When musicologist Jairo Moreno immigrated to the United States from Colombia in the 1980s, he arrived as a professional musician, and after earning a degree from the University of North Texas, moved to New York, where he began playing bass with some of the city’s finest musicians. Years later, reflecting on his time as a performer, he sought an outlet to characterize his lived experience as part of the lineage of Latin American music in and as American history. The result was “Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas.”
Moreno’s book highlights artists who have immigrated to the United States and reveals the transformative power of their music, from affecting a single person in a given moment to changing cultural identities over generations. “A lot of us who are immigrants, who go and settle elsewhere, at some point have to reckon with that event, the decisive event in our lives, leaving it all behind, seeking new lives and fortunes elsewhere,” says Moreno, a professor in the Department of Music in the School of Arts & Sciences.
At the book’s core, Moreno grapples with the history of and impropriety behind the phrase “Latin music” and the delicate relationship between its audience in the United States and the musicians’ countries of origin.
“In their countries, tensions emerge in connection to national belonging and to broader notions of Latin American history and sociopolitical orders,” Moreno explains. “At home, their music generates either immense national pride or suspicion for national betrayal. Regionally, their music provides a sonic index of Latin American resonance in the world at large; it addresses the continent, and in turn, the continent addresses the world.” In the U.S., he adds, this music elicits questions about how the country experiences monolingualism, race relations, the arrival of immigrants, cultural industries, cultural ownership, and more.
This story is by Phillip Marion. Read more at OMNIA.
