This Is (Not) America(n Music)

On March 18, 2022, René Perez—also known as Residente and member of the famous duo Calle 13—released the video to his 2022 song, “This Is Not America,” featuring the Afro-French Cuban musical duo Ibeyi.1 The first six seconds of the video are silent and show a short segment of Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar's 1987 installation, “A Logo for America,” a 42-second animation for an electronic billboard in New York City's Times Square.2 A map of the contiguous United States made from small colorful digital orbs appears on screen with the words “THIS IS NOT AMERICA” superimposed on it. What follows is a powerful audiovisual exercise in destabilizing the meaning of the word America with a deluge of impactful images: Lolita Lebrón, militant of the Puerto Rican nationalist party, leading an attack to the U.S. House of Representatives; violent sequences displaying police brutality in protests in Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, and Colombia; chilling references to imprisoned undocumented migrants; the replacement of the Statue of Liberty with an indigenous person; a mother breastfeeding her child through a metal fence; southern Mexican Zapatista women wearing balaclavas (ski masks); the tattooed bodies of praying members of Central American maras (gangs); indigenous people being violently attacked by state forces; students with bullet holes in their foreheads; Native American kids sitting on top of mountains of generic Coca-Cola, Amazon, Starbucks, and McDonald's boxes; the Brazilian president eating steak and cleaning his mouth with the national flag; and singer Victor Jara being shot in the head by the military in a Chilean soccer stadium.Residente made this song partially as a response to Childish Gambino's “This Is America,” one of the last decade's most powerful music video critiques on the prevailing anti-Black sentiment in the United States. For Residente, Gambino's song became a catalyst for addressing something that had bothered him for a long time: It all started here, as a Latino in the United States. And hearing people referring to the United States as “America.” . . . I used to hear the term and it made me uncomfortable. It's not that it bothered me or offended me because one gets used to it. But it made me uncomfortable. I'd be like, “Man, these people think they are the center of the world. . . . ” When I saw the song [“This Is America”] by Childish Gambino, who I am a fan of and I follow, I remember I said, “Wow, this dude is going to make something about the whole continent, how badass.” You know? So, I got excited and when I saw the music video, I understood that his song was super necessary, the approach he took, but at the same time I thought that there were a lot of things he did not cover about America, you know? About the American continent. So, I thought “Why don't I cover what is missing and put it out there?”3I have discussed elsewhere how the label “American,” is shared by the United States and the entire continent as an adjectival form and a demonym—i.e., a word used to denote the people of a particular place—and Residente's song seems to focus precisely on this point.4 In an interview just days after the premiere of the song, Residente argued that he wanted “to start a dialogue about whether we should stop using or referring to the U.S. by using the term ‘American.’ Now that we are changing words, and modifying, and educating baby boomers on how to talk, maybe we can start . . . This [program] is Good Morning America, maybe it should be Good Morning USA . . . or you could start talking about the whole continent.”5When put side by side, Residente's and Gambino's videos highlight some of the friction found at the intersection of anti-racist and decolonizing discourses.6 Residente's criticism explicitly completes a picture of the America outside of the United States. But he also implicitly emphasizes what is made invisible inside of it—in other words, how a particular racial discourse renders other minoritized populations in the United States invisible. Even if Gambino depicts not the dream, but the American nightmare, this construction of a Black/White America builds upon politically motivated nationalist and segregationist epistemologies. How does it feel for a Puerto Rican to see that opening image to Residente's video, that map of the lower 48 states? “I think it is another way of colonization,” Residente says, “I am Puerto Rican, we are a colony of the U.S., we don't have a president, our president is Biden.”7 Starting the video with Lolita Lebrón in front of the U.S. House of Representatives is not a coincidence. Even if the “America” of “This Is America” is only the United States, it is built upon a reductionist racial framework that denies and makes invisible the historical legacy of the multitude of peoples that constitute this country and the territories it has acquired through its expansion.8 This America is not America. One of the results of published scholarship in a journal called American Music is that it discursively establishes boundaries for the idea of America(n music). As a curatorial intellectual space, for forty years the journal American Music has had agency in delimiting the field it claims to study. Building upon Residente's critique, we can reflect on how American music studies constituted an America that was incomplete outside of the United States but also inside of it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the basic equation America = United States of America is at play (but not always) within the pages of this journal. However, there is also a discursive formation around a sonic Black/White divide