Santa Barbara. Her dissertation is entitled “Reggaetón as Resistance: Negotiating Racialized Femininity through Rap, Miniskirts, and Perreo” and is the subject of her first book project. Cloe’s writing explores how Caribbean femmes navigate intergenerational trauma and healing through decolonial sound, fashion, and dance, and has been featured in the womanist magazine, Brown Sugar Lit, and in Sounding Out!. She has presented and performed at PopCon, Society for American Music, and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch, among several others.