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This chapter examines contemporary representations of Latin(o) music's presence in the United States. It emphasizes Miami's unique positionality and Colombian music's role in the Latin(o) music industry at the moment of Miami's conversion into a “post-Cuban” city—a moment in which Latin(o) popular music undergoes a critical shift from “invisibility” to a brand of “carefully regulated, segregated visibility.” It deconstructs the prevailing and largely superficial depictions of the Latin(o) music boom that exist in the popular media. In particular, it foregrounds the decontexualized, dehistoricized language and subject matter of various recordings, television programs, and popular print media produced, written, and/or performed by non-Latinos and U.S. Latino performers and industry figures alike, with emphasis on the unique role played by the Miami-based entrepreneurs Gloria and Emilio Estefan.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book explores the musical urbanism of Los Angeles through the ear of Latin America. It argues that the musical life of this dispersed and dynamic metropolis is shaped by immigrant musicians and migrating, cross-border musical cultures that not only have determined LA's “harmonies of scenery,” but have also been active participants in the making of the city's modern aesthetics and modern industries. The remainder of the chapter discusses just how intertwined the music of Los Angeles and the music of Latin America have been since the very birth of the city in the eighteenth century.

This chapter assesses Shakira's Fijación oral, Volumen I and Oral Fixation, Volume II double-album production and performances in terms of the Freudian metaphors that inform our interpretations of her as a pan-Arab, pan-American figure in the post-9/11 era. Specifically, it addresses the implications of this focus on Shakira and her Oral Fixation(s) at this particular moment in the political and pedagogical trajectory of Latin American, American, Ethnic, and Middle Eastern Studies. Through a cross-media analysis of Shakira's recent music video production, it illustrates how she epitomizes the emancipatory possibilities embedded in the hybrid subject and the homogenized Latina popular icon. Her status prompts us to question the prevailing frameworks applied to the analysis of contemporary Latin(a) Americans in music video as a means of elucidating the present and future role of Latino Studies in the ongoing transnationalization of U.S. Ethnic and Area Studies. Against the historical and socioeconomic backdrop of the “Latin music boom,”the chapter concludes that the individual performers and the counterdiscourses that they engender have heralded the introduction of new possibilities for imagining Colombianidad, mainstream U.S. identity, and the very notion of the nation, both within Latin America and among its U.S.-based diaspora.

What do we in the United States know about Latin American art music, and how do we know it? From the 1920s until the end of World War II, U.S. critics applauded this repertory as universalist. During the cold war, however, Latin American music was represented as “exotic” or “nationalist” in the United States; that is, it was seen through a filter of difference. This chapter introduces the concept of Pan Americanism and how it has influenced the way we in the United States have represented Latin American art music.

This chapter suggests that new media and sound technologies in the early and mid-20th century—especially radios, gramophones, and films—introduced select audiences in Bombay to a wide variety of Latin American popular music and increased the demand for Latin American themes in live performances in local entertainment venues. It offers a brief discussion of the 19th and early 20th century, but largely focuses on the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s. During these latter decades, foreign films made strong headways into the life of public entertainment among select populations in India, including films such as Flying Down to Rio and Down Argentine Way that promoted and idealized the edgy exotics of Latin America. These and other films influenced the content and character of jazzy cabarets in hotel ballrooms, social clubs, for-profit clubs, cinema ballrooms, and railway institutes in Bombay and all of India. Audiences in these venues supported a general process of commodification and popularization of foreign artistic trends, so much so that by the mid-20th century, Goan Christian, Parsi, and Anglo-Indian minority communities also regularly attended jazzy cabarets and performed in dance band orchestras that boasted Latin American popular sounds. The chapter ends by suggesting that localized live performance practices in Bombay intersected with the Hindi film industry in the 1940s and 1950s, and influenced the character and content of cabaret and nightclub sequences in films.

Several centuries of interaction between musicians and audiences from diverse backgrounds in Cuba have produced the most intricate and appealing dance music of the world. An analysis of the music forms known collectively as salsa provides a good starting point for the study of Cuban music. This chapter examines the rise of the salsa music movement in the United States, its evolution, maturation, social and historical context, and especially, the musicians that created and developed it. Salsa cannot be limited to a musical definition, but is a collective term of recent vintage that encompasses several Afro-Latin musical forms. The core of salsa stems from the Cuban turn-of-the-twentieth-century country style, a marriage of southern Spanish and West African forms. Musicians attest to the centrality of Cuban dance music in the salsa phenomenon. Salsa began to enter the U.S. popular music scene in a substantial manner in the 1970s and 1980s. Appreciating the music took more than including an excluded culture; musical concepts as well as the culture of listening were rethought. Salsa is also analyzed as a vehicle for ethnic identity as it became identified with Latino urban communities in New York and other U.S. cities, as well as cities in the Caribbean. In the last two decades, it has exhibited a new twist in its development: the appearance of the salsa sensual, a romantic ballad with a steady salsa-rhythm background. This new approach represents a shift from Latin American music traditions characterized until then by rather strict separations between dance music and romantic listening music.

