Rhythms of Race: Cuban Musicians and the Making of Latino New York City and Miami, 1940–1960 by Christina Abreu (review)

Rhythms of Race provides a detailed historical analysis of Cuban musicians and their audiences in mid-twentieth-century New York City and Miami. This book joins a diverse literature by ethnomusicologists, cultural studies scholars, social scientists, and historians who have examined Cuban music and migrants in the United States, as well as issues of race, ethnicity, and nationality associated with cross-border movements. To offer a fresh look on well-known musicians, Christina Abreu utilizes new primary resources (e.g., recently available oral-history interviews at the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños and Bronx County Historical Society) and includes audiences in her analysis of performers. The work also sheds new light on Cuban migration by examining the two decades before the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Post-1959 Cuban exiles have overshadowed Cubans who left the island during the 1940s and 1950s, making Abreu's work an important corrective to the scholarly record and popular memory. Along with this shift in temporal focus, Abreu constantly links Cuban musicians and migrants to other Latino populations. She challenges "Cuban and Cuban American exceptionalism" and argues that "Cuban musicians and migrants, both black and white, shaped the development of a collective cultural consciousness of Latinidad," which was contested and sometimes racially exclusive (19). Moving between musician and community experiences, her nuanced yet expansive approach demonstrates how cultural producers fit within larger discussions about Cuban and Latino identities in the United States.

Like existing work on Cuban music, Abreu profiles famous Cuban entertainers. However, she moves beyond narrative to consider common discursive tactics, particularly claims about racial and national identity, which Cuban performers deployed to adapt and thrive. To examine these strategies, Abreu compares performers and their testimonies about their life and work. Abreu effectively juxtaposes, for instance, white pianist and arranger Marco Rizo, who worked for the Desi Arnaz Orchestra and I Love Lucy, to black trumpet player Mario Bauzá, who worked with the band Machito y Sus Afro-Cubanos. While the light-skinned Rizo hardly experienced discrimination, Bauzá noted racial prejudices in Cuba and the United States. However, both Rizo and Bauzá similarly pushed against the "Latin" label that the entertainment industry assigned to their music. They claimed instead the descriptor "Afro-Cuban." Continuing this analysis, Abreu considers Desi Arnaz and his persona Ricky Ricardo in the 1950s television show I Love Lucy alongside performers Machito (of Machito y Sus Afro-Cubanos), Miguelito Valdés, and Perucho Irigoyen. While Arnaz appealed to white, North American audiences, Machito, Valdés, and Irigoyen remained popular with Latino publics. Abreu explains that Latino audiences distinguished between Arnaz's "more watered-down commercial form" of Cuban music and other performers' supposed "authenticity" (164). Differential self-presentations and audience perceptions reflected unresolved "tensions between claims of (Afro-)Cubanness and Latinness" (142). Exceeding biography, Abreu reveals how performers navigated the racial and ethnic stereotypes that permeated show business and US society. In stressing race relations and discourses, Abreu complicates previous work on musical developments. She illustrates how music and musicians interacted with Cuban myths of racial harmony in a transnational context, aligning her work with historians like Alejandro de la Fuente, Alejandra Bronfman, Melina Pappademos, and Frank Guridy.

In addition to highlighting identity politics, Abreu traces developments within the Latino community in New York and, to a lesser extent, Miami. Mindful of Cuban performers and their local public, Abreu argues that Cuban migrants created "an identifiable colonia cubana," which significantly shaped the popular culture enjoyed by the larger Latino population (61). Abreu examines the colonia cubana by tracing developments in Cuban music, civic associations, the Spanish-language press, and events like annual patriotic commemorations of Cuban history and musical popularity contests to raise funds for charities. Cuban musicians furthered community building as members of associations and as entertainers. Music, organizations, and festivities helped create "a place for nation in the diaspora," Abreu claims (90...