Conference Agenda

In almost every corner of the vast territory of Mexico, one can find a historical pipe organ. Historians estimate that close to a thousand pipe organs which predate the 20th century still stand in Mexico today. Many of these grand instruments, despite their visual splendor, now exist in states of extreme disrepair, serving merely as decaying monuments to the past. In direct contrast to the neglect faced by many historical pipe organs in Mexico, the pipe organ on the nation's silver screen flourished as a steadfast representation of power throughout the mid-20th century. Within Mexican horror cinema, in particular, the ecclesiastical instrument enjoys a second life as an imposing audiovisual object which commands listeners' attention along with their respect and fear. In this presentation, I demonstrate a few ways in which the pipe organ in mid-century Mexican horror not only represents indomitable power and influence within select Mexican horror films, but also how its inclusion in these films echoes the instrument’s original colonial role within the nation as a coercive vehicle of empire.

Imperio Argentina is considered the leading Ibero-American actress of the 1930s. She played Spanish “Gypsy” women in Spanish folkloric musicals directed by her husband Florián Rey, and under the umbrella of the production company Cifesa, which established close commercial ties with Latin America. After their personal and professional split, Imperio’s film career gradually declined, and she never repeated the colossal successes of her earlier films. In the late 1940s, she filmed several co-productions in Argentina, reaffirming her ability to portray Spanish women on screen. She sought to relaunch her career in Spain with the film La cigarra (The Cicada, Rey, 1948), which takes place on both sides of the Atlantic and features prominent contemporary Argentine and Spanish stars, including Spanish actors Miguel Ligero and Tony Leblanc, and Argentine actor and musician Alberto Rivera. This paper explores the impact of film music in blurring overseas cultural borders in the Spanish-speaking region in the context of the Franco-Perón film alliance, using as a case study the transmedia, transnational and transcultural artist Imperio Argentina in La cigarra.

In a little over a decade, the “Brazilian Bombshell” Carmen Miranda rose and fell from a position of incredible fame in US popular culture. Mobilizing film musicals such as Down Argentine Way (1941), Greenwich Village (1944), and Disney’s The Three Caballeros (1944), I demonstrate how Miranda was exported to ease anxieties around race, gender, and modernity amidst radical shifts in how the US imagined its neighbors down south. From her breakout role in Banana da Terra (1939), Miranda would become known as the “lady in the tutti-frutti hat” with her extensive use of Baiana aesthetics (from Bahia, a majority preto/Afro-descended state in northeast Brazil) in Good Neighbor films that used music to promote narratives of harmony across the hemisphere. By the end of the Second World War, however, Miranda’s popularity waned as US foreign relations shifted from the Good Neighbor Policy to the Truman Doctrine, which began the decades-long period of US military intervention in Latin America. And yet, by the late 1940s, Miranda’s tutti-frutti style becomes the face of Chiquita bananas, even if Monica Lewis sang the hit jingle “I’m a Chiquita Banana and I want to say” (1947). In this paper, I examine the simultaneous explosive and one-dimensional success of Carmen Miranda in light of ongoing cycles of Latin American music “booms” alongside the United Fruit Company’s brand revival in the mid-twentieth century. I argue that Miranda’s ubiquity as a floating signifier for Latin America was the familiar commodity needed to market bananas to post-war US consumers.

Adapted from the Laura Esquivel novel, the Max series Como agua para chocolate (2024–2026) recounts the love story of Tita and Pedro, a young couple forced to separate due to a strict tradition practiced by Tita’s family: the youngest daughter will care for her mother until her death and not marry. To remain close to Tita, Pedro weds her sister, prompting Tita to seek refuge in the kitchen, creating flavorful dishes that transmit “personal emotions and physiological states of mind.” Set during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), the series focuses on how Tita uses the kitchen and her food as tools of empowerment and of passion. The acts of cooking and eating illustrate Tita’s emotions as those who consume her food embody her feelings. Intriguingly, non-diegetic contemporary songs from across the Americas accentuate these experiences, providing an aural suture connecting food, desire, and the body that has resonated with new audiences and has introduced an innovative approach to musical design. This paper analyzes how the music and culinary traditions shaped in Como agua para chocolate create a “cultural synchresis” that emphasizes the struggles of women against misogynistic family traditions and the Revolution. Women form the central voice of the narrative, wherein various musics rescript their cultural positions, sexual desires, and personal battles taking place in their kitchens.

Erik Alejandro Iglesias Rodríguez, the Cuban-born artist known internationally as Cimafunk burst onto the international scene following his breakout concert at SXSW in 2019. Born in the western province of Pinar del Rio and initially trained as a physician, Cimafunk and his music consciously explore the musical, aesthetic, historical, and political connections that connect Black popular musical traditions from Cuba, the Caribbean basin, and the United States—especially funk music—to create a new and innovative sound while also channeling voices, artists, and sounds from the past. Cimafunk’s performance practice has been notable for the intentional way that he has presented his own body as “a technology of Black musical communication and identity” (Gaunt, 2006), offering fans a deeply sensual and historically engaged performance of Black masculinity that had been surprisingly absent from Cuban popular music, although visual artists such as Elio Rodríguez, Rene Peña, and Alexis Esquivel have explored similar themes. This paper draws on the work of Mark Dery (1993), Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones (2016), and Kristy Soares (2020), to investigate the way that Cimafunk employs music video and other audiovisual media to advance an Afrocuban Futurist perspective of Caribbean and North American Black experience through his sonic and embodied performances. Unpacking the ways that his performance practice builds upon the sounds, movements, and materialities of the past, I explore how the resulting audiovisual texts present an unapologetically Afrocentric (Asante, 2007) exploration of musical innovation, embodiment, and potentiality.