Mas Musica

It was almost a decade ago that I made a small tour of Massachusetts college and university campuses, speaking on the cultural geography of Latin American music. The tour was sponsored by  MaCIE, and allowed me to meet a lot of interesting educators and students around the state. I am not a musicologist by any means, but I do find that music often reveals a lot about cultural geography, and my presentations consisted in discussing some examples. I carried around our Bose CD player and a suitcase of CDs at the time, and very much enjoyed myself.

I continue to find and enjoy new examples of culturally interesting music that I share with my students, though I do not attempt to update the Musica web site very often, but I occasionally add something to the blog. And today is such an occasion, as I just found a list of 11 Latina musicians who exemplify the great variety of music in the region.

I embed Fiesta from Bomba Estéreo simply because it is by far the most colorful and among the most modern of the examples collected by Marcelo Baéz on music.mic, but I encourage readers to watch all of the videos he has shared.

I found this article just as I was sharing the film Selena with my students and discussing my experience of living in South Texas during her rise and tragic fall. Both that film and the song "Sorry I Stole Your Man" by Jessica Hernandez and the Deltas reminds us that many Latin@s in the United States do not speak Spanish fluently.

Together,they are a rich lesson on the dynamic music of Latin America.

Lagniappe
The radio program Latino USA opened 2016 with this conversation, in which we learn a bit more about the how Jessica Hernandez began her career, at first at home in Detroit and then on tour, which meant long drives to small audiences.