Encyclopedia of Latin American Popular Music
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group that assumed various instrumental formats to explore on hybrid or hyphen-
ated genres like the bolero-capricho, bolero-son, and even on moved forms like
merengue, jaleo, and son; to promote a diversity of styles from various composers;
and to help devise a new romantic genre, quite distinct from the old Cuban bolero,
but structurally closer to the danza than previously assessed. This new kind of song
is also known as bolero. Composer Pedro Flores, second in prominence among the
Island’s composers, with an abundant number of boleros, often referred to them as
danzas modernas, acknowledging the role of danza as forerunner of this modern
ballad.
Between the late 1920s to the early 1940s, other major Puerto Rican record-
ing artists included Pedro Flores, Canario y Su Grupo, Rafael Hernández’s Grupo
Victoria, Pedro “Piquito” Marcano, Johnny Rodríguez, and Cuarteto Mayarí. Most
of them remained active after 1942, as did bandleaders Julio Roqué, Noro Mo-
rales, Rafael Font, Augusto Coen, and Juanito Sanabria. Mayarí founder Plácido
Puerto
Rico
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Acevedo and Felipe Rivera Goyco (“Don Felo”) add to the list of major composers
as well as Johnny Rodríguez, whose repertory adds to the nearly 2,000 works by
Capó. Juan Tizol’s 1936 “Caravan” is a song considered to mark the beginnings
of Latin jazz . Among the singers, Pedro Ortiz Dávila (“Davilita”) is considered as Puerto Rico’s top iconic voice of all times.
A host of young singers, bandleaders, and composers who displayed their ver-
satility in performing in a range of styles from the slow bolero genres to the faster
guarachas included Daniel Santos and, later on the eve of the salsa era, Pablo
“Tito” Rodriguez (Johnny’s little brother). Santos became a Latin American leg-
endary singer as was Tito Rodríguez, Myrta Silva, and Bobby Capó, all of which
are highly revered in Latin America and among the U.S. Latino communities be-
tween the 1940s and 1950s.
The New York–founded Trio Los Panchos specialized in bolero and invariably
featured Puerto Rican solo singers whose incumbencies established the three main
eras for this Mexican trío: the periods of Hernando Avilés (1944–1952), Julito Ro-
dríguez (1952–1958), and Johnny Albino (1958–1968). After them, similar trios
proliferated in Puerto Rico, Mexico, and elsewhere, and popularized Noel Estrada’s
“En Mi Viejo San Juan,” a song that voiced among Puerto Rican migrants their
profound longing for their homeland.
As U.S. big bands left their imprint on local dance orchestras like Orquesta
de Rafael Munoz and Cesar Concepción y Su Orquesta in venues like el Escam-
brón Beach Club, the dramatic exodus of 540,000 Puerto Ricans to the United
States favored the sudden reemergence of dance clubs in New York City. With
it came the popularity of mambo, a dance reaching its climax in the 1950s at
the Palladium Ballroom with the so-called Big Three, composed of Cuban vet-
eran Machito and younger Puerto Rican bandleaders, Tito Rodríguez, and the
abovementioned Tito Puente. Their developments infused mambo with stylistic
innovations, thus tracing a path toward the eventual transfiguration of anything
understood as typically Cuban in their music, into a distinctive and true New
York Latino music: salsa.
Although salsa was coined in 1966 as a music-related rubric and later made of-
ficial, some of its designated sounds were at work in Puerto Rico since 1954 with
Rafael Cortijo’s fusion of various Caribbean genres—including bomba , plena,
and calypso —and the vocal improvisations by sonero Ismael Rivera. By the early
1960s, pianist Eddie Palmieri explored with jazzy developments on the montuno
sections and replaced the trumpet section for trombones to create a harsh and ag-
gressive sound. The contributions by Cortijo, Rivera, and Palmieri were eventually
adopted as core ingredients of salsa, although this rubric was still to be acknowl-
edged by Fania, jointly founded in 1964 by Dominican flutist and bandleader
Johnny Pacheco, and Italian American lawyer Jerry Masucci, who envisioned a
style imbued with a substantial degree of barrio-street inspiration in recycled Cuban
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Rico
forms. Around that time, an interim period of Latino crossovers into the African
American realm of soul and boogaloo culminated in the Latin boogaloo craze (1965–1967), inspired by Joe Cuba, and Cheo Feliciano, among others. Boogaloo
became an ephemeral style, but many of its performers formed a lineup known as
Fania All Starts with the addition of other Puerto Ricans and Nuyoricans (New
York–born Puerto Ricans). The artful arrangements, and the compositions of sal-
sa’s most prolific source of songs, Tite Curet Alonso, made a formidable force
steering salsa —in various ways—to an intensifying process of sound and rhyth-
mic fusions. Eventually, salsa artists waned in popularity at home, or moved on to
fields like Latin jazz and salsa romántica in the early 1980s, as the genre gained
steam in various countries.
