This paper examines cumbia norteña music and the politics of Peru’s citizen insecurity crisis. Developed by hobbyist musicians in northern Peru throughout the 1970s, cumbia norteña entered Lima’s commercial mainstream during the ‘cumbia boom’ of the early 2000s. Scholars have described cumbia norteña as a commercialized and politically mild style compared to its Andean and Amazonian cumbia counterparts (Quispe Lázaro, 2016; Tucker, 2013). However, this commercial success has rendered cumbia norteña musicians vulnerable to extortion. I argue that cumbia norteña ensembles have become central figures in the politics of insecurity. As extortion rates disproportionately affect the popular districts where cumbia performance is concentrated, musicians are forced to “collaborate” with extortionists to protect their performances from violent retaliation. I draw upon a year of ethnographic fieldwork to demonstrate how musicians leverage their public status as a powerful symbol and means of popular resistance—without necessarily singing about it. Turning to popular music and media as an alternative avenue for making sense of the crisis, I argue that musicians and audiences alike engage in “the art of making do” (Pine, 2012) as they navigate the pervasive insecurity that government institutions have been unable to manage. 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 publics most affected by it.

Since 1968, the massive, custom-built, vividly painted sound systems of Colombia’s Caribbean Coast—known as picós—have circulated and popularized vinyl recordings of African guitar music (champeta africana) at outdoor street parties called verbenas. While genres such as soukous and highlife are widely understood by listeners as “popular” music, picó repertoires also include what participants call música folclórica, an umbrella term for acoustic African and Afro-diasporic traditions. These tracks are typically deployed at the dramatic climax of a verbena, catalyzing distinctive forms of collective dance and gesture among the largely working-class, racially mixed audiences that picós convene. Whereas champeta africana enables picoteros to narrate a connection to African heritage—often described as something that “runs in the blood”—música folclórica paradoxically becomes a vehicle for articulating affinities with a perceived rural indigenous past. Drawing on ethnographic research in Barranquilla, this paper examines the circulation and reception of three emblematic recordings in Colombian sound system culture: the Congolese rumba track “Mekua Mu Murako,” the Togolese xalam piece “Edzade Tom Doa,” and a field recording of a Brazilian Umbanda ceremony, “Ogum Beira Mar.” Contrasting the listening practices of picoteros with those of Colombian “lettered elites” —who distinguished the “folkloric” from the “popular” to situate themselves within 20th-century modernity (Ochoa 2006)—I argue that picoteros strategically redeploy foreign recordings of "traditional music" to unsettle such practices of purification. In cultivating popular imaginaries of the folkloric in an urban scene that prizes technological innovation, picoteros complicate global antinomies of race, rural and urban space, and tradition and modernity.

The quijada, an instrument made out of the jawbone of a donkey or a horse, is one instrument used in the Afro-Mexican musical, dance, and poetic tradition of son jarocho. In an area of Mexico traditionally associated with cattle ranching that was the site of entry for enslaved Africans brought to New Spain, the materiality and sonic qualities of the instrument reflect local realities and legacies of both ranching and African heritages among son jarocho community members in Veracruz. Despite the rich potential for exploration in and outside of son jarocho, the quijada has received little scholarly attention. In this paper, I argue that the quijada emerges among my interlocutors as both an object and a discourse in and of itself that counters the historic silencing and erasure of Afro- Mexican communities and experiences. Building on scholarship that considers the quijada in the context of son jarocho (Vargas Garcia 2016) and as a Black musical instrument (Petrulis 2023), I incorporate ethnographic data drawn from interviews and participant observation to explore how the personal relationships that community members have with the instrument underscore an acoustemology (Feld 1996, 2015) that foregrounds afrodiasporicity. In the landscape of son jarocho, my interlocutors perceive the quijada to sound blackness and represent a form of Afro-diasporic ancestrality both through its connection to other Afro-diasporic groups, its musical application within son jarocho, and, as I argue, through its timbral quality of a “buzz aesthetic” (Merriam 1962, Driver 2017) privileged in African and Afro-diasporic musics.