Studies in Latin America & Car – serie

Since its emergence in the 1960s, salsa has transformed from a symbol of Nuyorican pride into an emblem of pan-Latinism and finally a form of global popular culture. While Latinos all over the world have developed and even exported their own “dance accents,” local dance scenes have arisen in increasingly far-flung locations, each with their own flavor and unique features.Salsa Worldexamines the ways in which bodies relate to culture in specific places. The contributors, a notable group of scholars and practitioners, analyze dance practices in the U.S., Japan, Spain, France, Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Writing from the disciplines of ethnomusicology, anthropology, sociology, and performance studies, the contributors explore salsa’s kinetopias - places defined by movement, or vice versa- as they have arisen through the dance’s interaction with local histories, identities, and musical forms.Taken together, the essays in this book examine contemporary salsa dancing in all its complexity, taking special note of how it is localized and how issues of geography, race and ethnicity, and identity interact with the global salsa industry.Contributors include BÁrbara Balbuena GutiÉrrez,Katherine Borland, Joanna Bosse, Rossy DÍaz, SaÚl Escalona, Kengo Iwanaga, Isabel Llano, Jonathan S. Marion, Priscilla Renta, Alejandro Ulloa Sanmiguel, and the editor.In the series Studies in Latin American and Caribbean Music, edited by Peter Manuel

Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) is recognized as one of the most influential Latin American authors of the twentieth century. Although he helped establish the field of Afro-diasporic studies, his writings are still relatively unknown to the English-speaking world. In Fernando Ortiz on Music, accomplished ethnomusicologist Robin Moore has collected and translated an essential selection of Ortiz’s publications. These essays on Afro-Cuban expressive culture, music and dance are now available for the first time in English.Ortiz’s writings are accompanied by an extended introduction that contextualizes the author’s life, intellectual influences, and collaborators as well as his fieldwork and interviews. Fernando Ortiz on Music also charts the writer’s changing views of black heritage through the years. This comprehensive anthology, which includes examples of his early scholarship as well as publications from the 1940s and ’50s, extends the life and legacy of this important and under-known scholar of Latin American and Caribbean music. Contributors include: David Garcia, Sarah Lahasky, Cary PeÑate, Susan Thomas, and the editor

First published in 1995, Caribbean Currents has become the definitive guide to the distinctive musics of this region of the world. This third edition of the award-winning book is substantially updated and expanded, featuring thorough coverage of new developments, such as the global spread of reggaeton and bachata, the advent of music videos, the restructuring of the music industry, and the emergence of new dance styles. It also includes many new illustrations and links to accompanying video footage.  The authors succinctly and perceptively situate the musical styles and developments in the context of themes of gender and racial dynamics, sociopolitical background, and diasporic dimensions. Caribbean Currents showcases the rich and diverse musics of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Trinidad, the French Caribbean, the lesser Antilles, and their transnational communities in the United States and elsewhere to provide an engaging panorama of this most dynamic aspect of Caribbean culture.

First published in 1995, Caribbean Currents has become the definitive guide to the distinctive musics of this region of the world. This third edition of the award-winning book is substantially updated and expanded, featuring thorough coverage of new developments, such as the global spread of reggaeton and bachata, the advent of music videos, the restructuring of the music industry, and the emergence of new dance styles. It also includes many new illustrations and links to accompanying video footage.  The authors succinctly and perceptively situate the musical styles and developments in the context of themes of gender and racial dynamics, sociopolitical background, and diasporic dimensions. Caribbean Currents showcases the rich and diverse musics of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Trinidad, the French Caribbean, the lesser Antilles, and their transnational communities in the United States and elsewhere to provide an engaging panorama of this most dynamic aspect of Caribbean culture.

\u0022I am Felipe Garcia Villamil\u0022 begins Drumming for the Gods, the life history of the Afro-Cuban artist whose music has survived both political and personal upheaval. \u0022Balogun for thirty years. Oluana, of Matanzas, Cuba, for about forty years. Omoana for almost forty-five years. OluIyesa [he knows the secrets of the Iyesa drums].\u0022 A practitioner of sacred drumming for almost his entire life, Felipe practiced his trade in Cuba both before and after the Revolution and brought it with him to New York, where he continues to play for the gods. This book focuses on three periods of Felipe's life, each marked by changes in his personal life and by important historical events. The first period covers his formative years during which he received his initial training. Through Felipe's story, we explore the legacy of slavery in Cuba, the nature of Afro-Cuban religions and their musical traditions, and the history of bata drums. The second period covers the critical years of the Cuban Revolution. Here we see the effect of social turmoil both n music and religious practice (santero, palero, and abakua).The third period covers Felipe's life in New York as a refugee/immigrant, and the role of music in rebuilding his identity. Felipe's story illuminates his cultural practices and beliefs as well as the ways in which an individual musician selects and modifies the elements of his cultural heritage to create a voice that is personal and unique. Felipe not only lives through history but also makes history, shaping an identity that cannot be described as \u0022Cuban immigrant,\u0022 \u0022Afro-Cuban,\u0022 \u0022religious drummer,\u0022 or \u0022santeria initiate,\u0022 but is composed of all of them. Through Felipe's experiences, Maria Teresa Velez reveals the interaction between social, political, economic, and cultural forces and an individual's own actions. The professionalization of musicians in Cuba following the Revolution and the plight of Afro-Cuban immigrants in New York are seen as large historical and social problems to which Felipe must personally respond. A noted ethnomusicologist, Velez provides the most insightful and comprehensive English-language study of an individual Cuban religious drummer available.Drumming for the Gods is a must-read for those interested in ethnomusicology, Caribbean studies, and Afro-Cuban religions and culture.

