Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, vol. 57, no. 3, 2023 [published 2024], pp. 453–75.

Abstract: Boleros, guarachas, and other popular music rhythms resonate across Gabriel García Márquez's work. Despite this, only a few mentions of cumbias appear in his novels, letters, short stories, and other writing. The present study analyzes the changes in Gabo's capacity to listen to cumbias and cumbiambas in his work across time. I show that, in early work, cumbia appears as an event incapable of producing semiosis, and Gabo is unable to fully listen to it. This inability gradually shifts, however, towards a listening for cumbia as sameness when reproduction technologies like film and vinyl make Caribbean music widely available and desirable.

Analyzing GGM's columns for the newspaper El Universal (1948) and personal correspondence about the documentary Un carnaval para toda la vida (1961), I read Gabo's shifting attention to cumbia as a result of what I call "distant listening," a listening practice and positionality in which the authorial I perceives certain sound events as alien, thus preventing sound from entering the literary archive. Cumbia elicits GGM's attention when Caribbean music becomes available in reproducible media such as film and vinyl. Cumbias on vinyl help him produce what I call a "reproducible authentic," associated with a letrado listening positionality that listens for generic features in cumbia. That is, a cumbia that represents an authentic cultural manifestation using reproducible media such as vinyl records and film while maintaining the properties of a non-semiotic event.

Studies in Latin American popular culture, 2024-06, Vol. 42, p.145-171

Abstract: This article analyzes the album cover visuality of the tropical music orchestra Pedro Laza y sus pelayeros in Colombia (1954–1973) with other “sabanero sound” orchestras of the time, such as La Sonora Cordobesa (1959–1969), the orchestra of Clímaco Sarmiento, and big-band sound orchestras, such as that of Lucho Bermúdez. This corpus’s graphic, geographic, and racial symbolisms form racial tensions similar to a “contact zone” in which different visual and sonic expectations interact. My analysis shows that, unlike a sonic color line, there is not one single public this music is oriented toward, nor a type of racial representation linked to one single consumer expectation. Instead, I find a series of tensions in the use of white- mestizo and Black bodies and geographical references. My analysis supports two arguments: one, that bodies of color appear metonymized in musical instruments to authenticate geographically, racially, and generically-sexually the Caribbean rhythms as “Black” and “hot.” Metonymies are one of the
ways the recording industry “tropicalizes” the Colombian Caribbean. I explore other strategies, such as portraying rural environments with an intent to appeal to wider audiences, both rural and urban. Two, the woman’s figure as a “modern girl” authorizes the mass consumption of this music in mestizo and creole layers of the Colombian urban middle class and nationalizes the idea of Colombian mestizaje as an unmixed racial juxtaposition.
Keywords: discography, tropical music, Colombia, cultural studies, contact zone, race, album covers, mestizaje.