This chapter describes, first, the diverse and scattered musical markets, agents, institutions, and discourses that operated within what today is considered to be Latin America, but back then were considered disparate local, urban, diasporic, and transregional musical circuits. It shows the absence of unifying factors, either economic or ideological, that could sustain any encompassing regional aesthetic discourse or practice. Then the chapter presents the appearance, in disparate geographic spaces, of early intellectual, journalistic, and musicological notions of Latin America as a single regional musical space. It shows how, by the 1930s, a variety of regionalist discourses on Latin and Pan-American music gained legitimacy.

This chapter examines the relationship between African America, Latin America, and the Caribbean through the music and its associated performance practices realized on the stage of the Apollo Theater in Harlem from 1934 to the early 2000s. Through the lens of race, nation, and ethnicity, the complex and often tenuous relations among the diverse peoples who colluded and collided on the stage of the Apollo to produce some of the most significant and influential contributions to popular cultural expression in the United States throughout the twentieth century are explored. Though the Apollo is considered one of the most significant and influential venues in the twentieth century for African American music, studying the discourse and historical narratives concerning the theater’s history and traditions reveals that the venue was also one of the most important Caribbean and Latin American stages in the United States during that time. Situated just blocks from one of the most vibrant Caribbean and Latin American neighborhoods in North America, Spanish Harlem or El Barrio, the Apollo Theater was and continues to be a nexus for intercultural exchange between African American, Latin American, and Caribbean musics.

This introductory chapter briefly discusses an in-depth study of the US Navy Steel Band and its relationship within the scope of two overarching narratives: the development of post-WWII military public relations and recruiting, and American popular culture's fascination with Latin and Caribbean music over the past century. The chapter then explains what a steelpan is, along with the steelband movement in Trinidad and Tobago, and how it impacted the development of steelbands in America. It also explores how the American calypso craze of the late 1950s influenced the formation of the US Navy Steel Band.

This chapter focuses on Latin American singer and actress Carmen Miranda, who helped create an all-purpose, homogeneous image of Latin Americans, their culture, and especially their music. Hollywood used Miranda as a do-all prop in dramatic settings as diverse as New York, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Havana, and Mexico. The resulting conflation of costumes, instruments, musical genres, and languages is highly entertaining on one level but pernicious and (at the time) politically counterproductive on another. The partial coverage by US news media of events in South America left a gap that is “often filled by fictional representations in motion pictures and television shows. Film, in particular, has played a major role in shaping modern America's consciousness of Latin America.”

This concluding chapter reexamines national and regional struggles over immigration policy. It reiterates how making music constitutes a form of political action and builds community through dialectical collaboration between musicians and audience members; in addition, it analyzes what this research means for a conceptualization of the city as a cultural center and for the future of Latino music in the U.S. South. After all, in the Latin music scene in Charlotte, musicians are making popular music in the midst of immense political, economic, and social change and despite the indifference of the Latin music industry. In practices such as the “collective circle,” they are demanding a right to the city and are making spaces where music lives and thrives as a uniquely southern and Latino cultural expression.

This chapter presents the author's conversation with composer, violinist, and musical anthropologist Elisabeth Waldo, which took place October 17, 2015, at her home, the Rancho Cordillera del Norte, in Northridge. The author suggests that Waldo's work, differed from other works that were classified under the label “exotica” in that she went deeper into the archaeological and anthropological aspects of the music rather than simply making the music sound exotic in a general sense. As the author investigated her music further, he realized that she took this approach on many of her other records as well, all while showing off her symphonic abilities as well as her skills on the violin.

This chapter focuses on the Hollywood Bowl, summer home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and one of the first institutions to support cultural diversity even before that term entered the popular lexicon. The Hollywood Bowl has had a long-running practice of sharing its prestigious stage with Latino artists working in a wide variety of musical genres, from classical to mariachi, romantic boleros to hard-driving salsa and Latin jazz. In 2009, there was much ado about the arrival of Gustavo Dudamel as the philharmonic's latest musical director. However, many of those cheering the move may not have been aware that more than half a century earlier, two Mexican classical composers and conductors—Eduardo Vigil and Carlos Chávez—had taken up the baton as guests of the Philharmonic, performing on separate occasions at the Hollywood Bowl during its first two decades.

The Latin Music Studies (LMS) area at the Texas State University School of Music offers degree-granting programs with concentrations in mariachi and salsa. Such programs are still rare in mainstream US institutions of higher education. LMS founder John Lopez has recently developed a minor in mariachi, which in conjunction with the professional degree in music education provides students with fundamental skills in mariachi ensemble management, pedagogy, performance, and creative musicianship. The history of the minor in mariachi at Texas State University and the prominent presence of mariachi in middle schools and high schools suggest a future wherein the mariachi ensemble in Texas may enter the standard ensemble trio of the choir, band, and orchestra.