Since the mid-1970s, young Nuyoricans formed a prominent group among the
top DJs and stage artists in hip-hop and related forms like rap and freestyle . Charlie Chase, a salsa bassist—turned DJ in 1975—is considered a forerunner in the
art of DJing, a hip-hop realm known for its considerable Nuyorican representation,
with names like Disco Wiz, The Mighty Force, and “Little” Louie Vega; followed
in the mid-1980s and early 1990s by Kenny “Dope” González, Ruben, and Vico
C. On stage, singer La India’s ability to navigate in the urban sounds of freestyle,
soul, hip-hop, R&B, electro-funk, and salsa is proverbial and exemplary among her
fellow Nuyoricans, rather than exceptional.
The boom led by Ricky Martin and Marc Anthony in the late 1990s paralleled the
emergence in Puerto Rico of reggaetón , a genre influenced by various styles, espe-
cially the island-based underground rap/reggae, U.S. hip-hop , Panama’s reggae en
espanol, and Jamaica’s dancehall reggae . Nuyorican Vico C is considered to be the pioneer of the form later popularized by Tego Calderón, Daddy Yankee, and Calle 13.
Further Reading
Conzo, Joe and David A. Pérez. Mambo Diablo: My Journey with Tito Puente. Bloom-
ington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2010.
Díaz Díaz, Edgardo. “Danza antillana, conjuntos militares, nacionalismo musical e iden-
tidad dominicana: retomando los pasos perdidos del merengue.” Latin American Music Re-
view 29, no. 2, Fall-Winter (2008): 232–62.
Glasser, Ruth. My Music Is My Flag. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994.
Long, Pamela. “ ‘Ruidos con la Inquisición’: Los Villancicos de Sor Juana Inés de la
Cruz.” Destiempos (Mexico City) 3/14 March-April (2008): 566–78.
“Native Porto Ricans Are Born Music Lovers; An Amiable Trait of Character That
Needs No Americanization—The Music of the Country,” The New York Times , May 22,
1904, accessed August 29, 2011, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=FA
0815F8355F13718DDDAB0A94DD405B848CF1D3 .
Spottswoods, Richard K. 1990. Ethnic Music on Records: A Discography of Ethnic Re-
cordings Pr
oduced in the United States, 1893–1942 . Champaign, IL: University of Illinois
Press.
Punto | 319
“369th Band at Carnegie,” The New York Times, July 27, 1919, accessed August 29,
2011, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10713F93D5C147A93C5AB178
CD85F4D8185F9&scp=1&sq=porto%20rico%20music%20369th&st=cse .
Edgardo Díaz Díaz
Punto
The Cuban punto, also know as punto guajiro or punto cubano, is a sung musical genre that appeared from the rural countryside in 17th century from Spain via
the Canary Islands. The traditional punto is a kind of musical duel between two
singers or teams of singers that alternate improvised verses in décima form. There
are two basic styles: Punto libre (free punto) and punto fijo (fixed punto). Punto libre, common in the Western part of the country, alternates verses in a free meter
with instrumental interludes in a fixed 3/4 meter. Fixed punto, as its name implies,
maintains a fixed meter throughout the performance. Because of the emphasis on
the text, the vocal melody tends to play a subordinate roll with singers employing
a fixed melody drawn from a finite number of stock tunes. An accompanying in-
strumentation for a typical punto ensemble may consist of a guitar, a Cuban tres , and/or laúd with clave , güiro , and/or guayo (scraper). While punto is a rural style of folkloric music, the genre and its practitioners have at times in its history enjoyed popular success. In the 1930s and 1940s, punto guajiro musicans performed
their improvisations over Cuban Radio, which by 1940 had 12 weekly programs
devoted to punto. From this repertoire, several musicians have crossed over into
the popular sphere, including Antonio “Ñico Saquito” Fernandez, Guillermo Por-
tabales, and Josetito Fernandez, the latter whose improvisations over his compo-
sition “Guantanamera” earned him an international reputation during and beyond
his own lifetime.
Further Reading
Linares, Maria Teresa. “The Décima and Punto in Cuban Folklore.” In Essays on Cuban Music: North American and Cuban Perspectives, edited by Peter Lamarche Manuel, 87–
111. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991.
Sublette, Ned. Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo. 1st ed. Chi-
cago: Chicago Review Press, 2004.
George Torres
Q
Quena
The quena is a vertical notched flute mainly used in South American Andean musical
traditions from Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, northern Chile, and northern Argentina.
It is considered the traditional flute of the Andes. Modern quenas are mostly made
of reed, wood, or cane, although different materials such as bone, gold, clay, silver,
and gourd have been used in the past. In fact, some ancient quenas found in Peru
date back to 3000 BC. The quena consists of a tube between 25 and 50 centimeters
long that generally has six equidistant finger holes in front and one thumb hole in
the back of the pipe. The tube is open on both ends. It has a quadrangular notch
about 8 millimeters deep at the top end of the pipe. The sound is obtained by direct-
ing the air into the notch, blowing downward along the pipe.
