During the 1920s, Victor Talking Machine Company created a “Latin” music market with recordings of Afro-Cuban dance genres such as son and rumba. This music introduced foreign ears to a distinctive rhythmic framework, a repeated asymmetric oscillation between three and two pulses known as the clave. With origins in West African timelines, the clave soon entered jazz, became the basis for salsa, and “conquered the world.” Parallel to the clave’s musical prominence runs a relatively hidden and understudied literary history, a clave poetics. In my current book project, Writing in Clave, I argue that the clave, beyond its musical function, served as a structural and poetic principle that shaped transnational literary and musical expressions of Caribbean identity from the 1920s to the 1960s. This talk concerns the way poets and performers associated with negrismo, an avant-garde literary movement in the Hispanophone Caribbean during the 1930s, experimented with clave. The hemispheric popularity of negrismo came in large part thanks to musical settings and poetry recitals by declaimers like Eusebia Cosme. By examining written verse, musicalization, and declamation within a clave framework, I explore how rhythm is imbricated with debates concerning gender, race, and nation.