Carina del Valle Schorske

Cecilia Vicuña’s Desire Lines

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. When Cecilia Vicuña came to Manhattan in 1980, she had no plans to stay — but for Vicuña, an artist in exile from Pinochet’s Chile, plans…

Cecilia Vicuña y la geografía espiritual del arte

Cuando Cecilia Vicuña llegó a Manhattan en 1980, no tenía planes de quedarse, pero para Vicuña, una artista exiliada del Chile gobernado por Pinochet, los planes no importaban mucho. Llevaba menos de una semana en la ciudad cuando se cruzó con un…

LaBRiNtH KnOwS AdoLescEnce

By Hanif Abdurraqib / Illustration by Lennard Kok I have spent a lot of time these last two years managing small collisions of feeling: sadness laid over pleasure, heartbreak laid over some unnamed desire. This was a result of prolonged pandemic…

Dancing Through New York in a Summer of Joy and Grief

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. For most of 2020, I passed the pandemic alone in my studio apartment. I turned 33, then 34, and my body seemed to grow old without bringing my…

La Doña was ready to be a pop star. But her EP dropped just as the world was shutting down.

Profile by Carina del Valle Schorske / Photographs by John Edmonds / Profile by Carina del Valle Schorske / Photographs by John Edmonds / Profile by Carina del Valle Schorske / Photographs by John Edmonds / Profile by Carina del Valle Schorske /…

A rare woman among the Beatniks, she forged a path toward her own desires.

It might have pleased Diane di Prima that we can’t get our hands on her “Revolutionary Letters” by capitulating to the rapacity of Amazon Prime. The book is out of print. Instead, after her death, individual poems from her lifelong series pop up on…

An Interview with Julie Dash

Filmmaker “History is all there: I just dig it up, unearth it, make it available.” Carina del Valle Schorske I spoke with the legendary director Julie Dash by phone in March 2020, during her spring break from teaching at Spelman College, when both of…

The World According to

The Puerto Rican reggaetonero has come to dominate global pop on his own terms. By Carina del Valle Schorske Photographs and videos by Mara Corsino On Jan. 31, 2020, I could hear fireworks from my friend’s terrace in Santurce. All around Puerto Rico,…

El mundo de Bad Bunny es hoy

El reguetonero puertorriqueño ha llegado a dominar el pop mundial en sus propios términos. Por Carina del Valle Schorske Fotografías y videos de Mara Corsino El 31 de enero de 2020, pude escuchar los fuegos artificiales desde la terraza de mi amiga…

It’s Not Too Late

DISCUSSED Aretha Franklin & Smokey Robinson, Listening in Detail, Bits of History That Get Skipped Over or Left Unattended, Fred Moten, Soul Train, Deep Cuts, Belmont and Oakley, Boston Boulevard, What a Price to Pay, A Love Story Compressed, Aborted…

Pandemic Journal

Sara Nović Sara Nović is the author of the novel Girl at War (2015), which won an American Library Association Alex Award, was an LA Times Book Prize finalist, and is available in thirteen more languages, and the nonfiction project America is…

Pandemic Journal

This is the current edition in a running series of dispatches by New York Review writers that is documenting the coronavirus outbreak with updates from around the world that began March 17–22 and has continued through March 23–29, March 30–April 5,…

Let ‘West Side Story’ and Its Stereotypes Die

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times SAN JUAN, P.R. — For many years I’ve avoided writing about “West Side Story.” As a Puerto Rican critic, I resent the expectation that I have something to say about a musty old musical from 1957. Just as the U.S.…

The World According to

When Bad Bunny appeared with J Balvin on Cardi B’s smash hit single “I Like It” in 2018, the New York bugalú sample seemed to signal a major crossover moment. There’s no doubt that feature paved the way for his latest, greatest accolade: “YHLQMDLG”…

The Ladder Up

I’ve wanted to evade geographic determinism, but we’re still on another island: all of you and all of us. – Manuel Ramos Otero For many years, my Puerto Rican homeland was not the island but the fried chicken and Chinese takeout joint on 156th and…

Ana Mendieta Taught Me About Dispossession and Identity

The artist made it her life’s work to honor what was lost under colonization. Decades later, I tried to follow in her footsteps. Sep 18, 2019·7 min read “Like the dead-seeming cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went…

Ana Mendieta Taught Me About Dispossession and Identity

“Like the dead-seeming cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me.” — Zora Neale Hurston On Valentine’s Day of this year in San Juan, Puerto Rico, I had a drawing by Ana Mendieta tattooed on my back. I can’t…

How It Feels to Be Free

Drinking on the old, mossy fortress in Viejo San Juan, talking about bitcoins, exes, and the eyebrows of María Félix, it’s hard to imagine we were ever not friends. We met on the internet in 2016, when we discovered each other to be the only people…

Dancing Backup: Puerto Ricans in the American Muchedumbre

Carina del Valle Schorske | Longreads | April 2019 | 28 minutes (7,237 words) Muchedumbre. Noun, feminine: An abundance of persons or things; crowd, horde Noun, biblical: Survivors, the chosen * * * When I fell for the video girl in Omarion’s…

I Think I Lost It

When Lucinda Williams was at the far end of what men consider young—27, to be precise—she recorded an album called Happy Woman Blues. It was her sophomore effort, and perhaps it was sophomoric—wise in a foolish sort of way—to think she could lean in…