Conference Agenda

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.

This paper examines tango as a sonic practice through which the city of Buenos Aires is imagined, remembered, and progressively deterritorialized. By putting Jorge Luis Borges’s framing of tango as a metaphysical expression of Buenos Aires, emerging from liminal zones where past and present, myth and modernity collide (Borges 1953) in dialogue with hauntological thought (Derrida 1994) and cultural theories of urban space (Duarte 2017), I argue that tango articulates Buenos Aires not as a fixed place but as a spectral city: a network of sounds, texts, and affects through which urban space is continually reconstituted.

First, I focus on Troilo and Manzi’s 1948 tango “Sur” (south) and its later counterpart “Vuelvo al Sur” (Piazzolla/Ferrer), famously paired in Fernando Solanas’s 1988 film Sur. I argue that “Sur” territorializes Buenos Aires by naming specific neighborhoods and sensory landmarks unfolding a Bakhtinian chronotope—a condensation of time, space, and subjectivity (Bakhtin 1981). Yet this geography is mediated by melancholy and retrospection: “the South” is not a lived but a remembered space, shaped by what Svetlana Boym (2001) identifies as modern nostalgia—a longing for a world whose borders and values have eroded. “Vuelvo al sur,” by contrast, completes a process of deterritorialization. Place names dissolve and “the south” survives only as an affective refrain. Geography is no longer mapped but invoked; territory becomes specter.

Finally, I turn to Piazzolla and Ferrer’s María de Buenos Aires (1968), where this spectralization becomes structural. Piazzolla claimed that tango is “the music of Buenos Aires,” yet in María this equation is radically reimagined. The “barrio” is no longer operative. María is not from a neighborhood but simply from Buenos Aires, rendered as an abstract, phantasmagoric city populated by doubles, shadows, and infernal echoes. I argue that María de Buenos Airesstages tango’s hauntological condition: the genre persists as a ghost of its former territorial anchoring, simultaneously invoking and undoing its urban myths. By bringing hauntology into dialogue with musical analysis, this paper reframes tango not merely as the “music of the city,” but as a practice through which Buenos Aires haunts itself—listening to its own ruins.

Since the beginning of her career in the mid-1990s, singer-songwriter Lila Downs (b. 1968) has represented her Mixtec Indigenous, Mexican, and U.S. American heritage in her music. Downs is known for blending musical styles, from traditional Mexican genres like rancheras and corridos, to cumbia, jazz, and hip hop. Also reflecting her tri-cultural background, she interprets songs with texts in Spanish, English, and Indigenous languages, especially Mixtec and Zapotec, and usually performs while wearing the huipil, a traditional Indigenous garment. Downs’ emergence as a “world music” artist occurred at a time of social, political, and economic transformation for Mexico and its relationship to the U.S., with the 1994 passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and eruption of the Zapatista uprising, and a few years later, the aftermath of the 2000 Mexican presidential elections. It was in this context that she recorded the 2001 album Border/La Línea for the “world music” label Narada World. This release weaves themes of Indigeneity, gender inequality, and social justice, focusing on issues related to the U.S.-Mexico border and Mexican migrant experience. Besides songs that explore the effects of NAFTA on Mexico’s working-class, this album features a medley of “Pastures of Plenty” and “This Land Is Your Land,” thereby shifting the meanings of these classic Woody Guthrie songs.

Building on scholarship on the intersections of popular music, migration, globalization, and U.S.-Mexico border politics (Ragland 2009; Madrid 2011; Ramos-Kittrell 2020; Días Santana-Garza 2021), this paper examines two songs from Border: “La Niña” (“The girl”), and “La Línea” (“The line”). Through musical and lyrical analysis, I investigate how Downs artistically represented conditions of neoliberalism at the U.S.-Mexico border in a manner that catered to cosmopolitan “world music” audiences. I argue that these songs illuminate the effects of neoliberalism in the region by depicting the labor conditions of vulnerable groups, especially women, while performing a “strategic exoticism” (Saavedra 2012; Guldin 2021) that aligned with “world music” aesthetics. Ultimately, this paper contributes to scholarly conversations about popular music and neoliberalism in the Americas at the turn of the twenty-first century.