Oye Como Va! Deborah Pacini Hernandez Oye Como Va! Hybridity and Identity in Latino Popular Music TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS Philadelphia Temple University Press 1601 North Broad Street Philadelphia PA 19122 www.temple.edu/tempress Copyright © 2010 by Deborah Pacini Hernandez All rights reserved Published 2010 Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pacini Hernandez, Deborah. Oye como va! : hybridity and identity in Latino popular music / Deborah Pacini Hernandez. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4399-0089-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4399-0090-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Hispanic Americans—Music—Social aspects. 2. Popular music—Social aspects—United States. I. Title. ML3917.U6P33 2009 781.64089’68073—dc22 2009012832 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 Contents Preface vii 1 Introduction: Hybridity, Identity, and Latino Popular Music 1 2 Historical Perspectives on Latinos and the Latin Music Industry 15 3 To Rock or Not to Rock: Cultural Nationalism and Latino Engagement with Rock ’n’ Roll 34 4 Turning the Tables: Musical Mixings, Border Crossings, and New Sonic Circuitries 54 5 New Immigrants, New Layerings: Tradition and Transnationalism in U.S. Dominican Popular Music 77 6 From Cumbia Colombiana to Cumbia Cosmopolatina: Roots, Routes, Race, and Mestizaje 106 7 Marketing Latinidad in a Global Era 142 Notes 163 Selected Bibliography 199 Index 207 Preface ecause hybridity—the mixture of two or more dissimilar elements— produces objects or people that are in between and out of place, it is Boften considered dangerous, inferior, or contaminating. My dual-region ancestry, set down in two areas widely and erroneously perceived to be racially and culturally distinct (Latin America and the United States), has been the source of tensions and anxieties associated with feeling in between and out of place. My father, who was born in Barranquilla, Colombia, was himself of mixed ancestry: the child of a Colombian mother and a third-generation Ital- ian Colombian father, whose extended Colombian-born Italian Colombian family members kept their ties to and identification with the “old country” as active as they could in the days before means of transportation and commu- nication made it easy to do so. Indeed, my paternal grandfather had broken with his parents’ generation’s standing practice of returning to Italy to find a bride when he married my grandmother, a local Colombian woman, who, family lore has it, may have been of Sephardic ancestry. My mother, who was born and raised in the United States, has maternal ancestors who have resided in the mid-Atlantic and northeastern part of the country for genera- tions. But her father was an immigrant from Canada, the child of German immigrants to the province of Kitchener, who came to the United States as a young man to practice his chosen profession as a Presbyterian minister. Complicating my ancestral mix is the fact that I lack strong cultural roots in any one place. Because my father’s quixotic and peripatetic nature impelled my family to move repeatedly among New York State, Colombia, and various other parts of Latin America, my childhood—and, hence, my viii Preface deepest sense of self—was indelibly imprinted with the rhythms, sounds, and sights of multiple locations. As an adult, I have spent several years, on and off, in the northern coastal region of Colombia (known locally as la costa), where I lived as a child. My first marriage was to a barranquillero (whose indigenous ancestry was unclaimed but phenotypically visible), who turned out to be as unstable as my father; thus, for the seven years of our mar- riage, I continued moving back and forth between Colombia and the United States. As a result, my daughter, Radha, was born in coastal Cartagena, and my son, Tai, was born in New York, and neither one has lived in the place where he or she was born for more than a few months. After I became an anthropologist, I spent several seasons in Colombia doing fieldwork, but now the years I have lived in the United States far outnumber the years I have lived in Colombia. My vivid memories of and family connections and personal attachments to Colombia nevertheless remain integral features of my psyche, alongside those—equally powerful—that I have developed in the United States. Despite my ambiguous identity and the instability connected with my lack of deep roots in a single location, I am grateful for my life of multiplicities and movement. These are the life experiences that have, among other things, honed my sensitivity to hybridity (and its discontents) whenever and wherever I have encountered or observed it. This book—which explores the simultaneously powerful, vexing, and stimulating relationships between hybridity, music, and identity—grew out of my personal realization