Resonant with the anxiety of finding a distinctively ‘American’ music in the United States during the early twentieth century, the need to invent Latin American music (and with it, the very idea of Latin America) emerges out of an identitarian concern steeped in international politics. Pablo Palomino investigates this very issue in this book, and shows how cultural symbology (national music, national art) was central to that invention.
The monograph is based on a rigorous archival exploration of different repositories, and draws most heavily on information pertinent to Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. These countries provide a backdrop knit by foreign and cultural policy and the work of cultural brokers, media industries, and academic disciplines to contextualize more focused regional studies. This approach allows the author to see common points of convergence, in which music articulates a cultural idea of Latin America. While at a regional level the dichotomy between ‘serious music’ and folk and commercial music provides a nodal point to debate this idea, the ‘popular’ in music—that rugged terrain where marketing and consumption practices influence interests for representation—is the broad arena to frame this process. It is a historically shifting transnational political landscape wherein desires for modernity and representation became sonically signified.
One of the most interesting points developed throughout the book is how cultural processes stem from a relational political tension between the US expansionist cultural agenda and a concern to define local culture in light of what was perceived to be a culturally invasive foreign policy. Palomino's analysis, nonetheless, problematizes this tension even further. His findings suggest that the exoticism and racialization permeating cultural symbols (national music among them) relate on one hand to anxieties stemming from this North-South cultural and political relationship. On the other, they relate to local aspirations for cosmopolitanism. In this fraught landscape, foreign and local artists pursued careers that connected Latin American and foreign audiences. This landscape also fueled the activity of media industries in relation to emerging markets, and saw the emergence of a canon of cultural works (movies, recordings, radio programming, music performances) wherein concerns for representation grappled with notions of self and other.
The first section of the book (Chapters 1 and 2) maps the transnational connections that enabled the articulation of Latin America as a cultural idea. The mapping of work by specific performers and cultural industries receives special attention. In the case of individual artists, this is not because of their sole impact on notions of Latin American culture, but because, through their activity, the author sees the different factors outlined above at play. In the case of media industries (such as XEW in Mexico), Palomino's research sheds new light on the far-reaching impact that these entities had in the continent.
The second section (Chapters 3 and 4) provides an account of how academia and cultural state policy also played key roles in defining the idea of Latin American music. Together with readings by Alex Ross and Alejandro Madrid, these chapters provide a very rich picture of concerns over representation in relation to state policy and academia in the American hemisphere during the early twentieth century. The last section (Chapters 5 and 6) delves into the articulation of cultural identity in relation to international politics after 1950.
Overall, the book's analytical lens (somewhat informed by Richard Middleton) makes a timely contribution to Latin American music studies, positing the role of media industries as central to cultural arbitration. Thus, Palomino investigates the ‘popular’ as a political domain full of ferment, wherein identity should be questioned in light of the historical tension between the United States and what that country saw as everything else below. As Palomino shrewdly observes, Latin America seems to be defined by the ongoing politics of this historical juxtaposition: a continuous relational dialogue about what Latin America is.
