Examines the political and cultural possibilities and limits of the wide-ranging reggae scene that has emerged along both sides of the U.S./Mexico border since the 1990s. It investigates why and how members of seemingly disparate border communities, including Mexicanas/os, Chicanas/os, and Native Americans, find common social and political ground playing Afro-Caribbean inspired music. It also interrogates how people living in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands have responded to the impact of economic and political globalization by using reggae to fashion multiethnic and post-national political formations and social relationships at the grassroots.
The Caribbean coastal region of Colombia is called the costa, and its inhabitants are referred to as costeños. The müsica costeña (coastal music) is a product of tri-ethnic syncretic cultural traditions including Amerindian, Spanish, and African elements, a merging that begins with the colonial period and continues into the republican period on the Caribbean Coast. Traditional music from the Colombian Caribbean coast expresses its tri-ethnic costeño identity in various vocal styles and musical forms and through its types of instruments and the way they are played. This essay describes the aspects and circumstances under which cumbia, a coastal musical genre and dance form of peasant origins characterized by an African-derived style, has spread from its local origins in the valley of the Magdalena River to acquire a Colombian national identity, becoming in a few years a transnational musical phenomenon.
Focuses on specific aspects of the independent, creative network of musicians who in the late 1960s and early 1970s bonded together as the nueva canción or nueva canción movement across the Latin American continent, the Caribbean, and Spain. The author traces nueva canción through various key phrases. Nueva canción describes a music enmeshed within historical circumstances which included: the forging of revolutionary culture in Cuba; the coming together of political parties to form a coalition to elect the first ever socialist president in Chile in 1970; resistance to brutal Latin American dictatorships; and the struggle for new democracies. The music was often referred to by different names in different countries. It was known as: nueva cancionero (new song book) in Argentina; nueva canción (new song) in Chile and Peru; nueva trova (new song) in Cuba; and volcanto (volcanic song) in Nicaragua. Nueva canción musicians never saw their music as protest song. Nueva canción was regarded as a social force in itself and a key resource for creating collective bonds. This movement in its various forms was an emblematic music of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Functioning as both a national and international music, nueva canción has become part of the active memory of this period. Its potent legacy can be seen in the fact that many high-profile commercial singers today continue to be influenced by it: nueva canción continues to be perceived as a legitimate, unifying, and active force for peaceful change.
Examines children's musical practices on Corn Island, some 52 miles off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, which has long been a site of cross-cultural interaction and exchange. In 1987, as part of the postwar peace agreements, two autonomous regions—north and south—were established on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. The cultural and education aspects of autonomy came to be envisioned largely through concepts of interculturalidad, or interculturalism. Children's musical practices enter into discourses of interculturalism in several ways. They are often important symbols of the future; informal genres of vernacular expression (such as singing games) are a key resource for curricular reform that aims to bring regional folklore into the classroom; and they are central to processes of cultural interaction, exchange, and transformation. This is because children's activities are often oriented toward playful improvisation and because children are key actors in processes of socialization and adaptation to changing circumstances. Expressive practices such as music are dialogic tools through which differences are enacted, through which boundaries are constructed within and between social groups. This understanding of interculturalism as an everyday practice helps us see how culture emerges from interaction and play and how communication is accomplished using a diverse pool of resources. This essay focuses on the children of Miskitu migrants on Corn Island, particularly on singing game performance.
Adieu foulard, adieu madras is a very popular tune from the French Caribbean. It is just as popular today in continental France, where it has been adapted to different musical genres. Yet, for those familiar with the simple melody and its evocative lyrics, which encourages carefree humming, not many may be aware that it is so deeply rooted in the history of French colonialism, island tropes, and ethnic relations. This essay uses Adieu foulard, adieu madras and its multiple sonic meanings as the lens to better understand the dynamics of the (post)colonial relationship of the people of the French Antilles, particularly from the island overseas departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe, many of whom have now migrated permanently to metropolitan France. For these, Adieu has now also become their song of exile.
Unedited] The career of Laba Sosseh, the Senegambian singer of Afro-Cuban music, challenges many of the dominant paradigms of world music' research. His music was not the product of Western influence nor was Sosseh shaping his music to please elite Western audiences. Sosseh instead sought to Cubanize African popular music and Africanize new world Latin music. He was active in several West African music centers in the 1960s and 1970s and New York in the 1980s. He was the first musician reportedly to have a gold record in West Africa and his recordings for a U.S. Cuban-owned company circulated widely throughout the Caribbean Basin. In the 1990s, Sosseh returned to Dakar, Senegal, to mentor a new generation of Senegalese Latin musicians. By looking at Sosseh’s life on both sides of the Atlantic, it becomes clear that world music can come from unexpected places in unanticipated ways. Sosseh’s music had its roots in a South-South dialogue that underscored cultural difference and local identities. His work demonstrates that globalization does not inherently produce global homogeneity. Non-western communities can deploy communication technologies (records, radio and cassettes) to create forms of counter-globalization that rather than promote Western cultural hegemony resist it.
In colonial Spanish America, there were immensely complex systems of identity and power. One aspect of this is the distinction between the Peninsular Spaniards, that is those who were born in Spain and allowed to travel to the New World only after having proved their purity of blood, and the white Spaniards born in the New World. The latter were known as criollos and as a body were designated as mantuanos. By revealing cultural and religious manifestations, as once public and allegorical, of the partisan conflict between the mantuanos and Peninsular residents in the pre-independence era, the documentation that traces the historical development of the Fiesta de la Naval—a commemoration of the Christian victory over the Turks in the Battle of Lepanto (1571)—affords the source of information of the greatest symbolic significance for the study of the social, religious, and musical repercussions that sustained criollo power between 1687 and 1810. An appendix lists payments made between 1709 and 1812 the three categories of musicians: the gallery musicians of the Caracas cathedral; the military band of the black and mixed-race battalions of the province; the musicians from confraternities of pardo freemen. The nature and employment of each of these groups is described. The list of payments shows that the Fiesta de la Naval involved the whole of urban society and shifted the center of religious power away from the cathedral and toward the space occupied by the manutanos. The Fiesta was thus an example of Venezuelan cultural ownership and social and racial identify that formed part of the legitimization of the mantuanos power as opposed to the power of the Peninsular Spaniards.
The band Cortijo is contextualized within the socioeconomic changes in Puerto Rico from the late 1940s to the early 1960s as it adjusted to its new status as a commonwealth. Cortijo documents the realities of Puerto Rico's rapid urbanization and modernization at the time. The band's gritty reflections of a black, working class, urban, and marginalized population contradict the official rhetoric and imagery of an idealized rural landscape promoted by the government as the symbol of the commonwealth. Cortijo enjoyed immense popularity and visibility, despite, or perhaps because of, its critique of the euphoria of modernization and its questioning of the sociopolitical effects of internal migration that ran counter to the official stance.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Examines a variation of samba called pagode baiano in several peripheral neighborhoods of the city of Salvador. Dance parties organized around this genre provide the context for the affirmation of a racial identity discourse as well as the reterritorialization of 'easy women', 'dishonest and lazy people', jobless people, homosexuals, and blacks. Pagode reintegrates aspects of traditional African manifestations found in Brazil, such as dance, call-and-response song, and the emphasis on polyrhythm. It embraces a sub-altern gender (feminine) and sexuality (homosexual) and undermines the hegemony of the macho. It exists as a musical experience whose feelings are particular and shared amongst certain subjects. Musicians and the public share a language and a way of speaking about themselves and others that reveal an emergent, imperfect citizenship.