that obscures a much more complex racial makeup of music-making in the United States and, furthermore, has perpetuated racial cartographies that reproduce the boundaries of the social groups we call “races.” As an exercise, I wanted to show here the instances when Latinx and Latin American actors and practices have been central in the articles published in this journal past forty years.9 Even if we set aside the argument about America as demonym of United States and continent, I would not be the first to argue that discursively relying on a Black/White sonic divide, on the one hand, marginalizes the experiences of the interracial/interethnic/intercultural exchange already taking place in most U.S. musical traditions and, on the other, makes invisible the constant presence of many other racialized groups in the United States outside of this divide.10So, when have the pages of the journal centered on the experiences of Latinx or Latin Americans?11 During the 1980s, except for three reviews, there is only one article on Mexican composer Carlos Chávez by Robert L. Parker.12 The 1990s were not much better, and while reviews increased in number mostly through the work of John Koegel and Walter A. Clark, there were only three articles that centered Latinx or Latin American experiences.13 Once again, the first two were by Robert L. Parker on the composer Carlos Chávez.14 The third came from none other than Samuel A. Floyd who, despite not being a latinoamericanista per se, wrote what I would deem the most important pre-2000 contribution to destabilizing racial and geographic categories. In “Black Music in the Circum-Caribbean” Floyd foregrounded Afro-Caribbean Blackness and problematized how it does not fit the general imagination of Black music in American music studies.15 Floyd underlined that separating African-derived practices because they happen in current French-, Spanish-, or English-speaking territories masks that they all resulted from the same Atlantic slave trade. “African-American music,” Floyd wrote, “which currently—and groundlessly—refers only to U.S. black music, ought properly to signify the African-derived and African-influenced musics of all of the Americas: North America, South America, and the entire circum-Caribbean region, notwithstanding the fact that some of the particulars strain, somewhat, against my generalizations.”16The first decade of the twenty-first century did not improve the dearth of representation. In 2004 there was one article on composer Silvestre Revueltas by Lorenzo Candelaria, continuing the trend to publish on Mexican art music composers.17 Later that year, while not focused on Latinx or Latin American music per se, Anne Rasmussen's contribution to the special issue on “Disciplining American Music” particularly shines in her call to an inclusive view of American music and with a most incisive question: “How long until a music, a religion, a food, gets its green card?”18 Discussing the enduring perception of Arab-derived musical practices in the United States as foreign, Rasmussen points out that a more accurate representation of U.S. music would include “a variety of Latin musics, the musics of Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Scandinavian European communities, Asian (East, South, and Southeast) musics, and the Eastern European and Middle Eastern / Mediterranean musical presence in the United States.”19American Music 25, no. 1 (2007) marked the moment the journal became independent from the Society for American Music, which created its own Journal of the Society for American Music. Looking at the front matter of the two journals reveals that their stated focus differed precisely over the scope of the word “American.” American Music specifies that it is concerned with “subjects and periods embraced by the field of music in American life,” while on the other, JSAM made a point of stating that it explores “all aspects of American music and music in the Americas.”In any case, the post-2007 American Music did not change dramatically in the amount of Latinx voices or narratives, although sometimes the silences are hard to ignore. Jeremy Yudkin's article on the historiography of American vernacular music, for instance, mentions writings by Richard Crawford, Gilbert Chase, Wiley Hitchcock, and John Tasker Howard and looks at nonacademic books written for the general public. Yet none of them included (with the small exception of a passing mention of bossa nova) any mention of Latinx (or other U.S. American minoritarian) traditions, making them remarkably invisible.20A refreshing contribution appears in volume 26 (2008) with Gary Galván's discussion of the WPA music copying project and the Fleisher Collection.21 It is significant that while discussing “the most unique and comprehensive resource for the performance and study of American orchestral music,” Galván is unapologetically including Latin America as part of this project.22 Expanding on the same topic the following year, Christopher Shultis praises Arthur Cohn, who “made room in the Fleisher Collection for every type of composer writing music in America, be that Canada, the United States, Mexico, Central and South America. All of it.”23J. Peter Burkholder's “Music of the Americas and Historical Narrative” is an important historical record, given that it stemmed from his role as the third author to write and revise new editions of W.W. Norton's A History of Western Music, an influential text in the basic education of students of Western art music around the world.24 As the title suggests, Burkholder's goal was to consider how to better represent music of the Americas within such grand narratives. Crucially, Burkholder was not only