of distinct form and character. The second theory proposes that cueca is primarily
a musical form rather than a dance, rooted in the Arab-Andalusian musical tradi-
tion, which developed in Spain between the 9th and 16th centuries, particularly the
vocal production, the use of instruments such as the hexagonal tambourine and the
style of singing in a round.
128 | Cuíca
Up to the early 20th century, cueca was primarily performed in inns called chin-
ganas or fondas. Later on, it reached a far wider audience through broadcasts and
recordings by música típica ensembles such as Los Cuatro Huasos and Los Quin-
cheros, becoming identified with the image of the huaso (Chilean cowboy). During
the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the overall popularity of cueca has declined
and is danced primarily during the celebrations of the National Day (September
18) and at official ceremonies. Nevertheless, during the last few years, there have
been signs of a comeback of this genre seen through a number of young urban
groups. In the 1990s, the well-known rock/pop group Los Tres played cuecas in
“La Yein Fonda” during the National Day celebrations in a suburb of Santiago
called Ñuñoa, and later performed cuecas on MTV international music television
channel.
Famous cueca musicians include Los Chileneros, Los Hermanos Campos,
Violeta, Roberto, Isabel and Ángel Parra, Segundo Zamora, Nano Nuñez, Mar-
got Loyola, Pepe Fuentes, Los Afuerinos, Luis Araneda, Los Truqueros, Los
Santiaguinos, Las Capitalinas, Las Torcazas, Los Tricolores, Chamullentos,
and Los Porfiados de la Cueca. Some of the most popular cuecas are “La rosa y
el clavel,” “Adiós Santiago querido,” “La consentida,” “Chicha de Curacaví,”
“Los lagos de Chile,” “El guatón Loyola,” “Los lagos de Chile,” and “El chute
Alberto.”
Further Reading
Claro Valdés, Samuel. Chilena o cueca tradicional. Santiago: Ediciones Universidad
Católica de Chile, 1994.
Feldman, Heidi Carolyn. Black Rhythms of Peru: Reviving African Musical Heritage
in the Black Pacific. Music/culture. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006.
Knudsen, Jan Sverre. “Dancing Cueca ‘With Your Coat On’: The Role of Traditional
Chilean Dance in an Immigrant Community.” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 10, no. 2
(2001): 61.
Katia Chornik
Cuíca
A cuíca is a Brazilian friction drum with a thin bamboo stick embedded into a
single goat-skin head. It is known by a variety of names including puíta, tambor
onça, and roncador. Cuíca is found throughout Brazil where it is used primarily
in small musical ensembles to accompany dance. The model for the instrument
derives from the Bantu regions of Central Africa and was introduced into Brazil
by enslaved Africans from that area as early as the 16th century. A wet cloth is
used to rub the stick back and forth, producing vibrations that are transferred to
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the skin, resulting in vocal-like tones that can be low or high in pitch. By press-
ing on the skin while rubbing the stick, the pitch of the tone can be altered. The
cuíca was incorporated into the percussion section of the escolas de samba from
Rio de Janeiro in the mid-20th century and now occupies an important position
in those organizations. While the cuíca’s primary function remains as tonal/
rhythmic accompaniment, the instrument’s technical possibilities have achieved
virtuosic dimensions and the most expert players perform simple melodies on
the instrument.
Further Reading
Bolão, Oscar. Batuque é um privilégio: A percussão da música do Rio de Janeiro
(Batuque is a privilege: Percussion in Rio de Janeiro’s Music) . Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Lu-miar Editora, 2003.
Larry Crook
Cultural Imperialism
Cultural imperialism is a theoretical approach to forms of public culture such
as film, television, radio, the news media, and music. It must be understood as
a historically localized practice and incitement. In Latin America, the doctrine
emerged from a body of 1960s and 1970s era scholarship critical of the eco-
nomic and political dependency of Latin American nations on the United States
and Europe. Despite radical reformulations of the idea in the late 20th cen-
tury, the intensification of linear progress narratives associated with neolib-
eralism has given cultural imperialism new vigor in the early 21st century,
particularly in the news media, but also in academic circles. In many coun-
tries in Latin America, post-authoritarian uses of cultural imperialism frame
national identity by separating broadly acceptable public-cultural practices
from those thought to be culturally intimate. These intimate ways of being,
deemed both central to national character and simultaneously extremely em-
barrassing, are relegated to an ostensibly lower class position by virtue of
their dominated and subservient nature.
Music is an important site at which to explore such acts of categorization be-
cause of the way it is often conceived of as mixing philosophical argument with
embodiment. This mixture is frequently thought to grant music considerable power;
the argument is that music enters bodies and minds at the same moment. For this
reason, throughout Latin America, music provides a zone in which the regional,
the national, and the pan-national are defined and renegotiated. Proponents of cul-
tural imperialism frequently view musical practice as the frontline of the battle for
self-determination.
