Media, Sound & Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean ed. by Alejandra Bronfman and Andrew Grant Wood (review)

Upon consideration, scholars of Latin America and the Caribbean might find that beyond studies of salsa, bolero, and tango, our knowledge of the region’s full soundscape is limited, as a great deal of historical work is restricted to a spectatory, visually dominant study of culture. As Bronfman and Wood point out, it is essential to take an “expanded, full-sensory approach to history,” because sound is also an important “social artifact [with] which to decipher issues of social and cultural change” (xi). In that sense, Media, Sound & Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean constitutes an important contribution to the emergent field of sound studies, as it assembles a geographically diverse set of histories that opens up the sonic landscape of Latin America and the Caribbean to Anglophone scholars. The editors address the volume’s purpose in the introduction, where they assert that this “edited volume aims to decenter music in the study of Latin American and Caribbean sound, not by excluding it altogether, but by including it as part of a multi-vocal sonic environment. The book is not intended to be a comprehensive collection of sound histories, but a pioneering aural source sampling” (xvi).

Media, Sound & Culture is composed of seven chapters of varying approach, style, and quality. Four of them work with examples of mediated sound, two analyze live performance experiences, and one elicits literary descriptions of sound. The first study of mediated sound is Christine Ehrick’s “Radio Transvestism and the Gendered Soundscape in Buenos Aires, 1930s–1940s,” which explores early Argentine radio as a site where class, gender, and citizenship were negotiated. Ehrick studies gender-boundary-pushing performances that were criticized at the time by normative efforts of the threatened traditional hierarchy. The author’s exploration of vocal transvestism is squarely situated in the confluence between the nationbuilding medium of radio and the perceived threats of modernity to the Argentine national family. Whereas Ehrick’s study deals with the struggle within one country over the creation of imagined community via the medium of radio, Gisela Cramer’s “How to Do Things with Waves: United States Radio and Latin America in the Times of the Good Neighbor” examines the building of a pan-national mythology. During the early years of World War II, US government propaganda campaigns lent Latin America a presence never before enjoyed on North American airwaves. In an attempt to create sympathy for our southern neighbors as good allies against the Nazis, narratives were created of an inclusive brotherhood in the Americas—in which some of us were only a little more equal than others. In a third study of early twentieth-century technology, “Weapons of the Geek: Romantic Narratives, Sonic Technologies, and Tinkerers in 1930s Santiago, Cuba,” Alejandra Bronfman relates three stories that “share a relationship to the romance of the subversive capacity of technology” (69). The author describes a thrilling and chaotic period in Cuban history, drawing attention to an oftoverlooked group—technicians—and the power they held over technology and therefore communication. According to Bronfman, their role in political events of the day suggests the need to rethink current models for political change and the acquisition of power. In many ways, the last study of mediated sound stands in contrast to the previous three, “Music, Media Spectacle, and the Idea of Democracy: The Case of DJ Kermit’s ‘Góber,’” by Alejandro L. Madrid. The media frenzy surrounding the recorded telephone conversation of a corrupt Mexican politician is convincing evidence to the author that there can be no democracy in the presence of capitalist mass media with their drive for ratings. In the face of such commodification, Madrid assures readers, there can be merely the facade of democracy. An electronica song made about the scandal, “Góber (Precioso),” is posited as a statement about middle-class Mexicans’ dissatisfaction with the country’s ruling...