Race, Latinidad, and Latin Pop

Popular music is one site where the contributions of Afro-Latinos are widely recognized. However, few Afro-Latino musicians reach the top of the Latin music charts. Several authors have argued that music like mambo or salsa, which began with strong Afro-Latino representation, “whitened” once it entered the mainstream Latin music market. This whitening involved both a shift in aesthetics and in the prevalence and popularity of white Latino artists. This chapter examines the contemporary pop phenomenon reggaetón as the latest iteration of this shift. The author pays particular attention to the rise and popularity of CNCO, the “first reggaetón boyband” that emerged from a television show called La Banda on Univision. Through an analysis of CNCO’s self-presentation, performance, and music videos, the author examines the current trend toward whitening in reggaetón that has helped facilitate the genre’s growth in Latin and global pop music.

A Century of Latin Music at the Hollywood Bowl

This chapter focuses on the Hollywood Bowl, summer home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and one of the first institutions to support cultural diversity even before that term entered the popular lexicon. The Hollywood Bowl has had a long-running practice of sharing its prestigious stage with Latino artists working in a wide variety of musical genres, from classical to mariachi, romantic boleros to hard-driving salsa and Latin jazz. In 2009, there was much ado about the arrival of Gustavo Dudamel as the philharmonic's latest musical director. However, many of those cheering the move may not have been aware that more than half a century earlier, two Mexican classical composers and conductors—Eduardo Vigil and Carlos Chávez—had taken up the baton as guests of the Philharmonic, performing on separate occasions at the Hollywood Bowl during its first two decades.

Digital Resources: Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art

Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art: A Digital Archive and Publications Project is a multiyear initiative at the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston that seeks to consolidate Latin American and Latino art as a field of study and to place it on equal footing with other established aesthetic traditions. It encompasses the recovery, translation into English, and publication of primary texts by Latin American and Latino artists, critics, and curators who have played a fundamental role in the development of modern and contemporary art in countries or communities throughout the Americas. The ICAA makes these essential bibliographic materials available free of charge through a digital archive and a series of fully annotated book anthologies published in English. It is facilitating new historical scholarship on 20th-century Latin American and Latino art through a framework of thirteen open-ended editorial categories that center on thematic rather than more traditional chronological guidelines. This approach broadens the discourse on the modern and contemporary art produced along this cultural axis. A discussion and contextualization of a selection of recovered documents that relate to the editorial category of “Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino?” supports this central argument. These and other little-known or previously inaccessible primary source and critical materials will ultimately encourage interdisciplinary and transnational (re)readings of how aesthetics, social issues, and artistic tendencies have been contested and developed in the region.

Latin American art resources north of the border: an overview of the collections of the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC)

The New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC), consisting of The Frick Art Reference Library and the libraries of the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), houses significant collections of material on Latin American art that document the cultural history of Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and South America, as well as the foundation of New York City as an epicenter of US Latino and Latin American cultural production since the 19th century. Ranging from historic archeological photographs to contemporary artists’ books, the holdings of the NYARC libraries are varied in their scope and record the contributions of Latin American and Latino artists to the international art scene. With the creation of Arcade, the shared online catalog of the Frick, MoMA and Brooklyn Museum, the ‘collective collection’ of material about and from Latin America has been strengthened in ways both expected and unanticipated. Techniques for integrating Latin American bibliographic information into discovery platforms, strategies for increasing the visibility of these collections, and ideas for providing improved access to the Latin American subset of the NYARC collections are being explored, and many further opportunities exist to engage in co-operative collection development in this area, across the NYARC consortium and with other peer institutions.