In Argentina, neoliberal policies of privatization and deregulation, first imposed by the military dictatorship of 1976–83 and radicalized in the 1990s under the government of Carlos Menem, produced rapid deindustrialization, the end of labor and social protections, the declining power and relevance of unions, and, as a byproduct of these developments, rising unemployment and immiseration. This crisis had its epicenter in the Conurbano, the vast urban area surrounding Buenos Aires.Footnote 1 Impoverished residents of these districts responded by developing a shockingly innovative popular politics, an entirely new repertoire of collective action including ultra-democratic popular assemblies, communal kitchens, elaborate systems of barter, vast informal economies, recovered factories, land invasions, and unemployed workers’ organizations with effective, new methods of protest. This growing resistance to neoliberalism culminated in December 2001 with a massive uprising that toppled the government.Footnote 2 Although the cross-class alliance that energized the December revolt proved short-lived, the new popular politics had a lasting and transformative impact.
In the 1990s, as this new politics was emerging, the Conurbano was also the site of a new, hugely popular music and dance scene known as the Movida Tropical. Lower-class youth filled hundreds of dance clubs every weekend, gyrating to so-called “tropical music,” a collection of genres including, most prominently, the cumbia, a rhythm forged on the Caribbean coast of Colombia from African, Indigenous, and European elements. Perhaps more than any other genre, cumbia has traveled easily across national borders, gaining fans and generating local versions throughout Latin America.Footnote 3 In Argentina, it has been popular since the 1970s, when local, working-class cumbia scenes developed in various Argentine provinces. Waves of migrants from the provinces brought the music to Greater Buenos Aires, where it joined other provincial genres that lacked tropical roots but shared the cumbia’s festive mode and working-class audience. Hundreds of bailantas, or popular dance clubs, opened in the Conurbano in the 1980s and 1990s, as domestic record labels, radio stations, and television programs disseminated the music of local artists specializing in these genres.Footnote 4 Yet even though the Movida Tropical and the new popular politics mobilized residents of the Conurbano at the same time, few scholars have connected them. Tropical music was explicitly apolitical, consumerist, even frivolous, featuring lyrics focused on romance or partying. What could it have to do with this new wave of militancy and activism?
The emergence in the 1990s of new political and social movements in the Conurbano surprised most observers and scholars. From the 1930s to the 1970s, these districts had expanded rapidly as industrialization attracted migrants from the Argentine interior. Yet the communities of the Conurbano generally failed to acquire political or cultural influence, as they remained largely invisible in the national media. As the process of industrial expansion came to an end, the region was increasingly perceived through a series of negative stereotypes: it was constructed as the capital’s cultural opposite, a violent and dangerous place filled with dark-skinned others.Footnote 5 By the 1990s deindustrialization had produced rising unemployment, the dramatic growth of the informal sector, and a severely weakened labor movement.Footnote 6 In these conditions, Peronism, the dominant political affiliation of the nation’s working class since the 1940s, became a party rooted more in clientelism than in unions and lost its hold on a whole generation of poor people.Footnote 7 Scholars have described the Conurbano in this period as an organizational “desert” undergoing a profound process of “de-collectivization,” a context in which the emergence of a massive and effective protest movement—particularly one in which unemployed workers were protagonists—was a “sociological miracle.”Footnote 8 Others have emphasized the insistently local focus of the new popular politics as the barrio came to replace the workplace as the locus of sociability.Footnote 9 Yet by 2001, these local movements were able to contest national-level policies on behalf of broad constituencies.
Whereas ethnographies conducted in the Conurbano in the 1990s emphasized the profound social exclusion experienced by young people or the widespread reliance on Peronist clientelism as a survival strategy, more recent studies have linked the new political and social movements to earlier struggles, such as the extensive land invasions in La Matanza in the 1980s.Footnote 10 Yet notwithstanding this genealogy, the new movements mobilized thousands of young people who lacked any previous connection to activism. As Melina Vázquez and Pablo Vommaro have argued, these organizations emerged by activating and politicizing “existing, community-based social networks.” Vázquez and Vommaro stress that the new politics of youth was an embodied practice rooted in forms of community that privileged aesthetic expression, including music and dance, as well as the experience of “joy and emotion (la alegría y lo afectivo).”Footnote 11 However, the few scholars who have examined the musical trends that may have informed the new political consciousness have tended to focus not on tropical music, but on rock chabón, an underground genre that is, perhaps, more appealing to middle-class academics.Footnote 12 My contention is that the ostensibly apolitical discursive and aesthetic innovations of the Movida Tropical helped create the conditions that made possible a new political culture of resistance to neoliberalism.
The Movida Tropical constituted the poor residents of the Conurbano as a counterpublic, a visible, audible collective whose joyful social interactions expressed opposition to dominant aesthetic hierarchies. In his account of music in contemporary society, David Hesmondhalgh explores its capacity to facilitate community via its connection to publicness. Drawing on the work of Jeff Weintraub, he distinguishes sociable publics, which enable connection and community among strangers, from deliberative ones, which are more directly linked to citizenship and politics. Hesmondhalgh argues that although music contributes more frequently and powerfully to sociable publicness than to deliberative publicness, it nevertheless retains potential political relevance: “It is in the rich forms of sociability enabled by music that our mutual dependence and obligation can be most powerfully felt, and this can inform our contributions to political life, from voting to demonstrating.” Moreover, he recognizes music’s potential to catalyze counterpublics, which “set themselves against dominant forms of publicness.”Footnote 13
In Michael Warner’s account, a counterpublic’s political potential derives from its “awareness of its subordinate status.” Partly because of this self-conscious positionality, counterpublics imagine alternative worlds; they are “spaces of circulation in which it is hoped that the poesis of scene making will be transformative.” Many counterpublics elevate “embodied sociability” over the rational-critical discourse typical of the dominant public sphere, and, in this sense, the Movida Tropical was typical. In some contexts, the oppositional aspects of a counterpublic—its refusal of dominant aesthetic values, even its forms of embodiment—can be activated politically. In other words, counterpublics can sometimes “acquire agency in relation to the state.”Footnote 14 Filling the bailantas of the Conurbano on weekend nights or listening to cumbia on barrio radio stations, tropical music fans composed themselves as a collective subject in opposition to the dominant culture, overcoming the atomization and invisibility that had stifled their political efficacy for years.
