A bilingual edition of a renowned work of Puerto Rican literature, " Cortijo's Wake/El entierro de Cortijo" is novelist Edgardo Rodriguez Julia's vivid description of the funeral of legendary Puerto Rican musician Rafael Cortijo." El entierro de Cortijo" became an immediate bestseller following its original publication in Puerto Rico in 1983. An unparalleled Afro-Puerto Rican percussionist and bandleader, Cortijo (1928-1982) revolutionized the country's musical culture. His band, Cortijo y Su Combo, captivated Caribbean and Latin American audiences as it emerged in the mid-1950s. Immensely popular across Puerto Rican social classes, the band both "modernized" the traditional vernacular forms of "bomba" and "plena" and forcefully reestablished their African and working-class roots. The group's innovations have been integral to salsa since the 1960s.

Winding through the streets of working-class San Juan with Cortijo's funeral procession, Rodriguez Julia's autobiographical chronicle provides a rare portrait of the impoverished society from which Cortijo's music emerged. Along with detailed renderings of grief-stricken mourners--including Cortijo's childhood friend and fellow musician, the celebrated singer Ismael ("Maelo") Rivera--Rodriguez Julia records his feelings as he, a light-skinned, middle-class writer, confronts the world of poor black Puerto Ricans. The author's masterful shifting of linguistic registers, his acute sensitivity to Puerto Rican social codes, his broad knowledge of popular music, and his sardonic ruminations on death and immortality make this one of the most widely read books of modern Puerto Rican literature. Well-known critic and cultural historian Juan Flores has provided a scrupulous translation of Rodriguez Julia's text and an introduction situating the book in relation to Puerto Rican music and culture and the careers of Cortijo and Rodriguez Julia.

"San Juan: Memoir of a City" conducts readers through Puerto Rico's capital, guided by one of its most graceful and reflective writers, Edgardo Rodriguez Julia. No mere sightseeing tour, this is culture through immersion, a circuit of San Juan's historical and intellectual vistas as well as its architecture.
In the allusive cityscape he recreates, Rodriguez Julia invokes the ghosts of his childhood, of San Juan's elder literati, and of characters from his own novels. On the most tangible level, the city is a place of cabarets and cockfighting clubs, flaneurs and beach bums, smoke-filled bars and honking automobiles. Poised between a colonial past and a commercial future, the San Juan he portrays feels at times perilously close to the pitfalls of modernization. Tenement houses and fading mansions yield to strip malls and Tastee Freezes; asphalt hems in jacarandas and palm trees. "In Puerto Rico," he muses, "life is not simply cruel, it is also busy erasing our tracks." Through this book--available here in English for the first time--Rodriguez Julia resists that erasure, thoughtfully etching a palimpsest that preserves images of the city where he grew up and rejoicing in the one where he still lives.