Cumbia!

"Cumbia has mattered, matters, and will most likely continue to matter for the multitudes who create it, listen and dance to it, and debate it almost as a way of life. This collection is both a sonic roadmap and testimony to the imagination of people across the Americas as they make some sense of their many worlds through music."-Jairo Moreno, author of Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects "This is a significant, comprehensive, and timely collection of essays. As the essays demonstrate, cumbia is probably the most widespread rhythm in the Americas. Yet, until now, its travels and transformations have not received systematic attention, taking into account the complexities of the genre's roots in northern coastal Colombia and its subsequent routes into Mexico, Peru, Argentina, and the United States. Cumbia! fills a crucial gap in the literature on Latin/o American popular music."-George Yudice, author of The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era "The clear, simple language makes the essays accessible, and contributors are to be commended for their excellent presentations...Highly recommended." -- K. W. Mukuna * Choice * "Together [the essays] introduce the reader to a broad range of Latin American musical practices that claim their roots in a specific regional genre but mean different things in different places. Cumbia! is essential reading for anyone interested in popular music studies, music and migration, globalization, and communication." -- Helena Simonett * Hispanic American Historical Review * "The 'scenes' of this anthology range widely in a geographical sense and in the way that each writer approaches cumbia. Hector Fernandez l'Hoeste and Pablo Vila have assembled a collection of thoughtful essays and presented them in a logical sequence reflecting the outward migration of cumbia from its origins." -- Carlos Pena * Notes * "[T]he volume underscores cumbia's potential as a subject of academic inquiry and should inspire scholarship with a more integrative perspective. [The book] is a laudable effort to establish an understudied Latin American popular music in Anglophone academic discourse." -- Sven Kube * Journal of Popular Culture *

Hector Fernandez L'Hoeste is Professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Director of the Center for Latin American and Latino/a Studies at Georgia State University. He is coeditor, with Deborah Pacini Hernandez and Eric Zolov, of Rockin' Las Americas: The Global Politics of Rock in Latin/o America. Pablo Vila is Professor of Sociology at Temple University. He is coauthor, with Pablo Seman, of Troubling Gender: Youth and Cumbia in Argentina's Music Scene.

Acknowledgments ix Introduction / Hector Fernandez L'Hoeste and Pablo Vila 1 1. Cumbia Music in Colombia: Origins, Transformations, and Evolution of a Coastal Music Genre / Leonardo D'Amico 29 2. ?Pa' donde vas Marioneta? ?Pa' donde va la gaita?: La Cumbiamba Eneye Returns to San Jacinto / Jorge Arevalo Mateus with Martin Vejarano 49 3. Cumbia in Mexico's Northeastern Region / Jose Juan Olvera Gudino 87 4. Rigo Tovar, Cumbia, and the Transnational Grupero Boom / Alejandro L. Madrid 105 5. Communicating the Collective Imagination: The Sociospatial World of the Mexican Sonidero in Puebla, New York and New Jersey / Cathy Ragland 119 6. From The World of the Poor to the Beaches of Eisha: , Cumbia, and the Search for a Popular Subject in Peru / Joshua Tucker 138 7. Pandillar in the Jungle: Regionalism and Tecno-cumbia in Amazonian Peru / Kathryn Metz 168 8. Gender Tensions in Cumbia Villera's Lyrics / Pablo Seman and Pablo Vila 188 9. Feliz, feliz / Cristian Alarcon 213 10. El "Tu" Tropical, el "Vos" Villero, and Places in Between: Language, Ideology, Music, and the Spatialization of Difference in Uruguayan Tropical Music / Matthew J. Van Hoose 226 11. On Music and Colombianness: Toward a Critique of the History of Cumbia / Hector Fernandez L'Hoeste 248 References 269 Contributors 285 Index 289