Charlotte, a globalizing city -- The latin music scene in Charlotte -- Bands making musical communities -- Thursday is Bakalao's day! : bands at work and play -- The collective circle : music and ambivalent politics in Charlotte -- Shifting urban genres -- Race and the expanding borderlands condition -- The festival : marketing latinidad -- Musicians' ethics and aesthetics.

The Sounds of Latinidad explores the Latino music scene as a lens through which to understand changing ideas about latinidad in the New South. Focusing on Latino immigrant musicians and their fans in Charlotte, North Carolina, the volume shows how limited economic mobility, social marginalization, and restrictive immigration policies have stymied immigrants’ access to the American dream and musicians’ dreams of success. Instead, Latin music has become a way to form community, debate political questions, and claim cultural citizenship. The volume illuminates the complexity of Latina/o musicians’ lives. They find themselves at the intersection of culture and politics, often pushed to define a vision of what it means to be Latino in a globalizing city in the Nuevo South. At the same time, they often avoid overt political statements and do not participate in immigrants’ rights struggles, instead holding a cautious view of political engagement. Yet despite this politics of ambivalence, Latina/o musicians do assert intellectual agency and engage in a politics that is embedded in their musical community, debating aesthetics, forging collective solidarity with their audiences, and protesting poor working conditions. Challenging scholarship on popular music that focuses on famous artists or on one particular genre, this volume demonstrates how exploring the everyday lives of ordinary musicians can lead to a deeper understanding of musicians’ role in society. It argues that the often overlooked population of Latina/o musicians should be central to our understanding of what it means to live in a southern U.S. city today.

"This book reconstructs the transnational history of the category "Latin American music" during the first half of the 20th century, from a longer perspective that begins in the 19th century and extends the narrative until the present. It analyzes intellectual, commercial, state, musicological and diplomatic actors that created and elaborated this category. It shows music as a key field for the dissemination of a cultural idea of Latin America in the 1930s. It studies multiple music-related actors, such as intellectuals, musicologists, policy-makers, popular artists, radio operators, and diplomats in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, the United States, and different parts of Europe. It proposes a regionalist approach to Latin American and global history, by showing individual nations as both agents and result of transnational forces-imperial, economic, and ideological. It argues that Latin America is the sedimentation of over two centuries of regionalist projects, and studies the place of music regionalism in that history"--

Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race examines the emergence of linguistic and ethnoracial categories in the context of Latinidad. The book draws from more than twenty-four months of ethnographic and sociolinguistic fieldwork in a Chicago public school, whose student body is more than 90% Mexican and Puerto Rican, to analyze the racialization of language and its relationship to issues of power and national identity. It focuses specifically on youth socialization to U.S. Latinidad as a contemporary site of political anxiety, raciolinguistic transformation, and urban inequity. Jonathan Rosa's account studies the fashioning of Latinidad in Chicago's highly segregated Near Northwest Side; he links public discourse concerning the rising prominence of U.S. Latinidad to the institutional management and experience of raciolinguistic identities there. Anxieties surrounding Latinx identities push administrators to transform "at risk" Mexican and Puerto Rican students into "young Latino professionals." This institutional effort, which requires students to learn to be and, importantly, sound like themselves in highly studied ways, reveals administrators' attempts to navigate a precarious urban terrain in a city grappling with some of the nation's highest youth homicide, dropout, and teen pregnancy rates. Rosa explores the ingenuity of his research participants' responses to these forms of marginalization through the contestation of political, ethnoracial, and linguistic borders.

New York is the capital of mambo and a global factory of latinidad. This book covers the topic in all its multifaceted aspects, from Jim Crow baseball in the first half of the twentieth century to hip hop and ethno-racial politics, from Latinas and labor unions to advertising and Latino culture, from Cuban cuisine to the language of signs in New York City. Together the articles map out the main conceptions of Latino identity as well as the historical process of Latinization of New York. Mambo Montage is both a way of imagining latinidad and an angle of vision on the city.

Latino music as an amalgam of American cultures.

Shakespeare and Latinidad is a collection of scholarly and practitioner essays in the field of Latinx theatre that specifically focuses on Latinx productions and appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays.

The function of dance in Latin/o American culture is the focus of the essays collected in Everynight Life. The contributors interpret how Latin/o culture expresses itself through dance, approaching the material from the varying perspectives of literary, cultural, dance, performance, queer, and feminist studies. Viewing dance as privileged sites of identity formation and cultural resistance in Latin/o America, Everynight Life translates the motion of bodies into speech, and the gestures of dance into a provocative socio-political grammar. This anthology looks at many modes of dance--including salsa, merengue, cumbia, rumba, mambo, tango, samba, and norteño--as models for the interplay of cultural memory and regional conflict. Barbara Browning's essay on capoeira, for instance, demonstrates how dance has been used as a literal form of resistance, while José Piedra explores the meanings conveyed by women of color dancing the rumba. Pieces such as Gustavo Perez Fírmat's "I Came, I Saw, I Conga'd" and Jorge Salessi's "Medics, Crooks, and Tango Queens" illustrate the lively scope of this volume's subject matter. Contributors. Barbara Browning, Celeste Fraser Delgado, Jane C. Desmond, Mayra Santos Febres, Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia, Josh Kun, Ana M. López, José Esteban Muñoz, José Piedra, Gustavo Perez Fírmat, Augusto C. Puleo, David Román, Jorge Salessi, Alberto Sandoval

An ethnography on the significance of Selena's afterlife for Latino identity