Archipelagic Listening: Hawai‘i-Puerto Rican Connections in Augie Colón’s Exotica

• In Event: Easy Listening Empire: Exotica, Race, and U.S. Imperialism in Hawai‘i

Abstract

It’s hard to imagine how a music genre called “exotica” could be anything other than a colonialist enterprise. Originating in the resorts of 1950s Honolulu, exotica combined cool jazz and Latin music idioms with global percussion instruments and birdcall vocalizations. While scholars and critics have rightly positioned exotica as a musical manifestation of America’s Cold War imperial expansion, a purely colonialist reading of exotica fails to capture the multiplicity of perspectives that define this genre. Exotica arose from a collaboration between three musicians: white American pianist Martin Denny, Native Hawaiian vibraphonist Arthur Lyman, and percussionist Augie Colón, whose grandparents were among the 5,000 Puerto Ricans who migrated in 1901 to work on Hawai‘i sugar plantations. This paper asks, what “fugitive readings” (Vogel 2018) of exotica emerge when we locate Colón as a central innovator of the genre?

Building on recent discussions of “archipelagic American studies” (Roberts and Stephens 2017), I argue that Augie Colón’s exotica models an “archipelagic listening” practice that prioritizes island-based perspectives and destabilizes the continental American popular music industry’s power to orient exotica around the tourist gaze. Colón’s 1960 album Sophisticated Savage retains the branding of an exotica album yet departs from the genre sonically, delivering danceable vocal tracks inspired by Puerto Rican bomba and mambo. My paper discusses two tracks on the album: “Taboo” and “Manuela Boy.” Originally written in 1930s Cuba, “Taboo” migrated to 1940s New York, 1950s Hollywood, and finally 1950s and ‘60s Hawai‘i. Colón’s restores the vocalist and lyrics to “Taboo,” which, by the 1950s, was typically performed in purely instrumental jazz and easy-listening styles. Colón’s version reminds listeners that exotica’s musical depictions of jungles and “savages,” though putatively set in Hawai‘i, derive from earlier U.S. exoticizations of afrocubanismo. Also originally written in the 1930s, “Manuela Boy” describes local Hawaiian experiences of poverty and homelessness, interracial families, and dependence on the tourism industry, all from a joking perspective. Colón’s version uses mixed Spanish, English, and Hawaiian-language lyrics to convey the “ethnic multiplicity” of Colón’s “Pacific Latinidad” (Guevarra 2023). In constructing a common critical perspective between Hawai‘i and Puerto Rico vis-à-vis U.S. empire, Colón’s Sophisticated Savage anticipates the more explicitly political work of Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny’s world-famous 2025 song “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii”—thus remaining a crucial voice in sonic examinations of late-stage American empire.

Author

• Jade Conlee