Cumbia! Scenes of a Migrant Latin American Music Genre ed. by Héctor Fernández L’hoeste and Pablo Semán, and: Cumbia: Nación, etnia y género en Latinoamerica ed. by Pablo Semán and Pablo Vila, and: Troubling Gender: Youth and Cumbia in Argentina’s Music Scene by Pablo Vila and Pablo Semán (review)

Cumbia is one of the most widely heard musical styles in Latin America, its catchy rhythm appearing in a dazzling variety of places and spaces, at times bridging and at times upholding racial and class divides. Given its popularity, it is surprising that not until recently have scholars focused on cumbia in its various national and transnational contexts. Three books by Pablo Vila, Pablo Semán, and Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste combine the work of several researchers into valuable volumes for those interested in popular music of a transnational Latin America.

Chronologically, the first of these is Vila and Semán’s Troubling Gender: Youth and Cumbia in Argentina’s Music Scene, which examines the role of cumbia villera in the production of gender among marginalized youth in Buenos Aires. The authors focus on the tension between, on the one hand, misogynist and sexually explicit lyrics produced by male cumbia artists, and, on the other hand, the potential for the reception of those lyrics to be a site for the sexual “activation of women,” an ambiguous social process with the potential to trouble dominant notions of gender—hence the title, a nifty inversion of the groundbreaking work by Judith Butler. Through extensive interviews, ethnography at concerts, and lyrical analysis, the authors aim to show that the lyrics do not simply impose violence on female bodies but are debated and contested in their very consumption.

Vila and Semán position their work at the intersection of third-wave feminist scholarship and popular music studies. While the authors recognize the importance of pioneers such as Frances Aparicio and Deborah Pacini-Hernández, who have highlighted the ways in which Latin American music normalizes gender asymmetries (a hallmark of second-wave feminism), they also claim that this earlier scholarship does not go far enough in considering how popular music allows for multiple interpretations that tend to fracture singular hegemonic readings (a hallmark of popular music studies). Given this framing, I find some issues with Vila and Semán’s project. First, they overlook important literatures in both third-wave feminism and popular music. Their lack of attention to race is surprising, given that third-wave feminism is a school of critical analysis built at the intersection of race and gender. This is an especially grave oversight given the racially charged field within which cumbia villera, also known as música de negros, occurs. Or, for example, their claim that cumbia villera is so “idiosyncratic that any comparison with musical genres elsewhere makes little sense” (4). On the contrary, comparisons to hip-hop and reggaeton, other genres that have been criticized for marginalizing women, would have contributed directly, not to mention that cumbia villera is in dialogue with those genres. For that reason alone, I would have appreciated consideration of the work of music scholars such as Raquel Rivera and Tricia Rose. Second, although they do an impressive job with discourse analysis on lyrics and young listeners’ interpretation of lyrics, the text-centric approach offers little in the way of musical analysis. For example, when some of their female interviewees point out that they do not care for the lyrics but nonetheless enjoy the music for dancing, the authors do not further investigate what other musical features the participants might be enjoying.

These critiques notwithstanding...