Mixed Race Studies

Oye Como Va! Hybridity and Identity in Latino Popular Music

Temple University Press
December 2009
238 pp
6×9
1 figure 5 halftones
Paper EAN: 978-1-43990-090-1; ISBN: 1-4399-0090-6
Cloth EAN: 978-1-43990-089-5; ISBN: 1-4399-0089-2

Deborah Pacini Hernandez, Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Studies
Tufts University

Listen Up! When the New York-born Tito Puente composed “Oye Como Va!” in the 1960s, his popular song was called “Latin” even though it was a fusion of Afro-Cuban and New York Latino musical influences. A decade later, Carlos Santana, a Mexican immigrant, blended Puente’s tune with rock and roll, which brought it to the attention of national audiences. Like Puente and Santana, Latino/a musicians have always blended musics from their homelands with other sounds in our multicultural society, challenging ideas of what “Latin” music is or ought to be. Waves of immigrants further complicate the picture as they continue to bring their distinctive musical styles to the U.S.—from merengue and bachata to cumbia and reggaeton.

In Oye Como Va!, Deborah Pacini Hernandez traces the trajectories of various U.S. Latino musical forms in a globalizing world, examining how the blending of Latin music reflects Latino/a American lives connecting across nations. Exploring the simultaneously powerful, vexing, and stimulating relationship between hybridity, music, and identity, Oye Como Va! asserts that this potent combination is a signature of the U.S. Latino/a experience.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Hybridity, Identity, and Latino Popular Music
• 2. Historical Perpectives on Latinos and the Latin Music Industry
• 3. To Rock or Not to Rock: Cultural Nationalism and Latino Engagement with Rock ‘n’ Roll
• 4. Turning the Tables: Musical Mixings, Border Crossings and new Sonic Circuitries
• 5. New Immigrants, New Layerings: Tradition and Transnationalism in the U.S. Dominican Popular Music
• 6. From Cumbia Colombiana to Cumbia Cosmopolatina: Roots, Routes, Race, and Mestizaje
• 7. Marketing Latinidad in a Global Era
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index

Bradley Lincoln of  Multiple Heritage Project (mix-d™) Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed.  Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival)
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #138 – Bradley Lincoln
When: Wednesday, 2010-01-27 00:00Z

Bradley Lincoln, Founder
Multiple Heritage Project (now mix-d™)
Manchester, United Kingdom

Bradley Lincoln is the founder of the Multiple Heritage Project.  The Multiple Heritage Project exists for a number of reasons.

• Firstly, a growing population of young people are being marginalised, expected to choose one racial identity at the exclusion of another and rarely given a voice on the subject.
• Secondly, many professionals lack confidence in dealing with issues of appropriate terminology and thus are unable to empower these individuals.
• Thirdly, lone parents/carers of mix-d children can feel isolated without a full understanding of their child’s racial heritage or access to communities where they could get more information.

The Slave South

The racial character of American slavery and the commitment to white supremacy fostered a widespread antipathy toward race mixture in southern society.  Whites feared that sexual relations between blacks and whites, if not controlled, could undermine the institution of slavery and the racial order.  Children of mixed European and African ancestry, in particular, blurred the sharply demarcated boundaries between the races essential to slavery in the South.

The restrictive policy toward intermixture that emerged before the Civil War, however, was not all-encompassing.  Miscegenation laws sought not so much to eliminate interracial sexual contacts as to channel them.  Those in power employed these laws, as well as laws against fornication and adultery, mainly to keep white women and black men apart.  The legal process exhibited a degree of toleration for white males who had sexual relations with black females, as long as the liaison was kept casual and discreet.  This sort of illicit intercourse—between men of the higher-status racial group and women of the lower—reinforced rather than challenged the existing system of group stratification in the South…

…Maryland’s miscegenation law, in short, was directed primarily at white women, black men and, their mulatto offspring.  Recognizing that only the reproduction of “pure white” children of white women could maintain the fiction of a biracial society, the legal system was particularly determined to keep white women from interracial sexual unions.  This preoccupation, combined with the custom of lumping mulattoes and blacks into the same category, provides a crucial insight into the social and legal construction of reproduction.  Under the social rules that operated in the South, a white woman could give birth to a black child—thus the need for strict legal regulation of her sexual behavior.  But under the same rules, a black woman could not give birth to a white child.  Such a construction of reproduction clearly served the interest of white men in the South, allowing them to roam sexually among women of any color without threatening the color line.

A similar thrust characterized miscegenation legislation in Virginia.  The colony’s assembly decided in 1662 that interracial fornication demanded special penalties; the fine it imposed for this crime was twice that stipulated for illicit intercourse between persons of the same race.  Legislators moved at the same time to clarify the status of mulatto offspring of interracial unions.  Declaring that the child of a black woman by a white man would be “bound or free only according to the condition of the mother,” the assembly broke with English common law, which stated that the status of a child followed that of the father.  Virginia lawmakers thus ensured that the transgressions of white men would lead to an increase in the population of the slave labor force, providing a powerful economic incentive to engage in interracial sex even as criminal sanctions were imposed for such behavior.  To say the least, this new legislation delivered a mixed message to white males…

…The fact that mulatto children derived their status from their mother also helps explain why southern lawmakers struggled to prevent sexual relations between white women and black men.  Although mulatto children of black female slaves were subject to enslavement, mulatto offspring of white females could no be placed in slavery.  The free mulattoes threatened the racial caste system ideologically, if not practically, because their presence could lead to the blurring of the distinction between slave and black, on the one hand, and free and white on the other…

Bardaglio, Peter. “‘Shamefull Matches’ Regulation of Interracial Sex and Marriage in the South before 1900”, In Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, edited by Martha Hodes, 113, 115-116.  New York, New York: New York University Press, 1999.