The oppositional force of the Movida Tropical was enabled by the internal contradictions of neoliberalism itself. In most accounts, neoliberalism has dramatically reduced opportunities for community formation and collective action. Wendy Brown, for example, has charted how neoliberal rationality conceives of individuals as human capital and “wages war on … the very idea of a public.”Footnote 15 Paul Gilroy’s lament for the loss of African American music’s “counter-cultural voice” is typical of accounts that emphasize how neoliberalism’s radical marketization of social life has stripped music of its potential to promote solidarity.Footnote 16 And yet scholars who have explored popular music scenes that have emerged under neoliberal economic regimes have revealed their capacity to exceed and even contest neoliberal ideology. Gavin Steingo, for example, argues that South African kwaito musicians repurposed American house music to construct a reality separate from the one created by the deep economic crisis of the postapartheid period.Footnote 17 In Argentina, neoliberalism profoundly eroded existing forms of social and political belonging but also created new opportunities for consumption and accelerated the importation of goods and people from neighboring countries. In the Conurbano, tropical musicians and fans exploited these opportunities to fashion a counterpublic of enormous symbolic, and potentially political, power.
Tropical Music as Hybrid Form
The tropical counterpublic combined characteristics associated with four distinct models of popular music: “local music,” “migrant music,” “lowbrow music,” and “foreign music.” Mapping the Movida Tropical onto this typology clarifies its relationship to place, class, and identity, as well as its political potential within the specific cultural configuration of 1990s Argentina.
Local music expresses an identity tied to a specific place; it is the sound of roots, of communal distinctiveness, and it is often understood as “folk music.”Footnote 18 Making and enjoying local music can constitute resistance to dominant aesthetic values and to the implicit hierarchies conveyed by European art music or commercial pop. Yet local music is often subject to primitivism, which ethnicizes or racializes it in ways that can reinscribe hierarchy. Local musics have at times been appropriated and transformed into national symbols by musicians, intellectuals, and politicians: Colombian cumbia, Cuban son, and Brazilian samba are well-known examples.Footnote 19 This process offers marginalized groups visibility and cultural acceptance, but it can also sanitize local music and strip it of its oppositional character.
A different model of popular music’s relationship to identity is captured in the concept of migrant music. Migrant music retains local music’s connection to place, but it mobilizes the affect and ideology of roots to confront the challenges of community formation in a new context. Rather than simply recreating the community and culture of home, migrants repurpose cultural resources, including music, to forge a sense of belonging and to confront the challenges of their new surroundings.Footnote 20 Migrant music is typically traditionalist, even if the traditions it invokes are invented and contested, and its political potential and limitations follow from that orientation. Migrant music can catalyze resistance to xenophobia and racism by expressing pride in a stigmatized identity. Yet like local music, it can be backwards-looking, nostalgic, antimodern, or even primitivist. Music from home can figure as an attempt to preserve tradition, while migrants engage with modernity in other spheres of life. Compartmentalized in this way, migrant music may even reproduce the marginality of the immigrant community.
We might call genres that clearly express lower-class aesthetic preferences lowbrow music.Footnote 21 Local and migrant musics are often associated with poor people, yet music does not need to be local or migrant to be lowbrow. In the 1960s and 1970s, the most commercially successful musical genre in Latin America was balada, a style of pop balladry built from a broad range of transnational elements whose stars hailed from throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Lacking a connection to any specific nation or locale—lacking, in other words, any association with roots—balada was nevertheless deeply lowbrow: it was stigmatized by elites and embraced by its fans as a lower-class aesthetic preference.Footnote 22 Through their engagement with lowbrow music, fans can forge class-based solidarities and imaginaries that exceed national boundaries. As they enjoyed foreign balada stars, for example, many Argentines developed a sense of themselves as Latin American, an affiliation that expressed a rejection of elitist, European aesthetics. Still, balada’s counterhegemonic potential was clearly limited by its deeply mediated character. A product of multinational record labels seeking a way to unify the Spanish-language market, balada obeyed commercial strategies that depoliticized it at every turn. Its deracination—the very characteristic that enabled it to express transnational solidarities—also limited its capacity to express local concerns.
Foreign music, like migrant music, is music that listeners hear as coming from elsewhere. Yet foreign music lacks any connection to a home country and any tendency toward traditionalism; it is, on the contrary, available for local appropriations and resignifications. The best-known instance of this model is rock music, which spread around the world in the 1960s, inspiring local versions capable of expressing national identities.Footnote 23 But not all influential foreign music comes from the Anglo-American world; there are plenty of examples of South–South musical transmission and borrowing: the development of Congolese rumba from Cuban son and Peruvian chicha from Colombian cumbia, to cite just two.Footnote 24 Because they tend to circulate on local record labels and commercial circuits, these South–South borrowings avoid the mediation of multinational conglomerates and might more effectively represent autonomous, local perspectives and attitudes. Yet, foreign musical appropriations are extremely vulnerable to delegitimization and dismissal. And even when they do gain acceptance, foreign genres are policed by nationalist elites. As Alejandro Madrid and Robin Moore have shown, when the Cuban habanera, danzón, and bolero were successively adopted by working-class Mexicans, they were each denigrated as Black and therefore foreign to the nation’s mestizo identity. Each genre gained acceptance only by being discursively whitened in contrast to some new, more scandalous Cuban import.Footnote 25
The distinctive cultural power of the Movida Tropical derived from the way it combined these models. Simultaneously local and foreign, tropical music combined the evocative power of roots with the capacity for novel resignification typical of imported genres. Despite its localism, tropical music never signified as folk music; explicitly commercial and cosmopolitan, it was not subject to exoticism or primitivism. It expressed pride in provincial and immigrant identities, even as it linked the nation to Blacker parts of Latin America. The music’s deep connection to provincial Argentine identities meant it could not be easily dismissed as alien, but its foreign origins made it unavailable for nationalist appropriation. As commercial, lowbrow music, it audibly and visibly embodied a lower-class aesthetic, yet unlike balada, it was disseminated by domestic record labels, local radio stations, and popular dance clubs and largely ignored by multinational corporations. As pop music, it was subject to the pressures of the capitalist music business: exploitation, commodification, a star system, an emphasis on marketing and product placement, efforts to expand the market and to avoid alienating potential consumers, etc. Nevertheless, the local infrastructure of the Movida allowed it to retain a close connection to those who consumed it: most tropical bands were working-class musicians who performed for people in their communities. This enclave economy enabled tropical music to avoid policing by elitist gatekeepers whose disdain for the music allowed it to develop with relative autonomy. In short, the Movida Tropical embodied a working-class aesthetic that resisted appropriation, marginalization, and dismissal while revalorizing provincial roots and sparking new Latin American affiliations. In the rest of this article, I will show how tropical musicians and fans built this powerful counterpublic within the spaces afforded by neoliberalism’s contradictions.
