Community Conversations
Blogpost #1
On July 27, 2025, one of Nueva York’s most beloved plena singers passed away. Lovers of traditional plena song will remember José Rivera for his fiery vocals with Los Pleneros 21, the city’s venerable Afro-Puerto Rican bomba y plena ensemble. As a performer and teacher, José collaborated with many of the city’s leading Puerto Rican musicians and dancers over his four-decade career.
José ruminated on his life with plena in the following interview with folklorists Elena Martínez and Ray Allen in October of 2023.
I was born around the lagoons of Santurce, San Juan, on October 23, 1957. My father, Ramón “Chin” Rivera, was a fisherman, a drummer, and singer of plena, the sung newspaper of poor Black Puerto Ricans. At the age of two, my parents split up and my mother, Paula Castro, brought me to New York where my grandmother was living and where she thought I could get a better education. We lived on Eagle Avenue around 156thStreet in the South Bronx—that was where she opened up her own little grocery shop after she remarried.
Growing up in the 1960s I was exposed to all sorts of music: salsa, Cuban rumba, jazz, and I really loved American rock and roll. My mother wanted me to know something about our Puerto Rican music, and my older brother Raymond “Chin” Rivera (AKA, Papa Chin) , who was visiting us, taught me some basic beats of the drum. You see he had learned to drum from my father back in Puerto Rico. Then when I was around ten years old my mother sent me back to Puerto Rico to visit my real father. She figured since I liked to drum, I should go back to PR and learn about my roots. So my father took me around the lagoons where he fished and introduced me to all these musicians. He had bomba barrel drums and panderetas that he actually made himself from goat skins. It was a tremendous experience for me as a boy—eating all this food, drinking coconut milk, watching him build drums, and seeing all these people celebrating at fiestas with panderetas. That was my first experience with real bomba and plena.
Back in the Bronx I started at Morris High School and was lucky enough to get music lessons—I learned about jazz and even had some African drumming. El Barrio at that time, back in the 1970s, was a real melting pot of Latino cultures. I remember in the warm weather going every Sunday heading to the rumba jam sessions around the fountain in Central Park. There was lots of Cuban drumming with congas and batas. The Dominicans came with their tamboras, and there were even a few Africans with their djembe drums. And we brought our panderetas, which were easy to carry, so we could play plenas. It was a beautiful thing—all these people playing different drums and celebrating their heritage in the park!
When I was still in high school, I started playing bongos with some older guys who sang at the Four Corners Social Club that was just across the street from our apartment on Eagle Avenue. They played guitar and cuatro—mostly jíbaro stuff and Christmas songs for the holidays. But my mother didn’t like me, as a teenager, being in that club scene, she was worried I would get into trouble. So one day she took me to the recruitment center on Fordham Road and convinced me to sign up for the Army. “José, now you can be a gang member in the biggest gang in the world” she told me, “the US Army.” And I was only seventeen! Fortunately, it was post-Vietnam I ended up being sent to Germany where I became an MP. It wasn’t so bad, because I joined this club, Latinos Unidos, and played in a band that entertained the Hispanic soldiers. Imagine,there I was playing plena music right there in Germany!
After I finished six years in the army I came back to the Bronx and worked in my mother’s grocery store. Soon I started back hanging out down on Brook Avenue, where I met Chema, José Manuel “Chema” Soto, the founder of the legendary Casita Rincón Criollo at 158th St and Brook Avenue. He had cleaned up this lot and started a garden, and we built a casita, a wooden house, like a club, where people in the community could come and feel at home and play dominos and just hang out. He was from Santurce, and all these musicians started to come by with conga and barriles (bomba drums) and panderetas to get their drums fixed and to play. There were lots of musicians hanging around, and Chema and the drum maker Cali Rivera introduced me to Pepe Castillo, and that’s how I got going playing music with him.
Now I heard about Juango Gutiérrez and LP21 through Pepe Castillo and his cuatro playing compadre Edgardo Miranda. I had been playing with Edgardo and Pepe in the early 1980s–conga drum, bongos, and pandereta. We had just finished
recording this album, Banana Land; that was a tribute to jíbaro and plena music, but done in this very modern style.