When playing pre-Colombian music genres, quenas generally are played in con-
sort with a drum, using different sizes of quenas tuned in different registers. When
playing mestizo musical styles such as huaynos, bailecitos, carnavalitos, etc., one or two quenas are played along with sikus , guitars, charango , and bombo or some other percussion instrument.
Quenas may have different names (e.g., kena, kena-kena, kiena, kkhena, qina,
etc.) depending on the musical tradition or the region where the instrument is
played. There are numerous quena local and regional variants such as phusipias or
quenas that have four finger holes; quena-quena, which has six finger holes and
is used to play a dance that holds the same name; quena kharhuani, which is the
quena used by lama drivers; and quena lichihuayus, which is used in the Bolivian
region of Oruro.
Further Reading
Cavour, Ernesto. Instrumentos musicales de Bolivia. La Paz, Bolivia: Producciones
Cima, 2001.
Olsen, Dale A. Music of El Dorado: The Ethnomusicology of Ancient South American
Cultures. Jacksonville: University Press of Florida, 2001.
Raquel Paraíso
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R
Race Relations
Race relations are the ways that people of different races living together in the same
community behave toward one another. Latin America is one of the geographic
areas of the world where over different periods of time there have been complex
types of relationships among European, indigenous, and African cultures that pro-
duced a mestizo (mixed) tricultural heritage and diverse communities. In Latin
America, these communal relationships and interactions are also important in com-
prehending how people of different racial backgrounds, heritages, and experiences
have influenced the development and mixtures of the popular music.
In Latin American history, European contacts with indigenous and African cul-
tures that stemmed from extensive periods of colonialism enmeshed in types of
hegemonic—dominant (European) and subdominant (indigenous and African cul-
tures), social, cultural, and political relationships resulted in a blending and inno-
vation of different musical traditions, popular styles, instruments, esthetics, and
techniques that people in the area have often reinvented as symbols of racial, ethnic,
and national identity. For example, in Bolivia, the Spanish invasion of the southern
Andes in the 1530s brought from Europe new musical instruments that profoundly
influenced indigenous music. Race relationships of the Spanish were often biased
against the indigenous community. The Spanish often used music instruction to
Christianize and colonize the indigenous into European customs and traditions.
Also, in Bolivia, the Spanish invaders often viewed indigenous traditional musi-
cal instruments with suspicion. They associated panpipes with those played back
home in Spain by lowly castrators of pigs and grinders of knives. As a result, the
Spanish constantly made efforts to repress the use of indigenous musical instruments
and often encouraged the use of instruments such as violins and transverse flutes.
But, the indigenous sometimes adapted their traditional instruments to play Euro-
pean-style music. In addition, with innovations in more popular music styles, the in-
troduction of the vihuela and guitars resulted in the creation of hybrid instruments
such as the charango . Also, over periods of time, many European forms, styles, and
rhythms were adopted; and even musical concepts such as that of the siren (Spanish
sirena ) were blended with pre-Hispanic musical practices.
In Mexico ’ s colonial history (1521–1810), the indigenous communities experi-
enced many types of religious and musical training, biases, and prejudices by the
Spanish. By the late 1700s, among the locals, there was a Mexican racial identity
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Relations
distinct from Spain that represented a discontent of continued Spanish control of
Mexican communal life. When Mexican independence arose in 1810, popular
music played an important role in the creati
on of a new Mexican national identity,
especially with the popularization of styles such as the sones and jarabes . However, many Mexicans, particularly those of a growing middle class, continued to
look to Europe for their musical models. The waltz, one of Europe’s most popular
dance forms at the time, quickly became a mainstay among Mexican social dances.
In addition, the polka, also popular in Europe particularly during the latter years of
the 19th century, had a major impact on música norteña (northern music) with the
arrival of German and other central European migrant mining workers for whom
the polka had a special attachment.
During the late 1800s and early 1900s, German immigrant communities also
arose especially in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Paraguay. In particular, many
German Jews immigrated to escape Nazi-sponsored persecution, and many Volk-
deutsche (German-speaking Protestants living in Russia) immigrated into Argen-
tina. The obvious musical instrument legacy of the immigrant German people is
the accordion, of which two forms are found in parts of Latin America: the button
accordion ( acordeón de botones ) and the piano ( acordeón de teclas ). In Argentina, a
variant of the first type is known as the bandoneón , invented by Heinrich Band after
whom it was named became a popular instrument used in the Argentinean tango .
European contacts with the massive ethnic groups that were transported as slave
labor from West and Central Africa to countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Puerto Rico,
Colombia, Cuba, Peru, and so forth influenced African cultural traditions into Latin
America’s social and racial fabric. This historical experience is also one of the prime
examples of the complex relationships between Europeans, Africans, and the denial
of human rights based on race. Colonizers often attempted to pass legislation that
banned African music, drumming, and dance in public settings. But in spite of many
biases, restrictions, harsh treatments, and slave practices, Africans attempted to main-
tain aspects of certain musical traditions. Such traditions often provided tools for
developing a sense of ethnic and racial identity outside of Africa. As a result, many
different African-influenced rhythms, sounds, textures, dances, genres, performance