Local Music in the Provinces
As a working-class cultural movement, the Movida Tropical originated in the Argentine interior during the 1970s. Caribbean dance genres had been popular in Argentina before, first in the repertoires of jazz bands and later as performed by Los Wawancó, a group formed by a bunch of foreign students at the University of Buenos Aires medical school. After scoring a hit with “El pescador” in 1962, Los Wawancó focused their efforts on the cumbia, and other groups followed their lead.Footnote 26 Chico Novarro, a cast member on the popular teen television program El Club del Clan, recorded several hit cumbias in the early 1960s: “El orangután,” “El camaleón,” “El sombrero de paja.”Footnote 27 In this guise, cumbia represented a commercial fad: light-hearted, comic, mildly exotic dance music. In the 1970s, the genre would gain a foothold in provinces like Santa Fe, Santiago del Estero, Salta, and Jujuy, where it would take on an entirely new set of meanings and associations.
Provincial tropical music scenes emerged in the space left by the decline of the orquestas características. These big bands, usually led by accordions, offered dancers a broad, international menu of accessible rhythms: rancheras, polcas, valses, tarantelas, pasadobles. Hugely popular in the 1940s and 1950s, the orquestas características represented a less sophisticated alternative to tango and jazz, the two genres that dominated the national mass culture centered in Buenos Aires.Footnote 28 But all three types of big band began to lose their audience as global mass culture shifted in the 1960s. Forced to accommodate changing tastes, local musicians’ unions relaxed their rules, allowing small dance bands to perform.Footnote 29 In the provinces, many of these new groups were formed by semiprofessional musicians who worked regular day jobs. They followed a different business model from the old orquestas características; rather than tour relentlessly, they focused their efforts locally. They harnessed the plebeian sensibility of the orquestas características but grafted it onto a deep, localist affiliation. In much of the country, these new dance bands played cumbia.
One key factor in cumbia’s centrality within these provincial scenes was the arrival in 1964 of the Cuarteto Imperial, a Colombian band led by accordionist Helí Toro Alvarez. According to Juan Carlos Denis, the pioneering cumbia guitarist from the provincial capital of Santa Fe, Los Wawancó played cumbia for rich people, whereas the Cuarteto Imperial’s accordion-based cumbia appealed to the working class.Footnote 30 Provincial audiences, who associated the accordion with the orquestas características and with the chamamé, a working-class dance music from northeastern Argentina, embraced and emulated the Colombian band. Miguel Carranza, founder of the Cumbiambas, one of the first cumbia bands in Santa Fe, remembered that the band modeled its instrumentation, its musical style, and even its dance steps on those of the Cuarteto Imperial.Footnote 31 Likewise, cumbia took off in Santiago del Estero when one rock band switched to the Colombian genre at the suggestion of its agent, who noted that the local popularity of the Cuarteto Imperial indicated an untapped market. After recruiting a young singer named Koli Arce and an accordionist who specialized in chamamé, the musicians began learning cumbia tunes from the Cuarteto’s records. Calling themselves the Quinteto Imperial, they helped launch tropical music scenes throughout the Northwest.Footnote 32 One of Koli Arce’s accordionists, Marcelo Véliz, together with his brother Jorge, created a distinct subgenre known as guaracha by mixing the cumbia with the chacarera and up-tempo chamamé.Footnote 33 Santiago del Estero now had two local tropical styles.
At roughly the same time, a transnational cumbia scene emerged in southern Bolivia and the northwestern Argentine provinces of Salta and Jujuy. Longstanding patterns of Bolivian emigration and seasonal migration had made this cross-border area a more-or-less unified cultural zone. Cumbia had been popular in Bolivia since the 1960s when it formed part of the repertoire of La Paz dance bands. In subsequent decades, the Peruvian cumbia style known as chicha was also influential. As early as the 1960s, Bolivian bands like the Orquesta Swingbaly performed cumbia across the border in Jujuy.Footnote 34 In the mid-1980s, the singer Beto Durán, from Tarija, Bolivia, performed with Grupo Halley on both sides of the border. Featuring a mix of rock, cumbia, and the sort of folk music associated with the Bolivian band Los Kjarkas, they played regularly at festivals in the towns of Orán and Tartagal in Salta, where cumbia was particularly popular.Footnote 35 Similarly, in festivals throughout Salta and Jujuy, cumbia featured prominently alongside folk genres like the copla.Footnote 36
Provincial cumbia scenes were enabled by the emergence of local performance venues, record labels, and radio stations dedicated to the genre. The 1976 debut album of Los Palmeras, the longest running, most influential cumbia band from Santa Fe, was recorded by MRG, a label run by Martín Robustiano Gutiérrez, owner of several record stores in the city. Over the next few decades, MRG would release albums by more than fifty cumbia acts from Santa Fe. Local competition would arrive in the form of JLP, another label started by a record store owner. The city’s many cumbia bands also benefited from promotion on the radio; Javier Fernández Ortiz, a DJ on LT9, developed a following in Santa Fe and the surrounding area for programs featuring local cumbia and chamamé bands.Footnote 37 Cumbia santafesina thrived within these local circuits of production and distribution, maintaining an identity as a distinct, locally rooted genre.
Even as working-class cumbia scenes solidified in Santa Fe and throughout the Northwest, a different working-class dance music emerged as the sonic signifier of the province of Córdoba. The genre of cuarteto had been born in the 1940s when Augusto Marzano, a railroad worker and part-time musician, founded a quartet—accordion, violin, bass, and piano—to play the same repertoire as the orquestas características but with about one-third the number of musicians. In most accounts, Marzano’s daughter Leonor, the group’s pianist, gets the credit for inventing what would become the rhythmic foundation of the new genre: a staccato pattern known as “chunga-chunga” (or, later, “tunga-tunga”), reminiscent of the polka. This beat gave every tune a familiar, propulsive beat, turning a small musical combo into a dance machine capable of competing with the big bands. Cuarteto retained its cross-generational, working-class audience throughout the 1950s and 1960s and even survived persecution by the military dictatorship that took power in 1976. In the late 1970s, the band Chébere, led by keyboardist and arranger, Angel “El Negro” Videla, replaced the accordion with electric piano and synthesizers and added electric bass, drums, trumpets, and percussion to create the so-called “modern” cuarteto style. Chébere turned the band into a show, modeling its costumes, choreography, instrumentation, repertoire, and rhythms on those of Caribbean dance bands.Footnote 38 Though cuarteto retained its distinctive rhythmic feel, by the 1980s its sound and look, as well as its local, working-class audience fit comfortably alongside the provincial versions of cumbia; it had essentially become another form of tropical music.