You see Pepe, the main arranger and pianist, really knew contemporary jazz and fusion. music. That must have been around 1984. Then three of us split off from Pepe—that was Edgardo, who played guitar and cuatro, bass player Donald “Spider” Nicks, and myself playing drums. We started gigging around as a trio, doing música jíbaro and plena. Then one day Edgardo tells us about a new group that he’d been playing with. This young cat, Juango Gutiérrez, was putting together a group with these old plena and bomba masters. He said we should check it out, because they were playing the real stuff with elder pleneros Marcial Reyes, Paquito Rivera, and Pablo “Gallito” Ortiz. So we did, and all three of us went over to Juango and eventually we joined Los Pleneros 21.
In the early days, back in the 1980s, we would rehearse in the Marine Tigers Community Board Center basement in El Barrio. Juan had brought in the great singers Paquito Rivera and Gallito Ortiz, and the dancer Eugenia Ramos had just joined. With these old-timers we had a real traditional street sound with the singing and drumming. But Juan brought in other instruments—strings and piano—and we started doing plenas with fancier arrangements, mixing the older bomba and plena with more modern sounding jazz. Much of that was done by Edgardo who really knew jazz and understood all the chords on the cuatro and how to use them. And pianist Carlos Suarez and bass player Don Nicks helped too. I was playing pandereta, but that’s also when I started to sing. I had plenas that I had learned from my brother and father, and some that I made up myself.
LP21 started gigging around at community gatherings in El Barrio and travelling, playing for bigger events like the Smithsonian Folk Festival in Washington and at colleges and museums. Then in 1993 we got to go back to Puerto Rico as part of the Somos Boricuas tour organized by Roberta Singer through City Lore. Going back to PR as a plenero was exciting for me because my family and friends back there had never seen me perform—they knew my father and brother played, but now they saw me. And we got to jam with some of the Island’s leading exponents of plena, groups like Los Pleneros del Truco and Los Pleneros de la 23 Abajo.
Now Juango was an educator as well as a musician, so early on he figured out a way to get grants to have us play in the schools. Then he started community workshops in El Barrio for neighborhood kids to learn about their music and Afro-Puerto Rican heritage. So we became more than musicians, now we were teaching musicians. We instructed the kids on how to play drums, how to sing and dance, and where this music came from. You’ve got music coming directly from the Islands, Puerto Rico and Cuba, but also there’s bigger Africa—Africa is the real root of bomba and plena and the kids should be proud of that. One of the reasons I could relate to the kids was that I liked all kinds of music, including rap. So I took this traditional tongue twister song, “Chiviriquitón,” and added a rap verse in English to it. They loved it!
Eventually I started my own group, Los Amigos de la Plena. I was very proud that a few of my most talented community workshop students including drummers Nelson “Mateo” Gonzalez and Camilo Molina, and dancer LeAna López ended up playing with me for a while. We performed mostly in the Bronx, at schools and festivals and, and of course at Chema’s casita. We got involved at Hostos Community College, working with Wally Edgecombe to put on the BomPlenazo events—big festivals celebrating bomba and plena with players from New York and the Island.
I’ve played with lots of folks over the years, but still am part of LP21 as a singer and teacher. I was fortunate enough to perform at their 40th anniversary concert in 2023 and to contribute one of my own songs to the new CD they recently released, Por La Plena y Otros Asuntos. Looking back, playing with Juango and singing those old-timers like Paquito Rivera and Gallito Ortiz—may they rest in peace—has been a real honor. Music has been my life—that’s why my song says “Yo soy la plena” (“I Am the Plena”).
1 thought on ““Yo Soy la Plena” – Remembering José Rivera”
I always had great adoration for the work of Mr. Rivera and the love he put into it with Los Pleneros. I am neither an artist nor a folklorist, although at one point perhaps I could have been considered a “cultural specialist.” But I was a true admirer and, through the City of New York, a proud funder of the company and supporter of the terrific work they did in making community in New York City. His death is a loss, certainly, for those who loved him far and wide. But legends never die. Not really. They live in all of us who remember. We will remember.