Trinidadian sitarist, composer, and music authority Mangal Patasar once remarked and tan-singing, \u0022You take a capsule from India, leave it here for a hundred years, and this is what you get.\u0022 Patasar was referring to what may be the most sophisticated and distinctive art form cultivated among the one and a half million East Indians whose ancestors migrated as indentured laborers from colonial India to the West Indies between 1845 and 1917. Known in Trinidad and Guyana as \u0022tan-singing\u0022 or \u0022local-classical music\u0022 and in Suriname as \u0022baithak gana\u0022 (\u0022sitting music\u0022), tan-singing has evolved in to a unique idiom, embodying the rich poetic and musical heritage brought from India as modified by a diaspora group largely cut off from its ancestral homeland. In recent decades, however, tan-singing has been declining, regarded as quaint and crude by younger generations raised on MTV, Hindi film music, and disco. At the same time, Indo-Caribbeans have been participating in their countries' economic, political, and cultural lives to a far greater extent than previously.Accompanying this participation has been a lively cultural revival, encompassing both an enhanced assertion of Indianness and a spirit of innovative syncretism. One of the most well-known products of this process is chutney, a dynamic music and dance phenomenon that is simultaneously a folk revival and a pop hybrid. In Trinidad, it has also been the vehicle for a controversial form of female empowerment and an agent of a new, more inclusive, conception of national identity. Thus, East Indian Music in the West Indies is a portrait of a diaspora community in motion. It documents the social and cultural development of a people \u0022without history,\u0022 a people who have sometimes been dismissed as foreigners who merely perpetuate the culture of the homeland rather than becoming \u0022truly\u0022 Caribbean. Professor Manuel shows how inaccurate this characterization is. On the one hand, in the form of tan-singing, it examines the distinctiveness of traditional Indo-Caribbean musical culture. On the other, in the form of chutney, it examines the new assertiveness and syncretism of Indo-Caribbean popular music.Students of Indo-Caribbean music and curious world-music fans alike will be fascinated by Professor Manuel's guided tour through the complex and exciting world of Indo-Caribbean musical culture.

For the Achi, one of the several Mayan ethnic groups indigenous to Guatemala, the music of the marimba serves not only as a form of entertainment but also as a form of communication, a vehicle for memory, and an articulation of cultural identity. Sergio Navarrete Pellicer examines the marimba tradition -- the historical confluence of African musical influences, Spanish colonial power, and Indian ethnic assimilation -- as a driving force in the dynamics of cultural continuity and change in Rabinal, the heart of Achi culture and society. By examining the performance and consumption of marimba music as complementary parts of a system of social interaction, religious belief, and ethnic identification, Navarrete Pellicer reveals how the strains of the marimba resonate with the spiritual yearnings and cultural negotiations of the Achi as they try to come to terms with the political violence and economic hardship wrought by their colonial past.

For the Achi, one of the several Mayan ethnic groups indigenous to Guatemala, the music of the marimba serves not only as a form of entertainment but also as a form of communication, a vehicle for memory, and an articulation of cultural identity. Sergio Navarrete Pellicer examines the marimba tradition - the historical confluence of African musical influences, Spanish colonial power, and Indian ethnic assimilation - as a driving force in the dynamics of cultural continuity and change in Rabinal, the heart of Achi culture and society. By examining the performance and consumption of marimba music as complementary parts of a system of social interaction, religious belief, and ethnic identification, Navarrete Pellicer reveals how the strains of the marimba resonate with the spiritual yearnings and cultural negotiations of the Achi as they try to come to terms with the political violence and economic hardship wrought by their colonial past.

Examines how musicians navigated their everyday lives, grappling with the intercultural tensions and commercial pressures that were so pronounced on the salsa scene

Examines how musicians navigated their everyday lives, grappling with the intercultural tensions and commercial pressures that were so pronounced on the salsa scene

Arsenio Rodr\u00edguez was one of the most important Cuban musicians of the twentieth century. In this first scholarly study, ethnomusicologist David F. Garc\u00eda examines Rodr\u00edguez's life, including the conjunto musical combo he led and the highly influential son montuno style of music he created in the 1940s. Garc\u00eda recounts Rodr\u00edguez's battle for recognition at the height of \u0022mambo mania\u0022 in New York City and the significance of his music in the development of salsa. With firsthand accounts from relatives and fellow musicians, Arsenio Rodr\u00edguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music follows Rodr\u00edguez's fortunes on several continents, speculating on why he never enjoyed wide commercial success despite the importance of his music. Garc\u00eda focuses on the roles that race, identity, and politics played in shaping Rodr\u00edguez's music and the trajectory of his musical career. His transnational perspective has important implications for Latin American and popular music studies.