As local traditions, these thriving tropical scenes signified as roots music; firmly identified with their home provinces, they enacted an aesthetic preference that resisted the musical values emanating from the nation’s political and cultural capital. At the same time, they expressed none of the preservationist impulse or ethnic authenticity claims of folk music. Nevertheless, like earlier plebeian musical styles, they could be racialized by condescending elites. Tropical genres were often dismissed as “música de negros,” the music of provincial mestizos denigrated as uncultured and uncivilized. Marcos Camino, long-time accordionist for Los Palmeras, remembered that in the 1970s “we were totally discriminated against. Even by our own peers, musicians who played rock or pop, who treated us as ‘the negros who play cumbia.’”Footnote 39
Migrant Music in the Conurbano
Tropical music became a phenomenon of national significance and potential political import when the provincial scenes migrated to the Conurbano in the late 1980s. Of course, migrant music has a long history in Buenos Aires. The internal migrants who flocked to the capital in response to the import substitution industrialization of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s brought with them a taste for various types of folk music, creating a market that the record companies and radio stations were keen to exploit. The phenomenon is most often associated with Antonio Tormo, a folksinger from Mendoza who built a successful career as the “Cantor de los cabecitas,” a reference to “cabecitas negras,” the most common racialized slur directed at internal migrants. Yet Tormo’s repertoire was not regionally defined: his biggest hit, “El rancho e’ la Cambicha,” (1950) combined the rasguido doble rhythm from northeastern Argentina with the guitar accompaniment of the tonada, from his native Cuyo region in the west.Footnote 40 Moreover, Tormo’s success helped ignite a folk music boom that quickly crossed class lines. The folk music of the 1950s and 1960s had started as migrant music, but it was quickly appropriated as a broad expression of national identity.Footnote 41
A more direct precedent for the Movida Tropical was the chamamé, which migrants from the northeastern province of Corrientes brought to Buenos Aires in the 1930s and 1940s. Chamamé dance clubs, called bailantas after the rustic halls where the music was played in the Northeast, provided migrants with a means to create community and retain a connection to their home region. Unlike the music of the folk boom, which tended to center genres from the Northwest, the chamamé was a migrant music with deep working-class associations.Footnote 42 In the 1980s, when hundreds of new dance clubs specializing in tropical genres sprang up throughout the Conurbano, they were called bailantas because they catered to a similar working-class, migrant audience. But chamamé was not only a precursor to the Movida Tropical. Like cuarteto, chamamé underwent a process of tropicalization. Musicians from Santiago del Estero working in Buenos Aires were exposed to the genre, and by the 1970s, chamamé often featured in Carnival celebrations throughout that northwestern province.Footnote 43 Sensing an opportunity, the record producer Américo Cardinale recruited a group of rock musicians from Santiago to paint their faces in the style of the US band Kiss and perform chamamé with cumbia instrumentation. Cardinale named the group Los Caú, using the word for “drunk” in Guaraní, the Indigenous language of Paraguay and northeastern Argentina, to trigger an association with chamamé’s home region. They issued their first album in 1980, with a cover describing the band as “the kings of the chamamé tropical,” a genre that did not yet exist. In 1981 and 1982, several groups of Santiagueño musicians based in Buenos Aires and the Conurbano adopted Los Caú’s hybrid formula (without the makeup). They mixed up-tempo chamamé with the percussion and keyboards typical of cumbia bands, and they took two-syllable Guaraní words for their band names: Los Caté, Los Abá, Los Cambá.Footnote 44 The hybrid genre they created served as a sort of bridge between a working-class, folk style from the Northeast and the various forms of cumbia that had been percolating in the provinces.Footnote 45
Santiagueños were hardly the only provincial musicians playing tropical music in Greater Buenos Aires. For example, cumbia santafesina, particularly the guitar-based variety invented by Juan Carlos Denis, built a strong, working-class following throughout the southern zone of the Conurbano. Denis’s band, Los del Bohío, first performed in Isla Maciel, a gritty, portside neighborhood in Avellaneda, an industrial suburb of Buenos Aires, in 1979. Other Santa Fe cumbia bands quickly followed suit.Footnote 46 Before long, groups from the southern Conurbano emerged who specialized in cumbia santafesina.Footnote 47
An even more influential subgenre in the Movida Tropical was cumbia norteña, an innovative style developed within the Bolivian community in Buenos Aires and the Conurbano and enabled by new immigration patterns generated by neoliberalism.Footnote 48 Since the 1950s, the destination of Bolivian immigration to Argentina had been shifting from its historic locus in the agricultural economies of the Northwest to Buenos Aires and the Conurbano, where men found work in construction, while women sold produce or worked in domestic service. The deepening of neoliberalism in both Bolivia and Argentina in the 1980s and 1990s reinforced this trend. In 1985, the Bolivian government closed the state-owned mines in Potosí and Oruro, creating mass unemployment and pushing thousands of young men to try their luck in Argentina, especially in Greater Buenos Aires. In 1991, the Menem government addressed the problem of inflation by pegging the value of the peso to the dollar. The so-called “convertibility” plan made the country—and particularly the informal economy in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area—an even stronger magnet for immigrants from neighboring countries, who could earn overvalued pesos and send money home to their families. The new Bolivian migrants lived in ethnic enclaves in the capital city’s southern barrios and across the border in the Conurbano; most of them came not from rural, Indigenous communities but from Bolivian cities, where cumbia formed a major part of their popular-music diet.Footnote 49 These immigrants dramatically expanded the market for the kind of cumbia that musicians from Salta and Jujuy offered.