of the dangers (as George Lipsitz has phrased it) of living at the crossroads.1 Growing up with English- and Spanish-speaking relatives and friends, listening to rock ’n’ roll and cumbias, loving corn flakes and Colombia’s corn arepas, I identified with both the United States and Colombia but never felt that I belonged completely in, or to, either one. As a child, I was unsure how to answer when people asked where I was from, and when I got older, I was confounded by the identity boxes on official forms. In the 1980s, I claimed the term “Latina” as a better alternative than “My father is from Colombia, and my mother is from the United States.” Even so, I often found myself excluded from the “Latina” category because my pro- file did not conform to widespread expectations of what that identifier was supposed to encompass: My background included Latin American ancestry and residence, but my parents were both college-educated and middle-class (despite the economically precarious situations we often found ourselves in as a result of my father’s instability). Moreover, because of my light skin and its concomitant privileges, I was not a target of the overt racism experienced by darker-skinned Latinos. But since I did not conform to prevailing ideas of who or what it was to be “American” either, I found myself in between and out of place. Preface ix In my adolescence, a time when group identity is so important to a young person’s developing sense of self, I did not have one. Now, having spent decades as a researcher and educator exploring the diversity of U.S. Latino experiences, I know that many other Latinos and Latinas with mixed ances- tries and multiple geographic roots have also had to defend themselves against charges of fraudulently claiming an identity—be it white, black, Puerto Rican, American, Latino, or any other presumably bounded category. Indeed, the effects of ambiguity and dislocation produced by hybridity and border cross- ings have been well articulated in a vibrant body of literature pioneered by Latino and Latina writers such as Piri Thomas, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and Frances Negrón-Muntaner and subsequently developed further by many others who have similarly experienced the alienation of feeling out of place. Given the pervasiveness of essentialist notions of fixed and unambigu- ous boundaries (among Latinos and non-Latinos alike), it is perhaps more accurate to locate myself and other similarly hybrid individuals as living not only at the crossroads but also in the crosshairs of U.S. identity politics. If many Latinos have themselves been quite conscious of their hybridity, in the U.S. popular imagination the styles of music associated with Lati- nos have often been imagined as the “natural” expressions of communities defined ethnically or racially, as if they were unmixed and disconnected from other musics or, if mixed at all, mixed only with proximate cultures rather than with broader cultural developments on the national (and international) stage. The corollary has been that Latinos who listened to rock ’n’ roll, disco, and other contemporary styles of rock and hip-hop were somehow cultural traitors for having abandoned their ancestral identity and culture in order to get ahead by passing as something they were not. Some scholars, in contrast, have demonstrated the analytical power and possibilities of more inclusive approaches to U.S. Latino musical practices—such as Juan Flores in his pio- neering work comparing New York Puerto Rican and Chicano identities and exploring the complicated roots of New York Puerto Rican boogaloo, George Lipsitz in his essays on merengue and banda in Footsteps in the Dark, and Luis Alvarez in his recent call for “relational” Latino studies.2 Oye Como Va!3 builds on and extends such comparative, cross-cultural work by placing hybridity itself at the center, examining and validating Latino music making and identity formation that have always taken place at the inter- sections of (presumably) dissimilar categories. Latinos’ relationship to their hybridity has not been unproblematic, as it has often conflicted with equally powerful and valid desires to maintain a cultural identity uncomplicated by mixture or references to other genealogies. Central to the premise of this book, however, is the idea that far from being something abnormal or problematic, hybridity, whether racial, ethnic, cultural, or a combination of these, is one of x Preface the signature characteristics of the Latino experience: It is not a question of “either/or,” but rather, like hybridity itself, of “both/and.” Oye Como Va! brings to the surface and into focus the many ways that Latino musicians and their fans have refused to permit prevailing, often essentialist constructions of indi- vidual and group identity (no matter who espouses them) to limit their ability to define themselves.