Bound for Ameri’ky: Poetics of Inter-Racial Collaboration in the Puerto Rican-Appalachian Musical “Betsy!”

Maribel Alvarez, Folklorist, University of Arizona

"In Betsy!, secrets function as a gravitational force that pulls towards the light threads of unspoken connections between generations of racialized immigrants. The normalized history of the United States inevitably includes stories of travel, settlement, and love in mixed company. The facts are generally accepted: the people who came before us, in some cases indigenous to the land and at other times by forced or voluntary arrivals, engaged in a struggle of belonging and displacement that endures to the present day. In Betsy!, however, that familiar story bends in a different direction. Betsy! reveals a powerful and often painful secret: the ancestors we claim do not always tell the whole story of who we are."

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