Cumbia!: Scenes of a Migrant Latin American Music Genre

Chapter 4. Rigo Tovar, Cumbia, and the Transnational Grupero Boom

4. Rigo Tovar, Cumbia, and the Transnational Grupero Boom As the lights of the tv studio slowly fade, the music starts with a repetitive, syncopated electric guitar riff accompanied by a rather uncomplicated harmonic sequence played on the Sonic Cityelectric piano.The supporting musical structure is provided by a driving bass line and an incisive cumbia rhythmic pattern played by the güiro in counterpoint with the cowbell and bongos. The two guitarists of the band move rhythmically from left to right, following the cadence of the music in synchronicity, while a man wearing sunglasses plays the timbales and begins singing in a high-­ pitched, nasal voice: Ya tengo tantos deseos de conocer la mujer que será dueña de mi alma y dueña de mi querer. I have the desire to meet the woman who will be the owner of my soul and the owner of my love. A large star-­ shaped medal crowned with a diamond is visible through the open, white, puffy shirt under the turquoise polyester suit worn by the long-­ haired singer. As the song moves into an instrumental middle section the singer improvises a simple but loud solo on the timbales; the audience goes crazy, clapping, whistling, and screaming in ecstasy. The excitement only grows as the performance comes to an end when the repeat of the sung refrain is rounded off with the singer jumping high into the air, extending his legs and arms, in his classic, signature dance move.1 Alejandro L. Madrid 106 Alejandro L. Madrid This is just one of Rigo Tovar’s typically engaged performances, for which he and his band, the Costa Azul, became immensely popular throughout Latin America and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. Although the image quality is rather poor, the old video is a witness to Tovar’s extraordinary success, as well as the birth of one of the most remarkable musical tendencies at the end of the twentieth century, the so-­ called grupero, a cumbia-­ based musical trend championed by working-­ class grupos (bands) like Tovar’s that took the Mexican media by storm in the 1990s.Who was Rigo Tovar? What made possible the unlikely success of a charismatic but vocally limited singer? What circumstances allowed him to become an idol among the Latin American working classes and to have such great success in a music industry on the verge of neoliberal globalization? This essay offers answers to these questions by exploring Rigo Tovar’s cumbia style as a site for the intersection of class, ethnicity, race, and citizenship in Mexico and Greater Mexico during the 1970s and 1980s. I pay particular attention to the role of Mexican immigration into the United States in the changing attitude of Mexican media toward marginal working-­ class traditions. In analyzing this phenomenon I coin the theoretical notion of “dialectical soundings” after Walter Benjamin’s concept of “dialectical images,” and I argue that the transnational success of bands like Rigo Tovar y su Costa Azul allowed for the recognition of the marginal working classes and the validation of their cultural capital. This study of Rigo Tovar and his music is not simply an attempt to reevaluate or reinsert in the history of cumbia a figure that has been overlooked in scholarly research about Latino and Latin American music, nor do I attempt to homologize changes in aesthetic taste among Mexican audiences with changes in the Mexican social fabric due to migration. Instead I invoke Rigo’s success and his ultimate presence in the Mexican media as an index of the challenges that migration brought to mainstream Mexican culture in the 1980s and 1990s. The presence of Rigo Tovar and his music in the mainstream Mexican media is not a metaphor of social change but an example of social change. As such, I argue that the Rigo phenomenon in Mexico should be studied from a transnational perspective that illuminates how seemingly national mainstream practices occur within networks that exceed the national . In doing this, I understand transnationalism as “the idea that individual and even communal experience takes place within imagined communities that transcend the nation-­ State as a unit of identification” (Madrid 2011: 8). I show that it is precisely the type of culture exposed by the con- Rigo Tovar, Cumbia, and the Transnational Grupero Boom 107 sumption of Rigo and cumbia (among other genres) by Mexican communities in the United States...