advocating the inclusion of the United States but concluded that “the history of notated music in Europe and the Americas since the sixteenth century is in many respects one history, and it makes sense to include music on both sides of the Atlantic in our narrative histories and in our classes in music history.”25The 2010s show a new direction in the journal's inclusiveness. Jonathan Goldman's 2012 article discusses David Tudor's interactions with the bandoneon, an instrument central to Argentina and Uruguay's tango tradition and includes a discussion on Mauricio Kagel, an Argentine-German composer.26 Of great significance is Shanna Lorenz's “Black and Latino Hip Hop Alliances in the Age of State-Sponsored Immigration Reform.” This is the first time the journal published an article on a musical practice involving Latinx peoples inside the United States (as opposed to previous examples in Mexico, the Caribbean, or South America).27 The following year, Ludim Rebeca Pedroza wrote about a concert featuring the Los Angeles Philharmonic, under the direction of Gustavo Dudamel, and Dominican merengue superstar Juan Luis Guerra and his orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl.28 The first mention of non-Spanish-speaking Latinx practices in the United States in American Music appears in 2016 with Marc Gidal's “Catholic Music in Lusophone New Jersey: Circum-Atlantic Music, Intergroup Dynamics, and Immigrant Struggles in Transnational Communities.”29 Gidal looks at immigrants from Brazil, Portugal, and other Portuguese-speaking countries in the city of Newark. In 2017, I published an article on the creation of Indiana University's Latin American Music Center (LAMC) and Di Tella Institute's Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM), which highlights the transnational connections between two important centers for Latin American music.30Latinx participation in music-making made an appearance in the 2018 special issue dedicated to Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical, Hamilton, which notably relied on Black and Latinx actors (including Afro-Latinx actors) to tell the story of the Founding Fathers of the United States.31 Special attention to Latinx issues appears in Justin Williams's close listening to The Hamilton Mixtape; Anne Searcy's examination of the racial politics of Hamilton's dance choreography and the people behind it; and Loren Kajikawa's look at the musical's inclusivity, which dives deep into Hamilton's largely hip-hop-influenced language and emphasizes the “diverse roots of hip hop itself, where Puerto Rican, African American, and Jamaican youths, among others, came together in the South Bronx to create something positive in the midst of urban decay.”32Three final articles centered on Latin American/Latinx topics close this survey of the first forty years of this journal. First, Jacqueline Avila's 2019 attentive analysis of the musical and sonic elements found in two successful Spanish-speaking Netflix serials that simultaneously appeal to local (in this case, Spain and México) and global audiences.33 Second is Elizabeth Le Guin's “One Fine Night in Veracruz” (2021), an exemplary application of performance studies, song analysis, and historical work on the musings, stories, and accounts from the diary of a man who fought in the struggle for Mexico's independence.34 Lastly, Erin Bauer's research on Texas-Mexican conjunto reveals how genre labels can subsume fairly different repertoires and associated social identities and demonstrates the nebulous labor done by diverse ways of grouping aspects of conjunto based on repertoire, location, identity, and networks. Quiero vivir en América,Quiero morir en América;Quiero ser libre en América,Me van a matar en América!—“V Centenario,” Fabulosos Cadillacs (1993)Immigrant goes to America,Many hellos in America;Nobody knows in America,Puerto Rico's in America!—“West Side Story” (1957)Determining whether the word “American” should include “the Americas” or choosing a different demonym for the United States is beyond the scope of what this essay can do. But regardless, is this survey ultimately a call for American Music to have more representation? Only partially. Asking for comprehensive inclusion is often futile and might result in tokenism.35 But we do have enough evidence of neglect: large aspects of U.S. American music have been ignored as we reproduce narratives that privilege a Black/White binary as the core of American music. If this underrepresentation is a call to include all Americans (not just Latinx and Latin American folks), it is also a call for attention to the confirmation bias we, as researchers, have when we use pre-existing racial categories to examine musical practices that (inevitably) seem to confirm these categories. If we took the actual lived experiences of individuals as starting points, we would find that many of these musical experiences are deeply interracial, complexly connected, and richly networked. While discussions on race, ethnicity, and identity can be important, they should not become proof that these categories are there to begin with. They are abstractions we use to make sense of the world, and our sense-making can change with time. Our research should not end up stabilizing structures of exclusion but instead emphasizing the experienced porousness of social experiences. Learning from border studies, using methodologies from actor network theory, or engaging in more deeply ethnographic understandings of the music worlds we write about might reveal that everyday practice of American Music is much more than what we have so far represented through our research.

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