In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Synesthetic Sabor: Translation and Popular Knowledge in American Sabor
  • Priscilla Peña Ovalle (bio)
American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music. Organized by Experience Music Project | Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, Seattle, October 13, 2007–September 7, 2008. Miami Science Museum, Miami, October 25, 2008–May 17, 2009. Museo Alameda, San Antonio, June 17–September 20, 2009. Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, Austin, February 13–May 9, 2010. Musical Instrument Museum, Phoenix, February 12–May 15, 2011. Curatorial team: director, Jasen Emmons; guest curators, Marisol Berríos-Miranda, Shannon Dudley, and Michelle Habell-Pallán; associate curators Robert Carroll and Francisco Orozco.
American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music. Edited by Jasen Emmons, director of curatorial affairs, EMP|SFM. Seattle: Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, with The Boeing Company, 2007. 40 pages. $6.99 (paper).

While it can be easy to overlook the intellectual labor that goes into a museum exhibit, American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music merits appreciation for its intricate negotiation of three contentious concepts—Latino/a identity, popular music, and U.S. national identity. At its core, Sabor rightfully claims that Latinos/as have always played an influential role in U.S. popular music and culture.1 The exhibit educates audiences about the regional narratives and musical traditions that compose this history and provides an impressionistic series of lessons about colonization, displacement, and discrimination—highlighting the entrepreneurship, ingenuity, and talent of its subjects—through a series of listening stations, oral histories, and archival displays. Sabor challenges the audience’s understanding of U.S. Latino/a identity and culture by asking them to reconstruct their previous perceptions in multifaceted and multilayered ways.

The intellectual labor of Sabor is therefore a translational labor. The subtleties and nuances at the intersection of Latino/a communities, popular music/culture, [End Page 979] and U.S. identity require brokering of the concepts of space (regional/ national), scholarship (academic/public), and representation (aural/visual). To honor Sabor’s translational and collaborative methodology, this review incorporates interviews with the exhibit’s curatorial team: Jasen Emmons (director of curatorial affairs, Experience Music Project), and guest curators Marisol Berríos-Miranda (ethnomusicology, University of Washington), Shannon Dudley (ethnomusicology, University of Washington), and Michelle Habell-Pallán (women’s studies, University of Washington). Understanding the translational process of the exhibit allows for a better appreciation of its craft and innovativeness.

Sabor opened on Saturday, October 13, 2007, at the Experience Music Project | Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame (EMP|SFM) located in the heart of Seattle’s tourist district. As one of the institution’s largest exhibits to date, the EMP|SFM catalog billed Sabor as “the first major museum exhibition to explore the significant contributions of Latino/a artists in shaping the American soundscape,” marking a significant collaboration between EMP|SFM and the University of Washington.2 The bilingual exhibition closed at EMP|SFM in September 2008 and embarked on a national tour. By 2011, Sabor will have been presented in a wide variety of venue types and cities, including Miami, San Antonio, Austin, and Phoenix. In this review, I first explore Sabor as an example of collaborative research that illustrates how questions of identity, scholarship, and representation shape the translation of an exhibit from academic inception to public presentation. I conclude with a critical discussion of the complex issues raised about Latino/a representation by Sabor, especially at the intersection of the visual-aural and local-national. Although the exhibit provides a significant presentation of Latino/a contributions to popular music, its ambitious undertaking inadvertently draws attention to the tensions between regional and national meanings of Latino/a identity, especially in the use of visual icons that have so permeated the U.S. understanding of Latino/a-ness.

Whether focusing on San Francisco or San Antonio, Sabor is sited at the national pressure point of visual and aural understandings of U.S. Latino/a identity. By engaging Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican, and other Latino/a communities, Sabor identifies pan-Latino/a musical influences as important, complex, and consistent historical threads within the fabric of U.S. popular culture. To highlight how...

pdf

Share