Un-Disciplining Latin@ Music: Music and Latinidades in the United States, 1801-1900

What we know about Latin@ music history in the United States has been shaped greatly by the popular music industry. Because the advent of recording technology dates to the late nineteenth century, it is presumed that Latin@... [ view full abstract ]

What we know about Latin@ music history in the United States has been shaped greatly by the popular music industry. Because the advent of recording technology dates to the late nineteenth century, it is presumed that Latin@ music dates no earlier than the turn of the twentieth century. What has been lost in the disciplining of Latin@ music in this regard are the musicians from Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere who toured the nation throughout the antebellum and post-Civil War eras performing varying repertories of music. The narrative of immigration to the United States has similarly privileged European groups in the nineteenth century. Even Latin@ studies scholars have addressed immigration, globalization, transnationalism, among other current issues at the expense of equally rigorous accounts of the newly colonized, racially oppressed, and politically exiled Latin@s of the nineteenth century. What scholars and the general public alike need is access to texts of historical importance in whose documentation of music making and dancing are recorded the presences, tensions, and contradictions that Latin@s once embodied under the cultural, social, and political regimes of pre-twentieth century America.

This paper documents previously unknown cartographies of music making in the United States and explores music histories that disrupt boundaries of both Latin@ music studies and nineteenth-century American history. To do this it places the concept “Latin@” itself in historical context, showing that latinidades have always operated beyond dominant narratives of nation, race, and even Latin@ identity itself. One case study is Lorenzo Tio, whose presence in jazz’s pre-history has led scholars down problematic paths of nationalist identifications. What these scholars have not yet been able to account for is the fact that Tio’s father (whose grandfather was Catalan and grandmother Creole) chose to move his family to Mexico as legislation in Louisiana threated the freedom and safety of the Creole population of New Orleans during the build up to the Civil War. Lorenzo and his brother Louis were born in Tampico, but their parents’ lived experiences as Creole exiles in Mexico speak as much, if not more to Afro-Latin@ history as to the Tio’s contributions as Mexican-born but not necessarily self-identified Mexican musicians to early jazz history. A second case study takes into account contemporary theoretical questions concerning citizenship and labor migrations. To do this, it uncovers reports of, on the one hand, “wild fandangos” in the newly annexed southwestern states and, on the other, following touring Mexican and Cuban musicians, whose diverse racialized identities tended to confound reporters wedded to the nation’s Black/White political economy of race.

The paper, thus, disrupts ongoing attempts to homogenize and essentialize latinidades in favor of bringing to the fore histories of latinidades that cut across contemporary narratives of race, ethnicity, and music. The goal is to contribute to Latin@ studies’ work toward the inclusion of latinidades in the dominant narratives of American public discourse by re-interrogating the colonial archive in order that previously erased voices in music might resonate with those of today and of the more recent past.