Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:59:02am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Resilience and Dystopian Cities in Latin America Session Chair: Kristen Graves Discussant: Alyssa Cottle | |
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“No Queremos Morir”: Cumbia Norteña Music and Citizen Insecurity in Lima, Perú Northwestern University This paper examines cumbia norteña peruana and the politics of Peru’s growing inseguridad ciudadana (citizen insecurity) crisis. A regional style developed by hobbyist musicians in Peru’s northern coast and highlands in the 1970s, cumbia norteña rose to Peru’s commercial mainstream during the ‘cumbia boom’ of the early 2000s. Scholars often describe cumbia norteña as a commercialized and politically indirect counterpart to the lyrical activism and regionalism of other cumbia styles like chicha or cumbia amazónica (Quispe Lázaro, 2016; Tucker, 2013). However, this commercial success has recently rendered cumbia norteña ensembles vulnerable to extortion. The capital city of Lima boasts the highest extortion rates in the nation with a daily average of 79 reports or denuncias. Extortion rates are particularly high in Lima’s conos—underserved districts in the city’s peripheries where cumbia norteña performance is largely concentrated (Instituto Nacional de Estadística e Informatica, INEI). Cumbia norteña musicians are increasingly forced to “collaborate” with extortionists by paying large sums of money (cupos) to protect their performances from violent retaliation. I argue that cumbia norteña ensembles have become central figures in the politics of insecurity in Lima. Drawing upon over a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Lima, I demonstrate how cumbia norteña musicians leverage their labor and public appeal as a powerful symbol and means of popular resistance—without necessarily singing about it. I detail how musicians engage in “the art of making do” (Pine, 2012) as they navigate a labor environment characterized by the politics of precarity. As extortion rates in Peru rise steadily—approximately over 32% since 2024 (INEI)—citizens increasingly turn to popular music and media as alternative avenues for making sense of pervasive insecurity as government institutions are deemed incapable of managing the crisis. Violent attacks against cumbia norteña musicians have catalyzed a presidential impeachment and national protests to date, the first unified under the hashtag #NoQueremosMorir (“We don’t want to die”). Ultimately, this paper asks how a musical genre that seldom references violence in its lyrics has come to both represent and advocate for the popular classes most affected by it. | |