Caminos y Canciones en Los Angeles, CA

This chapter compares and discusses the possibilities, limitations, tensions, and liberatory exercises in both the fandango and the staged spectacle as the author experienced in the city of Los Angeles. She suggests that the fandango builds on a people's need to belong to a community and the desire to express oneself within and among them. Both worlds rely on nostalgia and the desire to connect as community. As all things Mexican and immigrant are currently under fire, the author asks, which music world is most valuable for Los Angeles? Which one keeps Mexicano histories and communities intact? Which music world is more inclusive and in this way most transformative for Mexican communities? The author's deliberation is motivated by her desire to not only articulate the ethical differences between fandango and the stage spectacle but also establish a conversation between them.

Studio Stories

This chapter presents interviews with some of the prolific Latin American session musicians in Los Angeles. These include Abraham Laboriel Sr., Justo Almario, Paulinho Da Costa, Alex Acuña, Airto Moreira, Luis Conte, and Ray Yslas. Between them, they have played on thousands of recordings for some of the world's most influential and most popular artists. Their contributions—delivered through percussion, bass, saxophone, and clarinet—helped shape songs that became international hits and albums that are still studied as masterpieces of jazz, funk, rock, pop, and R & B. Among musicians, they are legends, indispensable and reliable shape-shifting experts who can be counted on to play anything, produce any sound, slide into any groove, and lock into any genre.

Doing the Samba on Sunset Boulevard

This chapter focuses on Latin American singer and actress Carmen Miranda, who helped create an all-purpose, homogeneous image of Latin Americans, their culture, and especially their music. Hollywood used Miranda as a do-all prop in dramatic settings as diverse as New York, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Havana, and Mexico. The resulting conflation of costumes, instruments, musical genres, and languages is highly entertaining on one level but pernicious and (at the time) politically counterproductive on another. The partial coverage by US news media of events in South America left a gap that is “often filled by fictional representations in motion pictures and television shows. Film, in particular, has played a major role in shaping modern America's consciousness of Latin America.”

From Bahianas to the King of Pop …

This chapter traces the history of Brazilian music in Los Angeles, covering the journey of the collation of rhythms known as samba into the rest of the Americas, to the emergence of bossa nova as a major cultural force, to the post-bossa Brazilian sound in the United States. It argues that as music moves, it operates according to its own logic. Influences are fluid: a bossa nova rhythm can morph easily into a second line, a two step can slide into a samba, and writing music is, thankfully, a far more interesting way to write history than history writing. But it is undeniable that, since the late 1930s, the language, swing, and palette of Brazilian music have influenced the world and changed music in the city of Los Angeles profoundly, while very few of us noticed.

Musical Anthropology

This chapter presents the author's conversation with composer, violinist, and musical anthropologist Elisabeth Waldo, which took place October 17, 2015, at her home, the Rancho Cordillera del Norte, in Northridge. The author suggests that Waldo's work, differed from other works that were classified under the label “exotica” in that she went deeper into the archaeological and anthropological aspects of the music rather than simply making the music sound exotic in a general sense. As the author investigated her music further, he realized that she took this approach on many of her other records as well, all while showing off her symphonic abilities as well as her skills on the violin.

Voice of the Xtabay and Bullocks Wilshire

This chapter presents the author's account of Peruvian songstress Yma Sumac. Sumac is known for her four-octave voice and for launching the musical category known as exotica, a cinematic fusion of international styles that allowed mid-twentieth-century American audiences a taste of the mysterious and the remote. For the author, a Peruvian kid who grew up in Southern California, Sumac was a rare representation of the Andean in US popular culture. Xtabay, the hit album from 1950 that introduced Sumac to international audiences, seemed like otherworldly evidence of her power. In 2017, eight years after her death at the age of eighty-six, Sumac remains the subject of fan sites, Pinterest pages, and Facebook groups, and she has inspired a veritable rabbit hole of lip sync videos on YouTube.

Rumba Emissaries

This chapter focuses on Cuban stage and film star Ninón Sevilla, and one of the most beloved icons of Cuban popular music Beny Moré. Sevilla helps revive all those venues shared between Cuban and Mexican performers, between Mexico City and Havana before, during, and after the world wars. The movement between these cities was not linear, nor did it follow a predictable path. It was more a dynamic intersection that held Los Angeles as part of its junction. Moré recorded some of the most important mambos with the mambo genre's “King,” Dámaso Pérez Prado. Although his reputation on the island was always formidable, it was only after Moré spent almost a decade in Mexico as its rising star that he became a celebrity in and for Cuba.

Booming Bandas of Los Ángeles

The author's work with Oaxacan communities has drawn attention to Zapotec women musicians within this traditionally male-dominated musical practice. Although women have become more visible in brass bands, they are usually not revered as equal members of the band, even in cases where women have formal education and training. Taking seriously Sherrie Tucker's call for “engaged listening” of women musicians, this chapter focuses on Zapotec migrant women's experiences as musicians to address the formation of brass bands and the ways they negotiate the challenges they encounter in brass bands. It is through their localized articulations, voiced or played, that women establish a dialogue across the region of Oaxacalifornia.

Heroes and Saints

This chapter presents a poem by Luis Alfaro entitled Heroes and Saints.

Listening Across Boundaries

This chapter presents the author's reflections about Cuban music in Los Angeles. He says that although the history of Cuban music in East Los Angeles may be little known, musicians like Cuban composer Arsenio Rodriguez and flutist Rolando Lozano are an important part of the story of how Latin American music took shape across the greater LA landscape. Re-engaging with historical documents on the Paramount Ballroom that he collected from 1996 to 2003, he says that if we rethink the nature of our temporal and spatial distances from 1965, from the Paramount Ballrooms of the past, and seek to understand this place's meanings via people's movements of all sorts across time and geographic space, then we might retrieve the Paramount Ballroom's historical significances from vantage points of a different epistemology altogether. He attempts to listen between and across boundaries of all sorts, including “between the lines” of archival newspaper reports.