merically constitute the largest proportion of cumbia fans in the United States.
While some of the cumbia listened to by Mexicans is still produced in Colom-
bia, most of it is produced by Mexican norteño bands in Mexico as well as in
the United States.
The rapid growth and popularity of Latin immigrant music since the 1990s
has been spurred by a change in American immigration policy: while assimila-
tion had been its main goal before the 1980s, the celebration of multiculturalism
in the 1990s has encouraged people of different heritage to reaffirm and bol-
ster their ethnicity and to express their cultural loyalty with their home coun-
try. Moreover, improvements in technology, communications, transportation,
as well as interpretations of citizenship by governments have created a new
form of transnationalism. Modern technologies such as electronic and digital
communication are now readily accessible for a larger part of the population of
the Western hemisphere. As a result, immigrants are more intensely involved
in the social, economic, political, and cultural life of both home and host socie-
ties. Transnational circulation of music genres between Latin America and the
United States has increased and many Latin genres today are products of this
cultural exchange.
Further Reading
Aparicio, Frances and Cándida Jáquez. Musical Migrations: Transnationalism and Cul-
tural Hybridity in Latina/o America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Loza, Steven. Barrio Rhythm: Mexican American Music in Los Angeles. Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1993.
Pacini Hernandez, Deborah. Oye Como Va! Hybridity and Identity in Latino Popular
Music. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010.
Ragland, Cathy. Música Norteña: Mexican Migrants Creating a Nation between Na-
tions. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2009.
Rivera, Raquel Z., Wayne Marshall, and Deborah Pacini Hernandez. Reggaetón. Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
212 | Immigrant Music
Roberts, John Storm. The Latin Tinge: The Influence of Latin American Music in the
United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Simonett, Helena. Banda: Mexican Musical Life across Borders. Middletown, CT: Wes-
leyan University Press, 2001.
Washburne, Christopher. Sounding Salsa: Performing Latin Music in New York City.
Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008.
Helena Simonett
J
Jarabe
Jarabe is the national dance of Mexico , with several sections in contrasting meters.
Several regional variations exist and are named after. It began as one element of a
son -based traditional Mexican musical genre, and by 1900 had expanded into a series
of regional sones or canciones linked together in one composition.
The Spanish word jarabe (meaning syrup) referred to a Mexican dance as early
as 1789, when “El Jarabe Gatuno” was condemned by Inquisition authorities on
moral grounds. On July 9, 1790, a jarabe performance took place at the Mexico
City Coliseum and the dance was banned by the Viceroy soon after. In the early
1800s, the jarabe was still a single, short dance, often included in sones. Scholar
R. Stevenson documented that all allusions to the jarabe were “clearly disparag-
ing” prior to the period of independence (1810–21). Its identity as part of an op-
pressed mestizo culture catapulted it to prominence as Mexican insurgents won
independence from Spain in 1821: jarabes were honored as symbols of mexi-
canidad. Alfred Robinson described alta california society in 1829 in his Life in
California before the Conquest (San Francisco, 1925): he emphasized the jarabe
and the recently introduced waltz as symbols of the weakening hegemony of the
Spanish.
By 1900, the jarabe developed into one multisection composition; this was most
prevalent in the west-central states of Colima, Durango, Jalisco, Michocán, and
Nyarit. Typically, a jarabe will begin in 6/8, be followed by other sections in 3/4
or 2/4, return to 6/8, and end in another meter. The 6/8 meter is a constant pattern
with no contratiempos or sesquialtera (6/8, 3/4) juxtaposition of accents as in the
son jaliscience. They were played by brass bands (bandas del pueblo) in bandstands
(quioscos) set up in town plazas. Over the course of the century, a jarabe became
purely instrumental accompaniment for dancers, and in its traditional form consti-
tuted a highly improvised choreographic tradition.
With the Mexican Revolution, beginning in 1910, came a nationalist movement
in cultural thought and policy. Representations of folkloric traditions that had been
banned became key elements in education, tourism, and public welfare programs
sponsored by the Seguro Social. Many sectors of government, including the armed
forces and police, began to subsidize folk forms over classical music and dance. By
the latter half of the 19th century, “El Jarabe Tapatío” was celebrated not only in
213
214 | Jarabe
Jalisco (a tapatío is something or someone from the city of Guadalajara, Jalisco) but
throughout much of Mexico. The Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova danced on pointe
to this jarabe in Mexico City (1918), popularizing choreographic innovations that
further standardized the piece.
Originally, the jarabe was danced by female couples in order to avoid the
wrath of the church. As ecclesiastical influence waned during the revolutionary
period, that gave way to mixed couples. José Vasconcelos, secretary of public
education from 1921 to 1924, directed his agency (through its Aesthetic Cultural
Department) to encourage traditional music and dance; on the 100th anniversary
of the founding of the Republic (1921), thousands watched as dozens of couples
danced “El Jarabe Tapatío” in a Mexico City ceremony unveiling the version to
be taught throughout the country (“Jarabe Nacional”). This established the piece
as an archetype, though at the expense of losing much of its dynamic quality as
a social dance.
