The Invention of Latin American Music: A Transnational History by Pablo Palomino (review)

Pablo Palomino’s The Invention of Latin American Music: A Transnational History is an outstanding unraveling of the emergence and transformations of an aggregate of practices, repertoires, artists, genres, networks, histories, and sounds that eventually become conceptualized as “Latin American music.” The book is built upon the understanding that what we call “Latin America” as an idea, as a geopolitical reality, or as a category does not exist without the “sedimentation of projects—diplomatic, aesthetic, political—that invented it” (1). Palomino demonstrates that, before the 1930s, definitions of Latin America as a region did not point to cultural sharedness to claim distinction. Instead, the author shows how the perception of Latin America as a cohesive cultural area and a separate geopolitical and economic region is the result of a multitude of cultural projects, highlighting music as one of various fields of social action in which this was negotiated. Ultimately, this book illustrates how music became an essential part of that process of sedimentation, given that it is “particularly effective to express the power of culture better than other aesthetic practices, because of its ubiquity, its cross-class nature, and its ability to link, through aesthetic, policy, and economic means, the local, the regional, the national, and the global” (12). The category “Latin America” as a discrete region, Palomino argues, “may have had diplomatic and political origins, but music was the arena in which education, commerce, and popular culture disseminated it as a world-regional identity” (213). To prove his main claim, Palomino embarks on an exploration of the key actors, the repertoires, the ideas, the national projects, and the transnational exchanges that operated both within and outside the region to construct Latin America musically (21).

Chapter 1, “A Continental Patchwork,” demonstrates that until the 1930s there was no circulation of musics that we might group today as “Latin American” as any kind of cohesive regional repertoire. Palomino finds that the circulation of the most popular transnational genres—tango, bolero, bambuco, son, and others—took place in smaller regional, multinational, or intercontinental circuits and not in the national or Latin American circuits we might take for granted today. His examples include regional circulation of music in northeastern Brazil, the circum-Caribbean, and the Andes, complemented by the transit of musicians, recordings, and repertoire across certain large cities such as Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Paris, London, and Rio de Janeiro (34). To complement this argument, chapter 2, “Transnational Networks,” presents four stories underlining that the performance and marketing of musics made in Latin American countries before the 1930s happened without referring to a “Latin American music.” The first case study, a very short look at the Philippines (especially Manila), shows that even with the presence of radio broadcasts and recordings with music in Spanish (notably, Mexican), there was an absence of references to the category “Latin American repertoire” in what was otherwise a very heterogeneous musical world. The second case study follows the Ukrainian performer Isa Kremer, who immigrated to Argentina as a fifty-one-year-old singer. Kremer’s repertoire is highly eclectic, mixing songs from Argentina, Cuba, the United States, Spain, the Soviet Union, Greece Hassidic tradition, and others. However, the categorization of Kremer’s repertoire into labor songs, lullabies, children’s songs, love songs, and so on indicated that these were more important categories and aesthetic groupings for her kind of global folklorist project than using “Latin American music” as an encompassing label. The third case study, much more drawn out, focuses on tango music and dance and its markets in performance, recordings, and sheet music. By looking at tango composers and the two main associations of authors and publishers, ASCAP and SADAIC (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers and Sociedad Argentina de Autores, Intérpretes y Compositores de Música), Palomino demonstrates how tango’s initial circulation made it a transnational genre even before it had created a local market. For authors and...