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Reviewed by:
  • Music in the Hispanic Caribbean
  • Rebecca Sager, Independent Scholar
Robin Moore . Music in the Hispanic Caribbean. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2010. 256 pp, B&W images, CD, companion website. ISBN13: 978-0-19-537505-3. Part of the Global Music Series, edited by Bonnie Wade and Patricia Shehan Campbell.

Music in the Hispanic Caribbean is a recent addition to the Global Music Series: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, edited by Bonnie Wade and Patricia Shehan Campbell. Unlike Dudley's ethnographically grounded Carnival Music in Trinidad (2004)—the first book in the Series to concern the Caribbean, Moore's approach is an historical-cultural survey of African-derived, Spanish-derived, creolized, and transnational musical practices organized into chapters that highlight the intersecting historical, cultural, economic, and political forces that unify Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Concerned predominantly with the "legacy of colonization and slavery" in the Hispanic Caribbean, Moore's survey explores the extent to which "[c]ountless West African, European and other traditions have fused together in endlessly complex ways over the centuries" (xiii).

One of the book's achievements is as a fine introduction to race and racial terror in the Americas during and after slavery. The first chapter lays a foundation by defining "race," "creolization," and "diaspora" (citing Omi and Winant 1986, Stewart 2007, and Brubaker 2005, respectively). Most useful is Moore's presentation of sociologists Omi and Winant's (op. cit.) apt definitions of "racial formation," and "racial project" to ground discussions of music and racial politics that recur throughout the text.

The book's layout reflects Moore's conceptualization of musics as falling along a continuum of varying degrees of hybridization. Beginning with chapters devoted to musics that more closely resemble Spanish or African heritage, Moore then identifies a common trajectory for highly creolized dance musics, like merengue, son, plena, salsa. All began as marginal, "folkloric musics" (associated with working classes and African heritage), were initially rejected by middle and upper classes as "distasteful," then were eventually accepted as "powerful symbol[s] of creolized sensibility" as they came to represent national identity (120). While the first two chapters emphasize rural peasant or urban working class perspectives, the last two tackle issues of hybridization and class/racial consciousness from an upper and middle class, white perspective.

Rather than engaging in ethnographic storytelling that gives the reader a sense of being there (which is more typical for the series), the strengths of this volume lie in its incisive historical narratives, including excellent summary histories of colonization, of the decimation of indigenous populations, and of the slave trade, among others. The author emphasizes what many cursory histories miss: that Spain was not unified at the time [End Page 269] of conquest, and that Hispanic culture and musical traditions themselves were "fundamentally hybridized" (34).

No survey as ambitiously comprehensive as this could be without weaker moments. Thus, in an otherwise superb summary of the "cultural legacies of the slave trade" (Chapter 3), there are two confusing statements that could confuse a young reader's grasp of the material. The text states that slavery ended early in both the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico compared to Cuba (54) (slavery ended much earlier—in the Dominican Republic in 1822 then not until 1873 in Puerto Rico and 1880 in Cuba). The text also states there are smaller numbers of African descendents in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic as compared to Cuba (ibid.). Granting that demographic statistics on race vary by source and criteria, the Dominican Republic's population ranges between 84% "black" plus "mixed race" and 90% of "African descent," putting the Dominican Republic at the highest percentage range reported for the three nations (CIA Factbook 2012, Torres-Saillant 2000).

Chapters and even subsections generally stand well on their own. Only one oversight in the book's organization could raise flags. In Chapter 4's discussion of salsa, there is no mention that Puerto Ricans dominated the New York Hispanic community. (In 1980, 80% of the hispanic population in New York City was Puerto Rican.) While mentioned in Chapter 5 (121), this fact seems crucial to understanding salsa's development and the socio-political activism of Puerto Ricans...

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