Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization (review)

298 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies the deep level of confidence gained by Taylor. With the authority of one who has surmounted the barriers of heavy srreet slang and generational gaps, Taylor writes about the children's relatives, hometowns, favorite hideouts, most addictive habits , romantic encounters, terminated pregnancies, career aspirations, hidden abilities, and deepest flaws. Taylor's writing style, while intensely personal in nature, delves into metaphors that highlight the unmistakably social and political motivations behind the book's inception. Without explicitly referencing critical botder theory or Mexican political history (in fact, there is no bibliography ), Taylor manages to insert scathing critique into his narrative: [The tunnel kids] were rhe dark underside —the hidden truth of rhe border . Their very presence and movement beneath it belied the authority, the reality, of any fence or wall. The 'tunnel rats,' as they began to be called, moved through the tunnel with the refuse and sewage of another country. They were themselves a living contamination , (xiv) tion. The stark black and white portraits show the heroes, victims and drifters ofTaylor's documentary poised and posed in die doorway of Mi Nueva Casa, yet without a shred of artificiality to their often-solemn expressions. The tunnels in which the children live and work escape any visual represen tation, however they emerge implicidy from the glossy eyes and dirtied faces of rheir inhabitants . The professional quality of photographic composition lends an air of sophistication to a frequendy ghettoized population. The topic of displaced children plays upon human sympathies. The danger of writing about and photographing such children is that of essentializing their pain, exoticizing their reality, marketing to a society increasingly fascinated by the horrors of "the other." In the instance of Tunnel Kids, however, Taylor's candor and compassion coupled with Hickey's grace and ract exemplify the marriage between academic research and social acrivism and should prove inspirational to both scholars and activisrs alike. Elena Jackson The University of Arizona Taylor's anthropological background provides a framework of informant interviews and field observations that he sculpts into a journal-style monograph . He allows the book to follow an outline of interview quesrions skerched out by one of his juvenile informants-turned-interrogator, repeatedly referring ro these questions with each new acquaintance. Regardless of the applied anthropological approach, Taylor steers clear of dehumanizing rhe kids—the reader does not come away sensing that they are research subjects or statistics. No research problem is defined and no solutions are proposed. Taylors literary glimpse into the lives of tunnel children merely introduces yet another area of impact to be considered by scholars of border issues, globalization, international relarions, family studies, and a myriad of othet interdisciplinary areas of social science. The portraits by Maeve Hickey that accompany the text deserve more than a word of menBrazilian PopufarMusic and Ghbalization University of Florida Press, 2001 Edited by Charles A. Perrone and Christopher Dunn Globalization is a tricky term that despite, or perhaps because of its problematic nature, is gaining popularity among cultural critics. On the one hand, detractors of globalization blame the augmented circulation of economic as well as culrural capital for a homogenization of world culrure . According to the opponents of globalization , increasingly we find North American culture effacing the specificity of national or regional cultures. On the other hand, proponents of globalization argue that the free flow of material and cultural resources only adds to the diversificarion of national cultures. Néstor GarcÃ-a Canclini, for example, believes that globalization does not lead to the homogenization of cultures because artists Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 299 will invariably rransform rhe varied influences they receive, infusing them with local flavor. This seems to be the thesis underlying most of the sixteen articles included in Charles Perrone and Christopher Dunn's Brazilian Popukr Music and Gkbalization . The book gathers an impressive array of articles that seeks to convey the diversity and richness of Brazilian popular music from the 1940s to the contemporary period. The reader becomes familiarized with musical styles that vary from Carmen Miranda's stylized—and, some would say, (North) Americanized—version of Brazilian music "para exportaçâo" to the heavy metal of...