Books in the Studies In Latin America & Car series

Takes you on an ethnographic journey into the New York salsa scene of the 1990s. Written by a musical insider and from the perspective of salsa musicians, this study offers detailed accounts of these musicians grappling with intercultural tensions and commercial pressures. It addresses a range of issues, musical and social.

Explores the development of modernist and avant-garde art music styles and aesthetics in Mexico in relation to the social and cultural changes that affected the country after the 1910-1920 revolution.

How class divisions shape the definition of Ecuador's national music and identity

Musica nortena, a musical genre with its roots in the folk ballad traditions of Northern Mexico and the Texas-Mexican border region, has become a hugely popular musical style in the US, particularly among Mexican immigrants. This title provides a history of this transnational music that has found enormous commercial success in norteamerica.

Documents the social and cultural development of a people "without history," a people who have sometimes been dismissed as foreigners who merely perpetuate the culture of the homeland rather than becoming "truly" Caribbean. This book examines the distinctiveness of traditional Indo-Caribbean musical culture.

Examines the marimba tradition -- the confluence of African musical influences, Spanish colonial power, and Indian ethnic assimilation -- in the dynamics of cultural continuity and change in Guatemala.

Traces Arsenio Rodriguez's early career in Cuba, his influence on Cuban and Latin popular music in the 1940s, his struggle for recognition at the height of mambo-mania in the 1950s, and his importance to Puerto Rican and Cuban communities in New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

The contradance and quadrille, in their diverse forms, were the most popular, widespread, and important genres of creole Caribbean music and dance in the nineteenth century. This book explores this phenomenon with a pan-regional perspective. It features chapters that discuss the Spanish, French, and English-speaking Caribbean.

How contradanceand quadrille gave rise to merengue, danzon and other popular Creole dances

Examines the ways in which bodies relate to culture in specific places.

A practitioner of sacred drumming for almost his entire life, Felipe practiced his trade in Cuba both before and after the Revolution and brought it with him to New York. This book focuses on three periods of Felipe's life, each marked by changes in his personal life and by important historical events.