Cumbia norteña helped knit together the community of Bolivian descent in the capital and Conurbano. Adrián Chauque, the son of two Bolivian parents raised in Jujuy, moved with his brother to the capital in 1979 and soon formed the cumbia band Adrián y los Dados Negros.Footnote 50 In 1982, the Salteño Armando Marcelo followed, organizing and performing at weekend dances for 300 Salteños and Jujeños.Footnote 51 As the flow of Bolivian migrants increased in the late 1980s, the record companies did not hesitate to market the new groups to them. The first album of Armando Marcelo y los Cisnes, released in 1988, was dedicated to “los hermanos bolivianos.” Advertisements for the group’s shows boasted that los Cisnes were “from Bolivia,” bending the truth to attract Bolivian consumers.Footnote 52 Raul Fofa Andrade, who arrived with his family from Bolivia at the age of fourteen and later formed the cumbia band Kimba’s, began his career playing exclusively “for the Bolivian community.” The members of the group Imagen, all children of Bolivian immigrants, reported that they played cumbia because that was what the Bolivian community wanted to hear. Moreover, they claimed that all the cumbia norteña bands got their repertoire from Bolivia, in particular playing the hit songs of Pity Zapata, “the greatest” of Bolivian cumbia singers.Footnote 53 Although the name cumbia norteña anchored the genre to an Argentine geographic frame, it evoked Bolivian associations. Asked to specify his group’s style, Andrade insisted on authenticity: “Our thing is very norteño, very Bolivian.”Footnote 54 Sol Naciente, composed of four Jujeños and a Bolivian, continued to play Andean folk genres like the huayno and carnavalito alongside cumbia and insisted that norteña bands “are fortified by the music of Peru and Bolivia.”Footnote 55 When Bolivian folk artists like Los Kjarkas or Zulma Yugar played in Buenos Aires, cumbia norteña bands Sombras and Malagata opened the shows, replicating the mixed repertoire typical in southern Bolivia.Footnote 56 In 1990, more than 4,000 fans filled the Buenos Aires stadium of the soccer club Atlanta to enjoy a “norteña explosion” featuring Bolivian cumbia bands Climax and Mayoru alongside local cumbia norteña bands.Footnote 57
Notwithstanding its roots in Bolivia, cumbia norteña evolved in new ways once it emerged in Buenos Aires and the Conurbano. The genre’s distinctive sound is often attributed to the rhythmic innovations of Pascual Benítez, drummer for Sombras, whose biography is typical of norteña musicians. Benítez was born in Humahuaca, Jujuy, and moved with his family to Buenos Aires, where they lived in a villa, or slum, alongside Bolivians and other migrants from the Northwest. Like many young people of Bolivian descent in the 1960s and 1970s, Benítez was drawn first to rock music. He was in a series of bands that performed at parties for the Bolivian community, playing a mix of rock, cumbia, and folk genres. Since cumbia bands in Bolivia, Salta, and Jujuy typically played with a percussion section of timbaleta and tumbadora, Benítez needed to develop his own way to play cumbia on his rock drum kit. The beat he developed, the bombo cruzado, featured an unconventional syncopation on the bass drum that became the rhythmic signature of cumbia norteña.Footnote 58 As Sombras built a large following and released hit records, they remained rooted in the Bolivian community. In 1990, the group was honored on the feast day of Saint Cecilia, the patroness of musicians. As Benítez explained,
Among us, the tradition exists that each year one group receives the image of the Virgin. Last year, they gave it to us, and this past Sunday, we celebrated the mass. … It was very emotional, and we celebrated with all our colleagues, because we have a lot of faith in Saint Cecilia and we always ask her for protection.Footnote 59
Cumbia musicians like Benítez were part of a migrant and immigrant community that retained its internal coherence by innovating from within their collective cultural traditions.
Nevertheless, cumbia norteña was not exclusively migrant music; it was also a preference that Bolivians and their descendants shared with other working-class people in Greater Buenos Aires. Even as he described Sombras’ deep ties to the Bolivian community, Benítez also noted the band’s capacity to attract non-Bolivian fans: “At this stage of our career, we don’t just play for the Bolivian community but rather for all the people because our style is successful everywhere.”Footnote 60 Although there are multiple accounts of the origin of the band’s name, co-founder Juan Zapana said that he thought the name Sombras, or “shadows,” fit the band well, since “we’re all dark.”Footnote 61 In Buenos Aires, provincial migrants and their descendants were (and are) stigmatized as negros, a term that links racial characteristics to class position.Footnote 62 Embraced as a “música de negros,” cumbia norteña enabled Bolivians and their descendants to assimilate not into a diffuse Argentine identity, but rather into a transethnic community defined by class. By recreating and transforming the music and dance traditions of their home region, cumbia norteña musicians built cultural bridges to the diverse working class of Greater Buenos Aires.
