Paragraph: “Benito has just begun to think this through. He admitted that he didn’t know how to respond when, at the beginning of his career, journalists would ask him about Tego Calderón, suggesting he might have enjoyed more success if he hadn’t been Black. “That question used to stun me. Like, what do you mean, more success? For me he’s huge, he’s the greatest – so I didn’t understand.” It’s only now, after a little more time in the industry, that he sees that these prejudicial dynamics “are real,” even as he still struggles to articulate them clearly. His rather belated statement in support of the recent Black Lives Matter uprisings did not address racism in the music industry. Instead, he urged his audience not to “wait for artists, or for fictitious heroes.” Fame has exaggerated the tension between Benito’s drive to understand the world and his more hermetic
tendencies. He’d wanted to wait on the statement until he reckoned a little more with his own discomfort. He told me: “As a child, for better or worse, I always lived in my bubble. Now, I could say – and people do say – it’s a form of privilege. But it’s always been my way of being. Me, in my house and in my bubble, imagining a better, more magical world.”
Sentence: “Dreaming is everything,” Benito had told me, and this vision was indeed dreamlike: a larger-than-life enchantment of our quotidian reality here in the uptown corridors where so many Puerto Ricans have become, and refuse to become, Americans.”
