Long a favorite on dance floors in Latin America, the porro, cumbia,
and vallenato styles that make up Colombia's música tropical are now
enjoying international success. How did this music--which has its roots
in a black, marginal region of the country--manage, from the 1940s
onward, to become so popular in a nation that had prided itself on its
white heritage? Peter Wade explores the history of música tropical,
analyzing its rise in the context of the development of the broadcast
media, rapid urbanization, and regional struggles for power. Using
archival sources and oral histories, Wade shows how big band renditions
of cumbia and porro in the 1940s and 1950s suggested both old
traditions and new liberties, especially for women, speaking to a deeply
rooted image of black music as sensuous. Recently, nostalgic, whitened
versions of música tropical have gained popularity as part of
government-sponsored multiculturalism.
Wade's fresh look at the way music transforms and is transformed by
ideologies of race, nation, sexuality, tradition, and modernity is the
first book-length study of Colombian popular music.