Tropical Music as Lowbrow and Foreign
As the Movida Tropical coalesced at the end of the 1980s, it played a key role in the new cultural politics of Carlos Menem, the Peronist politician who ascended to the presidency in 1989 and who would enact a radical form of neoliberalism over the next decade. The government’s convertibility plan and neoliberal economic policies tamed inflation, expanded consumer credit, and opened the country to a flood of imports.Footnote 63 Despite rising inequality, these policies won support from a broad swath of the population, but Menem’s cross-class political appeal also reflected his eccentric brand of charisma, forged through a very public lifestyle of luxury consumption and hobnobbing with celebrities. In effect, Menem’s personal style functioned as an advertisement for the consumerism that was neoliberalism’s most seductive promise. Yet the so-called “fiesta menemista” did more than simply promote consumption; it also challenged aesthetic hierarchies by encouraging what some observers described as a “plebeyización del gusto”—a “vulgarization of taste”—symbolized by the phrase “pizza with champagne.”Footnote 64 The high point of this phenomenon came in the summer of 1990–91, when well-to-do Argentines discovered the charms of domestic tropical music. That summer, Ricky Maravilla, a cumbia singer from Salta, emerged as a star attraction in Punta del Este, Uruguay, the seaside resort town that serves as a playground for Argentine elites.Footnote 65 Maravilla had scored a hit with “¿Qué tendrá ese petiso?” a novelty tune about a man of small stature (like the singer himself) who has a way with women, but his popularity reflected more than just a taste for frivolity. Since he and many of the other tropical stars of the moment—Pocho La Pantera, Lía Crucet, the cuarteto singer La Mona Jiménez—were visibly of working-class origin, the elites who partied to their music were self-consciously dancing to the stigmatized music of marginalized, plebeian Argentines. As Pablo Alabarces and others have argued, this was a condescending exoticism, a form of cross-class consumerism that reinforced class distinctions.Footnote 66
Nevertheless, these elitist appropriations were a minor sideshow as tropical music expanded and evolved in the 1990s. The migrant music scenes that put down roots in the Conurbano nourished an autonomous, working-class musical culture. The music’s class character reflected its circuits of dissemination. During the 1980s, the large, multinational labels were actively marketing rock bands from Mexico and Argentina to a pan-Latin American audience; they had little interest in a music scene whose appeal seemed limited to a lower-class market segment within one country. Two small independent labels, Magenta Discos and Leader Music, filled the void. The brothers Jorge and Norberto Kirovsky inherited Magenta from their father in 1982. Recognizing the potential of the new trend, they recorded dozens of tropical acts, opened four bailantas in the capital and three more in the Conurbano, and purchased two FM radio stations. This vertical integration gave them enormous market power within the Movida.Footnote 67 Their main competitor was Leader Music, founded by Roberto “Kuky” Pumar in 1983 specifically to record cumbia. Pumar developed his business plan while working in his father’s record store, located in the train station in Constitución, a working-class neighborhood of Buenos Aires. As he put it,
I saw that the labels only put out one or two tropical albums per year, and they were always the same, el Cuarteto Imperial and los Wawancó. What was missing was the Madonna and Michael Jackson of local cumbia, and I went for it. Everyone was aiming at the wealthy market segment (“el segmento ABC1”), and I saw – I saw it at the record store – that the more popular audience spent a lot on records.Footnote 68
As Pumar’s account suggests, the popular music market of the 1980s was rigidly segmented by class. Leader and Magenta, as well as the growing number of bailantas, advertised their products on the dozens of local radio stations in the Conurbano that dedicated themselves to tropical music.Footnote 69 Big advertisers avoided these stations for fear that their products would be cheapened by association with such plebeian music.Footnote 70
The bailantas that sprouted up throughout the Conurbano reflected and reinforced the working-class character of the Movida Tropical. In a detailed ethnographic study conducted in the early 1990s, Jorge Elbaum reveals how class distinctions shaped the experience of dancing to tropical music.Footnote 71 Working-class men chose to attend bailantas close to home rather than clubs in fancier neighborhoods, where they were more likely to be hassled by the police or rejected by the women. Dancing on their home turf, Elbaum’s working-class interlocutors were expert in identifying middle- and upper-class outsiders: they spoke with different accents, avoided direct forms of speech, and often had questionable motives. As one woman put it, “You realize that they’re not like us because they’re all ‘blah, blah,’ and they’re always asking questions. The first thing they ask is where you live. They’re not interested in dancing.” Speaking to customers at elite discotheques, Elbaum documented deeply classist attitudes toward the bailantas. These informants described tropical music as poor quality and denigrated its fans as “negros” or “grasas” with bad taste and low-class customs.Footnote 72 In reaction to this elitism, Elbaum found a great deal of class pride among tropical music fans. The announcers who introduced the bands celebrated the prestige and quality of the performers, while fans praised the use of a simple, direct language they considered “ours.” Working-class fans of tropical music tended to reject the term “bailanta,” which they saw as a classist insult: “They say you’re going to a bailanta, and you become an ordinary negrito. This is a dance club (boliche) like any other.”Footnote 73 It was in these class-defined spaces that the tropical counterpublic emerged.
Tropical music fans encountered a similar class-based stigma on television, where some of the most prominent programs regularly ridiculed the genre and its stars. On Mirtha Legrand’s elitist talk show, Ricky Maravilla executed a comic pratfall, and Lía Crucet’s scanty attire and sexy dance moves scandalized and entertained for being so jarringly out of place.Footnote 74 Marcelo Tinelli’s hugely popular comedy-sketch show Videomatch included a recurring gag featuring an outrageously obscene cumbia singer named Sergio, el Lobizón del Oeste. The program often hosted actual tropical music stars only to make fun of them by, for example, interrupting the musical soundtrack when they were lip-synching.Footnote 75 These were spectacles of classist denigration that reinforced the subordinate positionality of the tropical counterpublic. By doubling down on aesthetic preferences that were the object of elitist ridicule, tropical music fans set themselves in opposition to dominant tastes.
More than just a working-class preference, tropical music was also a working-class product, a scene characterized by the absence of any social distance between musicians and fans. Almost without exception, tropical bands were composed of working-class youth, either from the provinces or from the Conurbano, a point that the media dedicated to the Movida reinforced at every opportunity. Profiles of new bands invariably described the neighborhoods where the musicians grew up, the provincial origins of their families, and their working-class day jobs. Interviewers depicted tropical music itself as a working-class job by asking musicians about practical issues: whether they could live off their music, how many shows they performed each weekend, the equipment they could afford to purchase.Footnote 76 Although these musicians clearly had dreams of upward mobility, their goals tended to be modest: to purchase a home in the same neighborhood they grew up in, for example.Footnote 77 In a typical statement, the lead singer of the cumbia group Sol underscored the band’s class affiliation: “We are neighborhood kids, simple, working-class, and we recognize that we owe [our success] to the people.”Footnote 78
By the middle of the 1990s, dozens of bands had formed throughout the Conurbano, playing first at private parties in their barrios before graduating to the local neighborhood community center (sociedad de fomento) and then, if they were able to record and if their records proved popular, to bailantas throughout the Conurbano. Their self-promotional tactics reflected their roots in the local community: the musicians in Amar Azul would ride their bicycles around the neighborhood, “broadcasting” their new recordings from their boom boxes and hoping that listeners would request them at the local bailanta.Footnote 79
These young tropical musicians were typically the children of provincial migrants who had settled in the Conurbano during the growth years of the 1950s and 1960s. They combined the musical influences of their parents’ home regions with the transnational tropical music culture in their neighborhoods. The musician and composer Marcos Bustamante grew up in Valentín Alsina, in the southern Conurbano, where his father, a migrant from Santiago del Estero, taught him to play chacarera and chamamé on the accordion. In 1982, at the age of twelve, he joined the chamamé tropical band, Los Caté. Impressed by the cumbia of Peruvian band Los Mirlos and the trumpet-laden cuarteto of the singer Sebastián, he later created the successful cumbia band Ráfaga from these various influences, assembling a group of young musicians from the nearby working-class barrio of Fiorito.Footnote 80 Similarly, Marcelo “El Chino” González and Ramón “El Mago” Benítez, the leaders of La Nueva Luna, were children of migrants from the Northeast and the Northwest, who grew up in Avellaneda and Quilmes in the southern Conurbano; they forged their distinctive style by mixing the folk music of their childhood with elements from cumbia norteña, cumbia santafesina, and Peruvian cumbia.Footnote 81 In short, the Movida Tropical of the 1990s was forged by working-class musicians who drew on multiple musical sources to cater to the tastes of dancers from their own communities in the Conurbano.
