Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body

This series listens to the political, gendered, queer(ed), racial engagements and class entanglements involved in proclaiming out loud: La-TIN-x. ChI-ca-NA. La-TI-ne. ChI-ca-n-@.  Xi-can-x. Funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative, the Latinx Sound Cultures Studies Working Group critically considers the role of sound and listening in our formation as political subjects. Through both a comparative and cross-regional lens, we invite Latinx Sound Scholars to join us as we dialogue about our place within the larger fields of Chicanx/Latinx Studies and Sound Studies. We are delighted to publish our initial musings with Sounding Out!, a forum that has long prioritized sound from a queered, racial, working-class and  “always-from-below” epistemological standpoint. —Ed. Dolores Inés Casillas

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My Puerto Rican grandmother used to sing Pedro Infante’s “Las mañanitas” to all the women in the family on their birthdays, so naturally I grew up thinking this was a Puerto Rican song. Not quite – it’s Mexican. When my family came to New York City from Puerto Rico in the 1950s, they were starved of warm waters, mountains, and family members, but they were not starved of Spanish-language music and media thanks in large part to Mexico’s Golden Age of Cinema. In the Bronx, Puerto Ricans would go the theaters to watch movies like Nosotros los Pobres (1948),which popularized boleros like “Las Mañanitas.” This movie-going ritual in the wake of relocation and diaspora has provided the birthday soundtrack to my life. 

My mother grew up listening to her father sing boleros, and she would later sing with the Florida Grand Opera Chorus when I was a child. My early knowledge of opera came from her. Growing up in Miami Beach, I would also listen to reggaetón and hip-hop in afterschool programs. The Parks & Recreation department would host dances for us, and that was where I first learned to dance perreo. My early musical surroundings represent what it means to be a colonial subject, to hear the Italianate vocal legacies of opera mixed with the Afro-Diasporic and Indigenous rhythms of reggaetón. This post contextualizes my experience within bolero’s colonial history and legacy particularly its operatic disciplining of brown and Black bodies and voices. Reggaetóneras provide models for sonic subversion by being ronca, raspy, or breathy, and thus overriding internalized Eurocentric dichotomies of feminine and masculine vocal timbres.

When I began my own operatic training in college, I was constantly told to “purify” my voice, to resist vocal “fry,” and to handle my acid reflux by avoiding spicy foods. I was steered away from singing the pop songs I had grown up with, and kept many musical activities secret, like when I soloed for the tango ensemble and my a cappella group. In graduate school, thanks to my Latina roommates, I began listening to reggaetón again. I reunited with the voices that raised me and was reassured that their teachings of resistance would always present themselves when I needed them.

After 20 years of listening to Ivy, I have located the descriptor that most closely encapsulates the way her voice sounds to me: ronca. This is Spanish for hoarse, and in my experience, it’s been used colloquially, mostly by women, to describe moments when their throats might feel sore, and their voices sound raspy, or masculine, even. Ronca has been articulated as an epistemology of vocal sounding in the artistry of lower-class Black reggaetón creators like Don Omar and more recently, Ozuna. Sounding ronca is a signifier of realness, of truly knowing the struggle of race and class oppression. It is a vocalization of full-body rage fueled by poverty and colonization.

Ivy’s voice is so special to me because she sounds like my aunt when she’s had a long day, my mom when she’s yelling, and my grandma after years of having long days and yelling at people. She sounds like the raw, unfiltered power that comes from exhaustion. She sounds like inner will and justified fury. She sounds like yelling at landlords and ex-husbands for hot water and child support. She sounds like age. And she always has, even when she was “young.” And this sound is even more beautiful and life-giving to me after 4+ years in a classical voice program that told me it was bad to sound hoarse or raspy, surveilled my eating, and perpetuated the colonization of Native and Black peoples through musical subjugation.

Operatic training utilizes mechanisms that are opposite of what is “natural” for me as a poor Latina from the barrio. It asks me to lift my voice, clarify it, and feminize it. This, to me, is antithetical to the girl who laughs really loudly, gets raspy often from yelling and eating too many Takis, and loves to sing from her chest. Ivy’s voice empowers my place as the antithesis. Even as I sang classically in college, my voice was still often described as “soulful,” “hoarse,” “raspy,” “throaty.” My voice, although in a moment of attempted cleanup in college, was read as having previously engaged in genres that disrupt colonial dichotomies of “art” and “noise.” The sonic Blackness– in particular the exoticized and tropicalized Blackness of Latinidad in the U.S.- of my timbre was legible, and perhaps even hyper-audible, in moments when I was trying to adapt to European art forms. Raquel Z. Rivera asserts in New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone (2003) that Latinidad doesn’t take away from Blackness but adds an element of exoticism to the Blackness. Thus, I have come to understand ronca voices as representative of a Latina/e liberatory sonic and embodied praxis that resists the derogatory discourse around racialized voices predicated on European ideals of cleanliness.

The ronca voice is negotiating suciedad, Deborah Vargas’ analytic for how queers of color may reclaim their abject bodies and social spaces. Readings of my voice in predominantly white spaces were contextualized by my queer ambiguously-brown body, which in direct opposition to whitening regimes, was sounding suciedad. This is what ronca voices do, and what I conceptualize as “ronca realness”: the tendency of Latinas/es to not hide behind the voice but rather keep it real with the audience via their vocal timbre. Ronca voices sound another option to Barthes’ hegemonic article “The Grain of the Voice,” which has been applied to Ivy Queen and Don Omar in Jennifer Domino Rudolph’s “‘Roncamos Porque Podemos,’” and Dara Goldman’s “Walk like a Woman, Talk like a Man: Ivy Queen’s Troubling of Gender.” I intend ronca realness to be understood as a queer of color vocal analytic born from community and lived experience.

Ronca voices reflect emotional states, flip colonial gendered vocal scripts, reveal if the singer had coffee that morning and Hot Cheetos the night before, and navigate tough musical contours with strain and stress; most importantly, they refuse to be white(ned). In college, my ronca realness was not always a choice. Keeping it real, in general, is sometimes undecided upon prior to the act of realness; it is an additional and deeply engrained responsibility that queer people of color have in white spaces to sound their dissent, or else face the continued exploitation of their communities. Further, these acts of realness may not even be legible as such but are often coded as bad behavior or an attitude problem.

Within communities of color and (im)migrant communities, it’s important to recognize that Ivy Queen’s ronca timbre was permissible because she was light-skinned, thin, and usually took on the masculine role of the rapper, rather than the feminine role of the dancer, in several of her videos. These privileges have left Afro-Latina ronca reggaetóneras like La Sista in the shadows.

La Sista has veered away from sounding ronca in recent years, but in her debut album, Majestad Negroide (2006), she praised Yoruba goddess Yemaya and Taino cacique Anacaona with a hoarse, raspy, bold sound. She is the Afro-Indigenous Latina many of us needed growing up, and her absence speaks to the ways in which Black ronca voices are policed and erased within Latinx culture and elsewhere. Let us praise her now.

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Featured Image: Still image by SO! from RaiNao’s “Tentretiene”

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Cloe Gentile Reyes (she/her) is a queer Boricua scholar, poet, and performer from Miami Beach. She is a soon-to-be Faculty Fellow in NYU’s Department of Music and earned her PhD in Musicology from UC Santa Barbara. Her writing explores how Caribbean femmes navigate intergenerational trauma and healing through decolonial sound, fashion, and dance. Cloe’s poems have been featured in the womanist magazine, Brown Sugar Lit, and she has presented and performed at PopCon, Society for American Music, International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch, among several others. 

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