This book is a historical and discursive study of rock poetry produced in Argentina, during the “transition to democracy,” in the 1980s. Lucas R. Berone analyzes the lyrics and albums of a heterogeneous group of Argentine rock artists and bands, who began their careers at that time, to demonstrate the emergence and functioning of a new grammar of discursive production, he terms the “grammar of the incognitus (or hidden) subject.” This grammar is a very specific and distinct way of...

From poets to sociologists, many people who write about life on the U.S.-Mexico border use terms such as "border crossing" and "hybridity" which suggest that a unified culture—neither Mexican nor American, but an amalgamation of both—has arisen in the borderlands. But talking to people who actually live on either side of the border reveals no single commonly shared sense of identity, as Pablo Vila demonstrated in his book Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaph...

Music, Dance, Affect, and Emotions in Latin America is a collection of essays that analyze different manifestations of Argentine music and dance taking advantage of the exciting new theoretical developments advanced by the current affective turn. Contributors deal with the relationship between music, dance, affects, feelings, and emotions in different scenarios and show how the embodiment of music shape the experiential in ways that may impact upon but nevertheless many times evade conscio...

Argentine Queer Tango: Dance and Sexuality Politics in Buenos Aires investigates changes in tango dancing in Buenos Aires during the first decade of the twenty-first century and its relationship to contemporary social and cultural transformations. Mercedes Liska focuses on one of the proposed alternatives to conventional tango, queer tango, which proposes to rethink one of the alleged icons of a national culture from a feminist conception and to imagine social transformation processes from...

Cumbia is a musical form that originated in northern Colombia and then spread throughout Latin America and wherever Latin Americans travel and settle. It has become one of the most popular musical genre in the Americas. Its popularity is largely due to its stylistic flexibility. Cumbia absorbs and mixes with the local musical styles it encounters. Known for its appeal to workers, the music takes on different styles and meanings from place to place, and even, as the contributors to this col...

Music is one of the most distinctive cultural characteristics of Latin American countries. But, while many people in the United States and Europe are familiar with musical genres such as salsa, merengue, and reggaetón, the musical manifestations that young people listen to in most Latin American countries are much more varied than these commercially successful ones that have entered the American and European markets. Not only that, the young people themselves often have little in common wi...

Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s underwent a profound and often violent process of social change. From the Cuban Revolution to the massive guerrilla movements in Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Colombia, and most of Central America, to the democratic socialist experiment of Allende in Chile, to the increased popularity of socialist-oriented parties in Uruguay, or para-socialist movements, such as the Juventud Peronista in Argentina, the idea of social change was in the air. Although this top...

Sound, Image, and National Imaginary in the Construction of Latin/o American Identities addresses a gap in the many narratives discussing the cultural histories of Latin American nations, particularly in terms of the birth, configuration, and perpetuation of national identities. It argues that these processes were not as gradual or constrained as traditionally conceived. The actual circumstances dictating the adoption of particular technologies for the representation of national ideas shif...

Along the U.S.-Mexico frontier, where border crossings are a daily occurrence for many people, reinforcing borders is also a common activity. Not only does the U.S. Border Patrol strive to "hold the line" against illegal immigrants, but many residents on both sides of the border seek to define and bound themselves apart from groups they perceive as "others."This pathfinding ethnography charts the social categories, metaphors, and narratives that inhabitants of El Paso and Ciudad Ju...

Rebel Dance, Renegade Stanceshows how community music-makers and dancers take in all that is around them socially and globally, and publicly and bodily unfold their memories, sentiments, and raw responses within open spaces designated or commandeered for local popular dance. Umi Vaughan, an African American anthropologist, musician, dancer, and photographer "plantao" in Cuba—planted, living like a Cuban—reveals a rarely discussed perspective on contemporary Cuban society during th...

Derived from the nationalist writings of José Martí, the concept of Cubanidad (Cubanness) has always imagined a unified hybrid nation where racial difference is nonexistent and nationality trumps all other axes identities. Scholars have critiqued this celebration of racial mixture, highlighting a gap between the claim of racial harmony and the realities of inequality faced by Afro-Cubans since independence in 1898. In this book, Rebecca M. Bodenheimer argues that it is not only th...

Earth Beings is the fruit of Marisol de la Cadena's decade-long conversations with Mariano and Nazario Turpo, father and son, runakuna or Quechua people. Concerned with the mutual entanglements of indigenous and nonindigenous worlds, and the partial connections between them, de la Cadena presents how the Turpos' indigenous ways of knowing and being include and exceed modern and nonmodern practices. Her discussion of indigenous political strategies—a realm that need not ab...