130 | Cultural
Imperialism
Cultural imperialism involves a series of nested concepts. First, within the con-
text of the world system, its supporters argue that locations deemed central shore
up their economic and political control over locations referred to as peripheral by
cultural means. Note that culture, here, is defined more as expressive practice than
in the more ample social and cognitive sense elaborated within anthropology. This
notion of cultural control, in turn, relies upon the assumption that the dynamic inter-
play of global and local is best understood by way of nation-states. Countries such
as the United States (the target these days) and Europe (the oppressor before the
Second World War) populate airwaves, television stations, movie theaters, record
stores, and book and magazine stands with texts aimed at fashioning subservience.
In the news media and on street corners, where theorizing about the subject occurs,
the discussion often stops here. In scholarly corners, however, the analyst making
use of cultural imperialism as an explicative framework frequently points to the
way each individual is recruited to a project of foreign power in the act of listening,
singing, and/or dancing. In such cases, the subservience in such an interpolation is
often thought to have been manufactured through the enactment of cultural mate-
rial deemed foreign, which, it is believed, quashes local specificity. Then, in time,
when that which is deemed folkloric is gone and an ostensibly incumbent sense of
real identity has di
sappeared, the theory is that the central power will have a much
easier time manipulating Third World masses. These masses play along with the
endeavor by failing to educate themselves about their traditions.
Interpretations of music that make use of the notion of cultural imperialism
separate what is under analysis into two categories: co-opted or resistant. This
oversimplifies the richness of empirical reality, separating folkloric genres, high-
artistic forms of rock ( música popular Brasileira, for instance), jazz, and classical music from genres with larger sales figures, such as pop, country, romantic
and evangelical music, and hip-hop. Scholars who fail to toe the line by elevating
musical texts produced along folkloric or artistic lines while debasing widely cir-
culating ones are described as alienated if they are Latin American, and oppres-
sors if they are from elsewhere. In this way, manifestations of public culture are
permitted to signify only along strictly demarcated lines given by a functionalism
of imperial power.
The notion of cultural imperialism justifiably incites inquiry into the complex-
ities of domination in Latin America. It is no coincidence that the dependency
theory on which cultural imperialism rests was often formulated during foreign-
supported military dictatorships that spearheaded economic miracles. These mir-
acles frequently expanded industrialized production while diminishing workers’
rights and widening the gap between rich and poor. Such regimes, which roughly
held sway between the early 1960s and the early 1990s, also made use of censor-
ship of the press, with cyclical festivals such as Carnival and soccer matches to
mollify mass unease. It is, therefore, the case that during this period, many nations
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experienced new forms of social control, some of it understandable in light of the
imperialism of foreign powers.
Nevertheless, it is worth inquiring into the underlying assumptions that the doc-
trine of cultural imperialism requires as a way of analyzing the musicality of Latin
American history and culture. First, for cultural imperialism to function, one must
assume a certain coherence on the part of central efforts and interests. Drawing
upon selective readings of the critical theory of Theodore Adorno, Max Hork-
heimer, and Walter Benjamin, one may posit a monolithic culture industry as a
unified body of actors, institutions, and practices aiming, consciously or not, at the
subjugation of the masses. Supplemented with postmodern doses of Foucauldian
capillary power, such theories frequently fashion an ever-present and menacing
First World, or perhaps a local elite, which, frighteningly, does not simply domi-
nate from the top, but also, from the bottom-up.
Second, for cultural imperialism to function as an explicative paradigm, one
must assume that the production of public culture dictates its consumption. For ex-
ample, one must assume that because American rock ‘n’ roll is an industrial product
promulgated by large record companies in order to make money, its money-making
capacity therefore shapes the way in which listeners will be able to hear it. Acts of
listening, singing, dancing, and playing thus may be reduced to a musical text’s os-
tensibly original profit goal. In short, since cash circulates back to a foreign-owned
company responsible for producing a text, this means that the users of said text can
only reinforce that company’s global domination in listening to it.
But a host of empirical and theoretical problems attend such analyses, as a brief test
case demonstrates. In Brazil, few musical genres are more subject to criticism as an
artifact of cultural imperialism than commercial rural música sertaneja . Proponents
of cultural imperialism point to this electric and electronic country music and the fact
that, sometimes, famous duplas perform versions of Nashville hits, as evidence that
Brazilian musical tastes are being co-opted by a foreign-owned culture industry.
