Conference Agenda

Before my Ph.D. studies, I was a touring musician with cumbia bands. These bands would play the same songs and share the same name: La Sonora Dinamita (LSD). LSD was created in Colombia (1960). As part of the Cumbia—or Tropical Music— boom (1968-1974) and economic and political crisis, LSD’s sound and members migrated to North America, first to Mexico and later to Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, these musicians began to “reproduce” many bands with the same name. Since then, LSD’s cumbia has been part of the soundscape of Latinidad in Southern California, and weddings and quinceañeras fiestas are unimaginable without the music of LSD. In this essay, I want to explore how Latinidad and the creation of a sense of belonging (or unbelonging) are invented and reproduced through aesthetic objects such as LSD(s)’ sound. My main contention is that one becomes LatinX in the US. This label has two sides. First, it is a way of othering families with ancestry in Latin America; second, despite its discriminatory origin, it is a label that is embraced and has become a mechanism to create bonds but also affirms differences. This new feeling of belonging happens through the molding of affects through concrete objects such as music. In this regard, I would like to explore how LSD(s)’ music has become a playlist that creates intimate affective spaces for the performance of Latinidad in Southern California and the US. Also, using literary resources such as time bending and over-exaggeration of Argentinean short story writer Jorge Luis Borges, I want to explore how LSD(s) “is able to play in more than one place at the same time.” I believe that the creation of these “social sound spaces” has little to do with the “authenticity” of the band(s) but with what their sound evokes and creates. This paper is in dialogue with the ideas of inauthenticity and unbelonging (Ramos 2023) and how Music and sound can create intimacy on the dance floor (Garcia Mispireta) as well as engage with issues of authenticity (Bendix 1997).

Stories concerning Presidential elections, debates, and campaigns are far from uncommon in major Peruvian periodicals like La República and El Comercio. By the early 2000s, however, headlines quickly took a lighter turn: photos of politicians joyously dancing, taking the stage at musical concerts, and heavily publicized appearances at musicians’ birthdays and funerals colored the backdrop of austerity and formality long associated with Peruvian politics. What type of political performance could this be, and what was its soundtrack?

This paper argues that Andean cumbia, a subgenre of Peruvian cumbia synthesizing the urbanized Colombian genre with traditional Andean genres like huayno, was strategically employed by Peruvian politicians to dismantle the image of a “serious” politician and gain support from the working class majority. This variety of cumbia music was developed by working-class Andean migrants living in Lima’s peripheries throughout the mid-to-late twentieth century, often characterized as the soundscape of Peru’s increasingly Andeanized capital city. Although degraded by Limeño elites as an imperfect bridge between conceived binaries of “modern/coastal” and “traditional/Andean” (Turino, 1990; Romero, 2008; Tucker, 2013), politicians recognized the political potential in the music and its working-class audience. Drawing upon national periodicals and chicha campaign jingles created before and during Alan García Pérez’s second term, I demonstrate how public engagement with cumbia music and musicians appealed to a “[Peruvian] politics as spectacle and entertainment” (Cala Buendía, 2014). The use of cumbia as a musical-political advertising strategy also poses a contrast to the North American campaign advertising, which is generally “linked to the affective semiotics of narrative forms” (Patch, 2021). I characterize former President García’s political exploitation of cumbia music as a display of (neo)populist performativity, where the “unofficial” political atmosphere was just as meaningful as the “official” one. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates how music serves as a powerful tool for crafting a political persona rooted in working-class relatability and how public engagement with music as “everyday nationalism” generates a political impact beyond “official” campaign activities.

With the recent commercial success of artists such as Peso Pluma and Junior H, Mexican regional music is experiencing a resurgence in Latine music scenes. The imagery surrounding this new generation of Mexican regional musicians centers around the melancholic sirreño figure that is more introspective and subdued than previous figurations of masculinity within Mexican regional music. Furthermore, the sirreño figure has developed over transnational circuits of artistic exchange, manifesting not only in the imagery of Mexican artists but also that of other Latino artists such as Bad Bunny. These networks of exchange create a cosmopolitan masculine figure that moves between sonic genres and state borders.

In this paper, I thread the trajectory of the sirreño figure with that of cumbia within northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. As I demonstrate, musicians have adapted and localized cumbia over the past few decades into cumbia norteña, successfully weaving cumbia into regional Northern Mexican and Mexican American performance practices. I identify the ways in which musicians have incorporated genres and instrumentations of the borderlands with the form, timbre, and aesthetics of cumbia to create a sound that is transnational and cosmopolitan while maintaining a distinct norteño identity. Building on the scholarship of Alejandro Madrid (2011), Michael Cardenas (2021), and Juan Restrepo (2021), I trace a history of cumbia norteña that demonstrates how cumbia has been threaded into norteño sonic aesthetics via transnational circuits of musical exchange. Situated within this historiography, I then utilize in-person ethnographies of northern Mexican artists in Chicagoland alongside virtual ethnography of online fandoms to argue that contemporary iterations of cumbia norteña epitomize a larger trend within Latin music scenes that center the melancholic sirreño figure. With cumbia norteña as my central analytic, I thus unveil how this genre, simultaneously cosmopolitan and localized, has become a sonic conduit for transnational reconfigurations of Latino masculinities.