Beyond its impact on immigration patterns, neoliberalism exerted a powerful influence on musical developments in the Movida Tropical. Chelo and Javito Torres, brothers from Lanús, also in the southern zone of the Conurbano, founded the hugely successful cumbia bands Green and Red. Their Paraguayan father raised them to the sound of the polca paraguaya, a genre closely related to the chamamé. They later embraced the cumbia norteña of groups from the Bolivian community and infused it with modern synthesizers and electronic drums. The influential innovations of Green and Red, in which synthesizers imitated the sound of trumpets, were enabled by the one-to-one exchange rate established by Menem’s convertibility plan. The Torres brothers used the strong Argentine peso to purchase synthesizers and drum machines in Paraguay, where they were cheaper.Footnote 82 Other bands were able to purchase these instruments in Argentina thanks to the flood of imports generated by neoliberal policy.Footnote 83 The result was a growing preference for electronic sounds—an “aesthetics of artifice” in the words of Federico del Río and Julio SchincaFootnote 84 —that stood in contrast to the guitars and drum sets of the contemporary rock music enjoyed by middle-class youth.
As the stories of these bands reveal, the Movida’s embrace of lowbrow aesthetic values yielded a musical culture that was extremely open to influences from other Latin American countries. Of course, tropical music in Argentina had always been a foreign import. As we have seen, Colombia’s Cuarteto Imperial galvanized cumbia scenes throughout the provinces, and Bolivian cumbia musicians like Pity Zapata directly influenced the tropical artists of Salta and Jujuy as well as the migrants who forged cumbia norteña in Buenos Aires and the Conurbano. Foreign influences shaped the development of the Movida Tropical in many other ways as well. Angel Videla’s modernization of cuarteto involved the importation of instrumentation and musicians from the Dominican Republic, including the singer Jean Carlos, who helped develop the popular hybrid known as merenteto (merengue plus cuarteto) in the early 1990s. It was likely through this process that the Dominican güira (metal scraper) became a standard part of the instrumental lineup in Argentine cumbia bands.Footnote 85
The continuing flow of immigrants from neighboring countries during the 1990s helped extend and multiply the foreign influences on Argentine tropical music. In 1991, the Peruvian producer José Carlos “Cholo” Olaya brought the band Karicia to Argentina and secured a contract with Leader Music.Footnote 86 Karicia’s Afro-Peruvian percussionist, Esteban “Memín” Pozú, played cumbia with rhythmic patterns and percussion instruments—the bongos and the “jam block”—that derived from salsa. His approach fascinated local musicians and injected a new level of rhythmic complexity into Argentine cumbia.Footnote 87 Another foreign influence came via Paraguay, where a slow, Mexican form of cumbia became popular in the 1980s under the name cachaca. The large Paraguayan community in the Conurbano, together with migrants from Misiones and Formosa, on the Paraguayan border, constituted a domestic market for the style. The Argentine bands Los Dinos, Los Forasteros, Los Chakales, and Malakate all specialized in cachaca, which exerted a growing influence throughout the Movida.Footnote 88 Mexican influences remained important throughout the decade. In the late 1990s, the groups Tambó Tambó and Jambao achieved success by emulating the sound of the Mexican sonidero bands Cañaveral and Grupo Karo’s, respectively.Footnote 89
Tropical music, then, was both deeply local and explicitly foreign. It could express an affiliation with a specific barrio in the Conurbano as well as with a home region in the Argentine interior or in a neighboring country. At the same time, tropical music fans in the 1990s self-consciously embraced styles from elsewhere in Latin America. Both forms of affiliation—the local and the foreign—reflected and reproduced class consciousness and an aesthetic orientation premised on an explicit rejection of dominant tastes. Dancing at bailantas in the Conurbano, tropical music fans forged bonds of sociability within their own working-class communities, even as they proudly claimed a connection to parts of Latin America that were typically devalued within Argentina’s elitist, Europhile national imaginary. They embraced musical styles that they knew came from Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Mexico, Colombia, and the Caribbean, all places that figured in the dominant Argentine racial ideology as nonwhite and uncultured.Footnote 90 They also forged connections with Bolivian and Paraguayan immigrants, the frequent targets of Argentine racism.Footnote 91 These counterhegemonic alignments reflected and inverted the long-standing racialization of class terminology in Argentina, the tendency to denigrate all poor people as negros. The capacity of the Movida Tropical to activate and extend the practice of class-based sociability made it a counterpublic with significant political potential.
Alongside its general affiliation with nonwhite Latin America, the Movida Tropical also at times drew a more specific connection between Argentina’s stigmatized negros—mostly people of mestizo or Indigenous ancestry—and negros of African descent. Ignacio Aguiló has insightfully explored this dynamic, but he identifies it as a novel feature of the subgenre of cumbia villera, which emerged only at the very end of the 1990s.Footnote 92 In fact, tropical music in Argentina had long contained resonances of African diasporic Blackness. The connection with the tropics and with Afro-Colombians, more specifically, was a key element of cumbia’s exotic appeal. In the early 1990s, the infusion of musicians, rhythms, and percussion instruments from the Dominican Republic and Peru was often understood in racial terms. In an article about Ra-Ta Plan, a merenteto group formed by several Dominican musicians who had worked with cuarteto specialist Angel Videla, the band members described the significance of their African, Dominican, and Jamaican ancestry in essentialist terms: “We have rhythm in our blood.”Footnote 93 Similarly, “El Palenque,” a bailanta in Lanús, took its name from the Colombian word for a community formed by escaped enslaved people, and its advertisements featured a sketch of a Black man drumming on a conga under a palm tree.Footnote 94 At times, local tropical musicians made their musical affiliation with the African diaspora explicit. In 1992, the cuarteto star La Mona Jiménez began to work with Peruvian percussionist Bam Bam Miranda in an effort to tropicalize and Africanize the tunga-tunga beat. On his 1994 album, Raza negra, Jiménez foregrounded Miranda’s drumming and Yoruba chanting. The song “Cuarte Conga,” written by Miranda, celebrated the musical mix: “This is an African rhythm that found in Córdoba a brother in cuarteto, that’s why I dance it.”Footnote 95 Here, La Mona Jiménez, a performer closely associated with an audience of Argentine negros, embraced a musical kinship with Africa, connecting the dots between local and transnational versions of Blackness.
