Music ImagiNation: U.S.-Colombian Identity and the Latin Music Boom by María Elena Cepeda (review)

The Colombian popular music scene has experienced a profound transformation in the past twenty years. The local music industry, established in the late 1940s, produced recordings for a highly segmented domestic market, but in the 1990s a new generation of successful pop and rock musicians came into the spotlight who not only were able to sell thousands of albums domestically but also seduced audiences far beyond the national boundaries. María Elena Cepeda's book examines the impact of some of those figures in the construction of a transnational U.S.-Colombian identity in the context of a large Colombian migration to the Miami area in the 1990s. During that decade, political turmoil and a failed agenda of peace talks with guerrilla groups propelled the departure of hundreds of exiles to Miami, long considered the northernmost Colombian city by many upper-class Colombians.

As Corona and Madrid (2008) suggest, globalized fluxes of peoples, commodities, and ideas require us to go beyond the traditional territorial boundaries of the nation-state to analyze the constructions of deterritorialized national identities. The arrival of new immigrant communities under special circumstances and the continuous growth of Latino population in the United States challenge scholars like Cepeda, brave enough to take the risk of analyzing a topic situated in a very recent past, on the basis of few documents and scholarly sources produced in Colombia on popular music. Faced with such a task, Cepeda does a really good job. Since the 1990s, political and economic changes have shifted the flux of immigrants: Venezuelan communities are now growing in Florida while many Colombians are moving back or relocating somewhere else, including Carlos Vives's return to Colombia around 2005 and Shakira's moving to Spain in 2011. Even though the academic community of music scholarship in Colombia is still small and has yet to solve many structural problems, studies on popular music have been growing locally since 2000. This brings about some problems with Cepeda's book that I discuss later.

The book's introduction sets the context of the discussion and the study's theoretical orientations, which are strongly entrenched in gender studies and Latino studies. I particularly liked Cepeda's explanation and consistent use of the term Latin(o), an identity juncture blending the U.S. Latino and Latin American, because in that way she acknowledges the multiple, diverse positions individuals can take depending on the context. Chapter 1 describes the crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s in Colombia that propelled many people to flee to Miami, and it maps the arrival of Colombian immigrants to South Florida. One of the book's main contributions is the portrayal of power disputes between Cubans and other South American and Caribbean groups in the context of the Miami's music industry and the so-called Latin boom at the turn of the twenty-first century. Cepeda shows the great influence of Emilio and Gloria Estefan on the music business and discusses the commercial trend for Latin(o) artists to "cross over" from Spanish to English, or vice versa, deconstructing biases and gender stereotypes implied in the process.

Cepeda does a great job analyzing the case of Shakira, with her multilayered identity as a public persona that might be called colombiana, Latina, Lebanese, or costeña, and Shakira's agency and versatility performing her sexuality in ways that constantly defy preconceived gender and ethnic roles. Later, Cepeda analyzes Shakira's video and cover images of her albums. In my opinion, both chapters on Shakira are the best sections of Cepeda's book, although I think Shakira's colombianidad is not perceived as such within the country. The case of Andrea Echeverri, the lead voice of the Bogotá-based rock band Aterciopelados, marks an interesting contrast because Echeverri's aesthetics come from punk and kitsch, and she deals in a completely different way with gender constructions...