Module 3 Latin Diasporic Traditions

This module covers a family of traditions, not a single one. Cuban music in New York and Miami; Puerto Rican music in El Barrio and the South Bronx; Mexican-American music in Texas and California; Dominican, Panamanian, and Colombian music as it moved north and east into US cities; the contemporary Latin pop, reggaeton, and Latin trap that reach a global streaming audience. The communities are distinct, but they share a long history of producing American popular music in Spanish, a sustained dialogue with African American music, and the specific experience of bilingual urban life as a musical condition.

Module 3 takes a different shape from Module 2. Where Module 2 traced one tradition forward through time, Module 3 moves chronologically across several traditions at once. The five tracks span forty years (1962 to 2002) and five distinct strands of the Latin diasporic family: New York Cuban-Puerto Rican mambo, El Barrio Latin soul and boogaloo, Bay Area Latin rock, Tejano cumbia, and Puerto Rican reggaeton. The order is chronological so the dialogues between the tracks are easier to hear, but the dialogues run sideways as much as forward. Each track teaches a different facet, and the music's different communities, geographies, and migration histories matter as much as its place in time.

What is in this module

The pieces below are arranged in the order I recommend you complete them. The framing reading sets up the geography, the migration histories, and the institutional infrastructure that the listening guides assume. The five tracks come next, in chronological order. The discussion and quiz close out the module.

Reading.Many Roots, Shared Routes
The framing reading. Covers what "Latin diasporic" means here, the Caribbean-and-Mexican substrate the music came out of, the migrations that brought it into the United States, the labels that recorded and circulated it, the long dialogue with African American music, and the modes of political work this music has done.
Listening 1.Tito Puente, "Oye Como Va" (1962)
The mambo-into-cha-cha-chá node. Recorded in New York at the tail end of the Palladium era, by a Spanish Harlem-born Puerto Rican bandleader trained at Juilliard, with a Dominican flutist and a multinational charanga-plus-brass orchestra. Sets up the Santana cover that arrives eight years later.
Listening 2.Joe Bataan, "Gypsy Woman" (1967)
The Latin soul and boogaloo node. A Filipino and African American singer who grew up inside Spanish Harlem's Puerto Rican world, covering Curtis Mayfield's 1961 R&B ballad with a band of teenagers from the neighborhood. Lets us teach the bicultural music of mid-1960s El Barrio and the bilingual codeswitching that became a formal signature of US Latin pop.
Listening 3.Santana, "Oye Como Va" (1970)
Latin rock and the Bay Area Chicano scene. A direct cover of the Tito Puente track, recorded eight years later by a Mexican-American band in San Francisco's Mission District, with electric guitar and Hammond organ replacing the charanga voicings. Two recordings of the same song, on opposite coasts, in different musical languages.
Listening 4.Selena, "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom" (1994)
The Tejano cumbia node, on a fundamentally different substrate from the first three tracks. A Mexican-American teenager from Corpus Christi working in a Texas-Mexico borderland genre that fused Mexican folk song, German polka, Colombian cumbia, and contemporary US pop production. The listening guide covers what Tejano was, what Selena's career accomplished, and how her death crystallized something about Mexican-American identity in the United States.
Listening 5.Tego Calderón, "Pa' Que Retozen" (2002)
The reggaeton node. From El Abayarde, the Puerto Rican album that brought reggaeton out of the underground mixtape circuit and onto formal commercial distribution. Tego is an Afro-Puerto Rican rapper from Loíza whose work makes Black Caribbean political claims explicit; the listening guide covers what the dembow rhythm is, what Tego's voice does, and how the song works as the doorway to a politically substantive album.
Discussion.Pick a Reflective Question (in Canvas)
A discussion thread where you pick one of the five reflective questions at the end of the Module 3 listening guides and write about that track. Canvas will assign you two classmates' posts to respond to after the initial-post deadline.
Checkpoint Quiz.Module 3 (in Canvas)
A short quiz covering vocabulary from the framing reading and factual recall from the five anchor tracks. Low-stakes; you may retake it.

Deadlines

Module 3 unlocks as soon as you finish Module 2. The Module 3 quiz and the discussion initial post are due Sunday, June 14. The two discussion peer responses are due Sunday, June 21 (Canvas will assign you two classmates' posts to respond to after the initial-post deadline). Module 4 follows Module 3 in the same per-module shape after that.

Expect roughly 10 to 12 hours of work for this module: the framing reading runs about 45 to 60 minutes, the five listening guides with their tracks and reflective questions take about 6 to 8 hours combined, and the discussion and quiz add another hour or two.

A note on this module's content

This module engages with the histories of migration, exile, and borderland life, and with the political conditions of US Latin communities across the second half of the twentieth century. Two specific items are worth flagging in advance.

The Track 4 listening guide on Selena covers her murder at twenty-three. The discussion is brief and factual but is part of the track's history and reception. The Track 5 listening guide on Tego Calderón engages with the Velda González Anti-Pornography Campaign of 2002, which was a sustained legislative and police effort against reggaeton on grounds that scholars have shown to be entangled with the racial coding of Black Puerto Rican youth, and with Tego's lyrics about Black Caribbean identity, the legacy of slavery, and police violence. Tego's album as a whole, which the listening guide situates around "Pa' Que Retozen," uses direct language on these subjects.

If you need to talk through accommodations to engage with this material, please contact me early and consult Accessibility Services.

How to reach me

Email is the best way: ines.thiebaut@csueastbay.edu. I check it regularly and will respond as promptly as I can. Canvas Inbox also works but I check it less often.

Office hours are Mondays and Thursdays 10 am to noon, by Zoom at https://csueb.zoom.us/j/5108853126. If those times do not work for you, email me and we will find another time.