BOOK REVIEWS
Cumbia! Scenes of a Migrant Latin American Music Genre
Editors Hector Fernandez L ’Hoeste and Pablo Vila
Duke University Press, 2013
If, as Nietzsche said, “Without music, life would be a mistake,”
the phenomenal popularity throughout the Americas of the musical genre
known as Cumbia makes Nietzsche’s remark seem an understatement.
Latin America has produced a wealth of musical traditions, the most
prominent geographic centers of production being Cuba and the
Caribbean, Mexico, and Brazil. As this much-needed and theoreticallyinformed collection of essays, with a lucid “Introduction” by Fernandez
L’Hoeste and Vila, illustrates, Cumbia, much like Affo-Cuban music,
transcends national hemispheric borders, making it today perhaps the
most popular music in Latin America. Despite its remarkable
popularity—including among Latino/a immigrants in the U.S.—this
Caribbean-origin (Colombian) working-class musical genre has too often
been overlooked as a subject of scholarly inquiry. Or, given this
anthology’s comprehensive bibliography, it may be more accurate to say
that the body of scholarship on Cumbia, which is substantial, has
wrestled with the reality that for many college-educated Latin Americans
and U.S. Latinos—or those of the middle or upper classes—Cumbia has
always carried with it an intellectually and culturally unpalatable lowerclass character. This timely collection recovers for a wide readership
across the humanities, and especially those with interests in hemispheric
culture and history, a vibrant and transformative musical genre that
continues to reflect and shape the lives of millions of fans throughout the
hemisphere.
As a Los Angeles-bom Mexican-American of middle class
background, in my own experience Mexican Cumbia, one of its many
rich variants as described in several of the essays included in this book,
always brought to mind the young working and lower-class lives of
Mexican immigrants, for whom the music was tantamount to a religion.
Especially as I entered college. Salsa and Afro-Cuban music easily
trumped Cumbia and other working-class Mexican musical genres, such
as Banda—just as it does for me today. Though Salsa and Afro-Cuban