The “Jarabe Nacional” is composed of excerpts from six regional tunes. The
“Jarabe de Jalisco” begins the story of courtship: a charro, dressed in the tradi-
tional three-piece suit composed of a vest, jacket, and silver buttons down the
seam, makes initial courtship gestures to la china (wearing a traditional Pueblan
china poblana outfit). The man attempts to woo the woman through machismo
and zapateado stamping and foot tapping to the “Jarabe del Atole” (from the early
1800s) and the popular “Son del Paloma,” in which the courting birds of the lyr-
ics (commonly sung until the 1920s and well-known to most audiences) are in-
terpreted through dance. After the charro impresses the woman, the tune changes
to the “Jarana Yucateca” (a typical dance melody from the Yucatan peninsula):
he becomes drunk with glory and is dismissed as a borracho (an inebriate). Ulti-
mately, he succeeds in conquering the china during the “Jarabe Moreliano” (from
the state of Michoacán), throwing his hat to the ground and kicking his leg over
his partner’s head as she bends down to pick it up. The couple concludes with a
triumphant march to a military tune called “La Diana,” and feigns a kiss behind
the man’s sombrero.
Further Readings
Cashion, Susan Valerie. “The Son and Jarabe: Mestizo Dance Forms of Jalisco, Mexico.”
Journal of the Association of Graduate Dance Ethnologists 3 (Fall–Winter 1979– 1980):
28–50.
Olaso, Irma. “El jarabe—prototipo de todos los jarabes mexicanos.” M.A. thesis, CSU-
Sacramento, 1977.
Saldívar, Gabriel. El Jarabe, Baile Popular Mexicano. 2nd ed. Guadalajara: Gobierno
del Estado de Jalisco, 1989.
Stevenson, Robert. Music in Mexico: A Historical Survey. New York: Crowell, 1971.
Laura Stanfield Prichard
Jazz | 215
Jarana
The jarana is a musical instrument used in the huasteco and the jarocho Mexican
son traditions. The jarana from the Huasteca region (a territory that crosses over the states of Hidalgo, San Luis Potosí, Tamaulipas, Puebla, Querétaro, and northern
Veracruz) is a small five-stringed guitar used in the traditional ensemble along with
a deep-bodied guitar called huapanguera and a violin. The jarana and huapanguera
establish the chordal and rhythmic drive of the music. The jarana from the jarocho
tradition in the southern region of the state of Veracruz is a fretted narrow-bodied
guitar that has eight strings arranged in five courses, usually arranged in two single
outer strings and three double courses in between. This instrument comes in at least
four sizes, the smallest being called mosquito. The jarana is often used in the jarocho ensemble, which traditionally consists of a diatonic harp, a jarana, which provides
rhythmic and chordal accompaniment, and a requinto (a four-stringed, shallow-
bodied guitar that is plucked with a plectrum commonly made of cow-horn).
The jarana is also the main dance in Mexico’s Yucatan state. Etymologically,
the term means alboroto or uproar, fiesta. Jaranas are played by orchestras com-
prised of clarinets, trombons, saxophons, timpani, and güiro (a scraped gourd). Tra-
ditionally, jaranas are danced by couples properly attired: women wear the typical
and colorful Yucatecan huipil, dancing shoes and hand-knitted shawls, and men
dressed with a typical silk or linen guayabera (white shirt) with a woven palm hat
and colorful bandanna in the front pocket.
In the Afro-Peruvian tradition, jarana refers to the context of competition in which
the Creole marinera musical style takes place. When sung in competition or contra-
punto, the marinera is performed by two or more singers accompanied by two guitars,
cajón and handclapping. Jarana is also the name given to the three strophes that the marinera uses in this competition: primera de jarana, segunda de jrana, and tercera de jarana, each having to follow certain poetic strophic and rhyming rules.
Further Reading
Sheehy, Daniel E. “Mexico.” In The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Volume 2 :
South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, edited by Dale A. Olsen and
Daniel E. Sheehy, 600–25. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1998.
Tompkins, William. “The Musical Traditions of the Blacks of Coastal Peru.” Ph.D. diss.,
Ethnomusicology, University of California at Los Angeles, 1981.
Raquel Paraíso
Jazz
Jazz first emerged in the early 1900s and is arguably the most significant and influ-
ential musical contribution of the United States in the 20th century. As a musical
216 | Jazz
style, the earliest jazz combined a number of African American styles and practices
with European, Latin American, Caribbean, and newly formed American musics.
