REVIEWS | AUTHOR BIO | SUBJECT CATEGORIES
Latino music as an amalgam of American cultures
Oye Como Va!
Hybridity and Identity in Latino Popular Music
Search the full text of this book
Deborah Pacini Hernandez
"Oye Como Va! provides an incisive historical and contemporary overview of all the major popular musical genres defined as ‘Latin.’ Pacini Hernandez presents an insightful, coherent, eloquent, and engaging analysis of the hybridity of Latino musical practices, carefully documenting the ‘transnational’ musical interactions between Latinos in the United States and in their countries of origin."
—Jorge Duany, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras
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.
Reviews
"Deborah Pacini Hernandez’s wonderful book highlights the magnificent diversity and generative hybridity of Latino popular music. Oye Como Va! presents empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated analyses of a dazzling range of national and transnational musical genres. From her fully realized critiques of cumbia, merengue, and salsa to her explication of the hidden bilingual and bicultural histories of disco, freestyle, rock, reggaeton, hip-hop, and house, Pacini Hernandez has produced a timely, compelling, and significant book."
—George Lipsitz, author of Footsteps in the Dark
"Oye Como Va! brings Pacini Hernandez's unsurpassed expertise in Latino/a and Latin American popular music into a groundbreaking study of how issues of cultural nationalism, immigration, and transnationalism have affected its identification and marketing. The result is the most comprehensive treatment of Latino/a music to date. From bachata to rock en español to reggaeton, Pacini Hernandez discusses both the historical and most fascinating contemporary dimensions."
—Arlene Dávila, author of Latino Spin: Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race
"As the United States starts to confront its own deep-seated hybridity, Pacini Hernandez’s brilliant and groundbreaking analysis of the long-standing crossovers and fusions of Latino popular music is a sophisticated and immensely enjoyable guide to understanding the political and symbolic economies of transnational racial-cultural flows and mixtures."
—Peter Wade, University of Manchester, author of Music, Race, and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia
Also available in e-book
About the Author(s)
 | Deborah Pacini Hernandez is Associate Professor, Anthropology and American Studies, Tufts University. She is the author of Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican Popular Music (Temple), and the co-editor of Reggaeton and Rockin' Las Américas: The Global Politics of Rock in Latin/o America. |