Music has been critical to national identity in Latin America, especially since the worldwide emphasis on nations and cultural identity that followed World War I. Unlike European countries with unified ethnic populations, Latin American nations claimed blended ethnicities—indigenous, Caucasian, African, and Asian—and the process of national stereotyping that began in the 1920s drew on themes of indigenous and African cultures. Composers and performers drew on the folklore and heritage of ethnic and immigrant groups in different nations to produce what became the music representative of different countries. Mexico became the nation of mariachi bands, Argentina the land of the tango, Brazil the country of Samba, and Cuba the island of Afro-Cuban rhythms, including the rhumba. The essays collected here offer a useful introduction to the twin themes of music and national identity and melodies and ethnic identification. The contributors examine a variety of countries where powerful historical movements were shaped intentionally by music.

A multifaceted portrait of "El Rey", the king of Latin music, this is the first in-depth historical, musical, and cultural study to trace the career and influence of Tito Puente. 57 photos.

Javier F. León and Helena Simonett curate a collection of essential writings from the last twenty-five years of Latin American music studies. Chosen as representative, outstanding, and influential in the field, each article appears in English translation. A detailed new introduction by León and Simonett both surveys and contextualizes the history of Latin American ethnomusicology, opening the door for readers energized by the musical forms brought and nurtured by immigrants from throughout Latin America. Contributors include Marina Alonso Bolaños, Gonzalo Camacho Díaz, José Jorge de Carvalho, Claudio F. Díaz, Rodrigo Cantos Savelli Gomes, Juan Pablo González, Rubén López-Cano, Angela Lühning, Jorge Martínez Ulloa, Maria Ignêz Cruz Mello, Julio Mendívil, Carlos Miñana Blasco, Raúl R. Romero, Iñigo Sánchez Fuarros, Carlos Sandroni, Carolina Santamaría-Delgado, Rodrigo Torres Alvarado, and Alejandro Vera.

Puerto Rican music in New York is given center stage in Ruth Glasser's original and lucid study. Exploring the relationship between the social history and forms of cultural expression of Puerto Ricans, she focuses on the years between the two world wars. Her material integrates the experiences of the mostly working-class Puerto Rican musicians who struggled to make a living during this period with those of their compatriots and the other ethnic groups with whom they shared the cultural landscape. Through recorded songs and live performances, Puerto Rican musicians were important representatives for the national consciousness of their compatriots on both sides of the ocean. Yet they also played with African-American and white jazz bands, Filipino or Italian-American orchestras, and with other Latinos. Glasser provides an understanding of the way musical subcultures could exist side by side or even as a part of the mainstream, and she demonstrates the complexities of cultural nationalism and cultural authenticity within the very practical realm of commercial music. Illuminating a neglected epoch of Puerto Rican life in America, Glasser shows how ethnic groups settling in the United States had choices that extended beyond either maintenance of their homeland traditions or assimilation into the dominant culture. Her knowledge of musical styles and performance enriches her analysis, and a discography offers a helpful addition to the text.

How are national identities constructed and articulated through music? Popular music has long been associated with political dissent, and the nation state has consistently demonstrated a determination to seek out and procure for itself a stake in the management of 'its' popular musics. Similarly, popular musics have been used 'from the ground up' as sites for both populist and popular critiques of nationalist sentiment, from the position of both a globalizing and a 'local' vernacular culture. The contributions in this book arrive at a critical moment in the development of the study of national cultures and musicology. The book ranges from considerations of the ideological focus of cultural nationalism through to analyses of musical hybridity and musical articulations of other kinds of identities at odds with national identity. The processes of global homogenization are thereby shown to have brought about a transitional crisis for national cultural identities: the evolution of these identities, particularly with reference to the concept of 'authenticity' in music, is situated within broader debates on power, political economy and constructions of the self. Theorizations of practice are employed after the manner of Bourdieu, Gramsci, Goffman, Gadamer, Habermas, Bhabha, Lacan and Žižek. Each contribution acts as a case study to characterize the strategies through which differing modes of musical discourse engage, critique or obscure discourses on national identity. The studies include discussions of: musical representations of Irishness; the relationship between Afropop and World Music; Norwegian club music; the revival of traditional music in Serbia; resistance to cultural homogeneity in Brazil; contemporary Uyghur song in Northwest China; rap and race in French society; technobanda from the barrios of Los Angeles, and Spanish/Moroccan raï. In this way, the book seeks to characterize the ideological configurations that help to activate and sustain hegemonic, ambivalent and dissident articulations of national identity and musical practices.

John Chasteen examines the history behind sexually suggestive dances (salsa, samba, and tango) that brought people of different social classes and races together in Latin America.

If, as David Guss argues, culture is a contested terrain with constantly changing contours, then festivals are its battlegrounds, where people come to fight and dispute in large acts of public display. Festive behavior, long seen by anthropologists and folklorists as the "uniform expression of a collective consciousness, is contentious and often subversive," and The Festive State is an eye-opening guide to its workings. Guss investigates "the ideology of tradition," combining four case studies in a radical multisite ethnography to demonstrate how in each instance concepts of race, ethnicity, history, gender, and nationhood are challenged and redefined. In a narrative as colorful as the events themselves, Guss presents the Afro-Venezuelan celebration of San Juan, the "neo-Indian" Day of the Monkey, the mestizo ritual of Tamunangue, and the cultural policies and products of a British multinational tobacco corporation. All these illustrate the remarkable fluidity of festive behavior as well as its importance in articulating different cultural interests.