Key to this stylistic mix was the unique cultural climate of 19th-century New Or-
leans, which was set apart from the rest of the United States due to its Caribbean
flavor and its alternating French and Spanish governance. This cosmopolitan and
multicultural setting from which many of the early innovators of jazz emerged, such
as Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, and Jelly Roll Morton, marked the music as
transcultural in its stylistic scope. However, the diversity of cultures that contrib-
uted to early jazz are rarely acknowledged due in part to the black/white racial dy-
namics of the United States that provide no space for people who do not belong to
such racial classifications, such as Creole, Latin American and Caribbean peoples.
In fact, it was not until the late 1930s when jazz musicians first began acknowledg-
ing their intercultural past. The most famous testament was made by Creole pia-
nist Jelly Roll Morton who commented that “If you can’t manage to put tinges of
Spanish (meaning Caribbean and Latin American) in your tunes, you will never be
able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz.” Duke Ellington also made similar
comments. In particular they were referring to a number of rhythm influences from
various Caribbean traditions that played a significant role in the rhythmic founda-
tions of early jazz.
What sets jazz apart from other music is the open-ended system of production
that it employs, in and of itself reflective of an esthetic, which was inherited by
African American culture, whereby jazz performers are free to incorporate a wide
range of traits from diverse influences without sacrificing the music’s fundamental
identity. Some writers, like Amiri Baraka, have preferred to view jazz as a verb,
rather than a descriptive noun, in the sense that it is more a way of making music,
which has at its core an esthetic of individual expression through improvisation and
an openness to outside influence.
Though the music is most often associated with African American culture, its
worldwide popular appeal, facilitated by the newly emergent phonograph record-
ing and radio broadcasting industries in the 1920s, quickly spawned numerous lo-
calized scenes throughout the United States and Europe establishing the music as
a truly global phenomenon. By the 1930s, swing, as jazz was known at the time,
was synonymous with popular music and musicians such as Duke Ellington, Count
Basie, and Benny Goodman led highly successful big bands (large ensembles of
fifteen or more musicians that feature highly sophisticated dance music arrange-
ments). In the 1940s, a new form of jazz, known as bebop, was developed by musi-
cians, such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. This newer style featured small
groups and emphasized highly technical and virtuosic improvisations that began to
move the music away from the popular realm and more toward art music, a direction
that would continue throughout the last half of the 20th century. Along with bebop
came a renewed interest in cross-cultural and cross-stylistic experimentation, often
Jazz | 217
fueled by political concerns that captured the fervor of the burgeoning civil rights
movement in the United States. One example is Gillespie’s collaborative work with
Cuban percussionist Chano Pozo, which not only popularized Latin music and jazz
mixings, or Latin jazz, but also served to acknowledge common cultural roots
of African Americans and other descendants of African peoples in the postcolonial
Americas.
Numerous other substyles emerged in the years to follow. In the 1950s, Hor-
ace Silver and Ray
Charles explored soul, rhythm and blues, and jazz mixings,
called soul jazz. In the 1960s, Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd experimented with
Brazilian music, collaborating with guitarist João Gilberto and vocalist Astrid
Gilberto and Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Cecil Taylor established a
vibrant jazz avant garde scene. In the 1970s, groups such as the Mahavishnu
Orchestra and groups led by Miles Davis incorporated rock and funk into the
mix, spawning a style known as fusion. In the 1980s, Wynton Marsalis led a
neoclassical movement, which reinvigorated interest in pre-1960s jazz styles.
He successfully lobbied for jazz to be on par with classical music, establishing
the prestigious jazz at Lincoln Center program. At the turn of the century, we
have experienced even further internationalization of jazz with growing scenes
in Asia, Latin America, and in parts of Africa; however, jazz remains mostly
aligned with art music performance, often subsidized through state funding or
private philanthropic organizations. This is especially the case with the Euro-
pean jazz scene. Numerous jazz stars from outside of the United States have
emerged as influential innovators in recent years. Examples for Latin America
and the Caribbean include Cuban clarinetist and saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera,
Panamanian pianist Danilo Perez, and Brazilian woodwind specialist and com-
poser Hermeto Pascoal.
Further Reading
Baraka, Imamu Amiri. Blues People: Negro Music in White America . New York:
W. Morrow, 1963.
Berliner, Paul. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation . Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1994.
DeVeaux, Scott. The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History . Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1997.
Fiehrer, Thomas. “From Quadrille to Stomp: The Creole Origins of Jazz.” Popular
Music 10, no. 1 (January 1991): 21–38.
Monson, Ingrid. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction . Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1996.
Schuller, Gunther. Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development . New York: Oxford
University Press, 1968.
Schuller, Gunther. The Swing Era: 1930–1945. New York: Oxford University Press,
1989.
Encyclopedia of Latin American Popular Music Page 38
