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music also attracted Mexican and other Latin American immigrants,
whom I met at the Salsa clubs I frequented, 1 knew that there existed,
often just down the street, a parallel musical universe where Cumbia
alone was the life blood and soul of those in attendance. Fernandez
L’Hoeste describes Cumbia’s draw; “[wjith its happy lilting beat, so
different from the melancholy of corridos and related genres, which
encourage sorrowful nostalgia and hard drinking, Cumbia was the ideal
companion for a long day at work or a festive night at the local dance
club. Hence in any of its Mexican incarnations, Cumbia would travel
back to the towns in the Michoacan, Guerrero, or Nuevo Leon
countryside, completing a full circle and granting greater presence to the
previously ignored inhabitants of working-class barrios" (10).
Despite its influence within hemispheric and Caribbean culture,
and particularly its popularization through both music and dance of a
working-class cultural identity rooted in the African, Hispanic, and
Mestizo Caribbean, aside from this new anthology, and a number of
other works on specific national variants, Cumbia music seems to have
been a neglected scholarly subject, often for the aforementioned reasons.
Yet Cumbia! Scenes o f a Migrant Latin American Musical Genre seeks
to accomplish much more than bring recognition to this musical genre:
like the best cultural studies scholarship of the past decade, the
contributors to this volume carry out a comprehensive critical project that
involves both “recovery” and theoretically-informed analysis with a
focus on the complex ways in which Cumbia music articulates a variety
of Latin American and Latino/a identities. As Fernandez L’Hoeste and
Vila point out, “the general hypothesis of [the] volume is that the focused
examination of Cumbia as perhaps the most widespread musical genre of
Latin American origin evinces some of the mechanisms through which
eminent forms of identity, like nation, region, class, race, ethnicity, and
gender (and all their articulations) are achieved, negotiated, and
provisionally and locally enacted by its followers” (13).
After an illuminating chapter on the Colombian origins and
evolution of Cumbia by Leonardo D’Amico, several of the early chapters
examine aspects of the Mexican Cumbia, from its regional variation in
Northwestern Mexico to the popularity of Cumbia’s greatest star.
Mexican-born Rigo Tovar, as an exemplar of the transnational grupero
boom. While several chapters focus on Cumbia in Colombia, this
anthology’s greatest strength lies in its hemispheric and transnational
scope, including essays which ex