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  • Oye Como Va! Hybridity and Identity in Latino Popular Music by Deborah Pacini Hernandez
  • Marco Antonio Cervantes
Oye Como Va! Hybridity and Identity in Latino Popular Music. By Deborah Pacini Hernandez. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2010.

To take on the task of explicating or analyzing Latin popular music presents a difficult endeavor; with the hybrid nature of the Latin music and US adaptations and appropriations, one could easily get lost in the array of musical styles, genres, artists, and record labels. Yet, in her book Oye Como Va: Hybridity and Identity in Latino Popular Music, Deborah Pacini Hernandez provides an organized, concise, and informative overview of Latin popular music, specifically in regards to the recording industry’s relationship to Latina/o musicians and audience in the United States.

At the beginning of the text, Hernandez catalogues theoretical perspectives that have been used to explain the mixture and authenticity of Latino musical performance and frames problems as well as the usefulness of concepts such as hybridity and mestizaje in reference to Latino popular music. She then presents a history of the economics of Latino music and the ways in which the music has been marketed and sold. Hernandez also discusses Latino participation in rock ‘n’ roll and focuses particularly on differences between West Coast Mexican American and East Coast Puerto Rican preference for performing rock music. Hernandez later shifts to expressions by Latinos that were not necessarily based on Latino roots music such as disco, rap, house, freestyle, merengue, and reggaeton. With her explication of artists from these genres, she does effective work in illustrating how Latino musicians in the late 20th century formed cross-cultural expressions through musical expression. Hernandez later focuses on Dominican contributions of merengue and bachata, using “transnational theory,” which is useful in understanding the cultural production of Dominican musicians and audience in and out of the United States. Hernandez then discusses the roots and development of cumbia by outlining cumbia’s beginnings in rural Columbia. In her analysis she focuses on racial and class implications and the rise and decline of cumbia’s popularity in the country. She ends the chapter reflecting on the hybridity of cumbia’s African, Afro Latin, and mestizo backgrounds and the [End Page 154] variants of cumbia expression. The last chapter of the book focuses on the marketing of Latinidad in the changing world of globalization. Hernandez explains how major record labels lost interest in Latino groups in the 1960s; however interest would rise again during the 1990s. Hernandez, however, remains concerned that throughout this process, the industry continues to have a stronghold on shaping what Latina/o and Latinidad means.

An ongoing theme of Oye Como Va suggests that Latino popular music is hybrid, transnational, mestiza/o, among other concepts to describe the mixing of cultures. These mixtures not only connect US and Latino culture, but also inform within Latindad to present potential for challenging the racial scheme of the US. For a scholar interested in an overview of the trends in popular Latino music, this text offers valuable histories and perspectives on the performance, recording, and marketing of Latin popular music.

Marco Antonio Cervantes
University of Texas, San Antonio
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