Describing his own career as a cumbia DJ at Tropitango, Jimmy Nogueira revealed the class politics of this racial alignment. Born in Buenos Aires to a Uruguayan mother and a Brazilian father, Nogueira was of visibly African descent. He had been a fan of Los Wawancó and the Cuarteto Imperial in the 1960s, but he considered his own Blackness an equally important qualification for the job, and he connected that racial characteristic directly to class. Referring to the club’s early days in the 1980s, Nogueira remembered: “Here in the Zona Norte … there was only one cumbia club, and that was the Tropi which was for the negrada, and who was more negro than me?”Footnote 96 Nogueira, who depicted himself as a connoisseur of authentic, Colombian cumbia, connected his own phenotype to the Caribbean, but also to the negrada, the mass of negros who filled the barrios of the Conurbano: provincial migrants and their children, immigrants from Bolivia and Paraguay, in short, the vast underclass disdained or ignored by the well-to-do residents of the capital. The Movida facilitated the transformation of this heterogeneous mass into a counterpublic.
Epilogue: 2001
The tropical counterpublic of the 1990s was not a political or social movement. It built no organization capable of political activism or engagement, and it remained focused on physical enjoyment, seduction, and escape. Nevertheless, it produced bonds of sociability, mutual recognition, solidarity, and, at times, the grounds for identity formation, all of which would prove useful in the face of economic and political crisis.
In 1999, as the Argentine economy stagnated under the weight of skyrocketing foreign debt and poverty rates continued to climb, Argentine voters finally turned their back on Menem’s Peronists, electing the Radical party politician, Fernando de la Rúa, president. Nevertheless, the new government sought to revive the economy with the same old medicine: deepening neoliberal reforms, additional IMF loans, and austerity. The result was an unprecedented economic crisis and a massive social and political uprising. Thousands of poor and middle-class Argentines poured into the streets in December 2001, mobilized a new repertoire of collective action, and succeeded in tearing down the existing political system: the resignation of de la Rúa on December 20 triggered a cycle of instability in which the country had five different presidents in eleven days. Over the next several years, the diffuse and diverse social movements that helped precipitate this massive rebellion remade the Argentine political system.
Tropical music accompanied these developments. Backed by Leader Music and Discos Magenta, musicians from the Conurbano created the scandalous subgenre known as cumbia villera. From its emergence in 1999, this musical style provided a soundtrack for the crisis with lyrics that seemed to document the poverty, drug use, and criminality produced by neoliberalism. Scholars have insisted on the connections between this new subgenre and the economic crisis of the moment, while puzzling over its politics.Footnote 97 However, the intense focus on cumbia villera has obscured the longer-term and more consequential connections between tropical music and the new forms of social and political action that emerged in the late 1990s and exploded in 2001.
We can begin to see the role of tropical music in the construction of a political culture of resistance in Cristian Alarcón’s chronicle of the life and legacy of “Frente” Vital, a poor kid from one of the villas in the northern zone of the Conurbano, who was killed by the police in 1999. Vital had been a young thief whose tendency to distribute his loot to people in need had made him a local legend. Vital and his friends also spent much of the money they stole by partying together at Tropitango and other bailantas. Tropical music loomed so large in the everyday life of the villa, in fact, that Alarcón took his book’s title from a line from one of Vital’s favorite songs: “When I die, I want them to play cumbia for me.” The young thief’s musical preferences reflected the Movida’s status as local, migrant, lowbrow, and foreign: he and his friends frequented the bailantas on their home turf; they loved the romantic cumbia santafesina of Leo Mattioli but were also devotees of Colombian cumbia as well as the Mexican cumbia band Cañaveral.Footnote 98 Alarcón describes the centrality of the Movida Tropical to this world:
[D]ancing is a funeral ceremony turned into a block party; it is for dedicating everything gained from an outburst of violence verging on death to the madness of the dance floor. … Frente and his friends … dedicated much of their takings to the consumption of large jugs of alcohol, and to the swaying mass of four thousand kids who gathered from every corner of the northern slums, brought by buses that ventured into all the poorest nooks and crannies to pick up the crowds willing to travel any distance to see the latest groups onstage at Tropitango.Footnote 99
Moving together on the dance floor, these kids embraced their status as negros and built an affiliation with the Blacker parts of Latin America. These were key ingredients for the consciousness that would enable new forms of collective action.
As the crisis deepened in 2000 and 2001, and the resistance grew, tropical music was present in the communal kitchens, popular assemblies, and protests. For example, Onda Sabanera’s “El piquetero,” one of the few cumbias with explicit political content, played on the loudspeakers at the massive protests of 2001 in La Matanza, in the southwestern zone of the Conurbano.Footnote 100 Yet the Movida was more than just a soundtrack to the new popular politics. By embodying a modern, working-class aesthetic that expressed transnational commitments and challenged dominant versions of Argentine identity, the tropical counterpublic claimed a cultural protagonism for itself. This collective assertion of public visibility and audibility enabled political mobilization. Lacking the unity of purpose provided by labor unions or the Peronist political tradition, poor residents of the Conurbano nevertheless spoke and acted from a position of collective, cultural autonomy. The Movida constructed everyday attitudes and practices that were both rooted in local contexts and communities and enmeshed in a deeply felt, popular Latin Americanism. By constituting itself as a collective defined in opposition to the dominant group’s taste, style, and national identity, the tropical counterpublic enabled ordinary people to act both within and beyond the borders of the barrio.
Matthew Karush is Chair of the History & Art History Department and Professor of History at George Mason University. He is the author of Workers or Citizens: Democracy and Identity in Rosario, Argentina (1912–1930) (New Mexico, 2002), Culture of Class: Radio and Cinema in the Making of a Divided Argentina, 1920–1946 (Duke, 2012), and Musicians in Transit: Argentina and the Globalization of Popular Music (Duke, 2017). He is the co-editor of The New Cultural History of Peronism: Power and Identity in Mid-Twentieth Century Argentina (Duke, 2010) and the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters. He was also co-PI on Hearing the Americas, a digital exploration of the early decades of the recording industry, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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