But what goes unnoticed here are the terms in which Brazilians are actually hear-
ing these Nashville songs. First, the lyrics are often profoundly different in their
Portuguese versions, pointing to the utter desperation that the música sertaneja
genre requires instead of an often comic North American distance from powerful
emotions. But even more important, the brother ( dupla ) form of música sertaneja
keeps the focus quite squarely on a type of social production with roots in colonial
land-tenure and rural-to-urban migration patterns organized by brotherhood. North
American country is largely a solo affair. In fact, a detailed analysis of the way in
which even these ostensibly most derivative Brazilian musical texts are performed
reveals a far more complex set of localized conventions than the doctrine of cultural
imperialism could explain. The tremendous irony of arguments espousing cultural
imperialism is that they become a mechanism for policing the tenets of taste, which,
in turn, assist in maintaining class boundaries.
132 | Cultural
Imperialism
What is required instead is a way to continue to acknowledge the effects of impe-
rial power while simultaneously allowing for local agency and complexity. Anthro-
pologist Marshall Sahlins, long-time critic of what he calls the despondency theory
upon which dependency theory was based, suggests looking at structures of conjunc-
ture. According to this approach, one must first understand the logics at the root of
cross-cultural encounters. Other approaches have been presented by a series of Latin
American theorists. Most famously, Garcia Canclini suggests reframing the debate
by thinking of processes of cultural reconversion whereby local actors put cultural
texts to multiple uses. Renato Ortiz recommends rethinking a new and highly me-
diated Brazilian tradition that simultaneously preserves and elides long-standing
Brazilian patterns. Roberto Schwarz seeks to reveal the ways in which readings of
public-cultural texts must be embedded in their incumbent forms of economic pro-
duction, such as neoliberalism. And Claudio Lomnitz problematizes the notion of an
overwhelmingly powerful imperial presence by asking us to focus on more manage-
able contact zones. Together, such perspectives promise to provide more empirically
rich and theoretically rigorous approaches to musicality in Latin American contexts.
Such perspectives help to grapple with domination without reducing its effects to
functionalist polarities, thereby preserving the richness of musical dispositions.
Further Reading
Appadurai, A., and C. Breckenridge. “Why Public Culture?” Public Culture 1, no. 1
(1988): 7–9.
Canclini, N. G. Cultural Reconversion. On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin
American Culture, edited by G. Yúdice, J. Franco and J. Flores, 29–43. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1992.
Dent, A. S. “Country Brothers: Kinship and Chronotope in Brazilian Rural Public Cul-
ture.” Anthropological Quarterly (Spring 2007): 455–95.
Dent, A. S. “Cross-Cultural ‘Countries’: Covers, Conjuncture, and the Whiff of Nash-
ville in Brazilia
n Country Music (Música sertaneja).” Popular Music and Society 28, no. 2
(2005): 207–29.
Herzfeld, M. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation State. London: Routledge,
1996.
Lomnitz, C. Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2001.
Ortiz, R. A Moderna Tradição Brasileira: Cultura Brasileira e Indústria Cultural. São
Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1999.
Sahlins, M. “What Is Anthropological Enlightenment? Some Lessons from the Twenti-
eth Century.” In Culture in Practice: Selected Essays, edited by M. Sahlins, 501–26. New
York: Zone Books, 2000.
Schwarz, R. “Brazilian Culture: Nationalism by Elimination.” In Misplaced Ideas, 1–19.
London: Verso, 1992.
Alexander Sebastian Dent
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Cumbia
Cumbia is a dance music with roots in Colombia’s Caribbean coast, but has be-
come popular throughout Latin America in various stylized forms. The earliest
usage of the term dates to the late 19th century in reference to the music and dance
of Afro-descendant and indigenous people, who by that point had been living in
close proximity for centuries in the areas around Cartagena, a key port in the co-
lonial slave trade. Lack of documentation makes it difficult to know more about
cumbia’s origins, although in its folkloric form cumbia is symbolically depicted as
having a triethnic heritage: African percussion and call-and-response, indigenous
flutes, and Spanish lyrics. Cumbiambas, nighttime parties attended by black and
indigenous workers, were the site of a courting dance between men and women,
adding a gendered layer to this origin myth. Folkloric cumbia is in duple meter, and
usually performed at a slow-to-medium tempo by a small ensemble featuring sev-
eral drums ( bombo, llamador, alegre ), a wooden scraper ( guacharaca ) and shak-
ers ( guaches or maracas ) playing a characteristic three-strike pattern, and flutes, either the vertical gaitas or the transverse caña de millo. The diatonic accordion, imported from Germany at the end of the 19th century, also found its way into
cumbia repertoire.
Beginning in the late 1940s, stylized big-band arrangements of cumbia such
as those of Lucho Bermúdez gained popularity in Colombia’s larger cities among
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